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956 Worldwide

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Posts posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. 20 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

    This is the new GOP leadership model.  The only things of any value are trolling and owning the libz.  That's it.  

    All of DJTs executive orders and any other action he took— combined— meant less to his voters than his shitposting and the media coverage of his shitposting. He won a Presidential election he shouldn’t have, he almost won another one, and got more votes than any Republican in history. The apprentices were taking notes.

  2. 2 hours ago, NeverMarryAStripper said:

    If they are quality wings why do you need to slather any of that crap on them

    “Good” wings (outside of hipster spots and some Vietnamese and Thai joints) are deep fried chicken wings doused with hot sauce mixed with melted butter. They’re quality if they aren’t frozen and if the sauce is mixed in house and not poured out of a bottle. It’s not great bbq or a steak or even a good hamburger. You’ve committed to eating a garbage meal by the time you order or make them, it’s not like you’re savoring the terroir when you’re gnawing on a drumette. 

  3. 4 hours ago, Lobo said:

    Why the fuck is her staff even letting read shit like this from Babylon or the Onion?  She's not gonna fucking get it, she's just gonna bury herself as being more and more stupid.  Seriously, between this and her fucking staffer calling me back to assure me that the Congresswoman does not have Down's Syndrome, who the fuck is running that Congressional office?  You shouldn't let her read anything that isn't offering high praise of her, nothing with satire or parody, nothing laden with critique.  Maybe toss her one CNN article per week to sort of remind her there is life outside your echo chamber, but you can't let her comment on shit like this---it only serves the narrative that she's mentally unstable.  

    Watch this, I don't know how to get this on twitter or push through a meme to her office (I only leave bizarre voicemails).  You can get a picture of her with lots of lipstick on, with her thumbs up at a campaign event or speech.  And the caption would read, "What looks like three thumbs and works for American?  This Congresswoman, that's who!"  And nobody in the office would fucking get it.  But we'd go viral and I'll split the t-shirt proceeds with anyone that can help. 

    I get the sense that she’s running her Twitter herself. She was for sure lying about someone else running her Twitter and Facebook in 2018 and before. It’s kind of important for people building the type of “brand” she is. People are shitty at a lot of things, including detecting fake news— but it turns out we’re actually pretty damn good at identifying unique voices on social media, and shitty at replicating them.

    She’s not a Congressperson in the traditional sense. She’s not educating herself on Roberts Rules or what part of the budget flows to her district. Most of her caucus doesn’t want to know her. Lobbyists don’t want to get close to her. She’s not on committees (ha).

    So she’s doing what she did before election. Her staff answers the phones and sets up such meetings as she can get. And she shitposts, to include blithely retweeting dumbass shit she sees in the feed, while she hate watches MSNBC and CNN.

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  4. If offered ranch vs. blue cheese for your wings, who chooses the ranch? Blue cheese has the same cool/creamy thing going on to cut the spice and grease a bit, and it has an actual interesting taste. 

    Related, I grabbed some good Roquefort to put in the blue cheese for this year's Super Bowl spread. Slammed and went hard.  

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  5. Got two pandemic related things making me surly today:

    We have to segregate our recyclables in this city, and every damn time I go down to our building's paper bin it is full to overflowing.  I know why, too--- its full of paper bags from the grocery delivery service we all use due to social distancing and reduced hours, and its also full of online shopping boxes that assholes don't break down before putting in there.  My options here are to let shit pile up in my place and then time my trips to right after pickup, get critical mass to pay for an extra bin and pick-up, or stalk the mofos who don't break down their cardboard boxes.  I won't be doing any of those things, I will continue to get surly while I try to mash the stack down enough to get my shit in there. 

    Second surly is that although we held pretty firm on electronic devices for kids (under ten), that shit went out the window now that the older one is in distance learning until TBD and we need our own devices for our own home office.  And we are also pretty firm on on the screen-time and app/site access we have on the kids' iPad (YouTube in particular is full of toxic shit that targets kids), the damn teachers keep sending educational links on regular YouTube instead of YouTube Kids as part of home school (and for homework, which for some reason we still have even though its ALL homework now).  So its nonstop monitoring wtf gets played and turning the permissions on and off depending on assignments, on top of trying to figure out the four other platforms they use for e-learning and school work. 

  6. 16 hours ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

    For an outside perspective, here is a thread from Twitter that you might find a somewhat pertinent read based on the earlier conversations. First tweet and then rest is behind spoiler. The account holder is anonymous, was raised in a fundamentalist homeschool setting and left due to abuse. Uses the account to educate others/researchers (as it is a very 'closed' society to outside influencers).

      Reveal hidden contents

     

     

     

     

     

    That type of stuff absolutely exists and is bat-shit and toxic and needs to be combatted. Where I hesitate is the logical jump..."so don't engage with evangelicals because they are against democracy and always have been."  Home-schoolers for solely religious reasons have always been the fringe of evangelicalism, and there exist even fringes within that fringe.  

    Most of us can see the logical flaws in these types of argument when they come from the right-side of the aisle: "Look at the anti-Semitism and authoritarianism on display in this literature we found in this Salafi medresseh. Clearly, we can't integrate orthodox Sunni Muslims into democratic societies." 

    There's not a dispute that these extremes exist and that they need to be combatted. But you also run a real risk when you tell someone "your faith isn't compatible with life in a democratic, small-l liberal society." In fact at that point you're confirming what extremists are trying to tell them and if you push them into making a choice, it often won't be the one you want. 

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  7. This article by Anne Applebaum seems to me spot on based on what I hear from my parents about trying to get vaccinated.  The issue isn't that making vaccines is hard, or that we should be surprised that we can't snap our fingers and get 330 million made and injected on a crazy timeframe-- it's that the system of distributing is just completely rickety and Kafka-esque. 

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/americas-soviet-style-vaccine-rollout/617942/

    Quote

    If you are the child of elderly parents in parts of the United States right now, and if you are trying to get them a COVID-19 vaccine, you are living in a shortage economy, a world of queues and rumors, a shadowy land of favoritism and incompetence—a world not unlike the world of the very late, very stifling, Brezhnev-era Soviet Union.

    Quote

    I get that states are supposed to have a system: Like others, Maryland’s website solemnly lists the various categories of people who are approved to receive the vaccine, and in what order. Like everywhere else, state officials are talking a lot about equity—the need to make sure that poorer communities are getting vaccinated. But this is like the propaganda in Pravda that showed gleaming shops with packed shelves when everyone knew they were empty. In practice, the people who are getting the vaccine first are the ones in the right health-care or hospital groups, the ones who can spend the day clicking links, the ones who are really fast at filling out forms. Supermarket pharmacies and busy hospitals have been left to navigate the mismatch between supply and demand; anyone without a computer or an internet connection is in big trouble. The result is no more fair or logical than an old-fashioned Moscow queue for cabbage.

     

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  8. The president of the San Francisco School Board gave an interview with a noted bastion of conservative gotcha journalism, The New Yorker. In case you thought that the actual process and debate was more nuanced, coherent, rigorous, and objective than portrayed by the media, she is here to dispel you of that notion. 

    On the Q thread @ndawg pointed out the emergence of a certain type of religious zeal among parts of the left in connection with that story, and there's more than a whiff of that here.  You can see some elements of a ritual purification of the community going on, where the process is key as opposed to observed outcomes and causality.  And attempting to bring in objectivity and expertise from outside is not only unwelcome-- it's beside the point.  A chemical analysis of the elements is irrelevant to transubstantiation, and a serious historical analysis is irrelevant to this committee's process of deciding which dead and old people are and are not racist or otherwise impure.

    https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-san-francisco-renamed-its-schools?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker&utm_social-type=earned

     

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    You’re talking about the learning of history and its importance. Did the committee want historians to testify? And why or why not?

    So, it’s hard for me to answer that question without just pointing to [committee statements that] “they did not want to include historians.” I think that that’s not the process that they created. They included a diverse set of community members, people with a set of experiences that contribute to these discussions, people from different backgrounds who are also educated in their own rights. So I think that was the makeup of the committee.

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    The reason I bring this up is that some of the historical reasoning behind these decisions has been contested—not so much how we should view the fact that George Washington was a founder of the country and a slave holder but, rather, factual things like Paul Revere’s name being removed for the Penobscot Expedition, which was not actually about the colonization of Native American lands. And so there were questions about whether historians should have been involved to check these things.

    I see what you’re saying. So, for me, I guess it’s just the criteria was created to show if there were ties to these specific themes, right? White supremacy, racism, colonization, ties to slavery, the killing of indigenous people, or any symbols that embodied that. And the committee shared that these are the names that have these ties. And so, for me, at this moment, I have the understanding we have to do the teaching, but also I do agree that we shouldn’t have these ties, and this is a way of showing it.

    I guess part of the problem is that the ties may not be what the committee said they were. That’s why I brought it up.

    So then you go into discrediting the work that they’re doing, and the process that they put together in order to create this list. So when we begin to have these conversations, and we’re pointing to that, and we’re given the reasoning and they’re sharing why they made this choice and why they’re putting it out there, I don’t want to get into a process where we then discredit the work that this group has done.

     

    The reporter goes on to point out some other fairly egregious factual errors and the response comes back basically the same--- that factuality isn't the point, the point is the work that the committee did and that pointing out facts undermines that work.

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    I’m not quite sure what that means when we are talking about things that did or didn’t happen.

    I think what you’re pointing to and what I keep hearing is you’re trying to undermine the work that has been done through this process. And I’m moving away from the idea that it was haphazard.

     

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  9. 11 minutes ago, ndawg said:

    For three generations, we've increasingly subjected Americans from an early age to a constant barrage of 1. superhero fantasies, 2. seeing everyday schlubs "making it" via reality shows or popular youtube channels, and 3. a cultural identity around entrepeneurship and exceptionalism that punishes the weak.

    It's no wonder adults aren't joining organizations greater than themselves, they're stuck as adolescents in grown up bodies, still indulging the delusion that they are individually great. We've been high on our own supply for about 70 years and poisoned our culture with toxic narcissism.

    I also think there’s a loss in opportunities to actually show real leadership or authority and so we replace it with resentment and narcissism. If you’re participating, you have a chance to do meaningful things, even if they are small. You can be a deacon or teach Sunday school. You can serve as a club officer. You can organize the bazaar or city day. You can make decisions, be listened to, learn to exercise responsible authority, even if it’s circumscribed. So you are not completely defined as “worker drone who isn’t a captain of industry or influencer.”  Your boss tells you what to do all week, but at Lions Club, you are in a position of directing and managing. 
     

    And Q can fulfill a lot of that, because all of a sudden you are initiated into special knowledge that not everyone knows, and you are playing a part even if it’s in an imaginary, bonkers RPG that makes the players crazy. And eventually you’ll stick it to the people out there who currently are making decisions and being listened to while you are just trying to keep your head above water. 

     

    (This is just my thoughts and I’m not claiming inerrancy, for the show your work crowd.)

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  10. 36 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

    Y’all are arguing past each other.

    The idea that people who participate in “institutions,” of which organized, church-going religion is one, have more stable and productive lives isn’t revolutionary or controversial.

    Religion isn’t unique in that regard, though. Other institutions (schools, clubs, etc) can perform the same role as “grounding and stabilizing influence and support network.”

    So, it’s not that having religious faith is a positive, it’s that meaningfully participating in a religious community generally has a positive effect.

    Having a religious “belief system” can be separated from that - see Q, which is absolutely a quasi-religious cult. The problem with Q (well...A problem with Q) is that it is JUST a belief system, with no structure or institutional role. Q doesn’t get you to church on Sunday, where your kids get to go to Sunday school with your peers, doesn’t put on a Saturday picnic, doesn’t run a day school, doesn’t offer couples counseling, doesn’t bring your family together for big life milestones like baptism or marriage, etc. It just offers a batshit belief system that, while you share it with other people, you aren’t brought into an actual community. In fact, it breaks family relationships.

    So, maybe this broad correlation: traditional organized faith can be a positive and stabilizing influence, extremist cults can be a bad influence.

    I’d also say that the collapse in organized religion wouldn’t concern me so much if it was accompanied by people rushing out to join the Elks, or the Secular Society of Mutual Aid and Discussing the Big Questions of Life.

    But you’re not seeing that, you’re seeing a collapse in civic engagement overall. And it’s not people switching to cool rationalism, it’s people groping for meaning alone, often on the internet, outside of a community with guardrails and support, even if that support and guardrails are flawed.

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  11. 17 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

    Y’all are arguing past each other.

    The idea that people who participate in “institutions,” of which organized, church-going religion is one, have more stable and productive lives isn’t revolutionary or controversial.

    ..............

    So, it’s not that having religious faith is a positive, it’s that meaningfully participating in a religious community generally has a positive effect.
     

     

    Quote

    Look, don’t take my own word for it. It’s a fascinating thing and you can see that I said “church attendance” and not religiousness

    Shit, it’s almost like I said exactly that. 

  12. Fox News is for dumb people who want to get dumber, but considering that less than 1 percent of the adult population is watching Fox News Prime Time any given day, it’s a pretty shit stand-in for “active church/mosque/synagogue/temple goers”. Yeah, a bunch of those viewers go to church regularly, but then again so does Joe Biden and a hell of a lot of recent Mexican immigrants. 
     

    I am on board with “professing atheists/agnostics on average have higher IQs than professing believers in god(s)” especially here in the U.S. But even in the studies you posted, you will see the disclaimer that the effect is much less strongly related to religious practice (what I am driving at) as opposed to professed religious belief. There’s a pretty vast spectrum of religious belief/practice/confession out there, it is not a binary “atheist or churchgoer.” “Regular church/temple/mosque/synagogue goers are dumber than the average bear” isn’t even close to the same proposition. 
     

    As far as Gallup goes, they measure not only “how are you feeling” but a range of behaviors and health indicators. Somehow I think findings that increased education/financial stability/volunteerism (all this exists) is also linked to reported well-being as would be challenged if posted in a vacuum, but when the same holds for religious engagement it’s all just sheeple deluding themselves. 
     

    It’s the last I’ll engage with this, but TL;DR, religious practice in the U.S. and elsewhere is a whole lot more complicated and diverse than Jerry Falwell has successfully made people believe. 

  13. 7 minutes ago, Dahobbs said:

    Fuck your condescendation. Seriously, all I did was question the methodology of the paper you presented. I don't care if your assertation is true or not. But that paper doesn't even purport to support it. And, even if it did, its methodology of simply assumimg the religioness of people wasn't well established in the paper, and it isn't clear to my how it could be reliable. 

    Here is a question for you: if your position is well supported by research, why do you keep citing to preprint material? Are you even reading the papers or do you simply like the summaries in the articles because they support your preexisting belief? It is easy enough to find research supporting almost any position. The question is whether the research is reliable. If you aren't questioning the methodology and rationale of your material, then I suggest you aren't serious about finding answers but instead prefer finding comfort. 

     

    Ok, so one more “I don’t have any data but I still don’t like yours or its presentation.”

    Go find some that shows that churchgoers are less intelligent/mentally hindered/less educated/socially vulnerable/ whatever. I’m open to challenges.

     

     

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  14. Anyway, to bring this back to Q, which I will freely admit speaks the language of certain strains of evangelical Christianity and how churches are handling (and not handling) it, I found this politico interview pretty illuminating.

    https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/02/04/qanon-christian-extremism-nationalism-violence-466034

    The link between religion, extremism, education, etc. is for me one of the most interesting things about human behavior. I started to really get intrigued after spending a long time in Pakistan and being forced to confront some tough truths about who is and is not attracted to extremist versions of Islam, or politically active conservative Islam that isn’t violent, and who ends up going off to the Northwest or Afghanistan to pick up an AK or join some local outfit closet to home. (Hint: Things like education, socio-economic status, mosque attendance, and lots of other factors do not play the roles you’d likely expect).

    People in the field are getting pretty good at abandoning “common sense truths” about this stuff when it’s not so close to home; we’d do well to keep that in mind as we confront similar phenomenons among people who are closer to us and therefore we think we understand. 

  15. 3 hours ago, Dahobbs said:

    Your claim related to dumbness. Nothing in the article or paper supports the proposition that the religious are less dumb. At most it suggests a correlation between being religious and following religious practices (eg marriage), which shouldn't be terribly surprising or really even useful information. It also suggests a correlation between religion and financial success, but the methodology used is more than a bit suspect. From the paper:

     

    Aka, a wild ass guess. 

    Quote

    Overall, though, the argument that people who go to church regularly are dumber/more messed up/getting preyed on absolutely has no basis in data. The opposite. 

    My claim was pretty expansive, but there’s arguments against the idea that it’s dumbness, too.

    https://newsroom.unl.edu/announce/todayatunl/452/2932

    While lower educational attainment isn’t a stand-in for “dumb”, I think it’s a tough argument to say that dumbness gets pronounced the higher you go up the educational ladder, but you’re welcome to go down that road. 

    Quote

    — Education had a strong and positive effect on religious participation. With each additional year of education, the odds of attending religious services increased 15 percent. 

     

    Quote

    The research also found that disaffiliating, or dropping religion altogether, was not a popular option for highly educated Americans — in fact, having a greater level of education was associated most often with converting to mainline, non-evangelical Protestant denominations. 


    As far as the messed up bit, Gallup reports better levels of well-being among regular attendees at religious services and separates it out from things like marital status, socio-economic status, etc. What’s really interesting is the effect is more pronounced between the moderately and very religious than it is between the very religious and non-religious.

    Quote

    The most substantial differences between the very religious and nonreligious groups are in the Healthy Behaviors, Work Environment, Life Evaluation, and Emotional Health Indexes. Differences between the very religious and nonreligious on the Basic Access Index are smaller, but statistically significant. In four of the six cases, the larger gap exists between the very religious and moderately religious groups, rather than between the very religious and nonreligious groups.

    https://news.gallup.com/poll/152723/religious-americans-enjoy-higher-wellbeing.aspx

     Like I said in my first post, I knew this would not be a popular stance here. What is interesting is that the posters who most dispute it have come back with the following: this research conflicts with my anecdotes from life and YouTube/this research from places like the National Economic Research Board (!) is biased/non-rigorous, this research doesn’t measure things the way I would/you can’t measure this stuff anyway. 
     

    What hasn’t happened: A presentation good data (or any data at all) showing that regular church goers are dumber/more messed up/worse off than average. 
     

    I mean, all this could be wrong/biased/not measuring the correct thing—- or regular engagement in religious activity could be a whole lot more complicated and nuanced than can be determined by catching a bit of Paula White/Kenneth Copeland and their flock, or the outspoken people you are most likely to notice in your daily life.
     

    It’s not a surprising response to information that challenges deeply held narratives, and it’s a tactic you might recognize from other political and cultural arenas of debate. 

     

     

     

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  16. 4 minutes ago, UpperWestside said:

    I read awhile ago that President Biden is calling up Americans to speak with them and hear their concerns about the pandemic and job loss among other things. 

    For the folks like myself who were wary of Biden being the nominee I think things like this help me to put into focus that he excels at the very things we need most as a country right now. We need a leader who can show compassion and empathy and one that is willing to speak to their fellow citizens and let them know we're going to get through this pandemic and economic crisis. So much normalcy so fast. Not real sure what to do with it after the prior four death cult years other than enjoy this time.

    https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/537418-biden-doubles-down-on-normal-at-white-house

     

    Quote

    The first weeks of President Biden's administration have been a striking contrast with the chaos and turmoil of the Trump administration, bringing a sense of normality back to the White House and government.

    Biden, along with Vice President Harris, begins each day receiving the President’s Daily Brief, usually before 10 a.m. His administration has revived the White House daily briefings every weekday.

    And when he has signed executive actions, they have usually been paired with events where the president delivers scripted remarks on policy, and he has rarely answered shouted questions from reporters. 


    Make politics and government boring again.

     

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  17. 6 hours ago, Beau Vine said:

    Bingo.  There's a huge difference.  

    “Evangelical” as it’s used popularly in the U.S. has almost lost its meaning. I’m reminded of Orwell writing about fascism, at this point when people say “Evangelical” it’s usually shorthand for “Conservative, probably white, politically active Christians who aren’t Catholic or Mormon.” Or it’s just used as a substitute for “fundamentalist.”
     

    It can be useful as a marker of certain theological beliefs, but even there I tend to agree with the theologians who say it needs to be put to bed because of a lack of consensus on what it means even among people who claim to be Evangelicals.

     

     

     

     

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  18. We are stumbling around in the medium sized European country I live. Despite one of the highest infection rates in the EU, collapsing  ICU availability, and the highest mortality rate since 1945 (hmmmm...what was happening then), a small party has announced they will no longer support an extension of emergency because—- the government refused to open ski resorts. If it expires, basically all the preventative measures save for border controls and public transportation masks go *poof* because there’s no legal authority.
     

    And that means that normal opposition parties, which have largely been able to symbolically oppose the extensions of emergency, have to either bite the bullet and behave responsibly or accept a collapse in health care. So open question. 
     

    So Americans aren’t the only ones capable of screwing this up.

  19. 3 hours ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

    Shadow FORMER president strikes again:

    ICYMI, Amy Kremer is the Chair for America First Women, Co-founder of the Women for Trump PAC, worked with StopTheSteal, and IIRC was one of the people who organized the march/rally on January 6th. This wave of "America First" is code and is going to swell as 2022 approaches.

    Lol, my favorite article this week was about Don writing out insults and then asking other people to tweet them.

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  20. That’s cool, I can see that it could have been worded more carefully. Just pointing out that the narrative of “churches are full of ignorant hillbillies that are getting bilked while they unplug from their shitty trailer park lives” doesn’t seem to match up with measured results in the wild. And that there’s a strong preference for anecdotal evidence that reinforces that narrative as opposed to statistical studies and peer reviewed papers that challenge it. 
     

    Anyway, this seems related, and the words could probably be put in a lot of Christian, Muslim, whatever peoples’ mouths:

     

  21. 14 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

    Well, why don’t you show us the data on that? I’m sure we’d be fascinated to see actual numbers on that. 
     

    the problem here is that we should separate religious followers from evangelical followers. There’s a difference. And the problem is I can spend 5 minutes on YouTube and find dozens of evangelical preachers actually preaching Q shit from their pulpit on Sundays. And I can’t support this with facts and numbers, but I’d bet 10 years off the back end of my life there’s a lot less of that shit from priests when went to an actual seminary school. All you need to do to preach in Southern Baptist land is show up and start talking.

    Sure, here you go. And I’ve been careful not to ascribe causation....but there is lots of research out there. Here’s some from NBER.

    Quote

    A number of researchers have found striking correlations between religion and various measures of well being. For example, religious participation is correlated with lower levels of deviant behavior and better health. And, attending religious services weekly, rather than not at all, has the same effect on individuals' reported happiness as moving from the bottom to the top quartile of the income distribution.

    Quote

    Doubling the rate of religious attendance raises household income by 9.1 percent, decreases welfare participation by 16 percent from baseline rates, decreases the odds of being divorced by 4 percent , and increases the odds of being married by 4.4 percent.

    Is this still true in the case of Q? I don’t know...but what I can say is that past evidence does not at all show that being active at a church means you’re more likely to believe crazy things or be otherwise broken by any empirical measure.

    https://www.nber.org/digest/oct05/religion-good-you

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