Hotter, Badder, and Unpopularer Takes

[RINO Tom]

Texarkana back for round 2??

[RINO Tom]

Eric Clapton > Jimi Hendrix

I think it's a draw (or lean Hendrix) on pure natural talent, but I certainly prefer Clapton.

[RINO Tom]

People who disparage the death penalty but push for people to be sentenced to life in prison are hypocrites.

People who have blanket statement views on the issue of criminal punishment (mandatory life sentences, opposition to the death penalty in all cases, etc.) are generally kind of single-minded, in my experience.

[RINO Tom]

Caucuses are far more democratic than primary elections, in the truest sense of democracy. All primaries should be held as caucuses.

I currently live in Iowa for a few more months ... you ever been to a caucus?  They're horrible, haha.

[RINO Tom]

Midnight in Paris is a criminally underrated movie.

[RINO Tom]

*TRENDS* and *SWINGS* are only so important and only deserve so much attention ... definitely less than the 2020 board spammers give them.  If a county/state voted  for a party, they voted for that party.  Period.  Wait until the place flips to give it so much attention.  “RI might be competitive soon!”  Kay, well it’s not.  Not yet.  So give it a rest, lol.

[RINO Tom]

Trump's obvious atheism is what gives me the most pause about my likely vote for him in 2020. A person with as much power as the US President needs to feel accountability to something greater than themselves.

And that something greater should be the US Constitution, the American people, and the rule of law.

I love the Constitution, but it can't love me back.

God can't love you back either, it's all in your head. like saying your imaginary friend loves you back, hell, it's literally saying that.

This is a thread for "hotter" takes, we don't yet have one for scalding ones.

[RINO Tom]

EC, you're just coming across like a sixteen year old who decided he's NEVER GOING TO CHURCH AGAIN BECAUSE IT'S STOOPID, lol.  There are so many eloquent atheists out there, and I suggest you jump on their train rather than this poor man's Richard Dawkins crap.  You just can't seem to get it through your head that the reason a belief in a deity still persists among billions of people in the 21st Century is not because everyone needs an imaginary friend or is lonely or needs meaning in their lives but rather because it is an alternative (that you have very ironically and very unscientifically completely written off as an even remotely possible scenario) to your belief that the Universe, in effect, created itself out of itself/nothing ... your picking apart of religion is surface level at best, but I will leave that discussion for the more theologically minded posters here who could more effectively demonstrate just how little justice you are giving to an intellectual subject all the while implying you have a more intellectual outlook on life than them; what I will comment on is that you seem to have a near-domga-like attachment to atheism to the point where you desperately frame any creator/deity/higher consciousness in the strict confines of the caricatures you have created for said "God."  It HAS to be an old man in the sky, or your jokes about how dumb it is would be rightfully seen as simplistic and dumb.  Jesus HAS to just simply die and come back due to magic with no more intricate of an explanation (from a hypothetical deity's perspective), because if it were anything more complex, it couldn't be as easily framed as a children's story joke.  You absolutely trash any religious outlook on the Universe and how it came to be the way we observe yet rarely if ever provide any intelligent though of your own on the cosmos and its nature.  Your views are not special, and you haven't simply climbed this latter of enlightenment a bit higher than the rest of us have.  You haven't *seen something* that we just can't.  You don't have more scientific information than we have at our disposal.  You act like you do, obviously, but that is my point - there are plenty of respectful, intelligent and articulate atheists out there who respect their "opponents" (i.e., theists and non-atheists) and therefore feel the need to provide thoroughly researched and well-reasoned theories of their own, along with an appreciation for the complexity and wonder of the debate in general.  You don't, and frankly that is why you will continue to get appropriately sarcastic and dismissive responses to your (let's be real) trolling.  You can chalk it up to you just being an atheist and "telling it like it is" or whatever, but I suspect deep down you kind of know it is the (very underwhelming and surface level) WAY in which you product-push your "views" on the Universe that earn you a bit of scorn.

P.S.  Your claim that a "majority of scientists are atheists or agnostics" is not really true.  Most polls show a high plurality or small majority of scientists usually believing in something with a very large minority being atheists.  I have also seen studies that it varies a lot by subject, with biologists being much more atheistic than chemists or physicists.  This probably isn't worth my time, but if you actually at all found this subject interesting rather than just a platform for you to shout teenage edgelord atheist talking points, I would highly suggest checking out the physicist Paul Davies.  He is not religious and does not believe in an overly personal God, but he consistently points out the flaws in an atheistic model to the Universe as we know it.

[RINO Tom]

Religion is a remnant of our more primitive past, just like eating and sex. It's really time we get beyond that sort of thing.

LOL what?! humans have to eat to survive, and have to have sex to reproduce so the species survives. we definitely don't need religion to survive.


You're comparing two very natural things to something that is the opposite of natural. all animals must eat and reproduce to survive, but humans are the only ones who have made up magical deity's to make themselves feel better about their lack of understanding.

Again, you deliberately dumb down the debate to make your own viewpoint look smarter in comparison and refuse to accept that many people who believe in a higher power don't "need" to; they simply do.

[RINO Tom]

Religion is a remnant of our more primitive past, just like eating and sex. It's really time we get beyond that sort of thing.

LOL what?! humans have to eat to survive, and have to have sex to reproduce so the species survives. we definitely don't need religion to survive.


You're comparing two very natural things to something that is the opposite of natural. all animals must eat and reproduce to survive, but humans are the only ones who have made up magical deity's to make themselves feel better about their lack of understanding.

Again, you deliberately dumb down the debate to make your own viewpoint look smarter in comparison and refuse to accept that many people who believe in a higher power don't "need" to; they simply do.

I didn't say otherwise, I realize that people who believe in a "higher power" simply choose to do so rather than there being some inherent biological or natural reason to do so. but comparing religion to eating or sex is just patently absurd, it's like if I compared using the internet to breathing. the internet and religion are both things we absolutely do not need to survive, while having sex, eating, and breathing are inherently things we must have/do to survive.

I'm not agreeing with shua's comparison, but you literally have never once discussed non-atheists on this site without implying that they believe what they do because, in some way, it makes them feel better and for no other meaningful reason like coming to the well thought out conclusion that they think the most likely scenario for the Universe in its current state is an intelligent agent outside of space-time.

[RINO Tom]

    Adding a hot take of my own, bicyclists going on major streets should have to carry a license. Make them more responsible for their actions rather than doing whatever and endangering everyone.

Making people go to the DMV is anti-worker.

Amen!

While we are on the roads, there is a special place in hell for someone going 30 mph in a 35 like a ing loser but then still cruising at 30 mph right through the 20 speed limit school zone.  They clearly don't give a rat's ass about safety, they're just off in lala land.  Again, slow drivers tend to be worse and more dangerous drivers than fast ones, on average.

[RINO Tom]

Bicycles are for children and teenagers too young for a license, and their use by well-off adults as a primary means of transportation is a sign of softness and social decay. This applies to the general decline in driving as well.

Biking is one of the most fun and best ways to get exercise on the weekends.  In many places, to get from one trail to the other, you have to ride with traffic for a short period of time.  Your comment is absurd.

[RINO Tom]

Game of Thrones is a trash show post season 4.

This is not even remotely a bad take. I can count the number of genuinely good post-S4 episodes on one hand.

What's absolutely heart breaking is that one of those post-S4 goodies was S8E2, which was phenomenal ... only to be followed up with the trash heap we've gotten the last two weeks.

[RINO Tom]

24 is better to watch than Game of Thrones


Arrow is better than The Flash

Game of Thrones has dumbed down its writing in an apparent effort to become 24, so maybe you'd like it more now.

[RINO Tom]

For supposedly being a more liberal and tolerant forum, Atlas is fairly Islamophobic,

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=114592.0

Holy sh!t look at BRTD throw down on that thread lol

It’s liberal, but that carries no inherent indication it will also be tolerant ... and it’s not.

[RINO Tom]

The World's End is ... like ... a really good movie.  Lol

[RINO Tom]

Lyndon Johnson was a horrible president as he quite possibly made the worst set of foreign policy choices ever by any US President in the history of the Country.

I didn't know you were a segregationist.

Touche, this absolutely reads like a response from someone who plays in a sandbox.

[RINO Tom]

Probably not that hot of a take, but Atlas has considerably moved to the right in recent years. Anybody who's still calling Atlas a "liberal echochamber" unironically in 2019 needs to get a grip.

The difference is that there didn't used to really be constant arguing about how terrible the other side was across several subforums, which is obviously going to make the clearly existent "liberal majority" seem more prevalent even if it shrinks.

[RINO Tom]

The Republican Party should stop trying to mimic previous moderation, and should try to mimic European style populism.

Maybe they “should.”  Hope to God they don’t (continue to get worse).

[RINO Tom]

^ Amazing how wrong I got you ideologically a few years ago, lol.

[RINO Tom]

-Lifehouse and Sum 41 are great bands.  More broadly, the early 2000's was the best time for music overall.

-Many people who are pro-choice know deep down abortion is wrong but resist it as they are uncomfortable with with the implications of fetal personhood as it relates to our national moral fabric and inherent individual depravity.

As a relatively moderate pro-choicer, I hardly represent the grouping well, but of course abortion is wrong.  My issue with blanket pro-life legislation is more the precedent that the government could force you to extract something OR someone from your body against your will.  That’s just my gut feeling, not some overly wonky guiding philosophy, as I VERY much support a cutoff for “late term abortions” that aren’t for medical reasons, as those seem rather indefensible ... which leads me to my own hot take:

Ideologically inconsistent middle ground solutions like the one above are almost always the best, most workable outcomes, and history shows this time and time again.

[RINO Tom]

For all of the talk of Atlas being full of Democratic hacks, I'd say that the Republican hacks are far more hackish and delusional on average. Of course, this doesn't apply to all or even close to all blue avatars, since many aren't hackish and make perfectly reasonable predictions. However, you'd be hard-pressed to find any Democrats on this forum who think that states like Mississippi or South Carolina are competitive (maybe one or two fall into this category), while at least a handful of Trump supporters on this forum think states like New Mexico, Oregon, or even Connecticut are competitive.

Being a hack, to me, isn’t just predicting your side to win.  A Democrat who buys the party message hook, line and sinker but thinks the party can’t win a race in MS or KY because there are too many dumb, racist voters to ever vote for the *Democratic Party* and repeats this with damn-near pride is arguably an even bigger hack.

[RINO Tom]

The White Walkers were a vastly more meaningful and interesting plot than any human politics anyway, and you could have *saved* GoT with any serviceable outcome that emphasized that (as it was hammered home since the first episode...).  Of course, what we got was the opposite and quite the abortion for other reasons, as well.

[RINO Tom]

The word "disabled" is much worse than "handicapped" or even "retarded" and it's nuts that it has become a standard way to refer to people.

The lesson here is how arbitrary what offends us is, honestly.

(Obviously in so far as we are literally just talking about the words)

[RINO Tom]

People who couldn't see Dany was going to go insane are terrible at actually paying attention to the show.

This is in no way a defense of the inexplicably awful writing of Season 8, of course.