General Discussion

He's gonna be busy for a few days.

 

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Biden started this......SCS


He didn't, actually. Because he wasn't in power when it started.....BWW

I award you no points for your bullshit, poorly thought out, uneducated post.....BWW




But environmental reviews by both the Obama and Trump administrations concluded that the Keystone XL pipeline would not have lowered gasoline prices.

I agree with Roger on this topic......you cannot blame Biden on Gasoline prices and the cost of Groceries.

The Republican Party had a plan in 2008 to Drill for Oil in the Artic.........not a good idea with the extreme weather the environmental damage would be chaotropic.

And President elect Trump has come out and said on the day after inauguration he will "Drill baby Drill"

These problems we are facing in our Life times is happening Globally.........Spain...China...United States...........and it is getting worse.

SCS I hope you are safe and clear of the Fires in South California right now.......I know first hand how destructive a Forest Fire can be and when the Wind Blows (Santa Ana) you can't stop the Fire.

I just hope you and your Family are Safe and out of Harms way.

So we can Talk more Trump with you...........lol

 

We were energy efficient when Trump was president, as soon as Biden got in office we had to buy oil from the terrorist again and pay a lot more for it. I moved to the beach in Washington 7 years ago and the water isn’t getting closer to me. I was five minutes by foot to the ocean waves back in 2017 and I’m still 5 minutes away. Global warming is bs.

 

That is a horrible anecdote. Climate change is real. For instance seal viewings on Quebec islands are now cancelled because they can't get thick enough ice anymore. The North Atlantic is become saltier and the Gulf Stream has grown weaker in the past 4 decades. One of the first things to go will probably be established ocean currents and if that happens the northern Atlantic coast and Europe will be in big trouble.

Governments will fight to tell you it isn't real because the interests of their backers are to make money from deregulation, tax cuts and increased demand.

 

This is an interesting article. It's long but if your reading comprehension is high, you shouldn't have any problems getting through it. I believe it offers some insight.

We’re Addicted to the Feeling of Being Right
Our craving for loud, divisive, identity-conferring opinion is poisoning politics
by Mark Kingwell
Updated 12:14, Nov. 7, 2024 | Published 6:30, Nov. 6, 2024

We live in a time of large-scale democratic reckoning, coupled with crumbling trust in public institutions and their elite functionaries. More people will cast electoral votes in 2024 and 2025 than at any other moment in human history: a so-called super-cycle election event that involves sixty-four sovereign nations around the planet—including India and the United States, most of Europe, and dozens of nations many people would struggle to locate on a map—accounting for 49 percent of the total global population. Together, these countries control most of the combined natural resources, financial power, and military hardware of the entire human project.

The results of this great tallying of political desire are, naturally, beyond any single person’s assessment. The many millions of votes being cast might also take years to show their genuine effect in public policy, cultural attitudes, and geopolitical shifting. But despite the obvious display of popular will, or maybe simply because of it, this is not a moment to feel much reassurance about the future of liberal democracy or transnational justice—what we might call the cosmopolitan dream. There are dark signs of rising right-wing authoritarianism everywhere, mobilization in rich nations against the flow of migrants, and entrenchment of economic disparity. Existential threats, meanwhile—from climate disaster, artificial intelligence, and old bogeys like nuclear war and fundamentalist rage—are the background noise of news feeds, doomscrolls, and the incessant demands of everyday life.

But elections are only a necessary condition of democratic accountability, not yet sufficient to the goals of genuine legitimacy. The challenges of global life also demand responsible, transparent institutions with effective regulatory controls. Until we decide to offload the work of such institutions to non-human agencies—a dangerous tendency—these systems will be staffed and controlled by imperfect humans. If the systems require expertise to function effectively, the granting of influence to such experts must be based on their reliable qualities or credentials. Trust works, in large measure, on assumptions about who people are, not just what they do before our eyes. We trust because we cannot observe and judge everything ourselves.

This becomes harder as the tasks of shared human aspiration and global survival become more decentralized, even as partisan differences show up more and more vividly. The presence of affective polarization in democratic nations has grown perceptibly since the turn of the millennium. This is the term political scientists use to describe negative feelings about political opponents. “Affective” because it is a matter of feeling: that the other side is not just divergent in views but beyond redemption, perhaps insane or evil. Actual policy differences may be less stark, but that does not matter when demonization of the other is the order of the day. People vote with their feelings. More drastically, they shape their worlds to fit those feelings. Division is as division does.

What today’s fraught circumstances urgently need, then, are the same countermeasures that societies have always required and, unfortunately, too often lack: trustworthy authority and leadership. When authority is absent, trust is impossible—and vice versa.


A 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that 75 percent of Americans perceived a shrinking of trust in government, while 64 percent saw the same shrinkage of trust between citizens. Those numbers got worse over the pandemic years and are no better now. Citizens “see fading trust as a sign of cultural sickness and national decline,” the study’s authors noted. “Some also tie it to what they perceive to be increased loneliness and excessive individualism. About half of Americans (49 percent) link the decline in interpersonal trust to a belief that people are not as reliable as they used to be. Many ascribe shrinking trust to a political culture they believe is broken and spawns suspicion, even cynicism, about the ability of others to distinguish fact from fiction.”

The background condition of this discussion is our current state of permacrisis: the collision of multiple critical problems whose conjunction renders effective response to any one of them impossible. Crisis demands a response, but too much of it strains our abilities. The permacritical state can, and should, be analyzed in terms of the Enlightenment imperatives that descend directly from Immanuel Kant’s landmark 1784 essay “What Is Enlightenment?” where he defends a popular version of the rational universalism that has grounded two centuries of human aspiration.

This focus might strike some readers as odd or tendentious. Surely, an eighteenth-century philosopher, white and male and stuffed with the prejudices of his time, is no guide for today? I focus on the injunction offered at the end of Kant’s essay: the familiar Latin motto “sapere aude.” This is usually translated as “think for yourself” in English and has, more recently, been joined with another imperative—“question authority.” The two commands seem to fall naturally together, as do the basic notions of authority and trust.

We are all addicted. Whether it’s drugs, alcohol, work, weight-loss programs, shopping, online videos, gossip, gambling, apps, comic books, at-home delivery, or new phones—anything, really, that the heart desires—we can’t seem to calm a relentless inner urge, a longing that will not be satisfied.

The least visible but perhaps most harmful addiction is thinking ourselves right. This particular form of cognitive dependency is something we may style addiction to conviction, what I call doxaholism. The simple definition of the condition is this: harmful craving for and attachment to loud, divisive, and identity-conferring opinion. The “dox” prefix here comes from the Greek word for opinion, “doxa,” and is therefore a different derivation than “doxing,” the public internet shaming or vilification of individuals you dislike.


The two “dox” roots conjoin in practice by way of aggressive public campaigns of hatred, targeting, intimidation, de-platforming, and cancelling. Virulent opinion becomes the basis for a targeted cancelling campaign. Not all doxing carries this attendant energy of condemnation and shaming, and sometimes there are legitimate reasons for publicly identifying a bad actor, especially online. But the basic drive to expose is an unstable property: one person’s self-righteous exposure is another person’s public shaming. Doxing of any kind is relatively rare; doxaholism is, by contrast, more basic, widespread, and dangerous.

Medical practitioners will tell you that addiction is the wrong framework to employ when it comes to belief, trust, and authority. Its metaphorical usefulness is impaired when applied too widely, they argue. Unless a condition or behaviour involves substance use disorder, potential withdrawal, and harmful dependence, a condition of perpetual craving should not be called addiction. And of course, it is true that you won’t find doxaholism in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

But other discourses, including social psychology, will argue that addictive behaviour is a valid wider category—and a necessary one. Not all harmful obsessions involve chemical substances, even if they all play out in dopamine cascades and the chaotic firing of neurons. Social media, fashion, gossip, and adventure all count as occasions for addictive behaviour. So, too, does the feeling of being right.

Whom do you trust as we stumble to the end of the twenty-first century’s first quarter? Your friends? Your family? God? Science? No one? We are often advised, in elite humanities departments and on wackadoodle conspiracist podcasts alike, to question, question, question authority. But is obeying that command possible? Even if we do push back on power, we know that overactive distrust leads to a dangerous endgame of broken institutions: politics, media, religion, science, expertise itself are all more suspect than ever. Should we complain about that? Fear it? Fix it? Or is the real problem within us?

The result of applying critical thinking to your own thinking is not a “herd of independent minds,” the much-mocked fashionable conformity, nor is it lock-step suspicion of everything going. It is, instead, a willing, and potentially just, civil society of disputatious freethinkers. Let us dwell together in doubt, guided by its companion cognitive virtue, humility. Because this is the only solution to a crisis of authority. And this requires reflection on our own stories, how we come to be the political actors we are.

 

We weren't though.

That's just a revisionist statement with no facts to back it up.

Deregulation doesn't equal efficiency. It may in some regard equal a lower cost but the biggest benefit to deregulation is truly the cost reduction to the uber rich at the top.

And yeah some deregulation is good. We have a bloated Federal government that could certainly go for a reduction in size and redundancy. But there are places with regulation makes sense. Like when it is going to impact human health and the environment. Government oversight exist for good reason in some other places.

For fucks sake.

 

Know your audience.

 

I kind of always assume that you're my audience.

 

WOW Gidi ......I thought you were a lot smarter than that............I understand you are a Republican and a Fan of Donald Trump.......but where the Fuck have you been for the Last 60 years ?

 

You guys have lost your minds. We weren’t buying oil from anyone when Trump was in office and the price of gas was lower than anyone else’s administration since Bill freaking Clinton. You guys are so full of hate for Trump and don’t care about anything except getting him out of office.

 

In the third quarter of 2018, the U.S. imported roughly 10.2 million barrels of petroleum per day,3 with the largest amounts coming from Canada (41%) and Saudi Arabia (10%).


Gidi I think you are smoking too much Pot........US bought a LOT of Tar Sands Oil from Canada and still do.....I think we should start calling you Forest Gump.

 

If what you say is true (It’s not, but let’s play pretend) then explain this….

Gas prices increased from when Obama left office and Trump took over.

Gas prices increased from Trumps 1st year in office to his 2nd.

In his third year prices slightly dipped.

Then they dramatically dropped in his last year in office….in the middle of a worldwide pandemic that saw a large majority of the world staying home and not driving.

If Trump was so energy independent and gave us amazing gas prices….why was his average gas price per year in office higher than his Democrat predecessors last two years in office?

If you could intelligently explain that (You can’t) I’d be absolutely fucking amazed.

 

As Vol says above….not for one fucking second in Trumps time in office did we stop buying foreign oil.

Just more bullshit lies republicans like to tell each other on Facebook.

 

By the way….in 2019 the US started making more energy than it consumed. For the first time since like the 1940s. This is where Trumps “energy independence” stuff comes from.

The reason for this can be traced back to the shale boom of 2005 that put us on the path to eventually make more energy than we consume and reduce what we import.

Has absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump and would have happened no matter who was in the Oval Office. That is 100% undeniable fact.

 

Oh yeah and in 2022 we reached our highest level of energy production and largest margin between production and consumption.

While Biden was in office.

Put that on your Facebook feed.

 

A week in and is the penny starting to drop yet?

Gaetz for AG.
Only to be upstaged 10mins later by Tulsi Gabberd for Director of National Intelligence. Gabbard is a straight up russian agent, and i dont say that lightly. You just have to look at the things she's on record saying, parroting, verbatim, pure russian propaganda. If Putin were able to hand-pick his choice for DNI he couldn't have made a better choice. Thats how bad this is. Thats who Trump wants to be in charge of US intelligence.

This is only the start. I don't think most people have any idea how bad this is gonna get. Tragic to say it, but America is so fucked.

 

Trump is going to be President and Reps will control both House & Senate. So can we all just agree on one thing. Whatever happens going forward, this will be the responsibility of Republicans. No goal-post shifting later on, no "but Dems this" and "but Dems that". Republicans are in charge now and whatever bad occurs that negatively impacts your life, it will be their doing, which means ultimately yours.

The next 4years are going to make the first term look like childs play. Republicans are going to move the US as a country so far off the norm(in some ways they already have) that there will be no going back. Whether the issue is big or small, doesnt matter. Attempting to overthrow the government is ok. Electing a convicted felon, ok. Electing an adjudicated rapist, ok. Electing a habitual liar, ok. Promoting the most unqualified people to positions of power, ok. Rampant corruption and making the swamp swampier than its ever been, ok. Removing all decorum and standards from the behavior of elected officials, normalizing the use of childish nicknames and basically normalising being assholes to one another, ok.

The precedent for all of this has now been set, and it was Republican voters who enabled it to be set. In terms of rules of governance, the constitution, the rule of law and anything to do with morality, Republicans don't get to pass judgement on Democrats ever again, because you already ok'd all of it and nobody is interested in a hypocrite.

My only hope now is that people like gidion, socalsaint and the others too gutless to speak up live long lives. Seriously, take care of yourself, don't die early. I want you to reap what you've sown. You wanted a cheaper tank of gas, you may even get it. And all its gonna cost you is everything.

 

Oh and a couple of final things while im on a roll.

If you voted 3rd party in a swing state, rot in hell.
If you are a single issue or pro Palestine voter in places like Michigan who flipped the bird at Harris/ the Dems cos of Gaza, you unbelievable idiot. Watch and see what happens there now.

 

@EvertonBears your posts are spot on!

There is growing concern in Canada about the Fascist Militarist who is slowly moving his baggage into the White House.

 

A fucking pedo is the nominee for Attorney General. A scumbag that’s been under investigation for years and has had a close associate plead guilty to sex trafficking.

Yeah but at least he’s a not woke, I guess.