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No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

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Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#591

Post by ModernMech »

mc32 wrote: post #548
_ei8q wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The example Thiel used in the original "seriously but not literally" argument was the wall. Of course Trump wasn't talking about a literal wall, he said, it was more of a metaphor for, you know, something. This argument was always embarrassingly stupid, but anyone still making it after Trump shut down the government for a month over literal wall construction has forfeited their right to be taken seriously at all.

I disagree with Thiel there, His base, and most independents want a literal wall (and, as he claims, Dems used to be for a wall) But his speeches are littered with these blue collar type speech patterns (boasting, exaggeration, put-downs, etc., when trying to “win” an argument).

> His base, and most independents want a literal wall

Can you back up that most independents want a wall? The polling I've seen says otherwise.

"CBS News polling from mid-November found that a majority -- 59 percent of Americans -- oppose building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. It's a partisan issue, though. A large majority of Republicans support the wall -- 79 percent. A majority of independents -- 66 percent -- oppose the wall, and 84 percent of Democrats are also against it."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-poll-americans-dont-su...

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#592

Post by ceejayoz »

jki275 wrote: post #570
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would disagree with that, a significant number of people think that Mr Trump is dependant on their _money_ and is ashamed to admit it, more than anything else. It's a fact that Mr Trump has been bankrupt six times. It's a fact that he has not shown his tax returns. His business dealing with Russia are under investigation.

Some of his business ventures have filed for bankruptcy protection. He has never been bankrupt himself. There's a significant difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump#Lawsuits_and_bank...

> Trump has never filed for personal bankruptcy, although in 1990 he came within one missed bank loan payment of doing so, agreeing to a deal that temporarily ceded management control of his company to his banks and put him on a spending allowance.

Personal bankruptcy in all but name.

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#593

Post by ineedasername »

mc32 wrote: post #530
brisance wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He solicited a hostile foreign power to interfere in the 2016 elections. In many countries this would be equivalent to treason. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2016/jul/27/donald...

I think he’s just implying they have more competence than the FBI in finding alleged missing emails. His comms is very non literal -and people take him literally. His whole campaign was off hand blue collar jokey remarks. Pundits understood him literally, so they failed to understand him at all. His nomination competitors also saw him in this light and ultimately failed. Mostly, J think they failed to understand his…

You can't claim he doesn't mean what he says literally after he shut down the government quite clearly over a literal wall he wants built. Or has harangued the Justice Department in public over not going after Hillary Clinton as an extension of his "Lock her up" campaign. Or his attempt to literally repeal & replace Obama Care. Regardless of whether you're pro or con on these and all of his other policy statements, it's clear through his words and his actions that he means it all literally. Up until it either a) becomes clear it's simply not going to happen (Mexico paying for the wall) or b) a statement is revealed to be patently untrue (see his various stories about his involvement with payoffs for affairs).

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#594

Post by Natanael_L »

mc32 wrote: post #561
ltc5505 wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, you'll still find people (even in this thread) that claim "of course Trump's campaign wasn't meant to be taken literally." With statements like "if you took what Trump said on the campaign literally, then you missed the point." So then if _The Wall_ was figurative, why did he shut down the government over its funding? "No he meant that one literally." Okay... So what about the fact that the wall would be funde…

Like any politician, the "Mexico would pay for it" was an "argument" to get support. Did supporters care if Mexico itself would pay? No. But it fit their sentiment. It's win-win for him because the only people who would "care" would be people against the wall who politically don't matter. It's like when Dems say they want to abolish ICE. That's what their base want to hear. Do they really think ICE is going to be abo…

You're basically saying "one side says what they want to do even if they know they can't get it, the other says whatever they think you want to hear"

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#595

Post by nerdponx »

danhak wrote: post #365
slg wrote: post #285

It seems like a lot of people are not reading between the lines of this post. Bezos apparently believes that he was hacked by either the US or Saudi government and that now one or both of those governments are using the National Enquirer as an attack dog against him. That accusation is much bigger than any other piece of this story. EDIT: Here [1] is a reporter from the Washington Post backing that up. The Bezos' cam…

It really puts this tweet from POTUS last month in a crazy new context: "So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post. Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better & more responsible hands!" https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/10846274519830732... Stran…

The only thing strange about it is how much easier it is to learn about these conspiracies now that we have the Internet.

People are acting all shocked like this is a new state of affairs. It's not. We are just far more empowered now to actually learn about these things.

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#596

Post by scottmf »

skrebbel wrote: post #416
optimiz3 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon could pull a CloudFlare and knock them off the internet as nationalenquirer.com seems to be hosted on AWS. My guess is Amazon/Bezos already has multiple backups of the Enquirer's digital assets for forensic purposes. https://twitter.com/ryanhuber/status/1093665718464327680

Aannnd in a spectacular twist to this beautiful soap opera, https://www.nationalenquirer.com is down. Even if AWS has nothing to do with this it (unfairly) reflects extremely bad on them.

Are you in the EU?

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#597

Post by leetcrew »

belorn wrote: post #509
CloudNetworking wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody said they've used sophisticated attacks to get their hands into that data, though. Why would a Government agency risk burning a zero day if they can just pay that lady or blackmail her with something else?

>>> "Bezos apparently believes that he was hacked" Hacking implies a sophisticated attack. Not saying either government didn't do it. Following paxys line of thought I would however agree that hacking is not the most likely explanation in how the private data was taken. Social engineering is sometimes also described as an "hack" but I doubt that is what Bezos implies with the word.

> Hacking implies a sophisticated attack

to you and me, yes. probably also to Jeff Bezos. but to the general public (arguably the real audience here), hacking is anything between guessing someones weak password and sophisticated attacks like stuxnet.

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#598

Post by ineedasername »

mc32 wrote: post #561
ltc5505 wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, you'll still find people (even in this thread) that claim "of course Trump's campaign wasn't meant to be taken literally." With statements like "if you took what Trump said on the campaign literally, then you missed the point." So then if _The Wall_ was figurative, why did he shut down the government over its funding? "No he meant that one literally." Okay... So what about the fact that the wall would be funde…

Like any politician, the "Mexico would pay for it" was an "argument" to get support. Did supporters care if Mexico itself would pay? No. But it fit their sentiment. It's win-win for him because the only people who would "care" would be people against the wall who politically don't matter. It's like when Dems say they want to abolish ICE. That's what their base want to hear. Do they really think ICE is going to be abo…

It is intellectually dishonest to attribute literal intent to some of his statements, but others made with the same bombastic style only obviously more ridiculous are hand-waved away as "it was the spirit of the thing he meant, not literally". And whether or not his followers care about Mexico paying for the wall, his various statements clearly indicated a literal intent on the topic. And while some on the left may mean "let's massively reorganize ICE and rethink its operational policies", it's clear that some also mean this literally.

You're right about Occasio-Cortez: she is shaping up to be about as bad as Trump in this respect. I'm not quite sure which of them is worse, but I know the prospect of her someday getting to the White House is a chilling prospect, even though my political leanings are in that direction. She appears to be about as dangerously ignorant (and perhaps callous) of facts of situations. The only mitigating factor for her is that perhaps experience will temper this, and maybe she is just uninformed but not unwilling to learn.

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#599

Post by dragonwriter »

mc32 wrote: post #561
ltc5505 wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, you'll still find people (even in this thread) that claim "of course Trump's campaign wasn't meant to be taken literally." With statements like "if you took what Trump said on the campaign literally, then you missed the point." So then if _The Wall_ was figurative, why did he shut down the government over its funding? "No he meant that one literally." Okay... So what about the fact that the wall would be funde…

Like any politician, the "Mexico would pay for it" was an "argument" to get support. Did supporters care if Mexico itself would pay? No. But it fit their sentiment. It's win-win for him because the only people who would "care" would be people against the wall who politically don't matter. It's like when Dems say they want to abolish ICE. That's what their base want to hear. Do they really think ICE is going to be abo…

> It's like when Dems say they want to abolish ICE. That's what their base want to hear. Do they really think ICE is going to be abolished?

Yes, they do.

They may not think the functions are going to be eliminated, or most of the rank and file staff removed from government service, any more than when the predecessors of various parts of ICE, like the INS, were abolished before it.

Re: No Thank You, Mr. Pecker

#600

Post by atulatul »

Is this a good place to quote a few lines from The Godfather?

Michael Corleone: My father is no different than any other powerful man,... like a senator or a president.

Kay Adams: You know how naive you sound?

Michael: Why?

Kay Adams: Senators and presidents don't have men killed.

Michael: Who's being naive, Kay?

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