Shiny.
"To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi." - William Faulkner
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Shiny.
Maybe age verification is for the best. I don't care. There are bigger problems than this. I'm posting this with no idea how long I'll have access. I really do believe my country is better than this. But for now, we've forgotten ourselves and it makes me weap. Full tears.
There are a lot of reason to restrict things. Some of those reasons make sense and are hard to argue on their own. But the conglomeration of offenses against everything I'm supposed to be proud of as an American is growing out of proportion with the good they are supposed to be doing.
I was told by my Papa at a very young age that I lived in America, where we have freedom. I bought that line hard. So hard that when I was 19 and flailing around at life I enlisted in the Navy and found myself. I cried the day I graduated boot camp. Full tears.
Banned in Mississippi
And then he runs.
I should block accounts like that, but it's easier to make them block me.
There is a nuanced conversation to be had about the rights of a people and the limits of those rights in the face of historic oppression. There are people who have seen both sides and struggle to find a moral standard in face of generational horror. And then there's this asshole.
Strawman arguments are common for your kind of trash. It's all you have.
I love how you people need to lie to make your points. That's what it means to have no real values.
When you celebrate cruelty because you have no real values.
Bet you can't name her.
Well that's certainly pre-code.
Sending virtual hugs your way. Best wishes to you for a speedy and safe resolution.
Not that hard. www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/u...
I wonder if this was involved in the FBI raid on his home this morning?
On December 14, 2012, a mass shooter murdered 20 children, ages 6 and 7, and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. Four days later, evangelical author James Dobson claimed the mass shooting was God's retribution for abortion and gay marriage. He died today at 89.
When bad people face the consequences of their actions, we don't have to defend them.
Have the courage to engage in pluralism. Trump can be grotesque, venal, morally repugnant authoritarian AND Bolton can be the asshole who brought this on himself.
Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Obviously it's the act of a psychotic dictator, openly threatening his enemies with wanton disregard for the law and concept of justice. But Bolton had a hand in making it happen, so there's a certain amount of karma here. www.yahoo.com/news/article...
"Speak the truth. Render true and perfect justice in your gates." Zechariah 8:16
This seems more in keeping with the moment. youtu.be/vRdMa5U8M-0?...
So fancy Cracker Barrel?
Real Southern heritage is having a preferred Vienna sausage brand. Bryan is clearly the best.
You people think immigrants are eating pets and that vaccines cause magnetism.
Can you narrow this down? A lot of terrible things are happening at the moment.
There is a lot to be said for that. I assume these are not people who are looking to vote blue, but perhaps all this chaos will affect voter turnout among those who consider themselves more moral than partisan. My worry is that every election will be big swings form now until is all crashes.
My county is one of the reddest. I can't say I've heard what you describe, but I'm not in a service field so that's not unexpected. That said, now that you mention it, I haven't seen quite the level of excitement for current events as I did early on. Fewer Trump flags and whatnot. That's something.
White woman puts Mexican flag on her truck to waste ICE’s time.
I'm curious what you think is coming here. I am not convinced there's as big shift on the horizon as we'd all like. All this energy they have doesn't just disperse. I'm not arguing with you. You're in a state that could actually shift, so I'm hoping you have insights that manage my expectations.
That gives Trump far too much credit. I think a more apt comparison is the Alien franchise. Billionaires trying to capture something that will ultimately destroy them, and the rest of us if they're not stopped. Trump is a cancer, but they are the plague. We can't end it just by getting rid of him.
I live in Mississippi. I'll need a little more than luck.
I have my own religious history, and "guided by God" doesn't always mean as in a divinely appointed leader. To someone like Johnson, Trump seems to be more like the car that drives by when you're stranded on the side of the road. A useful gift to help you with your own life, not a person to follow.
I plan to live forever. Or at least to outlive this particular era of awful.
They're certainly not experts.
A fine thought, but I wonder how you mean?
"Ivdue Process" I support the intent.
Which probably feels really good until you have to explain yourself outside that group. I worry far too much about the future to be so devoted .
I'm less concerned about mosquitos bothering me as I am not being the cause of more.
I agree, but we're talking about the country at large in the long term. Whether what we have now is a sustainable dynamic is yet to be determined. I don't think so, but these people are a solid block right now. Anything feels possible.
Sunk cost fallacy is a hell of a drug.
Great ideas!
Would someone please ask the next question. "Have you considered that DC residents think this is making them LESS safe?"
Evangelicals do that for EVERYTHING. It's their version of putting a "Better Business Bureau" sticker on the wall. It's a sign that they think he's being guided by god, not that he IS a god.
The later sounds very interesting. I'll need to price that out though.
I'm not sure pro-Israel groups will survive the decade. Israel went into 2020 with the mainstream reputation as an essentially moral nation struggling to maintain order in a chaotic region. It's well on course to be the next apartheid South Africa even in then mainstream.
I've been wondering if our country has the stomach for that. Seems to me the ideological lines are so divided that such a trial would be immediately dismissed by half the country as purely partisan. It's not like after the fall of Nazism where Germany was ready to move on. That energy will remain.
From you lips...
I don't agree. That suggests they don't believe in their rhetoric or that their goals are merely profit or power for its own sake.
Public opinion is not easily swayed by mere incompetents. Having control of all the levers of power and using them effectively is not something anyone can do. Underestimating Trump and his followers has burned this country TWICE now. I'll not do it again.
I'm saying that the N. Koreans, even the most fervent Kim cultists, love HIM, but what they want is food and cultural pride. They're just people. What MAGA wants, along with their white Christian nationalist fellow travelers, is to hurt people marginalized by society. Because they are malicious.
Again, I'm going to disagree. They worship whatever they worship: God, guns, white power, mandatory hetero-normative culture. I don't think they worship Trump the way the DPRK worships the Kims. They see him as the way to brush aside the civil society that has up to now protected people they hate.
And there is where my gut sinks. My nightmare is not that this current government persists. There are just too many headwinds. But say Dems take the House in '26 and sweep it all in '28. If they try to just roll back the clock to 2016 and put things back to "normal" rather than a true overhaul?
Only for NOW, while he's in office. Not for generations to follow. That's orders of magnitude different. If we're all singing hymns to the glory of the great leader and his progeny in 20 years, then something much more significant would need to happen than a failed midterm and a defunct PBS.
Fundies in particular want the same thing as the Klan, but not for the same reasons. Johnson comes from a place of imagine moral certainty. Invoking faith makes him feel like anything he does is unselfish, and certainly scratches the itch his constituents have. Trump is the MEANS not the end.
The Klan, like all White Christian Nationalists, see Trump as an engine for their own goals. He's not their ideal man, but they can make on in their own image. Also they don't venerate the state. His whole "drain the swamp" shtick is really just about removing obstacles to their power fantasies.
I'll argue here that none of them are the same thing, and for our purposes are worse. MAGA is certainly a cult of personality, but where the Kim family is venerated with near deific praise, the Trumps are more like rock stars. His followers want to BE him and think he's going to make them all rich.
That's a different kind of power. A whole society that has been indoctrinated from birth to worship the state and one family as the best shepherds of that state is nothing close to American today. It's not hard to think the Trump family is hoping to achieve that. But there were other factors in NK.
They're BAD people. Not stupid people. Some of them might be good at public service in another environment, but they are coming up in the worst of times so odds are they're just happy to let the chaos continue because it's working for them. I'd like to believe the tide will turn, but chaos is easy.
I think survival in an environment is a skill regardless of the environment. I call them "line jumpers." Trump does it too. This quality of ignoring norms. And it's not that they are BAD at diplomacy, they just don't value it. That's not so much a matter of intelligence as it is moral repugnance.
I understand your criticisms, and I'm not dismissing them. I just think that if these people really were the blithering incompetents they all seem to be in their public persona it would easier to remove them from power.
I don't consider her to be either dumb or unprofessional. Certainly she is young, and her position was gained in part as a result of her connections and her public loyalties, but that's hardly unique in public service. I take issue with her statement precisely because I think she could be better.
I cannot imagine being an educated professional so devoted to a man or a mission that I could just willfully act stupid on live TV. In 20 years all these Trump surrogates are going to have to tell their story (one way or the other) about why they were willing to sound like such ludicrous amateurs.
It's not undrinkable. But the other stuff is true.
Cream cheese?
I'm just used to the river closer to its mouth. There are similar offshoots down this way as well. The Mississippi Delta region is a maze of oxbow lakes.
That must be pretty far north for the Mississippi to look like a stream.
When people talk about "Southern heritage" this is what I WISH they meant.
The continued existence of cabarets in Berlin did little to signal all was well.
Could I interest you in a 24 hour diner with a delicious menu, excellent service, questionable cleanliness, and unnerving clientele at 3 am?
Point please to the reassuring facts that say everything is fine. Nothing to see here.
Because it's easy to make up a story on the internet. This is deep strawman.
This is not WHY I'm an Atheist, but it certainly illustrates a point about faith.
Okay, I'm all for never mowing again because I hate yard work, but what is the solution in my big, mosquito breeding unkempt backyard?
Right, and the context was criticism of his administration of the war in Afghanistan. See how that works? If you're not interested in being honest then what good are you against a Republican Party that feeds on lies?
Yes, I'm asking you to name where in this quote he used the word "evil" in any other context than that common phrase?
So where is the rest of the quote where he says "Obama is an evil man?" Where is this anti-black screed I'm supposed to see? Or are you basing everything off the phrase "lesser of two evils?"
The uncommitted people were explicitly talking about Gaza, for good reason. I wish they'd done otherwise, but I don't have family or cultural connections with Gaza, so I can't tell them they were all wrong.
What rest of the quote? "Lesser of two evils" is a common expression about choosing between two imperfect options. It's not a moral judgement. Obama DID conduct a great deal of bombing. There are reasons to criticize his administration. It's lazy and simplistic to say that means calling him "evil."
Caring about Gaza is the point. It's why people could not stand to support Harris, even knowing that Trump would not be better.
"Lesser of two evils" does not mean calling a person evil. Don't make lazy generalizations.
"Intifada" and an explicitly biased paper attacking Trans people are in no way the same thing. Try again.
Since he's FROM New York and was quoted in that context, yes.
Do they? Or are you just biased an incapable of critical thinking anymore? www.timesofisrael.com/mamdani-hold...
Yes, I'm defining what a word means. Facts do not change based on personal beliefs.
Well since you can't defend yourself without lying, I'm not sure you're interested in anything but spreading hate. So I ask again, how old are you?
He did. And he clarified his point MANY times. So either you don't CARE and or you're just being dishonest.
No, I told two social media accounts that they are operating in bad faith, using equivocation to justify a false argument. If you're asserting that Judaism needs to lie to survive then which of us is the antisemite?
I have many facts. You're the one making claims and then unable to support them with anything but your own feelings and a few half-context clippings.
Well since they are both trees, both are correct. But since all definitions for Intifada are not the same object your analogy fails.
So now we're on to false dichotomy? Seriously, how old are you?
Point to where I told anyone what it means to be Jewish.
Except that none of my arguments were any of those. "Opposition to Israel is not opposition to Judaism" is mainstream for most Democrats, including Jewish people. You're defending a bigoted narrative.
Thats not what it means. It's just what you believe. Like how anti-vaxxers believe vaccines cause magnetism or how Republicans that immigrants are eating pets. Your beliefs about other people are irrelevant.
Name it.
Why does how you feel about OTHER people matter when it's wrong? Do you think MAGA women "feeling" that Trans-women are threat is a justifiable prejudice?
Then you are operating in a lazy binary and I get enough of that from Republicans. You should try a more diverse community.
That's WILDLY not the case, especially in New York where Harris won by 13 points.
I would since I know what I believe and you don't. And neither does this person, who I'm more convinced than ever is either a 12 year old boy or a bot.
And what you hear is WRONG. Why are your prejudices more important than the facts?