Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, May 19, 2024
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72 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Just gonna leave this little ditty here.
Currently reading Chasing New Horizons, by Alan Stern and David Grinspoon, about the mission to explore Pluto and the Kuiper belt.
You’d think designing, building, and launching a probe that has to withstand the Sun’s heat, then Jupiter’s environs (for a gravity assist), then the cold of the outer Solar System, not to mention the accelerations both at launch and the boost phase (including a third stage for the Atlas V), would take a long, long time. And that’s why such missions take so long to come to fruition.
Well, it does. Just not that long. And I’m including testing, finding flaws and problems, and correcting them.
What really take s along, long, long, long time, and the reason such missions take decades from conception to launch, is navigating NASA’s processes, which involves a great deal of politics, in order to get funding and approval for the mission.
This makes some sense. NASA’s budget is no unlimited, and thus there will always be more worthwhile missions than the money to fund them all.
Still, a Pluto mission was proposed seriously in 1989, and New Horizons launched only in 2006. Of these 17 years, less than a fourth were taken to design, build, and test the probe. The rest was getting it approved.
Fun fact, Pluto was demoted seven months after New Horizons launched. One wonders whether any Pluto mission would have been approved had the demotion taken place earlier, say at some time in the 90s or early 2000s.
It’s one thing to spend a lot of money to explore the last unexplored planet, and a different one to go after the largest (known) Kuiper belt object.
@Kathy:
The largest known Kupier Belt object is Eris, not Pluto. The discovery of one bigger than Pluto is what triggered Pluto’s demotion, because the alternative was to make Eris a planet too, and they were worried about setting a precedent that could lead to dozens of planets being discovered.
@Stormy Dragon:
Beat me to it. IIRC, Eris is almost identical to Pluto in diameter, but Eris is 27% more massive.
Also, the orbit of Eris has the same 2:3 resonance with Neptune that Pluto has.
@Stormy Dragon:
See, now, that only makes it worse. Not a planet, not even the largest Kuiper belt object, but just some rock out there 🙂
That was a random counterfactual, not one thought out. But here’s another:
Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930, lived to be over 90. Had Voyager 1’s trajectory been held to plan, it would have flown past Pluto in 1986. This would have made Tombaugh the only person to discover a planet (as Pluto hadn’t been demoted by then), and to live to see that planet explored up close.
Currently reading The Fortunes of Africa: with a long subhead. I knew the broadest of outlines, but not much detail on Africa. The book is limited, inevitably, by the lack of written records from a lot of African kingdoms and empires, so the narrative tends to focus on sub-Saharan Africa’s interactions with Europe, as well as the Mediterranean littoral states, and in later chapters moves on post-colonial Africa.
Summarizing you have one absolute piece of shit individual or country after another, each seeing the ongoing horror and saying, ‘hold my beer.’ Some generally well-regarded European countries like Portugal and Belgium, and peoples like the Dutch, have the kinds of involvements you might associate with Germans. Or Mongols. The Middle Passage I knew a fair amount about (old reading for a book I never wrote), less about the Arab slave trades (featuring both Black and White slaves). Interestingly, the Brits come off best among Europeans. They fought the slave trade, not just at sea, but within Africa, frequently clashing with other European colonial as well as African powers.
That said, no one can lie like the English. For sheer perfidy and betrayal, always with an air of moral superiority, it’s hard to beat the Brits. “We absolutely recognize your right to rule this land that. . . oops, sorry, we just stole it, it’s ours now.”
I’d read about Leopold II, a European monster able to go toe-to-toe with Hitler and Stalin in the Top Ten of Evil. Did not realize the role the automobile and the bicycle played. Leo was not turning a profit in Congo until pneumatic tires made rubber profitable. And rubber requires little to no investment. You just find a village in the jungle, take families hostage, and order folks into the jungle to bring back enough rubber, or else their children may be hacked to death.
And of course after being abused in every inhuman way possible by Portugal, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, (what, no Norwegians?) Britain and Egypt, there came the home-grown horrors like Mobutu and Mugabe and Amin and the Boers.
Not a happy story.
Ringo “Peace and Love” Starr. Groomer
Hebephilia and ephebophilia are the same as pedophilia.
Comment deleted
Could we just not, please? That’s not the place we built nor want it to degenerate into.
Thx,
-SLT
@charontwo:
Pluto has a greater diameter and the measurements of Eris are not as precise.
@charontwo:
As a Discordian, I REALLY like Eris =3
Especially since getting discovered and completely throwing our understanding of how the solar system works into chaos is a totally Eris thing to do.
@Paul L.:
Professor Taylor didn’t like my first response, so let me take a softer tone: you seem obsessed with ‘false’ accusations of sex crimes. You’ve brought up the Duke Lacrosse case, what, a dozen times? (At least now that case is 18 years old.)
Comedian Gianmarco Soresi: “Technically speaking R. Kelly is not a pedophile. . .but I think the reason we don’t make those distinctions is because it’s very hard to explain the difference without sounding like a pedophile.”
Just as it is very hard to cite the differences between pedophilia, ephebophilia and hebephillia in defense of a racist murderer without sounding like a person of questionable morality.
@Michael Reynolds:
Gracias.
Because the Middle East didn’t have enough going on to destabilize everything.
Rescuers struggle to find helicopter carrying Iranian president after ‘hard landing’ (Gift link)
Ongoing live updates at the link.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Hey, I’m a professional writer, I am used to getting notes from editors and producers and whatnot.
We actually have a triage system for notes:
1) Notes that are so f’king stoopid we have no choice but to ignore them. (20%)
2) Notes that don’t really matter because they’re just an editor pretending to contribute something. With these we do, ‘phony compliance,’ meaning we do a few, pretend we did the rest then push things so close to deadline there’s no possibility of a follow-up. (75%)
3) Notes that – gasp – are actually right. We do these. (5%)
Twice though we’ve had major contributions from editors. Both times they were right, and we saved books that grew into series and made us big piles of money. Stopped clocks and all that.
@Mikey:
There’s a very long list of nations and groups that may have contributed to that ‘hard landing.’
@Paul L.: @Michael Reynolds: @Steven L. Taylor: Just for the record, we all know that the song is originally from 1960, that Johnny Burnette, the singer, was 26 when he sang the original, and that Robert Sherman, the songwriter, was 35 when he wrote it, right? There’s plenty of accusations of improper attitudes toward minors and sexuality to go around here–though why Ringo Starr having sung it is important is beyond me to begin with–so, I suggest that we all take a deep cleansing breath and step away from the bong (preferably in reverse order).
Sheesh! Some days, this place is just like Glenn Beck or Mark Levin.
@Paul L.: “Good Morning, (Little) Schoolgirl” was first recorded in 1937. If we assume the schoolgirl was 13, she would be a hundred years old now.
Say what you will about modern music, but the entire genre of “I want to fuck a child” songs has really taken a nosedive in popularity.
I suspect that a lot of this is because of the shift to streaming, where listeners have to make a much more conscious choice about what they are listening to than in the radio era, so hit records develop more organically, and there’s also more room for a near infinite amount of music to find its audience, rather than having a much more limited amount of music they are exposed to via radio.
I also assume that the people who program radio stations are just pedophiles.
(Currently listening to “Oysters In My Pocket” by Royel Otis, a song about the improper storage of easily spoiled foods)
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I’m not sure if El Paul is trying to use it as a gotcha moment, or whether he is trying to defend a racist, pedophile murderer. Probably both.
But, why would you go out of your way to bring up and then defend a racist murderer against imprecise charges of pedophilia unless you are ok with his racism, murder and the specific brand of pedophilia?
@Michael Reynolds:
I understand that progressives are using his creepy behavior to prove he is a murderer just like Rittenhouse.
Does the 18+ year time limit apply to any other cases or just ones that progressives would have to defend under MeToo despite the evidence and narrative being against them?
@Paul L.: “progressives” don’t have to prove anything as he’s already been convicted of murder by a jury of his peers as required by law.
The creepy behaviour just further proves he’s a creep in general.
@Gustopher:
Gerry Eastman Studds
It is all the same to someone with a axe to grind.
Because anyone under 18 is a child. 8 is same as 12/14 is the same as Democrat new voting age of 16/17.
Good commie advancing on someone with a firearm that J. Last claims was not ready to shoot is the same as a racist murderer fleeing with a locked and loaded firearm ready to shoot.
Love is love except if related or already married.
@Matt:
And the pardon is just as legally valid as required by the rule of law as the conviction by a jury.
Rittenhouse and Zimmerman were exonerated by a jury but the woke still say that are guilty.
@Michael Reynolds:
Including various Iranian ones.
@Gustopher:
Help me out here with the narrative.
Bad Woke commie Foster advanced with his not ready to shoot AK to stop the racist pedo/MAP groomer from running overbwith his car other woke Antifa BLM commies attacking his car.
Racist MAP grooner shot Commie making him a good Commie.
Why didn’t Racist MAP grooner try to keep running over other commies?
Is grooner a anti LGBTQIAMXYZ+++ slur?
@Paul L.: Do you smell toast?
If you want to troll people, traditionally you have to make enough sense that they understand what point you are making. All I got from that is that you are pro-incest, in addition to being against age of consent laws, which is certainly an opinion a person can have.
Is this some newfangled Dadaist trolling technique?
This is kind of nice:
In 1961, due to pressure from the Kennedy administration, one lone black pilot was chosen to enter astronaut training. His name was Ed Dwight. He never made it to NASA, even though he had the same experience and skills other astronauts and astronaut candidates. But he caused quite a stir in the news and media at the time, and often gets mentioned in space travel histories.
In January 6th 1967, Apollo 1 caught fire while undergoing a crewed test on the launchpad, killing all three astronauts on board (fire in a pure oxygen atmosphere is particularly intense). The crew were Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White.
At the time, as Ed Dwight was better known to the public and to news organizations, he was reported dead, even though he was nowhere near Apollo 1 at the time. remember, Dwight never made it into NASA.
What’s really odd, is that some space histories, including some quality and reputable ones, still mention the first African American astronaut died in Apollo 1. I even have a copy of Time Life’s “Man In Space,” written by Arthur C. Clarke, that says this. There’s a photo of the crew well before the fire, in which you can see three white men, identifying Ed White as the first black astronaut. I puzzled over that photo many hours in my early teens, wondering which of these white men was black.
All that side, it’s nice Ed Dwight made it into space six decades later.
Legally valid? Yes, I don’t think anybody is arguing otherwise. We’re just saying it is a morally bankrupt act taken by a morally bankrupt individual. And a very Republican thing to do. If you don’t like our saying that, fine. Life is rough all over.
Joe Biden at the National Museum of African American History and Culture on Friday:
He’s a uniter….right?
But if one looks at past actions:
@OzarkHillbilly:
Michael Morton convicted murderer
Let’s thank Paul L of reminding us of when Ringo owned the Jr. Miss USA contest and bragged about entering their dressing rooms.
@Steven L. Taylor: why not just solve the root problem?
Does Paul L come here to try to further debate? Does he come here to explain his views? Is he coming to discussions in good faith? Is he otherwise entertaining? Does he help maintain the site that you built in a way you want it to be?
Your site, your rules, do what you want.
I’m just really curious about what MR might have written that was worse than repeated deliberately ill-formed gibberish and a tossed salad of memes shortened to be devoid of meaning.
@JKB: people do change over the course of a half-century or so. Sometimes even for the better.
And parties also change. The white supremacists have made a home for themselves in the Republican Party in the last few generations, and are a key part of the Republican coalition.
What have Republicans done lately? There’s a reason Black voters vote for Democrats by a 8-1 margin, and it’s not that they’re stupid.
Geez. Just checked in for the first time today only to see another thread shot to hell by these two clowns
@Paul L.: Lost the edit button above. @Paul L.: Sorry. Linky no workee. NOW I got one. sigh…
So I goggled Michael Morton and this is what Greeted my eyes:
Do you have a point? Because I’m not seeing it. Or maybe you don’t know the difference between exonerated and pardoned?
@Kathy: good story, and Dwight looks elated. And he looks significantly younger than his 90 years!
@Gustopher:
No, he doesn’t. Your reminder that Paul L by his own admission is not interested in honest discourse:
”I don’t want to convince anyone. I want to see how people will go to defend what I see as indefensible.”
@MarkedMan:
Gee should I shoot the thread to hell some more by saying why I think Biden is going to lose in November? I’m not a clown just a holder of an unpopular opinion around here.
@JKB: And it was Republicans that ended slavery!!! And it was Republicans who voted for the Civil Rights Act!!!
My God, this kind of trollish yapping was tired when it was dragged out twenty years ago. Can’t you come up with something a tiny bit more original? I mean, if Joe Biden is as terrible as you say, surely you can find something objectionable about him that dates from this century…
@Paul L.:
I deliberately haven’t taken part in this conversation because I can’t figure out what the hell you’re talking about, though I recognize the names.
What’s a “grooner”? Is that like a cross between groaner and crooner?
A recent episode of Doctor Who has a villain (the avatar of music, come to steal music) played by a transgender woman* drag performer** Jinkx Monsoon. And she is over-the-top in every scene as the Maestro (who is a they/them non-binary entity)
The whole thing leaves me vaguely uncomfortable. Drag, especially in this context, just rings the same bells as minstrel shows for me.
I play banjo, specifically old-time clawhammer and two-finger picking’ banjo, and there’s an absolute shitload of really racist stuff in this hobby because of minstrelcy. Songs like “Half-Shaved Ni-clang” are common — and lest you think the ni-clang is the only bad part, “half-shaved” is apparently a reference to lynching). You have to acknowledge the history*** of a lot of the traditional music to engage with it.
And minstrel shows weren’t just white guys in black face. If that’s all it was, drag wouldn’t remind me of that.
It was also very often Black folk outlining their own eyes in white, and accentuating their lips. If you were a black musician in the 1800s and early 1900s this was a job you could have.
It was members of the out-group performing stereotypical versions of their own group for the entertainment of the in-group. And that’s what drag in Doctor Who makes me think of.
Everyone in the production of Doctor Who is somewhere in the LGBTQ+ (ok, there’s probably a token straight person somewhere in accounting or something), so they aren’t making anything quite like Shirley Temple in Blackface, and it’s really meant in a positive, fun, empowering way but… they’re still making it for a largely straight audience that won’t see it that way.
(This reminds me of the Dave Chapelle bit on the difference between Black people and ni-clangs, which my brothers love for all the wrong reasons)
Just a little icky.
I’m sure there’s a line somewhere between minstrel shows and drag, but I just cannot see it. And that makes me uncomfortable. Anyone have any thoughts on where the line is? Is this just a bit of harmless transphobia**** in my part?
Also, I think the villain wasn’t great. Ms. Monsoon gave the performance exactly as she and the director wanted, but she’s always fully on, volume turned up to 11, and the total performance lacks any quiet moments that are needed to build menace.
*: her pronouns and identity have changed over the years, so you may find things referring to her as they/them and non-binary. Wikipedia says she identified as trans-femme and she/her in a 2024 interview.
**: I know it’s all the rage to talk about trans women being men competing in women’s sports, but what about women (even trans women) performing as drag queens? Surely that’s an unfair advantage!
***: the banjo was a traditional African gourd instrument, remade on slave plantations, and then adapted with metal strings. After minstrel shows, almost no Black person has touched this instrument.
****: I think my being squicked out by drag and not wanting to ban it, or restrict trans people, or do anything like that is about as harmless as you can get. I just don’t go to drag queen story hours… woo. (and I assume that drag queen story hours present the drag performer as a lot more human-playing-a-role than this episode of Doctor Who)
ETA: Am I attempt in to derail a troll by bringing up race, transgender rights, drag, and science fiction all in one comment? No, not consciously, this has just been rattling around in my head for a bit.
ETA2: This new run of Doctor Who hasn’t delighted me yet. It’s fun, but it runs too much on emotion than logical plot developments, so it doesn’t feel like Doctor Who. That was a problem with all of RTD’s season endings during his first run as show-runner, too.
@Gustopher:
You’re starting to sound like an author of the ebooks I write. Does that scare you?
Though I don’t think I ever had a drag queen in any of my stories. Sex workers yes. Liza Minelli or Cher impersonators no.
@JKB:
We have no interest in unifying with white supremacist MAGA trash. Cockroaches should be driven out of the home — not negotiated with.
Agreements with anti-Trump conservatives, sure.
It’s 2024.
@Bill Jempty: It’s not that it’s an unpopular opinion as much as a horrifying possibility. Trump supporters don’t generally get the difference.
@Bill Jempty:
Why not? I’m sure everyone missed it the first nineteen times lol
@MarkedMan:
The troll may have to come here and spew their BS. Like the scorpion in the fable, it’s their nature.
Feeding them, though, is a choice.
Drag King
@Michael Reynolds:
I went traditional publishing just recently and at the moment I have two finished books being worked on by two different editors. Diane and Courtney email me if they have some issue with something I’ve written. This has happened only four times. I guess I’m not driving them up the wall too often.
Of my 29 self-published books, 24** of them are proofread by one of two people who so graciously helped me out, Steve and Leeanne. Steve concentrated on proofreading, Leeanne proofread and edited my books. LA and I had a system- We’d put notes in the story file when needed to clarify things in my case, and in some instances for LA to sternly correct me about something I wrote or knock my head to not go off on some unnecessary tangent. LA would also tweak my writing sometimes. This for example-
Someone in the back of the room quipped that he should have grabbed his toothbrush and pajamas before heading out of his home that night. Everyone, Isoshi included, had a good laugh, and then someone else added, “Real reporters keep a spare toothbrush and pajamas in their bottom drawer, right next to the whiskey bottle.”
The bold part was added by LA. I love it. While she didn’t work on my best seller, it was some constructive criticism she gave that caused me to re-write it some before publishing it at Amazon. LA said my main character whined too much. She was right.
Tentatively, my publisher is going to let LA*** finish that unfinished book. My trip to Australia is partly for the purpose of me doing some research for it.
*- The first of which will be hitting the bookstores in August. Sometime after that I’m going to be doing book signings.
**- Yes there are five ebooks of mine only I proofread or edited. Call me brave or stupid.
***- She’s a published author and sometime editor.
@Bill Jempty: Bill, whether I agree with you or disagree with you, whether I am interested in any given comment or not, you are a legitimatley contributing member of this community in my eyes. I don’t skip your posts and I certainly don’t get annoyed.
@Gustopher:
I want to like Dr. Who, but it never takes. Their publisher tried to hire me to write some Dr. Who spin-off books. I declined on the grounds that I’m American. Real reason: I’d need to get at least a bachelor’s in Dr. Who mythology, the fans can be brutal, and I’m American. A really nice pitch package, though.
@Bill Jempty:
Editors are like lane-keeping software: mostly useless, but every now and then they save your ass.
@JKB:
So you have to go back 51 years to get anything on Biden? Half a century? I don’t think you understand what you just demonstrated. But thanks for the reassurance.
@Michael Reynolds:
My first 2 editors were great. My third was nice, but tried to pretty up what I wrote. (Her other authors complained about this, too.) My fourth editor was so busy moonlighting to pay his alimony and child support as well as maintain his second family that I don’t think he even read anything I wrote.
@Gustopher:
Look, I (we) try to allow for open discussion. So, there is some level of toleration that we try to practice. I, personally, would suggest that people do what I learned to do a while back and ignore Paul L. It is largely impossible to know what he is talking about save by some amount of guessing. I once tried to give him some sincere instruction on how to engage, but not surprisingly he ignored it.
He hasn’t done enough to be banned, but it is tempting.
I deleted what I considered an inflammatory personal attack that was not warranted, in my opinion.
@Michael Reynolds: It’s not the Doctor Who fans that are brutal, it’s the rage-baiting professionally aggrieved people. There’s a small number who have been complaining that Doctor Who is woke ever since they learned the word “woke”, and they spend their time creating YouTube videos lamenting the death of Doctor Who for decades, and getting ad revenue for doing so.
(The outrage over the Doctor having a gay companion, the Doctor being a woman, and the Doctor being Black were the same people, vowing that the show was over for them, etc, over and over.)
And nearly everyone else just rolls with it. People tune out when it isn’t their thing, and then come back and try it again with the next Doctor. Everyone has at least one Doctor they mostly skip over for their own reasons, and that’s fine.
Continuity is a vague suggestion (the Cybermen have at least 3 different origins, same with the Doctor himself), and most stories are nearly continuity free.
There are a few stories that are pretty universally hated (the moon is an egg, some guy fucks floor tiles*, the Master becomes a cat boy, Galifrey is destroyed yet again, half the universe is destroyed yet again) but by and large they are just ignored and never referred to again. They might get dragged up if someone thinks they have a good story to tell and then sink back into the background when that allegedly good story sucks.
And everyone rolls with it. No one is screaming that they need to go back and fix whatever it was that was so awful.
Of all the large fandoms, I think it’s probably the least toxic. Certainly better than Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, Rick & Morty, and Zach Snyder’s DC.
*: not technically accurate, as it’s a slab of cement. But I went for the alliteration.
@Kathy:
Is it, though? I first started participating in discussions groups like this well over 40 years ago, when the Internet hadn’t yet spawned from ARPAnet. And one thing I’ve learned is that if there’s more than a handful of people, the group always, and I mean always, engages the troll/trumper/mentally disturbed person. I don’t understand why, but I have to accept reality.
@CSK:
The very best sort of editor.
@JohnSF:
He’s got 12 vice presidents. If it’s number 12 behind this, they’re going to lose a lot of helicopters.
@MarkedMan:
Yes it is.
Reasons vary between people, and as per the Michael Reynolds’ Principle, there are often multiple motivations.
I’d posit it’s similar to the decision to talk to the police without a lawyer when you’re a suspect, testifying at one’s own trial against advice of counsel, trying to explain to the TSA screener why your half-filled bottle can go through, and other things along these lines.
Motivations vary, as I said, but one is that the person feeding the troll thinks they can change the troll’s mind (if any) and make them see reason.
Another is to address a clear falsehood to the vast (one hopes) silent or mostly silent majority that read these threads but do not post. I can respect that, but there are ways of addressing such things without feeding the trolls.
@Kathy:
That’s Bernius and Taylor, despite what I presume is decades of experience. I think everyone else is motivated by wanting to shout at the idiot. The fact that the idiot’s primary motivation is to get people shouting means that it is a perfectly symbiotic relationship.
@MarkedMan:
I’m playing to the lurkers, the same audience the trolls are going for.
Sometimes I think they are playing to lurkers, sometimes it’s a replacement for (or adjunct to) pornography, and sometimes it’s to derail an otherwise productive conversation. It’s the last one that I think is most damaging, since even if the other motivations are there disruption is almost always at least a byproduct that they get free
@JohnSF:
I wouldn’t dare jump to any conclusions on the crash. There is a thing called GTI in aviation, “Get There Itis”. This is a condition which can be squared or cubed in pilots transporting VIPs. Nobody want’s to let the Big Boy down. Acute cases were suffered by the pilots transporting Billy Ray Vaughn and Kobe Bryant, fer instance, who talked themselves into marginal weather…and they knew better.
It was also an Iranian military helicopter. Translation: “Old Russian”.
@Gustopher:
I shouldn’t have said brutal, a better word would be, exacting. They know their canon. I have a hard time keeping track of mythologies I/we actually created. I write then move on. The fans read and stay. But I am very pleased that the 2 fandoms I’m part of (lord of?), people now in their 20’s and 30′, have been universally the sweetest, most open and tolerant people I could have hoped for.
@dazedandconfused:
It was actually old American. A Bell of some sort, likely pre-1979 vintage. Iran has a lot of civil and military aircraft from the 70s (still). Did you know Iran is the only country other than the US that flies the F-14 Tomcat?
The US Navy retired it in the early 2000s.
BTW all signs point to one dead Iranian president.
A sufficiently pushy and self-I VIP, can also make the flight crew try to land in, or fly through, hazardous conditions.
@dazedandconfused: once lived & cruised aboard a sailboat. Have done a bit of wilderness travel. Here’s a true saying: the most dangerous thing you can take with you is a schedule.
@Paul L.:
A normal guy can look at Ringo Starr and be happy for all the success he’s had, and that he married an incredibly beautiful woman like his wife. Ol’ Ringo has given a lot to the world, after all. He seems to be a happy man, and that makes most of us happy.
But you can’t do that, can you? Nothing to offer to the world except venom and BS.
Sad.
@dazedandconfused:
Agree.
Cock-up is always more likely than conspiracy.
Especially with elderly helicopters in bad weather in mountains.
Just one of those “acts of God”, as they say.
Poor old Raisi.
He’ll be sadly un-missed.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Could you link to these instructions?
@anjin-san:
You should view some Young Turks, Majority Report, MeidasTouch, Glenn Kirschner and BreadTube (Second Thought,The Humanist Report) YouTube videos.
@Paul L.:
If I view them will I become confused enough to equate “You’re Sixteen” with “Jailbait”?
@anjin-san:
Did you not see the story proving a man’s guilty when
@Paul L.: This can be a challenging concept at times, but the “speaker” of a song is not the singer. It’s a fictitious personality, a short story told in the first person.
In the case of that particular song, the “speaker” is probably another 16 year old. Or someone with a legal and socially acceptable interest.