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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

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Originally posted by second:
6ix, you define yourself by your resentments.

And yes, I mean “resentments” rather than “grievances.” Grievances are about things you believe you deserve, and might be diminished if you get some of what you want. Resentment is about feeling that you’re being looked down on, and can only be assuaged by hurting the people you, at some level, envy, such as Hollywood, Disney, James Cameron.

Consider the phrase (and associated sentiment), popular on the right, “owning the libs.” In context, “owning” doesn’t mean defeating progressive policies, say by repealing the Affordable Care Act. It means, instead, humiliating liberals personally — making them look weak and foolish, making their Disney movies (Avatar 2 and plain old Avatar) look like failures.

And does anyone doubt that resentment on the part of those who felt disrespected by Walt Disney and Hollywood was central to the rise of Donald Trump? Are there any pundits left who still believe that it was largely about “economic anxiety”?

I’m not saying that the decline of manufacturing jobs in the heartland was a myth: It really did happen, and it hurt millions of Americans. But the failure of Trump’s trade wars to deliver a manufacturing revival doesn’t seem to have turned off his base. Why?

The likely answer is that Trump’s anti-globalism, his promise to Make America Great Again, had less to do with trade balances and job creation than with a sense that snooty foreigners considered us chumps. (James Cameron is a Canadian. Avatar 2 was filmed in New Zealand. Disney is in California, the state viscerally hated by Trump and his voters.) “The world is laughing at us” was a consistent theme of Trump speeches, and his supporters surely imagined that the same was true of domestic globalist elites.

And I have a theory that Trump’s own underlying ludicrousness, his manifest lack of the intellectual capacity and emotional maturity to be president, was part of what endeared him to his base. You fancy liberals think you’re so smart? Well, we’ll show you, by electing someone you consider a clown!

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Haha! I just read the article that you plagiarized here. Give me a minute. I'll find it.





....


Ah... There it is.

https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2023/jan/07/paul-krugman-republica
ns-are-making-the-us-small/

It's written by your boy Krugman too. I knew it wouldn't take long before he'd make an ass out of himself after showing he might have a redemption arc.

Let's see exactly what you stole from Krugman's article for your own here...

(Feel free, everyone, to compare the underlined paragraphs to Second's post above)

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Like many liberals, I'm feeling a fair bit of MAGAfreude: taking some pleasure in the self-destruction of the American right.

There has never been a spectacle like the chaos we've seen in the House of Representatives this week. It had been a century since a speaker wasn't chosen on the first ballot. The last time that happened, there was an actual substantive dispute: Republican progressives (they existed back then) demanded, and eventually received, procedural reforms that they hoped would favor their agenda.

This time, there has been no significant dispute about policy; Kevin McCarthy and his opponents agree on key policy issues like investigating Hunter Biden's laptop and depriving the Internal Revenue Service of the resources it needs to go after wealthy tax cheats. Long after he tried to appease his opponents by surrendering his dignity, the voting went on.

While the spectacle has been amazing and, yes, entertaining, neither I nor many other liberals are experiencing the kind of glee Republicans would be feeling if the parties' roles were reversed.

Liberals want the U.S. government to function, which means that we need a duly constituted House of Representatives, even if it's run by people we don't like. I don't think there are many on the U.S. left (such as it is) who define themselves the way so many on the right do: by their resentments.

Yes, I mean "resentments" rather than "grievances." Grievances are about things you believe you deserve, and might be diminished if you get some of what you want. Resentment is about feeling that you're being looked down on, and can only be assuaged by hurting the people you envy.

Consider the phrase (and associated sentiment), popular on the right, "owning the libs." In context, "owning" doesn't mean defeating progressive policies, such as by repealing the Affordable Care Act. It means, instead, humiliating liberals personally--making them look weak and foolish.

I won't claim that liberals are immune to such sentiments. But liberals have never seemed remotely as interested in humiliating conservatives as conservatives are in humiliating liberals. And a substantial part of what has been going on in the House seems to be that some Republicans who expected to own the libs after a red wave election have acted out their disappointment by owning Kevin McCarthy instead.

Does anyone doubt that resentment on the part of those who felt disrespected was central to the rise of Donald Trump? Are there any pundits left who still believe that it was largely about "economic anxiety"?

I'm not saying that the decline of manufacturing jobs in the heartland was a myth. It really did happen, and hurt millions of Americans. But the failure of Trump's trade wars to deliver a manufacturing revival doesn't seem to have turned off his base. Why?

The likely answer is that Trump's anti-globalism, his promise to Make America Great Again, had less to do with trade balances and job creation than with a sense that snooty foreigners considered us chumps. "The world is laughing at us" was a consistent theme of Trump speeches, and his supporters surely imagined that the same was true of domestic globalist elites.

And I have a theory that Trump's own underlying ludicrousness, his manifest lack of the intellectual capacity and emotional maturity to be president, was part of what endeared him to his base. You fancy liberals think you're so smart? Well, we'll show you, by electing someone you consider a clown!

The irony is that the MAGA movement has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of sinister globalists (if any exist) in making America the opposite of great. Right now the world really is laughing at us, although it's terrified, too. America is still the essential nation on multiple fronts. When the world's greatest economic and military power seemingly can't even get a functioning government up and running, the risks are global.

Even with a speaker in place, how likely is it that the people we've been watching the past few days will agree to raise the debt ceiling, even if failing to do so creates a huge financial crisis? And there may be many other risks requiring emergency congressional action even before we get to that point.

The world is laughing even harder at Republicans, both the ultraright refuseniks and the spineless careerists like McCarthy who helped empower the crazies. For what shall it profit a man if he shall lose his own soul and still not gain enough votes to become speaker of the House?

I'm not sure what we are in store for, nor is anyone else. One thing is sure, however: America is already less great than it was when Nancy Pelosi ran the House, and it's shrinking by the day.

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HOLY SHIT, DUDE.

As your Professor in the School of Hard knocks, you get an "F" for plagiarism.


See... I told you I read media from both sides. Maybe you should try it yourself instead of LITERALLY writing exactly what other people write, and apparently program your brain with.


I recommend that you just shut the fuck up and take the BIG FUCKING "L" now.

Before somebody starts doing some digging and finding out just how often you rip off other people's articles and pretend that they're your thoughts.

Oh... wait. They are your thoughts. They're just not Second Originals.



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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Oh, I've known for years that SECOND doesn't write his own stuff. He used to post very long posts with no links and no quotes that clearly weren't his. Then he started to use the quote format on some stuff but try to pass off other stuff as "his". But the content and writing style were too self-contradictory and diverse to be coming from one person. I think he doesn't even READ what he posts, or give it a moment's thought. If he did, his posts would be a lot more coherent. He's just throwing crap against the wall for trolling purposes. Yanno, just to wind people up.

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Originally posted by second:
In his recent book "Thank You for Your Servitude", my colleague Mark Leibovich quoted a former Republican representative who bluntly summarized his party’s plan for dealing with Trump: “We’re just waiting for him to die.” As it turns out, this is not an uncommon sentiment. In my conversations with Republicans, I heard repeatedly that the least disruptive path to getting rid of Trump, grim as it sounds, might be to wait for his expiration.

Ha! Good luck with that. Consider this:

• Donald Trump has a Filet-O-Fish–centered diet, exercises only by playing golf, and employs some of the least trustworthy-seeming doctors to have ever been associated with the medical profession.

• He did not take the threat of COVID seriously at all and actually got COVID himself just before the last election.

• He’s 76 years old.

• He nonetheless recovered fully from COVID and has had no known health problems since. He looks fine. (He looks less frail than the Democrats’ likely 2024 nominee, for one.)

Have you ever seen Velveeta go bad? No, because it’s not real food. The same is true of Donald Trump and being a human.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:

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Originally posted:
‘Barbie,’ and why conservatives keep losing the culture war

The only person who didn’t enjoy the experience was my wife. She grew up with Barbie as, I imagine, most women today have. The movie’s left-wing message upset her. When asked by the kids why she didn’t like it, she replied, “It was a movie about Barbie made by someone who hates Barbie.”

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Well, at least he pointed out that his wife is the one who wears the pants in the family. I would have loved to have seen her elaboration on this point of view. What sort of Barbie were they expecting to see, if they didn't know it was Greta Gerwig Divorce movie?

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Apparently Greta Gerwig the writer/director of Barbie knows what sells tickets:

Top 2023 Movies at the Worldwide Box Office

Rank Movie Worldwide Box Office
1 The Super Mario Bros. Movie $1,356,699,911
2 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 $845,303,497
3 Barbie $816,822,894
4 Fast X $719,379,825

https://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-records/worldwide/all-movies/cu
mulative/released-in-2023

Movie Comparison: Barbie (2023) vs. The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)
shows that Barbie could surpass the #1 movie Super Mario Bros.

https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/custom-comparisons/Barbie-(2023)/Su
per-Mario-Bros-Movie-The-(2022)#tab=day_by_day_comparison

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The man-hating harpy finally cracked the code and figured out how to get normies to pay for their brainwashing.

Good for her. Fuck those kids up, groomer.

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How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Trump has always connected his claims of pervasive electoral fraud to the widespread anxiety among white, Christian conservatives that they are losing control of the country and especially movies to a racially diverse, secular, and LGBTQ-friendly Democratic coalition centered in the nation’s largest cities. As Trump put it during one 2020 rally before a predominantly white, rural audience in Georgia: “This is our country. (And our movies.) And you know this, and you see it, but they are trying to take it from us through rigging, fraud, deception, and deceit.” Voters who accept that argument will remain the most powerful force in the GOP coalition. And they will continue to demand leaders who will fight the changes that they believe threaten their position in American society. A majoritarian democracy cannot be tolerated under any circumstances if the outcome is not what they want it to be, including at the movies.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Trump may constitute a unique threat to America’s democratic traditions. But he has always connected his claims of pervasive electoral fraud to the widespread anxiety among white, Christian conservatives that they are losing control of the country to a racially diverse, secular, and LGBTQ-friendly Democratic coalition centered in the nation’s largest cities. As Trump put it during one 2020 rally before a predominantly white, rural audience in Georgia: “This is our country. And you know this, and you see it, but they are trying to take it from us through rigging, fraud, deception, and deceit.” Whether Trump is convicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election or not, voters who accept that argument will remain the most powerful force in the GOP coalition. And they will continue to demand leaders who will fight the changes that they believe threaten their position in American society.

Those other Republican leaders may not attempt to overturn an election as brazenly as Trump did with the conduct Smith catalogs in his indictment. But, as Wilentz told me, for the foreseeable future, they are likely to pursue other means “toward the same end: that majoritarian democracy cannot be tolerated under any circumstances if the outcome is not what you wanted it to be.”

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