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Mole

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Everything posted by Mole

  1. In many towns, Applebees is the only sit-down place open after 9 or 10. If you’re traveling and hungry late, it’s between Applebees and late night fast food. Marginally better than McDonalds is a viable business model.
  2. An informal case study on the classism vs. racism debate: My (white) wife has a name that is typically considered as Black. She is as white as can be, and people who meet her typically treat her pretty respectfully, relatively speaking. At one point, she got a job doing chat tech support. People would chat or text in with their tech problems and she’d solve them. She was one of the top performing tech support people in the company. Customers only interaction with her was a name and text support for their problems. Her female colleagues (so controlling for the sexism) — women who were largely less competent than her but had more racially neutral names — were generally treated respectfully by customers. The customers may have been angry or frustrated, but they remained open and receptive to help. My wife received all sorts of racist comments and general belligerence. Even after solving the problem, she was assumed to be untrustworthy and incompetent. The same person: in person she’s treated respectfully and assumed to be competent and trustworthy; when her whiteness is hidden, she’s assumed to be incompetent even after solving the problem. The only difference is her presumed skin color. I assume this presumption of incompetence and untrustworthiness is pretty typical for Black Americans. Classism may be a part of the equation, but it’s not the major driver. And even that classism is built on a foundation of racism. Polite society has largely driven out the ugliest expressions of racism, but the underlying assumptions that drove those ugly expressions are still widely present.
  3. Key phrase right here. Truthiness as justification feels ok, right?
  4. OG troll shibboleths. That rant was more of a troll culture madlib than anything resembling coherent or thoughtful. Come on conservatives, I so desperately want to be a stodgy conservative pushing back against some of the troubling progressive trends, but the current conservative ethos is so unserious, incoherent, and dishonest, even when you’re right, you only make things worse. Stop with the dramatic emoting and be the rational, thoughtful people you like to pretend to be. Be the rugged man’s men you fantasize about. You’re not a victim, you’re not being canceled, and your news source is also mainstream media, even if it’s not really news. Stop selling yourself short. You’re the party of Lincoln, so stop acting like a bunch of fools. Stop debasing yourselves, stop breaking everything, and have some dignity.
  5. Whatever happened to the chief painting/sculpture?
  6. I count 10, 7 of which I would consider more common than the winning choice. I found the last 4 letters on guess 2 and then incorrectly guessed each time after. I’m not a fan of these words where it’s a coin flip.
  7. Gonzaga - 1 Davidson - 10 North Carolina - 8 Murray State - 7 Arizona - 1 Loyola Chicago - 10 South Dakota St. - 13 Auburn - 2 Tiebreaker: Arizona
  8. Troll: posts clips that remove all context, edits out portions of the question and answers, and dishonestly frames those edited clips. Troll: repeatedly proclaims the troll position to be a self-evident truth. Also troll: where’s the critical thinking? We desperately need a robust and thoughtful conservative movement if we hope to succeed. Informed, vigorous, and reasoned debate is our last best shot at digging out of our current pit. We NEED conservatives calling out the president and VP, but they need to operate within objective reality. Instead conservatives seemed to have largely embraced the worst of troll culture. You revel in dishonestly, play (?) dumb when it’s pointed out, and call it critical thinking. If the evidence for your thesis consists of dishonestly framed and out of context clips, then your thesis is likely garbage. If you actually think these clips support some sort of valid point, your mental facilities are severely lacking.
  9. That’s not far from the truth. I wish I could say that I’ve invested most of the savings, but it’s mostly wrapped up in musical instruments. The musician joke about driving $5000 worth of equipment in a $500 car to a $50 gig hits pretty close to home. I will say that when we take a long road trip, we’ll rent a car. That’s at most a few hundred bucks maybe twice a year, so still cheaper than a nice new car. I’ve also always tried to live close to work.
  10. 40 something here with a kid still in a car seat. I’ve spent less than 10k total in my life on cars. We may spend a little more on gas than if we had the latest model, and I may have to dump a quart of oil in the cars from time to time, but I can’t even fathom spending the “reasonable” amounts listed here on a car. The only problem is that the cars are now old enough that the trustworthy shops in my podunk town don’t really want to work on them.
  11. It’s January 7, 2010, 11:30 left in the 1st quarter. Texas is driving and in a moment of delirious joy, I awkwardly jump up in my living room, fall, and smack my head on the end-table. I then fall into a 12-year coma. Upon awakening, I immediately check on my beloved Longhorn message board, Shaggybevo. I’m met with a single lunatic posting to himself and a startling amount of scat porn. Once I finish and clean up, I finally find my new Surly home to learn about the wonderful sports decade that I missed. We’re on our third coach since that moment? Colt went down? We keep losing to Kansas? In disgust, I turn away from the football board to see what’s going on in the world. Surely we’ve emerged from the economic catastrophe and are enjoying a golden era. I see several threads about a strange, deadly disease, a thread about war with Russia and a new Hitler, and two threads about the coming nuclear holocaust. I call my parents, only to find out that they’ve been brainwashed by some website that used to be for college students to creep on each other’s drunken pictures. The moon is a spaceship? Bill Gates is trying to murder us all to save us from the nuclear holocaust? Surely this is some fever dream and I’m still in that coma.
  12. I’ve been thinking about an end of the world music thread. It’d be a lot of metal and a lot of 80s music, but also stuff like the Götterdämmerung Immolation Scene, and Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. If I get some down time before we all start melting and glowing, I might go start it.
  13. Interesting to see a real, literal, in the wild shibboleth.
  14. I wish I didn’t have to learn it like this, but Ukrainians sure have a way with words and a natural gift for rapidly generating folk lore.
  15. Yes to weapons, supplies, money, intelligence, and advice for Ukraine. Yes to any and all sanctions for Russia. No to any physical involvement.
  16. Can you imagine the flopping and diving at the first mortar round?
  17. Wait, is there an octopus invasion underway?
  18. Mole

    Candace Owens

    Still, a middle-aged white guy using a slur as a joke about a black woman seems to cross a line, even if you think that the black woman gives cover to terrible, racist behavior. For example, Blazing Saddles was slur-ridden, but it was very clearly in mockery of the racists. The slurs weren’t the jokes, but rather the racists using slurs were the butt of the jokes. I don’t see that movie as particularly racist despite its liberal use of racist language and tropes. Joking by calling someone a racial slur is a bit different. You could make the case that it’s also in mockery of the racist position (quoting the hypothetical racist), but using racist language to argue a black woman is an anti-Black racist seems a bit rich. If “enlightened” views lead to such behavior, maybe they aren’t so enlightened.
  19. Tweet 1: something something order of magnitude. Tweet 2: claim about 9/11 which is unsubstantiated but it doesn’t really matter, due to Tweet 3. Tweet 3: no numbers, but they won’t be real anyway. Tweet 4: slippery language about “all” accounts (inflating numbers of accounts due to the crowdsourcing era?) and now it’s just “frozen more” than 9/11. What happened to the “order of magnitude.”
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