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Brisketexan

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Everything posted by Brisketexan

  1. Create a “Committee of three-toed losers who love losing and then losing some more.” And make her vice chair. And leave the chairmanship vacant.
  2. This…is perfection…..but also… …this. Salacious is 100x more leadership material than Three Toes.
  3. Looks like an E Texas flood, and just a light rain for the lakes. As we should expect.
  4. Also, giving the hiring manager an enthusiastic handy didn’t hurt your chances.
  5. Got my wife one of those...to go with the portable CD player I got her as one of our first "serious gifts" when we were dating. Did I bundle it with an Enya CD, because chicks dig Enya? Damn right I did. Setting the MOOD, mofos.
  6. Yep. He's what idiots think a "deep thinker" looks like. Sensing a theme?
  7. No, man....by my driving years, cassette was the dominant medium. I said what I said, motherfucker. I stand by it. If you don't wanna ride with us, you can get in your friend's janky-ass Chevette and listen to the Carpenters or some shit.
  8. MTG really is the perfect Trumpkin. She worships at the altar of BEING A FUCKING LOSER WHO LOSES.
  9. Which is why every one of these needs organization and clear, strong leadership. But those needs are counter to the character of the people most likely to be involved. Operating the movement as a lovey-dovey commune means you have 1,000 muddle messages and no clear direction. It's the old problem of when the revolutionaries succeed and take things over....they're only good at being revolutionaries, not at getting actual shit done. Hell, see the problem from the other side: the radicals who have taken over county and state GOP parties in Michigan. The meetings and action coming out of them are....a shitshow. Because everyone is the chief revolutionary, everyone thinks that their vision should define all action and they don't listen to anyone else. They are good at being radicals and noisemakers. They are terrible at being "people who actually get shit done." Culturally, strategic thinking is a huge weakness that we have. As we can see demonstrated over and over.
  10. Also a very good point. I mentioned my wife being involved with a couple of clergy-led protests in recent years, and those points were front-and-center. They had a clear message and goal. They had clear expectations as to behavior. Even the "civil disobedience" portion (that is, the people who were going to sit-down and be arrested for refusing to leave) was planned in detail, discussed with the authorities beforehand, and conducted peacefully. They made their point, with a plain message. They did not have any immediate or direct success in terms of policy change, but they took a step forward in changing people's minds/getting them to think. You don't save the world with one march or act. You do it slowly, incrementally....frustratingly so. See the entire civil rights movement.
  11. There's also a permutation of the response that is the punchline of "no, don't run down there and fuck one of them....walk down there and fuck all of them." That is....take the time to be more selective with your targeting. Eliminating Hamas as a threat, WITHOUT purposefully waging war against civilians (and we've seen much more than mere "collateral damage" - Israel and numerous senior officials have made it clear that they are targeting Gazan civilians to terrorize them and force them out of Gaza altogether, to meet a stated goal of total ethnic cleansing) takes time and methodical action. Israeli leadership stating that their goal is more than eliminating Hamas -- it's to ethnically cleanse Gaza completely -- doesn't help their position. At all. Israel has gone beyond self-defense, and is following a purposeful path of war crimes. That's the problem. Which is totally lost in the shuffle. We've now successfully reached the point where you either blindly and totally support Israel, subjecting them to zero accountability, or you're a pro-Hamas terrorist sympathizer.
  12. You know, this aggression against Tyler and Arlington will not stand, man. Tyler is totally the Santa Barbara of Texas.
  13. You could bet on Kirchner's take: “Milei’s plan is not anarcho-capitalism, it is anarcho-colonial. The recovery strategy is now clear: it’s oil, gas, mines, and grains. He wants to turn Argentina into an extraction country for raw materials. This pre-capitalism takes us back to the days of the Viceroyalty,” Or you could bet on the author's take: "A century later, Australia still manages to leverage its resource and farming wealth into a high-tech economy of top tier affluence. There is no foreordained reason why Argentina cannot do much the same." The problem is, the author's take misses one important point. "There's no reason" why Argentina can't follow Australia's path. The problem is, there is definitely a reason why it can't. That reason is "it's Argentina." Corruption, graft, and inefficiency are woven into its DNA. It is much, much more likely that Argentina will become an anarcho-colonial extraction economy, benefitting only those at the very top who have managed to take advantage of it. I'd love it if that was wrong, though. I love Argentina, I really do. Just saw enough with my family living there for 6 years to tell me which way to bet here.
  14. Don't forget "tort reform," and "let the regulated write all the regulations." Those do a lotta heavy lifting, too....to ensure that bad actors face zero material consequences for their actions. Those are really, really important factors.
  15. The hell of it is, where these groups START is often a place I have some sympathy/empathy for. Tea Party? Yeah, our gov't IS too beholden to special interests. But y'all had to go full Q-anon nutbar. Occupy Wall Street? Yeah, our system IS rigged to skew outcomes in favor of the capitalist elite who have set rules that favor them. But y'all had to go full-on "anything but agrarian communism is evil" and "all prosperity is bad." Pro-Palestinian activists? Yep, Israel IS killing the shit out of civilians and using starvation and such as a weapon. But then y'all have to go full-on "Hamas is cool," and "let's liberate everyone and everything willy-nilly." It sucks, because the original cause gets lost in the noise, and then discredited and derided as it has been here.
  16. Sure. You think Surly legacies are all like "I'm a third generation longhorn, from a family of successful and esteemed longhorns." Nope. Most Surly legacies are like this legacy:
  17. Brisketexan

    LBGTQ

    What, do you dream of taking over the Mineral Wells Ladies' Sewing Circle? Because that's what that top is MADE FOR.
  18. I don't fully agree with the bolded, because that implies that the chief kick they get out of this is external approval. I think it's equal parts internal self-satisfaction and approval FROM THEIR TRIBE/ECHO-CHAMBER. That is, they don't even get that much approval from their "side" of the political spectrum, outside of the small group of true believers that is their immediate "tribe." The other self-important pro-palestinian activists pat them on the back, but that's a relatively small group. The Q-anon-ers love each other, but they aren't lauded by the largest percentage of right-of-center people. It's about human nature and craving an identity and a tribe. It's non-partisan and across ideologies. Seriously, look at the people at Trump rallies. It's tribal, because IT FEELS GOOD. That's what we're seeing here, and what we've always seen about extreme ideological movements. It's why I've at least gotten a chuckle out of watching our local right-wing bunch jump all over this as some sorta toldyaso gotcha.....when the extremists on their side of aisle have actually ascended to positions of power and control. Mock the purple-haired Pro-Palestinian ideologues all you want....as you ignore the Q-anon/MTG/stollen election log in your own eye.
  19. Cool. Texas population in 1988: 16.67 million Texas population in 2024: 31 million It's damned near DOUBLE what it was when I started at UT. That means, by basic extrapolation, the pool of similarly qualified applicants is twice as big. But the campus isn't. The resources to teach those students aren't. If you have a school that can handle 50k students, and the pool of applicants doubles....that necessarily means that those non-god-level candidates who would have gotten into UT in 1988 have much lower chances of getting in today. And of course, the very FACT that UT Austin is more selective INCREASES its cachet -- seriously, having a degree from UT today means more than it did back in my day. It was a good state school in the early 90s. But now, due to the fact that its student body is made up of top 5% and such, it's an elite-level school. It's a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg thing. And from what I know of friends whose kids have gone to UTD, and UT Arlington....they're getting damned solid jobs out of school. The kind of jobs that the middle tier of students at UT got when they graduated back in my day. I mean, I get that everyone would love to walk on the UT Austin campus.....but it's not feasible. Shit, everyone would like to buy a modest home within a couple of miles of campus. You could do that easily through the 1960s. Today....not so much. Geography, and the fact that there is a finite supply of such properties with 5X as many people who want them now means that no, you aren't going to be able to buy a cheap house in Hyde Park.
  20. It means that what is happening with this group of naive true believers is what happens with ALL groups of naive true believers. They get caught up in a flurry of "causes" instead of focusing on a results-oriented path based on one cause or a couple of closely related causes. Pro-Palestinian activists/liberationists who started out protesting real-time genocide of Palestinians but are now calling for disability rights and a panoply of other predictable left-of-center shit? Meet the Tea Partiers....who started out protesting representatives who were too beholden to special interests but are now full-on Q-anon and "stollen election" nutbars. Same shit happened with the "Occupy Wall Street" movement. Same shit happened with the populist MAGA movement. True believers are more focused on how gratifying it is to "believe," and lose sight of the fact that maybe it would be better to actually achieve a result.
  21. In fairness to the "top tier publics," there are some limitations due to simple logistics, geography, space, growing population, etc. The answer isn't to have 100k students at UT Austin. The answer is to have the University of Texas system offer the quality of education that UT Austin offered in the 80s and 90s to a similar percentage of students (as a percentage of overall Texas population) as it did in the 80s and 90s. And....that is happening, to a reasonable degree. Look at UT Dallas - I'd wager that the caliber of students they are getting, and the education they are getting there, is on par with the middle of the bell curve of students at UT in, say, 1988. That's good. That's what university systems should do. Hell, that's what the California system has done - there are multiple damned fine schools in the state system. Due to simple logistics, not everyone who USED to qualify can go to UT or Berkely today. As many of us have noted, we wouldn't get into UT today. That means that we weren't god-level prospects back then, either -- UT had enough space where it wasn't as selective. So long as those good (but not god-level) prospects can get the same quality of education that they could have gotten at UT in 1988 SOMEWHERE in the system, then the system is doing its job.
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