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Mole

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Everything posted by Mole

  1. There’s having a philosophical framework that colors how you see the world: a libertarian seeing the national parks as governmental overreach. People see the world differently and will interpret events differently. There’s spin, which many cynical politicians do, but still is grounded in facts. Fox News lives here. Then there’s whatever it is that the Trump movement does, where we witness a conjured reality that has no basis in objective reality. This will be the truly destructive legacy of his movement.
  2. I’d say your parallel doesn’t go far enough. It’s more like the referee announcing who he thinks should win right before the coin toss. Of course, the last SOS in Georgia kept his position through his election for governor, so ethics and Georgia elections is a new concept.
  3. I voted for Brad in the 2018 primary and runoff since he was the least Trumpy R. His work updating the absentee ballot request system and in handling this garbage has been quite good. During the 2020 primaries, requesting an absentee ballot was a mild annoyance. You had to fill out some pdf form, sign it, and email it to your local person. Now you just click a few buttons and give them your driver’s license number and they send it out to you. It’s a really good and convenient system now.
  4. Look at John Titor here. Palm Beach Atlantic would check the evangelical box.
  5. I don’t expect them to start a bowling team or even convince each other to change policy positions, but they should share the same reality. We have a larger social problem with regards to truth and we keep making it worse. It largely stems from our politicians and the media (or maybe those two are reflections of us, or a little of both). It seems intuitive to me that if our politicians were better colleagues they’d be less likely to engage in the nonsense we’ve seen in recent years; nonsense that is breaking down our society. It’s not simply decorum or finding bipartisan solutions to problems; it’s being able to have a coherent discussion with disagreements. If it were simply limited to Washington, it wouldn’t be a big deal, but it’s spread everywhere in our culture and it’s damaging. The Q Caucus teaming up with the Anti-reptilian Caucus to Zoom bomb committee hearings would be pretty unhinged and destructive to a functioning society.
  6. 1. The House should absolutely expand substantially. 2. There is a possible downside. I’ve heard representatives state that one possible cause of our increased partisanship is that Congress no longer acts like a community or normal workplace. They don’t spend time with one another socially, particularly across party lines. Moving to a remote Congress would make this worse. So while a larger house would make things more representative, remote Congress would be less collegial. Add in the higher number of nutcases being elected and there could be some trade offs. I still think it’s worth it, but the giant Zoom house could be very messy. 3. As long as we’re fixing the House, districts should be drawn by algorithm.
  7. This a litmus test for obesity, not stupidity. A late night trip to Skyline is one of life’s great and simple pleasures. Also to the vaccine issue, what if stupidity is caused by a vaccine injury? Checkmate.
  8. While this footage starts in the middle of the incident and we are missing some context, it’s really weird how the footage that the outgoing president retweeted made the guy look like an innocent victim and this one made him look like an unhinged lunatic. Really weird.
  9. From Collins Dictionary: Yourself is used when the object of a verb or preposition refers to the same person as the subject of the verb.
  10. 1. Jesus said the greatest commandment is “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.“ Trump is a kind of orange god, so QED? 2. Paul said that if he or even an angel came preaching a different gospel, they should be accursed. I feel like this would lead to emptier pews and almost completely empty pulpits, so let’s just trust in the invisible hand of the market, which has proclaimed a new and better way. I remember something about the love of money... 3. I’m surely preaching to the choir here, but anyone proclaiming Jesus’ alignment with any current or past political philosophy is entirely missing the point of His life and ministry. A thoughtful person could absolutely apply the teachings of Jesus to governmental philosophy and come to the conclusion that socialism (whatever the word actually means anymore) is the best and most moral system. The early church operated in ways that have some similarities (and some stark differences, eg., if you don’t work, you don’t eat). Jesus of course preached on charity and sacrifice for one another. You could probably really squint and stretch to make a case that Jesus supported a progressive tax system (see the women who gave more out of her poverty than the wealthy in their abundance). None of it really fits neatly though. A thoughtful person could also apply the teachings of Jesus and come to the opposite conclusion about socialism (again, I have no idea what is meant by that word anymore). This is because, as Jesus clearly stated, His kingdom was not of this world. At a certain point, fitting these teachings into governmental systems breaks down, because the teachings aren’t meant for that purpose. This of course most strongly applies to the dominionists who are killing both the church and the county.
  11. The great evil of the Penn State situation wasn’t just Sandusky, which was very evil, it was the seemingly decent people who knew and did nothing. They repeated their evil every day by staying silent. Seemingly decent people supporting this is its own kind of bad.
  12. I absolutely voted for Biden with the hope that a fair share of Obama era people would return.
  13. Slorch’d I know, but there should absolutely be more investigations into election interference, foreign and domestic. We all know it’s ongoing and we should take efforts to stop it. The election is the most basic part of a functioning country and anyone who undermines it has no place in free society. If the Biden side decides to obstruct such an investigation, they too should be looked into. It’s telling that investigation into known foreign interference is equated with investigating Trump’s 2016 win. Weird.
  14. The Hilary comparison is a tacit admission of the outgoing president’s failure of leadership. The standard isn’t Hilary trying to convince the opposition party to not kill themselves and each other; the standard is a potted fern. Had the president simply modeled proper behavior, his followers would have mostly followed and the current situation would be far better. Had he done nothing at all we would all be better off. The potted fern as president would have saved lives. The presidency is a leadership role. His failure to mode good behavior, and even actively working against really basic measures, quite obviously led to numerous deaths. Writing that off as conjecture isn’t intellectually honest. At a minimum, his rallies killed his followers and at least one colleague. So yeah, it’s life and death.
  15. Temporary is a relative term. When is the heat death of the universe? Does his movement accept the loss? When he claims victory (repeatedly) and fraud (repeatedly), does that increase or decrease the odds of violence? Does that contribute to a Texas teen planning the assassination of Biden on social media? Trump’s claims are much more inflammatory than simply trying to clear up any irregularities, calling for recounts, and not conceding. He’s creating a dangerous situation. He’s giving fuel to the crazies, who appear to be replicating at a rapid rate. And “we didn’t die....” How many 10s of thousands have died this year because Trump politicized basic medical recommendations — not even his policy decisions — just constantly undermining sound medical advice? How many more will die this winter for the same reason? In other words, had he simply led by wearing a mask/social distancing and telling America to do the same (same policy of doing nothing, bullying the states, grifting off the PPE), who would be alive today? At a minimum, a Stanford study suggests that he killed 700 of his followers with his super spreader rallies. So yeah, people died because of him — just by his words and example. More will in the coming months.
  16. Has anyone called out the sheep for believing Tuesday was Election Day when the truth is that it was a secret mass vaccination program masterminded by Bill Gates, Antonio Gates, and Mark Wahlberg?
  17. Fair question. I’m not sure, but this moment seems different. It could be just be a lack of perspective due to the immediacy of it, but it seems different. A large portion of the population is gleefully abandoning all sense of reality. In the past, we justified our national sins through tortured logic, now we have a movement declare that nothing exists. Listening to the national discourse even a generation ago, the contrast is stark.
  18. Well two of the candidates are calling for the removal of the SOS.
  19. That painting has to be satire. And it’s brilliant.
  20. The gleeful disengagement from objective reality is the great crisis of our time. It’s a complex problem: Facebook and other social media, presidential “leadership,” me generation Boomers suffering the psychological pain of failing to self-actualize, the existential crisis by a fading racial majority facing their irrelevance (see Chapel’s monologue on SNL), entertainment merging with news, religion merging with politics, etc. I have hope over the long haul, but the short term is bad. I don’t know a quick way out, but I hope that the end of the Trump era will turn things down slightly. Facebook and Twitter, for all of their faults, decreased the odds of violence by their censorship. Perhaps they’ll continue with this and we’ll all become more educated about the true dangers of social media. The Boomers will fade in the coming years. Trump is the Boomer id, so maybe his movement will fade as the Boomers fade away. Entertainment news and religious politics are BBs that will be hard to put back in the box. There’s lots of talk on here about the damage that religion has in politics, but the damage has been been greater the other way. Our country has traded its soul and spiritual and moral grounding for partisan politics. The church died before the country and now the zombie church is killing the country. The “nones” may have to be the ones to save the soul and spiritual foundations of our country. And entertainment and news: we need to make the news boring again. I blame the journalists, or maybe capitalism. If your news source isn’t boring, it probably isn’t really news. If you’re a political junkie, you aren’t more informed, you are just part of a media fandom. I’m not sure how you put those BBS back in the box.
  21. When I saw this thread bumped I thought no nuke Friday had turned into mushroom cloud Monday.
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