apriorion

Well, I know that those NYT reporters have been on a mission to report on this stuff for a few years now, so this is just another report in a series.

The NYT article isn't gone; perhaps they changed the link. Here it is: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/pentagon-ufo-harry-reid-navy.html It's a much more sober read than the The Star one. That one goes a little overboard.

Honestly, the prospect of aliens and all this shit being true kinda cheers me up. I think I don't believe it all (because I don't believe much), but it's pleasing to entertain. I would welcome me some abduction at this point.

I was just revisiting the old 80s/90s "Unsolved Mysteries" (I've been feeling down lately, and that show is the equivalent of comfort food to me), and just the other day, season 2, episode 1 was the Roswell episode. The accounts reminded me very much of that Black Dog track from "Spanners", and so does that NYT excerpt you shared above: "I took a sledgehammer and I whammed it; I put it on the ground an whammed it. " "The...er... wood. I don't know what you'd call. It would burn. " Classic.

It’s kinda hard to believe, but then I get sobered up by trumps poll numbers (which aren’t zero) and I remember that I’m lucky to be in a bubble of friends who aren’t this weird. Glad to be insulated from this sort of craziness. Anderson cooper is paying people? Need to hydrate with tea? Yelling insanely “what is wrong with people?!” While shaking the camera with increasing rapidity? So very weird.

That was actually more amusing than upsetting.

You know, it irritates me so much to see these "courageous souls" stepping up now, as though Trump's corrosive effects on political conservativism weren't clear at the outset. There was another guy with a milqtoast name like Jeff Flop... (just looked it up) ah, Jeff Flake. I mean, he only found the courage when he knew he wasn't going to win his district. But he went along for the ride when Trump for a long time before that point. Or Mitt Romney, who only recently finds the courage to say something, probably because he sees that it's politically expedient in some way (perhaps his Mormon base has had enough of Trump). It's all so predictable, if you assume the worst about people, that is.

When terms like "anarchist" are thrown around by our own president as a sign that a person is "the enemy of the people", we are in trouble. It won't be hard to catalog those who hang out on various forums to discuss political ideology or opposition to the ruling party. These technologies have only helped. When political ideology becomes demonized (as it had with McCarthyism), democracy is dead, or at least in a coma. I fear that people will become penalized for having views that are considered "dangerous". I have friends who openly proclaim to be anarchists, but they're not the violent sort the president and his cronies have in mind, but instead prefer to keep to themselves and reach Bakunin or whatever. Crossroads, indeed.

Yes, not to mention that it's well-documented how many tech companies give info to the authorities in this country, which, given all of what we are seeing, are not ashamed of repeating the horrors of past authoritarian regimes. Look into the ubiquity of the PredPol database, and how it's been used to search for people who haven't committed any crimes via relatives and friends who have. Or check out Brayne's study of LAPD use of "secondary surveillance networks" and the "functional creep" of data compiled through pizza lobby camera footage for facial recognition. https://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/attach/journals/oct17asrfeature.pdf

Holy shit! What a freak. I almost felt bad laughing at that Colbert clip. Should have started placing bets back when it originally aired that this dude would try to kill someone. Out of all of the guests on that show, he seemed the craziest. what’s the evidence of the connection to Epstein case, exactly?

Nah, it's missing a "don't" right after "you". Then it'll be just right. Not that this needs evidence, but just a couple days ago: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/07/09/889356233/stop-getting-tested-ohio-politician-tells-constituents

I would love for this to be the case--please note, Warp!

Shouldn’t that be the converse: “If I beat you off, you will come on my property”?

I've thought a lot about it and decided that whatever rhetorical force it might have doesn't outweigh the harms. In other words, I'm reconciling with myself that that I fucked up. And I'm not judging people for the use of that word. I'm really torn because I hate euphemistic substitutes... Okay, I'm going to start rambling about this and I should stop. Just alerting you (dr. L) about what I went through here (on WATMM) recently.

yes Sorry, not funny. WATMM. A couple of guys on WATMM really didn't like my use of the "r" word once.

I want to ask these people, "So wearing a mask makes the government own the means of production?" I agree with the general point here, but be careful about the "r" word around these parts: I got blasted a little while ago by a couple guys around here.

Yeah, the coincidence of the rise of the thin blue line flag and the general (though slow-burning) acceptance that the confederate flag is racist is a bit suspicious.

Sure, but again, these flags are often paraded as a reply to black lives matter, at least where I live. While perhaps it wasn’t meant to express “blue lives matter”, that’s effectively the rhetorical force in many disputes, at least around here.

Yeah, and they usually influence impressionable young minds long before they die. They either reproduce or have nieces and nephews whom they can “teach” for a few decades. Unfortunately, natural selection just doesn’t work well on us. Our lifespans are too long for our own good.

Oh yes: where I currently live (middle-of-nowhere farm country Midwest) those have been common enough to begin with, but they’ve been increasing, along with the flags with a red line, which I guess means “first responder lives matter”, too. It’s such an unsophisticated rhetorical move to shift the focus to a different, comfortable Fox News talking point, casting the whole discussion as a merely verbal dispute or equivocation. Then again, the most discourse you’ll get out of these people is that shouting you have from that meathead redneck in his pickup truck.

Why in the world did autocorrect change my correctly spelled "records" to "tee cords"? Weird. Anyway, I wrote a bit about what I'm really concerned about in the other "WTF is wrong with America" or whatever it's called thread, but my concerns are more about the substantial (non-majority, but still substantial) portion of the electorate, and how they're going to handle the current convergence of crises. While I hope you're right and there's an orange jumpsuit waiting around the bend, that's not going to change the underlying problem that exists in this country. We have too many people who don't see a problem with Trump's behavior, and many of those actually like that stuff about him. Even if he doesn't win, what are the chance that there will be violence in the wake of the election? How close did some places get to historical violence over not getting haircuts 'cause "freedom", or whatever? I know that those events didn't happen, but how close were we, really? It's a counterfactual conditional that we have to evaluate here, so reference to the actual occurrences aren't enough to assuage my worries. I'm concerned about how bad things would have got if one silly, probably insignificant thing had been different. I mean, there are way too many people walking around with assault rifles, gettin' ready. Now, let's pile on rampant and probably not fluid unemployment, evictions, pandemic, conspiracy theories, historic levels of distrust of those with differing political views. How much longer until we hear substantial groups of people declaring that others, out-group members are simply not human? Or are pieces of shit to be disposed of? And the worse is yet to come. Experts say with some regularity that this pandemic is really a "trial run" for the real deal, probably around the corner. Zoonotic diseases are amping up exponentially, given population increases, habitat destruction, etc. When's the real problem going to catch on given what the fuck Brazil has been doing to its forests in just the past few years, thanks to Bolsonaro? When's the potable water supply going to make things worse? (Not just a rhetorical question: I'm genuinely concerned about this one, and the timing.) We just don't have our shit together, and with racial tensions shining a spotlight on criminal justice injustices in this country, we're seeing that people are just fucking stubborn and incapable of genuine rational dialogue and planning. Trump's re-election is not really the issue. I am inclined to agree that he won't win. But his election in the first place is a symptom of much deeper problems that we're starting to see bubble up to the surface, and his fucking insane plans to defund the WHO and pull out of the (largely vacuous and symbolic, admittedly) Paris Climate Accords just shows how there are enough people who inform our democratic "process" to drive us all off a cliff.

Oh shit: I lived there for 8 years. Nice to see community members getting a platform for challenging the BIZARRE socio-economic disparity in that town. Everything he said about the obvious disparity in Syracuse was completely correct: really stark contrasts in just small distances, even from block to block.

Regarding that beefy meathead Trump supporter: Man, people yell the stupidest things out of their trucks. I used to have to commute via bicycle (about 18 miles a day, round trip) when I lived in Florida, and I heard all sorts of un-insightful things just like that, long before this weird Trump-era we now find ourselves in. While not representative of the population at large, those kind of guys are representative of a certain segment of the population, the sort who will stick by Trump's side even if he shot someone on Fifth avenue, as he himself admitted. I don't know what I'm getting at here. I guess I was having some vivid memories brought to the surface there, and it got me to thinking that there are just enough of those sorts of people here in the U.S. that will always ensure life just kinda sucks for all of us. Trump wasn't elected by a majority, as everyone in the liberal camp loves to repeat ("He didn't win the popular vote!"), but his minority is a strong enough one to eek him out an electoral win. And even if Trump doesn't win re-election, the sad sort of mental gymnastics that these sub-average morons are all too eager to go through to justify their conspiracy theories about 5G and coronavirus, Obama, pizza shops, and so on really worry me about a peaceful transfer of power. (This is the point I wanted to write earlier in the Trump thread--I'll head over there in a minute.) That compounded with concerns over climate change, the global economy collapse, and the desperation over basic necessities such as housing and food are really going to make things very ugly in the next few months, not to mention the looming, almost never-addressed crisis over potable water is just going to mean major violence is inevitable. And what's there to be done about it? As a pretty cookie-cutter town "weirdo", I'll almost certainly be among the first to be culled, so I've just given up on preparations for any sort of life in that not-too-distant hellhole future. My colleagues all balk at everything I say about this shit (especially when I've brought up the water problem for the past few years), but they also scoffed when I laid out arguments for why I thought Trump stood a good chance of winning the 2016 election. I'm going to stop this and get back to work. I am seriously losing energy to move forward, though.

Unfortunately, no chance of those tee cords being released before Election Day. And even if they were released, I doubt they would affect his support all that much anyway.

I'm not only very worried about the precedence this sets for similar colleges and universities in my area, but I am just so disheartened by the increasing ignorance and stupidity in this country. It's really getting me down lately. More than usual.