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TwiceHorn

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by TwiceHorn

  1. 23 hours ago, David Dennison said:

    Suspicious Futurama GIF

    This is one of the conundra here.  #bothsides believe a substantial portion of the population is too dumb to vote, especially when their ignorance leads them to support their opponent.  The right is actively working to diminish the right to vote for the "wrong people."  So far, the left doesn't seem to be much attracted to that idea.    I think it is an illiberal notion regardless of which side employs it or acts upon it.

    The founding fathers I think either understood this problem (too dumb to vote) or were just afraid that it might be an undoing of their experiment, so they tried to build in some firewalls to unfettered democracy.  It is ironic that those firewalls are being employed or weaponized to undermine democracy.

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  2. I'm sorry that happened to you.

    I'm going to guess, though, that that is more representative of the state of mental healthcare in Texas and the US than not.

    I believe there are private-pay-only psychiatric hospitals that have at least an ostensibly higher standard of care.  Places that charge on the order of 1,000/day, plus.  A rate which only the pretty wealthy can sustain and I bet they don't have enough private-pay patients to offset the low-rate "public" patients and raise the standard of care.

    But, because that place accepts statutory mental health holds, for which no one but the state pays, it's scraping the bottom of the barrel for docs, nurses, and staff.

    We, as a nation, abolished state hospitals and asylums for conditions like this.  But the private sector hasn't much improved on the situation.

    On the other hand, being a staff member in a psych hospital has to be very challenging.  Not that this necessarily applies to you, but the people in there are fucking nuts and they can't possibly and shouldn't address every behavior and insane request from their patients. Differentiating those with legitimate complaints and requests from those making crazy and drug-seeking requests is too tall an order for them.  It takes talented, dedicated, and rare staff to deal with that and remain compassionate.

    Out of curiosity, why are you prescribed benzos?  Benzos are a controversial drug as far as efficacy and tend to be prescribed only for short-term use, and then sparingly because of addictive potential and the withdrawal you mention.  I am aware that you have "been through it" psychiatrically and probably "tried everything," but long-term prescription of benzos raises my eyebrows quite a bit.  I am not a medical doctor, however.

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  3. 17 hours ago, Ted Lange said:

     

     

    Imagine that an ignorant, uneducated, fat little turd like Rittenhouse is important enough to one's campaign to cause one to send his team to convince him to publicly change his vote to you.

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  4. 8 hours ago, royiv said:

    Great post. Appreciate your insight on this topic. It’s a subject that I don’t have the right answer on and your thoughts make a lot of sense to me. I think my head was already moving in the direction of your thoughts, but having you articulate it as you did makes it much easier for me to wrap my head around this issue.

    I think a certain section of our society is using this as a wedge issue out of ignorance, stupidity, hate or all of the above. Like many difficult issues, there is a high level of nuance and some people can’t think in non-binary (sort of a double meaning in this case, I guess) terms. Whatever the answer is, it has to be fair (subjective) and based in science (objective). I’m not the person to determine what either of those things are and I salute those that are working to figure it out since inevitably there will be dissension from many.

    The thing that grinds my gears the most is that this should be left to the sport's sanctioning body.

    There is zero place for legislative bans.  None.  Zilch.  Zero.   That is performative nonsense.

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  5. On 7/30/2024 at 8:52 AM, CooterBrown said:

    My parents still have my grandmother's microwave from the 60s. They don't use it but it still works.  There are no buttons or settings at all. You just turn the dial to however many minutes you want and the dial cranks down to zero as it cooks.  

    Amana RadarRange.  Although available in the 60s, they were prohibitively priced.  Still spendy into the 70s.

    My rich aunt had one in the 70s and gave it to my Mom in the 80s.  It lasted another 20 some odd years at least.

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  6. 6 minutes ago, WBT said:

    Well, yeah.  His 2016 quotes about Trump made that crystal clear.

    Well, you can still be a complete evil troglodyte and talk shit on Trump.  See, e.g. Ron DeSantis, among others.

    But the above shows that he isn't or wasn't, even in the context of Hillbilly Elegy.

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  7. So, JD Vance is a DEI guy, at least of a sort.  He was admitted to Yale Law based on his disadvantaged background.  I think that is indisputable.

    In digging around on this, I found this transcript of a discussion at Brookings with him and Wm. Julius Wilson.  It shows that Vance is, actually, a nuanced thinker.  https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/es_20170905_race_class_culture_transcript1.pdf

    It contains this amusing quote. "I was a weird kid."

    But this, and his emails with Sofia Nelson, a trans kid he was friendly with in law school, show that he's not actually the person he is holding himself out to be.

    It's even worse:  like many in the GQP, he has totally sold out for Trump and Trumpism, for power, I presume.  Nasty.  Weird.

     

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  8. 14 minutes ago, Red Five said:

    It's been very eye-opening. Like watching a group of people completely flip the fuck out over someone being left-handed or something. "Wait... Did y'all not know this is a thing?"

    Well, they're fucking weird.

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  9. Harris' background poses quite the conundrum for the GQP.  On the one hand, she's black, so full demonization.  On the other, Indian/Asian and what they would probably call a model minority despite the brownness.

    I had wondered how they were going to handle this and if it could possibly work in their favor.  Should have known the answer was badly.

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  10. 4 hours ago, YGIFS said:

    There was a pretty high-up guy in our entourage who is gay.  Kinda open, kinda closeted if that makes sense.  He's just in that age bracket where he feels he can't quite be one or the other, depending on the audience (50-55yo).  Did a lot with UT System on projects with Dept. of Energy, Dept. of Education, and Dept. of Defense.  So we're having drinks and we've completed our higher-level FBI backgrounds but they'll still be asking us shit tomorrow (like about drugs), and he brought up a good point.  We were talking about old spy movies where the bad guys would try to steal our nuclear or weapons secrets by finding a closeted gay guy to squeeze for intel under threat of outing him to his superiors.  And how that was a really serious avenue for both sides for decades.  And now, it doesn't even come up.  He said, he was once in D.C. and to clear the air he told the interviewer, "Just to be up front, I'm also homosexual."  Guy laughed and said, "There's 40 people in your group...it'd be weird if you didn't have a gay person on your team.  Then we'd think you were really hiding something."

    Or in The Good Shepherd, where MI5 flat murdered Michael Gambon for being gay and thus a security risk.

  11. 8 hours ago, Chips O'Toole said:

    I don't think "weird" was the endgame for that messaging, I expect it to shift to "strange" or "off-putting" and eventually end up at "backwards" to sync with the overall message.  Or that's what I think they should do. 

    The biracial stuff is only going to land with their hardened base, yet again. For like the 5000th time, it appears that winning this election in a legitimate manner was never really plan A for these people, and all they believe is necessary to regain power is to keep their base angry and loyal. I'm not a concern troll or conspiracy person at all, I'm just having a hard time connecting the dots and not seeing an overall plan that wasn't intended to end in blatant election fuckery at the very least. 

    The fundamental problem here is this.  Republicans haven't really known how to win a national election in the face of a decent candidate for 20 years or more.  By this, I mean pre-Trump Republicans.

    Trump only knows how to be Trump.

    Because Hillary was such a shit candidate, turnout was low and Trump won electorally as kind of an accident with his energized and crazed base.  Although astoundingly large, Trump's base doesn't get him the whole election.  He's going to have to swing some people from undecided or independent or hope for a low turnout.  The more conventional Republicans may understand the problem, but they don't know how to fix it.

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  12. On 2/1/2024 at 9:11 AM, locodos said:
    • 8th gen Maxima  no idea about reliability, but sportier than you think.  300hp 261tq.  Should eat up highway.  Should be pretty cheap
    • CTS-V Caddy she's fast and probably loose
    • BMW 3 Series Great little ride that's well behaved on the highway (smallish)  buy a good one and depreciation is going to be pretty flat.

    i might recommend an NA 3.6 CTS.  Not that Cadillacs are unreliable (my experience is to the contrary), but a -V is overengineered like a Krautwagen and I think somewhat temperamental.  Not something I think you want to be driving in its dotage.

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  13. Man, my aunt and uncle lived all around there (wildcatter), Vernon, Electra, then they hit it pretty big and settled in WF, where my cousin grew up.

    I used to go visit them every summer and my aunt after she was widowed.  This was before the extended oil bust of the 80s wreaked its havoc.

    Granted, it was the view of a 7th grader, at the latest, but I used to enjoy Wichita Falls and have fond memories of it.

  14. 5 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

    This morning's GOP gossip, courtesy of Politico playbook:

     

    https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2024/08/01/so-much-for-the-new-trump-00172219?nname=playbook&nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&nrid=0000014e-f0fd-dd93-ad7f-f8fde5bf0000&nlid=630318

     

     

     

     

      Hide contents

    We’re not just talking about moderate Republicans like former Maryland Gov.-turned-Senate hopeful LARRY HOGAN — who blasted Trump’s statement as “unacceptable and abhorrent” — or Alaska Sen. LISA MURKOWSKI, who called the comments “very unfortunate.”

    Just take a look at some of the on the record remarks from the Hill yesterday, courtesy of HuffPo’s Igor Bobic and Axios’ Andrew Solender, Stef W. Kight, and Juliegrace Brufke:

    NRSC Chairman STEVE DAINES (R-Mont.): “I think the better approach is to focus on their policies of Kamala Harris ... that’s what I’ve been talking about.”

    Sen. TOMMY TUBERVILLE (R-Ala.): “I ain’t getting involved in that. Let him talk about what he wants to talk about. I’m talking about how bad our country is in shape right now because of her.”

    Sen. JOSH HAWLEY (R-Mo.): “It’s not a great idea for either of the parties to be playing racial identity politics, whether it’s ‘white dudes for Kamala’ or whatever this is. … We should spend less time talking about race and more time talking about how we’re going to get people to work.”

    And that’s just what they’re saying in public.

     

    The GOP backlash suggests that Trump appears to have botched the “reset” that Republicans were hoping he’d implement this week, as our colleagues Natalie Allison and Alex Isenstadt write this morning. Indeed, the entire line of attack reeks of a desperation that Trump world has been doing a pretty damn good job hiding during Harris’ honeymoon these past few weeks.

    And yet there are signs that GOP confidence in Trump is now slipping. The Trump camp is launching new ads today in North Carolina, a state that has only once voted for a Democratic presidential candidate once in the past 40 years.

    Republicans are hoping to refocus Trump in the coming days. But they also know that’s not an easy task. On some level, this is who Trump is: He’s always had a penchant for prioritizing schoolyard taunts and divisive rhetoric over substantial policy talk.

    As longtime MITCH McCONNELL advisor SCOTT JENNINGS put it succinctly on CNN last night: “Trump did crap the bed today. The only question is if he’s going to roll around in it or change the sheets.”

     

    The answer, of course, is roll around in it.  It's who he is.

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