The question that comes to my mind is, “Who’s ‘we’, Kimosabe?” (It’s the punchline of a joke.)

In the drone example, half of the community acknowledges that the operators are doing terrible shit. The other half of the community things it’s fantastic. What then? The half that deplores the killing isn’t likely to do much about it, because the killing is happening to somebody else on the other side of the world. If they try to stop it violently, the killing will start happening to them.

Yes, I agree, what you said is true, but it’s also true that the purpose of Moody’s rating scale is to assess risk to investors rather than the soundness of the bond issuer.

That’s a distinction without a difference. Issuing more fiat currency to inflate away burdensome debt service would also inflate away investors’ gains from holding bonds.

How about we deep-six 47?

Here’s the thing: “Family-hauler” is so dumb. In a sane society, that wouldn’t even be a thing. Those kids should have the freedom to get around on their own, but they can’t because of all the super-sized “family-haulers” that would kill them.

What message are you trying to send by boycotting a vegetable domesticated in South America, and brought to Europe by Spanish explorers about 500 years ago?

Can you find Haldiram’s chips in your local stores? Potatoes were native to the Americas, but have been widely naturalized around the world. India is the second-largest potato producer in the world, and Haldiram’s is based it Uttar Pradesh. I would wager that they use local potatoes.

Sunburn, maybe. Perhaps he’s a “sunscreen skeptic,” too.

Did DOGE fire all of the deep-state, bird-drone operators?

(Apologies, this story is seriously distressing, but about all I can do right now is engage in some gallows humor.)

I saw this headline while clicking through into another post. Goddammit, I ate the whole onion.

Heh, this discussion underscores my point. Here we’re parsing how much age has affected Biden, how much he’s slowed down, how much he struggled to articulate his ideas, which were at least indicative of a fundamentally-sound mind. I mean, he said, “We beat Medicare,” but we all knew what he was trying to say. Meanwhile, his opponent was a gibbering baboon, who got easily emotionally triggered (not a quality I want in a President), and his best response after getting visibly angry was “no u.” But hey, at least he was able to bellow it out, and that feels like strength to monkey brain, so we can pretend he’s not manifesting more and more dementia symptoms as time goes on.

It’s hard to say how much that was a factor. We know that the campaign’s staff were instructed to record voter concerns about Gaza as “no response,” but independent polling organizations found that most voters ranked the issue well below the usual, immigration and the economy. IIRC, only in Michigan was the number of protest voters high enough to perhaps swing the election.

That’s an interesting one: That dig requires a measure of empathy, a capability often diminished by dementia. Biden had to understand the mindset of his opponent to pick something that would get under his skin in particular. Boy howdy, did it work! The target was totally unable to recognize the bait, and brush it off.

No, but he could maintain a train of thought for longer than 2 sentences.

That’s an interesting example, because the unions were correct. Reagan happened, but then when they did endorse the next Democrat for President, he fought hard to undo the damage, and didn’t promote something like, say, NAFTA, right? Or when they endorsed Biden, he didn’t break a strike, or anything?

Basically, when does this process of putting promoting better people in the party begin?

The last couple of years have really opened my eyes as to how many Americans are just fucking morons with, like, monkey-level brains.

Quiet voice == losing his mind and not lucid.

Loud voice == strong leader!

Okay, which version actually happened over the past 50 years—yours or mine?

The one that stands out in my memory is the time that I interviewed with the owner of a small, retail business, who was an out, gay man. (It’s relevant.) When I got there, I noticed that all of the employees were 6’+, blond boys. I’m neither of those things. Immediately, he did The Look, and I knew it was over, but I still had to go through the motions of the interview.

(The Look consists of looking you up and down, and then peering into the empty space over your head, as if imagining the tall man that they want to see instead.)

Here’s the hitch:

It is a literal yet unfortunate fact that we must hold our noses and vote for anyone who stands a chance at beating a Republican in a national presidential election. Until such time as the parties have been taken over by people who wouldn’t nominate someone like that.

This strategy guarantees that the parties will keep nominating someone like that. (After all, they keep winning.) There’s no mechanism for replacing the party leadership in it, nor any realistic scenario by which it would happen.

In a nutshell, what this meme is about is all the people that we’ve run into who say, “both sides are bad,” because they believe the Republicans lies about Democrats, and the Republican talking points on issues. Actual centrists, in Republican lingo, are “the far left.”