this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
729 points (97.0% liked)

News

23427 readers
2358 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

‘Donald Trump is losing his marbles,’ former Congressman and Republican Adam Kinzinger said

Republicans are concerned that party leader Donald Trump is having a “public nervous breakdown” after he made a series of offensive outbursts about Vice President Kamala Harris as he slips behind her in the polls.

The former president has made a number of  insulting personal attacks against his Democratic rival since she moved to the top of the ticket. Last week, Trump questioned Harris’s racial identity  at the National Association of Black Journalists conference. Over the weekend, he accused Harris of having a “low IQ.” 

New polls indicate Trump is slipping behind the vice president in the popular vote and races are tightening in battleground states. 

“This is what you would call a public nervous breakdown,” Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former Trump state department appointee, told Politico.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Get out of here with this fake news! There's no video! This is just a hit on Vance!

Again, there is no video of J.D. Vance fucking a couch. He only wrote about it in his autobiography (chapter 11, page 180).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I assume you're just memeing siince he never actually wrote about that?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (2 children)

If he didn't write it, maybe Jesse Watters should be demanding to see the book and not just a video he could masturbate to.

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/fox-news-jesse-watters-jd-vance-couch-video/

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Snopes doesn't need to be "helping" right now.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I'm confused... Are you saying we should encourage disinformation?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yes. I am saying America should be convinced that J.D. Vance fucks couches.

Because that's what you do when the opponents do things like say your candidates turned black all of a sudden or that he wasn't born in the United States.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I mean, there's so much bullshit to use against them we hardly need to stoop to lies. The truth is already incredibly damning and is tearing them apart right now.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

“Couch fucker” is catchy though, it rolls off the tongue, it’s easy to remember

‘Diaper Don and the couch fucker’ is a great response to ‘sleepy joe and low iq karolla’ or whatever tf trump is calling her

— it sucks that this is where American political discourse is, but this is where THEY brought it to. Taking the high road isn’t a virtue when dealing with a bully and it isn’t effective.

[–] eestileib 2 points 3 months ago

Diaper Don and the Couchfucker sounds like a bluegrass duo you'd see at a bar in Ithaca. I love it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

The thing about lies is that they demonstrably work a lot better than the truth on the segment of voters we need to reach. They're practically begging to be lied to, so I say give them what they want. If they wanted the truth, it would be extremely easy for them to find it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

"When they go low, we go high" almost never works in politics. So good luck telling people that they're smearing poor J.D. Vance with a terrible lie.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I'm not saying we go high. By all means, rip into them. The Harris campaign is doing a great job of that, using the truth. There's so much ammunition that the lies are just a drop in the bucket and serve no real purpose other than distortion. It's just pretty pointless.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

and serve no real purpose other than distortion.

Dude, I just showed you that Jesse Watters devoted airtime to getting upset about it. So that's demonstrably untrue.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Also, it creates social media engagement much like this thread, so that whether or not somebody believes the truth (that JD personally documented the experience of losing his virginity to a musty piece of furniture) they're still engaging with the idea the whole time they read and respond. That's called memetic fitness.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

And every moment spent by Republicans defending Vance against this rumor is a moment not spent on campaigning for Trump.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I hear what expr is saying though - several Democratic-voting people I know actually thought it was real in the initial scrum of the meme. That part I’m not so big on. Everyone going wink-wink-nudge dude fucked a couch is fine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

What difference does it make if they think it's real? I don't see how that makes a difference in the grand scheme of things. People believe much sillier things that aren't true all the time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I’d prefer my own political party to believe truthful things. Despite the wild success the reverse has shown in other parties.

Call it a quirk.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Well, put your mind at ease. The Democratic Party doesn’t think jd Vance fucked a couch.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Which members? Because 100% for sure some of them believe it. When I heard it “was in the first edition of the book” part I was sorely tempted myself.

It’s a trifle. Not important, and barely a whisper of a shadow of the simplest lie the republiQans tell on an hourly basis. But for the record, there absolutely are Democrats voting for Kamala that believe it to be true. That’s just how media works. Especially when it’s so plausible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Well then wake me up when they stop deifying JFK. Otherwise I'm not too concerned about a couch-fucking rumor.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

When Democrats stop deifying JFK?

Well, I guess you’d have to specify. For one thing that was six decades ago.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

And yet Democrats believe all sorts of myths about him anyway. And ignore things like how he stalled civil rights legislation and got the U.S. into Vietnam.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I suppose some do, but no one’s actively promoting that. Are they? The record is pretty clear by all accounts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If the record was clear, people wouldn't still be talking about Kennedy when they talk about civil rights. And yet they do. All the time. Actively.

I'm not sure why you don't think politicians reach back to their predecessors and talk about how amazing they were when it constantly happens. With Democrats, it's Kennedy. With Republicans, it's Reagan.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The Early Sixties
Racial tensions continued to build. In 1962 President Kennedy sent hundreds of U.S. marshals to enforce a court order to admit African American James Meredith to the University of Mississippi. The marshals encountered fierce resistance from violent segregationists. In a melee, two people were killed and dozens injured. In February 1963 Kennedy submitted a civil rights bill to Congress that did not address the important issue of integration of public facilities. He did little to support the bill and it floundered. When racial violence erupted in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963, John Kennedy realized it was time to put forward a broad new civil rights bill. Most of his advisers told him it would be a terrible political mistake. But Robert advised him that the future of the country was at stake and urged him to go ahead with the bill.

A Landmark Speech
On June 11, 1963, the day that Governor George Wallace made his “stand in the school room door” to prevent two black students from attending the University of Alabama, President Kennedy spoke to the nation in a televised address to ask for support of the civil rights bill. He said, “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities.”

Two Reactions
For some, Kennedy’s speech was a long-awaited show of support. “All of a sudden, he brought passion to it, he brought that eloquence to it and it electrified me and all kinds of other black people,” Roger Wilkins remembered. Fellow civil rights activist John Lewis said, “that night in June… he spoke, I think, to the heart and to the soul of America. I would never forget that speech.” For others, the speech was intolerable. Later that night, a reply came from those who opposed civil rights. Segregationist Byron de la Beckwith shot and killed Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s field secretary in Mississippi.

Source

I dunno how we got here from couch-fucking memes, but, okay?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

He did little to support the bill and it floundered.

Cool. One sentence that is a mild criticism of what actually happened.

Thank you for proving my point.

Please do show me the next link about how the Soviets started the Cuban Missile Crisis.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

There’s more in the paragraphs before about their unwillingness to pursue civil rights legislation. Suffice to say it was more nuanced than “JD Vance fucked a couch”.

What’s your point again?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

My point was that most Democrats think Kennedy was 100% for civil rights regardless of what website you might find says. They also think he saved the world by resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis without knowing he started it.

Because they believe things that aren't true.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

So, what you’re saying PBS is pretending Kennedy supported civil rights in the documented speech he gave supporting civil rights which was praised by people including John Lewis as a watershed moment for civil rights? I mean sure, you can prove anything with facts.

And you’re saying Kennedy started the Cuban Missile Crisis by moving nukes into Turkey?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Nope. I’m not saying anything about PBS. How about you actually read my posts?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

My point was that *most Democrats think Kennedy was 100% for civil rights* regardless of what website you might find says.

I thought I was!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Is English not your first language? Do you not know what "regardless" means?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The rest of the world can't do shit about your elections. And it's scary as hell. So please keep throwing shit around it make the train wreck more entertaining.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

We should encourage ridicule. Their positions are not worth the dignity of rational debate.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

There are two kinds of people: those who understand it's juvenile humor and are just memeing on it for funsies, and those who don't understand that and are never going to be high information voters and JD Vance fucks couches must just be the message that gets them to vote.

My optimism in humanity leads me to believe there are very few of the latter. What I'm certain of is the joke does no harm and is a silly little meme. President Trump was a silly little meme in 2015 but then Hillary ran the worst campaign in living memory (Kamala saved Biden from that dubious distinction), and here we are. So I'm okay with it, but obviously it has no place in serious conversation except to inject some laughs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Watters insists the couch-clapping story is as real as Covid-19. That sounds like an admission to me!