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Andrew Sullivan: Can Democracy survive tribalism?
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Topic Started: Sep 26 2017, 11:17 AM (281 Views)
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jon-nyc
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Sep 26 2017, 11:17 AM
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Longish but well worth the read.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/can-democracy-survive-tribalism.html
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In my defense, I was left unsupervised.
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Jolly
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Sep 26 2017, 11:37 AM
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The story on the right side column may be even better...
https://www.thecut.com/2017/09/worst-sex-story-lost-condom.html
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The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.- George Soros
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Luke's Dad
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Sep 26 2017, 11:48 AM
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Earmarked for later. jon, don't let me forget to read this.
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The problem with having an open mind is that people keep trying to put things in it.
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Jolly
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Sep 26 2017, 12:00 PM
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Conservatives bad, liberals good. In order for the nation to survive, the conservatives must recognize their sinful tribalism and liberals must magnanimously forgive conservatives of their sin.
And y'all bitch about some of the stuff I post? Two-bit thinking in an intelligentsia wrapper is just real purdy two-bit thinking.
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The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.- George Soros
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jon-nyc
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Sep 26 2017, 12:24 PM
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Wow, what a ****ty interpretation, Jolly.
Here's what he has to say about the leftist academic intellectual climate:
Put under spoiler for readability of the post - Quote:
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In America, the intellectual elites, far from being a key rational bloc resisting this, have succumbed. The intellectual right and the academic left have long since dispensed with the idea of a mutual exchange of ideas. In a new study of the voting habits of professors, Democrats outnumber Republicans 12 to 1, and the imbalance is growing. Among professors under 36, the ratio is almost 23 to 1. It’s not a surprise, then, that once-esoteric neo-Marxist ideologies — such as critical race and gender theory and postmodernism, the bastard children of Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault — have become the premises of higher education, the orthodoxy of a new and mandatory religion. Their practical implications — such as “safe spaces,” speech regarded as violence, racially segregated graduation ceremonies, the policing of “micro-aggressions,” the checking of “white privilege” — are now embedded in the institutions themselves.
Conservative dissent therefore becomes tribal blasphemy. Free speech can quickly become “hate speech,” “hate speech” becomes indistinguishable from a “hate crime,” and a crime needs to be punished. Many members of the academic elite regard opposing views as threats to others’ existences, and conservative speakers often can only get a hearing on campus under lockdown. This seeps into the broader culture. It leads directly to a tech entrepreneur like Brendan Eich being hounded out of a company, Mozilla, he created because he once opposed marriage equality, or a brilliant coder, James Damore, being fired from Google for airing civil, empirical arguments against the left-feminist assumptions behind the company’s employment practices.
It’s why a young gay freelance writer, Chadwick Moore, could have a record of solid journalism, write a balanced profile of Milo Yiannopoulos for Out magazine, and then be subjected to an avalanche of bile from readers and a public denunciation signed by many of his fellow gay journalists. He lost his relationship with the magazine shortly thereafter. Moore is a fascinating case in how tribalism now infects everything. After being ostracized by his own tribe, he flipped, turned into a parody of MAGA conformity, and became an employee of Milo Inc.
Here's what he has to say about the left's misuse of the words 'hate' and 'white supremacy' and the increasing use of internet bullying and ostracism on the left:
Spoiler: click to toggle - Quote:
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Total immersion within one’s tribe also leads to increasingly extreme ideas. The word “hate,” for example, has now become a one-stop replacement for a whole spectrum of varying, milder emotions involved with bias toward others: discomfort, fear, unease, suspicion, ignorance, confusion. And it has even now come to include simply defending traditional Christian, Jewish, and Muslim doctrine on questions such as homosexuality.
Or take the current promiscuous use of the term “white supremacist.” We used to know what that meant. It meant advocates and practitioners of slavery, believers in the right of white people to rule over all others, subscribers to a theory of a master race, Jim Crow supporters, George Wallace voters. But it is now routinely used on the left to mean, simply, racism in a multicultural America, in which European-Americans are a fast-evaporating ethnic majority. It’s a term that implies there is no difference in race relations between America today and America in, say, the 1830s or the 1930s. This rhetoric is not just untrue, it is dangerous. It wins no converts, and when actual white supremacists march in the streets, you have no language left to describe them as any different from, say, all Trump supporters, including the 13 percent of black men who voted for him.
Here's what he has to say about Ta Nehisi Coates and the absurd misuse of 'white supremacy':
Spoiler: click to toggle - Quote:
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This atmosphere can affect even the finest minds. I think of Ta-Nehisi Coates, the essayist and memoirist. Not long ago, he was a subtle, complicated, and beautiful writer. He could push back against his own tribe. He could write critically of the idea that “there never is any black agency — to be African-American is to be an automaton responding to either white racism or cultural pathology. No way you could actually have free will.” He could persuasively push against “nihilism and paranoia” among his own, to champion the idea of being “critical, not just of the larger white narrative, but of the narrative put forth by those around you.” He could speak of street culture as someone who lived it and yet knew, as he put it in an essay called “A Culture of Poverty,” that “ ‘I ain’t no punk’ may shield you from neighborhood violence. But it cannot shield you from algebra, when your teacher tries to correct you. It cannot shield you from losing hours, when your supervisor corrects your work.” He could do this while brilliantly conveying the systemic racism that crushes the souls of so many black Americans.
He remains a vital voice, but in more recent years, a somewhat different one. His mood has become much gloomier. He calls the Obama presidency a “tragedy,” and describes many Trump supporters as “not so different from those same Americans who grin back at us in lynching photos.” He’s written about how watching cops and firefighters enter the smoldering World Trade Center instantly reminded him of cops mistreating blacks: They “were not human to me.” In his latest essay in the Atlantic, analyzing why Donald Trump won the last election, he dismisses any notion that economic distress might have played a role as “empty” and ignores other factors, such as Hillary Clinton’s terrible candidacy, the populist revolt against immigration that had become a potent force across the West, and the possibility that the pace of social change might have triggered a backlash among traditionalists. No, there was one meaningful explanation only: white supremacism. And those who accept, as I do, that racism was indeed a big part of the equation but also saw other factors at work were simply luxuriating in our own white privilege because we are never under “racism’s boot.”
A writer is entitled to shift perspective. What’s more salient is his audience. He once had a small but devoted and querulous readership for his often surprising blog. Today, his works are huge best sellers, and it is deemed near blasphemous among liberals to criticize them.
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In my defense, I was left unsupervised.
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Jolly
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Sep 26 2017, 01:05 PM
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- jon-nyc
- Sep 26 2017, 12:24 PM
Wow, what a ****ty interpretation, Jolly. Here's what he has to say about the leftist academic intellectual climate: Put under spoiler for readability of the post - Quote:
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In America, the intellectual elites, far from being a key rational bloc resisting this, have succumbed. The intellectual right and the academic left have long since dispensed with the idea of a mutual exchange of ideas. In a new study of the voting habits of professors, Democrats outnumber Republicans 12 to 1, and the imbalance is growing. Among professors under 36, the ratio is almost 23 to 1. It’s not a surprise, then, that once-esoteric neo-Marxist ideologies — such as critical race and gender theory and postmodernism, the bastard children of Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault — have become the premises of higher education, the orthodoxy of a new and mandatory religion. Their practical implications — such as “safe spaces,” speech regarded as violence, racially segregated graduation ceremonies, the policing of “micro-aggressions,” the checking of “white privilege” — are now embedded in the institutions themselves.
Conservative dissent therefore becomes tribal blasphemy. Free speech can quickly become “hate speech,” “hate speech” becomes indistinguishable from a “hate crime,” and a crime needs to be punished. Many members of the academic elite regard opposing views as threats to others’ existences, and conservative speakers often can only get a hearing on campus under lockdown. This seeps into the broader culture. It leads directly to a tech entrepreneur like Brendan Eich being hounded out of a company, Mozilla, he created because he once opposed marriage equality, or a brilliant coder, James Damore, being fired from Google for airing civil, empirical arguments against the left-feminist assumptions behind the company’s employment practices.
It’s why a young gay freelance writer, Chadwick Moore, could have a record of solid journalism, write a balanced profile of Milo Yiannopoulos for Out magazine, and then be subjected to an avalanche of bile from readers and a public denunciation signed by many of his fellow gay journalists. He lost his relationship with the magazine shortly thereafter. Moore is a fascinating case in how tribalism now infects everything. After being ostracized by his own tribe, he flipped, turned into a parody of MAGA conformity, and became an employee of Milo Inc.
Here's what he has to say about the left's misuse of the words 'hate' and 'white supremacy' and the increasing use of internet bullying and ostracism on the left: Spoiler: click to toggle - Quote:
-
Total immersion within one’s tribe also leads to increasingly extreme ideas. The word “hate,” for example, has now become a one-stop replacement for a whole spectrum of varying, milder emotions involved with bias toward others: discomfort, fear, unease, suspicion, ignorance, confusion. And it has even now come to include simply defending traditional Christian, Jewish, and Muslim doctrine on questions such as homosexuality.
Or take the current promiscuous use of the term “white supremacist.” We used to know what that meant. It meant advocates and practitioners of slavery, believers in the right of white people to rule over all others, subscribers to a theory of a master race, Jim Crow supporters, George Wallace voters. But it is now routinely used on the left to mean, simply, racism in a multicultural America, in which European-Americans are a fast-evaporating ethnic majority. It’s a term that implies there is no difference in race relations between America today and America in, say, the 1830s or the 1930s. This rhetoric is not just untrue, it is dangerous. It wins no converts, and when actual white supremacists march in the streets, you have no language left to describe them as any different from, say, all Trump supporters, including the 13 percent of black men who voted for him.
Here's what he has to say about Ta Nehisi Coates and the absurd misuse of 'white supremacy': Spoiler: click to toggle - Quote:
-
This atmosphere can affect even the finest minds. I think of Ta-Nehisi Coates, the essayist and memoirist. Not long ago, he was a subtle, complicated, and beautiful writer. He could push back against his own tribe. He could write critically of the idea that “there never is any black agency — to be African-American is to be an automaton responding to either white racism or cultural pathology. No way you could actually have free will.” He could persuasively push against “nihilism and paranoia” among his own, to champion the idea of being “critical, not just of the larger white narrative, but of the narrative put forth by those around you.” He could speak of street culture as someone who lived it and yet knew, as he put it in an essay called “A Culture of Poverty,” that “ ‘I ain’t no punk’ may shield you from neighborhood violence. But it cannot shield you from algebra, when your teacher tries to correct you. It cannot shield you from losing hours, when your supervisor corrects your work.” He could do this while brilliantly conveying the systemic racism that crushes the souls of so many black Americans.
He remains a vital voice, but in more recent years, a somewhat different one. His mood has become much gloomier. He calls the Obama presidency a “tragedy,” and describes many Trump supporters as “not so different from those same Americans who grin back at us in lynching photos.” He’s written about how watching cops and firefighters enter the smoldering World Trade Center instantly reminded him of cops mistreating blacks: They “were not human to me.” In his latest essay in the Atlantic, analyzing why Donald Trump won the last election, he dismisses any notion that economic distress might have played a role as “empty” and ignores other factors, such as Hillary Clinton’s terrible candidacy, the populist revolt against immigration that had become a potent force across the West, and the possibility that the pace of social change might have triggered a backlash among traditionalists. No, there was one meaningful explanation only: white supremacism. And those who accept, as I do, that racism was indeed a big part of the equation but also saw other factors at work were simply luxuriating in our own white privilege because we are never under “racism’s boot.”
A writer is entitled to shift perspective. What’s more salient is his audience. He once had a small but devoted and querulous readership for his often surprising blog. Today, his works are huge best sellers, and it is deemed near blasphemous among liberals to criticize them.
Nah, thought those two sentences summed up his attitude pretty well. He can't help himself. everytime he reels off a decent paragraph or two, he then throws in a sentence where you know he thinks his side is right, and he's just peering over the top of his glasses at you. He decries tribalism, while not realizing he is just as infected as many of his friends.
It's not nearly as complicated as Mr. Sullivan would make it, in his thousands of words. The country is splintering because we have insulated ourselves from shared experiences, we have no common goals, little common society and no common enemies. Every man has become his own king and he's smarter than the guy he's standing next to. And it's not going to change. Not until we have a great crisis that demands we come together as a nation and so many of these little niggling problems we have are finally seen as something not worth wasting out time on.
We are going to lose this republic because people cannot put the interests of society and the country above their personal selves, not because of not being able to function outside of the tribe.
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The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.- George Soros
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Jolly
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Sep 26 2017, 02:56 PM
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Ok, just because I don't agree with Jon on his opinion of Mr. Sullivan's column, does not mean it is not worth the read. Read, digest and give your own opinion...
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The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.- George Soros
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Steve Miller
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Sep 26 2017, 04:06 PM
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Good article. Highly recommended no matter which tribe you like.
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Wag more Bark less
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Rainman
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Sep 26 2017, 04:30 PM
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...as a nation and so many of these little niggling problems ... not worth wasting our time on.
I don't need to read. You are a racist, as much as you try to hide it with misspelled words. I even quoted you, every word I quoted is yours, so no denying it. Bigoted and racist, that's your deplorable tribe, mister.
Ta-daa!!
That's the new contemporary journalist in me, I understand how to do it -- how to use "facts" these days to support a clearly indisputable accusation.
You're toast, mister. Oops, sorry. I typed "toast." My bad. That's clearly a microaggression. Guess I have not perfected my usage of facts yet.
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Steve Miller
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Sep 26 2017, 09:04 PM
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- Rainman
- Sep 26 2017, 04:30 PM
- Quote:
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...as a nation and so many of these little niggling problems ... not worth wasting our time on.
I don't need to read. You are a racist, as much as you try to hide it with misspelled words. I even quoted you, every word I quoted is yours, so no denying it. Bigoted and racist, that's your deplorable tribe, mister. Ta-daa!! That's the new contemporary journalist in me, I understand how to do it -- how to use "facts" these days to support a clearly indisputable accusation. You're toast, mister. Oops, sorry. I typed "toast." My bad. That's clearly a microaggression. Guess I have not perfected my usage of facts yet. You should read it.
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Wag more Bark less
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Horace
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Sep 26 2017, 09:10 PM
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I liked it. It's nice to see these sorts of ideas entering the main stream.
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As a good person, I implore you to do as I, a good person, do. Be good. Do NOT be bad. If you see bad, end bad. End it in yourself, and end it in others. By any means necessary, the good must conquer the bad. Good people know this. Do you know this? Are you good?
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Rainman
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Sep 26 2017, 09:23 PM
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- Steve Miller
- Sep 26 2017, 09:04 PM
- Rainman
- Sep 26 2017, 04:30 PM
- Quote:
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...as a nation and so many of these little niggling problems ... not worth wasting our time on.
I don't need to read. You are a racist, as much as you try to hide it with misspelled words. I even quoted you, every word I quoted is yours, so no denying it. Bigoted and racist, that's your deplorable tribe, mister. Ta-daa!! That's the new contemporary journalist in me, I understand how to do it -- how to use "facts" these days to support a clearly indisputable accusation. You're toast, mister. Oops, sorry. I typed "toast." My bad. That's clearly a microaggression. Guess I have not perfected my usage of facts yet.
You should read it. Jolly, you know I was kidding, right? Guess I can't be too sure. Sometimes when I think I'm being clever, it does not always come across.
Steve, OK, I'll try to read it. Geesh. I didn't think there would be so much homework.
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Jolly
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Sep 27 2017, 02:54 AM
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- Rainman
- Sep 26 2017, 09:23 PM
- Steve Miller
- Sep 26 2017, 09:04 PM
- Rainman
- Sep 26 2017, 04:30 PM
- Quote:
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...as a nation and so many of these little niggling problems ... not worth wasting our time on.
I don't need to read. You are a racist, as much as you try to hide it with misspelled words. I even quoted you, every word I quoted is yours, so no denying it. Bigoted and racist, that's your deplorable tribe, mister. Ta-daa!! That's the new contemporary journalist in me, I understand how to do it -- how to use "facts" these days to support a clearly indisputable accusation. You're toast, mister. Oops, sorry. I typed "toast." My bad. That's clearly a microaggression. Guess I have not perfected my usage of facts yet.
You should read it.
Jolly, you know I was kidding, right? Guess I can't be too sure. Sometimes when I think I'm being clever, it does not always come across. Steve, OK, I'll try to read it. Geesh. I didn't think there would be so much homework. I thought it was quite obvious.
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The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.- George Soros
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John D'Oh
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Sep 27 2017, 03:59 AM
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- Rainman
- Sep 26 2017, 09:23 PM
Jolly, you know I was kidding, right? I'm sorry, but that excuse won't work here.
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What do you mean "we", have you got a mouse in your pocket?
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Davis
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Sep 27 2017, 07:56 AM
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Jon. Thanks for the link. I read it twice, skimming which is the thing tribal people do to find confirming or non confirming statements snuffs the value.
I remember a time when our political parties were embattled and people ran with a bare mention of affiliation. It was thought they were an endangered species. Man did they over achieve in correcting the problem.
Also I thought we were better than parliamentary style governments with multiple parties, but the examples in the article gave me pause.
At least here the two tribes still talk, even when rattling each other's cages. I'm other milieu's it has gotten much more toxic.
From a physiological point of view I think the serotonin release for being truly partisan must be too tempting. Bashing the other side seems to provide a OxyContin chewing release.
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Luke's Dad
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Sep 27 2017, 08:06 AM
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I wouldn't be ao tribal if the other side wasn't brain dead libtards that want to destroy our way of life. They all have mental disorders.
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The problem with having an open mind is that people keep trying to put things in it.
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Larry
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Sep 27 2017, 08:12 AM
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That's true.
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Of the Pokatwat Tribe
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jon-nyc
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Sep 27 2017, 08:14 AM
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- Luke's Dad
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I wouldn't be ao tribal if the other side wasn't brain dead libtards that want to destroy our way of life. They all have mental disorders. Ok I laughed out loud reading this. After I did a double take on the avatar.
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In my defense, I was left unsupervised.
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George K
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Sep 27 2017, 08:18 AM
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- jon-nyc
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- Luke's Dad
- Sep 27 2017, 08:06 AM
I wouldn't be ao tribal if the other side wasn't brain dead libtards that want to destroy our way of life. They all have mental disorders.
Ok I laughed out loud reading this. After I did a double take on the avatar.
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Davis
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Sep 27 2017, 08:27 AM
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What Sullivan didn't say is that in our own Middle East conflict, the media wins as it is arming both sides.
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Nobody's Sock
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Sep 27 2017, 09:42 AM
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- John D'Oh
- Sep 27 2017, 03:59 AM
- Rainman
- Sep 26 2017, 09:23 PM
Jolly, you know I was kidding, right?
I'm sorry, but that excuse won't work here.
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"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
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Nobody's Sock
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Sep 27 2017, 09:43 AM
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- Larry
- Sep 27 2017, 08:12 AM
That's true. says the leader of the Pokatwat tribe. lol!
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"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
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