I guess the fact that so many people are posting gibberish instead of rants is a good sign :P.

My dear chap, how pathetic. You know that axiom about never assuming because it makes an ASS out of U and ME? You just broke it.

I'm neither Left nor Right. I just do not like the lies and fabrications that certain people in the political sphere *NEED* to use to get their "point(s)" across. FauxNoise doubles down on that, and runs away with it. The GOP love it because it fits in with their particular strain of racism and hate. And it's not really just Faux - You got the known liar blogospheres such as Limpbawl, Beck and Breitbart (albeit he died, and his website is run by a bunch of particularly Reich-whinge [actual] criminals and perjurists these days)... and pretty much most of the so-called "liberal" media - most of which is owned by just 6 arch-conservatives, who fund the GOP and their ilk.

I've always kinda leaned towards Conservatives, in this country - Labour are just too incompetent to manage the Treasury properly...but these days, it seems the Tories are just as bad, but for different reasons.

The *ONLY* political party I've ever voted for were the Official Monster Raving Loony Party - and despite the name, were probably the sanest people ever to run for office. Both Labour and Tory stole [large] parts of their manifesto to enact. But then their leader died, and with it, the spirit of the party. Unfortunately.

And don't get me wrong in singling out BIG money - they buy anyone of any political stripe they can. Although, in this country, before Bliar took over, they did tend to spend more on the Tories...Labour and the Unions are another matter altogether - they *DID* bring the country to its knees throughout the 1970s - overthrowing elected governments when they didn't get their own way, Labour being far too weak to do anything other than wring their hands, and award massive public sector pay-raises the country could ill afford.

To borrow a phrase : The Truth Is Out There. But you have got to WANT to look for it, instead of just swallowing wholesale the rage machine propaganda, Left, right, or fruitloops.

To reiterate this PSA:

Eh, the problem is not that it was gloriously elaborate, the posts I responded to were unfocused and just throwing SEVERAL unrelated points at once, a mishmash of USAian right wing talking points and namecalling.

Though I did get stunned by his initial salvo. I mean, really.

That's a hallmark of more sophisticated trolling. It superficially resembles a cogent argument, without actually being one. It's no longer as simple as "Yo momma fat" XD

I'd like to bring back my earlier reference to Poe's Law:

"Any sufficiently advanced troll is indistinguishable from a genuine kook."

I can appreciate that kind of trolling a bit. Some good trolls will build a stupid but convincing argument that will make normal and reasonable people frothing in their mouth and spend their precious internet hours to type comebacks,.

The best part is when the troll can pull in people with different POV and let them argue while the original troll slink away cackling.

Scientific consensus means that there's a high level of certainty that climate change is real and caused by humans.

Unless, of course, you're seriously suggesting that we can solve climate change by voting not to haveit.

Honestly, you're almost as bad as those anti-vaccers. Had we chosen to do something about this 20 years ago, we'd be in a much stronger position to avert this disaster. As a result, of democracy not working, we'll have to pay a much larger amount of money and make much larger cuts than we would have had to 20 years ago. In the mean time, there are species going extinct at the fastest rate in the Earth's history.

Democracy has crap to do with it. Ultimately, people like you are to blame for keeping this dead debate going.

Very much so. It takes great talent, skill, and subtlety to achieve this, and I've not seen it done properly in a very long time :(

Depends where you are, the GOP is like that, but the Democrats aren't. Fortunately, the GOP is basically extinct around here. They just elected a former news reporter to head the state committee, and she herself, couldn't even win a seat in the state house.

Which is a pretty good indication of how well they're doing.

I seen it done once. But later that guy ruin his own rep by falling into an argument that pissed him off so bad he ended up copy pasting the entire content of holy bible on the thread and got the permanent boot from the mod. Not on GOG obviously.

Seriously? They're all alike, regardless of party. See my comment before. Our own "anti-war" president is getting ready to involve us in another country's war after a massive anti-war campaign and promises of not making mistakes like Iraq and Afghanistan again. Somehow Iraq and Afghanistan were none of our business, but Syria is? SMH

First off, Afghanistan was completely our business, the mistake we made was failing miserably to set up the logistics and adequately protect the civilian population. As for Iraq, that wasn't any of our business, and we didn't send anywhere near enough troops in to prevent foreign fighters from coming in. And we didn't provide enough troops to prevent the genocide.

In terms of Syria, we haven't get sent anybody in, so it's premature to suggest that we're going to make the same mistakes. What's more, we already know that there are crimes against humanity being committed. I don't see how ignoring crimes against humanity is good for anybody. This isn't like Iraq where even at the time, it was well known that there were no WMDs, in this case, it's pretty well established that there are crimes being committed.

The fact that people think it's OK for us to sit idly by while crimes against humanity are committed is something that should be deeply disturbing to anybody with a conscience.

In other news, space is mostly dark.

You're honestly surprised with how anti-science and anti-people the Republicans are?

I posted that a couple pages back. I think the real news is that there are any scientists that are admitting to being Conservatives and or Republicans.