mistercwood

Australian "celebrity" comedians are widely known for taking the piss out of themselves, this isn't hypocrisy.

I have heaps of time on my hands, I was willing to take the hit for the team. Also I've seen he's capable of completely rational debate, just not on anything whatsoever about green energy or AGW.

No one engages with you on this topic because you have a literally years-long history of posting showing you have no interest in engaging rationally. This is the quality of your reasoning skills. A complete and utter waste of everyone's time, including mine for being suckered into taking your pissweak bait.

The explicit purpose of the "flatten the curve" approach is to prolong the timeline, which by definition reduces total deaths. If you reduce the timeline to any point that the healthcare system becomes overwhelmed, you will have more deaths. So the flawed assumption in this case is yours.

Respectfully, yes it can, and I believe it is being hidden - not through maliciousness, but mostly through poor messaging and inconsistent procedures. I've read several pieces recently highlighting an unusual uptick in deaths attributed to pneumonia or acute respiratory syndrome, that could well be Corona related but either aren't tested due to not meeting a local criteria, or there just aren't tests available. I trust the current US numbers barely more than the Chinese or Russian ones.

Honestly the first few celebrity cases immediately cemented for me the seriousness of the outbreak. It wasn't the usual thing of it being mostly confined to a few tiny pockets (and usually poorer areas), it was getting EVERYWHERE.

Yes. That outbreak started in Kansas, but US authorities kept things quiet until it had spread further and Spain was the next location to blow up, so they got blamed as the country of origin.

Around this time yesterday the US had just surpassed China as the leader of confirmed cases, approx 84k. You are now just over 101k confirmed cases, a 21% increase in a day. At this rate you will reach 1 million confirmed cases in 12 days. Within a month that will become 30 million cases. Stay. The fuck. Home.

Those are a problem up north, less so in the cooler waters of Bondi. QLD beaches are better anyway, Bondi's trash lol.

I take it back, this is a MUCH more laughable take.

This is hands down one of your most laughable takes yet. Absolutely breathtaking, well done...

Dude, even with how much people butt heads in here I don't think anyone would be wishing this shit on you or anyone else. Hell you're not even the biggest arsehole in SC.... Hope it's either nothing or at least wishing you a speedy recovery.

The whole piece reads as satire - he got "free checking" because he maintained a certain minimum balance of $500, this sounds like a normal discount extended to anyone who does the same. The Clinton campaign "jumps" on that and spins it as him paying $500 to banks for favours. There's also the reference to him having auto-cover that I presume provides the discount that is also referenced as him being on the take agin. Plus the article is listed under Humour in the link, pretty much seals it.

Look closer at the url...

I'm not being intentionally broad, I promise you, and I can see your point. I don't often engage on SC purely because it's so damned hard to have a decent debate, and a lot of the players here aren't even arguing in good faith. My point about the "good" party and doing the "right thing", is that you have two parties. Beyond the general griminess of business-as-usual politics, one of those parties has a track record going back well over a decade now of doing anything it takes to win. Not to represent the public interest, but to win, no matter what. The other party is absolutely not immune from that same fuckery, but the scale and levels of declared intent just don't compare. The thing is, only the "good" party gets held accountable. When one of theirs gets caught doing the wrong thing, they get (generally) black-balled by their own people, if they don't fall on their sword to save face. Al Franken got turfed for a photo where he wasn't even doing what he was accused of - it was still out of line, but he never touched the woman. The other party ran a guy (Moore) who has been credibly accused of being a sexual predator, with the party supporting him the whole way along. And he damn near still won. So the expectations are not remotely the same. One party gets the "oh boys will be boys" treatment and the other one gets "you should smile more so people will like you". It's fucked. It's hypocritical bullshit and I'm tired of it. But I will never tire of telling people they're being hypocritical shitbags every time they hold one party to a higher standard than the other. The Dem's could sink as low as Trump now and that would be a travesty, but again - when one player spends every second ignoring the rules, what is the point in the other player trying to continue? There isn't even a game at that point.

I misunderstood the point you were apparently trying to make. Ok and? That's the new normal. That's the precedent now. This is the bar the GOP has set. This is the entire point I have been making for days now - you had a party trying to do the right thing, and a party taking almost every opportunity to do the right thing by themselves above all else. Now the "good" party has started considering playing the same game (and has barely even done anything in that vein yet). So. Fucking. What. You CANNOT get mad or huffy or indignant with the dem's about a change in that direction, they're just meeting the other player on their level. If you're mad, direct it at the GOP. Stop being a hypocrite.

I was ready to actually try engaging until you posted this. You're asking for proof of something not happening, with the preconception that it probably is (without any proof of your own). The thing that frustrates me the most with you is that I know you're capable of rational debate and critical thinking, but for the most part you just take the lazy route of "neener-neener" lines that you know don't mean anything. Stop being so fucking lazy.

It amazes me that anytime conservatives have to defend Trump's lies the standard fallback is STILL "if you like your plan you can keep your plan". Every single time. Never anything else. The two examples you gave, could not be more different. At the time Obama made that infamous quote, the legislation was still in a form where it wasn't a lie. The GOP - true to their on-the-record mission statement of sabotaging anything Obama did regardless of benefit to the people - did everything they could to cripple the ACA and MADE it a lie. Trump said he'd scrap Obamacare and replace it with something far far better, and repeatedly stated he would protect pre-existing conditions. He then signed in laws to strip those protections and had absolutely nothing in place to replace the ACA. One of your dot points before was about how Obama wasn't bipartisan enough, then in this same thread you criticise him for the results of his bipartisan efforts - which the GOP used to try fucking him over. Trump is an absolute dumpster-fire of a person, who has zero business being in the office he holds. I held off judgement when the election results came in on the HOPES that he might turn things around like you keep hinting he could - he can't. He's shown that repeatedly for the last 3 years. Quit it with the "both-sides" false equivalence. It's horseshit and you know it.

Just to clarify some of my position as I believe it's also (possibly) been misinterpreted or misunderstood - I don't think the Democrats SHOULD be playing dirty or sinking to the GOP's level. I'm just saying that it's absolute hypocrisy for anyone to state one party has to be principled while the other one gets away with blatant corruption.

I see your point. Honestly, I base it on the fact that I never hear/read anything about the DNC outside of the run-up to presidential elections, so I consider them ignorable for "working" political purposes.

The DNC were idiots last time and they're being idiots again now. Not relevant to my point, I'm talking about elected legislators rather than the party machine.

I don't think the D's see dirty politics as a virtue, I think they're just reevaluating strategy. Staying principled within the political system in its current form just isn't doing anything. Seriously. One party has a consistent track record of acquiring power and then using it to rig the rules in their favour - either changing laws to expand their power while in office or changing laws to cripple the D's incoming to replace them. If your job is to represent your voters, but your opponent is constantly fighting dirty so that you can't get anything done even when you've won a campaign fair and square, how can you be effective in your job if you continue to just be the "good guy"? Please don't get me wrong - I think it's pretty messed up that Pelosi is doing childish shit like the paper-ripping, but I absolutely cannot blame her. When one party has become outright lawless, staying true to your principles does nothing but guarantee your own extinction. Again - this is the precedent that has been set. Every time those in power do shitty things and face no consequences, it opens the floodgates for anyone else to do the same.

You're reinforcing my point. One party gets to do whatever they want, while the other one is expected to have principles. Why are people getting upset when the principled party eventually decides, "You know what, fuck it, we're going to come play down in the mud as well". They're not doing anything worse, just playing to the precedent that has been set over and over without consequence. No-one gets to cry about decorum or principles anymore, they're no longer relevant.

Bullshit. Clinton is/was a sleazebag but he didn't make literally millions of dollars by pissing off to his own hotels every weekend and charging taxpayers for it (as one very basic, very brief example). Trump has broken every norm of the office he holds since most of them aren't actual official rules, because everyone knew that this just isn't how things are supposed to be done.

But why do the Dem's have to have/show that, and the Republican's don't? This is my point. One party is held accountable for behaviour, the other is not. There are no positives to playing nice and now no negatives to playing dirty, so fuck it, they may as well play dirty. This is what your nation chose.