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Mole

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Everything posted by Mole

  1. 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.
  2. Emerging contronyms leave me nonplussed.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. I absolutely voted for Biden with the hope that a fair share of Obama era people would return.
  6. 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.
  7. Do you even speak in tongues, bro?
  8. 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.
  9. Boiling the ocean is one thing we’re actually really good at.
  10. 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.
  11. 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?
  12. 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.
  13. Well two of the candidates are calling for the removal of the SOS.
  14. That painting has to be satire. And it’s brilliant.
  15. 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.
  16. When I saw this thread bumped I thought no nuke Friday had turned into mushroom cloud Monday.
  17. Good call. I had altered the memory. Also, the GA SOS is the best republican in the state and the only one I’d ever consider voting for. He was the least Trumpy of the candidates in 2018 and has done a lot of good for elections. The absentee system is very easy and secure. His process has been open and his people seem competent. But like I said, least Trumpy. I’m not sure what he’s done about the Brian Kemp voter disenfranchisement program, but I think Kemp would have scrubbed the list enough to deliver GA for Trump.
  18. He was probably called president elect for about 30 minutes between the first call for Florida and retraction.
  19. Facebook is the worst. Parler sounds even worse. We need massive public education about what social media actually is as well as how cable news isn’t actually news.
  20. The cake is mostly baked as far as the American carnage of COVID goes. You can’t undo the politicizing of basic mitigation measures. Biden will likely be sworn in during another peak of mass death and suffering. Maybe real leadership will make a dent in that, but I think that issue is largely poisoned. If another crisis hits though, I’m confident that we won’t maximize the death and suffering as a political strategy. I think we’ll slowly drift away from the constant division in everything to a more normal level of division. A deadly and destructive alternative reality will no longer have the largest platform in the world. There’s interpretations of facts and then there is the conjuring of alternative facts that we are currently casting off. We’ll eventually move back towards having a functioning society. I think once the normalcy of objective reality and decency returns, most will feel the difference. It’ll take a lot of work from those who have felt the brunt of the pain from the past 4 years to make this happen. It’s unfortunate that this is the case, but I don’t see another way. Criminals should pay, but the rank and file MAGA will need some measure of grace. It’ll be hard to do, since they gleefully supported such depravity, but there’s no other way for a functioning society. My hope is that the evangelical church will eventually repent. It’s a long shot, but they’ve killed the church’s witness in America. They’re rightly seen as cruel, selfish, and degenerate. Maybe seeing a decent man quoting scripture and talking about healing and reconciliation will remind them of what the gospel is. Or maybe they’ve grown too accustomed to the ticking of their ears with hatred and greed. Time will tell.
  21. Bin Laden “only” killed about 3000 Americans. Trump’s super spreader rallies killed about a quarter of that alone. His anti-leadership on COVID has killed many 10s of thousands. It’s a testament to the goodness of our forgiving country that Trump’s punishment will likely be simple irrelevance and shame.
  22. I’m no law dog, but my reading of the law doesn’t have any minimum time in the state, although you have to move with the intention of staying. There’s also something about moral turpitude, which could be a sticking point.
  23. According to the SOS calendar, the registration deadline is 12/7, so American hero Stacy Abrams needs to get to work.
  24. I just applied for my absentee ballot. So will Obama just rent an apartment in ATL for the next two months?
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