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By metmike - April 14, 2021, 7 p.m.
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Gee Larry, that was over a year ago and I'm wondering why you are only showing  a small part of what happened, the anti Trump part?

Here, let me help you out to remember the big picture(since you started the thread):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vucSkYJcvho

I can't understand for the life of me why Trump wouldn't want to shake hands with such a nice person who shows respect for the office of president (-:


Trump was extremely rude and mean to lots of people and said alot on inflammatory stuff, so one would think that you could find an incident better than one,  where the person he snubbed displayed behavior that was  an order of magnitude worse than his small snub.

Am I defending Trump?

No, just showing the entire OBJECTIVE picture.

I'll bet you can find at least 10 cases much worse than this one.....where the person actually didn't deserve it.

By WxFollower - April 14, 2021, 7:24 p.m.
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Mike,

 Fair enough. I realize that Pelosi tore up the speech afterward and it made her look bad as she was majorly pissed off due to the Trump handshake snub and couldn't hold back. Due to the handshake snub she was extremely pissed during the entire speech, which I fully understand. But this post wasn't intended to praise Pelosi. It is to show the contrast in how Pelosi was treated by GWB (with extreme class) vs Trump (as a jerk would do) at the start of their respective SOTU speeches. So, that's why only the starts were compared.

 I liked GWB very much. I proudly hate Trump. This is a good example why that's the case.

 

By metmike - April 14, 2021, 7:56 p.m.
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"I proudly hate Trump"

Yes, that's your choice and I'm 100% ok with you expressing your sincere human emotions here because you are usually professional and use evidence and make massive, massive positive contributions in many realms that offset this element in you by 100.......and you are my friend.

How many people do you think, on their death bed, think back and stated "I'm glad I spent so much of my life hating person X" The world is not better because of it(hate never makes the world better) but I don't owe anything to the world. 

"I realize that Pelosi tore up the speech afterward and it made her look bad as she was majorly pissed off due to the Trump handshake snub and couldn't hold back"

I think it was MUCH more than just a handshake snub. There was a really bad relationship going on between the 2 and Pelosi was every bit as responsible for the bad blood between them and when people act very poorly, then blame somebody else for it, when they had total control of their actions, its using somebody else as a scapegoat so that they don't have to be held accountable for their actions.

I liked Bush too.

I totally understand why Trump turned you off all those years. People that act that way are almost impossible to support.  What's interesting is, I would get this question all the time "I can't understand how somebody like you can support somebody like that!!!" My response is that I support the office and agenda but strongly frowned upon his horrible personality flaws but they would still never understand.

At the same time, I totally understand why somebody like them would feel this way about Trump.   In other words..............I am able to see why they feel the way that they do/did but people with their view refused to understand why I would feel the way I did and would condemn me for it.

I lost a couple of friends here because they would not understand it......pj and carl. It was too much for them to be friends with somebody that said positive things about Trump. 

One of my main points has been to try to make people aware that HATING somebody, never makes things better and almost always makes it worse. (I doubt that carl hated Trump)

Yes, it was especially hard for me to not hate Trump after what he did following the election. I have made many dozens of posts stating the facts but they are just the facts, not emotions.

However, there was one point, I think it was just before the insurrection that I was so infuriated with him because of what he was doing to so many of my friends here and I was spending hours, showing them what he was doing, that I was typing up a post ripping him and realized that I was being driven by hate.

I discarded that post and came back to the topic the next day, intentionally reminding myself to NOT hate him.

It ain't easy and we don't just have a switch in our heads to turn it on or off.  I admit that I hated Bill Clinton for awhile when I found out about some of the stuff that he did.....with the lying and ethics violations. 

I honestly think that he caused me to learn how to NOT hate somebody by forcing myself to see the good in him................and low and behold, there was plenty of it to be found but I had closed my mind to it because I hated him.

By metmike - April 14, 2021, 8:36 p.m.
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Since you started this thread Larry, it's turned out being about hating Trump but lets' expand the conversation a bit here and take the heat off of you because I don't want to be singling you out.

Around 9 months after I took over as moderator, I was trying to decide if I wanted to do this anymore. I spend much of my time volunteering to help numerous organizations, with youth scholastic chess being the biggest one. The objective is to help make the world a better place and I know with certainty, that the donated time is well spent at all these other places because of the positive results.

I decided to conduct a little analysis on the forum. Outside of my regular posts like,  how to make the world a better place or quote of the day and some of carl's posts,  65% of the posts were Trump bashing and they almost always featured hatred and often resulted in personal attacks between posters. Name calling and the type of behavior between people that in real life, I am totally against.

Here I was as moderator, telling people that I was not going to censor them because I wanted them  to have the freedom to say what they wanted.......without really violating the rules. 

Guys like mojo and vandy were coming here to have a picnic as predator trolls to stir up as much hatred as they could to get their jollies(rattle chains as vanderplas would say) and feed off of the reactions of their conservative targets.

While contributing exactly ZERO positively to the forum.

Larry, I can't emphasize enough that you are totally the opposite of that.

You express your hatred for Trump in an intelligent, reasoned way that is meant to make a valid point about why you feel this way......not to feed off of reactions.


So just over 2 years ago, I adjusted the rules a bit. Then, I gave our trolls a dozen warnings and showed them exactly what the infraction was each time and even suggested how they could present the same idea in an acceptable manner. 

The only reason that they came here was to make vicious attacks on others, so being civil, just was not in them.

Not so funny thing is that 2 years after being booted, mojo still sends me hate emails on a regular basis. Vandy only stopped earlier this year. This is who they are. 

So that sort of summarizes my thoughts about communicating in an acceptable manner here.

You might remember cliff. Cliff hated Trumps guts and was the king of posting meme's and attacks on Trump but he was different than the others. He never made it personal and just wanted to tell all his conservative farm buddies and others all the bad things about Trump and then some. 

I created numerous Trump bashing threads for him, some that got almost 100 posts(mostly him on Trump) and after around 6 months of that, he must have just got tired of it and realized it was a waste of time because nobody took him serious anymore.

In person, I will betcha that cliff is a nice guy. 


By metmike - April 14, 2021, 9:05 p.m.
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So now we have a new president and he's a liberal.

Most posters on this site are very conservative and in the last 3 months, other than some things that I posted,  I don't remember one positive post about President Biden(I've posted numerous negative things about him too).

In other words, now we will have wall to wall Biden bashing as a main feature on MarketForum because that's the way it is in America.

If the president is from the opposite party that you are...........you attack them constantly. 

Biden, at least is a tough guy to hate, unlike his predecessor but I would bet that emotion is playing a role in some of the posts..............which is ok, as I said as long as you don't make personal attacks on fellow posters.

It will be interesting to see how this develops. 

We apparently don't live in a world that will tune in to read the latest "quote of the day" or "this day in history" or "how to make the world a better place" or to find out what the natural gas and grains market are doing because of the weather.

They would rather express their one sided views about their dislike for what the opposite political party is doing or their dislike for somebody in politics or elsewhere......while listening/reading other people just like them saying the same things.

My wife always tells me that I have 2 faults and they show up here. She says:

1. "You are too analytical, you have to analyze everything and it drives people nuts." Note my analytical epistles(as Alex would call them).

2. "You are too honest."  Yep, when somebody makes a statement that is wrong, or clearly biased statement, I am the king of fact checkers but always use data/evidence, not opinion and am not shy about confronting them with the truth. 


Maybe these are bad traits to have for being a moderator. 


By GunterK - April 14, 2021, 9:39 p.m.
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In US politics, there have always been Liberals and Conservatives, Democrats and Republicans (and a bunch of in-betweens)… but never has the country been as polarized as it is now, IMHO (not counting the Civil War).

Trump has always been accused of “dividing” the country. However, I believe the MSM is just as much to blame for splitting the country .… with their never-ending, daily Trump-bashing, from day one.

I also have to admit that Trump’s personality made it easy to dislike him. He certainly was not ‘presidential” in some of his behavior.

He was not a typical, smooth politician… but that’s what appealed to many in 2016.

Over the last 4 years, this split has intensified. It looks like everybody is now entrenched in his/her biased views… and anybody who opposes them is a bad person.

This forum is blessed to have metmike as moderator. We all can learn from him…. and I don’t mean the college education about climate change he has given us.. I mean his continued efforts to be objective and fair.

I certainly have taken a look at myself. And I realized that on some subjects I had become“biased” and narrow-minded.

Metmike has not only asked us all to be objective, but he has also led by example.

It is often difficult to look for admirable things in people you don’t like. And it just as difficult to seriously criticize those you really care for.

Metmike has repeatedly done so, and I thank him for doing so. If we all were like metmike, the world would be a better place.

By metmike - April 15, 2021, 12:46 a.m.
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Thanks very much Gunter!

That makes me feel good and I have made several good friends like you here. I have also gained several life times worth of observing, analyzing and understanding of how people think and why they think that way.

That by itself is worth the education and doing tons of research on hundreds of topics over the years to present here or show readers the authentic facts or provide useful data on commodities or weather and many other things.....has allowed me to tap into the internet to use it in a very positive way that I would never do for myself but makes sense if it's being shared with 100 other  people that might see it here. 


This is the bottom line of the purpose of any forum. Sharing information and opinions.

I try to make as much as I can positive and true but am very dependent on others, like you to tip us off about things like the southern border crisis and opinions that I don't have from sites that I don't go to.

There are a ton of negative things going on around the world, so I know that, to be reality based, Marketforum must include them. We are a small microcosm of that world and I have been a source of some pretty negative stuff too, when getting down to the nitty gritty of explaining how the fake climate crisis was created or how the Hunter Biden story was censored by the MSM last October or showing the corruption of the Mueller investigation or the corruption of the fake Biden stealing the election scam. 

Regardless, this is not a complaint. We are living in the best times of human history by an extremely wide margin for somebody like me. I can apply my over analytical personality all day long by accessing a million times more information than was available just a few decades ago........in the comfort of my home. 

There is no limit to how much new information that a person can pack into their brains, almost for free. On top of that, I can share it with other people that live thousands of miles away, instantly, which greatly magnifies that power. 

Wow, it's mind boggling. 

Think of what it must have been  like for people living in the Civil War era when you are having a bad day. Our bad days, unless they feature a serious illness are probably better than their best days.

And even when you're  sick, the advanced medical treatments, like antibiotics can obliterate the pathogen or illness quickly, that might have been life threatening 160 years ago................and in fact in all of human history until the age that we've been living in.