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DonkeyCigars

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Posts posted by DonkeyCigars

  1. @Longhorn_Fan68 was called out for being either enthusiastically stupid or lying a couple of weeks ago and did everything in his power to deflect and avoid. Now he is on a one-man band tour to try and get me crowd-sourced by literally going back and negging every post, no matter the context or content, in order to be rid of me. He won't stop until I'm gone because he is a coward and a liar and by censoring me, it seems he thinks he will be rid of me.

    But I will come back as Longhorn_Fan69 and every iteration and permutation after that and remind you that censorship never wins.

    Just wanted to go on record before I can't post here any longer.  

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  2. 2 minutes ago, 'stache said:

    Because this is the horseshit they are peddling. The same maga victim complex that has infested at least half of our voting population in this country. I don't care so much that stupid people fall for grifts, I care that they are promoting lies and attacking truth. It is dangerous to our democracy.

    How does this: 

    "Forbidden Courses" that invites top students from other universities to join us for a spirited discussion about the most provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities

    equate to:

    Promoting lies and attacking truth and a threat to democracy?

     

    Isn't a University supposed to be where a push-back on the status quo and a pressure test to the establishment is encouraged? For many years when the status quo and establishment was conservative, the university was a petri dish of liberal ideas and thoughts and "spirited discourse and provocative debate" and other weird clubs and investigations. 

    Doesn't it make sense that when more and more of the status quo is liberal that the push back would be with more conservative thinking?

    Is the University's place to be a thought incubator for the anti-establishment and status quo?

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  3. 1 minute ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

    how the fuck are you still here? can't you tell when you're not wanted?

    I'm here to be a constant reminder that you are a coward and a liar. When you see my name and avatar, you'll have to reckon with your deeply shameful character. You are Longhorn_Fan68. A fate worse than death.

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  4. 16 minutes ago, Brian Fantana said:

    I just want to add that I'm not here to pillory Kyle Rittenhouse. He is a fucking child. A child. I had an extensive conversation about this with a good friend of mine who is a juvenile defender by profession and his view on this trial mirrors mine. He should be in kid court facing kid sentencing. Period. It is absolutely disgusting to me that he is facing life in prison (even though he is likely to be acquitted) at this moment. Did he act in self defense? YES. Did he actively place himself in a situation where the likelihood of him needing to use deadly force to defend himself was high? YES.

    It's even more disgusting how politicized this case is from both sides of the aisle, that we're fighting amongst ourselves when we should be fucking dragging the shitbags that filled his head with all the self-defense, protection of property, cowboy yee-ha bullshit that lead to him making a dumb shit teenage idiot brain decision to go wandering  across state lines with a gun he shouldn't be able to legally own during a protest.  

    He is literally the perfect poster child for a person who a fair and just criminal courts system could rehabilitate and turn into a success story if we had any inclination to ever do so.

    This shit pisses me off so much, and the discourse around it makes it clear that we'll just never be better.

    Hear, hear!

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  5. 9 minutes ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

    that's the problem. we/you are constantly arguing with people who are continually moving the goalposts. it's not even close to a good-faith argument.

    This is rich coming from you. Like, lobster bisque with extra butter, rich. Like Elon Musk rich.

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  6. 33 minutes ago, Bateshorn said:

    If you are looking for a place where conservative scholars can write and think conservative thoughts in a well funded safe space, it already exists: the Hoover Institute, and it exists under the banner of this up and coming school in Palo Alto, Stanford.  Rumor has it there’s some tech near by. 

    I don't think that is exactly what they are looking to accomplish, though sure, some of that is a driver.

    Question for you: why are you so against a new venture like this trying to exist? Why are you so opposed to people and money (none of which ask anything of or from you) trying to build something in the headwinds of what will be almost surely failure?

    Your posture here is "just buy an existing school!' or "this already exists!" when there are valid reasons to want to create your own institution from scratch and set your own strategy and vision/mission that will likely have variance from what already exists.

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  7. 30 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

    That's a funny way to characterize a jerkoff session where a bunch of people get together to talk about close-minded everyone else is for not buying into their racist pseudo-science. The key indicator that this is just a grift is that there's nothing more planned and that none of the big names who have been identified as being involved are actually leaving their current gigs to contribute serious time and effort.

    There's plenty of shit wrong with modern higher education (mostly related to the necessity to keep bringing in more and more revenue and related administrative bloat). "Classes are all closed minded incubators of P.C. thought" isn't a real thing that happens in universities though. The overwhelming majority of degrees aren't even in humanities-related fields. Hell, even in the humanities classes there's not a bunch of Socratic dialog in which everyone talks about their own beliefs all the time and everyone is taught to laugh at the dumb kids. All it is for the most part is going over the assigned reading that at most barely introduces students (those who actually bothered to do the reading) to some of the most basic elements of a bunch of different schools of thought. Class time is limited and it would be pointless to waste it on a bunch of jerkoff "discussion" among people who won't have done the reading necessary to have a good grasp on the ideas until the end of the semester (if then).

    1) I said in my first post that I think there is a low-probability chance of success. I think this fails.

    2) I don't go as far as you do in derision, but I am skeptical and hesitant and think that your bold is a good inflection point; if/when some folks leave their jobs at established schools or professions to join, I think that signals a better chance of success.

     

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  8. 54 minutes ago, Bateshorn said:

    To build doesn’t have to mean from scratch.  A serious proposal would look something like:  we believe in a classic liberal education.  Teaching the classics in an environment where our students are free from the woke nannies of traditional education.  Now that we have commitments of x dollars from these  donors, we are exploring locations and existing institutions on Texas that would be interested in become the focus of this innovative and game changing idea.  Our focus is establishing a premier undergraduate program that can explore the conservative ideas of freedom, self determination, and a commitment to a robust and unfettered free market. 

     

    Look, I just wrote your investment prospectus. When you show up with:  we are going to freedom the fuck out education, UATX will google right below UT Austin, our lead evangelist is a former NYT columnist whose working bit was bitching about being cancelled, click here to be a donor to this exciting idea, then yeah, my scam radar starts picking up some bogies.

    I think you are spot-on that this is a great way to go about it, but I think you are being shortsighted, of maybe blindsided, in that there are a myriad of reasons why you'd want to take a different approach (e.g. in this case, build from scratch).

    There are various ways to get to the end state, to skin a cat, as it were.

  9. I think in all likelihood this venture fails and it fails pretty miserably and might even have an embarrassing or shameful component to it as it goes down in flames.

    But I also think it's too early to say for sure that this is a naked scam and pure grift and ready-made disaster. I think we need to give it some time to see what sort of faculty and students it attracts and, most importantly, what sort of output comes from this.

    This is less like a traditional school, it seems, and more like an incubator or silicon valley house where people are living and working on different projects but with the more-or-less same philosophical basis for doing their work. If you are really young you can equate this to a YouTube Influencer incubator where likeminded people go to work on disparate projects but with the same loosely coupled goals. And I think this will resonate with a) young people who live in a world where the above mentioned are not only acceptable but favorable (digital natives) and b) smart people who want to push back and make an impact sooner rather than later.

    If you get some heavy hitters involved (sounds like they have some with Palantir folks) and get some good PR and legitimate monied conservative or libertarian business folks (Peter Thiel-- also did Palantir I believe, Elon Musk, etc.) then you attract the next wave of strong conservative/libertarian minds and if these folks can leave the University of Austin and make an impact and money, it will create a flywheel.

    Again, odds are low of success; high for outright failure. Need more time and data to see how it plays out, but I for one will be rooting for them.

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  10. 10 hours ago, Bateshorn said:

    So, some of the “UT Grads” talking this thing on this page obviously don’t know shit about how college works these days.  And that’s how I know this is a grift.

    You don’t need to start a school.  You can more or less buy a small broke school and make it a “conservative, liberal, freedom” bastion.  The Koch brothers basically bought the Law School at George Mason.  
     

    Southwestern has an endowment of $289 million.  If you really have a billion or so in commitments, you could almost certainly bend the college to your vision, and it’s already accredited and known.  With an $1.3 billion and 1500 ish students, you’d have resources in par with Trinity University, which fucking showers money on its students.  And that’s the expensive option.  There’s gotta be some little religious colleges in Texas barely keeping their head above water these days.
     

    That’s why this is an obvious grift, the money isn’t really there.

    GRIFT!

    To quote from the last page:

    Quote

    THE GRIFT. Grift: A word that has lost all meaning. Basically, if people want to pay for something you create and build, it's a grift. To the activist with no readership and nothing that will survive an internet outage, anyone with any impact is a grift.

     

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  11. 1 hour ago, JimmyJames said:

    Dude. Cmon Man. The aw shucks thing is totally your schtick. That and your attempts to be oh so reasonable. Denying it just hurts your credibility. It’s pretty obvious.

    I will never deny doing everything I can to be a reasonable person. I think that is part of what makes someone a good human good being. Would you prefer that folks on here try to be unreasonable?

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  12. 14 minutes ago, Hammerin Hank said:

    Is Rittenhouse a fire fighter? Is he a doctor, nurse, or emt? Is he a cop or security guard? If not, he had no business putting out fires, rendering aid, or guarding businesses. Arguing that that’s why he was there has no place in an honest discussion. We have laws and licenses regulating who can work those jobs so people, even well intentioned people, don’t make a dangerous situation worse. Which is exactly what happened.

    I guess he could have been exercising his right to peacefully assemble, but then why would he need a gun if his intentions were peaceful?

    image.thumb.png.17fc41ed1996ceaeb6be2d9e1af568d3.png

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  13. 3 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

    I'm talking about that particular writer's writing, along with your transparent "aw shucks" approach.  This isn't hard.

    I'm not "aw shucks"'ing anything-- I presented an interesting article, in a reputable rag, which gave what I thought was a fair-and-balanced treatment of the ridiculous cultural moment of "Brandon" and it was germane to this thread. You disagreeing with the article won't hurt my feelings just as your agreeing won't flatter me. 

    I hope you are doing okay, otherwise.

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  14. 1 hour ago, jimmyjazz said:

    It's childish. "Let's Go Brandon" is not a "cultural shift around language", it's a tee-hee lame joke that is about as much of an inside secret as the right's terror over losing their race majority.

    Keep pushing it.  It only further cements the impotence of the modern right wing.

    Are you talking the writers of The Atlantic here?

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  15. Ecobee might not be as big a player in smart homes as Google or Amazon, but it’s turning up the temperature on its efforts.

    Last week, the smart-thermostat company announced it will be acquired by Wisconsin–based Generac Holdings Inc., which specializes in backup generators and energy storage. The deal is worth $770 million and is expected to close by the end of the year.

    Why it matters: Ecobee hopes to use the acquisition to expand beyond smart thermostats and embrace a wider goal of creating products that enable “net-zero” homes that can run on renewable energy. Generac’s work on backup generators is essential to this goal, as they can help store solar power when it’s not daytime, which Ecobee’s products can then help distribute.

    Up until this point, the company’s key product was a smart thermostat that adjusted temperatures based on when users were home and away from home, and managed energy consumption to save customers money with their utility.

    In an additional push beyond smart thermostats, it recently announced a professionally monitored home-security service that integrates with its thermostats and sensors.

    “We get to take the best of what we put together, from our thermostats, our user experience, the relationships we have with grid operators, and [Generac’s] experience in backup generation, resiliency, solar, and storage,” he said.

    Ecobee, which will operate as a subsidiary of Generac, is based in Toronto and was founded in 2007. Between then and Generac’s acquisition, it has raised $149.4 million.

    Lombard told us the company boasts over 2 million customers across North America.

    For comparison, in 2018, Google said it had sold over 11 million Nest devices since 2011.

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  16. 1 minute ago, DDD Dad said:

    giphy.gif

    I'll bite, and I can see it as you are a lawyer and can approach this as a tradesman and a student of the craft:

    How has this trial gone so far in your estimation and review? Who is winning? Have you seen enough to make an educated guess on the outcome? Any surprises or gotchas? 

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  17. 30 minutes ago, JimmyJames said:

    If any sane person is watching it let us know how it goes. 

    This. It's hard to cut through all the noise and get some unbiased playback of what is going on and how it is going. Has anyone in 13 pages here shown themselves capable of being disaffected and neutral?

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  18. 58 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

    Nobody on the left cares about let's go Brandon. Knock yourselves out. Maybe keep the anime murder vids to a minimum, though. 

    Yea it sounds like both sides are getting a kick out of it, for different reasons, but as the article suggests, there are more cultural shifts around language and how we use it which is also really interesting to read about.

  19. Interesting read about all the Brandon stuff, from The Atlantic:

    The Serendipity of ‘Let’s Go, Brandon’

    The anti-Biden meme is meaner than your grandfather’s shoot or heck. It also offers a fascinating view of how language changes.

    I know how I am supposed to feel about “Let’s go, Brandon”: Mocking the president this way is uncivil, a sign of the collapse of once-routine public courtesy, etc., etc. How I really feel about it, though, is that it’s fascinatingly serendipitous, seriously funny, and intriguingly fecund. From that one meme, others are being born.

    Last month, an NBC reporter interviewing the victorious NASCAR driver Brandon Brown heard fans in the stands chanting “Fuck Joe Biden” in lustily contemptuous unison. The reporter insisted to viewers that the fans were in fact chanting “Let’s go, Brandon.” This improvisation made no sense. Brown had won, so why would anyone cheer him on by saying “Let’s go!” after he’d just accomplished quite a bit of going? Since then, Biden’s detractors have adopted “Let’s go, Brandon” as a kind of in-group salute—a coded way of saying, well, the other thing. The meme has found its way onto T-shirts, masks, signs at other sporting events, the House floor, and (reportedly) airplane intercoms, and was parodied this weekend in an online video from Saturday Night Live.

    Interestingly, despite its very American origins, the catchphrase is rather South African. Stay with me: In traditional societies there, such as in Zulu and Xhosa communities, a woman marrying into a family shows respect by refraining from using any words that sound like her husband’s or in-laws’ names and subbing in other words. Imagine if someone married William Green, the son of Robert Green, and instead of saying, “She will not eat green yogurt,” had to say, “She refuses to eat grass-colored yo-mix”—because will and green are her husband’s names and the second half of yogurt sounds like the end of Robert. The practice is called hlonipha, and “Let’s go, Brandon” is a coy substitution of the same kind.

    [Conor Friedersdorf: The fight against words that sound like, but are not, slurs]

    However, the anti-Biden euphemism is of a meaner tone. This is not your grandfather’s darn, heck, shoot, or fudge. Those are polite terms, expressed without the teeth-baring ardor of the words they stand in for, imaginable as things that characters played by Edie McClurg might say in ’80s movies such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. “Let’s go, Brandon” springs from the mangier, madder place of euphemisms such as snafu—which during World War II everyone in the American military knew was an acronym for “situation normal, all fucked up”—or right-wingers’ dismissal of conservatives who do not toe the party line as cuckservatives, rooted in the word cuckold.

    Those who dislike seeing President Biden’s name used disparagingly should welcome the latest development: People on the left are declaring “Thank you, Brandon” in praise of the administration’s accomplishments thus far. We are witnessing the birth of a diagonal reference to Biden that signals a defense of him from the slurs of the right. Brandon could well take its place as one of those bemusingly opaque code names such as Yeezy for Kanye West or Boz for Charles Dickens—or as one of those pseudonyms that some members of Congress direct their staff to use for them when talking about work in social settings. (A friend of mine who worked on Capitol Hill in the late 1980s referred to her boss as “Bubo,” lest eavesdroppers in public spaces pick up insider gossip about congressional business.)

    We might simply embrace that sentiments will differ about this Brandon person in exactly the same way as they do about, well, Biden. Calling him Brandon when dissing him could be seen as a kind of American hlonipha. And yet, in elite circles, one senses a bifurcation: Brandon is warm and wise when preceded by Thank you but an unacceptable epithet coming from Republicans.

    Few of the commentators who decried the supposed vitriol and vulgarity of “Let’s go, Brandon” appear to mind Democrats’ attempt to repurpose the race-car driver’s name. The tacit idea would seem to be that when the left throws shade, it counts as speaking truth to power and is thus okay. Until the late ’80s, some people on the left used politically correct unironically to suggest, without saying so, that right-wing views are inherently and incontestably wrong. The designation of conservatives outside Democratic enclaves as “deplorables” didn’t come from the right, either.

    [Read: When deplorability is no longer a dealbreaker]

    Overall, “Let’s go, Brandon” is simply fascinating. A time traveler from 2019 would have been mystified at the bewigged people going as Karen this Halloween (I saw two) as well as those in mustaches going as Ted Lasso (of which I also saw two). In the same way, think how utterly opaque “Let’s go, Brandon” would be to a time traveler from just Labor Day. The meme is a wild, woolly kink in the intersection of language, politics, wit, and creativity, and is a prime example of why language change is a spectator sport.

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