Religion, politics, sex .. and other taboo subjects

Yah, blaming the Liberals for acting like... oh, dear, two Republican stalwarts. :rolleyes:

I happened to find Dinesh D'Souza's definition of the Chewbacca Defense (from South Park) --
...someone asserts his claim by saying something so patently nonsensical that the listener's brain shuts down completely.
The Extreme Right has been doing this for decades. It's just now, due largely to the new prominence of sheep who cannot have an opinion without parroting their Facebook or Twitter feed, that this self-hypnosis has become de riguer -- anyone NOT doing it is suspect.

So now we have the Right-Thinking People who have barricaded themselves safely away from intrusion (by logic, fact, history, common sense, observable reality...), & realizing they're thus trapped are actively seeking to root out & severely punish whoever it was that imprisoned them.

As Pogo put it, "We have met he enemy and he is us." That is now outright heresy to a Right Wingnut -- nobody within the barricade is capable of error.

And anyone outside of the barricade is The Enemy, a tight-knit conspiracy of vicious ability, not the random, disorganized, & often squabbling rabble they pretend to be.

Why ridicule? Because it's the only communication channel that remains between the opposed sides.

According to the Right-Thinking People, only the Right Thinking are allowed to be angry, because they are the only people who are truly aggrieved. Likewise, they are the only people allowed to have bruised feelings.

Anyone else who finds a Right Wingnut's words or actions to be threatening or hurtful is therefore overstepping -- they have walked into High Mass & begun chowing down on the wafers.

Reasonable discourse has likewise been banned. Any difference, however calm, is an attack on Right Thinking, & therefore to be met with assault.
The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
 
According to the Right-Thinking People, only the Right Thinking are allowed to be angry, because they are the only people who are truly aggrieved.
I want to emphasize this -- it's not original with me, much less something I pulled from my metaphoric ass.

Before I get into this, I wish to make clear for the sake of trailer-trash hillbilly crackers everywhere (& especially on this site) that this is exactly my upbringing, & I reserve the right to criticize same. Being able to read a newspaper & do basic math, I remember (about when I was 8) determining that our family had just (barely) managed to rise above the state's poverty level. Of my parents & two siblings, I'm the only one to've graduated highschool. I've had a moderately exciting life & now I'm back where I started, & working a blue-collar job in a far-rural Midwest town.
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Dig up just about anything about Justin Gest. He's a professor of public policy (George Mason U) & author of The New Minority: White Working Class Politics In an Age of Immigration and Inequality.

Now, I am a cynic, which is a short way of saying I know a LOT about propaganda & attitude manipulation, & therefore kinda kick ass at poker. :) That title strikes me as a set-up: before you even open the book, it shapes you toward accepting certain premises, which we'll consider in a moment.

And I can't say that I disagree with Gest (though there are of course quibbles), but at the same time he regularly takes logical leaps then accidentally forgets to return & justify the leap. I'm a highly intuitive thinker as well, & I remain always aware that unless I go back & anchor my educated guess, then it's just empty conjecture -- fiction, NOT analysis. Hearing him speak, reading some of his stuff, I'm not sure Gest is consistently capable of that. So, grain-of-salt time.

As WFSU.com (Tallahassee NPR) put it, January 25:
He said poor whites feel discriminated against because they're white and poor.
Now, if you think at all like me, your brain is saying "aaaannnnnd...??"

I don't feel he's a dishonest person; he impresses me as smart & well-intentioned. However, he's also in the habit of dropping stinkbombs like the above flat statement, then, when asked to put this in some sort of real-world context, dithers & obfuscates --
Gest said it’s useless to have discussions about what groups are oppressed more. He says talking to people who we fear or disagree with can promote understanding.
http://news.wfsu.org/post/visiting-author-discusses-his-book-white-poor-voters

Me, I'd want to either talk about all the people that have been ACTUALLY discriminated against before the disenfranchised crackers showed up, or skip right in & examine the sheer irrationality of it behind the thin veneer of Reason.

As Minnesota Public Radio summarizes,
Gest argued that there are three key components to how white working class citizens feel marginalized, "rightfully or wrongfully."

  1. A sense of outnumbering -- In the U.S., white people make up about 68 percent of the population, so objectively they are not outnumbered. "But there is a sense of outnumbering that comes from the relative change in demography," Gest said. When more people of color move to communities where white people were previously the majority, the white residents do not retain any sense of predominant status, they only see the relative loss of predominance, said Gest.
  2. A feeling of being made external -- Many of these white working class people feel they no longer have a voice in public policy, business interests and government. In Congress only 2 percent of representatives come from working class backgrounds, and only a fraction of those politicians are white, Gest said. "The idea that they have a seat at the table as white working class people is a day dream of times lost from their perspective," Gest said. "They feel like they do not have a hand in the government that controls them, that manages their country."
  3. A perceived discrimination -- Those Gest interviewed said that they felt they were often discriminated against on the basis of being white and on the basis of being poor. They feel "relegated and dismissed as rednecks, hicks, hillbillies, white trash" and believe "they lose jobs or access to housing or access to social services because of this discrimination," he said.
http://www.mprnews.org/story/2017/02/23/white-working-class-politics

I mean, :eek:.

My takeaway: he's saying that someone has badgered these people into sheer barking insanity, & therefore they deserve all sorts of sympathy & cuddling despite the gun being waved in your face. It's the very same political correctness & nanny-state thinking decried by Right Wingnuts... yet now required of us all because, well, they're just a bunch of simple-minded childlike hillbillies (even if we can't call 'em that anymore) & will settle down just fine if we only offer them a safe space (or maybe a Good Sportsmanship trophy). :confused:

(BTW: here's an audio of the speech he gave -- "where we stand" in 28 minutes that'll give you chills: Justin Gest speech)

I mean, HELL, only a few years ago, reactionary morons were saying "drug addiction isn't a disease -- it's a crime!! Toss addicts into prison & throw away the key!!" Well, yeah, that would be what Rush Limbaugh was saying... BEFORE he was busted sending his maid out to score oxycodone for him in 2003. (The topic hasn't resurfaced so much since then. ;)) But now that we have so many whites getting hooked on oxy, there's rising Rightist demands to "respect their needs" because they know that's where easy votes come from.

Anyone else seen The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia? Okay, it's not generalizable about poor whites... but I'll tell ya, it's difficult even waaaay up here near the Canada border to go out to dinner (much less out to a bar on Saturday night) & not see someone every few minutes who sure COULD be a White.

That, to me, DEFINES poor whites. Not all, but enough. And I'm in it.
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More in a bit -- gotta make a grocery run. :p
 
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Before I forget (again), here's a bullet-point summary of Bills Introduced by Republicans While We Were Distracted by the 'Russian Spy Drama' --
  1. H.R. 861: To terminate the Environmental Protection Agency
  2. H.R. 610: Tax dollars for private schools
  3. H.R. 899: To terminate the Department of Education
  4. H.J.R. 69: To repeal a wildlife protection rule in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge
  5. H.R. 370: To repeal the Affordable Care Act
  6. H.R. 354: To defund Planned Parenthood
  7. H.R. 785: National right-to-work legislation
  8. H.R. 83: Mobilizing against sanctuary cities
  9. H.R. 147: To criminalize abortion in certain cases by making it a felony punishable by up to five years in prison
  10. H.R. 808: Sanctions against Iran
You need to read between the lines a little. Like "private schools" includes "the spare room in Reverend Bobby Ray's First Church of the Bleeding Almighty & Natural Tan Parlor." Out here, the only "private schools" are extensions of one church or another; & having done bookkeeping for a couple of well-funded charter schools in New Mexico, I get the impression that even the better ones spend a bit of their time hovering on the brink of disaster. (see Separating Fact From Fiction)

Considering those ten points alone, I'm still hoping to hear from some of the supposed many Right-thinking polyfolk on this site, or maybe their Koch-funded Libertarian cousins, or at least a protest voter who couldn't stand to vote for Hillary because the little voices in the closet kept whispering "...but do you really trust her?"

All I want to ask is, "How's that working out for ya?" :D Though that's premature because it might take a few years before the air begins to turn unbreathable... & water infrastructure regularly collapses trying to keep up with toxic water until Flint starts to become ubiquitous... & more people begin having a choice between a minimum-wage job (30 hrs/wk, no benefits, schedule subject to change at manager's whim) & starvation... & a few realize that the extra hundred bucks a year they save thanks to Donaldcare won't quite offset their medical bills.
 
What's not to laugh?

It's all starting to remind me of the exchange between two spies surveilling Inspector Clouseau --
1: He's either very clever... or very stupid.

2: No one could be that stupid.
Clearly, someone CAN, & they can get elected to high office, & they can surround themselves with equally stupid people, & use propaganda to create enough stupid people to accept outright lies.

When someone spouts yet another Facebook fabrication, laugh likes it's the best joke you've heard all week. :)
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Revisting Trump's claims that Obama personally tapped all the phones in Trump Tower -- I saw a segment on Fox News where a squawking head defended this by stating that it was all a Radical Far-Left LibRuhl plot to make Trump look like a paranoid idiot. Well, okay, he didn't actually say "paranoid idiot," but the rest is an accurate representation.

So, basically, the Rightists are allowed to do or say ANYTHING... & if it goes very southward (as would most anything that flies directly against verifiable consensus Reality) just tell everyone it's all made-up nonsense, you didn't actually see/hear/feel ANY of it.

So: laugh. Keep bringing up these embarrassing gaffes, & guffaw. Put them in your signature blocks.
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Here's my take on Kellyann Conway: Trump's #1 Fan, basically Donald's own Yolanda Saldivar. :eek: "Donald!! Donald!! Tell me you love me, Donald!! ...Donald...? Ooh, Donald!! Over here, Donald!!"

If I were joining a deadpool, I'd put my chips on Kellyann as most-likely suspect. ;)

Five days ago, she apprised us of actual threats being addressed by her idol:
There was an article this week that talked about how you can surveil someone through their phones, certainly through their television sets, any number of different ways. And microwaves that turn into cameras, etc. So we know that that is just a fact of modern life.
Of course, within hours she made clear that any misinterpretation of this is due to Creeping Liberalism, & it's all Fake News:
1/2: On wiretap claims, I have said many times that we are pleased the House/Senate Intel Committees are investigating & will comment after
2/2: response to Bergen Record was about surveillance articles in news & techniques generally, not about campaign. Headline just wrong.
#FakeNewsAlert & why so many people don't trust what they read Headlines don't match story. Never made nexus. https://t.co/4iSZe0HIKr
I'll entertain any explanation of how (1) those "denials" actually DENY ANYTHING, & (2) how they apply to the fact she SAID that your kitchen appliances are watching you.

And Baby Jane Conway later apparently said she doesn't need it to be a fact "because Congress is investigating it." :D

Honorable mention for Best Denial To Date goes to Andy Richter --
Donald Trump has never even been in the same room as a microwave.
(This demonstrates he'd be a GREAT addition to Trump's gag-writing staff. :))

Runner-up goes to a reply from one Scoop K --
with his hands, every wave is a microwave
:D
 
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This whole Obama wiretapping...oops, "wiretapping" thing is hilarious. It's an obvious attempt to draw attention away from the ongoing investigations of Trump and his staff and campaign. His problem is he is just so very bad at deception. Like Barney Frank says, he is not just a liar, he's a stupid liar. He lies about things that are very easy to check.

I burst out laughing when Trump referred to Andrew Napolitano as a talented lawyer and his source for the accusation, though he claimed he didn't make the accusation, despite the tweets showing that he did. Fox News suspended Napolitano. I can only imagine what the execs at Fox are thinking. Fox has always been a propaganda arm of the right. Their job was to instill doubt under the guise of commentary. Now, the head of the USA is quoting them like they are an intelligence source. It wasn't suppose to work that way.

And laughing at the Trump followers is what I've been doing. I know I'm not going to get through to them so I'll just drive them nuts. I treat them as though they are a parody, a la Colbert.

I watched a documentary on Nixon the other day. I was 11 when the inquiries started, but I still remember them. Yesterday I watched the Comey and Rogers testimonies. Brings back memories.

Hilariously, Trump was tweeting during those hearings. His tweets were being denied in real time and on record. Who would have thought something like Twitter would be the downfall of an American President?
 
Oh my god. Cards Against Humanity strikes again!! I love these people.

There is a bill in Congress right now that would allow Internet Service Providers to sell your browser histories. To anyone. As they wish. Anytime.

Max Temkin, one of the creators of Cards Against Humanity, said this on Twitter:

"If this shit passes I will buy the browser history of every congressman and congressional aide and publish it."

CAN YOU IMAGINE THE EXPANSION PACKS THEY COULD MAKE FROM THAT??

Best. Company. Ever.
 
So are we just overwhelmed with disgust and shock, or what?

Fuckin' Spicer talking about at least Hitler didn't use gas. Man... This Administration. What will it take to get rid of these people??? How bad are we going to have to watch it get?
 
My wife brought up a blasphemous and highly politically incorrect topic and I thought I'd share it it on this thread since it seemed like the right kind of thread for it.

She jokingly mentioned that Christianity had many themes similar to BDSM. Bondage to the church and submission to the rules. Dominant and submissive vows to each other resemble marriage vows of wife to obey her husband and vows of husband to care for his wife. The old testament describes many acts of sadism and Christ is the ultimate masochist - he frickin' died for us! :)

Not meaning to offend anyone. Please take this as the joke I intend it to be. I'm sure other religions have similar themes as well and as an extension, I think many societies have similar themes.
 
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My wife brought up a blasphemous and highly politically incorrect topic and I thought I'd share it it on this thread since it seemed like the right kind of thread for it.

She jokingly mentioned that Christianity had many themes similar to BDSM. Bondage to the church and submission to the rules. Dominant and submissive vows to each other resemble marriage vows of wife to obey her husband and vows of husband to care for his wife. The old testament describes many acts of sadism and Christ is the ultimate masochist - he frickin' died for us! :)

Not meaning to offend anyone. Please take this as the joke I intend it to be. I'm sure other religions have similar themes as well and as an extension, I think many societies have similar themes.

There are actually Christian BDSM groups that feel their religion demands this sort of relationship. Of course, it's always the woman who submits. Other Christian groups I've seen also use this to justify their kinky behavior, of course with the woman submitting as well.

Never saw any that viewed Jesus as a masochist though...lol
 
So are we just overwhelmed with disgust and shock, or what?

Fuckin' Spicer talking about at least Hitler didn't use gas. Man... This Administration. What will it take to get rid of these people??? How bad are we going to have to watch it get?

Basically, yes.

It is becoming so surreal to me that, at times, I've questioned my own sanity. Like, how can this possibly be? Maybe I am just nuts. Do republicans really think Trump is paying for his own jaunts to West palm? Do they really say he works hard and deserves a golfing break? Why are they okay with him not sharing his tax returns, like it's suddenly some foreign concept that Presidents share them? Did Spicer really call concentration camps Holocaust Centers? Is Trump really tweeting about N. Korea? Did the Republicans really say it was wrong to block Gorsuch?

Is it ever going to end? Maybe with the end of the human race. I'm okay with that.
 
I actually knew a guy who came to our erotic hypnosis groups (which I was primarily supporting because a dear friend was very into that, and I wanted to support her areas of interest by adding my warm body to the numbers showing up, and because I personally have an interest in ASMR, which I see as being somehow related to hypnosis)...anyhow this guy was kind of a kooky veteran, and he had a female sub who was blind. He kept her head shaved at all times, I am not sure why. And they had a "based on Christian religion" Master/slave dynamic.

He loved how dependent on him she could be additionally because of her blindness. Like he could put her somewhere, and take her dog and her cane, and she wasn't going anywhere without him.

Honestly? They were disturbing (to me) to be around. And after seeing some of his posts on fetlife groups, I unfriended him. Your kink is not my kink and all that.

But being who I am...I love blasphemy play. In my attempts to get more comfortable with porn, one of only a couple vids I've found that I really liked, was a gangbang in a church with a woman dressed as a nun and like four or five guys dressed as priests. They were very rough.

And it occurred to me last night, and I mentioned to Zen, a thought I had. I said, "if we ever decide to...make it official...be married people...I would like to do an additional photo shoot thing, at the club (the dungeon) where we wear our wedding clothes and have a pro photographer and we are pretending to get married but at the kiss-the-bride part, you instead basically pull my dress up and flog me and so on (I would like a full scene) and we have lovely pictures taken of this, and put them in a fancy album."

I would LOVE to do a blasphemous kinky wedding photo shoot thing. omg.
 
I began writing a comment about Politics, & had four windows open to Rightist sites, causing my browser to collapse under the weight of all the trackers.

And when I came back, it took five tries to get the Post Reply button to work here -- all the site would do is refresh the page.

I'm really getting tired of this crap...

Do you know most Internet users have no first clue that not only is their every usage being tracked, but that the bots steal data from each other? That's why your browser or app seems to hesitate for a second or two longer than absolutely necessary -- digging through your device's memory, comparing to what they're already got, "accidentally" looking into your word processor files & cached passwords to create/extend metadata.

They know what sites you regularly visit, sorted neatly by day of week, time of day, & where you were at the moment -- wiping your browser history is pretty much pointless, because the data's already been collected -- matter of fact, how often you wipe the history, & what was on it when you cleared, is already logged metadata.

Any "free" app is probably profiting from you. Firefox is one of the worst browsers so far as data harvest; on my machine, it's worse than IE. And you'd think that Google would be the worst search engine, but Bing looks worse. (I'm even starting to suspect "tracker free" DuckDuckGo of data collection.)

Basically, they're collecting YOUR info, selling it, & charging YOU for the data usage. Cool, eh?

They push "improved" software & "updated" hardware off on you because they know these incremental changes will disguise the ever-increasing slowdowns as they dig deeper & deeper into your brain & ensure you'll have no private life.

Those of you afraid of being outed? Doesn't matter whether you're poly or queer or kink or whatever: it's already known. Soon enough, anyone who decides on a passing whim to out you can do so with a couple of clicks, & there it is, forever. I strongly recomend that you plan for the day.

And the GOP thinks not only that this is okey-dokey, but your service provider deserves to do it too!! That means they'll be able to charge you for allowing your connection AND charge you for the data usage they use to harvest freely from all your connected devices AND make money selling your soul, crumb by crumb.

Just wait until the voice-service providers demand to get into the game.
 
Some highly recommended reading, but first the rationale, which I think is instructive.

There's an online magazine, The Federalist, founded late 2013. Though often held up by the squawking heads on Fox News, it actually reminds me much more of when Bill Buckley headed the New Republic -- that man did NOT suffer fools wisely & would excoriate people who tried to pass off parroted slogans as "opinion," especially Rightists. Whatever his personal leanings, co-founder Ben Domenech realized all media was already swamped with "snark and cynicism" and proposed to offer instead "smart analysis."

A few months after its founding, they published an article by Thomas "Tom" Nichols, People in political debates no longer distinguish the phrase “you’re wrong” from the phrase “you’re stupid.”

To disagree is to insult.

To correct another is to be a hater.

And to refuse to acknowledge alternative views, no matter how fantastic or inane, is to be closed-minded.[/SIZE][/quote]
Scroll down the article & read the Comments -- better still, sort them by Oldest First. You'll see where it begins to dawn on some Righties & Lefties alike what Nichols is saying. Before long, the author is being denounced by some Wingnuts as clearly an Ivy League Intellectual Commie Jew.

Nichols is proudly Conservative. He also denounced the Donald Trump campaign back when Lefties were being smug ass-hats & assuming they had the election in the bag &/or being "fair-minded" idiots talking each other into refusing to vote for Clinton.

He went off on [URL="http://ijr.com/2016/05/617035-conservative-writer-goes-on-brutal-twitter-rant-about-trump/"]a "brutal" (pronounced "hilarious") string of 16 #NeverTrump tweets, all 27 May 2016.

Sorry about the repetitions; nobody would claim that IJR is smart. Y'know, I think I'll just put 'em here.
I am 55 and lived through LBJ, Nixon's resignation, Carter, two Clinton terms and two Obama terms. I can survive four years of Hillary. /1

What I do not think the country or the conservative movement can survive is someone who makes George Wallace look like Churchill. /2

So, you can keep going on about SCOTUS and Emailgate and Bill, and it's all true. I detest Hillary too. But all of that can be fought. /3

Clinton falls on the most awful side of normal. Trump is an ignorant, disturbed rich man playing with the Constitution. /4

And if Trump gets his way, he'll prove that being rich enough, crazy enough, and offensive enough can snuff out a democratic contest. /5

Many of you think that's hilarious. Some of you think he's speaking for you. And some of you know what he is and you support it anyway. /6

But I won't. I will give Clinton those SCOTUS picks, suck it up on the emails, and forget the 1990s. Because I have to. Because of Trump. /7

Also, a President's first job, the one only he can do, is to be Commander-in-Chief. Trump is too mentally unstable to be allowed there. /8

Everything else -- *everything*, including your gun fears, your SCOTUS fears, everything -- is secondary to this one issue. /9

You all think it's hilarious a gay British kid is running around calling a POTUS nominee "Daddy." Now think about that for a moment. /10

If elected, "Daddy" will not build a wall or kick out brown people. But he will control arms that can destroy the planet in 30 minutes. /11

He's proven repeatedly he's an ignorant, racist demagogue. But to feel better about your own crappy lives, you'll hand him 4000 nukes. /12

And while you all whine about SCOTUS, you're supporting a man whose chief adviser was a Ukrainian dictator's PR guy. You idiots. /13

So I say it now, and I'll say it in November: #NeverTrump.
There is not one thing he, or you, can do to change my mind. /14

And in the meantime, I'll try like hell either to change yours, or to shame you for your irresponsibility. /15

Trump is an existential menace to our system of government. So if #NeverTrump means accepting Hillary's win, so be it. /16x
To his credit, he's still kinda pissed off. You can keep up with him @RadioFreeTom.
 
To be honest, I do believe Nichols to still have a noticeable smidge of the self-interested Wingnut Bullshit curse. In a tweet (Apr 19) he whines about the kneejerk feminism of Chelsea Clinton & clearly says
See, it's this kind of attitude that prevented me from voting for her mother and made me support Trump.
If you're on Twitter (or whatever), by all means put his feet to the fire: a year ago, he wrote that [t]he Trump campaign is a test of character, and many Americans are failing it which certainly appears self-damning.

If he thinks he's going to play all sides & come out looking like the only smart person in the room, he's at least gonna have to make a MUCH better case.

But Nichols has nevertheless left us a trove of delightfully pithy comments about Trump & the New New Right that should be treasured forever. When DJT spoke a year ago about foreign policy, Nichols fired back --
So, we now know what Donald Trump thinks about foreign policy.

Actually, we don’t. Once again, a Trump speech about policy turned out to be just another word salad of rehashed campaign slogans. And once again, all we learned is that Trump has no idea what he’s talking about, especially when it comes to foreign policy. ...

This wasn’t really a speech about foreign policy. It was a campaign event, meant to reassure Trump’s emotionally-driven, low-information voters that he gave a foreign policy speech.

And so he did. Some Republicans, facing Trump’s mounting primary victories, have even embarrassed themselves by praising it already. And of course, it was more than enough for Trump’s loyalists, as anything Trump does or says, no matter how stupid or incoherent, always is.
And a year ago he published If I Lose Friends Over Trump, So Be It, with points sure to delight any Rightist who get in your way. For example,
Yes, fellow conservatives: Trump is worse than Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Their policies are liberal, even leftist, often motivated by cheap politics, ego, and political grandstanding. But they are policies, understandable as such and opposable by political means.

Trump’s various rants, by contrast, do not amount to policies. They are ignorant tone poems, bad haikus, streams of words whose content has no real meaning. They’re not positions available either to the GOP or Democrats, because they do not contain a vision of the future over which those parties can fight.

In fact, Trump’s policies are not policies. They’re just feverish revenge fantasies. Trump, a scam artist whose entire career has been based on victimizing the working class, should be the target of that anger. Instead, he is encouraging Americans to turn their hostility away from him and against their fellow citizens, inviting us into a war of all against all over which he will preside as an amused dictator.
(The comments on this one stand at 1,431.)

Last Nov. 5, a few days before the election, Nichols published What Trump Has Already Cost America, where he admits that
I am partly to blame here: I have allowed this election, and the degree to which Trump's disgusting antics have succeeded with millions of people, to wear me down. I have tried to maintain engagement with the public as part of my personal vocation as a teacher and a scholar, but I admit that my faith in the virtue of American voters has been shaken.
Here's a review from Federalist.com, where it all started.

A couple of weeks ago, Nichols' book was published, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. I've read excerpts, & thus far haven't found where he's done a typical Wingnut flipflop to regain his Rightist credibility.

What I have read DOES make me want to read more, in hopes to put it to use NOT as a weapon against one "side" or another, but to fight a rising tide of bullshit where verifiable fact is not merely distrusted, but denied validity merely because it is provable fact. :mad:

To put it another way: experts are imperfect, therefore all experts are wrong about everything, & you'll do better by agreeing with whatever's trending with your "friends" on Facebook.

I've studied a little history. I am saddened that so many otherwise decent, sane German citizens talked themselves into turning a blind eye to Nazi atrocities... but what am I to make of those who gladly embraced each bald lie, & awarded the most egregious with the greatest fervor?
[N]ot only is the Internet making many of us dumber, it’s making us meaner: alone behind their keyboards, people argue rather than discuss, and insult rather than listen.
 
I'm going to file this complaint under "Other taboo topics."

Public bathrooms. At work. When you have to poop, especially if you're a lady.

I don't like it, nobody does, but sometimes you have no choice. Especially that one day a month where your body decides it's time for a full on clearance sale "EVERYTHING MUST GO" moment...and there you are, when you gotta go...you gotta go.

But why for the love of all that's sacred, is it, that every damn time I'm in this unenviable position, the restroom suddenly becomes Grand Central Station and there is all this traffic in and out, ladies standing around having conversations, and possibly the worst, despite the availability of many stalls, that one person who just has, for who knows what reason, to sit in the stall right next to the one at the very very furthest end, where I've attempted to sequester myself for the closest thing to privacy as I can get...

And of course, she's got to poop, too, so I guess we are poop buddies now. Did she figure we could hand each other toilet paper under the wall if one of us is out? Is that the reasoning?

Oh, but then...THEN... I have tried to pause in my activities to accommodate the sensibilities of the other ladies and wait them out, hoping that if I am only patient enough, they'll all go away and I'll get some time to myself.

But my poop buddy has the same idea.

And now...it's a stand off. Who will surrender to nature first?? For several minutes, we sit silently. Waiting. The only ones remaining in the bathroom. I stare at her shoes, wishing she would just finish and get the hell out...

Finally I just give up, whatever, it's a bathroom, she didn't have to occupy that particular stall. Fuck it. And of course, she does not even have the decency to wait until I've done washing my hands and left the facility before emerging from her stall, nope...as I'm washing my hands, she joins me at the sink. Fortunately, not right BY me. I give her a scornful look for her lack of etiquette...she doesn't make eye contact. No words are exchanged.

I am only thankful that she doesn't work on my floor, in my office. Nope, she's with the call center upstairs...and I should not be shocked, they've decorated the place with antlers painted weird neon green and orange (and they are NOT a business related to hunting)...so their sense of decency is clearly questionable, right off.

Terrible subject matter, I know. Still, possibly less disgusting than the politics of today, if you ask me...
 
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