I meant the title to the post literally, not figuratively.
EXCLUSIVE: A man who paid $150 for a “full-contact experience” with a black leopard says he had to undergo multiple surgeries after he was mauled by the animal in an enclosure behind a Davie home https://t.co/x0zlA4G9Ne
— WPLG Local 10 News (@WPLGLocal10) October 28, 2020
DAVIE, Fla. – A man who paid $150 for a “full-contact experience” with a black leopard says he had to undergo multiple surgeries after he was mauled by the fully-grown animal in an enclosure behind a Davie home.
A picture obtained by Local 10 News shows Dwight Turner’s heavily bandaged head and ear after the savage attack, which detectives from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission say happened behind a home on Earnest Boulevard on Aug. 31.
The man who lives there, identified as Michael Poggi, has a Facebook page saying he runs an animal sanctuary for rare and endangered animals.
I think I’ve identified the problem:
Investigators say Poggi charged the 50-year-old Turner $150 for a “full-contact experience” with his black leopard — to “play with it, rub its belly and take pictures.”
FWC’s report says that once Turner walked inside the enclosure, the leopard attacked.
Imagine that!
The injuries were so severe, the report says the victim’s scalp was “hanging from his head and his right ear was torn in half.”
Authorities say Poggi was charged with allowing full contact with an extremely dangerous animal and was cited for maintaining captive wildlife in an unsafe condition.
Attempts to speak to Poggi at his home have been unsuccessful.
Authorities say he is licensed to have the leopard. They say Poggi admitted to them what he did was illegal.
Yes, in Floriduh! you can get a license for a leopard. Who knew? Floriduh! Man knew…
I would think the lesson here is not to play with, rub the belly of, and take pictures with an actual leopard.
Best wishes for a full recovery for the leopard, who I’m sure was traumatized by all of this stupidity. And also for Mr. Turner.
Open thread!
On The Road – Dagaetch – Election Respite, World Edition
Jay C
Frist!!
“play with it, rub its belly and take pictures.”
I do that with my 10-lb house cat (who we raised from a kitten) and like as not, blood is going to be drawn (not the cat’s).
Florida, man…..
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
I could think of a few low-hanging fruit jokes I could make but won’t lol
khead
I haven’t been around this evening and I’m too lazy to look. Have you jackals made sufficient fun of Tucker “the dog ate my homework” Carlson yet?
Also, I have two cats that would do this shit too if you tried to rub their belly.
Adam L Silverman
@Jay C: The Floriduh! state flag:
piratedan
no refunds!!!!!!!!!
Glyph2112
We know trump is all bluster and has no coherent strategy. And apparently the campaign is cash poor. For all the talk from msm about court challenges, what’s the chance his legal team is merely someone who has issue keeping his shirt tucked and a few cronies from the doj?
dmsilev
You have to admit, he got what he paid for.
Adam L Silverman
@Glyph2112: They’ve formally named Jay Sekulow and Rudy Giuliani as the leads for all election challenge litigation.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@piratedan: Refund? Refund!
piratedan
@Adam L Silverman: I’m positive that all of their legal arguments will be cogent and steeped in historical legal precedents….. //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Mary G
I’ve owned four house cats in the last 40+ years, all adopted as adults from the shelter, ranging from semi-feral to poorly socialized, and I have never rubbed any of their bellies. And WTF Florida for letting this asshole keep a leopard in his backyard.
Adam L Silverman
@dmsilev: And then some.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
the article doesn’t say what happened to the big cat, but I’m afraid I can guess….
Jim, Foolish Literalist
sweet fancy Moroni!
I’ve lost touch with my Mormon friend, but I’m tempted to email him to ask what he thinks of this.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
So about that Republican Party case where mail ballots received after 11/3 in PA could be invalidated. What’s to stop Gov Wolf with the SOS from telling the USSC to pound sand, continue counting votes AND if the GOP PA leg appoints a separate slate of electors for the US House to refuse to certify the election unless the electors based on the full tally are appointed instead?
Kelly
A tune for our times Lyle Lovett “Election Day”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCC7VBxw_d8&ab_channel=KUTXAustin
Adam L Silverman
@piratedan:
via GIPHY
jl
Thanks. A Floriduhman story with two Florida men, and each has a good Floriduhman schtick, though of course the guy who paid to go into a cage with a leopard wins that contest.
I remember fantasizing about how it would be nice for California to win back the crazy state title, but the way these stories are trending, maybe time to let that dream go. And standards have changed. When California held it, all you had to do was smoke dope and eat sprouts, and only needed a few guys to pull suicidal stunts every couple of years.
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): No one really has answers to these hypotheticals because we are in uncharted territory. I’m sure Alito has an answer for how it is constitutional to change the rules for an election after the votes have been cast and are being counted. I’m also sure while it’ll have a lot of citations and be faux erudite, it will also be logically bullshit.
Mike in NC
Between 2010 and 2019 we managed to make four trips to Europe, hitting about 20 countries in all. Still hoping to see Paris and Rome some day.
gene108
@Glyph2112:
If the election is worth contesting, Trump’s legal team will be paid for by whoever funds Leonard Leo, and the Federalist Society.
Money will not be an issue for Republicans.
piratedan
@Adam L Silverman: I knowest that thou hath seeneth the tags of snark trailing my response, yet thou still smote me with the Marcia meme, I thinketh that thine snark detector needith adjustment… or not.
Cameron
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: https://youtu.be/mdmuqYCf5Ik
jl
@Adam L Silverman:
” They’ve formally named Jay Sekulow and Rudy Giuliani as the leads for all election challenge litigation. ”
You’ve forgotten the snark tag, right? Or are you serious?
Keith P.
@Jay C: Same here. The only cats I’ve ever gotten away with rubbing are the ones I’ve raised from kittens. Felines normally do *not* like belly rubs, as it is the most vulnerable area.
CaseyL
Kevin Richardson, the Lion Whisperer, has a huge sanctuary in South Africa where a bunch of lions, hyenas, and leopards live. No, not all together: they’re in groups, in separate fenced-in enclosures which look to be a few (5? 10?) acres of open ground plus a nighthouse each.
Richardson has worked with big cats for over 20 years. The ones currently at his sanctuary came to him as babies or youngsters, as rescues from not-great situations.
Anyway, he has two leopards, whom (again) he has known since their infancy. They know and trust him. He can handle them: pet them, scritch them, play with them. He knows their personalities, and which signs to look for that mean “Back off! Now!” and he respects that. He respects all his critters, and gives them, as best he’s able, an excellent life. And no one else ever goes into the enclosures alone, or has contact with the cats.
Roadside zoos don’t do that at all. They don’t socialize their animals, probably use punishment/fear/hunger as controlling mechanisms, make no attempt to enable the animals to enjoy their natural behaviors. I would as soon put my arm down a woodchipper as try buddying up to one of their animals.
jl
Leopard sounds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi3350uEvE8
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@CaseyL: I couldn’t watch that Tiger King series everybody was talking about a few months back. I couldn’t decide which made me sadder in the first episode, the animals or the people. I still get sad thinking about one obese tiger brought outa on a leash… how do people enjoy that?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
But don’t Alito and the others realize they’ll be effectively signing their own death warrants, placing targets on their backs for the rest of their lives if they reverse a landslide in any of the states? That mass violence, directed at them and the GOP in general, could break out in the aftermath of such a blatant theft? It’s not 2000 anymore.
smike
@khead:
I haven’t been around either, but I think it is obviously antifa that stole the evidence, probably holding it over the dumbs to make them do their bidding.
The dog is innocent – and I rub the bellies of both of mine:-)
mdblanche
Has anybody thought to test America’s Wang for syphilis?
gwangung
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Any political elite are cut off to some extent from the pulse of American society.
But I think right wing elites make a point of pride of how cut off and isolated they are from the American mainstream. Pushing it too far will be dangerous for society as a whole. And these assholes keep on pushing….
Mallard Filmore
@Glyph2112: I am sure there are plenty of independent and well funded organizations that will step in with money and/or lawyers.
Cheryl Rofer
My two kitties, who are not the best socialized ever, are fine with belly rubs.
Usually.
VOR
@Mary G: It really varies by the cat. We had a pair, adopted at 8 weeks old, who would usually push us away if you attempted to rub the belly. Strangers would get outright clawed. We had a Mama cat, adopted when about a year old, who would usually tolerate our belly contact. Usually, not always, and not from strangers. Her son, born at a shelter and adopted at 3 months old, will allow practically anyone to touch any part of his body, including the belly. The sole exception is the vet, for whom the cat loses his little furry mind.
Omnes Omnibus
Why do you think that they are going to do that in the face of a landslide?
Chetan Murthy
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
They are counting on that *not* being the case. They believe that we’re soft and cowardly. But there’s a kernel of truth there: “any jackass burn down a barn; it takes a skilled carpenter to build one.” And widespread civil strife would indeed burn down a lot of things. It’s not something that people in our camp would do lightly. And so, in a way they’re right.
I think what they forget, is that there are other ways, than civil strife. Like outright defiance by civil authorities. And while that isn’t as satisfying as rousting that Fucker Alito and putting him in stock buck nekkid covered in tar and feathers, it’s far more likely if things really go pear-shaped.
Kent
@khead: What fresh horror has Tucker committed? I’ve long ago lost track and don’t really care to be honest.
SteverinoCT
@Keith P.:
I was playing with a cat in a book store. As I left, I asked if I could have a paper towel or a few tissues, and the clerk gasped at the several bleeding scratches running down my arm. “I was sitting with Kitty,” I explained, “and we had an earnest discussion about whether I was petting, or tickling, her belly.” I knew what would happen, of course; it’s a reflex. But we were just playing.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kent: The documents that prove the 2017 Biden Family Criminal Conspiracy to use Joe’s influence as an ex-Vice President to do… Something Nefarious! have been stolen! Purloined! Absconded with! Pilfered! Misappropriated!
Some people are saying he’s blaming Kamala Harris and we’re so far through so many looking-glasses if that’s snark or if he said it.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Don’t know if anybody here remembers this “meme”, but thought I’d share:
Absolutely bonkers and got made fun of all over the intertubes. Yes, I too think a mass murderer is somebody to emulate! //
Memes aside, here’s my formulation of it, crystallizing my feelings on superheroes (and superpowered characters in general):
RepubAnon
@Jay C: Indeed. My cat rolls over and presents its belly to me – when he wants to bite the hand that feeds him. Scaling up this experiment to a leopard seems suicidal at best.
Adam L Silverman
@piratedan: Just reinforcing the snark with more snark.
Kent
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): As I understand it, the state is supposed to “segregate” late arriving ballots so that they can decide at a later date whether to count them or not. How I read this ruling:
First, SCOTUS doesn’t want to get hung out on a limb making a nakedly partisan ruling unless they absolutely need to. By waiting until the election they will know whether (1) The PA election is even close, and (2) whether the electoral college is even close. So there’s really only perhaps a 1 in 100 chance that they would actually NEED to intervene in PA to throw out votes to install Trump. Why be completely corrupt if you don’t need to. If Biden is up by say 300,000 votes on election day then the whole issue is moot. Likewise, if Biden has locked up 300 electoral votes in other states then the issue is moot even in PA is super close.
Second, I expect that they have GOP officials observing every aspect of the vote process in all the big Dem counties around Philly and Pittsburgh. They don’t need to observe ballot handling in GOP leaning jurisdictions, only the few counties that are heavily Dem. So they will have people on the ground ready to SCREAM if those late-arriving ballots start getting counted or mixed in with the others. But they won’t say anything if some heavily GOP county gets theirs all mixed up and ‘accidentally’ counts them.
The point will be to preserve a very narrow Trump election day victory if there happens to be one. By locking up any late arriving ballots in blue areas. No doubt the USPS plans to accommodate by delaying ballots in blue counties and rushing them to the elections offices in red counties. Hopefully the union postal workers will prevent their political appointee overlords from actually doing that. I’m hoping that Dem postal workers (I expect most are Dem) will do what they can to foil such schemes. the Trumpers are a very thin veneer on the very top and can’t supervise every post office in every city.
Adam L Silverman
@jl: I’m serious. I saw news reporting about it a couple of days ago.
Adam L Silverman
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I lived about 15 miles south of that entire insanity when it happened. There are several really quality not for profit, largely running off of donations wild animal rescue in the area. Those are good people and they do good and important work on a shoe string budget.
Kent
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Wait. really? They *had* the goods on Biden but they lost them? Bwa ha ha!
That’s even better than the blind guy with the strip mall laptop shop.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kent: Your first reason is more than enough.
piratedan
@Chetan Murthy: and even in the face of being tear-gassed, assaulted and having people shooting at them, people are still protesting and for the most part, keeping their cool. It’s a chancy thing though… one more atrocity and things could snap and if they do, it gets REALLY ugly, people die, and maybe even the folks with the guns and the clubs could lose when balanced against a group that is without any more fucks to give.
Our side seems to understand that and is avoiding that, trying to play by the rules, but the other side keeps on pushing that envelope. They believe that for the “left” it’s all talk, no passion and I sometimes think that they even believe that. Yet people are people and everyone has a breaking point and to be honest, I’ve been proud that no one on the left has just lost it and led a mob against the police and essentially disarming them and embarrassing them, which would give those on the right the justification to up the ante even more.
I don’t want to see that happen because where does it end? But I understand the anger and the buttons that the right is pushing….
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Omnes Omnibus:
I guess not a landslide, but if the race is close and there are many ballots that arrived late, the USSC could try to order those ballots thrown out
West Texan 70
You’re a lot nicer than me. After living among Texas idiots for damn near 60 years, taking dopes like Mr. Turner out of the gene pool doesn’t sound too bad.
The leopard deserves much better, however. Its fucking owner needs to go to jail.
Patricia Kayden
jl
Watched a news clip of Trump in Michigan. Why is he running around pissing people off in the states he’s visiting? Insults and lies about Michigan at his rallies, what does he think makes the local news? Well, I saw what makes the local news… clips of Trump insulting and lying about Michigan.
It got me curious, so here is how Trump’s Arizona tour got covered on the AZ Republic editorial page.
Trump’s disrespect of Sen. Martha McSally was painful to watch
OPINION: President Donald Trump treated Sen. Martha McSally like a second-class citizen during his Goodyear rally. That’s the thanks she gets, for her loyalty to this president.
Laurie Roberts, Arizona Republic, Oct 28, 2020.
Here is Fox News’ summary:
” Trump gives Arizona’s McSally ‘one minute’ onstage during rally as she lags in polls ”
Trump is broke, so maybe we can pay him to visit some more swing states?
NotMax
A Day at the Zoo.
Glyph2112
@gene108: I don’t doubt if it’s close, rats will come out of the woodwork. But do they really have have the legal muscle to ratfvck a win from a legit loss? That seems like a worry that’s been floating out there in the cyber.
Omnes Omnibus
I think I may minimize my time here in the run up to the election.
cain
@Keith P.: I’ve given all my cats belly rubs including the current set of velociraptors kittens that currently are surrounding me and clearly communicating that things are not right in the world and that kitty food must be put in the bowl pronto!
SFBayAreaGal
Deleted
Percysowner
I used to live in Akron, Ohio. One day a friend was driving somewhere. A truck pulled out in front of her and there, in a cage, was an adult tiger. I turned out that a guy in Copley (a suburb) had an exotic animal collection. In 1983 one of them stalked and killed his 2 year old son, but he said an old Amish man told him “accidents happen and don’t give up on your dreams” so he kept his exotic animal farm and continued to exhibit his animals.Ohio man whose son was mauled and killed by pet tiger kept exotics for years after At the time there were no regulations against keeping exotic animals in that city or county, because nobody thought anyone would be fool enough to do it. They did pass a county ordinance later to forbid it.
And then there was was Terry Thompson of Zanesville, Oh. who decided to commit suicide and set his 50 of his 56 exotic animals free before he committed suicide. Most of them had to be killed to protect the people in the area.
Basically, idiots are ALL over this country, although they do tend to move toward red states that believe in FREEDUMB! Plus Ohio is weird!
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’m sorry if it’s party because of me. I’ll try to stop
Original Lee
Apparently they don’t need Tucker’s documents now that the Hunter Biden sex tapes are out. I have no idea at all what’s on them and don’t care, but my Trumpista friends have been burbling about them all day.
NotMax
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Give it a rest, bud.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Patricia Kayden:
What a tone deaf coward
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Original Lee:
Well, I guess Hunter Biden’s not going to be president now lol
frosty
@Omnes Omnibus: Minimizing any news isn’t a bad idea. From Kerry in 2004 on to now, the last week of every election has been insane.
And probably before, too, but I paid them slightly less attention.
frosty
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Don’t sweat it.
jl
President Trump slams Gov. Whitmer at his Michigan rally
MLive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbDzqGAM5XU
NotMax
@Omnes Omnibus
Whence comes the recommended daily dose of snark otherwise?
;)
cain
@Chetan Murthy:
A general strike will fuck things up. Kill the stock market – a non-violent – devastating attack on the American economy. We can let it burn without nothing more than staying home, or hanging out with neighbors or what not.
Do it around April, don’t pay taxes, don’t fund the govt, and don’t go to work – a strike.
It does take an incredible amount of discipline – we are a soft people and don’t take hardship that easily these days.
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I don’t really get the impression that outside of trying to move the law and constitutional interpretation to where they want it that any of them are really strategic thinkers. Except for Roberts.
Inventor
@Kent: So unfair to Tucker. If only there was some means to duplicate documents so there would be a “back up” for this kind of dastardlyness. Perhaps there will someday be some means to store documents digitally, in the circuitry of computer machines. But, alas, now they are lost.
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Superman is simply the story of Moses reframed and despite Snyder’s attempt to make it the Jesus story.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@NotMax:
I apologize. I suppose I just want to be reassured sometimes. I’ll try to cut it out
Chetan Murthy
@cain:
The poor, blue-collar workers, the people who keep our country running, don’t have enough savings to endure a general strike. Sure, people with a month’s savings can do so: but as we all should well know, a vast number of our countrymen don’t have even that much savings. A general strike is a non-starter; I wish it were otherwise, but this is just the truth.
MisterForkbeard
@jl: Interesting.
How many cultists do you think will get pneumonia there tonight?
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: I’ve been considering the same.
NotMax
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
One can drown in a shallow pool of ‘but what ifs’ as readily as in a broad sea of them.
Just sayin’.
Adam L Silverman
@cain: Have you met Americans?
There will be no general strike. There will be no mass, popular uprising.
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Just lay off the Zima and you’ll be fine.
jl
@MisterForkbeard:
I don’t know, if they heard about NE, maybe they came with survival gear.
For some reason, youtube recommended a local Michigan TV station clip about Trump’s rally. After the who what where what why, the anchor asked the reporter about covid precautions, and the reporter said no social distancing and only about 30 percent wearing masks, and some snark ensued.
The MLive (Wiki says is online outlet for a local paper chain in Michigan) with title about how Trump insulted Whitmer was next up.
I suppose, besides all the other bad stuff, infant and fool are essential parts of the Trump essence.
Jay
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
As laid out by two nice Jewish lads from Cleveland.
Brachiator
@Chetan Murthy:
I don’t know what would happen if the Supreme Court tries to steal the election for Trump, but I suspect it would not be pretty.
However, it occurs to me that the worst possible outcome for the country would be if Trump legitimately won a close election.
Adam L Silverman
I’d like to report a murder!!!!!
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: Yep.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
some numbers here that are almost enough to make one feel… optimistic, if one were so inclined
So glad we went with the candidate with youth appeal
I’d really like to see these numbers compared to 2018
SFAW
@khead:
To what are you referring? [Serious question]
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: Perdue’s face during that was priceless.
SFAW
@Adam L Silverman:
Ably assisted by Hugh Lewis Dewey (founding partner of Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe) no doubt. With any medical info provided by Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, and Dr. Howard, I imagine.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
What I was trying to get across is that the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve tended to sympathize with the antagonists (or at least the POV that one should not trust people who can destroy the world or flout laws) in various works of fiction that distrust or try to destroy the protagonists with powers. These stories, often sci-fi and fantasy, try to portray fear of the unknown as xenophobic and is always wrong. However, if you look at human evolutionary history, that very fear of the unknown is what has allowed humanity to survive to the present
The X-Men are the worst offenders of this in comics. So many fans try to defend the racism metaphor but it doesn’t hold up; real life ethnic minorities can’t destroy entire cities in a matter of minutes to hours or mind control the POTUS to shoot themselves in the head. The fact is, humanity has every right to fear mutants. They have every right to try to combat them and, best case scenario, depower them. Just imagine if YOU (general you) lived in the Marvel universe; would you be so sanguine about the people that could kill just you in the blink of eye?
I don’t feel this way because I’m some fascist or a xenophobe. It comes from my distrust of uncheckable, absolute power and belief in the greater good. Fact is, I wouldn’t trust anybody with powers, not even myself. Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Cliche maybe, but it’s true
SiubhanDuinne
@Adam L Silverman:
Wow. Look at Perdue’s body language —the way he rocks back and forth from one side to the other as Jon Ossoff questions him.
SFAW
@Adam L Silverman:
Damn, that was good.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: Yep. I particularly like him trying to signal he wanted to reply/rebut, but it looked like he was signaling the waiter for the check.
mrmoshpotato
WHAT?! THE?! FUCK?!
I have no other words.
piratedan
@Adam L Silverman: damn… and Perdue just stands there, swaying in place, going completely fucking THARN. Cripes… if anyone was on the fence who saw that… I’d have to wonder if they’re still on the fence now.
fucking brutal, well done Ossoff… enjoyed the stiletto about Perdue’s ethics investigations being established first
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
Isn’t this just Reverse American Exceptionalism? I disagree. Americans are fundamentally no different than anybody else on the planet. There’s always a breaking point
jl
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks. Boom! I’ll send some $
Adam L Silverman
@SFAW: Here you go:
HRA
NEWS
Trump Sparks Outrage After Telling Crowd Biden Could Be ‘Shot’ Just ‘Three Weeks’ Into His Presidency
This was Tuesday at a rally in Lansing, Michigan. Sorry this was the only way I could bring it over here.
mrmoshpotato
@Adam L Silverman: Who doesn’t stick with the two-shot? The monster!
jl
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I agree. Americans learned how to do general strikes during the Great Depression. People get pissed enough, they can learn how to do things.
If a swiped election doesn’t do it, horrific GOP policies will.
Let’s hope it doesn’t get that far.
@piratedan: I think Perdue was pretty well nailed on his corruption and gross immoral malfeasance. I don’t have the stomach to go look for his response, if he had one. He looks like a hapless jewel thief staring at the cops while the diamonds and emeralds fall out his clothes.
piratedan
@Adam L Silverman: our blockbuster reveal would have totally fucked over Joe Biden’s campaign but how could we have known that fucking over the USPS could have bit us in the ass?
SFAW
@Adam L Silverman:
My fucking word. What a moron.
And, of course, for “evidence” as “damning” as it was, there was only one copy in all of the universe.
Chief Editor Korir on Line One, Tucker, you stupid piece of shit.
mrmoshpotato
Sufficient fun? I don’t understand the question.
Adam L Silverman
This is good news. I think Roberts may have explained to the rest of the GOP appointees that if they don’t cool it for a few minutes, the party they have planned for 2021 is going to get cancelled real quick if Biden is elected and the Democrats take the Senate.
Delk
@Omnes Omnibus: was thinking the same thing.
MisterForkbeard
@SFAW: Tucker Carlson made a big deal about getting a bunch of “Hunter Biden emails” that would blow the lid off of whole mess.
Now he says they were totally lost in the mail, guys.
mrmoshpotato
Doesn’t this shitshow include a photo of text messages on a phone that’s on a Russian cell phone network?
Brachiator
@cain:
I have mentioned before that America really doesn’t do general strikes.
Also, we have had a close to national lockdown because of the pandemic and life went on. How would a general strike be any different?
And the stock market is not the economy. At this point it is not even a reflection of the economy. It is a minor alternate universe where the wealthy go to trade and maybe make more money. Meanwhile, whole sectors of the economy are still shut down and we still manage to survive.
Danielx
@khead:
Making fun of Tucker never gets old.
NotMax
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
The whole “Mutie! Mutie!” trope was a late arrival in the X-men mythos and itself mutated from being a plot crutch to a lally column supporting the edifice.
The fact is, humanity has every right to fear evil mutants. Or, for that matter, evil non-mutants. It ain’t the gene, it’s the mean.
JanieM
@Adam L Silverman:
That makes me feel a lot better about how it’s going to go.
SFAW
@MisterForkbeard:
As I hinted in 103, it’s probably in the same Sooper Sekrit Vault where the “Whitey Tape” was stashed by Obama and other Libs.
mrmoshpotato
@MisterForkbeard: You don’t print out all of your emails?
westyny
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Captain Moroni saved your damn neighborhoods, ok?
MisterForkbeard
@mrmoshpotato: I have them printed out, and then I eat them.
Brachiator
@MisterForkbeard:
Funny. Carlson has always been a joke. But Fox News depends on viewer loyalty no matter what crap they spew. I saw some story claiming that Fox recently was number one in the ratings. Didn’t check the details. I guess some people just like being fooled.
mrmoshpotato
Clever girls.
NotMax
@MisterForkbeard
I guess ProudMail hasn’t quite managed to work out the kinks in its V-2 delivery service.
//
SFAW
@mrmoshpotato:
Which PROVES that Hunter Biden* was really the one who colluded with Russia in 2016 — not Trump — so that Hitlary would lose, and his father would be the 2020 nominee.
I’m joking, but it would surprise me not-at-all to hear that that rumor was making the rounds on the RWMF boards.
*ETA: Acting as his father’s cat’s paw, of course.
Matt McIrvin
@Adam L Silverman: unless it’s a trap, and they’re going to get people to vote that way, then invalidate the votes on Wednesday with a new ruling.
Timurid
@Adam L Silverman: And hopefully he’s explaining that by enabling a rising despot they will be making themselves obsolete. If Trump wins, within a decade they’ll have to follow orders from the White House on how to rule in big cases if they don’t want to fall out of a window…
mrmoshpotato
You can say that again! I’m curious how close Biden comes to calling people selfish idiots.
jl
@Adam L Silverman: “The difference appears to be that a majority of the Justices are unwilling to disturb *state court* rulings with respect to deadlines for receipt of mail-in ballots, but willing to intervene where it’s only because of a *federal* court’s intervention that the deadline changed.”
OK, at least that is consistent. If that is going to be their originalist, textualist rule, that they are going with for this election, probably Roberts will have to take notes and have his clerks proof read the drafts to make sure the maniacs on the court can keep it straight.
Wonder if Roberts told Kavanaugh to stay off the sauce until mid-November.
SFAW
@jl:
I don’t get the idea that he’d comply. [My sentiment is aided-and-abetted by the photo from his hearings that LGM uses.]
westyny
@SiubhanDuinne: He looks like he’s either got to pee or is peeing right then and there . . .
mrmoshpotato
@MisterForkbeard: Most likely with mayonnaise (FOX).
mrmoshpotato
@SFAW: It all makes sense now!
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@NotMax:
Really? I thought that happened pretty early on, using Civil Rights Movement framing?
Anyone with the powers the characters have in X-Men can’t be trusted, no matter how well-meaning they are. Lots of mass shooters who went on rampages were normal people at some point in their lives. What happens if one of these mutants have just one bad day too many? They still have normal human minds that are subject to the same stressors we experience.
Winston F Boomer
The folly of sending emails by truck.
Chetan Murthy
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I just wanna be sure that we’re not off in la-la-land. Such individuals could not exist, right? I mean, maybe they can, but you might as well posit the existence of pink flying elephants (which arguably would be less outlandish than some of the X-Men). The relevant real-world analogue to X-Men would be billionaires, right?
Anoniminous
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Trump won Georgia by 211,141 votes in 2016.
ASSUMING the youth vote in Georgia reflects their age group national partisan divide (roughly 70/30 D/R) ….
those 340,000 votes suggests an additional ~238,000 Democratic Party votes. Which means Biden may very well take Georgia.
Brachiator
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Huh? What? This runs counter to anything I have learned about evolution.
You’re right, but the comics teach a sad truth here. Racist oppressors always project their own murderous fears and impulses onto their victims. Racists are full of hate and fear, so they are deathly afraid of retribution.
This is where the comics are just bullshit. In the “real world” the X-Men would simply displace ordinary humans, just as homo sapiens displaced archaic hominins.
We don’t know exactly why Neanderthals disappeared. We just know that they and other branches of early humans died out.
I stopped reading comics and most SF a long time ago. Are there any good stories that imagine what the next step of human evolution might be like?
Power is relative. But those who have it tend to use it. Or threaten to use it. And the world muddles along.
NotMax
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Now you’re moving into Minority Report ex-ante facto territory, a field better left fallow.
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I think you need to separate out a couple of things. Superman was created in the run up to World War II by a couple of young Jewish guys who’d routinely been beaten up for being Jewish. He was a straight power fantasy, but one who used his power to promote what they believed were the best ideals of America, not its imperfect reality. But they were also creating the stories for children, teens, and young men when there was nowhere near the amount of sci-fi or fantasy being written. Superman provided an escape with a moral to the story during the lingering effects of the depression and what would later be recognized as rapid socio-political change as the US tiptoed its way into WW II.
The X-Men were created during a different period also on the cusp of rapid socio-political change also by a pair of Jewish Americans: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Both had served in WW II and had gone through that rapid change during and after WW II that then quickly settled into the 50s and the Cold War. The conformity of the former, the growing existential dread of the latter combined with the Civil Rights movement and the assassination of Kennedy, as well as Kirby’s own quirky aesthetic and narrative sense all went into the X-Men. Initially the “the X-Men and their persecution is an allegory for anti-Semitism” wasn’t the focus if even a consideration. By the time you get to X-Men: God Loves; Man Kills in 1982 the X-Men were on their second iteration, or, really, their 2.5 version, the writers and artists had changed, and the US was going through the first few years of both the religiosity cycle and extremism cycle that have been overlapping and feeding off of each other for over 30 years. So the stories, and the narrative purpose of the entire idea of the X-Men, were beginning to reflect current concerns.
And comics were beginning to go through a shift. No longer solely intended for children, but now dealing with more mature themes for adults, though often still largely pitched at straight men.
The beauty of the stories is they work on multiple levels. If you want escapism with usually good to very good art, then they scratch that itch. If you want deeper meaning, they scratch that itch. But they’re fantasies. Superman and the X-Men were created by men who’d all served in World War II. And were little children during World War I. They grew up in a world that didn’t have The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia. There was Edgar Rice Burroughs and his stories of Tarzan and John Carter, Robert Howard and Tarzan, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, as well as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, but what we think of as a vast, deep well of fantasy and sci-fi didn’t really exist yet. So they created their own fantasy stories and art. They clearly use archetypes from mythology and history. And they originally intended them, especially Siegel and Shuster, for children who had been picked on and bullied like themselves as an escape. Shuster even drew adult cartoons with a BDSM theme where a woman who looked just like how he drew Lois Lane would dominate a man who looked just like how he drew Superman because he could sell them and he needed the money.
Adam L Silverman
@SiubhanDuinne: He was not very comfortable for a few minutes there.
Anoniminous
@Adam L Silverman:
Pro Tip: when participating in a debate on live television remove the rod up your butt BEFORE going on stage.
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: Down Around My Place
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I do low intensity warfare for a living. Trust me on this.
Jay
Rand Careaga
Let me not to the marriage of two memes admit impediments.
jl
@Anoniminous: Using estimates from The Economist model, it would take only around 30,000 votes to swing Georgia. Doesn’t mean much in terms of predicting anything, just a rough indication of how little may be needed to push the results one way or another.
SFAW
@Adam L Silverman:
Interesting, considering Action Comics #1 was published in 1938.
Adam L Silverman
@HRA: To be honest, and while I understand why everyone is interpreting the way they are, the President’s vocabulary in terms of idiom and colloquialisms is locked into somewhere between the late 1950s and early 1960s. Saying someone would be shot in that era would mean that someone would be worn out. And I think it is likely that was what he was intending, but because he’s such a malicious individual everyone has interpreted it without recognizing the idiom he was using.
SFAW
@Adam L Silverman:
Well, Balloon Juice has its share of interpersonal conflict at times, but I don’t think I’d characterize it as “low intensity warfare.”
smike
@SFAW:
Previously on BJ:
Tucker Carlson, “I had super secret documents proving ‘something,, somthing,, Hunter/Joe’, but I sent them somewhere and they disappeared. Oh, I didn’t think about making any kind of record first. This is very concerning.”
NotMax
@Brachiator
Not the sole example, initially Roddenberry’s Star Trek too a stab at filling that niche.
jl
@Jay: The Trumpsters claim that the pandemic is over in a public report? Seems very counterproductive, good for oppo ads.
Trump must have ordered it up himself, or staff produced it as a last ditch effort to keep him under control.
SFAW
@Adam L Silverman:
Except he specifically mentioned Kamala becoming President, I think, which (to me at least) means he was talking about an actual shooting. Considering his history of threatening violence against people he hates, I’m inclined to stick with the non-colloquial use of the word.
Adam L Silverman
@Brachiator: And they didn’t really disappear. A lot of humans have some Neanderthal DNA. And that is what would happen with the X-Men. They’d fall in love with and have children with non-mutants who would inherit the X gene and eventually everyone would be a mutant of some sort.
SFAW
@smike:
Well, at least you didn’t insert a spoiler.
Goku (Amerikan Baka)
@Chetan Murthy:
I’m saying that the people in those fictional universes have every right to be afraid of people who can unilaterally blow up the Earth if they felt so inclined.
Society functions not just on the social contract, but through the monopoly on violence that the government possesses. With superpowers coming into play, laws cease to have any meaning
Anoniminous
@jl:
If Biden takes Georgia it very likely Dems will take both Senate seats.
I let my Economist subscription lapse back in the oughties. Do happen to have a link to their analysis?
jl
@Adam L Silverman: “eventually everyone would be a mutant of some sort.”
Where are my superpowers, then?
Adam L Silverman
@SFAW: I reference that the character was created prior to WW II. But I wanted to emphasize that all four creators – the two for Superman and the two for the X-Men – served in WW II. In the case of Lee and Kirby it clearly impacted their creations. In the case of Siegel and Shuster it couldn’t because DC had locked them out.
NotMax
@Goku (Amerikan Baka)
Don’t like being so blunt but you do realize you’re making the arguments in favor of Japanese internment, but writ larger?
SiubhanDuinne
@Adam L Silverman:
You, sir, are a master of litotes.
Adam L Silverman
@jl: I’m not a geneticist and I do not play one online.
Goku (Amerikan Baka)
@NotMax:
All I’m saying is that people with the power to level modern metropolises in a matter of minutes or seconds cannot be trusted to always be good, stable people. It’s as simple as that
SiubhanDuinne
@westyny:
Ha! That’s exactly what he looks like!
Brachiator
@Adam L Silverman:
True enough. There was apparently interbreeding between early modern humans and Neanderthals and other hominins. But Neanderthals as a separate species appears to have met their end in Gibraltar or thereabouts.
Yeah, pretty much. The fantasy of the X-Men comics is that ordinary humans would still be around.
Jay
@Adam L Silverman:
or not. Dilution is also possible, where in their kids don’t become mutants, just have some weird skills and quirks, and their grandchildren are not much different from everybody else, except maybe turning a shade of blue when they blush.
If I remember some of the story line, X People are products of the Nuclear Age and Atmospheric Testing. So far, we have stopped that.
SFAW
@Adam L Silverman:
I guess I’m nitpicking (semantically) with the use of the word “created.” “Developed” might have been more appropriate, because your wording implied they were WWII vets who then created Supes.
As I said, nitpicking.
West of the Rockies
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Okay, if it helps, I dig your presence here. You offer frequently informative, heartfelt bits. Everyone here sometimes has a misstep. Hang out long enough and you’ll probably be annoyed by someone else, too. We’ve probably all also taken undeserved shit now and again. It happens. No need to be fearful or trepidatious. Like Dory says, “Just keep swimming…”
Goku (Amerikan Baka)
@NotMax:
IMO, and given the evidence, Japanese-Americans weren’t existential threats. They also didn’t have the ability to mind control FDR to blow his brains out. So on that basis, Japanese internment was wrong
Adam L Silverman
Oy vey! I’m sure our legal eagles will get a good guffaw here:
SFAW
@Goku (Amerikan Baka):
Give it a rest, OK?
John S.
@Adam L Silverman: Fun fact — my grandfather was a comic book artist during the Golden Age.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Elias
Calouste
@Adam L Silverman: He claims they used UPS or FedEx or something, not the Post Office, right? Stuff doesn’t vanish without a trace there, it gets scanned every time it enters or exits a facility. They always know where the package was seen last, which is by definition a trace. If it’s transported between facilities, they know which truck or plane it’s on.
Of course, they shouldn’t have put “Super Secret Biden emails” on it in 4 inch red letters :)
Jay
@Brachiator:
there was a Siberian find of a mixed Human/Neanderthal family, who seemed to have been murdered by others living near by.
Adam L Silverman
@SiubhanDuinne: I have “master of litotes” on my business cards.
Adam L Silverman
@SFAW: It’s late here. I’ve already done a lot of writing today. Stuff happens.
Brachiator
@NotMax:
Are there any good stories that imagine what the next step of human evolution might be like?
Star Trek is about social evolution. Kirk and the gang are not much physically different from us.
The Expanse depicts humans that have adapted to their different worlds and are variations of homo sapiens.
Jay
@Adam L Silverman:
Sovereign Citizens new grift?
Covid Paper Terrorism?
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
Just for the record, what would eventually become DC comics was founded by a WWI vet, Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, said company being the first to publish a book of comics containing all original, first-run material.
Goku (Amerikan Baka)
@Brachiator:
Think about it. Any ancient humans or their evolutionary relatives that would’ve approached a predator would not survive long enough to reproduce
In the real world, mutants would take over the planet, with some becoming warlords, and enslave normal humans
Adam L Silverman
@John S.: Excellent! I’ve got reprints of the All Star Squadron, including the issues he worked on. They did a reprint run of them in the late 80s/early 90s. And I’ve seen his Black Cat and Black Canary art, as well as the Flash art he did. And, of course, I’ve got some reprints of the Adam Strange work reprinted in pocket sized collections in the early 80s. I’m a big Justice Society fan.
His creation, Eclipso, will debut on TV next year in season 2 of Stargirl as the season long big bad.
Goku (Amerikan Baka)
@NotMax:
Just to add, this is what I was afraid of. Does this make me a bad person to feel the way I do? Am I a fascist or a xenophobe? I’d never argue for internment of Muslims, for example
Adam L Silverman
@Calouste: As a Federal court judge ruled last year, nothing Carlson says on air can be taken as true or factual. Rather it is the fictional narrative of a character he is playing.
John S.
@Brachiator: One of the things I really like about The Expanse is how it covers the difficulties humans would have with gravity after living in space for long periods of time, or even their entire lives.
That’s a nice detail that most other Sci-Fi doesn’t really get into.
Adam L Silverman
@Goku (Amerikan Baka): Please turn yourself in to Anne Laurie on the Mezzanine Level. She’ll have you placed in holding until we can work out a good time to have you stoned in an appropriately socially distanced manner.//
I think you need to take a deep breath and recognize that you’re significantly importing your reaction to a sci-fi/fantasy graphic art story series into real life.
ETA: And conflating a group of fictional characters with tremendous power and a historic minority who had such little power that it was easy to round them up and place them in concentration camps. Remember, the X-Men is fiction. And to make that fictional narrative work a whole lot of things are left out because it would destroy the fabric – the warp and weft – of the fantasy narrative. It’s why the three recent superhero movies that attempted to actually show what would happen if superheroes existed and actual had to deal with an equally powered threat in terms of physical devastation – Man of Steel, Superman-Batman: Dawn of Justice, and Avengers: Age of Ultron – were all received poorly. Part of the fun of the narrative is that Superman can defeat Zod with little to know collateral damage. Same with the Hulk dealing with Abomination. When in reality a couple of good blows landed from either party would level most of a city and kill and injure thousands of people. This does not exist in reality, it can’t be mapped onto the truly horrendous way we treated Japanese Americans and Japanese residents in America during WW II, just as it can’t be mapped onto how some German Americans were treated during WW I. Because at those times, those groups had so little political and social power that nothing and no one would intervene on their behalf. Fantasy is fantasy. Sure, it can teach us lessons in its narrative, but at the end of the day it isn’t real.
Sebastian
@cain:
If I understood the concept correctly all it takes is 3.5% of the population. Civil disobedience is incredibly powerful and can bring an economy and society to a grinding halt.
The best thing about it is you don’t need to convince people to perform an action like protesting or marching or storming government buildings. No, you convince them to do nothing, to not pay bills and taxes.
Folks are generally in favor of such action but fear retribution and that’s where the numbers come in. Once people realize there a LOT of people doing this, they feel safe to join and the whole thing gets its own dynamic.
NotMax
@Goku (Amerikan Baka)
What makes a bad person is being a bad person, a qualification you have never demonstrated herein.
Delk
@Adam L Silverman: that’s a whole lot of CLE!
John S.
@Adam L Silverman: He was a pretty talented guy, though he had some bizarre work habits (as I’m sure many artists do). My mom has some very interesting stories about him from when she was a kid.
My favorite work is some of the horror comics he did (e.g. Chamber of Chills). I have some of those in my collection.
My daughter may be following in his footsteps. She seems to have quite the knack for drawing anime, and my wife and I are very supportive.
beckya57
I have nothing to say about FL idiots or leopards. I’m here to tell DougJ that Osoff murdered Perdue on TV tonight and he should be rewarded for his foul crime with an Act Blue fundraising page. That is all. Oh and throw some to Warnecke too please.
mrmoshpotato
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Seconded.
Chetan Murthy
@Brachiator:
I don’t know about stories, but there’s lots of *evidence*.
None of this is romantic like X-Men mutants. But then, such large mutations almost always kill the organism, and the idea that multiple such mutations, occurring in different organisms, could result in individuals capable of breeding and producing offspring …. is pretty fanciful.
Jay
@Goku (Amerikan Baka):
in the “real world” mutants created as a byproduct of atmospheric nuclear testing would stop being “made”.
mutant/human relations would dilute their powers, generation by generation, unless some cadre of mutants elected to isolate themselves from humans.
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
Everybody Must Get Stoned.
;)
Adam L Silverman
@Jay: Would make sense as a logical evolution of how paper terrorism is used.
mrmoshpotato
@Adam L Silverman: Thirty thousand hours! Dude didn’t sleep for almost 3 and a half years! (There’s no other explanation, or other way to put 30000 hours of practice and study!)
ETA – fearless and wise (nods sagely)
Adam L Silverman
@John S.: Everyone who does anything that’s creative seems to have them. I know when I have to write – an assessment, a proposal, a two page info paper, a white paper, what have you – I can force it out if I’m on a tight deadline, but I have a process and part of that is that I will start writing when the material is ready to be written.
I’m sure you have an amazing collection of his work. I didn’t really go for the horror comics, largely because they just weren’t a big thing when I was a kid in the 70s, but the art in them was usually excellent.
And I’m also sure you are very proud of your daughter and her talents.
John S.
@Adam L Silverman: Oh, and Black Cat Mystery #50 is pretty intense. ?
Adam L Silverman
@Delk: I believe the technical term is a buttload.
Chetan Murthy
@Goku (Amerikan Baka):
Goku, you realize that you’re not talking about “the real world”, right? I mean, you’re talking about a world with Pink Flying Elephants, so you can make up any sort of other rules you want: they’re all equally fanciful. In “the real world”, individuals with such massive mutations rarely if ever survive the development process from zygote to newborn (read about it sometime — it’s *incredibly* complicaed) and if they do, they’re rarely-if-ever fertile, and the chances that two such individuals could be interfertile is ….. even more astronomically improbable. And then the idea that somehow the laws of physics as we know then are wrong, and such individuals can wield destructive forces currently possessed only by nuclear warheads, without destroying their biological/organic tissues ….. again, pure and utter fancy.
Look: you can see them as allegories for the real world. But there are limits, b/c the only humans with even remotely comparable powers are heads of state and billionaires. I’m sure there are ways of reading the X-Men as stand-ins for Jewish people, but to imagine that somehow Jewish people have such super-powers ….. well, that’s pretty messed-up, I’d think. So the allegory falls apart. I’m not saying that it’s not a useful literary device, to explore certain human failings: just that you have to be careful to not take it too far, b/c it’s based on *literally* impossible assumptions. Literally. Impossible.
There are no known examples of evolution working by giant leaps — only by small, very small, infinitesimally small steps over incredibly long durations involving many, many, many generations. it might be worth looking at some writings about evolution. You might start with the blog Pharyngula, and maybe the writings of Stephen Jay Gould.
Calouste
@mrmoshpotato: They’re lawyer billable hours, so it’s more like 30,000 hours is about 2 weeks.
Adam L Silverman
@John S.: Yep:
https://digitalcomicmuseum.com/preview/index.php?did=7835&page=1
Though I was referring to the female character Black Cat he worked on that is somewhat similar to Black Canary in aesthetic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Cat_(Harvey_Comics)
Adam L Silverman
I’m to bed. Catch everyone on the flip.
John S.
@Adam L Silverman: Yeah, I completely understand “the process”, and everyone certainly has their own for any creative output. I worked for many years as a graphic designer myself, and I always use to sketch out logos and concepts for print ads by hand (which my colleagues in the early 2000s thought was both charming and bizarre).
My daughter is only 10 now, and frankly we are astonished at the quality of some of her work. I honestly would have to say it’s in the genes.
Anoniminous
@Chetan Murthy:
And stay far, far, away from Richard Dawkins. Even he now – finally – admits “The Selfish Gene” is unscientific claptrap.
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
It will be bullshit, first, foremost, and always, and the concept of logical anything will never be within a thousand miles. Hell this won’t even rise to the level of illogical.
Adam L Silverman
@John S.: Everyone has their own process.
And you clearly know, from experience, how to foster your daughter’s talent as she decides what to do with it.
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy: I should add that the claim that such giant leaps actually occur … is a key article of faith of Intelligent Design/Creationism advocates. They argue that evolution (which, again, proceeds by infinitesimal steps of random walk, pruning variations by natural and sexual selection) cannot produce some facet of an organism (the eye, the whale’s baleen, etc, etc) and systematically, in every case, paleontologists and biologists have bene able to piece out of the fossil record and living organisms examples of intermediate organisms between the two widely-separated endpoints.
The entire premise of these X-Men mutant worlds, is based on an active rejection of how evolution actually works.
Tom Ames
Mitchell & Webb saw this coming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXSRvQlALMA&ab_channel=5aruh
Brachiator
@Goku (Amerikan Baka):
Humans obviously survived encounters with predators. And it wasn’t just because we were afraid of them. We learned to hunt predators as well as hide from them when necessary.
That’s just one of many possibilities. And if mutants really had fantabulous powers, humans as slaves might not have much value. Better to just leave us alone, perhaps.
Chetan Murthy
@Anoniminous: Heh indeed. Yeah, I’ve heard that some of his work is … questionable, though I pretty much tend to ignore him anyway. IIRC some of Stephen Jay Gould’s work has been superseded, but nothing has been -disproven- and certainly a lot of his writings on paleontology and the history of the development of evolution (again, IIRC) have stood the test of time. And P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula is a working developmental biologist: so he brings his actual research in evo-devo (evolutionary developmental biology) to the conversation.
Anoniminous
@John S.:
Genes can only do their thing if they are expressed and we now know Nurture, starting as early as the first trimester and extending throughout the life, is as important as Nature when it comes to getting them going. Statistically speaking the smartest person on the planet is living in some Third World pest hole and will never achieve their potential.
Jay
@Calouste:
sick burn,…..?????
mrmoshpotato
@Calouste: LOL
Jay
@Brachiator:
there are roughly 1500 bear/human encounters in BC every year. Bears lose 99.99% of them every year.
Chetan Murthy
@Goku (Amerikan Baka): Another way of looking at these fictional worlds: there’s an old saying among SF&F writers, that to create a fictional world, you should change only -one- thing about this world, and then follow all the rest thru based on the rules of our world. So they stipulate mutants with superpowers, but “everything else is as in this world”. And they pretend that that’s what they’re doing. But in fact, you can’t do that: you can’t stipulate an organic being that can generate A-bomb energies in their cells, and yet don’t kill all their cells, without further stipulating some new sort of field theories of protective fields , etc, etc, etc, etc. it goes on forever, regardless of whether you want it to.
And there’s a reason for that: As Feynman put it so well: when somebody asks you to explain how a magnet works, and you try to explain it by analogy to rubber bands, you’re making a mistake: because rubber bands’ behaviour is DIRECTLY due to electromagnetism. So you haven’t actually explained anything by that recourse.
So [back to X-Men] when we stipulate that we’re going to “change only one thing” and imagine that somehow this isn’t the same as imagining Pink Flying Elephants, we’re making a mistake: we might as well imagine Pink Flying Elephants, and furthermore that I, I, I am the Pope in Rome on my Throne.
And that means that when we try to draw lessons from those worlds, for our own, we have to be careful that we’re not importing pure fancy. It doesn’t follow that we’re being rigorous, simply because we “only changed one thing”.
NotMax
@Jay
Because wussy bleeding heart liberals have stomped on the right to arm bears.
//
John S.
@Anoniminous: Absolutely agree. And as Adam suggested above, my wife and I do our very best to nurture those genes we passed on to our children to unlock their potential.
Fortunately for them, we do not live in a Third World backwater — despite Trump’s efforts to make the US into one.
Ruckus
@Danielx:
Yes, yes it does. OK not making the fun so much as it’s that there is so much crap to work with. Maybe I’m just tired of fucker carlson’s bullshit, along with the shitforbrains bullshit and every other republican’s bullshit, I mean damn it, aren’t we up to our necks in republican bullshit and it’s not fun at all?
Brachiator
@Chetan Murthy:
I know a bit of the real science. That’s why I am curious about the science fiction.
Industrialization is an eyeblink of time. And it is not so much modern medicine as better nutrition (relatively and absolutely) that has made the difference, again in an incredibly short period of time.
There was an interesting tidbit on the British quiz show, QI, that reflexes are slightly slower in contemporary people, compared to those in the Victorian Age. We are on average taller, and it takes slightly longer for the signal to travel from our fingers to our brain.
Anoniminous
@Chetan Murthy:
I don’t follow Evolutionary Theory except its practical aspects I can use in my work of modeling brain processes. Example, single cell organisms use G-protein receptors in processing cell signalling is pretty much the way our brains use G-protein receptors. I found my life much more pleasant when I stopped arguing with Creationist Cretins and people who refuse to sit down and read a book.
Chetan Murthy
@Brachiator:
This is why I was careful to distinguish between the case of the brain (where as I have read, geneticists have been pretty firm that there is a lot of selection -pressure and has been for a long time) and cases like body strength and sexual dimorphism, where what’s really happened is that selection-pressure has been removed, and hence genetic drift is the only mechanism for change. Which means it’ll just wander about unless some trait gets selected-for (typically by sexual selection, and even then, really slow).
Heh. I think the problem is, the -reality- of evolution on any timescale that is imaginable by SF&F authors, simply doesn’t yield any possibilities for good stories. It takes too long, even when directed by intelligence (e.g. animal breeding.
So …. well, I think any good story you find, will necessarily get evolution wrong: badly wrong.
smike
@Anoniminous:
Interesting concept.
Jay
@NotMax:
I fully support the right to arm bears,
adapt the weapons,
give them fire arms training and combat training, along with tactical and strategic training.
Brachiator
@Chetan Murthy:
But of course you CAN do that, which is exactly why there is so much fun SF and fantasy. The creators don’t know what is impossible, or don’t care, because it would get in the way of a good story.
TS (the original)
@Adam L Silverman:
Wow. I had no idea he could speak so well, with all the facts ready to go. The democratic party has some wonderful people waiting for their chance – I hope Pres Biden gives any of them who lose the election a place in his administration.
Chetan Murthy
@Brachiator:
What I meant was, you aren’t actually changing only a single thing (as the SF&F writers recommend) while leaving everything else the way it is. By changing what (to a layperson) is one thing, you’re actually changing the way that the physical laws of the universe work, usually introducing a bunch of new fields, and not actually showing how it all fits together. So it’s actually a massive set of incoherent changes, all made for the sake of storytelling.
So to then say “in the the real world” (the idea being that since it’s “only one change” the way this new world works, has some relation to how our world works) …. well, as I said, I might as well assume I’m the Pope in Rome on my Golden Throne. It’s just as real.
Chetan Murthy
@Brachiator: Just to be clear, I also believe in the utility of SF&F for imagining how human societies could work, if things were different. It’s a great way of “wargaming” so to speak. But when we draw lessons back for our world, I think we have to be really, really careful, and especially so when drawing lessons back from worlds that are so massively counterfactually different.
Yes, some lessons for how we treat minorities can be drawn, by looking at how X-Men are treated. But there are limits, b/c …. well, X-Men have world-destroying powers., and no minorities have. Indeed, as I argued far up-thread, the right real-world analogy to X-Men isn’t minorities, but *billionaires*. I’d claim that the mere fact that there can be two such wildly-different real-world analogies for X-Men, might mean that we must be doubly careful in how we draw conclusions from thought-experiments about X-Men.
Chetan Murthy
@TS (the original): I wonder if part of why he lost in 2017, was just that it was his first campaign. I mean, hooboy he was pretty damn on-the-ball in his delivery against Perdue in that clip, eh? I mean *wowsers*. One presumes that that sort of skill is something you learn by experience and training.
Steeplejack
⭐⭐⭐ (3/5)
“Might go for partial experience next time.”
Chetan Murthy
@Anoniminous:
I read this book called _Why Evolution is True_. It was …revelatory. I learned, for instance, that even though certain body forms are targets of convergent evolution (e.g. dorsal fin + flippers for swimming), once a particular adaptatoin is lost (like a bony vertical tailfin) it cannot be recovered. So when reptiles went back into the water, and plesiosaurs re-evolved vertical tailfins, the part tha protruded vertically wasn’t bony — because that adaptation had been lost when their ancestors had gone onto land. And this is a mere matter of probabilities, nothing more.
Fantastic stuff.
Redshift
I once spent a weekend at a place that had a sanctuary for African Jungle Cats. They’re the possible wild ancestor of house cats, and look like a slightly oversized brownish cat.
We got to “meet” some of them. They are, of course, extremely cute, and you really want to pet them. But they have this look that says “you know I’m a wild animal, right?”
I’m sure the leopard had that in spades. You have to be aggressively stupid to ignore it.
TS (the original)
@Chetan Murthy:
It’s also Georgia. Like Texas slowly turning blue. I think he’s going to win – and what an asset he will be to a democratic senate. He will have 6 years to show the people of Georgia what he can do for them – and take them further to the left.
J R in WV
@Chetan Murthy:
Actually, in an organized strike, people get payments for walking specific picket lines, food boxes, gas. From peoople who support the strike. Perhaps the
political partiesDemocratic Party could organize that kind of effort? heh\Redshift
Brachiator
@Chetan Murthy:
Yeah. And so?
Fiction, including SF and fantasy, is just another way of thinking about and commenting on the human condition. But we don’t have to demand that SF be narrowly didactic, or that it has to be accurate in order to teach us something.
In the 60s, even Stan Lee himself talked about the X-Men being an allegory about race, with Professor X being MLK and Magneto being Malcolm X. Later the X-Men were read as an allegory for being gay. And there are other ways to look at it as well. But it’s all about the problem of being human and how we treat one another. The super powers are just a way into the story.
the pollyanna from hell
What lie or metaphor would be most useful to illuminate the mystery which enfolds your spirit? We have often chosen the most obviously impossible. And we have always given equal time or better to those lies and metaphors that seem most real and unmysterious. Goku plays the fool, and pretends he doesn’t understand. What a wonderful play!
mrmoshpotato
@Jay:
This really is a full service blog!
We even have a Canadian Floriduh! man! :)
aliasofwestgate
My roomies’ elder cat is a 14 year old Maine Coon mix who is the mellowist cat i have ever met. He even enjoys having his belly pet. Even my beloved Velvet, who adored me and was my velcro kitty every chance she got? Was a trap. But not roomie’s Jotan. Mr Mellow loves being brushed and spoiled in general. Welcomes belly rubs galore. *grins* Every other cat i have known in my life will leave me with scratches or at least the near scratches for attempting to go for the belly. A trap. Invite you, scratch you. Trying that with a strange big cat? hell no. I’m not that stupid. He probably ignored every single signal the poor leopard gave him to stay away. Idiot.
mrmoshpotato
@the pollyanna from hell:
The need for pants at home. Next question.
Amir Khalid
@aliasofwestgate:
I just gave Bianca a belly rub. She responded by licking my hand.
the pollyanna from hell
@mrmoshpotato: Does the goddess of pants follow you home from the hunt, or does she arise from the earth beneath your home?
Sab
@Amir Khalid: I gave Starscream a brief belly rub. He bit my hand., and he rarely bites.
yellowdog
@Glyph2112: Trump may be cash poor but I’d bet that the RNC and assorted PACs are rolling in it.
yellowdog
@Omnes Omnibus: They will do it because they can.
yellowdog
@Glyph2112: I am convinced Trump will prevail in the courts. There will be hundreds of suits and all they need is one syncophant judge to do their bidding to keep the case going and keep one or more states electors from voting.
NotMax
@yellowdog
Say what now? Furiously flamenco dancing on the tip of a feeble twig with that supposition.
satby
@mrmoshpotato: Goku shows up to derail threads with his hypothetical scenarios. And has an amazing amount of free time to do so considering he’s supposed to be a newly graduated RN. Most of the medical personnel I know are really, really busy right now working, not fantasizing about mutant internment online.
Not that I doubt his online presentation of his personna. Much.
TS (the original)
@yellowdog:
If you try you can always find a way to turn victory into defeat. No idea why you would want to do that.
Biden is going to win Georgia and Texas.
TS (the original)
@satby:
I responded once. Lesson learned.
NotMax
@satby
It was a casual, meandering thread* so not nearly as noisome as interjecting “What if Hitler had post-nasal drip?” types of bushwah into meatier discussions.
*As it began with a leopard, one might even say spotty.
;)
satby
@NotMax: True, which is much more amenable to his schtick.
MagdaInBlack
@Amir Khalid: My Gordita, a retired mom-cat, loves a belly massage She kneads the way mom-cats do when kittens are nursing.
Ian
@Goku (Amerikan Baka):
That was like 160,000 years ago dude
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Percysowner: not just Ohio. Here in Connecticut there was a woman who kept a chimp as a pet. I forget the details but the animal was particularly upset one day so she calls her friend over to help her… who knows.. calm the animal down. The friend was severely mauled though she survived. Friend or not I wish she would have told her friend to call an animal control or zoo and not gone to help her. Chimps are really smart and really really strong.
Chris T.
@Keith P.: I can rub all our cats’ bellies, but I did raise some of them from kittens. You have to be able to read the cats’ body language, and even then the risk is proportional to the size of the cat…
Uncle Cosmo
Late to a dead thread, but…
“The mean” is in all of us to some extent. Humans aren’t angels, and they aren’t devils; they’re both.
The problem is the enormous capability of a single person, or a very small group, to cause massive death and destruction in this day and age. Vast numbers have at our disposal implements of devastation – not just automatic weapons with large-capacity magazines, but automobiles and trucks for doGsake. Timothy McVeigh. Steven Paddock. The Aum Shinrikyo cult manufactured enough anthrax to kill tens of thousands in Tokyo**. Who knows what sort of plague some talented idiot with a grudge might unleash upon the world from his basement lab? And there is always the “nuclear football”…
Our abilities to destroy on a whim have far outstripped our abilities to control those whims. There’s your problem.
** And tried. Only their ignorance of the need [and means] to remove the electrostatic clumping of the spores prevented mass death. Then they switched to bags of sarin on the subway…
evodevo
@Anoniminous: Yeah…I don’t really argue with them nowadays, since I’m no longer having to deal with them in the classroom…in those days I just shut them down by saying in this class we will stick solely to science…if you want to argue religious beliefs, I’ll do that outside class. No one ever came up afterwards to say anything lol…
One thing you have to remember with fundies is, they don’t CARE about the science…Creationism is a rear-guard action protecting their religious beliefs…those come first. After all, if Adam and Eve didn’t exist as real beings, and the snake didn’t introduce Eve to the Apple (pomegranate, whatever), then the ENTIRE premise for Jesus’ dying on the cross is obliterated, since there was no Original Sin…THAT terrifies them, and they therefore will go to absurd lengths to deny science and posit a universe created 6000 years ago…
Uncle Cosmo
But not very various. The one serious factor is the effect of gravity or the lack thereof, & that is literally impossible to show convincingly in video without a lot better special effects. (There’s one scene where Avsarala is interrogating a Belter who’s been CGI’d as so tall & thin that just being hung up by his armpits in 1 g is torture…but that’s about it.)
For SF involving posthuman evolution, there’s A. E. van Vogt’s venerable Slan, and more recently Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio and Darwin’s Children. John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (Re-Birth in the USA IIRC), Children of the Atom by Wilmar H. Shiras, and doubtless many more of wildly varying quality.
jonas
@Adam L Silverman: A pretty good sign they’re planning on challenging this thing mostly via unhinged rants on Fox.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Uncle Cosmo: This is something I wish the Expanse had gone into more, and that I wish anyone involved in space exploration would make clear to the general public. Space beyond the Earth’s atmosphere exposes humans to hard radiation which can cause cancers and birth defects /mutations in a developing embryo/fetus , weightlessness for long periods has possibly permanent effects on human eyes and skeletons, low-gravity/no-gravity environments may cause birth defects in a developing human fetus, or could cause pregnancy loss.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Jay: In a SF/fantasy series I am reading there is a genetically enhanced grizzly bear, who has been given an implant that allows him to communicate. He was genetically enhanced and had his intelligence enhanced by the government/military to be a soldier. Except Sargent Teddy is a pacifist…and refuses to hurt anyone on command.
jonas
I hope Mr. Poggi has good homeowner’s insurance, though I presume in FL, they do offer special riders for things like “alligator tickling” and “playing with dynamite”.
sherparick
@Adam L Silverman: It is like they taught me regarding Commercial Paper law. There, the result is always “Bank Wins” and work your legal reasoning backward from that result. For Alito, the rule is is always “GOP wins!” and he works his reasoning, or something that can fake reasoning back from that result.
For instance, if the election is close enough to matter, they will want to say “don’t count ballots received after the polls close on 3 November, except for military ballots (correctly or not they will be believe lean toward Republicans), those ballots, but no others, should be counted” and the reasoning will in the end a lot of argle-bargle that really means “because we say so.”
sherparick
@CaseyL: We have to admit though these guys are making the metaphor of the “Face-eating Leopards Party” come to life.
A thought always to keep in mind when dealing with leopards, or the slightly smaller distant North American cousins, the Mountain Lion & Jaguar, are that human beings are almost the perfect prey size for this size cat (we are really to small to b much more than an appetizer to a tiger or lion.)
Betty
@Kent: Some Republican controlled counties are saying they won’t count any mail-in ballots until the 4th.
Chris Johnson
Because he’s a drug-crazed narcissist and he’s losing, and so he is mad at everybody in the world and is going to take it out on them every way he can.
Of COURSE he is shitting on his own supporters and allies. They have obviously failed to deliver him the kingdom! There is nothing to the guy but madness and petulance.
2liberal
I’ve had enough, I just applied the filter.
misterpuff
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): How it went down:
Floridah Man 1: It’s full contact right?
Floridah Man 2: Yup, you can rub its belly, give it scritches, hell, it may give you a lap dance
FM1: And this cat ain’t drugged right? I ain’t paying for some Sleepy Joe leopard.
FM2: No its totally straight and we ain’t even fed him yet today.
FM1: Bortles!
KenK
@Patricia Kayden: @#52. Collins gives a five-second answer: “I do not believe systemic racism is a problem in the state of Maine.”
Alternately, “yeah, it exists, but I don’t see it as a problem.”