We live in the age of fraudulence

[steve_bank]

One of the greatest political frauds of the last century was the JFK image of the American rfamily7man.

Pictures of JFK playing with his kids inn the Oval Office. Jackie giving TV tou7rsof the WH as the devo0ted wife.

JFK and Jackie were estranged, he was a serial adulterer and in the WH. Everyone knew.

The Kennedy faioly6image was a fraud constructed by political cco9nsultants.

The edi8aa called the WH Caelo0t. People ate it up. Woken did their hair like Jackie.

 

[Colonel Sanders]

One of the greatest political frauds of the last century was the JFK image of the American rfamily7man.

Pictures of JFK playing with his kids inn the Oval Office. Jackie giving TV tou7rsof the WH as the devo0ted wife.

JFK and Jackie were estranged, he was a serial adulterer and in the WH. Everyone knew.

The Kennedy faioly6image was a fraud constructed by political cco9nsultants.

The edi8aa called the WH Caelo0t. People ate it up. Woken did their hair like Jackie.

Does anyone not know that JFK was a notorious poonhound? Bill Clinton was a distant second and he got blown in the Oval Office.

 

[pood]

Well, they couldn’t have been that estranged, given that their third child died right after birth a few months before the assassination.

But Kennedy did commit infidelities right in the White House, kept hush-hush from the public. One may have cost him his life.

He had a bad back, but his doctor talked him off the back brace. Shortly before the assassination, he hurt his back anew while frolicking in the White House pool with two White House secretaries whom he had named Fiddle and Faddle, I believe. That put him back in the brace, which he wore to Dallas.

The first shot, which passed through his upper back and lower neck without affecting any major organ, likely would have thrown him to the floor of the car were it not for the brace keeping him bolt upright. But it did, making him a sitting duck for the fatal head shot.

 

[pood]

A number of presidents have fooled around in the White House. FDR had a mistress. So did Ike. Grover Cleveland fathered an illegitimate child. LBJ may have been a bigger poonhound than JFK. He once boasted, ‘I’ve had more women by accident than Kennedy has had on purpose.” The Secret Service would alert him while screwing in case Lady Bird was on her way. Warren Harding fathered a child by his secretary in a White House closet. And so on.

 

[steve_bank]

Pood, the JFK family saga is well documented.

Starting with Joe Kennedy the family was as corrupt as it gets. JHK was hanging out with mobsters. Today he would be crucified by the media. Joe Kennedy bought votes in the election.

Teddy Kennedy literally got away with murder at Chappaquiddick.

 

[pood]

Pood, the JFK family saga is well documented.

Starting with Joe Kennedy the family was as corrupt as it gets. JHK was hanging out with mobsters. Today he would be crucified by the media.

Today nobody would care. A convicted sex offender was elected president.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Pood, the JFK family saga is well documented.

Starting with Joe Kennedy the family was as corrupt as it gets. JHK was hanging out with mobsters. Today he would be crucified by the media. Joe Kennedy bought votes in the election.

Teddy Kennedy literally got away with murder at Chappaquiddick.

...negligent homicide.

 

[TomC]

Pood, the JFK family saga is well documented.

Starting with Joe Kennedy the family was as corrupt as it gets. JHK was hanging out with mobsters. Today he would be crucified by the media. Joe Kennedy bought votes in the election.

Teddy Kennedy literally got away with murder at Chappaquiddick.

Everyone knows what those Irish papists are like.
Tom

 

[bilby]

"It is also well known, based on extensive archaeological evidence, how the pyramids were built. I have watched many documentaries about the building of the various Egyptian pyramids, and they explain quite clearly how the Egyptians achieved these tasks, and it shows that they were intelligent and motivated." That means you don't know because none of your so called experts can't know. They did not live back then.

Today I learned that archaeology isn't a thing. Nor history.

It is impossible to know anything at all about anything you didn't see happen with your own eyes.

The USS Arizona could be resting on the seabed at Pearl Harbor because she struck an iceberg, and anyone who claims to know otherwise is a damn liar, because they did not live back then, so the so called experts who blame Japanese torpedo bombers can't know.

Meanwhile in the real world, we can and do know a shitload of stuff about the past, because knowing stuff isn't the impossible dream that people who don't know stuff would like to pretend it is.

Maybe it's more comfortable to tell yourself that the reason for your ignorance isn't a lack of effort, or a lack of intelligence, but is simply because it's impossible to ever know anything you didn't directly witness.

The conclusion - that everyone who claims to know anything is therefore a liar - may be a bit hard to swallow, but is at least more palatable than the admission that you are either lazy or stupid, I guess.

 

[Tigers!]

Pood, the JFK family saga is well documented.

Starting with Joe Kennedy the family was as corrupt as it gets. JHK was hanging out with mobsters. Today he would be crucified by the media.

Today nobody would care. A convicted sex offender was elected president.

That is how far we (societal) have fallen

 

[Tigers!]

Maybe more importantly, a non-vote can be a form of protest.

A more potent (and perfectly legal) form of protest would be to vote for “none of the above”.

Start counting and publishing what are called informal votes in Australia. These are ballot papers that are not valid for whatever reasons.
Whilst it will not tell you the protest votes numbers the trends in informal votes will allow you to see patterns.
We have had seats in Australia where informal votes have come 3rd. That tells you there is a sizeable protest vote buried within.

 

[Tigers!]

I like the idea, but it would extremely difficult to enforce. If 50,000,000 choose not to vote, what's the government going to do about it?

Collect a billion dollars in fine revenue.

Maybe more importantly, a non-vote can be a form of protest. To disallow it would be a 1st Amendment violation.

Nobody in Australia has to vote. The fine is for failing to submit a ballot paper. It's a secret ballot, and if you put a blank paper into the box, nobody can (or will) do anything about it - if you want to protest by not voting, you can. You can even write a manifesto on the paper if you want (though nobody in power will likely ever read it).

But sitting on your arse watching TV on election day isn't a protest. There's no first amendment right to laziness.

How would the government go about collecting the names of those who didn't vote without incurring more expenses than a fine would cover?

"Laziness" and free speech have nothing to do with each other.

Personally, I'm not voting again unless the Dems make some drastic changes. The GOP is right out. IOW, I don't feel represented by either party. Voting for a third party is ineffective and potentially harmful.

The Trump party is a flat-out, unacceptable disgrace while the Dems have created apathy and its own niche brand of revulsion. Fuck 'em both. I don't need either.

All your posts on this thread would suggest that you do care but do not have a viable alternative to consider. I can understand that feeling well.

To be clear, I'm not making a middling, half-assed "both sides are bad" argument. The Dems are far less awful than the GOP.

 

[TomC]

Maybe more importantly, a non-vote can be a form of protest.

A more potent (and perfectly legal) form of protest would be to vote for “none of the above”.

Start counting and publishing what are called informal votes in Australia. These are ballot papers that are not valid for whatever reasons.
Whilst it will not tell you the protest votes numbers the trends in informal votes will allow you to see patterns.
We have had seats in Australia where informal votes have come 3rd. That tells you there is a sizeable protest vote buried within.

Your system in Australia is very different from the one here.

Due to our antiquated system, we don't vote for the president. The Electoral College does, based on who the state legislatures send. For the majority of Americans, the outcome of the state is known long before the election. Makes it difficult to get excited about voting when the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
Tom

 

[ZiprHead]

Pood, the JFK family saga is well documented.

Starting with Joe Kennedy the family was as corrupt as it gets. JHK was hanging out with mobsters. Today he would be crucified by the media. Joe Kennedy bought votes in the election.

Teddy Kennedy literally got away with murder at Chappaquiddick.

...negligent homicide.

Probably not even that. Drunken driving didn't carry the stigma back then as it does today.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If I take "with college degree" in polling data at face value, plenty of presumed well educated people still voted for Trump. Why is that?

These people don't know history, political philosophy, or even what's in their own best interests. It's a long winded way to say that most of them are ignoramuses.

I might buy a huge block of US voters being ignorant and stupid but I still can not accept that they are voting against their best interests. Even unintelligent animals know what their best interests are and it is arrogant and condescending to say otherwise. My pet cat knows whether it is better or worse off after 3 election cycles and those "stupid and ignorant" who voted for Trump were people who did and do also. People might be stupid electing the wrong person for 1 election cycle but not after this amount of time has passed for their reality to set in.

If the Democrats want to win they need to be better than MAGA and they simply need to change who they are and stop "whining about Trump".

Or better yet a non corrupt 3rd party needs to take over from the completely corrupted uni-parties we have today.

The problem is that The Felon was promising pie in the sky.

The only beneficiaries of The Felon's policies has been the very rich.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

After reading the New Yorker profile of Curtis Yarvin, it is more clear to me than ever that we live in the age of fraud. The ultimate crisis we are experiencing is one of epistomology: a majority of people are unable to distinguish bullshit and propaganda from established science and fact.

Most of us have to depend on others to know what "the truth is". We have to depend on others because we do not have infinite time resources to know first hand for ourselves. And when we do depend on others there is always the opportunity to be scammed.

Actually finding the truth is extremely difficult to come by. If finding the truth was so easy that any intelligent person would know, we would not need courts to find judgement for defendants accused of crime.

Not all truth is equally easy to find.

There were plenty of people telling you what would happen if The Felon was elected--and things are turning out pretty much as we said they would. But pleasant fiction is more palatable than unpleasant reality. If the truth couldn't be discerned by the average person why did so many of us get it right?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So you think you know the absolute unimpeachable truth and everything possible because you are so smart and intelligent? Tell us all for certain what happened during the JFK assassination. Tell us all whether Epstine was killed or killed himself. Then tell us all (since you are the all knowing God) just exactly how the Egyptians built the pyramids.

Yeah, what's supposed to be so hard about it? No harder than what an awful lot of hunters face in bagging a deer. Yet plenty of deer are bagged.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I don't think they 'lost' at all. I don't believe for one second that election was legitimate - and I suspect Musk's cronies were quite useful to that end.

The exit polls were dead on in the tight races. One would have needed to fix those as well, which seems very unlikely.

I think Musk was involved with micro-targeting ads in locations. The GOP likely benefited from some incredibly intelligent AI driven app to micro-target house seats and EVs among certain minority groups.

The election rigging was long before the ballot box. Vote suppression.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

A number of presidents have fooled around in the White House. FDR had a mistress. So did Ike. Grover Cleveland fathered an illegitimate child. LBJ may have been a bigger poonhound than JFK. He once boasted, ‘I’ve had more women by accident than Kennedy has had on purpose.” The Secret Service would alert him while screwing in case Lady Bird was on her way. Warren Harding fathered a child by his secretary in a White House closet. And so on.

I've read a book about wandering presidents. About half of US presidents are known to have engaged in illicit relationships, some are known to have engaged in many of them.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The USS Arizona could be resting on the seabed at Pearl Harbor because she struck an iceberg, and anyone who claims to know otherwise is a damn liar, because they did not live back then, so the so called experts who blame Japanese torpedo bombers can't know.

The whole thing must be a sham. How could a landlocked desert state have a battleship in the ocean in the first place??

(I won't say they couldn't have a battleship. If you direct the majority of the power of a battleship's engines to big fans you can fluidize enough sand that you could operate a battleship in it. Horribly abrasive, though, it won't work for too long.)