Favourite latest post by previous poster

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I don't care about Atlasia or IRC (lol @ taking the IRC seriously) so I can only judge by his posts on the regular forum and thus I voted FF. Give me an Oakvale over a MormDem or someone who only empty quotes any day.

     Convenient that you only care about the parts where oakvale is an FF. I like to judge people by the entirety of their conduct, myself.

Um, how the hell are we supposed to know how he conducts himself in places we don't pay any attention to?

Ask Gully to do an Internet search?

[IceSpear]

Atlas members are presumably like likely to angrily throw wine glasses at walls for no reason but emphasis, so I'll pick them.

sure, but maybe they'd be more likely to ban wine glasses for no reason.  or walls for that matter.

[Türkisblau]

Confirmed: Rand announcing in 3 weeks.

Meh, 24.7% chance he doesn't run.

[JerryArkansas]

Hillary Clinton

From this:



To this:





SOOOOOOOO SAAAAAAAAD

You realize this favorability rating is far higher than that of any of the Republican candidates, correct?

What polls have shown is that Hillary has very high name recognition. 

Now that the public is getting to know more about her, her statements, her views, her actions, her favorable ratings will decline, go up with some other event, fluctuate.

But anyone who believes that Hillary is guaranteed the Presidency is sadly mistaken.

Once she declares, if she does, and once she is under the microscope as a major candidate for the Presidency, and once the slogging gets tough and nasty, as it surely will, she will not be leading the race nearly to the extent that she has been doing. 

This race is not over, as some Hillary robots seem to believe, but really has not as yet even begun in the larger context.   

Yes, very high name recognition...and positive favorability. Quite a good combination if I do say so myself.

And if the public already knows about her, why would they fall after they "get to know her"? They already know her. Maybe 2 weeks of intense and relentless negative media coverage will move the numbers a bit, maybe she'll get temporary bumps from things like announcing her campaign clinching the nomination, but in the grand scheme of things, most people aren't changing their opinion of her at this point.

Nobody said she's guaranteed the presidency, so that's just a strawman. She's already been under the microscope for quite a while now. She's received far more scrutiny than any other candidate in either party. If anyone has to be worried about increased scrutiny, it will be the eventual Republican nominee (unless it ends up being media darling Jeb Bush, since they'll give him a pass for everything.)

[Türkisblau]

We both posted for IceSpear at the same time! I am very excited at this development myself:

Well, guess what guys, I'm a Democrat. 

[Sumner 1868]

Why does this thread exist?

To parody a lot of the other sh**tty posts that go by this formula. I for one can't understand why this thread is doing well.

That being said, 6707.

[Antonio the Sixth]

The LibDems have few consistent ideological positions besides being hardcore EU supporters; there 2005 and 2010 levels of support were artificial response to Labour's disastrous foreign policy and economic decline. I don't see them holding more seats than Labour, who were already in the worst place imaginable in 2010 and yet maintained there status as a major party.

[Warren 4 Secretary of Everything]

Who are you?

[LeBron]

"My fellow Republicans, it has come to my attention that a few of my fellows have begun attacking each other. This kind of behavior will get us nowhere and cannot be tolerated. If we look back to the past we can easily see that the practice of scorched earth politics has only increased partisanship in our great nation. And it has also lead to weak Republican Nominees.

A great man and an even greater leader put forth the 11th Commandment: Thou shalt not speak I'll of any fellow Republican. That was President Ronald Reagan, and following that rule he won the largest electoral landslides in US history. If all you can do is knockdown your competitors you have no place in this race. We need ideas. We need leadership. We need bold vision.

We get it. Political dynasties are bad. Flip-flopping is wrong. But there's got to be more than just beating each other over the head with these attacks. Train your fire on the true opposition: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Democratic Party. If we can show the American people the folly of their policies, it won't matter what your last name is or if you've changed your position on immigration. As long as you've got an "R" next to your name then you'll have the support needed to get to 270.

We are One Party. We are One Nation. We are One People. All of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the Constitution. We are Republicans. And it's darn time we started acting like it"

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

It's a shame he has to go through this. He's remaining a closeted homo and breaking ethics rules in the process in fear that his party will persecute him if he reveals he's gay and find someone to primary him. He doesn't deserve this kind of political bigotry, but it would happen.

[Antonio the Sixth]

What is the meaning of life?

Atlas Forum.

No.  The Atlas Forum is Anti-Life.

Stop with your biased, misleading terms! It's called pro-choice, Ernest.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

What the f**k is wrong with this country.

[Sumner 1868]

Huge Freedom Fighter. He is at least sincere in his beliefs; some people join the forum, try and carve a niche for themselves as a true leftist and call for the beheading of bankers before moving to the right and constantly obsessing over the true leftists as a means of getting attention as the "INSERT WHATEVER IDEOLOGY HERE guy."

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Not happening. Baby Boom Republicans in the seventies were more liberal on social issues, but took a massive rightward shift during the Holy Saint Actor's presidency, and I expect a similar trend will happen eventually. Being socially liberal is simply the conformity of the hour and will fade eventually, just like how everybody predicted the religious right would take over the world in the mid-80s and again during 2003-2005.

Why do you hate Reagan so much, He is been one of the best presidents in the past 50 years along with Clinton

For a start, Reagan's domestic policies were pretty bad-brutal safety net cuts, radical deregulation, civil liberties violations, corporate welfare, etc, etc. But his authoritarian foreign policy, as well as his "secret government" drug-running and black market arms trade, play some role as well.

Reagan Tax cuts and deregulating was needed at the time. Taxes were skyhigh and there where too many regulations. Too many regulations is bad and too little regulations is bad and Reagan deruglated to a level where it was required.

Reagan inherited the Worst Recession since the Great Depression and with 10% unemplyment and 12 % inflation and left with 5.4% unemployment and low inflation. Plus his foreign policy let the US to win the Cold War(Nixon deserves more credit fore this though)

Nixon, Ford and Carter all signed deregulation bills, and each time it was a disaster (especially trucking deregulation) and worsened the economy. So, I don't accept there was hyper-regulation when he took office; he merely added more poison to cure the disease. He was expanding the policies of his predecessors.

Reagan tax cuts simply enriched corporations, who have had ridiculously token tax ever since. What helped the economy was when credit was loosened in 1983-1984 and a bubble formed for a few years. It had nothing to do with Reagan's policies, and in any case, many of the jobs created in the eighties were low-wage, burger-flipping jobs that had no health care, sick leave or pension.

It's interesting how people keep claiming that Reagan ended the Cold War. How? By aiding  the Contra terrorists? By bombing Libya pointlessly? By supporting Saddam Hussein? By supporting Khmer Rouge? By running drugs? The only halfway possible explanation I've ever heard is that the SDI was meant to bankrupt the Soviets. If that was the case, then it was simply more "secret government" scheming that just got lucky.

What is perhaps is the biggest problem with Reagan is that he added absolutely nothing to the debate. Neoliberal economics had already been gradually adopted since Nixon, tax cuts had been in the political realm since Truman, and his foreign policy goals were consistent with other Cold War presidents. He has no legacy, and it's time this be admitted.

[Maxwell]

I'm glad to see that the Democratic party's second attempt to swing an Israeli election has failed miserably, unlike their first attempt under Clinton which led to the election of Barak.

Oh please. The Republicans let Netanyahu use them as a backdrop for his dishonest, bellicose, alienating, almost palpably sleazy 'statesman' theatrics because they thought it would help them score points against a president who's already a lame duck. That's significantly more abject than anything the Clinton administration did.

Yes Netanyahu is a nightmare.

[Antonio the Sixth]

It's always been Joe Biden.

What the f**k is wrong with this country.

Wait, I thought you were a fan of Bibi?

[TDAS04]

folks like me, Phil, and oldiesfreak are treated unfairly on a regular basis.

For reasons that have nothing to do with politics.

[Lief 🗽]

Any song by Toby Keith is horrible.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

It's always been Joe Biden.

What the f**k is wrong with this country.

Wait, I thought you were a fan of Bibi?

No, I want to avoid WWIII if at all possible, or at least survive it . Bibi is the idol of the Israel firsters who I despise.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Yes, R2D2 is the unreasonable and self-righteous one here, not the guy writing a three paragraph screed full of profanity when he is told not to use the word "retard" as a slur or an insult.

No, I want to avoid WWIII if at all possible, or at least survive it . Bibi is the idol of the Israel firsters who I despise.

Ah. Well, good to know!

[traininthedistance]

If you are so certain that you posses the absolute truth and anyone who disagree with you is a hopeless moron who only wastes your time, you could stop posting on this forum altogether. I don't really see the point of doing what you do unless you just want to show off how smart you are.

[Mr. Smith]

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The county seat of Alpine pretty much became a rural San Francisco starting in the '90's.

Basically the demographics shifted greatly. The county was already becoming Democratic on a statewide level.

Alpine's pretty much like California's internal Vermont.

And Mono's pretty much like the internal New Hampshire.

[politicus]

Sorry this took me so long! Long week.




Christianity concentrates in the west, but not for the same reasons as Buddhism (or as we shall see in the next map, Shintō). This rather has to do with the directions from which missionization came during the Nanban Trade period, which basically set the plot for subsequent Japanese Christianity despite the two hundred and fifty-odd years of vicious persecution that separate it from modern Japanese Christian life. The missionization during this period came from the west and concentrated on what a lot of histories of Japan call, during this time and up to about the middle of the Meiji Era, the 'southwestern periphery'--Kyūshū, the southern half of Shikoku, and the westernmost tip of Honshū--and on the Seto Inland Sea, which at the time was the main avenue of trade and transport between the Spanish and Portuguese mission sites and the power centers in Kansai. For a generation or two in the late sixteenth and very early seventeenth centuries before the persecution started, parts of Kyūshū and Shikoku were majority-Christian. A lot of these Christians went into hiding, obscuring their faith in rituals that cosmetically resembled those of Buddhism and eventually drifting further and further away from orthodoxy due to their lack of priests and Bibles. Most of these 'Hidden Christians' rejoined the Catholic Church after the Meiji Restoration but some have persisted to the present day as 'Separated Christians', and are worthy of study and might make a fascinating thread topic some day in and of themselves.

Note that the most Christian prefecture is to this day Nagasaki. It’s the very dark red area in the far west, a group of barely-connected peninsulas and islands—that is in fact a prefecture and not just a bunch of overlapping lines and blotches! It's 5.8% Christian and was first the main hub of Catholic missionary work and later the only area that was partially open to Europeans throughout the Tokugawa bakufu. The insular portions of this prefecture are where the vast majority of the remaining Separated Christians life.

The Tōkyō Metropolis is the second most Christian prefecture because it's Tōkyō. Tōkyō has a lot of everything.

William Temple once said that the Church was the only organization that existed for the benefit of its non-members. This wasn’t even close to being true and it doesn’t even make Christianity unique among religions in that the formal Shintō shrine network exists to cater to the needs of as many people who don’t belong to it as possible as well. There are a few generally highly specific and arcane things for which formal membership in a shrine helps but in general in order to participate in most aspects of Shintō worship one basically just has to show up (or volunteer, in the case of things like carrying portable shrines at festivals). It’s enough of an ethnoreligion that people who are obviously not Japanese might get looked at a little askance but even that is not insurmountable. Indeed, I’m really not sure why anybody would feel the need to be a formal member of a Shintō organization exactly, other than clergy and their families; and indeed, few enough people are that this group is actually smaller than Christianity by some measures.

There’s a softer instance of the same general patterns from the Buddhism map in this map, but other than that what’s interesting here is basically just one prefecture, Kōchi. It, Akita, Tottori, Miyazaki, and Kagoshima are the only prefectures that stands out enough that it is basically impossible to argue that it’s statistical noise, and Kōchi (5.5% formal Shintō) stands out the most among these by a considerable margin. It stood out on the mushūkyō map too, so clearly the idea of Shintō over against other religions has some sort of strong appeal here. There are very specific, locally powerful shrine networks in these five prefectures, which rely partially on the religious equivalent of patronage, but I wasn't able to figure out exactly what the nature of these shrine networks is. Shimane Prefecture in the southwesterly part of the Sea of Japan coastline, the location of the Izumo Grand Shrine, is part of a cluster of prefectures with slightly higher rates of formal Shinto adherence than most of the country, but doesn't even stand out as much as neighboring Tottori does; Mie Prefecture, the location of the Ise Grand Shrine, doesn't stand out at all, which surprises me.

[Antonio the Sixth]

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