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thawkins

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Everything posted by thawkins

  1. this sounds a lot like Jade helm paranoia. I'm guessing the military are always doing training like this? Not in major cities without notifying residents (beyond a couple people I know who got Facebook notifications a few hours in advance). I've never heard the army conducting two major training operations late at night in the center of a densely populated city in my life, much less simultaneously in TWO neighboring cities using ground troops, aircraft and some kind of pyrotechnics or blank firearms (I didn't see what that stuff was, I just heard the blasts down the street. There have been gun fights on my street a few times and this was way beyond anything civilian. There's still some weird business going on today, too. A fighter jet flew over earlier and actually just as I finished the last paragraph I could hear anoter helicopter maybe a mile away, at most. It's still there. Bigger and louder than the police or news helicopters you usually hear. Strange and ominous. When Homeland Security mobilizes, it can also be pretty scary. I didn't realize they had their own black SUV / black helicopter military force, but after Hurricane Ike, they were all over the Galleria area of Houston, speeding down congested streets in vehicle columns where lots of pedestrians were, this was while the power grid was completely fucked and they were paranoid the wealthy jewelry stores, etc. would get looted. They all had body armor and automatic rifles slung, with the requisite black sunglasses. It was like a Philip K Dick book or something. Yeah you don't realize it's even there until suddenly there's an armored vehicle the size of a bus driving down the main street through town. When I was living up there in the years after 9/11 there would be Homeland Security people with automatic weapons doing random bag checks at the subway entrances every few weeks for a year or two, and sometimes they'd stop the commuter rail trains and sweep through with dogs. And that was before we went into Iraq, things are a lot farther along now, not for some shadowy, sinister reason but because police forces across the country have been cutting costs for the past 15 years by reworking their training programs to more closely resemble military training so that they can recruit officers straight out of the military when they fnish their tours of duty and put them to work with only minimal training. The fact that we've ended up with police forces that basically operate like an arm of the military in a lot of ways is just a side effect of that plus military contractors who will jump at any opportunity to sell more products by marketing to the police, even if they're completely inappropriate for the job. It's nothing so clean, simple and unambigous as an Alex Jones style conspiracy. Nothing ever is. IMO this is the consequences of Afganistan and Iraq.. the US is kind of stuck with the military spending, because you have a lot of people whose income depends on there being a war somewhere. And what's worse, I don't think the US has really been in a serious war since Vietnam, so most people even with actual combat experience think war is something they fucking see on television or that it's like Iraq where you go fight for 6 months and come back to your house that's not been bombed and infrastructure that's working. So it's easy for the US to slip into a war because all the people who have really experienced one are dead or dying of old age.
  2. Probably me talking about the UC4. Not sure if there's many available second hand, but the new one was worth it (to me) for basically having Ableton macros for specific sets. I always know this fader does this, this button is mapped to this, etc., without having to hunt through effects sections in various tracks on Push. That sort of thing is integral to how I'm jamming right now, so well worth the price tag. That said, I don't really use the default Ableton set up on the UC4...if that's all you're going to use it for I'd suggest just getting a Push or something cheaper unless space is at a premium. Hell, I might sell you my Push 1 if so... But If you're interested in having multiple setups of user-defined controls in a compact space on solid hardware, the UC4 is perfect. I ain't selling that, get your own But they're all better options than building your own unless you're just into that sorta shit...but to be fair, any cheap MIDI controller can be mappable for basic controls, the Push and UC4 are sort of 'premium' in what you're spending. I certainly don't regret having either, I just use my Push less often lately. Thanks for the infos. I really like the compactness about the UC4, because I kind of have this philosophy that I want my gear to fit in my backpack and not require huge amounts of space when laid out. I've used the Push, and I don't really like it as it's too big and I don't really need all the menu-diving options because I will be having my laptop anyway to add effects and create tracks. I'm generally using Ableton for recording/starting/stopping MIDI and audio loops, and then fading them in/out. So in that respect, the UC4 seems nice and small (and also good for some laptop DJing, which is always nice). If I understand correctly, the LED screen on the UC4 also shows current parameter value, so dealing with knob takeover should be easier than looking at the yellow bar on the bottom of the Live screen. But triggering and recording clips seems not to be so straightforward as there's no button grid (like a launchpad). I started building my own because it seemed cheap, I actually wanted to be into that sorta shit and I thought I was a good enough programmer to do it. Basically, getting parts for the Doepfer Pocket Electronics was cheap and soldering also turned out to be easy enough, and then I taped a USB numpad on top to use as buttons.. I also hacked together a Ableton Remote Script for mapping all the controls nicely, so basically combined with the Launchpad, I already have a weird Frankenpush. But I feel that maybe I wasted a lot of time and should just have got something that's already pre-mapped, less bulky and not shittily soldered. Anyway, I expect my hots for the UC4 to go away as soon as I can sit down and jam on my current setup again. My GAS seems to flare up usually when it's been a long time since I played (like more than a week).
  3. Someone in this forum once mentioned the Faderfox UC4 (I guess in the studio pics thread) and I've been spending the whole week looking at it and thinking "why did I spend all that fucking time shittily soldering a Doepfer PE and hacking together a crappy Live remote script instead of just getting a UC4". PS. does anyone else come to this thread, type up a longish GAS themed post, then feel conflicted about publicly admitting that they're once again lusting for gear they don't really need and close the window before hitting post? :)
  4. Having had to move an upright piano from one place to another, and also having many years of classical piano studies behind me.. It's true that a real piano is an awesome thing, even an old janky out of tune upright, BUT they're huge and heavy and it's so much room for only one instrument. Besides you can't really take it out for live performances or rehearsals, but that's maybe not a problem if you're a home tinkerer. That said, I kind of wish I had this old-school studio room with a grand piano littered with pages of sheet music and a lush green tropical scene outside the window (and there's of course a balcony with a hammock) and digital stuff and monitors in one corner. Might as well change my name to Eno, Brian while at it..
  5. The reason fossil fuels are so cheap is that it's subsidized by trillions of dollars globally. Move that subsidizing to renewables and that would help bigly in cutting carbon emissions. Coal use is already declining due to the markets, so Trump's pledge to save coal country is DOA, the market has spoken! And besides none of the top industries would be profitable if they actually paid for their environmental and social impact. I always wondered why oil companies raking in billions in profits needed subsidies. But I guess that's what an army of lobbyists gets you. Yeah of course the cheap price in $$$ is also an issue, but the point of that book was rather that in terms of kilowatts of energy, how is it even possible to replace today's energy needs with renewables. And the result was basically that with current usage trends, renewables won't be able to replace everything, you'd have to build nuclear also to be good for the next 1000 years or so. But of course the efficiency of solar has grown loads during the last 10 years, and since the author has sadly passed away, there's no update on the calculations I'm aware of. So basically even if we replace everything with renewables, we probably have to cut down on usage heavily as well, which will influence lifestyles a lot.
  6. Good read this, I would say that conservatives and the right using masculine identity isn't massively ground breaking though... even good old fashioned 30s/40s fascist propaganda banged on about non-fashies being big girly twats. Overall probably ties in to the whole "I worked hard and earned all this and you don't deserve a cut". If anything, riches built off taking profits and labour off the proles would be considered an added bonus for your macho competitiveness. But yeah, definitions of masculinity definitely need a rework for the modern age, and the guy is bang-on about the left not learning from this (if anything certain radical lefties outright alienate dudes). I would say that the kind of guy who invests his masculine identity into big ol trucks and military fetishisation and the like probably isn't massively secure in their identity in the first place tho - could be argued "changing times" don't help this. By the way one of my takeaways is also that I'm not immune to this shit either, nobody is. This sort of brainfuck advertising/marketing mind control will work to an extent regardless of what you know, because they're using all the clever techniques developed by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists to hit you straight in your reptilian brain in order to trigger emotions and shut down rational thought. I guess it was kind of fine when they used it to sell you a better laundry detergent, but now this identity/reality building shit has got so good that it's possible to sell people the illusion that an egotistical billionaire is now a man of the people.
  7. https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/06/how-the-trump-russia-data-machine-games-google-to.html tl;dr: nothing new really, Google search results (and probably Facebook, Twitter, etc.) are being gamed by misinformation and SEO industry to try and create "truth" and make you think Trump really is a victim of persecution and anyways What About Her Emails, etc.
  8. The right is at a stage that if it upsets the "libtards" then they are for it. It's simply spite. I'm not american, but this thread on twitter made a lot of sense to me. Also with regard to climate change, I read a book where one guy analyzed how to fill the world's energy need with renewable stuff. It's free and it's really good, because usually there are no calculations when people are talking about renewable energy. So the take-away for me was that a) it's fucking difficult to replace all energy needs with renewables and b) life will probably be noticeably more uncomfortable, because there's so much stuff that comes from oil or is cheap because coal is cheap. I kind of assume that at least some global leaders/elites know this, and it kind of turns into the same thing as a psychological drug addiction. Like you're hooked hard on heroin, you *know* it's an unsustainable habit, but you keep doing it and hoping that a miracle happens and you survive, even though the objective reality is that you're barely making ends meet, your health is getting worse and you're having a hard time even maintaining your life. The difference with the drug addiction scenario is that there you usually have sober people around to notice that you're fucked, but with oil/coal/gas, *everyone* in your country is more or less stuck on the same needle, so there's almost no alternative perspective. And if you've ever had an addiction (computer games, booze, modular synths, etc.), you've probably had this existential dread feeling when you're told that "OK, you can't get your regular hit of dopamine this week". From experience I know stuff like this can make people very mad sometimes. Now imagine that the people in 1st world countries suddenly get told that they're not allowed to drive to work in their personal car or that the price of new clothes has just gone up 100x because plastics can't be used and shipping from China isn't dirt cheap anymore. I'm pretty sure people in general acknowledge this at some reptilian level, and that's why the easier response is to either ignore it and hope some scientist will make a breakthrough or (worse) start "believing" in whichever god says it's okay to kill other people so that you'll survive.
  9. I have a Macbook Pro from 2009 I got "fairly" cheap because a new model had come out and the local shop wanted to get rid of the old models. Over the years I've upgraded it to 8GB RAM and a terabyte of disk space (both SSD/HDD). Last year it was already getting fairly hot in the summer, but this year I might finally have to get a new one to get with the times. Embarrassing, but I think the main reason is that it's having a hard time loading intensive web pages like Facebook. No way in hell am I going to buy a brand new one though, I'd only consider that if it were a work machine I actually earned money with. Apple.com lists some refurbished MBP's starting from $1699, that actually sounds quite reasonable if they even last half as long as my current laptop. I think over the years I put around 2000€ in it, which makes it cost around 20€ per month. So in the end I don't really mind the Apple tax because the hardware is solid as fuck. :)
  10. That's the main thing for me too. I think when you're at the point where you can listen to your own stuff and it'll sound good to you, then you're basically set. If someone else likes it as well, then that's just more cherries on the cake, but you've got the most important thing down already. :) I guess you've got to be really lucky if you can think like this and actually also make a living from your music.
  11. I have been thinking about the MPC1000 many times, because the workflow seems to be really easy for recording realtime MIDI loops, then recording the audio into samples which can then be filtered and mangled somehow. This is more or less what I'm doing anyway with a laptop, except my workflow is much more muddled because I don't really know how to set up Live to do the same things comfortably. The MPC however has a purpose designed UI.. But each time I think about that, I say to myself that I should work harder and figure out my own (better) workflow, instead of starting down the hardware path, which will inevitably lead to GAS and misery...
  12. Yes, it's always good because the part of my head that's been subconsciously working on these tracks can now finally have a rest... and start cracking on the other 20+ hopeful things I got littered around my desktop.
  13. Sorry for the shameless plug, but thanks to this thread I got off my ass and released a bunch of stuff that had been waiting for I don't know what. Perfect is the enemy of the good. PS. I think it should be not very difficult to make a URL scraper for the EKT new releases forum. It may also be possible to automatically add all found Soundcloud playlist URLs to a special playlist on SC. I can't think of a good solution for Bandcamp right now... Edit: nope SC API does not seem to allow to add songs to playlist using this trickery.
  14. Coming from a punk/rock background, I can totally sympathize with the woes of electronic percussion. The drabness of it was actually one of the reasons I stopped making electronic stuff (other than a drone/beatless track here and there) about 2 years ago. Finally just got back into it within the past 6 months. I find that mixing strange sampled things (fucked completely with fx) and slicing uncommon loops has been a game changer for me. I rarely ever quantize and I still never use step sequencing. I used to play drums in a psychedelic rock band. I think the main difference between analog (the wood + skin) and digital drums is that with digital it's much harder to get dynamics in. Unless you spend $$$ to buy a really good digital kit, the best you're going to get is a volume change of some normalized "perfect" drum hit sample. One trick I've found to counter that is using several ride/bell samples and kind of impulsively playing them so that the end result sounds much much more like you're actually hitting the cymbals in different places. I've been pretty impressed with the results considering I used a MIDI keyboard to play the stuff. I guess getting some Akai pad thing might be even more awesome. And I totally agree about quantization and step sequencing, that just sucks the life out of playing. Edit: and to tie this into stress while making music.. I guess that's the only stress that I have nowadays with regard to achieving some sound in my head. I miss my drumkit and how easy it was to get the sound and rhythm out of it. I have so many ideas that I know exactly how I'd play drums to, but no means to actually do it (except renting a studio, which I feel is too much $$$ for practice noodling). Basically the only thing that's not possible if your home studio is a shelf in an apartment.
  15. I like this sort of idea. Back in my home town I used to more or less know everybody who was performing or making music, which was cool because in my head it formed this sort of local cultural sphere. But now I'm in Tokyo, which is a huge change for me, because the sheer number of venues/artists. So when in my hometown, the metaphorical "local youtube channel" was like 100-200 videos, now it's 1-2 000 000 and I don't even know where to start really. It's like the complexity is too much for my puny human brain. It makes sense too, I read somewhere that the human brain can handle "representing" memories around 150 other people before they start becoming "compressed" somehow. Like instead of a full memory of a person your brain would just store the more important points, like a facebook profile which only shows a mugshot and tells you where they work. So my hypothesis is that this is also true for music - you can listen to a lot of stuff, but you can't really deeply process all of it, unless you really take the time. And with the internet there's new music anywhere. Youtube is full of fantastic and weird stuff, so is Soundcloud. Labels are just one way of grouping all that together to somehow manageable chunks. Sometimes I've found absolutely genius stuff just by letting SC/Youtube autoplay related songs to something. And sometimes it's just full of boring dreck. Now that I think of it, I wish there was some WATMM playlist on Youtube or SC so I could just click play and hear a random selection of all the artists who post here. I know I could just go to the latest releases subforum but I'm kind of a fan of listening to large playlists on shuffle mode instead of single albums at a time.
  16. Explain to me why to release on a label? I never understood this, maybe you can help me with this. Isn't releasing just "making something accessible" in a cool format? Why does anyone need a label in times of bandcamp / soundcloud. The prefiltering mechanisms that labels had, do not work anymore from my point of view. Finding really inspiring dedicated artists is hard work, building a name is even harder. From a negative side, I think it's a little about a quality certificate - to get your music released by a famous label sort of means that it's supposedly really good. It also gives your music a common thing with the other releases on the label, which means that all the people who like the label's other releases are much more likely to find your music and enjoy it too. But for me that's kind of bullshit because I'd like my music to stand on it's own, I'd like listeners to listen and enjoy it as it is, not because it has been released by a label. From a positive side, I think labels are still a good thing for spreading and promoting the music. I think what I expect from a label is that through them my music would reach the people who would like it way better than if I did the promoting myself. I don't care so much about album sale profits or things like that, at least at this point. A label should be like a bunch of like-minded and similar artists who can then organize concerts and deal with merch etc., instead of artists doing everything by themselves like jacks-of-all-trades.
  17. Well..... true IDM is NEVER EVER making boring or shit tracks. The "shit/boring" determination is something that is settled upon, so one must just never settle there. Craft everything until it's awesome. Also, being able to put up with the non-euphoric nature of finishing a full track (usually somewhat difficult)- THAT is IDM. Finishing music or any art takes a lot of discipline, and the more awesome tracks that are finished, the stronger one's IDM lazer becomes. Has anyone here thought about why one even outputs music? It might sound like shit and non-underground, but it is 100% for sharing. Every artist has been blessed with the skills to perceive and create, but they have taken these skills along with the burden of having to complete things. Completion is divine, and truly IDM. Any motherfucker can bust out badass loops. How many people can output albums where every single track is solid? It's seriously like <.001% of musicians. Think about it doodz and doodettes... A lot of you are really good at making music and know it. Didn't you work your fucking ass off for your skills? You WANTED to be good at making music. And now you're really fucking good at making music and complaining that you have to make awesome albums?! Making awesome albums is 100% what you DREAMED ABOUT 5~20+ years ago. Your skills and understanding of composition, sound design, mixing, dsp fuckery- fucking everything- your skills now have far surpassed what you even knew existed in music when you started. And now you're going to let yourself down and get stressed out about something you asked yourself for? FUCK THAT. Difficult? Possibly. Time consuming? Yes. Stressful? No!-- Believe in yourself, because you are obviously good. Stick to your guns and COMPLETE ALBUMS. Mike P doesn't give a fuck about your sketches. He wants your albums. THE PEOPLE want your albums. You know your skills are sound-- what makes you think thousands of people aren't unknowingly WAITING AND WANTING TO HEAR YOUR MASTERPIECES???!!!!! Don't let yourself down by being a lazy fool, and don't let humanity down by being afraid of goals that YOU setup. YOU asked for this. YOU wanted this. If you go around life being half-assed about things, you will not accomplish much-- you see, this "not finishing tracks/albums" concept carries through all aspects of life. If you keep being lazy and never commit to things that YOU WANT, you will find yourself one day, old and crusty, disinterested in all, having a track record of enthusiastically starting new things and quitting them like a little impulsive bitch and crying to proverbial mommy when things got tough, living the life of a poor college student. Remember those 45 year old dudes who used to randomly be at your college parties? Fuck that. That's about the least IDM it gets. The mark of a true Cosmic Warrior, is setting goals, and doing what needs to be done to accomplish them (end result is irrelevant and illusory-- the path walked is what is very, very important). Being IDM isn't about outputting the best art in the world-- it's about outputting the best art THAT YOU CAN. It's ultimately about sharing, but fundamentally, you have to realize your potential to yourself. You know you can do it, so just do it. YOU WANT IT, or you wouldn't have spent like half your life training for it. Completing albums is not easy, but it is 100% worth it. Completing things in life is 100% worth it. You owe it to yourself. YOU are 100% worth it. Can't help myself to be reminded of this: :)
  18. Regarding your first point, I hate the feeling, too, of having shit half-finished and not wanting to ruin the "magic" that was there when you were jamming by coming back to it and sucking the life out of it. That's why I vowed, about a year ago, to only have 3 main projects going at once (at the most). If I have three sketches, I will stop myself from starting something new until I finish at least one of them, or decide to scrap something. That's a good idea, I should try something like that.
  19. I get stress when I've had half-finished stuff around for a long time, but I end up not finishing the things quickly enough. It's that I remember clearly that the stuff felt so good when I initially recorded it, and I'm afraid of losing that vision because too much time passes. Then I get stress when I have to choose if I continue working on an old idea or start something new.. I guess the solution here is to Start Finishing Stuff. Then I get stress when I feel the need to program my MIDI remote scripts for Live in Python or build stuff in Pure Data because time spent on that is not time spent on actually making music. But on the other hand it's time I spent on making my workflow easier and I do like tinkering with that stuff, and it's fulfilling to build new functionality to the hardware I already own instead of spending $$$ to buy new flashy thingamajigs. I just wish it wouldn't take so much time. Maybe I have SAS instead of GAS (software acquisition syndrome). I agree with the above point that no matter how stressed I am, the moment when I start playing and record the first loop, everything's bliss and I like making music again. Even the sound doesn't matter, I can be happy with the simplest preset piano patch. :)
  20. Here's a nice investigative piece on the people who voluntarily go patrolling for illegal immigrants on the US border.
  21. I totaly understand where you're coming from. It's a reactionary thing from my side, I try to remain neutral (right nor left) in all of this but from what I've seen from videos posted on Youtube refugees are causing trouble and harassing innocent people on the street, not taken from any right wing given news sites. Those refugees that are detrimental to society are not welcome and those who wish to contribute and make something of themselves are very welcome to stay. Sure there's refugees who are detrimental and harassing, but that's not all of them. Just like there's natives who get drunk on weekends, harass people, start fights and smash things. You don't see videos of refugees who have integrated and have jobs because they're not out there in the street for you to make phone videos of. There's a minority of shitty people everywhere, but that's no reason to start painting people with a broad brush of "refugee", "muslim" or "privileged white" and saying that they're all alike. However there's no way to know beforehand with any kind of vetting which refugees are going to be detrimental and which ones are not. Just like there's no way to know which kid will grow up to be a doctor and which one will become a criminal. I see a lot of arguments saying "islam is fundamentally not compatible with western civilization" and "true muslims have a duty to kill nonbelievers". Pretty strong words there, but to me this means that either the millions muslims who have been living in Europe for the past two generations are not True Muslims (because there'd be a serious civil war already?) or these arguments against islam are bunk. After all, all kinds of crime has steadily been dropping all across Europe. If these trends are only now reversing, I would rather blame economic inequality, because that's been increasing since late 90s. It's been some 20 years since The Troubles ended in Ireland, according to Wikipedia that's around 3500 dead. But that wasn't islamic terrorism.. Also, regarding the US, UK and all the other nations that fucked over Afghanistan and Iraq recently (not to mention Middle-East in the past), I find it really nasty that people are now refusing refugees from those locations. I mean you've let your politicians fuck over poorer countries for decades, at least have the backbone to deal with the consequences then. Alt-right doesn't seem to care all about that though, they have already made their conclusion and the only stuff they'll listen to is what proves that their conclusion is the correct one. Because if official figures don't support their story, it means that there's a conspiracy to hide the "real" figures. But to me that's no longer rational if you ignore the official facts but don't provide an alternative story that actually logically makes sense. I'm all for challenging the official narrative, but the alt-right's is just full-on conspiracy theories.
  22. @LimpyLoo You still missed my point. I never said "do whatever it takes to stop Trump". I said "I think massive nonviolent protest is the best way to bring Trump to act normally". None of this means that you have to think the other side is an idiot and you need to shout at them more loudly. The only point of the protest is to say "hey, we the people don't agree with this, we're really sorry, you won the election, but you got to stop and we need to talk". Absolutely fucking none of this ever entails "going low". Martin Luther King didn't "go low", Gandhi didn't "go low". Haven't you noticed the tendency where every altruistic act is getting labeled "virtue signalling"? This means these two words can turn every act of good faith against you, because people have been led to believe that good acts are just something that rich/liberal people do to give a nice impression. What I'm saying is that now, in order for people to actually believe in your good faith, you need to do something pretty impressive. I don't fucking get it, you've got the Civil Rights movement and anti-Vietnam in living memory, and now you've got the president and his advisors ignoring climate change and threatening Mexico, Iran and China with war, and you're here thinking about long-term solutions? Well if it satisfies you, going out to protest a crazy government has very big long-term implications in terms of strength of democracy and political accountability, and it absolutely does not mean that you have to be angrily shouting at your opponents that they are idiots.
  23. I don't understand how you're reading that stuff out of my posts.Let me make it crystal clear: I like sincerity and good faith, but I don't think sincerity and good faith are going to fucking work on Trump et al. It did not work during the campaign and it's not working now, at least not on the people currently running the White House. It might work on regular people who feel that Trump is their only way forward, but since he has wound them up emotionally and keeps doing so, it's going to be really hard to get them to change. And I'm not using the word "rational" in the way you think I am. My point is that if people are riled up emotionally - angry, afraid, etc. - then they're acting less rationally and making decisions in the heat of the moment without thinking. I want to put sincerity and good faith into the system, but what I am saying is that Trump has and is currently putting industrial quantities of BAD faith in the system. I don't get how I'm the one somehow advocating tribalism here. You're saying we need a 'short-term solution' for dealing with Trump?(And my proposed 'long-term solution' isn't gonna work on this short-term problem?) "It didn't work during the campaign" Were people being sincere and honest during the campaign? I must've missed the part where the political debate in the U.S. tried actual sincerity and actual good faith...and it failed (Hillary is totally sincere and totally acts in good faith, btw) You're putting words in my mouth that I didn't say. I am not talking short term vs long term and I am not saying "whatever it takes to stop Trump". I am simply saying that what you propose does not make logical sense, because: 1) Trump, Bannon and his people have publicly said that they wish to burn down the world (figuratively speaking). 2) If you take their words and intentions in good faith, then the only conclusion is that they aren't interested in talking or negotiating with you. It's their way or the highway. 3) If you don't take their words at face value and try instead to figure out some 'real meaning' behind them, then by definition you are not taking their words and intentions in good faith. So from here I conclude that before engaging in any good-spirited dialogue, the other side needs to be listening. It hasn't been listening for a long time and currently seems to be victoriously pissing on everyone who says that it should be listening. I don't care if the president is Trump, Clinton or whoever the fuck, what's going on right now is probably just a logical conclusion of people not really giving a damn about what politicians actually do and not holding anybody accountable. Political activism for a common cause is not tribalism. The first is about what you believe and the second is about what you are.
  24. I don't understand how you're reading that stuff out of my posts. Let me make it crystal clear: I like sincerity and good faith, but I don't think sincerity and good faith are going to fucking work on Trump et al. It did not work during the campaign and it's not working now, at least not on the people currently running the White House. It might work on regular people who feel that Trump is their only way forward, but since he has wound them up emotionally and keeps doing so, it's going to be really hard to get them to change. And I'm not using the word "rational" in the way you think I am. My point is that if people are riled up emotionally - angry, afraid, etc. - then they're acting less rationally and making decisions in the heat of the moment without thinking. I want to put sincerity and good faith into the system, but what I am saying is that Trump has and is currently putting industrial quantities of BAD faith in the system. I don't get how I'm the one somehow advocating tribalism here.
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