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Mole

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Everything posted by Mole

  1. 15 years of marriage has made me an expert on the mental ignore button.
  2. The mole household is now a vaccine breakthrough household. We’re both experiencing mild symptoms. Mrs. Mole tested positive; I tested negative but was told to test again in a few days. We got our 2nd Pfizer shot in April. We’ve done minimal socializing with unvaccinated people. Assuming it’s delta, it passes around really easily. I currently have a mild headache, some post nasal drip, and generally feel run down. It’s essentially the way we both felt after each shot. I’ll check in a few weeks from now if I’m dead!
  3. The culture war is the worst. The pro-life position should be extremely pro-mask and extremely pro-vaccine. If you're advocating regulating doctor/patient interactions during pregnancy like the typical pro-life position does, then surely you should be advocating vaccine and mask mandates. Anything less is rejecting the culture of life. If life is the concern, then life should be the concern. You save lives where and when you can. In this case, the pro-life movement should be the loudest advocates for aggressive COVID policies -- they certainly aggressively advocate for similarly or more intrusive anti-abortion measures. The pro-life movement has had their chance to advocate forcefully for their culture of life, but they failed miserably in search of meaningless gotcha moments. And since there's significant overlap between pro-lifers and the American church, the American church was given the greatest opportunity in generations to act out the Gospel and instead laying down their lives and picking up their crosses, they've largely chosen to lay down the cross and take up arms in the culture war. This need to win internet argument points by using the words of the other side to point out their hypocrisy rather than advocate for a coherent set of beliefs is due to the madness of the culture war. It's the worst. Stop it.
  4. I’ve become a single issue voter on objective reality.
  5. The difference between the treatment of GR and Triple may have had more to do with the scope, persistence, and the nature of the bad-faith posting. Triple had a HCQ bat signal that sent him into insane ranting. It seemed to me to be genuinely held beliefs based on an insane mental game of telephone with himself. I didn’t really notice him outside of the HCQ stuff. It was almost Grendalesque. GR was broader with his trolling, more persistent, and it seemed to be more disingenuous. Triple was trying to have a single and repeating honest conversation based on insane precepts; GR was consistently trying to muck up and distract in a broad range of topics. It wasn’t an honest conservative perspective; it was a troll perspective. Put another way, there is no doubt a need for more genuine, thoughtful, conservative voices in the CR, but that should be distinct from insane ranting or dishonest trolling.
  6. I've never heard such an idiom before. It's perfectly descriptive. Is this an Alabamaism or have I just been missing out?
  7. I meant to click on For Sale but instead clicked Daily Texan and was mildly surprised by the thread title.
  8. Datum is the singular of data. I propose that the singular of aggy be texum aggy.
  9. I don’t care that much about gymnastics and I suspect that most of us with hot takes don’t either. It might have been a wise decision or the best decision for her and/or her team. If you can’t go, you can’t go. Calling this brave or even heroic is a bit much. Honestly, there’s not much that happens in athletic competition that should be called heroic. Jackie Robinson was brave and heroic. All of the gymnasts, including Giles, who spoke out about Nassar were brave and possibly heroic. Kevin McHale playing through the playoffs on a broken foot — persevering through a difficult and painful trial — was “sports brave.” Backing out may have been wise and she certainly deserves no hate for it, but it’s not even sports brave. All of the brave/hero talk reminded me of this:
  10. Maybe it’s small, but as the fall semester approaches I find myself personally resenting this whole thing. Last year, I found the perfect paper to frame the first week of one of my upper level major courses. By that point, students feel like they know a lot and the paper wonderfully undermines everything that they had been taught, calls into question pretty much everything I would teach the rest of the semester, and shows how small and provincial their education is. A paper that says I’m a small-minded idiot hurting the education of all of my students by perpetuating a racist framing of their field seems worth exploring in an upper level class. There was some slight political resistance to the premise (“why does everything have to be about race?”), but the moment of realization about the glaring hole in their education was wonderful. It’s important to be periodically reminded how little you know about subjects that you know so well. Those moments are the foundation to a good education. The paper/lecture borrows heavily from the language of CRT. It was some heavy lifting last year, but this year I’m not sure if it’s worth the cost of entry. It was a means to an end for deeper understanding (kind of like CRT), but now I know a good portion of the students will never get past the politics. Maybe I’ll still roll with it or maybe I’ll find some less politicized way to tell them that everything we’ve been teaching them is arbitrary and closes their mind as much as it opens it, but every subsequent cohort misses out either way. The subject has been poisoned. Of course, poisoning uncomfortable subjects seems to be the point. Something else, however small, has been lost in the culture war.
  11. I don’t care about the financial aspects of it. No one is cutting me a check. I don’t really care about the recruiting aspect of it except that I want the teams to have good players. Whatever coaches are selling on the recruiting trail seems like someone else’s problem. I also don’t put much stock into the academic reputation of sports conferences unless we’re joining the Ivy League. When it comes to college sports, I just want to watch more big games. There will definitely be more big football and baseball matchups. I’ll miss the excitement of Texas/Kansas basketball though. Reviving two old rivalries will be fun too, even if they won’t be the marquee matchups. On the whole, this seems like a path to more fun, which seems to be the point to me.
  12. Who knew aggy still used the Julian Calendar.
  13. No matter what happens, I’m counting on Thujone’s trenchant analysis to help make sense of it all.
  14. I'm on team, we have very different understandings of the word pyramid.
  15. FIFY. See “an artist’s response to justified criticism” and Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony.
  16. Kareem was 24 when he won with the Bucks.
  17. Are you a time traveler? Also, a few months ago this board had lots saying he didn’t have what it takes.
  18. I love the energy right as teams are about to win the finals. It’s such a weird expectant intensity.
  19. The truth always lies in the middle of two points, no matter how nonsensical. Fauci isn’t responsible for all 4,000,000+ COVID deaths. He’s just responsible for ~2,000,000 deaths and half of the economic problems. This has been established.
  20. I moved away from Texas shortly before the descent into madness, but most of my social circle from Texas has lost their minds. “Fauci belongs in prison” is common, as is some nefarious connection with Bill Gates, and of course vaccines/masks/human decency is the mark of the beast. Q beliefs are common. The flat earth thing seems to be strangely coming up recently as well. I haven’t specifically heard the microchip stuff, but instead I hear dressed up pseudoscience versions of similar concepts. It’s not microchips, but the shot put something in me that’ll do the same thing. Also, apparently the shot was fake too? Probably 20% seem to believe that the vaccinated will die within months because reasons. It’s been nuts. A white single mother with mixed race children started expressing support for Christian nationalism. One guy seems to believe that the sun is fake or something. I can’t figure it out. These are all people I knew very well several years ago and were all normal, sane people. They were close friends. They’ve jettisoned from reality.
  21. This is profoundly poetic and a perfect reflection of our present day culture.
  22. Admitting that she has a moral compass just reveals that she was a coward the whole time. I guess that’s an improvement for her, but it’s no endorsement if she has an future political aspirations. I like elected representatives who aren’t sniveling cowards afraid to do the right thing.
  23. When the BLM protests were going on, some folks wanted to turn it into a thing about communism. When Cuba is (hopefully) overthrowing their communist regime, we’re treated to a discussion of BLM in the Cuba thread. Weird, yet predictable. Contrafact is a musical term describing a musical work based on a prior work. For example, jazz musicians would take the chords to popular tunes like “I’ve Got Rhythm” and write new melodies. The old Flintstones theme is an example of a tune based on “I’ve Got Rhythm.” Placing the familiar in a different context can be compelling. I’m not sure if there’s a political science term to describe a similar concept, but it sure seems appropriate here.
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