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Mole

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Everything posted by Mole

  1. It’s a fun question for probably a different thread, but my quick nomination for “best 1/2 punch of any college for different major sports” is UNC MJ/LT. There are probably other good ones, but I’m not sure if it’s possible to top that one.
  2. Put another way, and only slightly tongue in cheek, as bad as the current situation is, staying is worse, so he’s done a better job than the previous 3 presidents who all failed to get out. Doing the right thing, warts and all, is better than kicking the can down the road. If the Republican way was so good, they had plenty of chances to do it but they failed. There is plenty of room for criticism, but anyone failing to acknowledge that even the best plan would have been a disaster — and still better than staying — isn’t being honest. If you don’t like how he’s doing it, then why didn’t your side do it the ”right way” over the past 20 years? It’s because your “right way” would have been terrible too. Apparently it takes an addled old man to have the balls to do the right thing even poorly. Everyone can say how they would have done it better, yet it never seemed to happen.
  3. My wife and I were breakthroughs a few weeks back; I know a fair number of others. My anecdotal guess is that it’ll be pretty common going forward. I know just one breakthrough who was briefly hospitalized.
  4. I don’t think it’s possible to jump a line that doesn’t exist.
  5. I enjoyed the interview. KD’s perspective on basketball is intriguing to me. My armchair view is that he’s largely motivated a kind of basketball self-actualization rather than simply the pursuit of victory. Great play and winning often go hand in hand, but there’s a difference in motivation. The way he talked about the beauty of Kyrie’s game, his high school experience, his reasons for joining the Warriors, etc., he wants to win, but he seems more motivated by a more abstracted version of great basketball. I know we like to romanticize the sociopathic zero-sum hypercompetitiveness of players like MJ, but I appreciate the purity of basketball for its own sake. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Their discussion about the argument and management seemed to be a bit of a rationalization and oversimplification. It didn’t feel fully genuine to me. Sometimes we have to tell ourselves lies to make peace with people we like and respect. No biggie to me.
  6. Setting aside important questions like how many posters fantasize about shooting refugees at our border, the more I think about the subject of this thread, I’m left with a collection unsatisfying conclusions: 1. Every possible plan was bad and had a good chance of being a total disaster. 2. Maybe the current one is the darkest timeline, but not by all that much. 3. All these hot-take brilliant or obvious plans how to get out smoothly are a little like complaining about not calling the touchdown play. Your plan sucks too and would be a disaster. Yes, you. 4. The only way to avoid such a disaster would be to stay, which pretty much everyone agrees only delays the suffering and is truly the worst plan. 5. Pulling all the people currently clamoring to get out earlier would have probably avoided the current crisis, but with the bonus of creating its own crisis. Maybe it’s a lesser crisis, but it’s still a crisis. And maybe it would have been worse. As we’ve learned, things can always get worse. 6. Whether or not the intelligence was wrong is somewhat irrelevant to the current crisis. It was destined to be a crisis of some sort. This is like the worst kind of trolley problem. 7. Unless I’ve missed something today — I’ve been busy— in terms of American interests, it’s still mostly a hypothetical crisis. Afghan women were destined to be subjugated once the choice was made to leave. The humanitarian crisis was somewhat baked in. The people we want to get out and that we’re currently betraying haven’t been slaughtered yet. It sucks and it didn’t have to be that way, but every solution was bad. 8. I don’t know what I’m talking about and except for a small few posters here, you don’t either. Your plan sucks too. Even the fantasy plans of the few who know what they’re doing were destined for a crisis. 9. That doesn’t excuse Biden’s failures, his plan has really sucked, but I’m not going to complain that he doesn’t seem to be calling the touchdown play. 10. Maybe he’s calling the touch shovel pass play with the squinty-eyed freshman QB, which sucks.
  7. More cartoons and fewer people acting like cartoons, please. I’ll even take ham-fisted, over-captioned Ben Garrison slop.
  8. Medice, cura te ipsum.
  9. Good for you and for her. Here’s hoping the Greater Lubbock Bridge and VD Club have many years of getting Mama-Slorch’d. But seriously, any unvaccinated person getting the shot is good news. And it’s encouragement to keep gently bugging my unvaccinated friends.
  10. A lot of higher ed is trying to figure stuff out right before class and slapping it up on a power point.
  11. I haven't seen the simulation glitching this much since Melania Rick Rolled us at the 2016 RNC.
  12. I’m hoping that’s a euphemism for permanently banning them from campus, otherwise, what’s the point of admin if they won’t support faculty when they’re assaulted?
  13. Before my kid was born, I was about 60 lbs overweight and hadn’t been to the doctor in close to a decade. Kid born -> regular doctor visits -> lost 60 lbs. The idea of not being around for all that good stuff — not being around for him or me — is terrifying. I can’t imagine risking that because of my political beliefs.
  14. My kid is years away from having any sort of phone, but if he was of phone age, I'd appreciate the anti-sexting feature. Kids do stupid stuff, but I'd rather the more destructive stupidity be annoying to accomplish so that the lazy/less-destructive stupidity wins out. But maybe I'm underestimating the intrinsic motivation of sending dick pics.
  15. I found a source for 800,000 (from 2012): https://reuters.com/article/amp/idUSBRE83P14020120426 Eat your heart out Darrell Huff, author of How to Lie With Statistics.
  16. I wonder if that number is totally made up or just a product of creative statistics. Maybe particularly contentious divorce/custody situations get called “missing”, a family goes homeless and now the kid is “missing”, a kid gets briefly reported as missing but really just needed to charge their phone, and then you can get any number you want. It’d be nice to have an honest assessment of the situation, since the reality is probably bad enough. Absurd numbers just make it easier to dismiss. I guess Soul Asylum needs to bring back a longer version of their song.
  17. It might have come from the wet market or it might have leaked from the lab. Smart people who have no reason to make stuff up seem to say it wasn’t manufactured, so I’m inclined to believe them. We could use a bipartisan investigation into the origins and international alignment on the appropriate response and more importantly, a plan to stop future pandemics. We’ll get the My Pillow Guy hosting Jim Jordan at the Plandemic Cyber Symposium for a 144-hour lecture on miasmata and essential oils. That’s probably what we deserve.
  18. It sure seems like the backup plan in my state is to shut things down for two weeks. I know an administrator who just had to shut things down a few days ago — the whole district. Small districts don’t have a lot of resources. Delta is so much more contagious and teachers probably aren’t getting vaccinated in large enough numbers in rural areas. Of course no one wants to use masks in rural areas. If you refuse to use any of the tools to keep things running, then things might not keep running. Things shut down fast.
  19. It’s fun to talk about high-minded thing like muh freedoms vs. who will think about the children, all the relative risk management issues with kids, or even the nuts and bolts of funding, but there are schools shutting down in my state for a very simple reason. An outbreak among the faculty very quickly over strains the already strained resources of a district. It doesn’t take much for an exposure at a faculty meeting to shut a school down. You can talk all you want about wanting the best for the kids, but once faculty start having to isolate for two weeks, you lose the ability to have school pretty quickly.
  20. I have no idea. My service was as cushy as military service could be. My experience was so far from the things we imagine as military service, so I'm not even sure if I'm qualified to answer those questions. I suspect you'd get 1000 different answers if you polled 1000 service members. I remember a conversation I had with another soldier on the way to a funeral mission. He had a more typical Army experience than me. We were talking about why we joined. I talked about practical things like the details of the job I had, the excitement over learning new things, supporting my family, ect. I didn't mention any of the Army value stuff they pound into you. I guess all of these things can help provide meaning to the inherent stupidity. The Army values are fine values, but I joined for "selfish" reasons rather than all that patriotic stuff. This soldier was a bit baffled that all that stuff didn't play into my service. He was all about the romance of military service and couldn't comprehend my mindset. I just wanted to do my job well and learn new things and couldn't wrap my brain around his way of thinking. We both did our jobs well, so I guess the difference didn't really matter. I'm not sure if there's a coherent way to find meaning in an organization that is so absurd while taking part in actions that are so absurd. So much of it is so dumb, but it has a real human cost. We spent the past 20 years -- an entire military career -- fighting "terror" with so little tangible good to show for it and a lot of really bad stuff; and now leaving is hurting people like InkaUTexas' friends. I don't know how meaning, value, or honorableness can be assessed in such a messed up situation.
  21. The spiritualization of bad and cruel choices is maddening. For people of faith, God blessed us with brilliant saints of all and no faiths who worked tirelessly under extraordinarily difficult conditions to produce a miraculous vaccine. Finally we could end the death and suffering with just a minor inconvenience. The inherent value of life reaffirmed. You have not because you ask not; if you won’t accept God’s blessing via these wonderful people, what should you expect to happen? Good people sacrificed for this and so many people of faith are rejecting and vilifying them. There’s a twisted gospel message somewhere in there. A lot of the church could learn about the Gospel from the unbelieving world. They’re kicking our ass when it comes to upholding our stated values.
  22. Who’s playing?
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