Charlie Kirk shot at (shot?) in Utah

[pood]

I should add that Ford was once surprised to discover that he was wearing a tie decorated with a bunch of letter “U’s” with screws going through the bottom of each of them.

 

[pood]

Jeez, how could I forget Ronnie Raygun, or the “amiable dunce” as Gore Vidal correctly labeled him? His program to ease or end drug abuse? “Just say no.” His program to fight the spread of AIDS? Nada. He wouldn’t even mention it. His “trickle down” economics led to a great many of the economic problems we have today as well as beginning the widening chasm of income inequality. His Star Was fiasco was a fantasy in what passed for his head under his dye-tinted hair. Let’s not forget the Iran-Contra scandal. He did make some progress with Gorbachev but that was almost entirely Gorbachev. Communism collapsed under the elder Bush, not under Raygun, though his fans like to give Ronnie the credit for it. Raygun started his 1980 election run with a huge racist dog whistle and periodically revived them throughout his presidency He was also credibly accused by a woman of raping her before he became president.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Meeting minimum qualifications was not the issue. The issue is that when you restrict yourself to a small fraction of possible candidates, you are unlikely to find anybody close to optimal for the job.

But this is what the US has been doing for centuries, just choosing white males and there is still pressure from certain groups to keep doing that.

Of course, the veep’s only real job is to wait for the president to die. Other than that, pretty much anybody could do it. FDR’s first veep, John Nance Garner, characterized the job as “a bucket of warm piss.”

Which is probably why in more modern day, Veeps are given tasks. Kamala was supposed to look into the border mess.

Tasks like Mike Pence...his one job was to rig the election counting for Trump but he failed.

With Biden being so ancient, it was always more likely than for most Veeps that she would be needed to replace him. But when the time came, she did not measure up, and failed miserably.

I wonder how 2024 would have looked had Biden not restricted himself like he did.

So now you don't even want an Asian VP.

 

[Derec]

Not at all. In fact I am most likely to point out white make when someone else brings up the lack of qualifications or criminality or lack of morality of those who are not white or male or , heaven forbid, neither.

You keep denigrating white men all the time. I get it, white men being the worst is a leftist article of faith.

Yes, I am very selective about the news I read.

Which outlets do you read?

I’m careful about what I believe, and who and usually do so provisionally, and check various sources.

And yet you are very quick to accept things that verify your prejudices, be it any claims against sex work or about how bad white makes[sic] are.

Here’s a link about mass shootings of schools and workplaces in the US since 1966.

And it does not say what you claim it says.

Mass Shooting Factsheet | Rockefeller Institute of Government

Mass Shooting Factsheet High-level details about mass shootings from 1966 to today Last updated: September 15, 2025 502 Number of Shootings 1,714 Total Fatalities 4,371 Total Victims Definition A mass shooting is an incident of targeted violence carried out by one or more shooters at one or more...

rockinst.org

94.6% of shooters are male. 54.5% of shooters are white.

First note that this site uses a more restrictive definition of mass shootings, given how in almost 60 years they only count 502 shootings (~8.5 per year) with 1714 fatalities (~29 per year and ~3.4 per shooting).
That the shooters are heavily male is not surprising given that human species has a marked sexual dimorphism regarding androgen levels and aggressive behavior.
Second, the race data shows that whites are underrepresented in mass shootings.
According to this wiki page, in 1970, non-Hispanic whites were 83.5% of the population. In 2020, it was 57.8%. The average percentage for the period between 1966 and 2025 is somewhere between these two, and definitely higher than 54.5%. Which makes whites underrepresented among shooters, contrary to your "white men are bad, mkay" claims.

You keep ignoring the effect of population size and need for per capita rates every time I bring it up, and just keep going back to your talking points. Why?

 

[pood]

Meeting minimum qualifications was not the issue. The issue is that when you restrict yourself to a small fraction of possible candidates, you are unlikely to find anybody close to optimal for the job.

Oh, nonsense. There are and were plenty of black women qualified for the job, including Harris.

Nonresponsive to my point.

Of course it was responsive.

And it is also hardly justifying eliminating most people from consideration simply because of their skin color and plumbing.

It is just astonishing how you destroy irony meters everywhere. Eliminating from consideration blacks and women because of their skin color and plumbing was always the national norm, and Biden decided to end it. Women only just got the vote a little over a hundred years ago, and as little as 60 years ago blacks could not even vote in many places!

Of course, the veep’s only real job is to wait for the president to die. Other than that, pretty much anybody could do it. FDR’s first veep, John Nance Garner, characterized the job as “a bucket of warm piss.”

Which is probably why in more modern day, Veeps are given tasks. Kamala was supposed to look into the border mess.

With Biden being so ancient, it was always more likely than for most Veeps that she would be needed to replace him. But when the time came, she did not measure up, and failed miserably.

She barely lost the election, with racism and misogyny being the likely reasons for her loss.

 

[pood]

We all know that if Biden had never announced he was restricting his pick to black women, Derec would still be complaining that Harris was picked only because she was female and black and therefore was a “DEI” hire.

 

[Toni]

Not at all. In fact I am most likely to point out white make when someone else brings up the lack of qualifications or criminality or lack of morality of those who are not white or male or , heaven forbid, neither.

You keep denigrating white men all the time. I get it, white men being the worst is a leftist article of faith.

Yes, I am very selective about the news I read.

Which outlets do you read?

I’m careful about what I believe, and who and usually do so provisionally, and check various sources.

And yet you are very quick to accept things that verify your prejudices, be it any claims against sex work or about how bad white makes[sic] are.

Here’s a link about mass shootings of schools and workplaces in the US since 1966.

And it does not say what you claim it says.

Mass Shooting Factsheet | Rockefeller Institute of Government

Mass Shooting Factsheet High-level details about mass shootings from 1966 to today Last updated: September 15, 2025 502 Number of Shootings 1,714 Total Fatalities 4,371 Total Victims Definition A mass shooting is an incident of targeted violence carried out by one or more shooters at one or more...

rockinst.org

94.6% of shooters are male. 54.5% of shooters are white.

First note that this site uses a more restrictive definition of mass shootings, given how in almost 60 years they only count 502 shootings (~8.5 per year) with 1714 fatalities (~29 per year and ~3.4 per shooting).
That the shooters are heavily male is not surprising given that human species has a marked sexual dimorphism regarding androgen levels and aggressive behavior.
Second, the race data shows that whites are underrepresented in mass shootings.
According to this wiki page, in 1970, non-Hispanic whites were 83.5% of the population. In 2020, it was 57.8%. The average percentage for the period between 1966 and 2025 is somewhere between these two, and definitely higher than 54.5%. Which makes whites underrepresented among shooters, contrary to your "white men are bad, mkay" claims.

You keep ignoring the effect of population size and need for per capita rates every time I bring it up, and just keep going back to your talking points. Why?

The site specifically looked at mass shootings in schools and workplaces. Only an idiot refuses to acknowledge that the motivations of shootings at schools and at workplaces differ sharply from other types of multiple/mass shootings associated other criminal activity or family annihilations. At least some of the school shootings seem to have been motivated by desire for some kind of fame or notoriety or just lulz. We do not look at the 9/11 attacks or Oklahoma City bombings the same way, although they killed many more people including young children.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

"If you don't vote for Dems, you're a fascist nazi"?

Who (other than @Emily Lake ) said that?

There ARE other possibilities:

* You may be equally disgusted with “both sides”

Ah. Being equally disgusted with "both" sides. According to IIDB, that makes me a right winger by default.

 

[laughing dog]

Yep. Free speech is dying fast.

Camryn Booker wasn't expelled/arrested for free speech, but for trying to knock a fellow student's hat off his head.

OMG. the horrors. And I thought Texans were supposed to tough. But they are fucking snowflakes.

But even the free speech part of her performance was distasteful. What would you be saying if a white student was yelling "your homie is dead" after, for example, George Floyd was killed in 2020?

Remember when back in 2019 Nicholas Sandmann was condemned in the media for standing around while being white?

No. Probably because that didn't happen. It was a clusterfuck of misunderstanding that lead to lots of asshattery.

 

[Politesse]

"If you don't vote for Dems, you're a fascist nazi"?

Who (other than @Emily Lake ) said that?

There ARE other possibilities:

* You may be equally disgusted with “both sides”

Ah. Being equally disgusted with "both" sides. According to IIDB, that makes me a right winger by default.

By default? No. "Disgusted" is extreme language perhaps, but most Americans deny a political party affiliation. I certainly do, and if I'm right wing, Kamala Harris is a dang fascist.

 

[Colonel Sanders]

Your ideals have been a significant part of getting us into the mess and now the very people you claim to protect are and will continue to suffer for it.

This is just a bullshit narrative. People will always lie about the left no matter what we do. There is no tone whatsoever that will change that. And also no, the vast majority of the blame can be put on misinformation spread by social media as well as the Evangelicals.

Don't acknowledge reality. That's up to you.

You can just, I dunno, look at the statistics. Without the Christian right, it's hard to see Trump's cult of personality becoming that powerful, or abortion being such a big issue.

I have no idea what you're on about, but I'm having some memory issues that you could help with.

Who's in the White House?

Who has the majority in Congress?

What is the majority makeup of the Supreme Court?

Maybe that'll help enlighten me.

For some reason the sports term "Scoreboard Motherfucker!" might be relevant here.

OK. Are you disagreeing with GN or not? I think his/her point is valid. The Christian right has an outsized influence in elections, coupled with Catholic anti-abortion politics, and MAGA wins - the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court. Religion is the real problem in America. I had hoped that as time went on it would become less and less, but it hasn't. I remember the elections of 2004 and my disappointment over Kerry's loss. I thought though that young people at that time were rejecting religious fundamentalism and the Republican Party's fanaticism, but it just hasn't happened. In fact, as the Republicans have gotten worse, they've gotten stronger!

The only hope I see is for an out and out economic collapse before the mid terms next year.

I also continue to see the democratic party in its newest mindset of identity politics and that's a loser and will be. They need to be the party of the working class and against the billionaires. They need to champion working people again, but they've lost them - perhaps for a very, very long time.

I honestly don't know what GN was on about. I did click on the link, which is full of numbers, but I'm not busting out a pen and legal pad to begin deciphering what point GN wants to make. A summary of a few sentences coupled with the link would've been helpful.

 

[Colonel Sanders]

So you won’t vote for a Dem, which is essentially a vote for MAGGOTry

"If you don't vote for Dems, you're a fascist nazi"?

Certainly!

It really is that simple. Pood understands very well that everyone who disagrees with her on anything would've volunteered at Auschwitz.

First, I am not a “her,” and second, I never said anything close to that and you know it. Meanwhile you whine about progressive rhetoric while deploying actual destructive rhetoric.

You and others like you imply it. I choose not to vote for either side because I refuse to be party of any movement that demands insufferable adherence to constant white knighting while the nation falls into the sewer. Right now, a vote for a Democrat is support for incompetency. A vote for the GOP is support for a rotting shithouse. I don't have to engage in either.

"Destructive rhetoric." As if this doesn't make my point for me.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

As I already pointed out, we've lost Roe and we're going to lose Obergefell.

I think we're less at risk of losing Obergefell, because we actually have a law in place that requires all states to recognize same-sex marriages as legally binding. We never had an actual law regarding abortion, and that was the undoing of Roe.

Summer child.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Of course, the critical words in LP's post are "If the only reason"... then yes, LP would be right. No one should get a position strictly because of their race.

I'm glad somebody gets it.

The issue we have here is that this isn't strictly about race... as much as people want to assume it is. Harris didn't become a VP candidate because she was black. She did stuff, had a career. No one wants to look at anything else in the resume. LP is obsessed with the answer on the ethnicity line.

But here you are wrong. "Black" was a required characteristic, but not the only one. That is discrimination. (But I consider all VP picks to be discriminatory, I'm not singling her out.)

And yet, she’s the only one you’ve mentioned. And not a single word about how, with a single exception, being a white make was a requirement to be POTUS or VP.

Putting any race or sex requirement on the VP position is wrong. It's just that it's normally not done openly so it doesn't get criticized. He openly told the world he was going to discriminate on race and sex and then proceeded to do so.

Yet you have zero problem with the demonstrated fact that with a single exception every single elected POTUS and VP has been white and male.

Seems like a very very strong preference to me.

All VPs are DEI picks. It's just Biden was very open about Harris being a DEI pick so he gets more criticism for it.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So you won’t vote for a Dem, which is essentially a vote for MAGGOTry

"If you don't vote for Dems, you're a fascist nazi"?

I didn’t say that.

Not in those words specifically, no.

But you did say that not voting Dem is equivalent to voting for MAGA. And you've also expressed that MAGA is essentially synonymous with fascism and nazism. Therefore, not voting Dem is equivalent to being a fascist nazi.

If A = B, and if B = C, then A = C.

Not voting Dem in 2024 is in effect a half vote for fascism.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Yet you have zero problem with the demonstrated fact that with a single exception every single elected POTUS and VP has been white and male.

Seems like a very very strong preference to me.

Look, you know I disagree with LP on damned near every topic like this, but I think you're stretching things here. It's entirely possible to be quite happy and open to non-white or non-male (or both) leaders while still opposing affirmative action or diversity objectives as the reason why we get non-white or non-male leaders.

Seriously, I would love to have a competent, powerful, intelligent woman in charge of the US. But I'd like her to get there on her own merits, not because some collection of guilt-ridden people decided that we had to have a female president to make some sort of social statement.

Exactly. I want the best people available, do not look at race, gender or such irrelevant things. Putting an irrelevant constraint on a search inherently reduces the chance of finding the best. We do tend to look but outside theatrical roles (although I take a wide view of theatrical--I have no problem with the idea of an ethnic restaurant hiring people that look to be of the correct ethnicity etc) we shouldn't be looking.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But why should we think that Kamala Harris, for example, did not get where she was on her own merits?

The point is we don't know because Biden artificially limited the search to black females. It's the same thing that's come up in other contexts--the competition should not be rigged.

 

[crazyfingers]

Yet you have zero problem with the demonstrated fact that with a single exception every single elected POTUS and VP has been white and male.

Seems like a very very strong preference to me.

Look, you know I disagree with LP on damned near every topic like this, but I think you're stretching things here. It's entirely possible to be quite happy and open to non-white or non-male (or both) leaders while still opposing affirmative action or diversity objectives as the reason why we get non-white or non-male leaders.

Seriously, I would love to have a competent, powerful, intelligent woman in charge of the US. But I'd like her to get there on her own merits, not because some collection of guilt-ridden people decided that we had to have a female president to make some sort of social statement.

Exactly. I want the best people available, do not look at race, gender or such irrelevant things. Putting an irrelevant constraint on a search inherently reduces the chance of finding the best. We do tend to look but outside theatrical roles (although I take a wide view of theatrical--I have no problem with the idea of an ethnic restaurant hiring people that look to be of the correct ethnicity etc) we shouldn't be looking.

That's utopian thinking. The people in charge do look at race and assume that skin color impacts intelligence. Your system will only work after racism no longer exists - if ever.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Why yes, yes it is in fact racist to assume that certain ‘slots’ are for whites only.

You (and ld) are misinterpreting Kirk's point here. What he obviously meant is a slot that would have likely went to somebody white if not for the pernicious practice of racial preferences, and people were treated as individuals.

Mr Kirk did not say “stealing a white person’s LIKELY slot.” . He clearly meant a white person’s slot which means he did not consider that the slot those black women got might have gone to Asians, Latinos or Native Americans.

So, it was racist.

Yes. This is basically a stopped clock situation. The base claim that someone who got there by affirmative action (their own claims) got there by stealing the slot of someone more qualified is true. Doesn't exonerate him overall, it just means the one statement was true. But the reality is that they didn't get where they were due to affirmative action.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

In regard to Kamala Harris being a black woman, and Biden gave prior notice of his intention. What if he had said that he wanted an economist as his VP? That is an even narrower pool of possibilities, less than 1%, whereas Black woman as a category is about 10% of USA population.

Economist is relevant.

And black women politicians are not 10% of all politicians.

But the pool of black women that he would consider actually choosing his VP from was very much less than 1%.
She wasn't chosen because she was a black woman. She was chosen for her qualifications, and she also matched his desire for a black woman to be his VP. If he couldn't have found a qualified black woman he would have chosen someone else, but of course there were plenty of black women who could have qualified.

We do not know if she was the best as others were not even considered. That's the reverse discrimination you want to pretend does not exist.