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The thread for stupidity from GQP politicians who don't have their own thread

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shemp

a flimsy character...perfidious and despised
shemp
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Oddly, one of the effects of unchecked global warming is that winds might die down a whole bunch and make wind farms useless for generating any real power.

But I really don't think that is what he meant.
 
Honestly, I think we need to focus less on the specific nutters and more on the general nuttery. Most of them are spouting the same nonsense, just in their own flavor. Making it about the specific nutter just makes them famous and feeds into the narrative that they are "fighting the media/left/socialists/whoever".
 
Donal said:
Honestly, I think we need to focus less on the specific nutters and more on the general nuttery. Most of them are spouting the same nonsense, just in their own flavor. Making it about the specific nutter just makes them famous and feeds into the narrative that they are "fighting the media/left/socialists/whoever".
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Again that's the narrative anyway. We need to stop acting like responding to their crazy, dangerous, stupid evil is "making it worse."
 
The things that we're assured don't work against the Proudly Evil Wrong.

- Reasoning with them
- Mocking them.
- Literally anything and everything.

As I've said a billion times there is no difference between being on someone sides and just always arguing for them.
 
Senator Ron Johnson is a goldmine of crazy:

https://madison.com/wsj/opinion/editorial/ron-johnson-spouts-his-worst-idea-yet/article_30927a6c-faac-5f82-a95d-fe543ccbeb59.html
Wisconsin’s conspiratorial U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson has spouted plenty of garbage in recent months — that mouthwash has been proven to kill COVID-19, that unvaccinated people are being put “basically into internment camps,” that climate change is “bullsh-t.”

But the Oshkosh Republican’s worst idea among many doozies went like this: He wants his partisan pals at the statehouse in Madison to take over the administration of Wisconsin elections.
Click to expand...
 
JoeMorgue said:
Again that's the narrative anyway. We need to stop acting like responding to their crazy, dangerous, stupid evil is "making it worse."
Click to expand...

Responding to them does nothing but burn energy and makes it harder to draw attention to the actual danger. You end just playing wack-a-mole. Look at here, how many threads get bogged down because a right-wing troll plays the same stupid game over and over and someone engages them like it will change anything?

I'm not saying the likes of Boebert and Greene aren't dangerous or should be tolerated. I'm saying going at them directly is a bad tactic. Life is not an Aaron Sorkin drama where you can just pummel a person acting in bad faith with the facts and a sense of decency and make them back down.

Like I said, they are all doing and saying the same things, just with their own flavor. Go at the rhetoric and actions without naming the perpetrators directly. It won't do anything to shut their traps at first, but it lets you control the greater narrative.

If you really want to go after specific individuals, at least go after the financial backers. Like folks are doing with JD Vance. Most of the media talking heads I have seen discussing him make sure Peter Theil's name is in the same breath. Those people don't want to draw attention.
 
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JoeMorgue said:
- Reasoning with them
- Mocking them.
- Literally anything and everything.
Click to expand...


At this point we shouldn't reason with them or mock them. We need to just start saying, flat out, "That's ******* stupid, and you're ******* stupid if that's what you really think. You need to go home and think about what you're doing with your life, you ******* moron."

Don't try to explain things to them. If they could understand it, they'd have gotten it by now.

Don't try to be "clever" and get a laugh. If they could understand how clever we are, they'd have gotten it by now.

At this point, a flat, unemotional statement about how ******* stupid they are, no more, no less, should be the standard reply to any of this crap.
 
Something is to be gained by examining why the right is so successful in convincing gullible people to act against their self interest.
 
digger said:
Something is to be gained by examining why the right is so successful in convincing gullible people to act against their self interest.
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Control the information sources. They did a good job of that the last few decades. And even young supposedly more progressive generations are being bombarded by right-leaning propaganda from some very successful online outlets.

The base doesn't have to be able to rationalize much beyond "I heard it there first".
 
digger said:
Something is to be gained by examining why the right is so successful in convincing gullible people to act against their self interest.
Click to expand...

It's not exactly a secret.
LBJ said:
If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
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All that "owning the libs" stuff has nothing to do with liberals and everything to do with giving these people someone to feel better than.
 
Madison Cawthorn tells college students they should drop out of college, calls college "a scam."

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1473379286140833794

Madison Cawthorn today to an audience of mostly college students: “I think you should home school. I was home schooled all the way through. I am proudly a college dropout. Unless you are becoming a doctor or lawyer or engineer, I highly encourage you to drop out. It's a scam.”
Click to expand...
 
digger said:
Something is to be gained by examining why the right is so successful in convincing gullible people to act against their self interest.
Click to expand...

There's a lot written about. In fact, a lot of it is written by right-wingers. Most of them either don't care or aren't smart enough to be subtle about it.

I wish I could remember his name, but there was a GOP strategist back in the 70s who wrote a memo openly acknowledging that they couldn't argue with facts anymore and had to press on people's emotions and try to scare them. The problem is when I do a search for conservatives and facts vs feelings or similar terms, it's buried under a bunch of right-wing stuff claiming the opposite.
 
shemp said:
Madison Cawthorn tells college students they should drop out of college, calls college "a scam."

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1473379286140833794
Click to expand...

He's just cribbing off some silicon valley wannabe "thought leaders". That line has been kicked around for decades. While there might be an important discussion revolving around that idea, a mook like Cawthorn isn't part of said discussion.

Also, he didn't "drop out" of college. That implies he had a choice.
 
shemp said:
Madison Cawthorn tells college students they should drop out of college, calls college "a scam."

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1473379286140833794
Click to expand...

I saw this great statement from John McWhorter's mother (a college prof) as to why college is valuable beyond advancing your employment opportunities:
. . . after four years of college, students . . . should have a sense of the world’s complexity, that everything did not easily reduce to common-sense observations of the kind you preface with “Well, all I know is …”
Click to expand...
 
Paul2 said:
I saw this great statement from John McWhorter's mother (a college prof) as to why college is valuable beyond advancing your employment opportunities:

". . . after four years of college, students . . . should have a sense of the world’s complexity, that everything did not easily reduce to common-sense observations of the kind you preface with “Well, all I know is …” "
Click to expand...


That's considered a bad thing these days.
There was a newspaper comic I saw once, "Non Sequitur", I think, in which a couple approaches a newsstand.
"Excuse me. What kind of material do you sell here?"
"Why, only the finest periodicals intended to entertain and educate the reader."
"Educate? Do you mean expose me to ideas different than my own?"
"Yes ... ?"
"Sigh. Let's go dear. We'll try the next one."
 
Again right now ~40% of the population wants to just be wrong with no consequences.

It's why so much effort is being put into the goal of pulling us into the post fact world. It's the mission statement of all the "You can't tell me what to think, if everyone says 2+2=4 I'm going say it's 5 just so I know I'm thinking for myself" Proudly Wrong types.

And... real talk.. I think they eventually want to just drop the pretense. "I'm wrong, like I'm literally admitting I'm factually wrong, what are you gonna do about it punk" is so much of the subtext, it's has to be the text at some point.
 
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I am pretty sure a solid chunk of them already dropped the pretext. This is why I have no idea why shaming them or berating them is seen as an effective strategy. I think we're at a "contain and isolate" stage right now.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Again right now ~40% of the population wants to just be wrong with no consequences.

It's why so much effort is being put into the goal of pulling us into the post fact world. It's the mission statement of all the "You can't tell me what to think, if everyone says 2+2=4 I'm going say it's 5 just so I know I'm thinking for myself" Proudly Wrong types.

And... real talk.. I think they eventually want to just drop the pretense. "I'm wrong, like I'm literally admitting I'm factually wrong, what are you gonna do about it punk" is so much of the subtext, it's has to be the text at some point.
Click to expand...

It's the Dirty Harry theory of stupidity. "Do you think you're smart, punk?"
 
shemp said:
I think we need a catchall thread for the stupidity of all the GQP idiots who don't already have their own thread (Trump, Greene, Gaetz, Boebert, Nunes, etc.)

We'll start with Ryan Zinke, U.S. House candidate from Montana:

https://twitter.com/ryanzinke/status/1473058255509278729

And this reply:

https://twitter.com/PetekJeff/status/1473066035066519552
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Though the "batteries" argument is kinda bad. Grid based battery storage implementation really isn't there yet.....it looks very close though. And there are systems that help stabilize supply....but nothing like wind charging up batteries and those batteries then fully supply the grid for several hours without wind (almost there though).
 
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BobTheCoward said:
Though the "batteries" argument is kinda bad. Grid based battery storage implementation really isn't there yet.....it looks very close though. And there are systems that help stabilize supply....but nothing like wind charging up batteries and those batteries then fully supply the grid for several hours without wind (almost there though).
Click to expand...

The most famous is the South Australia power bank - https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a31350880/elon-musk-battery-farm/
 
BobTheCoward said:
It is incredible how it has gone from non existent to an hour long emergency supply for a city on a very short time.
Click to expand...

If I'm reading the page correctly;

This smoothing has saved South Australians a ton of money, already much more than the $50 million cost that Tesla passed on to its Australian investor. The battery facility “reduced network costs by about A$116 million ($76 million) in 2019,” Bloomberg explains, “savings [Garth] Heron, [Neoen’s head of development in Australia] said would be passed on to businesses and households in the state. The battery’s introduction also slashed the cost to regulate South Australia’s grid by 91 [percent], bringing it in line with other regions in the nation."
Click to expand...

that's payback in under a year!

I wonder how scalable it is?
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
If I'm reading the page correctly;



that's payback in under a year!

I wonder how scalable it is?
Click to expand...

Scalable as in the same use? Very!

Scalable as in making a renewable energy system fully self sufficient? It isn't there yet.

(I'm assuming the latter was the implication of the tweeter. But I'm making a few other assumptions, such as they meant chemical batteries and not hydroelectric batteries).
 
GOP Congressional Candidate Noah Malgeri wants to see Gen. Milley executed live on CSPAN.

It's time that we call out these sort of unhinged characters for what they are: mainstream Republicans.
 
varwoche said:
GOP Congressional Candidate Noah Malgeri wants to see Gen. Milley executed live on CSPAN.

It's time that we call out these sort of unhinged characters for what they are: mainstream Republicans.
Click to expand...

1971: "Gen. Westmoreland should be executed for treason for his failure to win in Vietnam!"

*Gets locked in loony bin*

2021: "Gen Milley should be executed for treason for calling the Chinese!"

*Gets elected*
 
varwoche said:
GOP Congressional Candidate Noah Malgeri wants to see Gen. Milley executed live on CSPAN.

It's time that we call out these sort of unhinged characters for what they are: mainstream Republicans.
Click to expand...

Malgeri:

"We need to get back to our patriotic, liberty-loving roots. What did they used to do to traitors if they were convicted by a court? They would execute them. That's still the law in the United States of America. I think, you know, if he's guilty of it by a court-martial, they should hang him on CNN. I mean, they're not going to do it on CNN. But on C-SPAN or something," he said.
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Unsurprisingly, Rep Paul Gosar endorsed Malgeri. And some people wonder why I think the GOP has gone off the crazy rails.
 
Remember when not being able to spell potato or looking goofy in a tank helmet was enough to end a political career?
 
JoeMorgue said:
Remember when not being able to spell potato or looking goofy in a tank helmet was enough to end a political career?
Click to expand...

Those were also the days when dealing under the table with Iran and drug cartel enforcers weren't enough to end your presidential administration.
 
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