Trump names former Boeing executive Patrick Shanahan acting Secretary of Defense

[Death-trooper]

For the love of fuck, no.

[Breadman]

'Necessary evil' has never been and never will be a good justification to put someone in power.

[bat/hacker]

Even still, at least it's people fighting on the basis of truth and arguing in good faith.

It's borderline impossible to have a discussion anywhere else. People just want to spout off with whatever bullshit "feels right" to them and the facts or evidence be damned. I watched a discussion just day before yesterday where someone posted the video of Trump offering to take responsibility for the government shutdown to disprove someone who said it didn't happen and he outright refused to watch "a deep fake". The argument just fell apart from there, with one side chiding the other for ignoring blatant facts, and the other calling the facts faked by absurd shadowy entities and claiming people were "falling for the meme". Finally moderation got involved and just muted both sides because it went literally nowhere in a full half hour. In the end, the guy who (still) wouldn't watch the video was gloating and being applauded that he wasn't led astray.

A couple of days before that there was someone at my office claiming George Soros was artificially tanking the stock market to try to make Trump's brilliant economic policies look bad. When pressed for sources, he said he had two of them and pointed to his eyes and smugly suggested the other person "start using his". From there the guy just seemed pleased that he'd succeeded in being annoying and wouldn't engage any further.

That same day I witnessed an argument about transgender rights where someone claimed there was zero scientific backing for someone being transgender. Someone posted a science article disproving that, and he just replied with "lol i'm not reading that shit, fuck off." The discussion went nowhere from that point.

My dad's been at odds with his mom for months over the white nationalist propaganda shit she's been posting on Facebook. A lot of it is disprovable by a ten second Google search so he often does that in response. Instead of acknowledging the counterargument she just cries fat crocodile tears about how my dad is trying to publicly humiliate her for being conservative, which usually gets him dogpiled by her conservative friends admonishing him for being a "typical liberal who can't respect the wisdom of his elders" which shifts the focus onto him long enough for her to go find more gross shit to post. It's a trend that's torn our family apart these last couple of years.

When you just have to put up with shit like this all the time it makes you appreciate the kinds of discussions we have here, where even if yeah it's pretty one-sided it's at least somewhere where behaving like the people I described above will get you ridiculed if not banned. It's refreshing for someone who has to put up with all this to be able to just witness some rationality once in a while.