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Mole

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Everything posted by Mole

  1. I teach college. I’ve spent time this fall with basic civics lessons (voter registration, census, absentee, early voting, etc.). A week before the election, one of my students asked me about trying to get an absentee ballot. School is about 4 hours from home, so in-person voting would have been tough by then. I encouraged him to try to get home on the Friday before the election to early vote, but barring that, take his chances with an absentee ballot. A 20% chance of getting your vote counted is better than zero.
  2. Look, mister, there's... two kinds of dumb, uh... guy that gets naked and runs out in the snow and barks at the moon, and, uh, guy who does the same thing in my living room. First one don't matter, the second one you're kinda forced to deal with. I don’t care if he tweets stormfront posts 40 hours a day once he leaves. It’s different when it’s an official statement of the president of the United States. He needs to just go away.
  3. There’s a perception, and it has some merit, that the left is antagonistic towards faith issues. I think that’s part of how you have the disconnect of the degenerate Trump seen as the pro-religion president and the man of faith Biden seen as part an anti-faith socialist plot. It’s nuts how it plays out, but there’s a considerable portion of the left that seems pretty antagonistic towards faith, even if it seems like too much of that faith is one that seeks to oppress. Maybe, but lots of healthcare issues could be reprioritized as pro-life measures. Unfortunately, I think there’s an element of the pro-choice movement that sees anything anti-abortion as some forced birth Trojan horse (they might be right). If the Ds pushed healthcare and the economic safety net as a route to deal with the social ills that lead to abortion, maybe you could break up this block. They currently try make the case, but it’s a bit of an afterthought. I think there might be ways to build legislation that’s more focused on dealing with minimizing and humanely dealing with crisis pregnancies. There’s a pro-life way that doesn’t really touch abortion, but it doesn’t really exist in American politics right now. It isn’t simply a marketing/branding issue, but one of priorities and focus. My wife and I both voted straight ticket D, but the abortion issue definitely causes some mental tension. Most evangelical endorsements of Trump were, “he’s the terrible — the worst really — but abortion (and socialism).” There’s a way to take the wind out of those sails and actually do some good. There used to be pro-life Democrats.
  4. Not that anything matters anymore, but in the real world the Trump meltdown is nailing shut any legitimacy to the moral or intellectual underpinnings of conservatism. Forevermore, I will translate the phrase, “as a conservative,” to, “I hereby claim.” Can some coder whip up a little Chrome extension to do this?
  5. Very few presidents really have materially affected my life, but this one has. Had Trump done nothing but not politicize reality, mask-wearing, and large events, many thousands would still be alive today (with many more deaths coming; you can't put the BBs back in the box with regards to doing COVID well). Remember, his own super spreader rallies killed at least 700. In addition to a number of people on the edges of my social circle, someone personally and professionally very important to me died a few months ago from it; I'd guess that his likelihood of dying would have been way lower. That ignores having to function in a country where everything -- really, everything -- is partisan and divisive, which directly points back to the current president. So yeah, materially affected.
  6. Every few months, I write my reps — sending them unhinged screeds might be a better word, but I’m tempered by a desire to stay off of FBI lists. My reps are super Trumpy, and I always remind them that Trump is the greatest thing for the progressive movement (minus all the death and suffering) in generations. The fallout from the Trump movement, if we survive, will be a country far to the left of where we now are. Baseball is America’s past time. I want my Supreme Court to be able to field a team and I don’t want any of them relegated to the bench.
  7. In a sane world I’d be considered conservative since I believe in an objective reality and morality — I’ll have none of that moral relativism that I heard so much about years ago. Interpretations may vary, but right is right, wrong is wrong, and truth is truth. This statement can’t be squared with the current Trump movement. To embrace this movement is to reject the very foundations any functioning society. Policy isn’t even a relevant discussion since we’ve gone full Pontius Pilate “what is truth?”
  8. He was probably thinking about Pergolesi. Pinochet was the famous dictator and Pergolesi wrote La Serva Padrona. Uberto can be viewed as a right wing archetype.
  9. Let’s be honest here, you were off the Trump train the moment he started ranting about saying, “Merry Christmas” again.
  10. Really? Were you expecting OSU to win it there instead?
  11. The pro-life president.
  12. Wait, you and some other people here actually believe that there was ever a World Trade Center? Sheep. DO SOMETHING!!
  13. Counting on it... A little bit doomy... This is the content that we're counting on to start our impending doom weekend.
  14. The worst movie in the Babylon series. It really peaked at Babylon 3.
  15. Ah, the sweet optimism of morning. Twelve hours from now, this thread will be filled with hellish visions of Trump placing mind control agents in Elsinore beer and activating it with the Star Spangled Banner.
  16. Even the republican consensus was that the Mueller report was creditable, it just wasn’t impeachment-worthy. So even the opposition agreed with the claims.
  17. CR motto-worthy.
  18. Worst Dylan song ever. A real deep cut from Saved.
  19. Just workshopping your session title here, “Goods, Not Hoods: Ideological Purity in a Party of Racial Purity.” I’d listen in/watch just for the eagle. Is Thujone still in the art game? Can he whip up live illustrations? I’m not sure how quickly the muse of his genius takes to hit.
  20. If the weather is nice, I'll be outside watching the stars and listening to music with my son. If the weather or bugs are bad, we'll be inside playing trains or watching a movie. If the mood strikes me or suspense gets to me, I'll probably check in here or AP/Reuters.
  21. Old Ted would just challenge you to fight Jim Jordan.
  22. It’s a bit of one of those stories we tell ourselves to make us feel better, but I can connect with the Jon Stewart take on Biden as the tragedy-stricken figure best suited to see us out of these dark times. As I’ve mentioned above and elsewhere, it’s not so much that the current policies are cruel and terrible (they’re cruel and terrible), it’s that we’ve become cruel and terrible — full of hatred and division. That works hand in hand with the Trump movement; he arose out of this division and hatred and continues to amplify it as his only strategy. It’s impossible to function or even rationally deal with policy in this environment. Even the perfect policies would fail under these conditions — it’s more fundamental than the right legislation. Our culture and social order is failing. Biden is relatively inoffensive politically and has a life story with a good bit of tragedy — the stutter, the accident, Beau’s cancer, even Hunter’s addiction. If I squint hard enough, I could buy him actually repairing some of the broken parts of our social order, to the extent that a president can impact this (Trump has surely proven that they can). Actual humanity can go a long way to getting back to arguing about marginal tax rates.
  23. If the question is was my vote for Biden or against Trump, it was without a doubt against Trump. I think Biden will be competent enough as a president, but that’s less of a factor than Trump. I would have voted for Lenin’s reanimated corpse against Trump. As to your scenario, I’d go talk with Biden. I don’t want vengeance against Trump, I just want obscurity for him. I have no intention of ever listening to him speak again. I just want to pretend that he doesn’t exist. Justice for him would be nice, but really, he just needs to go away.
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