JackRiddler » Fri Dec 20, 2019 6:34 pm wrote:I tried, people. I focused all of my telepathic powers to make him yell out "Motherfuckers! Let's do pushups, right here!" It didn't work, but I'll practice more next time.
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JackRiddler » Fri Dec 20, 2019 6:34 pm wrote:I tried, people. I focused all of my telepathic powers to make him yell out "Motherfuckers! Let's do pushups, right here!" It didn't work, but I'll practice more next time.
Former Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D) has endorsed Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
“As a former Cleveland mayor and eight-term U.S. congressman, I remain concerned that our country is spending too much time looking for dragons to slay in other countries instead of taking care of things here at home,” Kucinich, who ran for the White House in 2004 and 2008, said in a video shared on Twitter on Monday by an ABC News campaign reporter.
“That’s why I’m supporting Tulsi Gabbard for the Democratic nomination for president. She has the courage and the intelligence to get our country back on track,” Kucinich added.
stickdog99 wrote: the most important issue of all facing our nation today is to get big money out of politics.
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2020 ... more-11642
21st Century Machiavellians 1.1: Elites View the Democratic Party as a Containment Vessel for Popular Discontent
Posted on January 20, 2020 by Michael Hoexter | 4 Comments
(This is a 3-part essay divided here into a total of 4 installments, with the first part divided into two)
Michael Hoexter, Ph.D.
The on-again, off-again political war now being waged inside and around the Democratic Party between a new generation of progressives and the Democratic Party Establishment requires a new or expanded lens to help understand what is going on. This quite intense “war” of varying intensities is being waged in an era when simultaneously the Democrats represent the only established political vehicle within the United States to unseat the monstrous Trump Administration and the Republican Party that backs them. Perversely, it seems, the Democratic Establishment has tried and continues to try, at almost every turn, to suppress enthusiasm for ideals and policies as well as the representatives that most nearly embody those policies and ideals that would be its own political energy source, the basis for Democratic political identity.
...CONTINUE READING
Non-player characters (NPCs) insults are leveled at leftists, progressives, and liberals, depicting them as mindless creatures as mechanical as the people the player character talks to at the tavern in role-playing games. No matter the situation, the NPC will respond with prewritten dialogue triggered by a designated input. Often solely for the purpose of helping the player character move along. “There are strange noises in the old dwarf mine to the north, I heard that orcs and dark elves may have set up camp.” All these insults ultimately denote the same kind of person – an empty, uncultured, and vapid boor with no original thoughts or feelings. Or, in the case of the NPC, an automaton running a pre-programmed script (or worse, a compiled binary of pre-programmed source code). The problem is that the more that we participate in online social networks, the more truth that is attached to the stereotype. After all, the experience of being on social networks leaves a bad taste in your mouth. You know on some level that your behavior is predictable, programmable, and antithetical to your self-concept as an independent individual.
Is there any truth to that? Probably yes. Why do you post to begin with? The secret to gambling – an analogous activity – is the sublime beauty of variable-reward reinforcement schedules. You may lose a lot of money at the slot machine, but as long as you get a payout every now and then its enough to keep you hoping you’ll get another. You never really know when the next reward is coming. Its not really clear that Skinner box behavior shaping is actually what keeps you online – another likely motivation is simply that its harder and harder not to as online swallows up the “real” world and your social and professional contacts. But that’s not the issue. The machinelike process of engaging with social media is sufficient to produce an unhappy consciousness that stems from self-loathing about one’s own participation in a system that affords no special privileges to being human, blurs the distinction between human and machine, and recasts everything fed into it into networks and data. This self-loathing is matched with a powerful cynicism about a fake world filled with fake people and populated by fake beliefs and sentiments. Everything’s fake, everyone’s a bot, and you can’t shake the nagging suspicion that you’re a fake bot too.
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