DonkeyCigars

Bold prediction, I like it! It looks like 100% the government shut down will be avoided, at the very least.

And CNN today is making the point when Manchin first started obstructing, nobody took him serious and thought he was posturing (and you heard that here too). When he asked for the pause in August, nobody took him serious and thought he was posturing. He is showing he was serious. How can one be more clear that he is serious? When someone shows or tells you who they are and what they want, believe them.

Just heard on CNN that the pundits aren't bullish on this deal getting made today on the $3.5T because the progressives already feel like they have compromised because they wanted $6T in spending (wow!) and there is nothing left to compromise on or talk about. I feel like today will be entertaining political theatre if you are into that sort of thing, like @Js1 and those political junkies on here.

Agree. It's like most people on here don't use slack or slack channel etiquette.

Huckleberry, I'm happy to say it because I absolutely think the moment I made the claim, the conversation bifurcated. I was pretty surprised at how most of you immediately went into this mode thinking I was making a literal comparison and had some concrete example in mind, versus my intention which was to lay claim based off of poster history and personality, what would happen (again posters reaction and NOT the real world outcomes), if something similar happened but the characters were reversed. Anyways, based off of our mutual inability to communicate: I'm sorry, I was full of shit. And to your rightly made point about being too verbose, I had a very busy day and wanted to respond before EOD. I'll quote Mark Twain here: “I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one.”

Just saw the ultron one. Excellent indeed. This was a cool series for sure.

Aside from people like Dbeasy who seem to believe in an economical value system that is consistent beyond basic party politics (though itself is political, of course), I think it can be summed up pretty generally with an old political joke. Stop me if you've heard this before, it's a classic everyone's heard: DonkeyCigars clears his throat [ahem] and pulls out a pitch pipe and blows it, trying to strike the right chord of pastiche and humor to honor the late, great Norm MacDonald: If you are young and generally of the male sex and find yourself to be of the fiscally conservative persuasion AND you are worried about taxes eating into your monies for your own petty and self interests...and in your youth you've begun to concern yourself with a worry about an inextinguishable deficit-- a deficit that grows and grows, never stopping, just constantly growing in exponential and pained growth, like an otherworldly creature that groans as it grows by feeding off the ever abundant foolishness that is the natural state of the flawed and wickedness of the human condition. If you find yourself in that hellscape mindset...[pause a full beat]: This is because you have no heart. If, on the other hand, you are an older person. Maybe someone who is well into your middle ages, gray or graying and having lived through some things. You've loved. You've lost. You've made mistakes and you have regrets. Regrets that keep you up at night sometimes and regrets which torture you. Regrets who haunt you in those ungodly hours between being awake and asleep, when all that you can discern in the ghostly dark is the thumping of both your anxious heart against your rib cage and the dampness of the sheets you soil. If you are so fortunate to live to this age [pause a beat] and you find you are economically liberal AND you find comfort with the instability of the fiscally unknown and what can only be financial theory in service of the advancement of human mercy...using money to assuage whatever pain and misery -- the only real currency in this brutish world-- to relieve the pain and misery of your fellow human beings. And in doing so, maybe helping to salve that pain and misery in your soul that could only happen if we wouldn't let people hoard stupid little papers [pause a half beat]: Then it's because you have no money. [Sheepish smile at telling a stupid, shaggy dog re-imagining of a pithy classic]

The Thor party episode was very stupid and broke the streak and momentum.

The Killmonger one was awesome too. These are getting way better after the first two were not very good IMO.

That post wasn't for you. Like Irwin said, please just quietly scroll through. It limits the noise for all of us.

Just saw the zombie one. That one was really good and the best.

Huck. It's been a long day at multiple airports and bad food. Forgive me for the delay. First I want to address the extremely narrow interpretation of my statement that people like JimmyJohns have taken. My implication was NOT that a military leader has broken rank or chain of command or what have you when Trump was in office and not been disciplined to the letter of the law or whatever that I'm sure is very prescriptive within the military policies and rules of engagement. I was not attempting to make a specific, analog allegation. I thought that was clear when I used the idiom "if the shoe were on the other foot" to express a hypothetical. My point was that the people-- pundits, twitterverse, us here-- we are so unabashedly political in our thinking in 2021 that we will (whether consciously or subconsciously) get online and interrogate, examine and prosecute (and then make extreme judgments in anonymity on this site, as it were) behavior that is personally (which is also to say, in 2021, politically) anathema to us. OR, if the behavior and resultant actions and impacts happen to fall on our side of the personal belief/values (and political) wall, we will allow it. Allowing it whether that be explicitly celebrating it because we consider any political pain inflicted upon our opposition to be good, or tacit allowance with a blind eye or plausible deniability because, "hey, the ends justifies the means" and because the status quo to which I'm opposed is inherently wrong and flawed and an injustice by virtue of it simply being what I oppose as we beg the question. The above was the long form version of the point I was trying to make by observing the oft-reactionary and extreme posters on here effortlessly default to technicality and process (of which I actually agree!) because I maintain that the same oft-reactionary and extreme posters would take great pain to justify dissent and a challenge to authority if the political aims were aligned. I then go further and call out someone specifically for what I would think he would do in a hypothetical based off of my reoccurring interactions with him and from reading a lot of his body of work on this site. That above is my position and I stand by that being a sufficient defense of my claim. However, I know everyone is itching for an example. The closest I could find in the small amount of time I looked into this was the General Milley situation. There was speculation and belief (which has since I think has gotten murkier, but for the example this still works because of what we believed to be more or less true garnered the responses) that General Milley broke chain of command from Donald Trump in talking about nukes to a foreign enemy and generally stepping out of line. Lots of posters celebrated this because they believe(d) politically that Donald Trump was a loon not to be trusted and by going above or around him, breaking the chain of command was justified. One such poster is Underdog. He says about Milley and I'll quote "LOL @ Trumpanzee, aka Republicans, worried about Milley breaking the law when the Orange Fuckstick disregarded any and all laws when in Office." doing an obvious "but trump..." whine while dismissing Milley's alleged behavior. That is one such example, but again, that was not at all my point. Though it has become compulsory to whine "prove it!" about things that ought be self-evident. But there I go, illustrating my own bias and assumptions and demanding my worldview be met, as well.

Still not back yet; long travel day.

I am not opposed to public health measures personally and I’m still mobile so I won’t be able to put any energy into looking for the evidence you want for a while.

You would be first in line claiming this guy was a political prisoner and being Nelson Mandela’d if Trump did this to someone speaking out about one of his political moves that folks disagreed with. Must be a politician, huh?

Give me some time when I can get back to a computer. I’ll either post an example we can share in laughter or I won’t find one and will have been wrong.

If this guy gets in trouble but you have crypto artists stealing money….

Not what I meant. I agree with you on the process and protocol and think it should be applied blindly. Im talking about the general public (and the people here) and the response. If your team is being held in a brig for speaking out against the other team, you root for it and see it from a prism of injustice or oppression. The opposite and you get what we have here, some ho humming about how that’s the process and should have stayed in line and not made waves, etc.

If the shoe were on the other foot, you people would be clamoring the same. Can we at least be honest about that and how nakedly political the reality we live in actually is?

That's pretty impressive. I bet that gator was much heavier than it looked and to use upper body strength on the top of a can like that...good job florida guy!

Good boy.

There is a reason two party systems aren’t favorable for heterogeneous populations; I know it sounds counterintuitive because of the abject corruption, but we should look to Latin America for how multiple party governments have to operate and build coalitions and consensus that are defined and boxed by project or bill or time. Seems like it would be more efficient.

Because they don’t have consensus among the elected. Because the letter D next to your name means your party cuts a much broader swath of interests and people than the letter R.

I read the bold as, progressives need to conform and get in line and come off the $3.5T number and compromise. You started high, now end a little lower.

Also Dog wears elevator shoes because he's like 5'7 or some other miniature height. He should not be taken serious on that fact alone, much less taking into account his other body of work.