Sunday School 27th March 2022

[TheEncogitationer]

Jake,

Allergy Season is not a good time to be building Straw Armies.

Once he wakes up to what happened to his Army, I’m sure Putin will tell you that no time is a good time for building Straw Armies.

And just by having them present arms, your Straw Army has gone the way of his.

Start again. Do better.

[jakelafort]

Enco,

If I’ve mischaracterized your viewpoints in any way shape or form let me know. It isn’t straw. It is a shoe and the shoe fits. So either abjure, repudiate and own your errors or indicate in what way I’ve deviated from essential Encotunes. If the shoe fits you must acquit me of straws.

[TheEncogitationer]

Jake,

You have never characterized my position properly, hence the Straw-Manning characterization stands long after the Straw Man and Straw Armies fall.

[jakelafort]

Enco, that is weak.

On the other hand i would not want to be the one who defends the viewpoints you espouse.

[TheEncogitationer]

Davis,

Your own words, on the Rittenhouse thread:

March 14, 2022 at 7:46 pm

I mean I keep repeating this shit but all the hate-speech and bullying has led to a situation where not a single of the (by statistics) thousands of gay atheletes in top tier professional sports leagues in the West is out of the closet. The only possible explanation for this figure (zero out of closet and all who dare have a relationship hide it in fear from everyone) is because of hate speech and bullying.

Remember, you said “not a single” one, not only in the U.S. but the entire West.

[Unseen]

@Enco

Davis can’t imagine that there’s any other reason for so few “out” pro athletes than prejudice against LGBTQ’s. This based on the missing statistic: How many pro athletes are gay? Pro athletes is anything but a normal demographic, and that there simply aren’t many gays ready to out themselves in the demographic. It’s already a weird demographic when you consider that there is a much higher percentage of blacks than in the demographic of the general community, so the idea that the percentage of gays in the pro athlete demographic might be far lower than in the general community is not some sort of off-the-wall, hare-brained, far-out notion. It’s a very reasonable possible explanation.

I live in America and Davis does not, and I can assure you that among America’s great unwashed, they’d likely prefer a gay couple move into the house across the street than a black college professor with two teen boys.

[Davis]

Enco, I do not understand why you have such a difficult time understanding “top tier sports leagues”. I have gone on to specify and fully explain and this multiple times which you must have ignored multiple times (the four big pro American leagues and football premierships of Europe, playing actual league games). I highly encourage you to pay attention to what people say. It makes discourse go so much smoother. Pretty please. Regardless, all you are doing is arguing that things are slightly less shitty and unjust than they are rather than acknowledging the shit and unjust. If you still want to argue over the numbers of grains of sandrather than the larger picture, so be it: you may have the last word.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Davis.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Davis.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Davis.

[_Robert_]

Russia’s church is backing Putin’s war and so is much of the citizenry of Russia according to recent surveys and reports. Poland should not rest easy. Anyone care to enlighten me on why/how Russians are so clueless in this age of communication and information?

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

@Robert – I was going to put this link in yesterday which addresses some of your question. Putin has primed their minds with misinformation about Ukraine for several years now and he also controls all media sources.

[_Robert_]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

@robert – I was going to put this link in yesterday which addresses some of your question. Putin has primed their minds with misinformation about Ukraine for several years now and he also controls all media sources.

 

…But modern well-educated middle-class Russians, particularly tech-savvy younger generations, have not yet become as isolated and rigidly controlled as populations living in Turkmenistan, Eritrea, and North Korea,,,

Geez, and I thought the typical Russian knew better and assumed Putin’s media was 100% BS. Guess they are very similar to US’s large group of religious idiot/nationalists. Conditioned to be suckers from the day they are baptized.

[Unseen]

According to a Russian who should know, Putin actually was expecting his invasion to be welcomed by flower girls and dancing in the streets by Ukrainians overjoyed to be freed from their Nazi overlords.

Thus, the destruction of Ukraine is no more or less than a Putin hissy fit.

 

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Unseen.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Unseen.

[_Robert_]

Unseen wrote:

According to a Russian who should know, Putin actually was expecting his invasion to be welcomed by flower girls and dancing in the streets by Ukrainians overjoyed to be freed from their Nazi overlords. Thus, the destruction of Ukraine is no more or less than a Putin hissy fit.

Surrounded by “yes” men these dictators are always the last to know. Just like when Nazi SS general Steiner was surely gonna save Berlin, mein fuhrer. The same Steiner that eventually worked for CIA even though he was a big SS denialist. They weren’t that bad.

[Davis]

Robert, I think you need only look at the media narratives in the US before the second Iraq invasion and during it. Dissent against the narrative that there were clearly WMD and that the war was wrong showed journalists on mainstream news sources and most newspapers being sanctioned or paying a heavy price for questioning the existence of those WMDs and speaking against the war. In fact, non-American news sources had far more critical stories and some heavily questioned the existence of WMDs and the efficacy of the war. People against the war (even lightly) were quickly “cancelled” (that’s right…cancelling wasn’t a liberal-boogeyman until recently). While we should not say that this environment is close to as disturbing as the media environment in Russia, it still shows how a nation with one of the strongest free-speech laws in the world can still show a pro-war narrative despite that very war being extremely dubious and war-crimes happening during that war that aren’t reported (or downplayed). Transport to a country that came from an empire of propaganda and limited rights, barely crawled out of it and has been slowly crawling back in…I would say it is not a surprise that a country with a government that has banned many websites, closed down dissenting newspapers and heavily influences the media that they are behind it. I mean, if millions of Americans can be duped into thinking via social media that COVID is a conspiracy and that vaccines can hurt you…do you really think that social media (even the non-distruthful kind) can compete against Russian narratives?

[_Robert_]

Remember, Davis that gawd talked to lil Bush and told him to go ahead and invade. How could the creator of the universe be wrong about the existence of WMD? Seems that many folks get existence assumptions dead wrong.

[Unseen]

@Davis

Here in the U.S. we are protected from our government by the 1st Amendment of our Constitution and by the FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act), so it seems the government has farmed out censorship to the so-called mainstream media and the social media who can censor at will without violating the law or being subject to FOIA. This arrangement seems to have been in an incipient form back in the Iraq war time, but it’s in full flower now.

How does the government get these sources to toe the line? Alternating threats of withholding access and/or offering special “inside” information dealt out exclusively to cooperative sources.

Minority and offbeat news sources are censored and deplatformed by anonymous people with unknown qualifications or an impersonal AI algorithm designed by who? using what rules?

The government gets what it wants but stays off the hook otherwise.

[Author]

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