Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.
No matter who’s President, nothing gets done as long as Congressional gridlock and dysfunction persist.
We cannot keep ignoring major issues, conducting sham executive oversight, or trying to develop unsustainable, one-party solutions to complex problems that will be overturned with the next change of power — It’s insane! Solutions exist. Legislators must be forced into real bipartisanship.
There will never be real legislative bipartisanship as long as one party controls all legislative committees. Equal membership on committees and strict compliance with so-called “regular order” would force compromise and unbiased executive oversight.
Amended Congressional rules, requiring an equal number of members from each party, could result in forcing bipartisan legislation based on research, investigation, agreed to facts & data, unbiased staff analysis, equal, fair, comprehensive expert testimony, media scrutiny and extensive public input and transparency. By the time legislation advanced to a floor vote there would be a broad bipartisan coalition of legislators, experts, interest groups and the public to force a positive outcome.
Yes, it would be difficult. There would be temporary deadlocks, but eventual compromises would be reached. Compare it to what we have now!
The fact that Congress cannot effectively deal with the most pressing issues of our time — infrastructure, health care, immigration, climate change, entitlements, etc. — is at the core of the public’s unrest with the political chaos and tribalism that exists. Additionally, objective, unbiased executive oversight is not possible under existing rules.
It’s time to force Congress to change the rules and truly put “Country Over Party.”
There is now a proven model process for bipartisanship; it only requires a willingness to end gridlock.
See the December 11, 2019, Update on the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress https://tinyurl.com/sffqwzg
Amended Congressional rules, requiring an equal number of members from each party, could result in forcing bipartisan legislation based on research, investigation, agreed to facts & data, unbiased staff analysis, equal, fair, comprehensive expert testimony, media scrutiny and extensive public input and transparency. By the time legislation advanced to a floor vote there would be a broad bipartisan coalition of legislators, experts, interest groups and the public to force a positive outcome.
And I want my magic rainbow farting, gold shitting unicorn too.
It has been a roller-coaster week for the state of Missouri versus 42-year-old Kimberly Daniels.
Daniels had been charged back in September with abuse of a child and hindering the prosecution of a felony in connection with the June encounter with the 4-year-old.
Both of those charges were dismissed Monday by Judge Robert George following a preliminary hearing in Lawrence County.
The next day, Tuesday, prosecutors filed a new child abuse charge against Daniels for the same incident.
And then on Wednesday morning, prosecutors dropped that new charge.
……………………………
Daniels was placed on paid administrative leave following a June incident where she took a 4-year-old boy by the arm and led him away from a kickball game.
Prosecutors had alleged Daniels’ behavior was abusive and that she injured the boy. Bilyeu argued that Daniels was following her training and fulfilling her duties to take the defiant child away from a situation where he could have harmed himself or others.
During Monday’s hearing, Bilyeu pointed out the alleged victim told authorities Daniels had done nothing to him, several teachers who witnessed the incident did not report any wrongdoing, and a Children’s Division employee who thoroughly investigated the case found that allegations of abuse against Daniels were “unsubstantiated.”
In her closing arguments Monday, Bilyeu called the criminal case a “farce.”
………………………….
Bilyeu said Wednesday she did not want to speculate as to why Lawrence County prosecutors chose to charge her client again after a judge had just dismissed the case, only to drop the charges the very next day.
Though it’s from 2018, it was only just a few weeks ago that I stumbled upon this Randy Rainbow song parody, and I have to say it may well be the most brilliant song parody I’ve ever heard in any context, ever.
It’s time to force Congress to change the rules and truly put “Country Over Party.
The problem is for many their job literally depends on not doing that. If you were elected by highly partisan voters, they’re going to expect you to represent them by being highly partisan. If you are elected by voters who believe in “alternate facts” and conspiracy theories, making fact and science-based decisions runs counter to their wishes.
Congress is not monolithic by design. It’s made up of hundreds of people from thousands of political districts to represent millions in carefully broken-up chunks. In order to stop making Congress be dysfunctional due to political machinations, we have to address the source material first. They are only a reflection of who sent them and who allows them to stay there. Crap in, crap out….
This week I’m experimenting with the onion sauce using ground beef and more tomato paste, which I then will mix with spaghetti or fettuccine (Italian has like a million words for “noodles”). For some reason, I want to make chilaquiles on the side.
New emails and direct messages released by Boeing to congressional investigators reveal some shocking messages from Boeing employees about both their own planes and the regulators overseeing the safety on their aircraft. In one of the most startling messages from April of 2017, a Boeing employee wrote, “this airplane is designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys.”
The story of El Salvador’s gang problem is a study in shortsighted thinking – and Donald Trump’s policies threaten to make a bad situation even worse. By William Wheeler
Israel Ticas is racing down the highway, drumming his hands on the wheel of “The Beast”, a tall, boxy police truck that he aims at the small, bustling town of San Luis Talpa, about 25 miles south of El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador.
A decades-long veteran of the security forces, Ticas’s first job was as an artist in the counter-terrorism unit, sketching suspected guerillas during the country’s 1979–1992 civil war. The experience left him equally as distrustful of the rightwing generals he had served as of the guerrilla commanders who would join them among the political elite at war’s end. In most ways, the country has never quite recovered since. In 2015, homicides in El Salvador rivalled the most violent peak of the civil war, and it ranks consistently among the world’s most violent nations. Before long, Ticas spots a body by the roadside. “It’s fresh,” he observes. “With clothes on.” It hasn’t been stripped or dismembered. The victim, he says, was likely shot at that spot during the night.
Ticas calls himself a “lawyer for the dead”. A self-taught forensic criminologist, he locates and digs up the bodies of victims of gang killings, and in so doing, he documents the crimes of the country’s notorious maras, or gangs. On this hot March morning in 2018, his finger is wrapped thick with gauze – a few days earlier, he pricked it on a thorn covered in fluids from decomposing bodies. His belt is adorned with a skull-and-crossbones pattern. As always, he carries a pistol in a handbag at his side.
But we aren’t here for the body by the roadside. Instead, we stop outside a two-storey concrete building where men in blue-and-white camouflage uniforms armed with assault rifles are milling about. Our security detail piles into a Toyota Hilux, and we follow them zig-zagging out of town and into the surrounding sugar cane fields, the convoy kicking up a bright cloud of swirling dust. Our destination is a site used by members of the local MS-13 gang to rape, torture and execute people. The victims include civilians, rivals from the Barrio 18 gang, and their own members who break internal codes of discipline. After a few minutes, the convoy stops at a parched basin beside the fields, a spot where a river runs during the wetter months.
As the river rises and falls in the jungle terrain, Ticas explains, the land swells and crumbles. So the topography has changed since the site was in use, several years ago, and his informant has struggled to remember where all the bodies are buried. Still, Ticas has managed to find 11 of the 21 bodies his informant says are buried here. The attorney general gave Ticas three months to work the location, and today is the deadline. He thinks he can find one more before his time is up and he has brought the informant here to help.
It gets pretty gruesome, so if you haven’t eaten breakfast yet you may want to wait, but it’s well worth the time to read it all.
Another year, and another investigation into a Clinton that has come up empty.
A Justice Department inquiry launched more than two years ago to mollify conservatives clamoring for more investigations of Hillary Clinton has effectively ended with no tangible results, and current and former law enforcement officials said they never expected the effort to produce much of anything.
Think about that…“…A Justice Department inquiry launched more than two years ago to mollify conservatives…” Is that really the basis on which we decide to investigate people?
Look…I’m no Clinton fan. I would have much preferred she hadn’t run in 2016. But these people, and particularly Hillary, have been hounded for most of their adult lives and no one has really found anything. Not really. A blowie. And some BS around the edges.
How long should someone have to endure this crap? And the end result is that people (like our dear James) are left with the impression that they are slimy crooks. They are simply smeared
by the very fact of the investigation itself.
FFS…she arguably had the Presidency stolen from her because Comey announced another bogus investigation. This is exactly what Trump wanted to do with Biden; he didn’t care about the actual investigation, he just wanted an investigation announced in order to smear his opponent.
These politically motivated investigations/character assassinations are a waste of time and resources and should not be a consequence of dedication to Public Service.
@Kathy:
Sounds tasty – let us know how it goes. Tomorrow’s culinary experiment for me is going to be a non-coconut Thai shrimp soup. I’ve got spiced stock, shrimp, bella mushrooms, mirepoix, crushed tomatoes and udon but I’m toying with some other additions. Only making a small pot in case this goes south because I’m winging it and nobody else is interested in testing their taste buds.
My New Year’s Resolution – beside the usual “lose weight and get in shape” lie – is to learn to make at least 5 dishes from different cultures I can’t get in local restaurants. That way, I really have to try and learn the recipe instead of just mimicking an example of what is “right”. Like learning how to grill properly instead of trying to recreate a Whopper. Any suggestions or recipes welcome!!
And the end result is that people (like our dear James) are left with the impression that they are slimy crooks.
This. A thousand times this. During the campaign I got into it with James, who wrote me off as blindly naive because I wouldn’t concede that the Clintons were obviously corrupt. OK, I said, if they are so obviously and continuously corrupt you should be able to easily come up with a list of uncontestably corrupt acts. He came back with a link that had five items. Three were donations to their charity from politicians in corrupt countries with no evidence whatsoever that there was any kind of tit for tat. None. Nada. Basically this bad man put money in the collection plate so it proves the whole enterprise is corrupt. The other two were nothing burgers. I pointed this out to James and he conceded the list was bogus but them basically said that “everyone knows the Clintons are corrupt and that evidence is easily found and he’s not going to waste any more time on this.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump revealed that he had Soleimani offed because of pressure from Repub senators he wants backing him during impeachment.
My New Year’s Resolution – beside the usual “lose weight and get in shape” lie – is to learn to make at least 5 dishes from different cultures I can’t get in local restaurants.
One of my back burner projects is to make Pho. I’ve never tried it, but I’ve heard enough about it to grow curious. I’m just not in a rush.
I should be making tangerine chicken, seeing as tangerines are in season. Maybe next week.
Three were donations to their charity from politicians in corrupt countries
I failed to note in my original comment that this investigation was primarily focused on the Clinton Foundation and the Uranium One deal.
These are two bugaboos that Republicans always use in their “whataboutism”.
So these should be off the table now…but Republicans won’t know about it because Fox News won’t tell them about it.
@MarkedMan: @Daryl and his brother Darryl: It was a smear campaign that took almost 25 years to bear fruit. Everybody just knew they were guilty of something. Meanwhile, the crime cartel currently in the White House blatantly engages in criminal and unconstitutional behavior while half the Senate +3 and 47% of the electorate has already exonerated them.
Meanwhile, the clueless Chris Cilizza thinks the proper remedy is to “take note of it”. Which means it will be mentioned once, and thereafter forgotten about.
And when Trump tries to do the same thing with Biden (or whomever the Democrats nominate), his allegations will be breathlessly reported on every time he makes them.
I’ve made a simplified version using small, brown button mushrooms, dried chiles, and egg ribbons. The trick is to add enough corn starch to thicken the soup.
The egg ribbons are so cool to make. You pour beaten eggs very slowly into the hot soup while stirring it also very slowly. The eggs don’t so much cook as coagulate just about instantly.
Trump was on camera last night saying Democrats are all “vicious, horrible people”.
Something tells me this comment won’t be judged by the same standard as Hillary’s deplorables comment.
That’s because liberals aren’t actually snowflakes and won’t be outraged for years about a offhand comment. Remember, it’s all projection from the right these days.
The real class war. Even the upper middle class is starting to be left behind as aaaaaaaallllllllllll the money gets re-distributed to the capital owners.
@Teve:are: knife sharpening. After years of so so results I finally broke through with the purchase of a cheapo video microscope, the kind that connects to your computer for a display. Someone had given me one of those three slot knife sharpeners and I had never had much luck with them, but I felt obligated to try. I took a knife, drew a blue magic marker down both sides of the edge pulled it through the coarse slot and checked my progress by looking at the edge through the microscope and seeing where the blue had been ground off. Bottom line, it took a lot longer to get the entire edge ground off evenly then I would have ever imagined. Then when I went to medium it again took a lot longer. And even in fine. But, man it was worth it. Over the course of three weeks I did all my knives. My hands were sore but my tomatoes were perfectly sliced.
@Teve: You got that right. The modern Republican Party is just a bunch of whining, get-off-my-lawn types who spend their days looking for reasons to be offended and accomplishing nothing useful.
Trump is now saying that he deserves the Nobel prize but it was unfairly given to someone else. (Abiy Ahmed, prime minister of Ethiopia, who ended a decades-long war, released political prisoners, invited exiled resistance groups back into the country and politics, gave the press more freedom, and repealed some abusive laws.
Remember when Charles Krauthammer diagnosed Obama as an extreme narcissist because he occasionally use the word “I” in sentences? Simpler times, man.
Really thinking about getting one of those Chef’s Choice electric knife sharpeners.
Professional knife sharpening services are one of those things that sound like they aren’t worth it, but they are. Some will let you mail them your knives in a box, and mail them back to you sharpened. It’s easy to ruin an expensive knife if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Snowflakes with a persecution complex. Having gone to an evangelical affiliated University, I can attest to both thos adjectives personally. And this was a couple decades ago.
@DrDaveT: fortunately i only have cheap knives like a $30 stamped Henckles chef knife, some Farber boning knives, etc. If it’s good enough metal that it holds an edge, I’m good. I’m not a professional, I don’t need something forged by dwarves from a meteorite.
Is it just me or has anyone else noticed a lack of activity from Doug and James? I think maybe I am am spoiled with the frequency of Doug’s posts but it feels like the frequency of new posts has slowed the past couple of days.
If this is due to personal issues, folks being on vacation, life getting in the way (school/work responsibilities, etc.) than I totally understand and a few days of calm around this site is not the end of the world. In fact, I get that this post makes me seem a bit whiney and like someone who feels entitled to be able to always read new content on this site (for free, no less) while I sincerely feel that I am not that type of individual especially if you met me in real life.
Anyway, I just like to think of this post as further proof that I love this wonderful site.
@inhumans99:
No, you’re not whiny. I think we’re all a little spoiled by the quantity and quality of the articles posted here. And the comments are pretty high quality as well.
@inhumans99: I was thinking exactly that this AM and then this Open Forum popped up and I thought, “All’s OK.” But then I remembered, Doug has these programmed to automatically post every other day.
I’m beginning to think James, Doug, and Steven have been renditioned to Guantanamo Bay by the trump Admin who are in the process of rounding up the worst offenders among the commentors. Have you noticed Michael Reynolds hasn’t commented all day. Neither has Matt Bernius.
LOL…..I was laughing about this same thing this morning when I noticed nothing new from Doug but the Open Forum, and how great it was that we’re all like “Nobody to entertain us? That’s all right, we’ll just talk amongst ourselves and see where things go.”
Our hosts are pretty great for giving us a spot to do that in, thank you much, guys! Without this place I’d be forced to read the comments at other places, and I always lose my faith in humanity after that. 😉
@J.P. McJefferson: Take at the Convention of States, a movement to restore the balance of powers according to the US Constitution, the way it was intended. The Federal unelected bureaucracy is out of hand – no limits and no accountability.
“Bring the power back to the states and to the people”
@DrDaveT: I just tried the online knife sharpening service and it was great. $59 for 4 knives – pricier than the hardware store that used to do it but try finding someone local who sharpens knives anymore – and easy as can be. Took about a week start to finish.
By the way, if you haven’t heard about the upcoming changes to Twitter’s reply capabilities, it should be a drastic improvement in the service. Tweeters can adjust the settings for a particular tweet such that rando assholes wouldn’t be able to reply. Lots of complaints already from the Reply Guy community.
@Teve: The irony to me of the article is that the “it must suck to be you” guys are part of “you” except that they haven’t caught on yet. Same with the ever-popular-in-these-quarters “why should I have any sympathy for people who won’t even move or train for a new job” folks. As Warren Buffet noted all those years ago, his class is kicking the asses of all the other classes in the class war. The difference being that he realized much earlier than most.
@Kathy: That was the best part about their shows. I was in Phoenix at the time, mid 90’s? The whole show was like watching rock gods, everybody knew every song, every time.
Gen X’er, my Mom listened to Rush so I listened to that shit as a young lass. Same with Beatles and alllllll of the others. We are the musical bridge from the 60’s to….cough cough (Justin Bieber) and Reality TV.
I’m not sure what went wrong, but somewhere, it happened.
“If the federal minimum wage in 1968 had kept up with inflation and productivity, it would now be $22 an hour. Instead, it’s $7.25,” write @NickKristof and @WuDunn
But if the minimum wage were $22 an hour, Betsy Devos would probably only have 7 yachts, instead of 10. She worked hard to inherit that money! How is that even fair???
@OzarkHillbilly: At least I’m calling out the people I have a problem with, not whining about them behind their backs. I might change someone’s mind. What are you hoping for here? Your best outcome is reinforcing fellow liberal whiners and beating down the stray conservative.
We are the musical bridge from the 60’s to….cough cough (Justin Bieber) and Reality TV…. I’m not sure what went wrong, but somewhere, it happened.
Digital media. Burnable CDs. Widespread pirating on college campuses. Usenet. The internet. iTunes and iPods. The demise of the big record companies as content gateways. The demise of contemporary pop/rock music radio. The “democratization” of pop/rock music. Being old-fashioned, I also suggest the demise of “sing-along-ability.” This was first pointed out to me many years ago by a woman during a discussion of why some 70s groups that boys thought were banal or worse were very popular with girls. “You’ve never been on a women’s dorm floor where someone is playing one of those groups and half the women on the floor are singing along.” I note in passing that the other day at McDonald’s I was watching one of the teen-aged Hispanic girls lip-syncing with an Eagle’s song that was probably three times as old as she was.
@charon: Somebody joked the other day that what republicans need is a mom: “oh you want a new war with Iran? Do you have any new war money? You already have plenty of war at home. You can’t start a new war until you finish one of the two you’ve already got.”
@95 South:
You might be happier at Lucianne.com, where commenters who criticize Trump are banned. I don’t think you will change the opinion of Trump expressed by almost anyone here.
@95 South: Some of us arrived here looking for conservative voices. James and Doug were well informed, good writers, and intellectually honest conservatives. It was either here or The American Conservative (which I still read occasionally*, despite Dreher’s constant whining). Our hosts have evolved, but it’s more the old saw that the Party left them.
This site could use a good conservative voice. You ain’t it. In fact the country could use a good conservative voice. WAPO and FTFNYT would pay serious money for one, but the best they can find are people like Douthat and Stevens. The problem seems to be, 95, that it is not possible to make an intellectually honest case for what the Republican Party stands for.**
* Is it my imagination, or are commenters at TAC getting better?
** We can have a discussion about what “conservative” means and whether the GOPs are, but as Dr. Taylor likes to point out, we get only two parties and they’re the conservative party. De facto Republican = conservative.
In fact the country could use a good conservative voice. WAPO and FTFNYT would pay serious money for one, but the best they can find are people like Douthat and Stevens. The problem seems to be, 95, that it is not possible to make an intellectually honest case for what the Republican Party stands for.
Well, I think you have to start by identifying what the Republican Party stands for these days. Ethnic nationalism*, cultural conservatism, low taxes and regulations on the wealthy and powerful, and… then I’m honestly at a loss.
I don’t see a through line from Bush’s trade policy to Trump’s, and I have no idea how to describe the foreign policy in a way that makes any sense. They aren’t key parts of the Republican Party if they will embrace a radical change without flinching.
I’m not sure you can make a good, intellectually honest argument for most of the things that Republicans are consistent with.
You could have a discussion of whether a multi-ethic state can be stable, but it’s a moot point because someone brought a whole lot of African slaves over here, so we are always going to be a multi-ethnic state.
Cultural conservatism often comes down to “you should be free to live your life as you want, but not too free…”
I don’t see any way to defend a policy of “the wealthy and powerful should be wealthier and more powerful”
*: Long before Trump was embracing the white nationalists, it’s been an undercurrent of the Republican Party — George W. Bush tried to push against it and failed. Democrats are less nationalist, and they tend to rally around ideas (equality and the pursuit of opportunity) rather than race.
@CSK: Is HAL conservative? He’s more conservative than a lot of people here, but I would have placed him more as a moderate with a mix of left and right.
@95 South: It’s a free country and you can call yourself a conservative, a liberal, or the worlds greatest tenor, but that doesn’t make it so. You have never said anything that resembled actual conservative principles. You are to conservative principles as the Westboro Baptist Church is to Christian principles.
@Tyrell: Is Morrison off the roids enough to come back? On the other hand, The Big Snore Show is back, too. (And he even appeared in a match, not just a cameo.) Maybe it’s yet another oldies week at WWE. I hear that the main event at next year’s WrestleMania is gonna be Triple H, Undertaker, Batista, Hogan, and Rick Flair in a teevee trays, stepstools, and walkers match.
I honestly do not understand how anyone can be culturally Conservative outside of a Burkean framework and simultaneously attempt to own the mantle of freedom or liberty.
It also seems untenable in the sense that the public/private dichotomy changes over time. Much more of life is played out on the public stage now than at anytime in history. So when some jackass from The Daily Wire posts a picture of a particularly exuberant person at an LGBT+ parade, Conservatives get the vapors.
The irony is that if the RW stopped trying to argue that a gender atypical person is deranged, maybe people wouldn’t feel the need to put on a flamboyant, public display of their identity. Ditto for any other identity.
If I wrote that Democrats hate blacks, or Jews, people would push back. No one challenges comments like Gustophers. He and Kurtz admit they don’t understand conservatives. If the rest of you are so well-read, you should be able to explain it to them. Either you don’t know they’re wrong or you don’t care. Where’s the hope for growth?
He and Kurtz admit they don’t understand conservatives.
It is difficult to understand how one could call himself a true “conservative” and yet still support Trump…there’s a reason such people are thought of as being part of a cult…
If I wrote that Democrats hate blacks, or Jews, people would push back.
Up until the 1960s, the Democrats were the racist party. And a lot of attitudes and policies did not turn on a dime with the passage of the civil rights acts. Some of irt is still there.
America has a problem with race. And anti-semitism. All of America. Even Democrats. Democrats tend not to embrace it of late.
If you said that Democrats hate blacks or Jews, as a blanket statement, that would be nonsense, but I’m 100% positive there are very real examples even up to the present day. Look back to the 2018 primary and the PUMAs.
Anyway, why don’t you explain what conservatism means in the context of the modern Republican Party?
I honestly do not understand how anyone can be culturally Conservative outside of a Burkean framework and simultaneously attempt to own the mantle of freedom or liberty.
There’s a balance between the freedom of the majority to decide how they want to live, and the freedom of the individual.
As an analogy, I would say it is roughly equivalent to zoning laws. If you maximize individual freedom, you can end up with a pig farm in a residential neighborhood. If you maximize the community’s freedom (think freedom of association) there are no pig farms anywhere, and I don’t know where black people live but it sure as hell ain’t here.
I think the cultural conservatives and the libertarians in the Republican Party have blurred the definitions of freedom to form an uneasy alliance.
On the other hand, remember that a whole swath of libertarians are more bothered with the government’s interference in a business owner’s right to associate with only their preferred clientele, rather than worrying about whether discrimination imposes a loss of opportunity and freedom on the minorities. It might not be such an uneasy alliance.
I don’t think economic analogies really fit what I am talking about. It is a mistake to separate social and economic spheres completely, but it is also a mistake to assume that they function the same way.
The reason I highlighted Burkean Conservatisim is because, from what I understand, a perfectly reasonable modern interpretation would be:
Too much change, too fast risks tearing apart the fabric of society. Gradual change allows a society to develop organically, but retains its cohesive elements.
Whatever you want to call the GOP now, it ain’t that. I suppose you could call it some sort of Conservatism, but I think it probably tracks more toward a soft authoritarianism than something rooted in liberty.
Using the example from my post, there are differences between the following statements:
-If injustice exists, it is a fact of life. It is not the proper role for government to attempt to legislate social behavior.
-the government ought not take positive protective action toward LGBTQ, as society will evolve organically toward acceptance. Trying to force acceptance is an abrogation of someone’s rights, and risks breaking the cohesion of society.
-Sexual Orientation is a behavior that can be corrected. Gender identity is biologically determined by genitals, thus transpersons suffer from mental illness.
The first two are similar. The third one is extreme. Even leaving that aside, the first two are still fundamentally different, as the first only takes a position on the jurisdiction of government action without taking a position on the state of society.*
Those who think the third one is accurate are only Conservative as defined in terms of government action, but are certainly not expressing any appeal to liberty as a basis for a society. They would undoubtedly agree with the first two statements, but their disposition is fundamentally different from the first two. In practice, it can actually cast the mere existence of LGBTQ+ as a threat and worthy of government action.
The current condition of the GOP is much closer to the third one than the first two.
*Simply, the first can be described as indifferent to society. The second, non interventional because freedom is a natural evolution. The third, interventional when confronted by perceived threats to the social order.
Just got my first primary campaign text of the 2020 season. It’s from Bernie.
Since the Democratic Party will hold 26 primaries and caucuses before I can vote in the Illinois Primary on March 17 there’s no telling if Independent Candidate Sanders will even be in the running by then so I deleted it.
My research into the Democratic delegate selection process did mention something called the North Dakota Firehouse Caucuses and this note:
Participation in North Dakota’s delegate selection process is open to all voters who wish to participate as Democrats. North Dakota has neither party nor voter registration.
Sexual Orientation is a behavior that can be corrected. Gender identity is biologically determined by genitals, thus transpersons suffer from mental illness.
I’m not even sure that’s all that wrong with transgender folks. They have some kind of medical problem (physical or mental), otherwise they wouldn’t need medical intervention (gender reassignment surgeries).
But, what I find offensive is how transgender folks are treated. People with medical issues have equal rights, and should be accommodated where possible so they can live normally.
No sane person would yell at someone who lost their legs that they were incredibly careless to have lost their legs, that they did it just so they could sit down all the time, that wheelchair ramps are just encouraging them to not try walking up stairs and that their very presence encourages a perverted leg-free lifestyle.
And yet, that’s how transgender folks are treated.
If the far right wants to think of it as an illness, they should treat it as an illness — with respect and compassion and no condescension.
Does it present a danger to others? No.
Does it spread through exposure? No.
Can the person function in society? Yes.
Ok, get over your objections and your squeamishness.
Are trans women real women? Who cares?
They’re people. The deserve equal rights, and to be treated with respect.
(Despite being bi, I’m also willing to consider same sex attraction as a mental illness — one with no known cure, and which people can live with, like color blindness. I don’t know what purpose such an approach would serve (ADA protections? Fancy data modeling?), but I’m not opposed to it in principle)
Ahem.
Just a rant I had built up. The whole “they’re ill so we can treat them like shit” attitude just pisses me off. Very unchristian.
Despite being bi, I’m also willing to consider same sex attraction as a mental illness — one with no known cure, and which people can live with, like color blindness.
And what, exactly, would make same sex attraction a “mental illness”?
Very unchristian.
It seems as if many of the most unchristian people actually claim to be Christians…
Well, from a medical professional’s perspective, there would be a distinction in approaches to mental illness versus a physical ailment. (I tend to think that at some level, there is no difference biologically–mental processes are just an emergent property of the brain’s physical structure. But that isn’t germane here.)
I don’t think that a mental illness approach to same sex attraction gains anything, but has a downside that we see embodied by the RW now.
Even from simple definitions, gender and sex are not at all considered the same thing. Obviously, they are interchangeable informally and in some cases officially. But to social scientists, they are distinct.
But from a strictly physical perspective, even sex is a spectrum. See: PCOS and this. It is not as simple as boys have a penis and girls have a vagina.
Put simply, any attempt to to create a stable gender based on genitalia is a fool’s errand–the platform is wobbly.
To bring it back to your rant: I agree with it. I would just add that if, for example, Shapiro ridicules a transperson, it reveals his true character. In the end, he is either a highly intelligent liar or his reputation outweighs his cognitive abilities. I guess we could say he is just intellectually lazy, but i think he is worse than that: a cynical piece of shit.
@95 South’s whining that we don’t understand Conservatism is missing the point. It’s not that I don’t understand Conservative thought–it seems that s/he doesn’t understamd Conservatism. The GOP at the present time isn’t Conservative, it is reactionary and denialist.
And what, exactly, would make same sex attraction a “mental illness”?
From the perspective that we have a biological imperative to breed to spread our genes, a same sex attraction is clearly doing it wrong.*
I don’t know that there would be any benefit to fixing it — frankly children are overrated larva, and most opposite sex couples seem to spend their time trying to not have kids — but a perfectly reasonable case could be made that it is a defect from a purely biological point of view.
I don’t know that there would be any benefit to considering it as an illness (any more than considering red hair as an illness), as there is no way to change it, there are no treatments, and it’s pretty harmless (as harmless as an opposite sex attraction), but I’m not opposed to using that model in principle.
(With red hair, there are treatments involving hair coloring at least, and the biology is much better understood.)
I am also not opposed to using the tools of epidemiology to examine the effects of gun violence.
Or using a disease model to examine the spread of crazy right wing ideas. Or religion.
Applying different models can change our viewpoint, and present options we haven’t considered. Or lead to rounding people up, putting them into camps and exterminating them. Or some world where embryos are tested and removed. Ok, there are a lot more nightmare scenarios than good ones.
*: Just because you are doing it wrong doesn’t mean it’s not a lot of fun…
I don’t think that a mental illness approach to same sex attraction gains anything, but has a downside that we see embodied by the RW now.
The right wing approaches same sex attraction as a moral failing, rather than a mental illness. Some use phrasing of illness as an attempt to hurt people, and others will use the language of mental illness because they believe mental illness is a moral failing… But, really, they see it as a moral failing rather than anything biological.
After all, you can’t pray away the cancer — at least not in remotely reputable circles — but pray away the gay remains their preferred “treatment”.
From the perspective that we have a biological imperative to breed to spread our genes, a same sex attraction is clearly doing it wrong.*
That makes same sex attraction sound like pedophilia, as that generally doesn’t lead to breeding…I’m sure the usual homophobes on the right would, or indeed do, use just such an argument…
The right wing approaches same sex attraction as a moral failing, rather than a mental illness. Some use phrasing of illness as an attempt to hurt people, and others will use the language of mental illness because they believe mental illness is a moral failing… But, really, they see it as a moral failing rather than anything biological.
In All in the Family, there’s a weird moment where Mike tells Gloria not to smother the baby, because that might turn it homosexual. It’s easy to forget that the notion of homosexuality as a mental illness was once considered the liberal position, as opposed to the conservative position that it was simply sinful. Since the 1970s, liberals (along with the scientific community) have moved away from considering it a mental illness, and that position was eventually co-opted by conservatives who wanted to give their views a veneer of scientific objectivity. I remember Trent Lott comparing it to alcoholism and kleptomania. Dr. Laura lost her TV show in large part over her comments that homosexuality was a “biological error.” However, she also cited the Bible to justify her views.
I’m not much invested in the debate over whether it’s a mental illness (if there is any such debate), because it strikes me as rooted in semantics. There’s no absolute, objective definition of what constitutes a mental illness, and if you’ve ever read from the DSM or other psychology manuals, it’s striking how often they refer to societal norms as a benchmark for their definitions of psychological disorders. That applies in particular to the notion of paraphilia (previously called sexual deviancy), which could be defined as any sexual interest regarded as abnormal enough to be considered a disorder. (Yes, I know it’s more complicated than that, but I don’t think you can totally escape the concept of social norms when distinguishing paraphilia from things we would regard as reasonably healthy sexual interests.)
Obviously, consent and harm are important concepts in the moral question of whether something deserves to be accepted by society at large, but they don’t fundamentally change what a condition actually is in terms of the mental processes involved.
The problem is that conservatives who invoke psychology to attack gays are being disingenuous, since it’s not the real reason for their opposition. When they call it an error or a disorder, they’re simply relying on the negative connotations of those terms to make their point, without actually explaining why it’s something that should be opposed on a large scale. (It’s similar to what they do when they claim “life begins at conception,” in which they use a vague scientific definition of “life”–no one disputes the fetus is alive–to bypass the larger question of when a developing human embryo should gain the rights of a “person.”) Biological errors aren’t intrinsically bad; indeed, they’re the driving force behind evolution. And even if homosexuality would seem to be relatively un-Darwinian (though there are a lot of human traits that could be described that way, most of which are fairly uncontroversial), that doesn’t make it a net negative in society apart from some extreme hypothetical scenario where birthrates are falling and the species is facing extinction–and even then, it wouldn’t justify the level of loathing and disgust you see in most anti-LGBT people.
-your view of evolution/genetics is confused by how it is taught. It is an abstract idea with complex mechanisms that is commonly put into human terms to make it easier to understand.
-it also informs your second mistake: putting mental illness into objective terms. Though that mistake can also be independent of your first misstep.
Part I: Biological Imperative
You’re imputing human motives to things that do not have motives. There isn’t a biological need to reproduce–the first replicating molecule didn’t have a motive in doing so. They replicated because that’s the chemical/physical process that replicators do.
Biological imperatives are the behaviors that result in survivial. Those behaviors are just responses to chemical signals. Water is required for survival, but an organism doesn’t know that. The signal just causes the organism to seek water.
The biochemical process for thirst is not:
“i haven’t had water for a whole day, if I don’t find water soon, i will not survive. So i should find water.”*
Rather, it is:
Body physically needs water – – > chemical signal for thirst – – > behavior (follow sensory inputs that indicate water) – – > behavior (travel to water)
But an organism is blind to all of this. Organisms just do whatever results from chemical processes. That is exactly how sex works. After an organism matures enough, the body signals sex, so organism engages in whatever behavior leads to sex.
So, sex is just a behavior resultant from chemical processes. An amoeba doesn’t decide to engage in binary fission. The footnote acknowledges that higher order organisms are more complex. But that complexity is just resultant from a higher density of processes. In fact, if the imperative was to pass genes on, doing it like amoebas do is way more efficient and less dangerous than, say, peacocking.
Now, this where most decently read people say, “but Dawkins.” But Sir Richard has expresses regret for calling his book The Selfish Gene specifically because it implies a blijd process has motive.
In short, you’re confusing a pedagogical tool with the object of study.
*this is what it seems that modern humans do, but the process is actually over-complicated for us because we have complex neurology. But the underlying biological signals for thirst are the same as any other organism. The physical sensation of thirst causes us to seek a beverage.
Part II: Gayness as a defect/mental illness
This will be much shorter, because it is simpler to explain. Remember, genes are expressed in specific environments. They are not black boxes.
Take for example, in America in 2020, Sickle Cell Anemia is a genetic defect. But it is not a defect any place and time that Malaria is endemic.
Putting genes in terms of good/bad is an incomplete answer to a poorly phrased question.
Mental illness is, in at least most cases, culturally defined. In this place and time, severe ADD can ruin a person’s chance of meeting goals. But it probably had little to no effect in previous eras. So was it really an illness before?
As @Kylopod points out, it matters not what explanation they cite, RWers want to eliminate behavior that they disagree with. And it doesn’t matter what reality based reason you give or how airtight your proof. It will be coopted.
Why? I don’t know, but it means they have zero ground to claim the mantle of freedom. Remember, that was the overarching point of my first post in this thread.
At one time, they would make laws or pass ordinances. They are still trying to control the behavior of other people. It may not be through the government apparatus, but that’s why i called it soft authoritarianism.
The Voyager mission was dreamt up by Gary Flandro, a summer student in the 1960s at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who realised that a mid-1970s launch offered a once-every-170-years opportunity to visit all four giant planets when they were in rare alignment.
I was aware of the rare alignment and the milestone the Voyager program reached, but not of how it originated.
BTW, the reason Voyager 2 was the one to visit Uranus and Neptune, is that the main objective was to do fly-bys of Jupiter and Saturn (*), and NASA decided to make sure that would happen with the first probe.
(*) Jupiter and Saturn align from Earth’s POV far more often. A generation earlier, the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes flew by both
The Coverups (Green Day doing covers) do actually have a great loud version of Surrender that ends in that glorious massive resounding din that I crave.
Not a huge Green Day fan, but this fucking rocks hard. I approve.
@de stijl: Have you ever listened to much Pigface? When I get in that mood, I generally go for “Bitch” or “Asphole”.
I saw them live once. They were melt-your-face awesome, when Asphole started playing and you could see the shadows behind the screen, and that catchy little intro started…..Wow. 😉
My liver and kidneys resonated with the drum beat. It was intense and a bit disconcerting and possibly the greatest thing I’d ever witnessed first hand.
It was insanely loud. My internal
organs throbbed to the beat.
@de stijl: Hahahaha….that might’ve been why Pigface was so awesome, also. They had a 25th reunion tour last year and I WANTED to go, but I didn’t think it would be the same sober, soooo…..
@de stijl: Fun fact: I spent the night of my wedding stranded on a speedboat on Lake Mead. All. Night. Long. The motor very casually said “See ya, losers!” and fell off the boat not far from the marina….no oars, no trolling motor, no radio, no emergency lights and a steady breeze that pushed us all the way across to the fish hatchery. Just us, 2 other couples, and a BUNCH of beer. This was LONG before cell phones, so we just bobbed out there all night long, and tried not to fall in when we had to pee.
If you want to know the kind of elderly snowflakes Fox News caters to, they literally had a story where they referred to the word damn as “the D-word”.
@de stijl: Not necessarily a sob story, per se…..I mean, I was fully aware of the irony after my drive thru, “Hey, we’re in Vegas, we should get married!” wedding with the Elvis preacher. 😉
Definitely a story, however.
Yeeesssss…..us ladies invented some interesting ways to get it done.
Doesn’t matter if you’re a boy or a girl, you should never piss into the wind!
When I was a kid (late 80s/early 90s) Hard Copy was around. I don’t think I ever watched it for more than a couple minutes, but Fox News’s presentation reminds me of that.
I saw something the other day railing against CNN saying “shithole countries” a bunch of times without censoring it the day that story broke. I think it was on The Daily Wire. It’s amazing how outraged RWers get about something innocuous that gets said all the time, everywhere. Yet they get angry that actual offensive language directed at a person’s identity can cause a backlash. Somehow the d word and the s word are more offensive than casting aspersions on an entire nation or ethnic group.
Aside: whenever some GOP Congressperson claims that tech companies are supressing Conservative stories, I wonder why my suggested stories feed on Chrome is almost exlusively populated with stories from Fox, National Review and Daily Wire. It amkes no sense, because I rarely visit those sites. Plus, if someone looked at my web history, it would be obvious where I am on the political spectrum.
On other things, the onion sauce with ground beef (and minus the parmesan! though I added a small piece of Gouda, which melted into the sauce), was very good. It goes well with fettuccine, too.
Next week I want to try tangerine chicken. I wonder if I can use cucumber in the veggie mix. I usually add carrots, jícama, celery, soy bean sprouts, and onions(*). I’m thinking cucumber without seeds would fit in.
(*) I think I’ve never cooked an entree without onions in it
I was out most of yesterday as I served as a mock juror. No headline of the day.
@Bill: No promises, but we’ll see what I can do to pick up the slack.
Insanity Defined
No matter who’s President, nothing gets done as long as Congressional gridlock and dysfunction persist.
We cannot keep ignoring major issues, conducting sham executive oversight, or trying to develop unsustainable, one-party solutions to complex problems that will be overturned with the next change of power — It’s insane! Solutions exist. Legislators must be forced into real bipartisanship.
There will never be real legislative bipartisanship as long as one party controls all legislative committees. Equal membership on committees and strict compliance with so-called “regular order” would force compromise and unbiased executive oversight.
Amended Congressional rules, requiring an equal number of members from each party, could result in forcing bipartisan legislation based on research, investigation, agreed to facts & data, unbiased staff analysis, equal, fair, comprehensive expert testimony, media scrutiny and extensive public input and transparency. By the time legislation advanced to a floor vote there would be a broad bipartisan coalition of legislators, experts, interest groups and the public to force a positive outcome.
Yes, it would be difficult. There would be temporary deadlocks, but eventual compromises would be reached. Compare it to what we have now!
The fact that Congress cannot effectively deal with the most pressing issues of our time — infrastructure, health care, immigration, climate change, entitlements, etc. — is at the core of the public’s unrest with the political chaos and tribalism that exists. Additionally, objective, unbiased executive oversight is not possible under existing rules.
It’s time to force Congress to change the rules and truly put “Country Over Party.”
For additional information see my blog post.
https://t.co/s4AMQ1nAO5
There is now a proven model process for bipartisanship; it only requires a willingness to end gridlock.
See the December 11, 2019, Update on the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress https://tinyurl.com/sffqwzg
According to the Boston Globe, some Harvard Law School students are reluctant to clerk for Trump-appointed judges.
@J.P. McJefferson: See testimonials from Republicans & Democrats that have actually experienced Shared Legislative Power: https://tinyurl.com/y4eeg5z2
Hong Kong: nearly a third of adults report PTSD symptoms – study
This can’t be true. Congressman Jim Banks told me only US veterans are allowed to have PTSD.
Bots Are Destroying Political Discourse As We Know It
I’m wondering if we just received a visit from a bot in a post above. And by the way, whatever happened to the bot Ms. Cris Ericson?
How Trump’s Trade War Is Making Lobbyists Rich And Slamming Small Businesses
@J.P. McJefferson:
And I want my magic rainbow farting, gold shitting unicorn too.
Prosecutors drop abuse charge against Marionville teacher a day after filing
Here’s an idea: Because they’re dicks?
Though it’s from 2018, it was only just a few weeks ago that I stumbled upon this Randy Rainbow song parody, and I have to say it may well be the most brilliant song parody I’ve ever heard in any context, ever.
3 guesses as to which company this unnamed employee works for and the first 2 don’t count.
The headline of the day-
Woman claims she predicted Harry and Meghan Markle splitting from royal family by reading asparagus spears
@J.P. McJefferson:
The problem is for many their job literally depends on not doing that. If you were elected by highly partisan voters, they’re going to expect you to represent them by being highly partisan. If you are elected by voters who believe in “alternate facts” and conspiracy theories, making fact and science-based decisions runs counter to their wishes.
Congress is not monolithic by design. It’s made up of hundreds of people from thousands of political districts to represent millions in carefully broken-up chunks. In order to stop making Congress be dysfunctional due to political machinations, we have to address the source material first. They are only a reflection of who sent them and who allows them to stay there. Crap in, crap out….
@KM: Hence the real need is to end gerrymandering.
Trump was on camera last night saying Democrats are all “vicious, horrible people”.
Something tells me this comment won’t be judged by the same standard as Hillary’s deplorables comment.
This week I’m experimenting with the onion sauce using ground beef and more tomato paste, which I then will mix with spaghetti or fettuccine (Italian has like a million words for “noodles”). For some reason, I want to make chilaquiles on the side.
Trump’s Justice Department ended the investigation into Uranium One and said there was nothing there.
I expect that information will have zero effect on dumbass Trumpers.
link
@Bill: I really like the idea of a mock juror:
“That’s your crime?!?! My grandmother can do better crimes than that.”
The long read
How the US helped create El Salvador’s bloody gang war
The story of El Salvador’s gang problem is a study in shortsighted thinking – and Donald Trump’s policies threaten to make a bad situation even worse. By William Wheeler
It gets pretty gruesome, so if you haven’t eaten breakfast yet you may want to wait, but it’s well worth the time to read it all.
Another year, and another investigation into a Clinton that has come up empty.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/justice-dept-winds-down-clinton-related-inquiry-once-championed-by-trump-it-found-nothing-of-consequence/2020/01/09/ca83932e-32f9-11ea-a053-dc6d944ba776_story.html
Think about that…“…A Justice Department inquiry launched more than two years ago to mollify conservatives…” Is that really the basis on which we decide to investigate people?
Look…I’m no Clinton fan. I would have much preferred she hadn’t run in 2016. But these people, and particularly Hillary, have been hounded for most of their adult lives and no one has really found anything. Not really. A blowie. And some BS around the edges.
How long should someone have to endure this crap? And the end result is that people (like our dear James) are left with the impression that they are slimy crooks. They are simply smeared
by the very fact of the investigation itself.
FFS…she arguably had the Presidency stolen from her because Comey announced another bogus investigation.
This is exactly what Trump wanted to do with Biden; he didn’t care about the actual investigation, he just wanted an investigation announced in order to smear his opponent.
These politically motivated investigations/character assassinations are a waste of time and resources and should not be a consequence of dedication to Public Service.
@Kathy:
Sounds tasty – let us know how it goes. Tomorrow’s culinary experiment for me is going to be a non-coconut Thai shrimp soup. I’ve got spiced stock, shrimp, bella mushrooms, mirepoix, crushed tomatoes and udon but I’m toying with some other additions. Only making a small pot in case this goes south because I’m winging it and nobody else is interested in testing their taste buds.
My New Year’s Resolution – beside the usual “lose weight and get in shape” lie – is to learn to make at least 5 dishes from different cultures I can’t get in local restaurants. That way, I really have to try and learn the recipe instead of just mimicking an example of what is “right”. Like learning how to grill properly instead of trying to recreate a Whopper. Any suggestions or recipes welcome!!
@Kathy: You are never going to go wrong with an onion/ground beef/tomato base.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
This. A thousand times this. During the campaign I got into it with James, who wrote me off as blindly naive because I wouldn’t concede that the Clintons were obviously corrupt. OK, I said, if they are so obviously and continuously corrupt you should be able to easily come up with a list of uncontestably corrupt acts. He came back with a link that had five items. Three were donations to their charity from politicians in corrupt countries with no evidence whatsoever that there was any kind of tit for tat. None. Nada. Basically this bad man put money in the collection plate so it proves the whole enterprise is corrupt. The other two were nothing burgers. I pointed this out to James and he conceded the list was bogus but them basically said that “everyone knows the Clintons are corrupt and that evidence is easily found and he’s not going to waste any more time on this.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump revealed that he had Soleimani offed because of pressure from Repub senators he wants backing him during impeachment.
@KM:
One of my back burner projects is to make Pho. I’ve never tried it, but I’ve heard enough about it to grow curious. I’m just not in a rush.
I should be making tangerine chicken, seeing as tangerines are in season. Maybe next week.
Schiff says he’s not going to subpoena Bolton to testify before the house because there would be “little to be gained” from it.
@MarkedMan:
I failed to note in my original comment that this investigation was primarily focused on the Clinton Foundation and the Uranium One deal.
These are two bugaboos that Republicans always use in their “whataboutism”.
So these should be off the table now…but Republicans won’t know about it because Fox News won’t tell them about it.
@MarkedMan: @Daryl and his brother Darryl: It was a smear campaign that took almost 25 years to bear fruit. Everybody just knew they were guilty of something. Meanwhile, the crime cartel currently in the White House blatantly engages in criminal and unconstitutional behavior while half the Senate +3 and 47% of the electorate has already exonerated them.
@Kathy: If I bothered to learn how to make hot & sour soup, I would never have to step into a Chinese restaurant again.
@MarkedMan: “I was lied to, and believed the lies, completely, for years.” Is a hard thing for anyone to admit to themselves.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
Meanwhile, the clueless Chris Cilizza thinks the proper remedy is to “take note of it”. Which means it will be mentioned once, and thereafter forgotten about.
And when Trump tries to do the same thing with Biden (or whomever the Democrats nominate), his allegations will be breathlessly reported on every time he makes them.
@Joe:
I’ve made a simplified version using small, brown button mushrooms, dried chiles, and egg ribbons. The trick is to add enough corn starch to thicken the soup.
The egg ribbons are so cool to make. You pour beaten eggs very slowly into the hot soup while stirring it also very slowly. The eggs don’t so much cook as coagulate just about instantly.
@Teve: According to Aaron Rupar (@ atrupar), at his rally last night, Trump said, “Crooked Hillary — you should lock her up, I’ll tell you.”
Then again, he pretty much went through his greatest hits of stupid statements. Pity, no cover of “Sweet Child O Mine.”
Marianne Williamson just said peace out bitches.
Not a big fan, but she would’ve been an improvement over trump.
Marianne Williamson ends 2020 Presidential campaign…
I’m guessing Cory Booker will gain some support here…
Nancy Pelosi is preparing to send the articles of impeachment to the senate next week.
Really thinking about getting one of those Chef’s Choice electric knife sharpeners.
The cooks illustrated people really like this one.
trizor xv
@Teve: I have never been able to sharpen a knife with a sharpening stone. They always end up duller than when I started.
@Mike in Arlington: i can do whetstones fine but it’s tedious.
@Teve:
I have a manual knife sharpener. It has a slot you place the knife in, then pull it through quickly. Repeat ten times.
It does work, provided he knife was sharp to begin with. I notice it when I sharpen it before tackling bell peppers.
@Teve:
That’s because liberals aren’t actually snowflakes and won’t be outraged for years about a offhand comment. Remember, it’s all projection from the right these days.
Anybody for a new outrage? New York City Bar Association Calls for Congressional Probe of US AG William Barr
@Just Another Ex-Republican: i’ve worked retail for years in the deep South. There is no whinier group of babies than elderly white Trumpers.
@Joe: 3o minute prep-time hot sour soup
The real class war. Even the upper middle class is starting to be left behind as aaaaaaaallllllllllll the money gets re-distributed to the capital owners.
@Teve:are: knife sharpening. After years of so so results I finally broke through with the purchase of a cheapo video microscope, the kind that connects to your computer for a display. Someone had given me one of those three slot knife sharpeners and I had never had much luck with them, but I felt obligated to try. I took a knife, drew a blue magic marker down both sides of the edge pulled it through the coarse slot and checked my progress by looking at the edge through the microscope and seeing where the blue had been ground off. Bottom line, it took a lot longer to get the entire edge ground off evenly then I would have ever imagined. Then when I went to medium it again took a lot longer. And even in fine. But, man it was worth it. Over the course of three weeks I did all my knives. My hands were sore but my tomatoes were perfectly sliced.
@Teve: You got that right. The modern Republican Party is just a bunch of whining, get-off-my-lawn types who spend their days looking for reasons to be offended and accomplishing nothing useful.
@MarkedMan: cool. Putting an edge on a very dull knife can take a long time. Once you get that done, though, a touch-up takes a dozen seconds or so.
I’ve always been a 22.5° knife person, but everybody has now moved over to the 15° that the Japanese started.
Trump is now saying that he deserves the Nobel prize but it was unfairly given to someone else. (Abiy Ahmed, prime minister of Ethiopia, who ended a decades-long war, released political prisoners, invited exiled resistance groups back into the country and politics, gave the press more freedom, and repealed some abusive laws.
Remember when Charles Krauthammer diagnosed Obama as an extreme narcissist because he occasionally use the word “I” in sentences? Simpler times, man.
@Teve:
Professional knife sharpening services are one of those things that sound like they aren’t worth it, but they are. Some will let you mail them your knives in a box, and mail them back to you sharpened. It’s easy to ruin an expensive knife if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Trump just signed an Executive Order renaming the San Andreas Fault.
The new name?
Barrack Obama’s Fault.
You’ve been wrong about so many things, yet there is no self reflection. 5 more years of Trump.
@Just Another Ex-Republican:
Snowflakes with a persecution complex. Having gone to an evangelical affiliated University, I can attest to both thos adjectives personally. And this was a couple decades ago.
@DrDaveT: fortunately i only have cheap knives like a $30 stamped Henckles chef knife, some Farber boning knives, etc. If it’s good enough metal that it holds an edge, I’m good. I’m not a professional, I don’t need something forged by dwarves from a meteorite.
Is it just me or has anyone else noticed a lack of activity from Doug and James? I think maybe I am am spoiled with the frequency of Doug’s posts but it feels like the frequency of new posts has slowed the past couple of days.
If this is due to personal issues, folks being on vacation, life getting in the way (school/work responsibilities, etc.) than I totally understand and a few days of calm around this site is not the end of the world. In fact, I get that this post makes me seem a bit whiney and like someone who feels entitled to be able to always read new content on this site (for free, no less) while I sincerely feel that I am not that type of individual especially if you met me in real life.
Anyway, I just like to think of this post as further proof that I love this wonderful site.
@inhumans99:
No, you’re not whiny. I think we’re all a little spoiled by the quantity and quality of the articles posted here. And the comments are pretty high quality as well.
@inhumans99: I was thinking exactly that this AM and then this Open Forum popped up and I thought, “All’s OK.” But then I remembered, Doug has these programmed to automatically post every other day.
I’m beginning to think James, Doug, and Steven have been renditioned to Guantanamo Bay by the trump Admin who are in the process of rounding up the worst offenders among the commentors. Have you noticed Michael Reynolds hasn’t commented all day. Neither has Matt Bernius.
We might be ne
LOL…..I was laughing about this same thing this morning when I noticed nothing new from Doug but the Open Forum, and how great it was that we’re all like “Nobody to entertain us? That’s all right, we’ll just talk amongst ourselves and see where things go.”
Our hosts are pretty great for giving us a spot to do that in, thank you much, guys! Without this place I’d be forced to read the comments at other places, and I always lose my faith in humanity after that. 😉
There is no whinier group of babies than elderly white Trumpers.
Multiply the whine factor by 666 if they have a Jesus T-shirt on with the MAWA hat.
@J.P. McJefferson: Take at the Convention of States, a movement to restore the balance of powers according to the US Constitution, the way it was intended. The Federal unelected bureaucracy is out of hand – no limits and no accountability.
“Bring the power back to the states and to the people”
@DrDaveT: I just tried the online knife sharpening service and it was great. $59 for 4 knives – pricier than the hardware store that used to do it but try finding someone local who sharpens knives anymore – and easy as can be. Took about a week start to finish.
@inhumans99:
The last time, Doug disappeared for a few weeks. I hope everything’s ok.
@CSK:
Except for the ones about dung beetle fiction or the bucket of feces thrown by a Florida woman at her landlord.
I’m completely fucking gutted. No words. Crushed.
Neil Peart, the drummer and lyricist of Rush, has died at 67
And this is on top of Trump admitting he was under pressure from Republicans in the Senate whose votes he would need during the impeachment trial.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/world/middleeast/trump-iran-yemen.html
By the way, if you haven’t heard about the upcoming changes to Twitter’s reply capabilities, it should be a drastic improvement in the service. Tweeters can adjust the settings for a particular tweet such that rando assholes wouldn’t be able to reply. Lots of complaints already from the Reply Guy community.
@Bill:
Believe me, I’ve seen worse at other sites.
@Mikey: Me too. I’ve seen Rush 3 times, and every single concert STILL rates among the best I’ve ever seen live.
@Mikey:
Yeah, terrible news.
Not that many lyricists wrote science fiction rock songs.
@Teve: The irony to me of the article is that the “it must suck to be you” guys are part of “you” except that they haven’t caught on yet. Same with the ever-popular-in-these-quarters “why should I have any sympathy for people who won’t even move or train for a new job” folks. As Warren Buffet noted all those years ago, his class is kicking the asses of all the other classes in the class war. The difference being that he realized much earlier than most.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: first they came for the service workers, and I didn’t care because I had a degree. Then they came for the union workers,..
Waah waah waah, these whiners sure are making you, um, voice your displeasure in a high pitch.
@95 South: Guessing you’re having a sad about Uranium One and Hillary NOT getting locked up? 😉
@Kathy: That was the best part about their shows. I was in Phoenix at the time, mid 90’s? The whole show was like watching rock gods, everybody knew every song, every time.
Gen X’er, my Mom listened to Rush so I listened to that shit as a young lass. Same with Beatles and alllllll of the others. We are the musical bridge from the 60’s to….cough cough (Justin Bieber) and Reality TV.
I’m not sure what went wrong, but somewhere, it happened.
Iran admits to shooting down Ukrainian passenger plane unintentionally, report says
@95 South: Says one of the chief whiners here.
But if the minimum wage were $22 an hour, Betsy Devos would probably only have 7 yachts, instead of 10. She worked hard to inherit that money! How is that even fair???
@OzarkHillbilly: At least I’m calling out the people I have a problem with, not whining about them behind their backs. I might change someone’s mind. What are you hoping for here? Your best outcome is reinforcing fellow liberal whiners and beating down the stray conservative.
We are the musical bridge from the 60’s to….cough cough (Justin Bieber) and Reality TV…. I’m not sure what went wrong, but somewhere, it happened.
Digital media. Burnable CDs. Widespread pirating on college campuses. Usenet. The internet. iTunes and iPods. The demise of the big record companies as content gateways. The demise of contemporary pop/rock music radio. The “democratization” of pop/rock music. Being old-fashioned, I also suggest the demise of “sing-along-ability.” This was first pointed out to me many years ago by a woman during a discussion of why some 70s groups that boys thought were banal or worse were very popular with girls. “You’ve never been on a women’s dorm floor where someone is playing one of those groups and half the women on the floor are singing along.” I note in passing that the other day at McDonald’s I was watching one of the teen-aged Hispanic girls lip-syncing with an Eagle’s song that was probably three times as old as she was.
@Teve:
Considering how desperately eager Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo are to go to war against Iran, I will feel better if the Senate acquits Trump.
Trump’s now talking about a $50 billion “monster“ welfare bonus for farmers.
Seen on Twitter:
Trump is Putin’s butt-plug.
@charon: Somebody joked the other day that what republicans need is a mom: “oh you want a new war with Iran? Do you have any new war money? You already have plenty of war at home. You can’t start a new war until you finish one of the two you’ve already got.”
@95 South:
You might be happier at Lucianne.com, where commenters who criticize Trump are banned. I don’t think you will change the opinion of Trump expressed by almost anyone here.
@95 South:
The truth? A little self awareness would be nice.
@95 South: Some of us arrived here looking for conservative voices. James and Doug were well informed, good writers, and intellectually honest conservatives. It was either here or The American Conservative (which I still read occasionally*, despite Dreher’s constant whining). Our hosts have evolved, but it’s more the old saw that the Party left them.
This site could use a good conservative voice. You ain’t it. In fact the country could use a good conservative voice. WAPO and FTFNYT would pay serious money for one, but the best they can find are people like Douthat and Stevens. The problem seems to be, 95, that it is not possible to make an intellectually honest case for what the Republican Party stands for.**
* Is it my imagination, or are commenters at TAC getting better?
** We can have a discussion about what “conservative” means and whether the GOPs are, but as Dr. Taylor likes to point out, we get only two parties and they’re the conservative party. De facto Republican = conservative.
@gVOR08:
Hal10,000 is a good conservative voice.
Highly doubtful…but do keep trying, I suppose…
John Morrison has returned. Things will will step up a notch.
Well, I think you have to start by identifying what the Republican Party stands for these days. Ethnic nationalism*, cultural conservatism, low taxes and regulations on the wealthy and powerful, and… then I’m honestly at a loss.
I don’t see a through line from Bush’s trade policy to Trump’s, and I have no idea how to describe the foreign policy in a way that makes any sense. They aren’t key parts of the Republican Party if they will embrace a radical change without flinching.
I’m not sure you can make a good, intellectually honest argument for most of the things that Republicans are consistent with.
You could have a discussion of whether a multi-ethic state can be stable, but it’s a moot point because someone brought a whole lot of African slaves over here, so we are always going to be a multi-ethnic state.
Cultural conservatism often comes down to “you should be free to live your life as you want, but not too free…”
I don’t see any way to defend a policy of “the wealthy and powerful should be wealthier and more powerful”
*: Long before Trump was embracing the white nationalists, it’s been an undercurrent of the Republican Party — George W. Bush tried to push against it and failed. Democrats are less nationalist, and they tend to rally around ideas (equality and the pursuit of opportunity) rather than race.
@CSK: Is HAL conservative? He’s more conservative than a lot of people here, but I would have placed him more as a moderate with a mix of left and right.
@Teve: 😛
@charon: While I agree with you, THAT was a discomforting thought.
@95 South: It’s a free country and you can call yourself a conservative, a liberal, or the worlds greatest tenor, but that doesn’t make it so. You have never said anything that resembled actual conservative principles. You are to conservative principles as the Westboro Baptist Church is to Christian principles.
@Tyrell: Is Morrison off the roids enough to come back? On the other hand, The Big
SnoreShow is back, too. (And he even appeared in a match, not just a cameo.) Maybe it’s yet another oldies week at WWE. I hear that the main event at next year’s WrestleMania is gonna be Triple H, Undertaker, Batista, Hogan, and Rick Flair in a teevee trays, stepstools, and walkers match.“
youI should be free to liveyourmy life asyouI want, but you don’t need to benottoo free…”FTFY
@Gustopher:
I honestly do not understand how anyone can be culturally Conservative outside of a Burkean framework and simultaneously attempt to own the mantle of freedom or liberty.
It also seems untenable in the sense that the public/private dichotomy changes over time. Much more of life is played out on the public stage now than at anytime in history. So when some jackass from The Daily Wire posts a picture of a particularly exuberant person at an LGBT+ parade, Conservatives get the vapors.
The irony is that if the RW stopped trying to argue that a gender atypical person is deranged, maybe people wouldn’t feel the need to put on a flamboyant, public display of their identity. Ditto for any other identity.
If I wrote that Democrats hate blacks, or Jews, people would push back. No one challenges comments like Gustophers. He and Kurtz admit they don’t understand conservatives. If the rest of you are so well-read, you should be able to explain it to them. Either you don’t know they’re wrong or you don’t care. Where’s the hope for growth?
It is difficult to understand how one could call himself a true “conservative” and yet still support Trump…there’s a reason such people are thought of as being part of a cult…
@95 South:
Up until the 1960s, the Democrats were the racist party. And a lot of attitudes and policies did not turn on a dime with the passage of the civil rights acts. Some of irt is still there.
America has a problem with race. And anti-semitism. All of America. Even Democrats. Democrats tend not to embrace it of late.
If you said that Democrats hate blacks or Jews, as a blanket statement, that would be nonsense, but I’m 100% positive there are very real examples even up to the present day. Look back to the 2018 primary and the PUMAs.
Anyway, why don’t you explain what conservatism means in the context of the modern Republican Party?
@Kurtz:
There’s a balance between the freedom of the majority to decide how they want to live, and the freedom of the individual.
As an analogy, I would say it is roughly equivalent to zoning laws. If you maximize individual freedom, you can end up with a pig farm in a residential neighborhood. If you maximize the community’s freedom (think freedom of association) there are no pig farms anywhere, and I don’t know where black people live but it sure as hell ain’t here.
I think the cultural conservatives and the libertarians in the Republican Party have blurred the definitions of freedom to form an uneasy alliance.
On the other hand, remember that a whole swath of libertarians are more bothered with the government’s interference in a business owner’s right to associate with only their preferred clientele, rather than worrying about whether discrimination imposes a loss of opportunity and freedom on the minorities. It might not be such an uneasy alliance.
@Gustopher: 2008 primary. Typo.
@95 South:
You are ignoring the qualification in my post. So, let me just ask you:
Define a cultural Conservative; what does that paradigm mean to you?
@Gustopher:
I don’t think economic analogies really fit what I am talking about. It is a mistake to separate social and economic spheres completely, but it is also a mistake to assume that they function the same way.
The reason I highlighted Burkean Conservatisim is because, from what I understand, a perfectly reasonable modern interpretation would be:
Too much change, too fast risks tearing apart the fabric of society. Gradual change allows a society to develop organically, but retains its cohesive elements.
Whatever you want to call the GOP now, it ain’t that. I suppose you could call it some sort of Conservatism, but I think it probably tracks more toward a soft authoritarianism than something rooted in liberty.
Using the example from my post, there are differences between the following statements:
-If injustice exists, it is a fact of life. It is not the proper role for government to attempt to legislate social behavior.
-the government ought not take positive protective action toward LGBTQ, as society will evolve organically toward acceptance. Trying to force acceptance is an abrogation of someone’s rights, and risks breaking the cohesion of society.
-Sexual Orientation is a behavior that can be corrected. Gender identity is biologically determined by genitals, thus transpersons suffer from mental illness.
The first two are similar. The third one is extreme. Even leaving that aside, the first two are still fundamentally different, as the first only takes a position on the jurisdiction of government action without taking a position on the state of society.*
Those who think the third one is accurate are only Conservative as defined in terms of government action, but are certainly not expressing any appeal to liberty as a basis for a society. They would undoubtedly agree with the first two statements, but their disposition is fundamentally different from the first two. In practice, it can actually cast the mere existence of LGBTQ+ as a threat and worthy of government action.
The current condition of the GOP is much closer to the third one than the first two.
*Simply, the first can be described as indifferent to society. The second, non interventional because freedom is a natural evolution. The third, interventional when confronted by perceived threats to the social order.
Just got my first primary campaign text of the 2020 season. It’s from Bernie.
Since the Democratic Party will hold 26 primaries and caucuses before I can vote in the Illinois Primary on March 17 there’s no telling if Independent Candidate Sanders will even be in the running by then so I deleted it.
My research into the Democratic delegate selection process did mention something called the North Dakota Firehouse Caucuses and this note:
Participation in North Dakota’s delegate selection process is open to all voters who wish to participate as Democrats. North Dakota has neither party nor voter registration.
How do you spell voter fraud?
@Kurtz: Just dragging this to a random aside…
I’m not even sure that’s all that wrong with transgender folks. They have some kind of medical problem (physical or mental), otherwise they wouldn’t need medical intervention (gender reassignment surgeries).
But, what I find offensive is how transgender folks are treated. People with medical issues have equal rights, and should be accommodated where possible so they can live normally.
No sane person would yell at someone who lost their legs that they were incredibly careless to have lost their legs, that they did it just so they could sit down all the time, that wheelchair ramps are just encouraging them to not try walking up stairs and that their very presence encourages a perverted leg-free lifestyle.
And yet, that’s how transgender folks are treated.
If the far right wants to think of it as an illness, they should treat it as an illness — with respect and compassion and no condescension.
Does it present a danger to others? No.
Does it spread through exposure? No.
Can the person function in society? Yes.
Ok, get over your objections and your squeamishness.
Are trans women real women? Who cares?
They’re people. The deserve equal rights, and to be treated with respect.
(Despite being bi, I’m also willing to consider same sex attraction as a mental illness — one with no known cure, and which people can live with, like color blindness. I don’t know what purpose such an approach would serve (ADA protections? Fancy data modeling?), but I’m not opposed to it in principle)
Ahem.
Just a rant I had built up. The whole “they’re ill so we can treat them like shit” attitude just pisses me off. Very unchristian.
And what, exactly, would make same sex attraction a “mental illness”?
It seems as if many of the most unchristian people actually claim to be Christians…
@Gustopher:
Well, from a medical professional’s perspective, there would be a distinction in approaches to mental illness versus a physical ailment. (I tend to think that at some level, there is no difference biologically–mental processes are just an emergent property of the brain’s physical structure. But that isn’t germane here.)
I don’t think that a mental illness approach to same sex attraction gains anything, but has a downside that we see embodied by the RW now.
Even from simple definitions, gender and sex are not at all considered the same thing. Obviously, they are interchangeable informally and in some cases officially. But to social scientists, they are distinct.
But from a strictly physical perspective, even sex is a spectrum. See: PCOS and this. It is not as simple as boys have a penis and girls have a vagina.
Put simply, any attempt to to create a stable gender based on genitalia is a fool’s errand–the platform is wobbly.
To bring it back to your rant: I agree with it. I would just add that if, for example, Shapiro ridicules a transperson, it reveals his true character. In the end, he is either a highly intelligent liar or his reputation outweighs his cognitive abilities. I guess we could say he is just intellectually lazy, but i think he is worse than that: a cynical piece of shit.
@95 South’s whining that we don’t understand Conservatism is missing the point. It’s not that I don’t understand Conservative thought–it seems that s/he doesn’t understamd Conservatism. The GOP at the present time isn’t Conservative, it is reactionary and denialist.
@An Interested Party:
I intentionally avoided (mostly) the mental illness discussion, but I am curious about Gustopher’s response to your question.
@An Interested Party:
From the perspective that we have a biological imperative to breed to spread our genes, a same sex attraction is clearly doing it wrong.*
I don’t know that there would be any benefit to fixing it — frankly children are overrated larva, and most opposite sex couples seem to spend their time trying to not have kids — but a perfectly reasonable case could be made that it is a defect from a purely biological point of view.
I don’t know that there would be any benefit to considering it as an illness (any more than considering red hair as an illness), as there is no way to change it, there are no treatments, and it’s pretty harmless (as harmless as an opposite sex attraction), but I’m not opposed to using that model in principle.
(With red hair, there are treatments involving hair coloring at least, and the biology is much better understood.)
I am also not opposed to using the tools of epidemiology to examine the effects of gun violence.
Or using a disease model to examine the spread of crazy right wing ideas. Or religion.
Applying different models can change our viewpoint, and present options we haven’t considered. Or lead to rounding people up, putting them into camps and exterminating them. Or some world where embryos are tested and removed. Ok, there are a lot more nightmare scenarios than good ones.
*: Just because you are doing it wrong doesn’t mean it’s not a lot of fun…
@Kurtz:
The right wing approaches same sex attraction as a moral failing, rather than a mental illness. Some use phrasing of illness as an attempt to hurt people, and others will use the language of mental illness because they believe mental illness is a moral failing… But, really, they see it as a moral failing rather than anything biological.
After all, you can’t pray away the cancer — at least not in remotely reputable circles — but pray away the gay remains their preferred “treatment”.
That makes same sex attraction sound like pedophilia, as that generally doesn’t lead to breeding…I’m sure the usual homophobes on the right would, or indeed do, use just such an argument…
@Gustopher:
Biologically I’m not doing it right by not having kids at the age of 43. Good thing I’m not a slave to biology. Is ain’t ought.
@Gustopher:
In All in the Family, there’s a weird moment where Mike tells Gloria not to smother the baby, because that might turn it homosexual. It’s easy to forget that the notion of homosexuality as a mental illness was once considered the liberal position, as opposed to the conservative position that it was simply sinful. Since the 1970s, liberals (along with the scientific community) have moved away from considering it a mental illness, and that position was eventually co-opted by conservatives who wanted to give their views a veneer of scientific objectivity. I remember Trent Lott comparing it to alcoholism and kleptomania. Dr. Laura lost her TV show in large part over her comments that homosexuality was a “biological error.” However, she also cited the Bible to justify her views.
I’m not much invested in the debate over whether it’s a mental illness (if there is any such debate), because it strikes me as rooted in semantics. There’s no absolute, objective definition of what constitutes a mental illness, and if you’ve ever read from the DSM or other psychology manuals, it’s striking how often they refer to societal norms as a benchmark for their definitions of psychological disorders. That applies in particular to the notion of paraphilia (previously called sexual deviancy), which could be defined as any sexual interest regarded as abnormal enough to be considered a disorder. (Yes, I know it’s more complicated than that, but I don’t think you can totally escape the concept of social norms when distinguishing paraphilia from things we would regard as reasonably healthy sexual interests.)
Obviously, consent and harm are important concepts in the moral question of whether something deserves to be accepted by society at large, but they don’t fundamentally change what a condition actually is in terms of the mental processes involved.
The problem is that conservatives who invoke psychology to attack gays are being disingenuous, since it’s not the real reason for their opposition. When they call it an error or a disorder, they’re simply relying on the negative connotations of those terms to make their point, without actually explaining why it’s something that should be opposed on a large scale. (It’s similar to what they do when they claim “life begins at conception,” in which they use a vague scientific definition of “life”–no one disputes the fetus is alive–to bypass the larger question of when a developing human embryo should gain the rights of a “person.”) Biological errors aren’t intrinsically bad; indeed, they’re the driving force behind evolution. And even if homosexuality would seem to be relatively un-Darwinian (though there are a lot of human traits that could be described that way, most of which are fairly uncontroversial), that doesn’t make it a net negative in society apart from some extreme hypothetical scenario where birthrates are falling and the species is facing extinction–and even then, it wouldn’t justify the level of loathing and disgust you see in most anti-LGBT people.
@Gustopher
This is long. If you want a tldr:
-your view of evolution/genetics is confused by how it is taught. It is an abstract idea with complex mechanisms that is commonly put into human terms to make it easier to understand.
-it also informs your second mistake: putting mental illness into objective terms. Though that mistake can also be independent of your first misstep.
Part I: Biological Imperative
You’re imputing human motives to things that do not have motives. There isn’t a biological need to reproduce–the first replicating molecule didn’t have a motive in doing so. They replicated because that’s the chemical/physical process that replicators do.
Biological imperatives are the behaviors that result in survivial. Those behaviors are just responses to chemical signals. Water is required for survival, but an organism doesn’t know that. The signal just causes the organism to seek water.
The biochemical process for thirst is not:
“i haven’t had water for a whole day, if I don’t find water soon, i will not survive. So i should find water.”*
Rather, it is:
Body physically needs water – – > chemical signal for thirst – – > behavior (follow sensory inputs that indicate water) – – > behavior (travel to water)
But an organism is blind to all of this. Organisms just do whatever results from chemical processes. That is exactly how sex works. After an organism matures enough, the body signals sex, so organism engages in whatever behavior leads to sex.
So, sex is just a behavior resultant from chemical processes. An amoeba doesn’t decide to engage in binary fission. The footnote acknowledges that higher order organisms are more complex. But that complexity is just resultant from a higher density of processes. In fact, if the imperative was to pass genes on, doing it like amoebas do is way more efficient and less dangerous than, say, peacocking.
Now, this where most decently read people say, “but Dawkins.” But Sir Richard has expresses regret for calling his book The Selfish Gene specifically because it implies a blijd process has motive.
In short, you’re confusing a pedagogical tool with the object of study.
*this is what it seems that modern humans do, but the process is actually over-complicated for us because we have complex neurology. But the underlying biological signals for thirst are the same as any other organism. The physical sensation of thirst causes us to seek a beverage.
Part II: Gayness as a defect/mental illness
This will be much shorter, because it is simpler to explain. Remember, genes are expressed in specific environments. They are not black boxes.
Take for example, in America in 2020, Sickle Cell Anemia is a genetic defect. But it is not a defect any place and time that Malaria is endemic.
Putting genes in terms of good/bad is an incomplete answer to a poorly phrased question.
Mental illness is, in at least most cases, culturally defined. In this place and time, severe ADD can ruin a person’s chance of meeting goals. But it probably had little to no effect in previous eras. So was it really an illness before?
If you stuck with me this long, thanks.
@Gustopher:
As @Kylopod points out, it matters not what explanation they cite, RWers want to eliminate behavior that they disagree with. And it doesn’t matter what reality based reason you give or how airtight your proof. It will be coopted.
Why? I don’t know, but it means they have zero ground to claim the mantle of freedom. Remember, that was the overarching point of my first post in this thread.
At one time, they would make laws or pass ordinances. They are still trying to control the behavior of other people. It may not be through the government apparatus, but that’s why i called it soft authoritarianism.
We should get a thread about how Trump’s Department of Justice investigated the whole uranium one deal and didn’t find shit.
@Teve: The FPers are probably waiting for the release of the actual report. Right now we have little more than rumors.
Yesterday I read a story about 17 yr old Wolf Cukier discovering a new planet. Today I read this bit of old but new to me history:
@OzarkHillbilly:
I was aware of the rare alignment and the milestone the Voyager program reached, but not of how it originated.
BTW, the reason Voyager 2 was the one to visit Uranus and Neptune, is that the main objective was to do fly-bys of Jupiter and Saturn (*), and NASA decided to make sure that would happen with the first probe.
(*) Jupiter and Saturn align from Earth’s POV far more often. A generation earlier, the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes flew by both
I need a new rave up.
Listening to Crystal Castles and We Were Indians (hat tip to Michael Reynolds)
I need a song that resolves as a great big resounding din. Glorious, massive cacaphony and joy.
And loud. Really, really loud.
Something new that stuns me into oblivion. I need that.
Please help.
I wanted the loudest version of Be My Little Baby ever (bless the Ronettes) and I found The Dollyrots.
But I need faster, louder, bigger.
I need to freak out to a great really loud song really soon. I need this.
Crikey!
There are butt loads of punk covers of Be My Little Baby. Explore. It is so worth it.
I am fond of The Huntingtons.
But I need more. An explosive, massive, overwhelming joyful noise.
I need it.
Fast loud hard versions of Surrender by Cheap Trick.
I wish I had louder speakers.
Am I alone in this?
Every so often I need to bathe in a great loud song. Jank about. Box the walls and the lamps. Be a big stupid physical fool.
The Coverups (Green Day doing covers) do actually have a great loud version of Surrender that ends in that glorious massive resounding din that I crave.
Not a huge Green Day fan, but this fucking rocks hard. I approve.
@de stijl: Have you ever listened to much Pigface? When I get in that mood, I generally go for “Bitch” or “Asphole”.
I saw them live once. They were melt-your-face awesome, when Asphole started playing and you could see the shadows behind the screen, and that catchy little intro started…..Wow. 😉
@de stijl: I am quite fond of Blueberry Boat by the Fiery Furnaces.
It tells a story, and it builds nicely and loudly. Not really a cacophony, but quite nice.
I saw a show once so loud my innards jiggled.
My liver and kidneys resonated with the drum beat. It was intense and a bit disconcerting and possibly the greatest thing I’d ever witnessed first hand.
It was insanely loud. My internal
organs throbbed to the beat.
I was bliss. I was peaking on psilocybin.
Standing On The Edge Of The Hoover Dam.
@de stijl: Hahahaha….that might’ve been why Pigface was so awesome, also. They had a 25th reunion tour last year and I WANTED to go, but I didn’t think it would be the same sober, soooo…..
@de stijl: Fun fact: I spent the night of my wedding stranded on a speedboat on Lake Mead. All. Night. Long. The motor very casually said “See ya, losers!” and fell off the boat not far from the marina….no oars, no trolling motor, no radio, no emergency lights and a steady breeze that pushed us all the way across to the fish hatchery. Just us, 2 other couples, and a BUNCH of beer. This was LONG before cell phones, so we just bobbed out there all night long, and tried not to fall in when we had to pee.
@Jax:
You peddle this as a sob story, but you had beer. And a fish hatchery! Win win!
I guy apologize for the peeing bit. It’s way easier for us. We face the way we pee. Unzip, pull down, do it. Easy as shit.
It’s way harder for girls. You have to get way more undressed and balance on your toes.
I hope the marriage was better than the wedding night. Lake Mead is a pretty place to get lost, though. Red rocks all about.
I know Lake Mead, rented a houseboat there for a week. Good times.
I hope Doug is OK. I totally understand him needing a break, he is a prolific writer, but damn it…..announce it, so we don’t send out the cavalry!!
If you want to know the kind of elderly snowflakes Fox News caters to, they literally had a story where they referred to the word damn as “the D-word”.
linky
Damn, that is stupid!
Most original content channels now allow almost every curse word, if contextually benign.
As long as it is not used as a verb, fuck and shit are totes okay on FX, etc.
What channels do these folk watch?
@de stijl:
The more pressing question I have is, what president do they think they support?
Surely not the one who moves on them like a b—-.
@de stijl: Not necessarily a sob story, per se…..I mean, I was fully aware of the irony after my drive thru, “Hey, we’re in Vegas, we should get married!” wedding with the Elvis preacher. 😉
Definitely a story, however.
Yeeesssss…..us ladies invented some interesting ways to get it done.
Doesn’t matter if you’re a boy or a girl, you should never piss into the wind!
@de stijl: “I need to freak out to a great really loud song really soon. I need this”
Seashore by the Regrettes.
@de stijl: @Teve: @Kylopod:
When I was a kid (late 80s/early 90s) Hard Copy was around. I don’t think I ever watched it for more than a couple minutes, but Fox News’s presentation reminds me of that.
I saw something the other day railing against CNN saying “shithole countries” a bunch of times without censoring it the day that story broke. I think it was on The Daily Wire. It’s amazing how outraged RWers get about something innocuous that gets said all the time, everywhere. Yet they get angry that actual offensive language directed at a person’s identity can cause a backlash. Somehow the d word and the s word are more offensive than casting aspersions on an entire nation or ethnic group.
Aside: whenever some GOP Congressperson claims that tech companies are supressing Conservative stories, I wonder why my suggested stories feed on Chrome is almost exlusively populated with stories from Fox, National Review and Daily Wire. It amkes no sense, because I rarely visit those sites. Plus, if someone looked at my web history, it would be obvious where I am on the political spectrum.
Literally the first reply is ‘Hillary sold all are Uranium to the Russians!!!!’
I fear Doug may have gone missing again. He doesn’t seem to have posted on Facebook at all the last two days.
On other things, the onion sauce with ground beef (and minus the parmesan! though I added a small piece of Gouda, which melted into the sauce), was very good. It goes well with fettuccine, too.
Next week I want to try tangerine chicken. I wonder if I can use cucumber in the veggie mix. I usually add carrots, jícama, celery, soy bean sprouts, and onions(*). I’m thinking cucumber without seeds would fit in.
(*) I think I’ve never cooked an entree without onions in it
Sorry to see Booker drop out of the race. He never got any traction, but I think he has a role to play.