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ndawg

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by ndawg

  1. I'm no more fooled than I always am when I overlook something staring at me in the face and leap without looking. ADD is a bitch on a good day, and being in a permanent state of heightened anxiety from the very real shitfest that's a couple weeks away makes everything worse. Apologies.
  2. Oh, shit yeah. Twitter has clearly enabled the dissemination of many, many bullshit stories over the last few years, and so couldn't shut this one down without raising a massive red flag. I didn't realize the root of this back and forth was still the question of whether Twitter's decision was appropriate... it seemed like we had drifted into the broader topic of which stories we should believe or disbelieve. The sooner our political discourse gets the fuck off of social media the better for all of us.
  3. I don't believe you're so simple minded as to believe that a single tweet could express some rational framework for gauging the merit of any particular accusation, ranging from rape at a college party all the way to political corruption in board daylight. I can, however, believe that you'd expect us not to notice that you just sort of pretended that we all agreed to the tweet's premise. I ain't fooled, son.
  4. I suggest you upgrade your primitive notion of "bias" into a concrete understanding of fallacious reasoning. For instance, your post I'm replying to right here is a really great example of a Motte and Bailey fallacy. After all, if you are basing your retirement on your ability to draw rational conclusions, you're only hurting yourself by remaining in ignorance.
  5. I mean, if I got credit for the occasional wit, I'd also deserve criticism for any stupidity posted elsewhere... so I'm happy with this arrangement...
  6. For sure. Even if Amazon had managed without a public postal system, it would have still depended upon a public transportation network of some kind. And Ford could never have built Highland Park without people being able to leverage those same roads, either. Not to mention, just to be even in a position to spend money on the embarrassing amount of junk I buy from Amazon, I need my government to provide safety for my person and property. Public utility (currency, roads) is always at the mesh point between producers and consumers.
  7. Indeed, we don't get a better society by picking the correct "-ism," as I thought in my early 20s when I was more interested in perceiving myself as an intellectual than actually improving the world around me. What I didn't realize is that improvement happens when our policy becomes informed by a comprehensive study of all the "-isms," including their real world application (and how it intersects with culture, geography, etc). But that would have required hitting the books and being humbled by how much I didn't know. Youth is wasted on the young...
  8. I'm pretty left of center, but it seems hard to argue against capitalism being capable of serving as a beneficial component of a thriving society. Somebody like Jeff Bezos, as much as we on the left criticize his huge hoarding of wealth, has basically built a small country's economy from scratch, employing a ton of people along the way, all while simultaneously improving our nation's logistical network immeasurably. The public good has been even more obvious during the pandemic. Most former conservatives probably already know this, but I think a lot of the younger leftists would benefit from a reminder that capitalists can actually create value; and when they do, the wealth they accumulate for themselves is itself just a portion of a much larger benefit they bring to society. Sure, it sucks that Amazon has driven out a lot of mom and pop stores, and Bezos really could provide health care for every employee that doesn't have it without any meaningful decline in his standard of living, but the American citizen still won, in aggregate. But that's a digression. I think that America is in the process of finding out that capitalism can be lethally injected with oligarchy just like communism. When a society shifts towards sustaining a small ruling class of people who have no experience creating value, the invisible hand can no longer function properly. Capitalism relies on the assumption that your competitors will punish bad decision making, which doesn't hold when there is a system in place that puts unqualified people at the top of every company, including your competitors. IMO the conservative movement got duped into believing that capitalism is inherently beneficial, rather than just one component of a thriving society, and the progressive movement got duped into believing that capitalism is inherently harmful.
  9. I think the recent tradition of Republicans blowing up the debt means that what we used to call "fiscal conservatism" should be renamed to plain old "fiscal responsibility." Because these days, the conservative party seems a lot more interested in protecting the wealth of its oligarchy than spending responsibly. "Fiscally conservative" 20 years ago might have meant "fiscally responsible," and I can get behind that. But it doesn't mean that anymore. It now means, "the rich get richer, poor get poorer, fuck the national debt, because the rich will have enough to protect themselves when the chickens come home to roost."
  10. Excellent point. "Socially liberal, fiscally conservative" is just conservative with less bullshit to memorize.
  11. Trump is like an Aggy coach that, every time they lose, his base rationalizes away the loss ("just needed one more quarter," "the crooked TU refs handed them the win," etc.). Even the Aggies get tired of losing, though, so that analogy doesn't really hold. For an accurate analogy, you'd have to imagine that aggy actually gave themselves license to appoint their own winner of each and every game they played, and that the entire population of aggy all agreed to that made up win/loss record. That means if aggy lost 77-0, their base would convince themselves that they actually won a close. That's what it would take to have a D1 head football coach to be as bad at their job as Donald Trump is at president.
  12. For anyone who doesn't want to go near texags, they're currently suspecting that Nanci Pelosi's orange mask and suit was a deliberate signal that the Democrats are going to execute Trump soon. Because, I suppose, the Democrats really think it's a good idea to telegraph their intentions to assassinate the president.
  13. I wonder what she uses to notate the non-generic tweets. "Batshit?"
  14. I can see this beings a really winning message. A lot of Americans are the type of people who go to NASCAR races to watch the accidents. A lot of them probably don't vote because they normally don't get enough kicks out of it. Get them excited about watching Trump's meltdown if he faces a landslide. I bet a lot of them will go vote just to be part of egging on the biggest public humiliation in modern history.
  15. The next time the free press enters the White House, cameras will record a scene so depraved it would creep out Colonel Kurtz.
  16. I think his strategy was to remove about 25% of her forehead and distribute the bone throughout the rest of her face to make it all proportional. And he probably still had to tell her that her bangs would be necessary cover up the rest of that igloo she had above her eyebrows.
  17. Ah, I think they'd spin it fairly easily: "A military officer is the latest casualty in our war against China's virus." Spin doesn't seem to need to be airtight. Or even mostly non-porous. A sleight-of-hand that nudges people towards a different framing of the issue (anti-China sentiment) is enough to keep the rubes distracted.
  18. I'm sure some do, some don't. I'd guess it would depend on how much each one relies on superstitious rationalizations for their sociopathy. But anyone among them who is unashamed of their greed enough to prioritize it above all else understands two things: 1. If the taliban wing of the GOP takes control, this country will no longer be capable of maintaining our post WWII dominance in science and technology, which spells doom for our economy as a whole 2. If a concession ever needs to be made, the evangelicals are the ideal choice to grab the short straw, because their support can be taken for granted I've met plenty of wealthy GOPers that are not religious but have zero problem prohibiting abortion, because they know they can still get their daughter a safe abortion if they need to. Rules for thee, not me, and all that.
  19. This does make make sense. Part of the GOP strategy has to be that they actually need to pace themselves. Their base may be chomping at the bit to go full handmaiden's tale, but if they do that, they will lose their wealth along with the economy. After all, they need the US to be a decidedly secular society in order to maintain their wealth. Abortion and supreme court justices seem like a great way to stage a quality loss, because the current supreme court already works just fine for the wealthy people that the GOP serves. They've got Citizen's United already, for example. So, by deliberately losing on the issues that matter most to evangelicals, they actually lose nothing of value; the country remains secular enough to sustain an economy that substantiates their wealth, and the evangelicals, being true zealots, will never give up their cause, no matter how many Ls they take.
  20. My guess is 1.5. He’s got moderate problems, and is bullying the doctors into throwing the kitchen sink at the problem to make it go away as soon as possible. Outwardly, he’s a pathological liar. Inwardly, he is in pathological denial. The experts might have said (or he might have heard) that if he recovers in a few days, he’ll be one of the many who make it through okay, so his strategy is to put himself through aggressive treatment to make sure he makes that window.
  21. Basically the entirety of the media they consume on the internet and on TV is a drug whose primary effect is to make them feel smarter and better informed.
  22. Oh, I think if a sizable enough mass of "the meanies never gave Trump a chance" collided with their grief over their cult leader's death, the result might be Trump somehow becoming a martyr in their eyes.
  23. Agreed. But after the election, the coalition behind Biden will begin disbanding. We're likely to need to muster up the will to carry out justice without the benefit of, say, The Lincoln Project's witty ads. We have work to do.
  24. We may have enough momentum to kick Trump out of office, but we need enough momentum to undo the damage he's done in order to save the country.
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