You can tell how sick the formerly-banned account holders are by how happy they are to be back on Twitter. Imagine being kicked out of somewhere because you're a creep that people hate and then celebrating that six months later you get to go through all that again
— Hemry, Local Bartender (@BartenderHemry) October 29, 2022
Nobody sane wants to pollute the Lily threads, Adam would not appreciate his Ukrainian post being derailed, and I would just as lief keep the upcoming Garden Chat for respite. So here’s a place for all your bad news, doomerist speculation, and general impure Jackal thoughts…
"It was my whole life, being a disgusting freak on twitter that everyone despises, and now that papa elon is here i've risen from the sarcophagus of being in the real world to make people recoil in horror once more!!" Ok bro, we get it, you're a huge loser
— Hemry, Local Bartender (@BartenderHemry) October 29, 2022
======
man, a thing that is not discussed in media enough is how absolutely graceless, charmless and gauche virtually every republican is, and, especially, every republican media personality.
— 🎃GHOULLIKEHELLMACHINE🎃 (@golikehellmachi) October 28, 2022
crankball wank is the avatar of every middle aged divorcee whose kids choose not to call him on his birthday and whose next door neighbors do not invite him to the cookout.
— 🎃GHOULLIKEHELLMACHINE🎃 (@golikehellmachi) October 28, 2022
it’s just striking that all of the traits we think of that go into being likable or charming (wittiness, clever, self-effacing, complimentary, etc) have been completely burned out of the party because it’s led by a psychopath in cognitive decline
— 🎃GHOULLIKEHELLMACHINE🎃 (@golikehellmachi) October 28, 2022
i flat out do not believe that *anyone* in america truly likes ron desantis, alleged heir apparent, they all just think he’s mostly likely to snatch the crown when trump [redacted]
— 🎃GHOULLIKEHELLMACHINE🎃 (@golikehellmachi) October 28, 2022
The Moar You Know
Twitter is getting what it deserves. I am perfectly fine with CEO Elon opening the gates of hell back up. Maybe decent people will stop using it.
NotMax
“On the plus side, we won’t run short of confetti.”
HumboldtBlue
DeSantis is the latest bubble boy, but as Betty has pointed out repeatedly, once he emerges from the fox news qanon swamp, actual decent people are repelled.
That’s why Obama no longer needs an anger translator.
piratedan
I do find good content on twitter, some folks I’ve been introduced to on there have been helpful in educating me in everything from reproductive rights to essential dog ratings. I don’t go there hoping to attract a national following in hopes of impressing folks with my cleverness or hot takes, so I can maintain a low profile and learn more about a whole lot of folks who are more knowledgeable. Anyone who I would happen to cross swords with are folks that are likely not worth my time in engaging with, be they racists, sea lions or trolls of various and sundry variety.
The best parallel I can find with Musk taking over twitter is that he’s Richard Atherton’s character from Ghostbusters, a dickless prick that assumes he knows best and fucks over everyone else with his self-righteousness.
sab
I have only had a twitter account for about five years and I rarely used it. I really kicked it into gear when our blog went down and I searched madly for jackals’ twitter accounts.
Cutting the cord this week was easy for me because I am just a lurker. I don’t think I will miss it, although I had about fifty accounts I followed. Mostly I will miss the weird animal posts. The others I can read without a twitter account for now. Just have to remember to check in on them.
mrmoshpotato
Haha, this rings so true about some assholes I used to work for.
sab
@piratedan: Yes. Some good content on twitter. I just take notes now and won’t let twitter algorithems rule. Pick my own content. I will miss the weird animal shenanigans, but not the unfiltered politics or commericial ads.
opiejeanne
All of those creeps and Nazis weren’t happy on Parler or Truth Social because it was an echo chamber inhabited by people just as despicable as they, and they were bored. They kept inviting liberals to join them because “it would be fun”, but what was fun was when they left or were banned.
I’ve seen some of the idiocy that has been let loose, a Pandora’s box of assholes of every stripe and color you can imagine. Meanwhile, Elon is trolling everyone on Twitter, or thinks he is. His bon mots are not so very bon, more like a crude child thinking he’s witty.
I haven’t left yet because I have a quick blocking finger, and because I got to tell Elon that he is an ass before I blocked him.
mrmoshpotato
@HumboldtBlue: Here’s Obama’s full campaign speech.
opiejeanne
@sab: The ads are out of control the last couple of days. I just keep blocking the ads because I’m really not interested in ANYTHING being advertised there.
bjacques
I’ll keep my Twitter going for now. I have some friends who still use it, so we keep in touch with that and email.
I’m also sticking around there out of curiosity. If any edgelords are still around, 2016 is ancient history. Last I heard of one such, Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, he was trying to shepherd a bunch of trust fund babyfash in some obscure corner of Manhattan’s Chinatown, and even that was about three years ago. And I reckon more people remember Doctress Neutopia than Weez.
sab
@opiejeanne: Yikes. And I thought the ads used to be out of control.
Ken_L
I was banned years ago by Breitbart, RedState, Gateway Pundit, Power Line and Townhall. I imagine they will adopt a “free speech” policy in response to Musk opening Twitter to diverse points of view some time after hell freezes over.
James E Powell
My twitter is all sports, music, movies, and TV, but the ugliness of politics always manages to seep in.
Today it was a retweet of DeSantis’s wife at the Florida-Georgia game calling him “America’s governor” – I cannot throw up enough.
eclare
@HumboldtBlue: I was really surprised Obama didn’t drop an F-bomb or goddamn in that clip. You could feel his righteous anger.
eclare
@piratedan: I follow maybe a dozen people on twitter: Cole, Ms. Cracker, Paul Bronks, Joe Biden, Obama, an author who posts daily pics of her dogs, etc. I’ve been on there since 2011-2012, I think I’ve tweeted twice, although I do like tweets from time to time.
I find it easy to scroll past ads and trolls.
eclare
@James E Powell: And at some point during that game (I turned it off in the second quarter) someone projected on the scoreboard “Kanye was right about Jews.” Disgusting.
Can’t remember who I follow that retweeted that.
West of the Rockies
@HumboldtBlue:
DeSantis constantly looks like a guy who’s just sniffed a massive fart, or found a toe nail in his burrito. I can’t imagine even his wife likes him.
That he and Cruz and (once) Scott Walker thought they’d be president is laughable, man.
sab
Laughing here, because if I ever wanted a collecrion of Balloon Juice venters, these nice folks wouldn’t be on my list. Maybe I misunderstood. I thought venters are nastiness venters. And thes guys are not it, which I am okay with.
ColoradoGuy
That Wisconsin speech is stunner, and such a dramatic contrast to the NYT mantra of learned helplessness in the face of evil on the march.
eclare
@West of the Rockies: Twelve year old me: he who smelt it dealt it.
Steeplejack
@eclare:
Message projected at the end of the Georgia-Florida game. Apparently coördinated with at least one banner on a nearby overpass.
eclare
@Steeplejack: Thanks for the link! I’m on my phone
Wow, just saw the banners. Yes, coordinated.
m.j.
In passing I would just like to say to the crank, if it was so easy to buy student debtor’s votes, why didn’t Republicans do it?
You suggested speculation. I have a little something with absolutely no supporting evidence other than it’s too good to not be so. Okay, here it goes.
One of my current senators is Chuck Grassley. I think he is going to keep his seat. I also think he will step down in two years and Kim Reynolds will appoint his grandson Pat. Why do I think this?
Pat is unknown and a bit of a lightweight. Reynolds is a cardboard cut-out who does as she’s told. Four years is a long time to campaign. It sort of gets the goobers used to the idea of who they need to vote for.
JoyceH
@opiejeanne:
And are we surprised? Whenever anyone appears to believe that an entirely unregulated public forum is going to be in any way useful, I want to ask, “How old are you?” Because they must either be too young to have experienced Usenet, or so old they forgot. Or maybe some ageless jackass who thinks a forum overrun with ‘F–khead Cascades’ is a place that anyone but moron trolls will want to be.
cain
@HumboldtBlue: have the DC press clutched their pearls and headed to the fainting couches over ‘tone’?
cain
@James E Powell: DeSantis showed up at some concert .. I think he was a former Idol contestant. Apparently the crowd went wild.
Aussie Sheila
@cain: Heh! 👌
cain
@JoyceH:
Ahhh.. usenet. It was ok for me .. but I wasn’t on the main stuff mostly in rec.arts.fiction.sf, comics or fantasy or Commodore Amiga. It was pretty decent there and yeah we had our flame wars. Back then I never said fuck that much.. not like now lol .. used to roast people pretty good.
Geminid
I went into this in more detail on the Ukraine thread, but I think people should know about the ominous warning that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard commander gave to protesters yesterday:
The last time the Revolutionary Guard Corps stepped in to suppress protests was “Bloody November,” 2019. They used machine gun fire, rooftop snipers and even fire from helicopters to murder 1500 Iranians (by Reuters’ estimate). These protests are much more widespread that those of 2019.
Balconesfault
I’m thinking it would be good to come up with analogue campaigns to the anti-vaxxer and vote fraud “free speech” that a lot of Nat Review types think were “unfairly” banned by Twitter or FB censors.
I’m thinking something about riding in EVs causing testicular cancer (“massive EMF sources right next to my nads!”) or how privately funded space exploration is really about billionaires making contact with the aliens who already hang out around our solar system in order to negotiate deals for selling off portions of the world’s excess population in order to reduce stress on our resources.
Build up some good momentum for these campaigns and test good old Elon’s commitment to his publicly declared principles.
Baud
@Geminid:
That is ominous.
In other news, horrible crowd crush in South Korea. Over 150 dead.
ETA: I learned Halloween is a big thing in South Korea.
JoyceH
@Baud: The Halloween thing surprised me too. Seems so western.
Geminid
@JoyceH: American secular holidays like Halloween and Valentine’s Day have spread widely, no doubt with the assistance of commerce.
Matt McIrvin
@bjacques: Yarvin’s up and coming in the world! J.D. Vance mentioned him as a key intellectual and he’s getting the media profiles with pictures of him in a cool leather jacket! When they fire up the ovens he’ll be providing the big-brain justification on all the Sunday morning shows.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I noticed that seems to be a common attitude on the internet the last year. I think the losers Elon let back on to Twitter aren’t going to find it as fun as they think.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The only one I can imagine doing that and making it threw the full meal would be Romney, and even then I can’t see it being a fun time, sort of like have a meal with some random company exec at work.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Jobs program!
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: Yesterday I ran into a long, detailed thread about Yarvin, retweeted by Michael Paulauski. The writer described how Yarbin’s rotten ideas are gaining traction left and right. According to the writer, Yarvin seems influential with PeterThiel, Vance’s sponsor.
Chris T.
All my thoughts are generally impure.
Baud
@Geminid:
As in the political left?
I’ve never heard of the guy.
snoey
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Boehner with several cocktails in him and off the record could be interesting, if not actually fun.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Or every thread over run with porn adverts literally trying to spam actual posters out.
The fact that some friendless dork whose only human interaction is with his employees like Musk is the lizard king of the un-moderated free speach says it all.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@snoey: yes, even more so if he gets so drunk he starts shit talking other Republicans.
Baud
Elon Musk’s Twitter will be as committed to free speech as Donald Trump’s Truth Social.
trnc
It had occurred to me a couple of days ago that democrats like to hang out with someone they can laugh and discuss hopes and dreams with, and republicans like to hang out with people they can gripe with.
eclare
@snoey: Agree, dinner and drinks with Boehner could be fun.
Starfish
@Baud: There were some bloggers who would write extremely long essays some years ago. Yarvin was one of them. Really off the wall stuff like “I am a monarchist. Most people are dumb. Bring back slavery” but expand the idea to ten thousand words.
There was a tech conference where Yarvin was invited to speak on tech and not on his stupid political theories. I accepted a free ticket to go because I love going to clown show fail parades, but I did not get to stay for Yarvin’s talk because I had to go pick up my kid from preschool or something.
I had a lot of time and would read all the weirdos on the internet.
I grew frustrated with such people, and their unwillingness to engage with near future harms because they were trying to build up grand theories of the universe.
A lot of the rich clowns are enamored with the idea of “longtermism” right now– that it doesn’t matter what happens in the near future so long as things are good for the many many more people that will exist hundreds of years from now.
They are throwing money into non-profits that work on this idea. Basically, they get a tax break now for a non-profit that has no tangible goals for numerous generations. It is a scam.
artem1s
@JoyceH:
problem is this is the entire marketing department of every company out there. B Ark people all the way down. They have gotten as lazy as the media. they have no idea how to put together a PR campaign anymore except to cross post in their own bubble of marketing firms and ‘influencers’. They will go back to thinking they are doing a great job because some bot farm retweeted their dog whistle shit post.
Baud
@Starfish:
Is that how you found Balloon Juice?
@Starfish:
It often is.
Geminid
@Baud: Until yesterday I had never heard of Yarvin either.
By political left I mean people in the so-called Red-Brown alliance, lefties who are gravitating to authoritarian positions and rightwing movements. This could be because they believe they and “the Workers” could dominate an authoritarian populist movement, or because they are accelerationists who think a rightwing takeover will create the conditions for a left wing revolution. They might hold both beliefs at the same time.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: What strikes me is that when you actually read his writings, he sounds like a slightly better-spoken version of Ignatius Reilly from “A Confederacy of Dunces”, this crank who should be pushing a hot-dog cart around and yelling about Boethius. But I guess he’s good at impressing rich assholes.
Starfish
@Baud:
I wanted to read some thoughtful Republicans, so I started reading Balloon Juice around the time when Andrew Sullivan would link to it.
The crazy blogs that required much free time to read happened later. It would be stuff like The Last Psychiatrist.
Yarvin was writing as Mencius Moldbug. He now has a substack. I have not had time to pay attention to him in years.
lowtechcyclist
Truth.
I don’t know if this is the primary difference between Democrats and Republicans, but it’s surely a contender:
Dems look for ways to make the world less sucky.
Rethugs just want to blame the people they already hate for the fact that the world sucks, and make their lives as miserable as possible.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: The ability of Yarvin to impress rich assholes is impressive to opportunists on the left, the kind who follow the cynical Jimmy Dore. They hate the Liberal state too, and they know that conservative money is beginning to flow towards anyone who will help tear down the Democratic Party.
lowtechcyclist
@artem1s:
What a load of useless bloody loonies, huh?
Princess
De Santis is what you get when you start to worry Ted Cruz may be too likeable.
prostratedragon
The rant at the top is something I’ve been raging over with this crowd from the beginning. It’s hard to express, but the matter has to do with much more than just one’s aesthetic preferences. I guess one has to go back into philosophical speculations about the relationship among beauty, truth, and goodness or some such. Good Lord, but they’re crass!!
Matt McIrvin
@Starfish:
I used to have that impulse decades ago but I had it burned out of me. Of course I still follow some people who likely happen to be Republicans, but not for politics. There’s just nothing of worth to be had there.
The thing that disappoints me is this: around the time I decided that, I also decided I needed to be paying more attention to the further left: people who identify as socialists or Communists or anarcho-syndicalists, etc. The Iraq war specifically convinced me that in some cases they could be right when most liberals were wrong, and that they were deserving of more attention.
But so many of them are just… so… DUMB. Even if they’re book-smart. Some became convinced by mealy-mouthed corporate diversity rhetoric that civil rights themselves are just a bourgeois distraction from the revolution. They’ve got this weird inclination to ally with utterly loathsome figures on the far right who pose as anti-establishment. The rise of Trump was for some reason a thing they couldn’t deal with because their resentment of liberals and centrists kept them from seeing there could be something worse.
I’ve still got this part of me that thinks it’s wrong to dismiss everything they say, but it’s fading.
Chris T.
@Geminid:
Has this ever, even once, happened, ever, in history?
(ETA: “No, but you know the old saying:
third51,251,065,025,633rd times the charm!”)Starfish
Dear Canadians, please kill Facebook. The Canadians are absolutely dragging Facebook.
Matt McIrvin
@prostratedragon: They’ve got their “intellectuals”, people who will actually go on about those lofty philosophical subjects like beauty and goodness, but in this utterly crack-brained way, like the kind of kids who started wearing bow ties at age 16 and want to reconstruct the Byzantine Empire in America and denounce the newfangled innovations of Claude Monet as an insult to the Old Masters.
Sooner or later they get obsessed with how butt stuff is the same thing as Armageddon.
Geminid
@Chris T.: There’s always a first time!
But seriously, some of tbese people believe this is inevitable. The science of dialectical materialism tells them so. They know that the two Bourgeois Parties must be destroyed first, and they’ll happily help the Republicans destroy the Democrats so they can build the Left party “Workers” deserve.
These are some very cynical and hateful people. It could be I’m only just now paying attention, but it seems like the last couple of years have aggravated their anger. And now Russia’s war on Ukraine seems to have really brought this strain of hatefullness above ground.
Matt McIrvin
@Starfish:
Oh, God, I was just in a discussion about those freaks elsewhere. Strongly connected to Yudkowsky’s notion that all normal human ethics needs to be subsumed to gassy science-fictional speculations about the possible desires and motivations of hypothetical artificial superintelligences.
There’s always this long long chain of assumptions-for-the-sake-of-argument that somehow mutate into things you take as gospel truth by the time you get to the end of the chain. “Suppose that we can build swarms of nanobots that replace all of regular human industry, and that these are under the control of Skynet-level intelligences, and that they build vast simulation engines that can house the minds of 10^36 emulated individuals in a plurality of virtual worlds…” or whatever, and it’s interesting stuff to suppose, but somewhere the “suppose” qualifications all melt away from the argument while you’re not paying close attention, and suddenly they’re talking as if we should ignore the well-being of real people in the immediate future in favor of worrying about this stuff.
This kind of phenomenon is a hallmark of bad science-fiction plotting, which is probably where they got it from.
I have a super esoteric metaphor for this that I use to sound like a smart guy: it reminds me of the problem of renormalization in quantum field theory. You try to calculate some small quantum correction to a number and it appears the answer is “INFINITY!!!” and it turns out the calculation is apparently dominated by divergences that happen in the limit of infinitely short distances and high energies, this fantastical realm utterly divorced from the situation you care about. It turns out that one of the elements of regaining your sanity is to establish a rule that that exotic stuff should cancel out in the end–if the final answer depends on the fine details of the super-high-energy physics, you’re probably doing it wrong.
Matt McIrvin
I think if there’s one idea I would like to impress upon smart children, it’s “just because you think something is cool–that’s fine, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s important, or is the salvation of the world.”
It seems like there’s a lot of activity these days that amounts to dredging up futurist or science-fiction ideas that I encountered too in the period from about 1976 to 1999, and, yeah, I thought they were cool too, but that doesn’t mean that they’re right, or that they’re the most important thing in the world to worry about.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: The dark side of empowerment is that a bunch of people think the things that are in their heads are important or valuable.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris T.: Hey, when the German Communists said “Nach Hitler, uns!” they were right.
…in the eastern part of the country. After the whole place had been bombed to rubble and invaded by the Soviet Army.
RaflW
Baseball jank: “How dare people who’ve been under the massive thumb of crushing student debt take a vacation with their modestly improved financial situation. Moar suffering for the plebes is the only true answer!”
What an absolute fucknugget of a person.
Chris T.
@Matt McIrvin:
Hm. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Guess I’ve been proven wrong!
(ETA: just wondering: is there a fallacy where you get your fallacy wrong, like in this case where “post hoc” is supposed to not have such a big time interval?)
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: It also reminds me a lot of Pascal’s Wager, where you frame having or not having religious faith as a matter of a rational decision procedure, but the complete absence of actual data to go on gets swept under the rug because there are literally infinite punishments and rewards involved. It doesn’t matter that you can’t even vaguely calculate a probability that God exists, because, look, Heaven and Hell are on the line! And before you know it your “rational” decisions are supposed to depend on how lurid a punishment/reward fantasy somebody can dream up.
The funny thing is that people like Yudkowsky’s cultists all frame themselves as rationalist/skeptic types, and they’ve all heard what I just wrote before and probably rejected it for the reasons I just gave. But then they insist on recapitulating it all with a science-fictional gloss instead of a religious one, and somehow that’s convincing.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris T.: I imagine some Communist in late 1920s Berlin getting hold of a cursed monkey’s paw. “I wish that this Hitler freak will bring about a Communist regime in charge here by… oh… make it 1945, I won’t be too greedy!” A finger curls…
bjacques
@Matt McIrvin: Pascal’s Wager can apply to *any* religion, though of course, the only certain way to find Paradise and escape punishment is to send $35 to “Bob”. There’s still time…
Jackie
For what it’s worth:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-nationalist-nick-fuentes-re-banned-from-twitter
cmorenc
@Chris T.:
Actually, yes it did more or less happen, right here in the U.S. The RW was ascendent in the 1920s, with alcohol prohibition and Calvin “the chief business of America is business” etc. RW policies (e.g. Smoot-Hawley tariff) contributed strongly to the onset of the great Depression, which resulted in landslide victories by FDR, who initiated one of the brightest, most durably long progressive policy eras in our entire history, from 1932 up through the late 1960s when Nixon won in 1968. And despite Nixon’s darker side and deliberate exploitation of racial resentment, nonetheless had a surprisingly progressive policy side (much of our major environmental legislation was passed while Nixon was president, e.g. EPA). The RW only really regained general dominant control with Reagan in 1980 and the RW sweep of Congress in 1994
But it would be unwise for hard-core progressives to count on the stars aligning for things to work out as they did in 1932. Germany would be a counter-example where the stress of economic failure facilitated the rise and takeover of the country by the demagoguic fascist Hitler and the Nazid.
opiejeanne
@Jackie: Haha!
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin:
I figured out the idiocy of the left in 2016 by watching the green party presidential debate sponsored by the RT network on YouTube. It quickly became apparent that literally every green candidate thought they were running for the position of dictator of America, but it was OK because they would be a benevolent left wing dictator.
Matt McIrvin
@cmorenc: That wasn’t a literal revolution, though! I’m sure many of the revolutionary leftists of the time thought FDR was a shitlib tool of the elites, propping up the failed capitalist system with his little tweaks around the edges. If only the system had been allowed to REALLY fail we’d get something better.
I just saw someone opining that the problem with the George Floyd/BLM protests was that the actual violence was false-flag stuff initiated by right-wing Boogaloo types and overblown by the right-wing media (this is largely correct) …and that if there had only been some REAL widespread rioting coming from the grassroots, we might finally see some real change happening…
Miss Bianca
@opiejeanne: For some reason, your post reminds me of an exchange from Road House, that Patrick Swayze vehicle that my ex described as a “Zen koan disguised as a dumb action flick.”
The Swayz is doing his thing as a Bouncer Extraordinaire when one of the comically evil bad guys shows up and wants to get into the club. Swayze refuses him entrance and then tells him something like, “Look at all these people in there. They ‘re dancing and drinking and having fun.”
“I want to have fun,” the other guy replies.
“You’re too stupid to have fun,” Swayze retorts.
And that’s true of these pathetic right-wing loser dudes.
Miss Bianca
@Matt McIrvin:
And yeah, look at how great that turned out for East Germany!
I visited Berlin for a couple weeks in 1996. I was staying in the eastern part of the city. I remember being slightly freaked out at *just how many* bombed-out buildings remained from 50 years previous. Possibly all changed by now, but who knows?
Ruckus
@Chris T.:
My thoughts are often genuinely impure…..
But then so am I…..
Makes life more fun…..
Tony G
@West of the Rockies: Politics has changed, for the worst, within the past 30 years or so. Back in the day, a successful politician, regardless of how toxic his policies might be, would at least pretend to be a friendly human being who likesthe people who vote for him. Ronald Reagan — a sociopath — at least pretended to be kindly old Uncle Ron — and managed to convince tens of millions of people that his false persona was his real personality. Now, however, they don’t seem to bother with masks anymore. We get people like Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Ted Cruz and, of course, Trump — truly repulsive people who seem to hate the entire human race. There seems to be a new level of toxicity in our culture that causes millions of people to be attracted to these despicable men.
Ruckus
@lowtechcyclist:
Dems look for ways to make the world less sucky.
Rethugs just want to blame the people they already hate for the fact that the world sucks, and make their lives as miserable as possible.
Notice that liberals look for ways to make things better, even in small ways, while conservatives are scared shitless of reality because they are shallow and scared of what they can’t see, the future. Both groups know that we can imagine the future but can’t know the future until it is the present. We can though, set rules and concepts that at least make a possible future – possible. Conservatives don’t think change is good because they can’t control the future so they look at the past for guidance, which leads them to reject change. At a time when change happened much slower that was acceptable, the future was pretty much the past. Now? Change happens a hell of a lot faster. There are more of us, we have, by continuing to do things the old ways continued to do some things that create negative change – do damage, noticeable damage, possibly massive damage. We can change direction, other than going backwards, but it requires thought, science, effort, time, and not giving up. Conservatives can’t comprehend that, which is what makes them conservatives.
Ruckus
@Tony G:
It is very basic. Change is the one constant and is relatively out of our control. We can do things to make the change better or worse but we are mostly powerless to affect a lot of change in the world. At my age I’ve seen a hell of a lot of change in the world, some better, much not. I’ve seen that often, humans trying to control the concept of change, screw things up, and occasionally make things better. This world is, overall a better place now than when I was born, almost 3/4 of a century ago. But it is not all better. And some of the better was accidental or unintentional or out of our control. And we are still humans, with all the good – and all the bad. We still have hunger and greed. We still have hate and love. We still have brilliance and stupidity. We have feminism and MAGA machismo. We are still humans.
VOR
@Tony G: it was phrased as the “would you want to have a beer with them?” test. George W. Bush rode that over Gore even though Bush didn’t drink. But who on the Right would you want to watch a football game and drink beer with? I can’t think of a one. It’s just assholes all the way down.
But both Biden and Obama would be pleasant companions.
Citizen Alan
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I just perma blocked a friend of 25 years on Facebook Because he thought the attack on Paul pelosi was a logical and foreseeable result of woke politics andicks and the democrats rejection over the working class.