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Mole

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Everything posted by Mole

  1. That Reddit thread. Buy airtime on any and every media and just have some frank talk like that. That’s sobering stuff. I don’t know how healthcare workers can face that day after day with no end in sight.
  2. If we weren’t so completely culturally broken, this would be a moment of great national pride. It doesn’t have to negate the justified criticisms of leadership, but these past two weeks have been heroic. Reuters says 100,100 evacuated since August 14.
  3. I have no idea if he believes it. I just think it’s dumb.
  4. There’s a passage in Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, a great book about an aging and marginal baseball player hanging on in the big leagues. In the passage, he talks about having to act really mad after every loss even though it was just an act. He liked winning, but he didn’t see the point in throwing a tantrum after a loss. I feel the same way every time a president gives the tough talk to the bad guys. It feels so pointless to me, but I guess it’s part of the job to act angry. If you need to blow up some bad guys, then blow them up. I don’t see the need for the act. I guess some people take solace in tough talk, but it seems dumb to me. If a president initiates military action, putting American troops in danger, simply out of some righteous sense of vengeance, he’s a maniac. If there’s a valid strategic reason for it, that’s a sobering decision that carries the weight of life and death. If you have a strategic justification for killing the bad guys and the risks are acceptable, cool, but that’s not a choice made in anger. Put more directly, no service members should be put at risk just because some fat redneck in College Station wants to act tough and angry. Some things are worth dying for, but not a demented identity and hurt national pride.
  5. To the extent that retaliation serves actual purposes and protects our people, it’s good and sort of patriotic, but retaliating because we’re angry isn’t patriotism. Making American service members pay the price of our anger is the opposite of patriotism. I don’t care if the bad guys get the last lick as long as it’s the last lick.
  6. There are times when killing your enemies is justified, but any ideology that unilaterally seeks to simply wipe out the bad guys includes self-annihilation if it’s to be consistent. If we start destroying all the “bad guys” then we’re the bad guys. I don’t like the minimizing of today’s suffering. It sucks and we can discuss it without pretending otherwise because it might be our guy taking the heat. And the pretend patriotic rage is the worst. Vengeance only leads to more American tragedy. Making loud noises and talking tough doesn’t make you a patriot. Legitimate grieving anger is fine for the short term, but sending someone else’s children to die for your anger isn’t patriotism.
  7. I think it’s officially an adjective. According to the Lego company it’s Lego bricks, but the Lego nerds seem to use it as a plural noun. I’m a descriptivist at heart, so I go with the people over the official version. Of course my depth of knowledge on this subject rivals my depth of knowledge on Afghanistan and infectious diseases.
  8. I always said Legos, but since my son has gotten really into them, I’ve noticed that all the Lego nerds we watch seem to use Lego as plural. I’ll take any chance I can get to use the awkward, unintuitive, and pompous sounding phrasing. Life’s more fun that way. Just like someone using data as plural communicates that they’re more likely to understand the data they’re using, plural Lego seems to be a Lego nerd shibboleth.
  9. Henry Kissinger how I’ve been missing you.
  10. CNN sucks, especially in the Trump and post-Trump era, but not for the reasons conservatives claim.
  11. If you can include swimmers, Phelps/Brady probably beats MJ/LT for top spot, maybe.
  12. There absolutely could have been a better plan and this whole thing really sucks. There’s a bit of a difference between discussing the shortcomings — some avoidable and some unavoidable — and their possible solutions vs. the breathless magical thinking hot takes that have become the political side of this discussion. I’ll listen all day to informed thoughts and plans, but even those pretty words don’t really convey the uncertainty and problems they introduce. I never served in Afghanistan so I don’t understand the region at all, but I spent enough time in the military to understand that any kind of operation is mostly sausage making that often looks pretty disastrous in the moment. The closer you look, the uglier it seems. Everyone always seems to have a brilliant plan for how it should be done better. I don’t know anything about how Afghanistan works, but I know how we work, and it’s messier than we like to pretend. Add in all the competing interests of everyone involved and the sudden power vacuum, it’s guaranteed chaos. If you or someone else who understands what’s going wants to tell me their proposed solution, great, but that’s a bit different than the political hackery/brilliant plans this version of the thread keeps cyclically slipping into. In the alternate universe where the “right” plan happened, we’d by having a similar thread for whatever crisis that plan caused and the same hacks would be complaining about those problems and proposing their obvious magical solution. I’ll definitely admit to too much nihilism about this issue. I should work on that. I think Biden might share my nihilism. He should work on that too.
  13. The audio is far worse than the caption. The worst part is that it’ll probably eventually work.
  14. Political Twitter is just competing propagandas. I guess it’s fun to hear the Republican war monger hits again. It harkens back to better days and better football, but man it’s a beating to follow those Twitter links. Also, anyone who has some simple or complex plan to leave without starting a crisis isn’t being honest. Talking about the problems or missteps is fine and great, but your plan sucks too. Your way would have started a slightly different crisis — maybe a little better or maybe a little worse, but still terrible. Stop pretending. My reading between the Biden lines is that their analysis was that there’s no good way to leave, so let’s just get out. Leaving is bad, staying is worse, so pick any terrible plan because none of them will work well and they still beat the alternative. The Clash taught us that 40 years ago.
  15. I didn’t know Grendel was back.
  16. I’ll admit to knowing very little about the wet markets until sometime last year. I had heard the term but given them little thought. There are obviously unsanitary conditions and unsavory practices associated with them, but if you had told me five years ago about a market where you can buy fish so fresh that they’re still swimming, I would have thought that pretty great. That is to say, I get why they’re bad, but I get why people love them.
  17. UNC has to reach a bit for baseball to add to the MJ/LT domination. They’ve had a few solid MLB players but nothing close to great. They also had Moonlight Graham, which is fun.
  18. The lead paint may explain some of our current situation.
  19. Jesus: you shall not put the Lord you God to the test. OT God: Do not put the Lord your God to the test as you did at Massah. Paul: Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. Paul: Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. Jesus: Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’ American Christians: still waiting on God
  20. I know a few Baylor grads, some are pretty smart, some are decent humans. I don't know any that are both if I'm honest. Good folks but dumb, or smart shitheads who fuck people regardless of consent. When me too hit, a classmate from grad school told her date rape story on Facebook but didn’t name names. My wife messaged her and among other things, correctly guessed the perp. It was the Baylor grad.
  21. There’s a good case for LT as the greatest defensive player of all time. Teams game-planned against him like you would Montana, Rice, or Barry Sanders. He changed the game as much as any player ever. He’s still the last defensive player to win NFL MVP and only one of two to ever do so. I’d put MJ/LT over Tiger/Elway, but maybe it depends on your perspective of the value of QBs then vs. today. Jim Brown/Jim Brown is probably it’s own special category of madness. My heart says team Texas should be KD/Earl but my head says it’s probably KD/Clemens. I don’t think either team catches UNC or Stanford if you include golf.
  22. My wife was all about the “breast is best” thing and so was our hospital. It wasn’t going well at first and rather than discussing the benefits of supplementing, the nurses were suggesting formula in a vaguely menacing manner, like we’d be permanently tainting our child by getting him fed. Every time my wife picked up the kid for the first day or so, it was just to work at trying to nurse. It was miserable. Finally I had to step in and make sure she was just enjoying holding her child and not missing out. The nurses did a terrible job for my wife and child at a vulnerable time and I had to step in to reassert what actually mattered. She never produced enough, so we ended up doing a mix of formula and nursing. It worked great. The research behind the “breast is best” movement is spotty and doesn’t really account for population. Parents who are able to exclusively breastfeed generally are better educated, so their kids will obviously do better. It’s not the milk; it’s the parents. If she enjoys that time nursing, great, but enjoying the time together and getting the kid fed is key, not the magic milk. Her milk won’t magically turn your kid into an X-man and formula won’t turn the kid into a Tech grad. Along the same lines, a lot of professional parenting advice is fear and guilt based. It’s based on misunderstandings of half-assed research and is usually pretty manipulative. Reject the parenting industrial complex and just love your kid well. Make sure they feel safe and loved and everything else will work out well.
  23. Other nominees that don’t quite meet the standard: Brady/CWebb, Kareem/Aikman, Montana/Yaz sort of, Bonds/Harden, Golden Bear/Havlicek/tOSU. Tiger/Elway is pretty good.
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