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Mole

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  1. Mole

    Shit My Kid Says

    To follow up on this. The lesson mostly stuck and he has the self-control to not say them, unless he hears someone else say one. Then he calmly rattles off every cuss word he knows and explains how you shouldn't say any of them. He's a smart kid, so he has a rapidly growing vocabulary. We're church-going people, so "oh my God" was on the list of words/phrases to avoid. If he hears that phrase on TV (which is a lot) or just thinks that you might say any bad word at all (for example, if you spill something and seem frustrated), he responds with, "don't say oh my God, don't say fuck, don't say shit, don't say...." It's so calm and matter-of-fact that it's unnerving.
  2. If you click “hide” enough, you start getting vapid vaguely inspirational quotes about how you’re a strong, independent woman.
  3. It seems like that may have been the cause of this mess.
  4. This one hits close to home. I once played a show with Sean Feucht. He was nice enough and put on a good show. Too many of my friends have followed him down the road of whatever it is that he's selling now. They appear to see themselves as some combination of super patriot and persecuted believer. It's some unholy mix of George Washington and Stephen from Acts. Jesus taught his followers to lay down their lives ("no greater love" and all of that). The pandemic provided probably the greatest opportunity in generations for American Christians to live out the Gospel, but I've seen more and more of the Gospel being replaced by self-worship, cruelty, indifference to suffering, and self-proclaimed persecution. I'm willing to give a lot of grace in failing to understand a once-in-a-century event. No one really knew what to do or how to act and there's so much unknown, but wrapping selfishness up in the veneer of spirituality while calling selflessness wickedness is a bridge too far. Acting so cruelly and so selfishly under the banner of Christ and then calling opposition to this selfishness wickedness -- wrapping this whole anti-gospel all up in the name of Jesus -- is just too much. It's not surprising, but it's heart-breaking.
  5. No one is more professional than I.
  6. Two threads on this and still no Andy Kaufman. A few other loosely related thoughts. 1. The culture war is exhausting. I’m tired of manufacturing reasons to hate everyone around issues that I only marginally understand. We have enough organic reasons to hate that I understand as it is. 2. Considering the rough go that trans kids can have, there’s a certain dark irony in this becoming a flashpoint for having an athletic advantage. There are no doubt fairness and competitive issues to work through, but the framing of this seems bizarre, particularly for kids sports. 3. There’s no doubt some intuitive unfairness when physically dominant kids use their dominance athletically. Clear rules are needed, but establishing broad standards for things that are mostly edge cases seems unproductive unless the goal is to score points in the culture war. In that case, congrats.
  7. You don't even have to close all of them, just limit their hours. The nearest DMV is about 30 miles from me and is open less than 20 hours per week. Cut the budget while also improving the "quality" of votes. It's a win/win.
  8. So one of the fears is that the next Trump won’t be such a moron, but I’m coming around to the idea that his idiocy and the movement’s effectiveness are deeply connected. Maybe the next chosen one will be even dumber because that’s what this movement thrives on. A smarter, more competent Trumpist might not have the necessary tools to wield power. If that’s the case, I don’t think that makes the movement any less dangerous, it just makes it more maddening. I’d also like to announce that the Court of Grand Citizens has indicted Ted Cruz for the crime of anthropomorphic impersonation.
  9. Voter ID requirements would be fantastic if paired with more robust systems to provide those IDs, automatic registration, same-day registration, and other pro-voting reforms. Of course support for IDs would evaporate since their purpose is to suppress the vote, I mean value quality of white votes over quantity.
  10. And the year before?
  11. A friend of mine died this past weekend of a heart attack. He was in his late 50s and a bit overweight, but didn’t have any previous known heart problems. He did have an extended bout of COVID this past fall. I’m not saying that COVID caused his heart attack, but it probably played a role.
  12. The evangelical arguments are all rooted in self-preservation (will God or the vaccine protect ME?) yet Jesus said to lay down our lives and Paul taught that Christians have died with Christ. Such a disconnect and such a selfish vision of the faith.
  13. Minister of the Gospel Mike Huckabee.
  14. Maybe Nickelodeon is more his speed.
  15. Mole

    Shit My Kid Says

    My wife can cuss like a sailor and some of that has drifted into my 3 year old's vocabulary. He dropped a "fuck it" on the playground this past weekend when my wife spilled her drink. Last night he and I had a talk about appropriate language and he really understood the message. He gets that there are some words that aren't appropriate for little kids to use. I know he understood this because he spent the rest of the night walking around the house saying, "no shit."
  16. Team Pfizer #2 here as well. I feel normal, which is usually terrible on a pretty spring, pollen-soaked day.
  17. Those Thin Blue Line flags make handy weapons if you’re inclined to beat cops with them during your insurrections.
  18. As mentioned by others, I suspect that much of the change has to do with nominal Christians no longer feeling social pressure to half-heartedly claim a faith, but as someone still affiliated with a church, the past year has been a bitter pill. I can understand people coming to different conclusions to political questions for which the best answer is really the least terrible answer, but I can't really wrap my mind around the depth of idolatry and self-worship that openly became mainstream Christian positions and at times seemed like official positions for some denominations. With COVID, Christians were handed a prime opportunity to act out the Gospel and lay down our lives for our communities in really simple ways, but at least in my Christian circle, way too many are acting out Left Behind fantasies instead. I'm not sure what post-COVID church life will look like for my family, but I suspect there will be some strained relationships within the church as everyone comes to terms with what has all happened. The problems have been brewing for a long time, but this past year has brought a lot into focus.
  19. I thought our current system of privatized gains and socialized losses was corporate communism. From each according to his ability; to each according to their market share. The corporations have seized the means of production: a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
  20. Honky-Tonk Madrasa is my next album name. The cover art will be lit.
  21. As a Georgia voter who voted absentee during COVID: 1. We already have an ID requirement. To get an ID where I live it’s about a 45 minute drive and there’s no public transportation. When we moved here, it took a few trips to bring all of the proper documents, even after checking the website for what we needed. It’s not exactly conducive to a poor person getting an ID, but that ship has long since sailed. It’s not new. Mobile units or drives would be nice though. 2. I had to submit an ID number to get my absentee ballot. During the primaries the system was still pretty bad, but by the general, things were updated, easy, and convenient. The SOS did a really good job with absentee voting and the COVID response. 3. For the reasons already mentioned, signature matching stresses me out. Judgement is very subjective and many signatures are so variable. A number seems better on this respect. At one point there was talk of requiring a photocopy of the ID, so the number seems better than that. 4. A number is also easy to mess up when filling out a form. I suspect that a certain percentage of ballots will be thrown out due to simple human error in writing down the right number. There might be demographic trends to this, I don’t know. I’ve never gone through the ballot curing process personally, but I did scan the lists in November to see if I knew anyone on it. Generally, those changes seem positive to me. I believe they also allowed or required earlier counting of absentee ballots to avoid some of the issues of this year. That’s also a good change. The water thing seems cartoonishly bad. The election board stuff seems more troubling.
  22. I’ll admit to my ignorance about most gun-related matters (I’ve only touched firearms handed to me by Uncle Sam), but the 2nd amendment as a threat of violence towards an oppressive government doesn’t seem readily apparent from any imaginable reading of it. If that was its purpose, you’d think they would have put that in there. Are there any well-researched summaries of how the founders went from discussing militia participation (negating the need for a standing army while also keeping slaves and natives in line) to our children having active shooter drills so we can pretend that we would overthrow a hypothetical fascist government? Point A to point B doesn’t seem to be a straight line.
  23. So the water thing is so comic-book-villain horrifying and absurd that I have to assume that it must be a distraction from something far worse in there.
  24. Best case he’s our next president; worst case it’s an even dumber scenario.
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