Sidewalker
You literally cant be both incel and a rapist. However, women talk of rape all the time and we are not calling them obsessed with rape. Are incels under some "privileged" status where they become rapists by just talking about rape often enough?


You didn't look up the word "obsessed, its only a few keystrokes.


I need to get back to telling my dog how to castle.

Sidewalker
I mentioned that RemyBrown is an incel that is obsessed with raping women

How can he be both incel and a rapist?


I'd try to explain language to you but I would rather spend my time trying something with a chance of success, like teaching my dog to play chess.


Try looking up the word "obsess"...or you could research incel culture and its obsession with denigrating women, murder, rape, and (for you) pedophilia.

Sidewalker
It just comes across more like a lecture rather than a persuasive piece. There's no objective "real issue" except the one she says exists. That sounds oddly....undemocratic? How about, (wild thought) we leave such a decision to the people and neither your bombastic president Trump nor this obscure and condescending author. That would come across as a lot more like an actual democracy and nothing described in your posted article.


Free speech is undemocratic lol...how's that for a broken mind.


"Democracy is talking itself to death” - Benito Mussolini


A few other Fascist quotes about suppressing free speech:


"When 97 percent of the stories are bad about a person, it's no longer free speech" – Donald Trump (On negative news coverage being illegal)


"I would think maybe their license should be taken away" – Donald Trump (On news networks that criticize him)


"We're going to have people sue you like you've never got sued before" – Donald Trump (To reporters on promise to change libel laws to make it easier to sue journalists and news outlets for criticism)


“Critics of the Supreme Court should be put in jail” – Donald Trump (On women protesting the reversal of Roe vs Wade)



Sidewalker
Hmmmmm

Not sure of the relevance of your comment.

Please explain.


Why on earth would you expect a relevant comment from Debby?


That would be unprecedented, maybe you should get over it.


BTW, it's not her fault, it's just the way she was programmed.


Sidewalker
You trust in man to tell you the age of the earth, yet their measurements are flawed.
It takes more faith to believe in evolution than creation, for you must trust the claims of man.


What you are contending requires a direct refutation of the most general principles of most of our physical and biological sciences. As a unifying theory of biology, evolution holds true. Its mechanisms are by no means completely understood and it does not in any way eliminate the mystery of life, question the existence of God, or bring into doubt any of the basic tenets of Christianity.


But it is absolutely central to science.


The theory of evolution is the great unifying principle of biology, as powerful a model to biology as Newton's model was to physics. The conceptual framework of the theory of evolution makes sense of a profoundly wide range of scientific facts and it does it in a magnificent and comprehensive way. It provides a principle of unity, a framework by which science can attempt to explain, to unify, and to order, a vast amount of disparate data into a consistent whole providing tremendous coherence and clarity. To deny evolution you must bring into question the entire interwoven fabric of scientific research.


Flat out denial of the theory of Evolution requires the concomitant denial of an astounding range of scientific disciplines, not just the disciplines of geology, paleontology, archeology, radiometric dating, genetics, and zoology but also such fundamental disciplines as physics, astronomy, astrophysics, chemistry, biochemistry, geophysics, biology, botany, microbiology, and meteorology, and many others. Because of the interrelated aspect of the sciences, you can't really propose that the theory evolution is false without being fundamentally anti-scientific. You can contend that the theory of evolution is incomplete, nobody claims it is complete. If you could in fact, deny the theory of evolution, it would, in effect, unravel the world of science.


And I just don't see why anyone would want to do that. I simply do not see evolution challenging any of the basic tenets of Christianity; unfortunately, I can't say the same thing about your contention here. In order to support the belief that evolution is false, you accordingly have to postulate a deceptive God, don't you?


You would need to propose a God who would create Man with a rational mind, a sense of wonder, and seeking intellect, while creating a universe with the false appearance of tremendous age with the overwhelming evidence of "evolution" occurring in creation as a trick or something. This concept of a deceptive God is very hard to accept; it strikes me as a much greater challenge to Christianity than any damage the concept of evolution could ever hope to do.


In the end, it takes more faith to believe in your deceptive, trickster God than it does to believe in the science of evolution.

Sidewalker
The result is that we can risk losing sight of the real issues we need to follow to effectively defend our democracy.  

Why does this one person writing this get to decide what the "real issues" are? Doesn't seem very democratic.


How dare her, only the glorious leader decides what the issues are.


"The point isn’t persuasion — it’s reframing identity.... the opponent gets mired in defending themselves from the attack, leaving the control of the narrative entirely in Trump’s hands."


What she had to say is no longer the issue, what she said is irrelevent, her right to say it is the issue, fascists don't like free speech.


Good MAGA, you get a treat.

Sidewalker
Men can be raped too.


No shit, so what?


The fact you mentioned only women shows you are trying to be politically correct. Wake up


I mentioned that RemyBrown is an incel that is obsessed with raping women, that's a fact and it has nothing to do with the fact that men can be raped too, pay attention.


Is raping men your incel obsession?



Sidewalker
Tell me when America was of one single mind to break it [allegedly].

That's communist shtick. We're individual minds, my friend, but I understand trying prop up a Penn State academic. She's as big a loser as the Nittannies were last Saturday against Ohio State. Nittany - a solitary mountain lion [as if PA has mountains anything close to the one I live on outside and above Park City]. I'm at 7500 fleet elevation, more than double anything in PA.

I read her WaPo article. A hit job that has cute interactive graphics, but it gets old [repetitive] real fast, considering that, according to Psychology Today, the average person lies 20 times daily, which makes the Trump lie count amassed by the derelict media merely average.


Good MAGA, now rollover and you get a treat.


The misrepresentation of opponents

Trump doesn’t argue with opponents; he distorts them. Former President Joe Biden becomes “Crooked Joe.” Journalists become “enemies of the people.” Any prosecutor investigating him is “deranged” or “corrupt.” The point isn’t persuasion — it’s reframing identity. Once the label sticks, the opponent gets mired in defending themselves from the attack, leaving the control of the narrative entirely in Trump’s hands.


As I have written for Salon, Trump doesn’t just reduce opponents to absurd caricatures; he also creates false versions of their positions, a tactic that destroys the conditions for reasoned debate. By misrepresenting the views of his opponents, Trumpism forces them into a cognitive trap: They get stuck refuting the way they have been misrepresented rather than advancing their ideas. 


For those of us watching these manufactured debates, our minds get distracted by the back-and-forth between misrepresentation and defense. The result is that we can risk losing sight of the real issues we need to follow to effectively defend our democracy.  

.



Sidewalker

This is a great article that helps explain Trump supporters, link and full article pasted below:


 How Donald Trump broke the American mind


How Donald Trump broke the American mind

Opinion by Sophia A. McClennen


President Donald Trump’s decision to demolish the East Wing of the White House to make way for a ballroom is classic Trumpian theater — grandiose destruction packaged as vision. But the stories of the institutions, buildings and legacies that Trump and his team have destroyed aren’t the most disturbing threats our nation faces. What’s truly at risk of collapsing is the country’s cognitive infrastructure.


The real wreckage of Trumpism isn’t political chaos or partisan decay — it’s the slow demolition of the American mind. 


The success of any autocrat lies in their ability to mesmerize their supporters and mentally paralyze the resistance. Opposition depends not only on organized protests, but on the collective capacity to think through the crisis. Despots, knowing this, endeavor to do everything in their power to shut down our ability to think outside of their established narratives. 


This means that, while turnout for the “No Kings” protests is cause for optimism, effective resistance will require more than clever signs and animated crowds. It will demand careful attention to the cognitive toll of living under an absurd autocracy that claims to defend democracy while simultaneously dismantling it. How can the collective consciousness of pro-democracy Americans withstand the mental assault of Trumpism?


The first step is to understand how these attacks on critical thinking take place. 


Trump’s assault on the American mind operates on five fronts, with each one designed to distort perception, drain attention and degrade the nation’s collective reasoning. While it can be easy to think that these are simply incidental habits or stylistic quirks, it is critical to note that they are strategic modes of cognitive domination and they have been on display since well before Trump began his first term as President.


The culture of lies

Feel tired of making sense of Trump’s lies? If that resonates, it’s because mentally processing constant lying wears you down and, over time, becomes hard to resist. 


Trump’s politics depend on what psychologists call cognitive overload. He lies so relentlessly that even his detractors become mentally fatigued as the brain’s basic truth-tracking mechanisms begin to short-circuit. Research by psychologists Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand shows that repeated exposure to falsehoods erodes the brain’s resistance: The more often we hear a claim — true or false — the more familiar, and thus believable, it feels. 


Consider one of Trump’s repeated falsehoods: That his tariffs on China brought in “billions and billions” of dollars in revenue. Fact-checkers have debunked it hundreds of times, pointing out that tariffs were largely paid by U.S. consumers, not China. Yet repeated lies often become the message. The cognitive labor of constant rebuttal — the fatigue of knowing and re-knowing the same facts — slowly wears down public reasoning.


The real cognitive toll, though, comes in the exhaustion the mind suffers in the constant rebuttal of falsehoods. Each day the administration saturates the public sphere with a constant litany of lies. Psychologists have proven that processing a culture of lies results in cognitive fatigue.


The faulty logic

If Trump’s lies weaken truth, even greater damage is done to our capacity to use reason to make sense of information.


Trumpian rhetoric relies on a rotating arsenal of cognitive traps: Whataboutism to deflect, false equivalence to confuse, red herrings to distract and gaslighting to exhaust. In fact, the Trump administration offers a constant lesson in all of the most common flaws in logical reasoning. 


For example, when it emerged that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth discussed classified U.S. military operations using the encrypted messaging application Signal, the faulty logic of the administration was on full display. The same administration that once led chants of “Lock her up!” over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server now dismissed the breach as “no big deal” and a “witch hunt.”

It isn’t just that the Trump team offers an incessant flood of faulty logic. They also create an environment that makes thinking critically exceptionally difficult. As cognitive scientists Keith Stanovich and Richard West have shown, humans possess two systems of thought: One fast and emotional, the other slow and deliberative. Trump keeps the public in the first mode — triggered, reactive, impulsive. Under Trump, critical reasoning collapses from emotional overload.


The threat, then, isn’t just misinformation; it’s misreasoning. 


The misrepresentation of opponents

Trump doesn’t argue with opponents; he distorts them. Former President Joe Biden becomes “Crooked Joe.” Journalists become “enemies of the people.” Any prosecutor investigating him is “deranged” or “corrupt.” The point isn’t persuasion — it’s reframing identity. Once the label sticks, the opponent gets mired in defending themselves from the attack, leaving the control of the narrative entirely in Trump’s hands.


As I have written for Salon, Trump doesn’t just reduce opponents to absurd caricatures; he also creates false versions of their positions, a tactic that destroys the conditions for reasoned debate. By misrepresenting the views of his opponents, Trumpism forces them into a cognitive trap: They get stuck refuting the way they have been misrepresented rather than advancing their ideas. 


For those of us watching these manufactured debates, our minds get distracted by the back-and-forth between misrepresentation and defense. The result is that we can risk losing sight of the real issues we need to follow to effectively defend our democracy.  


The barrage of spectacle

Trump and his team don’t just lie, twist logic and misrepresent their opponents — they never stop. The chaos is not incidental; it’s the method. 


Long before his career in politics, Trump perfected the performance of power and honed his skills at becoming an ongoing source of attention. As Guy Debord warned in “The Society of the Spectacle,” when social life becomes mediated by images, “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” Trump is that principle embodied. From “The Apprentice” to Truth Social to his daily barrage of inane memes, Trump has turned politics into a show — collapsing governance into entertainment and politics into virality.


Processing an ongoing spectacle simply fries your brain. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains that constant novelty and interruption deplete the brain’s executive functions — the very ones essential for critical thinking and judgment.


The swagger of impunity

If Trump’s lies corrode truth and critical thinking while his spectacle exhausts the mind, it is his swagger of impunity that leaves us in shock. Every smirk that follows a scandal, every boast of getting away with it, threatens to rewire the public’s moral compass. 

From claiming that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and [not] lose any voters” to watching his administration violate one norm, regulation and protocol after another, Trump and his team don’t just brag about breaking rules, they get away with it. 


Hannah Arendt warned in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” that when the absurd becomes normal, thinking itself collapses. Trump’s defiance of norms, laws and political consequences boggles the mind. His followers see his shameless disregard for the law as proof of strength, not guilt. Yet, his critics reel from a growing numbness. Each unpunished act dulls outrage until the mind struggles to believe in effective guardrails to democracy. 


If you’ve found yourself burnt out, exhausted, confused, dejected and dismayed as you process the daily onslaught of the Trumpian team, you now know why. And while it might be tempting to allow awareness of these authoritarian tactics to sow depression, that would be playing right into Trump’s hands. 


Understanding the power of authoritarian confusion must breed clarity, not despair. The more we grasp how Trumpism corrodes thought, the better equipped we are to defend it — because the fight for democracy always begins in the mind.


The post How Donald Trump broke the American mind appeared first on Salon.com.


Sidewalker
You mean pure and uncontaminated Buddhism, as found in Wikipedia?

What I mean is that Buddhim is very clear about their teachings. There is no space for uncertainty as there is in Christianity. So, it's very difficult that a son of a bitch can convince buddhists that they need to go to war to defend their "faith".

Besides, the key of its success is that Buddhism doens't have a God which people can fight for as it is in the Islam which exhort explicitly to use violence against the enemies.


I’m pretty sure Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana, Zen, and Nichiren Buddhists all think they are practicing “the original teachings of Buddha”, but hey, feel free to correct them, all half billion of them.


You could call your movement, Wikipedia Buddhism.


Sidewalker
some English to Hieroglyphics translator I Googled.

What's laughable, my friend, is that admission. Just what do you think drives some online, Googled [which, itself, is A.I.] English translator to hieroglyphs? A.I., that's what, which fails miserably when the English phrase contains a modern idiom not even intelligibly translated into French [for example] with syntaxal accuracy. And you expect it to stretch to antiquity?


LOL


Bless your heart

Sidewalker
Reading Walt Withman’s books can often leave a man breathless, especially those who take him literally.


I'm thinking that people who take poetry literally are just too stupid to remember to breathe.


Sidewalker
LLLLLLL Canadaaaaaaaa… dun dun dun dun dun dunnnnnn!


A Canadian team hasn't won the world series since 1993, a 32-year dry spell.


Of course, Baseball is "America's Pastime", in Canada it's hockey, and the last time a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup was....oh my...that was 1993 too.


No wonder Canadians have an inferiority complex.



Sidewalker

Trump

Sidewalker · a year ago

The verb "to trump" in this context means to release gas from the bowels. This usage has been around for centuries and is considered an older or less common meaning, especially compared to its modern usage for Donald Trump.


They might not be the exact same meanings, but they are very closely related, Donald Trump talks out of his ass and usually, what he says stinks. In the end, both uses of the word mean the same thing,







Sidewalker
Yep, best way to avoid fluid transfer and microorganism exchange.


You say that like it's a bad thing?


If you don't thoroughly enjoy "fluid transfer and microorganism exchange", then you are doing it wrong.

Sidewalker
There are a few problems with your string of Egyptian hieroglyphs. making it apparent this is a Chat GPT construct, or some other AI disaster.


LOL, nope, not AI, I just typed "Stick it in your ear" into some English to Hieroglyphics translator I Googled...couldn't care less if it's accurate, it's the thought that counts.


When you can snatch the pebble from my hand Grasshopper, you will know when you are being mocked.


New Chinese Proverb: People do not laugh at you because you tell jokes, they laugh because you are the joke.




Sidewalker
My argument is very simple. Buddhism is the most peaceful phylosophy or spiritual ideology that ever existed. The other religions, in contrast, created wars and unrest in the name of their "God".


Buddhism has had its fair share of wars and violence too.

Sidewalker
Lefties think it's people right to set fire on their country if they are unsatisfied with the work of their authorities.


Yeah, that's because it pays so well.


We also like to torture puppies, kill babies, and lick cupcakes when nobody is looking.

Sidewalker
What 
seems to defy logic typically falls into three categories: paradoxes, phenomena of quantum mechanics, and human emotions/behavior. In many cases, these things don't necessarily break the rules of logic but rather expose the limits of classical logic, common sense, or current scientific understanding. 


Maybe you should Google it.


ontology vs epistemology - Google Search