Topic: The Chit Chat Thread

I've been loving these stories about Thor the Walrus turning up around the country. It's like he decided to take a holiday to the UK and is doing a coastal road (sea?) trip.

I know I am personifying the walrus but i am finding it quite fun!

Happy new year all. Wishing you a year full of love, good health and happiness.

I played Kung Fu Rider PS3 just now, one of very unique game on PS3 with PS3 Move to play and you take control of either Toby or Karin to pass through the mafia gangs in Hong Kong to the van by riding a wheeled stool or ridiculous vehicles to slide like Tony Hawk games. 😆

And this was my candid reaction from the gameplay. 😂

Duh... This was the only my B score.
The others just only disgusting D scores. 😆

@LN78 The media is positioning it as hardliners vs moderates, but the truth is that the GOP doesn't have a moderate wing anymore, and the few that are left are being primaried or leaving of their own volition. McCarthy is a hardcore Trump fashy, but the thing is that, in this sort of political environment, there's always someone more extreme who doesn't think your particular brand of right-wing politics is pure enough. It's an environment where loyalty doesn't exist, no matter what your accomplishments are (Mitch McConnell is becoming increasingly unpopular nationally among Republicans despite effectively handing the Supreme Court to the far-right on a silver platter, for example).

I would say this is as good an example as any of Trump's waning influence on politics, btw, considering the man explicitly endorsed McCarthy for Speaker recently.

In terms of what happens if this keeps going on? Presumably, at some point, Republicans would have to reach across the aisle for support and find someone sufficiently tolerable that Democrats would be willing to vote for. I don't think it'll come to that, though.

It seems like this is going to be a game of political chicken between the anti-McCarthy bloc, who obviously has immense power atm, and McCarthy himself. Either the dissidents fold, or McCarthy backs down.

It's pretty funny. Despite being the minority party, the Democratic candidate for House Speaker is actually getting more votes than McCarthy. That's how close the split is in the House.

Even funnier is that McCarthy had already moved his stuff into the Speaker's suite.

Funniest of all is that the 19 Republicans who are causing all this drama are just doing this to be a nuisance. The guy they chose to give their votes to, Jim Jordan, was chosen precisely because he made a speech trying to convince them to support McCarthy, so they voted for him out of spite.

@LN78 A fractured ethno-nationalist party would be preferable to a united one, for sure. The party is likely still freaking out internally about the absolute drubbing they received during the mid-terms, and stunts like this aren't going to help them attain the sort of cohesion they'll need to be politically effective.

At this point, I hope Trump continues to refuse to bend the knee, as his influence on conservative politics is now a net negative for them.

@EaglyTheKawaiiShika Interesting comment. I post a lot on NL, and I don't recall ever being modded for expressing a political opinion.

@EaglyTheKawaiiShika We tend to self-moderate here anyway. Politics isn’t usually discussed unless it’s something purely intellectual like the above exchange or pretty much universally agreed upon like basic human rights or Trump being a fascist loser. Something that’s a bit more divisive will get shut down but I can only really think of that happening once if you discount times when just one person (usually their only posts on the forum) tried to start something and were drowned out.

@LN78 I wouldn't call them Trump loyalists (I mean, they'd totally go back to sucking up if he regained his mojo, but I mean ideologically). Trump loyalists probably would have heeded his calls to vote for McCarthy, right? This all makes Trump look very weak atm compared to where we were a few years back, where he had an almost cult-like sway over elected officials in his party. This is a power play against a politician they really don't like, but also against the "GOP establishment" more generally.

As far as legislative gridlock goes, they definitely won't be launching any of their million bogus investigations into Hunter Biden and impeachment votes against Joe Biden just yet, and this does make them look chaotic and disorganized, but in the last decade or so, obstruction has been THE goal of the GOP, so I'm not sure how damaging that is to them nationally unless it causes enough chaos to swing more voters against the GOP. But in terms of not passing bills, not passing government funding, not tending to the basic needs of the nation? They'd be obstructing all of that anyway, since it'll damage the country, and they can just blame that on the president. It's the reason why we've had debt ceiling drama every time a Democratic president has been in office since the Tea Party movement first swept into power.

After all, Dems hold the Senate and the White House, so it's not like they'd be able to push any crazy hyper-partisan nonsense legislatively anyway.

@JudgeDredd @LN78 It is an ongoing process for me, battling with my internal monologue!

@KAIRU Amen to that!

@EaglyTheKawaiiShika "It’s a bad look other countries are mocking the US as usual."

I wouldn't worry about that mate, hating the USA is seen as a requirement in some social and political circles no matter how the country behaves.

I think it's because the USA is a largely successful country and some people just hate that.

It happens in England, there's a contingent of English people who utterly loathe England, its past, its present, its culture and any other country is preferable. They're delusional and have absolutely zero nuance in their argument but they exist.

The point of this long post is basically people are just going to hate you and your country for reasons both genuine and invented, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it as nothing will change their mind.

@LN78 Maybe, but by the same argument so is hating a country and its people for something. If we can't be proud of a country's achievements then we can't hate them for it either.

@LN78 You'll hear no argument from me on that.

@EaglyTheKawaiiShika All countries go through these government deadlocks etc. The MSM just have an obsession on any of the failings of the USA and UK. Belgium didn't have a government for months a few year back due to them being unable to form coalitions, wasn't covered all that much but nobody looked on them with shame.

Just one of those things, citizens aren't necessarily responsible for the workings and ineptitude of their elected officials.

@LN78 I can't even begin to imagine what it must be like to follow our politics from the outside. The world's largest superpower collectively losing its mind, or at the very least growing increasingly politically and socially unstable... it's embarrassing.

Although perhaps also inevitable. Every empire eventually suffers the same fate.

@EaglyTheKawaiiShika In fairness, he was warning there was a contingent that was very opposed to him becoming Speaker. I put this fiasco mostly on McCarthy's shoulders: he doesn't have the votes, and should step down for the good of the party.

Not that I care. Aside from passing government funding bills/debt ceiling increases, which they'll use as leverage in terroristic negotiation tactics anyway, a GOP-led House is going to be an embarrassing waste of public resources and devote 100% of its energy to trolling the White House.

@EaglyTheKawaiiShika Pretty much par for the course this last decade. Although it keeps getting dumber and dumber. The Benghazi situation didn't require ten separate investigations (Republicans really wanted to find something that would properly hurt Obama, but there just wasn't much blood in that particular stone), but at least it was a real thing that happened. Once the House GOP regains its composure, how many meaningless investigations into Hunter Biden's laptop d*** pics are there going to be?

@LN78 Who didn't get beaten up by their older brother? If you didn't they weren't doing their job right.

It'd be really bad to have his as Speaker, since that'd put him second in the line of succession. Cue some QAnoners cooking up some hare-brained conspiracy to take out Biden and Kamala so that Annoying Orange can retake the throne. Wouldn't work, of course, but they'd probably hurt some random person in the process, or blow up the family dog, or who knows what else.

Sorry. First thing that immediately came to mind.