"Burn Karma"? I'm one of your left-wing groupthinkers, and I get downmodded all the time. Suggesting that the 2nd amendment isn't sacred is particularly likely to do this.
What I want to know is: when did rightwingers become such crybabies?
So, because things will change drastically in 12 thousand years, it doesn't matter what happens in the next 100? That's like saying "What's the big deal with Russian Roulette? Everybody dies eventually."
Even allowing for inflation, coffee prices have been going up pretty much continuously since I started drinking it, which was around 1971. So much for getting cheaper. Actually, all crops are getting more expensive.
Replicators? You think Captain Picard is going to come and fix everything?
Which reminds me: People always talk about how predictions of natural resource exhaustion and ecological disaster turned out to be overblown. They never talk about the optimistic predictions that were equally overblown. Wasn't Discovery supposed to be arriving at Jupiter right about now? Where's my personal aircar? Why do people still get sick? If you think "progress" is something you can count on to solve your problems, you need to get out more.
So, you need to move your coffee farm, and the guy in the next field doesn't want to sell. Or there's a town in the way. Or, since coffee only grows on volcanoes, the soil is wrong, or there's a valley, or there's volcanic vent in the way. Or the weather patterns are just wrong. Or there's no irrigation water.
This is one thing people don't get about climate change. They assume that if the change is gradual (which it won't necessarily be, but let's ignore that), crops can just move further from the equator, or downhill, or whatever. A lot of the time there's no place to move to.
And of course the same goes for natural biomes, only more so. Which is why wild arabica (and a lot of other species) is in trouble.
McCain drives me crazy. For a long time he was the arch-conservative liberals could admire, because he tried to deal with liberals honestly and fairly, because he refuses to take himself too seriously, and because he's been through a lot of nasty shit and faced up to it with courage and dignity.
Then in 2008 he seemed to decide that he wanted the Presidency bad enough to abandon his own core values. I see to recall a lot of his long-time aides left him about then. During his previous tries at the job, he got screwed over — this time he seemed to want to be the one who did the screwing. Wackiness ensued.
He's tried to be less crazy since, but really, it lacks conviction.
In hindsight, I have to wonder how much of this craziness is about appealing to right-wing voters and how much is about appealing to right-wing donors. I can't see any other explanation for McCain jettisoning his first choice for running mate (Joe Lieberman) in favor of Sarah Pain, a lady who managed to more than any single person to elect Obama.
I agree that a reasonably intelligent and honest conservative could have beaten Obama. But with the right-wing crazies determining who wins the primaries, there was no way such a person could be nominated.
And I have to question whether Romney qualifies as such a candidate. You talk about his true beliefs. WTF are they? When he was Governor, he was pro-Choice (there's a video somewhere where he's getting very emotional about how banning abortions just causes dangerous back-alley procedures), pro-gun control, pro health care reform. Then when he was trying to persuade the crazies to support him in the primaries, he was against all those things,. Then when he was debating Obama he tried to paint himself as a centrist, as if he'd never said any of the crazy stuff. Either the guy totally lacks any core beliefs or he's willing to lie about them; either attitude is beneath contempt.
And intelligent? Look at the all the mistakes he made as a candidate. You can blame his campaign team, but he chose them.
Simply not true. All three groups do tend to support Obama, but not exclusively. I think something like 40% of women voted for Romney. Many of the pissed-off Romney volunteers quoted in TFAs are apparently quite young, and I've seen many others. Non-whites are more solidly pro-Obama (having so many conspicuous racists on one side and a black candidate on the other will do that) but even there you see some solid pro Romney people.
I live in Portland, OR, where we liberals in the city are thoroughly detested by the right wingers in the surrounding counties. (Oregon is mostly rural — classic Romney territory.) My neighbors celebrated Obama's victory by running whooping through the streets, but the local news discussions forums were full of local TPers proclaiming the Downfall of America.
The scary people are not Romney and his cadre. They're just capitalizing on a really scary trend in a big segment of American society.
Not fair that you called a troll, but surely being taxed for things you don't want isn't slavery. I don't feel enslaved by W just because he spent $4 trillion on the stupidest war in human history.
And you're taking a simple-minded view of the whole help those in need thing. Poverty, hunger, disease are all bad things in themselves, but that's not the only reason to spend tax money on them. They happen to be things we can't ignore. They screw things up for all of us. The economy is less resilient, because there fewer consumers. Bad things like disease don't always confine themselves to the bad part of town.. And worst of all, people with sucky lives tend to become criminals. You can hire more cops, but really, the most cost-effective way to cut crime is to make people's lives suck less.
I share your dismay at the reality-phobic right. The fact remains that their guy came very close to winning this thing. The sad truth is that a lot voters like their flavor of koolaid, and a better-run campaign could have taken some of those swing states.
I voted for the O guy, and I'm positively relieved that he won. But I don't share you smug assessment. If the popular vote separation is more than 3 or 4 points, I'll eat my hat. If you get outside the liberal echo chamber, you'll see a strong conservative side to the electorate. It's just very poorly led.
Can we get rid of the brainless AC posts already? They're all shoot-from-the-lip ignoramuses like this asshole.
I'm an Obamatron, but I can't abide the Huffpost. So I learned about this fiasco from Newser, which linked a conservative web site which linked John Ekdahl's blog. John's a Romney volunteer, and his scathing description of Orca is informed by his day job as a web developer. And the there's Pudge, who helped design Slashdot, and who I presume voted for Romney, unless he considers him too liberal.
So obviously there's no absence of IT talent on the right side of the aisle. What is missing is administrative judgment by Romney himself, who obviously bought some IT snakeoil from somebody, and has generally managed to find total clowns to run his campaign.
People keep telling me about this brilliant guy named Mitt Romney who had a brilliant academic career (MBA and JD from Harvard), did well as a management consultant and equity capitalist, and accomplished great things as Governor of MA, even though the other party controlled the legislature. But I just don't see how that can be the same guy!
"Fortunately" because it's interesting to see what they planned. And because it says a lot about their mindset that the only contingency they had planned for was victory.
I've always been fascinated by a document that turned up in Dwight Eisenhower's papers. It was a letter to his superiors taking sole responsibility for the failure of the D-Day invasion! Of course, he never sent it, because the damn thing succeeded, and he got credit for it, which is as it should be. But it says a lot about him that he was ready to face the very real possibility of total failure, at a huge cost.
Contrast this with the current Republican crowd that always cherry-pick their facts to support what they want to believe. (And I mean you, Carl Rove.) Maybe, just maybe, the stupidity of this is finally going to become apparent, and we can go back to having political arguments that are based on honest differences of opinion instead of Destroy The Enemy at All Costs crap.
You're the third person to cite the "everything is dangerous" fallacy. Not gonna keep responding to it over and over. And people who use are not in any position to talk about "mindless regulation".
You know, I thought the Bear Patrol episode of the Simpsons was funny too. But enough with that cliche already. When you have a product that actually kills kids, it's not mindless regulation to ban it.
Well, duh, I know James Bond is just a story. But there's a difference between stories that require suspension of disbelief and stories that require suspension of higher brain function.
Slashdot Mirror
"Burn Karma"? I'm one of your left-wing groupthinkers, and I get downmodded all the time. Suggesting that the 2nd amendment isn't sacred is particularly likely to do this.
What I want to know is: when did rightwingers become such crybabies?
So, because things will change drastically in 12 thousand years, it doesn't matter what happens in the next 100? That's like saying "What's the big deal with Russian Roulette? Everybody dies eventually."
Even allowing for inflation, coffee prices have been going up pretty much continuously since I started drinking it, which was around 1971. So much for getting cheaper. Actually, all crops are getting more expensive.
Replicators? You think Captain Picard is going to come and fix everything?
Which reminds me: People always talk about how predictions of natural resource exhaustion and ecological disaster turned out to be overblown. They never talk about the optimistic predictions that were equally overblown. Wasn't Discovery supposed to be arriving at Jupiter right about now? Where's my personal aircar? Why do people still get sick? If you think "progress" is something you can count on to solve your problems, you need to get out more.
Yeah, because if you don't collide with the iceberg on schedule, icebergs must be a myth. I mean, you do know there's a finite supply of oil, right?
So, you need to move your coffee farm, and the guy in the next field doesn't want to sell. Or there's a town in the way. Or, since coffee only grows on volcanoes, the soil is wrong, or there's a valley, or there's volcanic vent in the way. Or the weather patterns are just wrong. Or there's no irrigation water.
This is one thing people don't get about climate change. They assume that if the change is gradual (which it won't necessarily be, but let's ignore that), crops can just move further from the equator, or downhill, or whatever. A lot of the time there's no place to move to.
And of course the same goes for natural biomes, only more so. Which is why wild arabica (and a lot of other species) is in trouble.
Regular coke destroys my brain with all the sugar. Diet coke tastes like a failed chemistry experiment.
McCain drives me crazy. For a long time he was the arch-conservative liberals could admire, because he tried to deal with liberals honestly and fairly, because he refuses to take himself too seriously, and because he's been through a lot of nasty shit and faced up to it with courage and dignity.
Then in 2008 he seemed to decide that he wanted the Presidency bad enough to abandon his own core values. I see to recall a lot of his long-time aides left him about then. During his previous tries at the job, he got screwed over — this time he seemed to want to be the one who did the screwing. Wackiness ensued.
He's tried to be less crazy since, but really, it lacks conviction.
In hindsight, I have to wonder how much of this craziness is about appealing to right-wing voters and how much is about appealing to right-wing donors. I can't see any other explanation for McCain jettisoning his first choice for running mate (Joe Lieberman) in favor of Sarah Pain, a lady who managed to more than any single person to elect Obama.
I agree that a reasonably intelligent and honest conservative could have beaten Obama. But with the right-wing crazies determining who wins the primaries, there was no way such a person could be nominated.
And I have to question whether Romney qualifies as such a candidate. You talk about his true beliefs. WTF are they? When he was Governor, he was pro-Choice (there's a video somewhere where he's getting very emotional about how banning abortions just causes dangerous back-alley procedures), pro-gun control, pro health care reform. Then when he was trying to persuade the crazies to support him in the primaries, he was against all those things,. Then when he was debating Obama he tried to paint himself as a centrist, as if he'd never said any of the crazy stuff. Either the guy totally lacks any core beliefs or he's willing to lie about them; either attitude is beneath contempt.
And intelligent? Look at the all the mistakes he made as a candidate. You can blame his campaign team, but he chose them.
The man would have been a disaster as President.
I don't have source for the Eisenhower doc. If you want to google it, feel free.
Harry Truman was the one with the "The Buck Stops Here" sign on his desk.
Simply not true. All three groups do tend to support Obama, but not exclusively. I think something like 40% of women voted for Romney. Many of the pissed-off Romney volunteers quoted in TFAs are apparently quite young, and I've seen many others. Non-whites are more solidly pro-Obama (having so many conspicuous racists on one side and a black candidate on the other will do that) but even there you see some solid pro Romney people.
I live in Portland, OR, where we liberals in the city are thoroughly detested by the right wingers in the surrounding counties. (Oregon is mostly rural — classic Romney territory.) My neighbors celebrated Obama's victory by running whooping through the streets, but the local news discussions forums were full of local TPers proclaiming the Downfall of America.
The scary people are not Romney and his cadre. They're just capitalizing on a really scary trend in a big segment of American society.
Not fair that you called a troll, but surely being taxed for things you don't want isn't slavery. I don't feel enslaved by W just because he spent $4 trillion on the stupidest war in human history.
And you're taking a simple-minded view of the whole help those in need thing. Poverty, hunger, disease are all bad things in themselves, but that's not the only reason to spend tax money on them. They happen to be things we can't ignore. They screw things up for all of us. The economy is less resilient, because there fewer consumers. Bad things like disease don't always confine themselves to the bad part of town.. And worst of all, people with sucky lives tend to become criminals. You can hire more cops, but really, the most cost-effective way to cut crime is to make people's lives suck less.
I share your dismay at the reality-phobic right. The fact remains that their guy came very close to winning this thing. The sad truth is that a lot voters like their flavor of koolaid, and a better-run campaign could have taken some of those swing states.
I voted for the O guy, and I'm positively relieved that he won. But I don't share you smug assessment. If the popular vote separation is more than 3 or 4 points, I'll eat my hat. If you get outside the liberal echo chamber, you'll see a strong conservative side to the electorate. It's just very poorly led.
So you got spammed. Spammers do not consider overkill a failure.
Business Insider is pretty bogus site. I have to wonder of if they even asked for Ekdahl's permission to copy his blog. Which is here:
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/334783.php
Can we get rid of the brainless AC posts already? They're all shoot-from-the-lip ignoramuses like this asshole.
I'm an Obamatron, but I can't abide the Huffpost. So I learned about this fiasco from Newser, which linked a conservative web site which linked John Ekdahl's blog. John's a Romney volunteer, and his scathing description of Orca is informed by his day job as a web developer. And the there's Pudge, who helped design Slashdot, and who I presume voted for Romney, unless he considers him too liberal.
So obviously there's no absence of IT talent on the right side of the aisle. What is missing is administrative judgment by Romney himself, who obviously bought some IT snakeoil from somebody, and has generally managed to find total clowns to run his campaign.
People keep telling me about this brilliant guy named Mitt Romney who had a brilliant academic career (MBA and JD from Harvard), did well as a management consultant and equity capitalist, and accomplished great things as Governor of MA, even though the other party controlled the legislature. But I just don't see how that can be the same guy!
"Fortunately" because it's interesting to see what they planned. And because it says a lot about their mindset that the only contingency they had planned for was victory.
I've always been fascinated by a document that turned up in Dwight Eisenhower's papers. It was a letter to his superiors taking sole responsibility for the failure of the D-Day invasion! Of course, he never sent it, because the damn thing succeeded, and he got credit for it, which is as it should be. But it says a lot about him that he was ready to face the very real possibility of total failure, at a huge cost.
Contrast this with the current Republican crowd that always cherry-pick their facts to support what they want to believe. (And I mean you, Carl Rove.) Maybe, just maybe, the stupidity of this is finally going to become apparent, and we can go back to having political arguments that are based on honest differences of opinion instead of Destroy The Enemy at All Costs crap.
I think you might have trouble selling it as a toy.
You're the third person to cite the "everything is dangerous" fallacy. Not gonna keep responding to it over and over. And people who use are not in any position to talk about "mindless regulation".
I've already covered the "everything is dangerous" fallacy. Speaking of mindless....
Kitchen knife have serious applications. This is a fucking toy.
And the "Darwin" meme is getting really old, especially since the people who use it tend not to be credit to the species.
It's funny how many knee jerk reaction I'm getting accusing me of having a knee jerk reaction.
I have facts on my side, you have "fuck you asswipe". Which of us is being mindless and kneejerky?
So, by your logic, anything can kill you, so all regulation is stupid.
Hey, wanna buy a flamethrower?
You know, I thought the Bear Patrol episode of the Simpsons was funny too. But enough with that cliche already. When you have a product that actually kills kids, it's not mindless regulation to ban it.
He can't compare with creepy religiosity Jobs invoked during his famous product launches.
Well, duh, I know James Bond is just a story. But there's a difference between stories that require suspension of disbelief and stories that require suspension of higher brain function.