The "red circle" (actually a round quote bubble) is back. I noticed it about 5:15 p.m. Central.
I wonder how much additional grousing on the mothership it would take to elicit any actual communication from the Dispatch about this issue. Or is continued radio silence now the policy?
Think about the comments from Taiwan, I think of my friend Kathi, who was a missionary there. She was born there (her parents were missionaries there as well). We met at a college dance, went on three dates, then she broke up with me. We remained friends, although after college we drifted away, due to a lack of internet/cell phones. We refreshed our friendship a few years ago via email, and she wants to meet Katie sometime when we are in town.
We discussed the Taiwanese situation. She is fearful China will invade, resigned that China will invade. But she think Taiwan will make China regret doing it. She hopes the chip factories there will be destroyed and the employees will relocate to the US, rather than work for China. Although if that happens there will be a global depression for a time.
I admit I have had a long-term dislike for Biden. That’s why I’m very inclined to believe it was overwhelmingly his character flaws that led him to seek reelection, although the addition of poor judgment due to senility might have played a role. I’ve long thought of him as amazingly vain, self-centered, cruel, and narcissistic. Worse than Trump? Different from Trump, I’d say: Less prone to wear these flaws openly and with apparent pride.
If he’d possessed better character and judgment, he’d have admitted it was time to retire and support a viable successor in the D party primary. And hopefully it wouldn’t have been a dedicated left-winger.
I do think I owe President Biden a reconsideration on one point. I've been saying that he's trying to get Israel to let Hamas win the war because he wants the votes of Hamas's supporters in Michigan. After reading/hearing some of the interview stuff, I think it's possible that he simply has no idea what he's saying or what U.S. policy is at any given time, and he may not know Michigan is a state.
"We, on the climate side, have come along and we've done everything that is reasonably—and three other countries are the reason we're in the problem we're in," Biden said. "But what happens if all of a sudden, on the Amazon, they're starting to clear, vast swaths of land, cut down forests, etc. Back when Dick Lugar was alive, he and I started something back in the '90s, where we said—late '80s, excuse me—where we said to, in the Amazon, they said, look, if you, we'll make a deal with you Brazil. You don't cut your forest, we'll pay you not to do it. We'll pay you not to do it, we have to prevent— And that's why we're working so hard to make sure Angola can be in a position that they have more solar capacity than almost any place in the world, to help that whole continent."
According to Commentary, he went on to say that we're going to build a railway across "that continent," although it's unclear from the context whether the continent in question was Europe, South America, or Africa.
Anyway, I'm sure he said all this, including telling the interviewer, "I can take you," with great empathy. Did you know that some people in his family have died in the past?
The Commentary guys have been reading out some of Biden's responses from the Time magazine interview. He seems not to understand the questions, and the answers are rambling and unresponsive. But then, Donald Trump was presenting word salads back in 2015, and you were just supposed to pretend it made sense.
As I keep saying, they are equally unfit: both of them 100% unfit.
I heard a stat yesterday that the largest budget item after Social Security is interest on the debt. How can we afford to police the Earth? How can we provide weapons to so many different countries and have enough to protect our country? I never considered myself an isolationist but I’m kind of moving in that direction.
I see the same problem. Not just that we’ve got no apparent *will* to limit spending, but now we don’t even appear to have any means.
Nevertheless, I also don’t think we have the option of retreating to a defensive posture only. At the very least, our enemies are willing to cause other nations to implode as a means of overwhelming us with refugees. That was one of Putin’s strategies in Syria regarding Europe, for instance. That can also break budgets in many different ways.
I hate to think this way but whether it’s inaction by Congress or appeasement of bad actors by our admin, it seems we’ve lost the ability to do big, important things. Or maybe the willingness.
I think the roots are at the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall fell. We in the rich developed westernized countries have lost any sense of purpose. Meanwhile, the authoritarians have regrouped.
Good morning. Cloudy and hot again today, with rain likely later. The Front Page is reporting on violent hip-hop in the wake of rap star Sean “Diddy” Combs attacking his girlfriend.
Warm and damp here now, thanks to the receding rain showers.
There should be a scale to measure such conditions, and it should probably involve “earwigs per cubic yard of habitable space”. Damned things are everywhere!
People over at the Free Press comments are saying that comments are being deleted by the Management with "explanations" like "Not great." Subscribers are, understandably, asking the Management what the specific guidelines are, and they're getting content-free blather in reply.
"Just answer the question!" she bellows at the ceiling. If there is a list of banned words, provide it. If there are banned opinions, specify them.
I can understand their wanting a somewhat different environment. There's a strong element of hostility among many, though not a majority, of the commenters there.
However, I don't think that kind of thing is resolved by arbitrary removals because a comment was "not great." Make rules, publish the rules, and enforce the rules consistently. Imagine if major universities had done this over the last several several months, instead of being blatantly inconsistent.
"Not great" somehow sounds to me like the sort of remark a callow youth might think was very clever and appropriate as a justification. Maybe they picked it up from a professor.
I think it's lazy and passive aggressive. If they'd said, "We don't allow the use of (pick an inappropriate term)," then they'd have to police it consistently. If they said, "Although we can't point to anything specific, this comment just gives us a racist-y vibe," they'd seem muddle-headed even if they're right. If they said, "Stop yelling ALLCAPS stuff about Donald Trump. It makes this seem like a media outlet for kooks," they wouldn't make anyone happy.
I'm sure it's important. However, wouldn't it make sense to report on the decisions when they occur, and report today on something that has actually happened?
On the other hand, events that have actually happened can take time to analyze so as to give useful information, while events that are waiting to happen are, as it were, holding still. It's like drawing trees: not easy to make things clear, but at least they're not moving.
I'm not opposed to preview stories, whether they be for elections, Supreme Court rulings, or football games. They help us make sense of what we're seeing -- or not seeing. There's value in that.
I don't imagine Jon Stewart is anyone's favorite cup of tea at this table. Neither is he often mine, but a good helping of cream and sugar sometimes makes his hyper-histrionic and profanity-laced schtick tolerable enough to let him get to his point. Which sometimes is a pretty darned good one.
To wit, considering this thread of yours and Wilhelm's that I've been following with interest, I submit this brief story (when the flag asking for "support" appears, you can click on 'continue without supporting' to get the story) and suggest you start the video at 10:50 and give Stewart a chance to make it to the end...
That’s more JS than I’ve watched since the second Dubya term. 🫠 And I liked him less back then, even if I wasn’t a Dubya voter. (I wasn’t a fan of the overspending.) As you note, I, for one, certainly wasn’t anywhere near JS’s ideological beat.
Not a complaint, per se, but I haven’t had cable TV in over a decade, so his romps through cable and broadcast “news” content are outside the media I consume.
Should there be nothing written on an election until the day after? As some might say, Naw dog.
In my humble opinion, the news media's responsibility is to inform, educate and entertain. Sadly, the infotainment is what you get when you have networks that have 24 hours to fill but won't hire reporters. (I shan't bother with naming names.) The BBC and NYT do a better job at balancing the three things. (Informing should be Job One, of course.) But there's no center-right equivalent of those two. The WSJ seemed to be headed that way, but even it's getting weird. Trump apologists seem to be everywhere these days.
That's why I read the mothership. They try really hard and are pretty successful at meeting my meager standards.
"Should there be nothing written on an election until the day after? As some might say, Naw dog."
I agree. However, an election is going to require action on the part of the general public. Therefore, the public needs information. Supreme Court decisions do not require action by the public: they're going to decide what they decide when they get around to it, whether or not I even know they exist. (Sort of like the Finance Council at my church ...)
Sportball games are more like the Supreme Court. For the viewer, information in advance of the game can be entertaining, but it doesn't affect the outcome for either the players or the viewer ... unless either the players or the viewers are gambling, of course.
I do more than my share of griping about the infotainment industry. But to be fair they have a problem that they can’t unify an audience around foreign policy stuff since it requires too much base knowledge. And infotainment works by clicks and eyeballs. Heightened emotions achieve those, which means the subject matter has to be stuff everyone readily comprehends.
The media just aren’t any good at forcing news consumers to eat their spinach first and foremost. So they just capitulate and serve sugary snacks 24/7.
It reminds me of something Chris Stirewalt, I think, wrote about "pseudo-events," by which he meant a government or corporate entity scheduling an event to make an announcement, introduce an employee, read a statement, etc. He said that the journalism industry loves this, because they know the who-what-when ahead of time and can schedule their employees' time and their publication of what occurs.
I think stories of the "Here are some things that aren't actually an occurrence at this time" are kind of like that: an efficient allocation of writers' time and the interwebs' electrons.
The article's main point is that not every song (or poem, or novel) is autobiographical about the writer. Songs can be fictional. Also that songs featuring violence and misogyny are not new.
Ripper: A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
And it seems the perfect way to keep the international community dithering. China can make the case that it's NOT conducting a blockade, because that involves another nation. And even the US doesn't recognize Taiwan as another nation.
This headline from the WaPo seems appropriate for today's topic:
Deceased New Jersey congressman wins Democratic primary election
Rep. Donald Payne Jr. (D-N.J.) died following a heart attack in April. More than a month later, he won the Democratic primary for New Jersey’s 10th District.
"A mockup of Taiwan’s presidential palace has been built in a remote desert military training ground. There’s also a replica of the streetscape around Taipei’s parliament house and executive government centres."
This reminds me of the preparation for the October 7 attack on Israel, which included mockups of the kibbutzim to help the attackers plan the murders and kidnappings.
I think it’s time for the US to get serious about Taiwan, openly announcing an alliance and even finding a reason to station US military on the island. That will PO the CCP, with likely economic repercussions, but it will signal our resolve and make an invasion much less likely. (And we need to be less economically tied to the PRC anyway).
But neither our current President or his wannabe successor are likely to move in that direction. Trump in particular admires Xi Jinping, as he does all dictators who hate the US.
I can remember prior elections that didn’t involve attention-obsessed celebrity candidates. There were actual discussions about what each candidate’s positions were on foreign policy. I recall, too, thinking at the time that the debates were silly and superficial…
But trying to guess what a Trump foreign policy would look like is highly uninteresting, since even taking him at his word results in unintelligible mumbo-jumbo from a man whose only consistency is in being inconsistent.
"I think it’s time for the US to get serious about Taiwan, openly announcing an alliance and even finding a reason to station US military on the island."
I would support that. I think it would be a safer world for everyone if evil dictators expected the United States to do something for our fellow democratic countries other than, at best, shrug and mumble.
If the CCP moves to active invasion, they’ll only need to declare it an anticolonial effort in order to find full support of US academia and legacy infotainment.
Well, ya hafta do what the Chinese Communist Party tells you, even if you're an American. They're a government too, so their instructions have to be legitimate and binding on everyone everywhere, because it's a global world and all that, and besides it wouldn't be polite to say no. The Chicoms would have no reason to think it's OK to overstep, right? So what they're doing can't be overstepping. /heavy sarc
It seems as though, a dozen times a day, I yell at the ceiling, "Just do your damned job!!!" This is not specifically aimed at the ceiling, which is adequately supporting the upstairs, but at many people out there in Life. The ceiling is just a proxy.
Well, first, I am relieved that you don't expect the ceiling to do more than the job for which you "hired" it. Second, the whole proxy thing doesn't seem to be working.
No, it's not working. Once in a while, involving a higher authority works. I was able to get some action out of one of our parish's employees when I started emailing some people I know at the Diocese.
It does not give me a better impression of a person when she replies to my emails only after a more senior figure copies her on an email saying, "I don't understand why your parish coordinator isn't helping you with this." If I hadn't decided that the one important thing was getting the information I needed, I would have replied-to-all, "I don't understand it, either, but I have some theories. For example, one could certainly get the impression that she doesn't want to assist Hispanics."
The "red circle" (actually a round quote bubble) is back. I noticed it about 5:15 p.m. Central.
I wonder how much additional grousing on the mothership it would take to elicit any actual communication from the Dispatch about this issue. Or is continued radio silence now the policy?
I saw it, too. The tiny heart to Like an article, at the left on the same line as the red circle, is also back. I wonder how long it will stay.
And now I must put away my perishables before joining the G-File already in progress.
I need to make coffee for tomorrow.
I wonder a lot of things.
Think about the comments from Taiwan, I think of my friend Kathi, who was a missionary there. She was born there (her parents were missionaries there as well). We met at a college dance, went on three dates, then she broke up with me. We remained friends, although after college we drifted away, due to a lack of internet/cell phones. We refreshed our friendship a few years ago via email, and she wants to meet Katie sometime when we are in town.
We discussed the Taiwanese situation. She is fearful China will invade, resigned that China will invade. But she think Taiwan will make China regret doing it. She hopes the chip factories there will be destroyed and the employees will relocate to the US, rather than work for China. Although if that happens there will be a global depression for a time.
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/what-did-the-president-know-and-how-long-did-he-remember/
Speaking of occasions for crushing morosity ...
Andrew Stiles had some fun with the *Time* interview.
https://freebeacon.com/author/stiles/biden-administration/biden-threatens-to-beat-up-journalist-and-other-highlights-from-time-magazine-interview/
I admit I have had a long-term dislike for Biden. That’s why I’m very inclined to believe it was overwhelmingly his character flaws that led him to seek reelection, although the addition of poor judgment due to senility might have played a role. I’ve long thought of him as amazingly vain, self-centered, cruel, and narcissistic. Worse than Trump? Different from Trump, I’d say: Less prone to wear these flaws openly and with apparent pride.
If he’d possessed better character and judgment, he’d have admitted it was time to retire and support a viable successor in the D party primary. And hopefully it wouldn’t have been a dedicated left-winger.
I do think I owe President Biden a reconsideration on one point. I've been saying that he's trying to get Israel to let Hamas win the war because he wants the votes of Hamas's supporters in Michigan. After reading/hearing some of the interview stuff, I think it's possible that he simply has no idea what he's saying or what U.S. policy is at any given time, and he may not know Michigan is a state.
"7) ???????"
"We, on the climate side, have come along and we've done everything that is reasonably—and three other countries are the reason we're in the problem we're in," Biden said. "But what happens if all of a sudden, on the Amazon, they're starting to clear, vast swaths of land, cut down forests, etc. Back when Dick Lugar was alive, he and I started something back in the '90s, where we said—late '80s, excuse me—where we said to, in the Amazon, they said, look, if you, we'll make a deal with you Brazil. You don't cut your forest, we'll pay you not to do it. We'll pay you not to do it, we have to prevent— And that's why we're working so hard to make sure Angola can be in a position that they have more solar capacity than almost any place in the world, to help that whole continent."
According to Commentary, he went on to say that we're going to build a railway across "that continent," although it's unclear from the context whether the continent in question was Europe, South America, or Africa.
Anyway, I'm sure he said all this, including telling the interviewer, "I can take you," with great empathy. Did you know that some people in his family have died in the past?
The real question is who is running the office of POTUS, because it isn't Joe Biden.
He won't last four years, so the election is really Donald Trump vs. Kamala Harris.
Yeah, that one isn't any better, is it?
The Commentary guys have been reading out some of Biden's responses from the Time magazine interview. He seems not to understand the questions, and the answers are rambling and unresponsive. But then, Donald Trump was presenting word salads back in 2015, and you were just supposed to pretend it made sense.
As I keep saying, they are equally unfit: both of them 100% unfit.
I heard a stat yesterday that the largest budget item after Social Security is interest on the debt. How can we afford to police the Earth? How can we provide weapons to so many different countries and have enough to protect our country? I never considered myself an isolationist but I’m kind of moving in that direction.
I see the same problem. Not just that we’ve got no apparent *will* to limit spending, but now we don’t even appear to have any means.
Nevertheless, I also don’t think we have the option of retreating to a defensive posture only. At the very least, our enemies are willing to cause other nations to implode as a means of overwhelming us with refugees. That was one of Putin’s strategies in Syria regarding Europe, for instance. That can also break budgets in many different ways.
I hate to think this way but whether it’s inaction by Congress or appeasement of bad actors by our admin, it seems we’ve lost the ability to do big, important things. Or maybe the willingness.
I think the roots are at the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall fell. We in the rich developed westernized countries have lost any sense of purpose. Meanwhile, the authoritarians have regrouped.
Good morning. Cloudy and hot again today, with rain likely later. The Front Page is reporting on violent hip-hop in the wake of rap star Sean “Diddy” Combs attacking his girlfriend.
Did he hit her or worse, midgender someone in her entourage? 😱
Violent hip hop? Who could have ever imagined that? Next we’ll hear they treat women badly too.
You put me in mind of Thomas Sowell’s “Black Rednecks”, an except of which here is from the audiobook version:
https://youtu.be/jYSBZ0DKNa4?si=-O8pMMUUcAzB7fhf
We’ve been getting pounded with rain. I’ll take it over last year’s drought. The corn is looking good this year.
It is humid enough to make it hot already, although there is a breeze.
I am watering. All the rain is going around us. Or depleting itself falling on our neighbors to the west.
Warm and damp here now, thanks to the receding rain showers.
There should be a scale to measure such conditions, and it should probably involve “earwigs per cubic yard of habitable space”. Damned things are everywhere!
Ugh. Just ugh. I am so grateful for air conditioning!
We had over 3" yesterday.
People over at the Free Press comments are saying that comments are being deleted by the Management with "explanations" like "Not great." Subscribers are, understandably, asking the Management what the specific guidelines are, and they're getting content-free blather in reply.
"Just answer the question!" she bellows at the ceiling. If there is a list of banned words, provide it. If there are banned opinions, specify them.
This is not a good development. If they want to not make that million subscriber mark, this would seem to be a way to do it.
I can understand their wanting a somewhat different environment. There's a strong element of hostility among many, though not a majority, of the commenters there.
However, I don't think that kind of thing is resolved by arbitrary removals because a comment was "not great." Make rules, publish the rules, and enforce the rules consistently. Imagine if major universities had done this over the last several several months, instead of being blatantly inconsistent.
"Not great" somehow sounds to me like the sort of remark a callow youth might think was very clever and appropriate as a justification. Maybe they picked it up from a professor.
Not from me!
Oh, that should go without saying. I imagine you'd teach them to use less hackneyed expressions, at the very least.
I think it's lazy and passive aggressive. If they'd said, "We don't allow the use of (pick an inappropriate term)," then they'd have to police it consistently. If they said, "Although we can't point to anything specific, this comment just gives us a racist-y vibe," they'd seem muddle-headed even if they're right. If they said, "Stop yelling ALLCAPS stuff about Donald Trump. It makes this seem like a media outlet for kooks," they wouldn't make anyone happy.
And as with certain kinds of legislation, if *no one* is happy, you've probably done the right thing.
It's almost like a John Lennon song.
Almost.
I loved his song Mind games!
"Imagine clear, specific, and reasonable rules, consistently enforced."
It sounds like utopia to me!
I think of it as living with my mother. I wasn't always good at it.
The mothership is reporting on the 32 cases still teed up waiting for Supreme Court decisions expected this month.
Why does the court even bother? We all know it’s illegitimate. Boy I’m feeling sarcastic today.
Good thing I don’t show sarcastics (is that a word?) the 🚪
And CSLF births another great band name - The Sarcastics.
Surely that one is already in use, though.
Then I’d always be on the outside looking in. But it’s a badge I wear proudly.
I'm sure it's important. However, wouldn't it make sense to report on the decisions when they occur, and report today on something that has actually happened?
On the other hand, events that have actually happened can take time to analyze so as to give useful information, while events that are waiting to happen are, as it were, holding still. It's like drawing trees: not easy to make things clear, but at least they're not moving.
I'm not opposed to preview stories, whether they be for elections, Supreme Court rulings, or football games. They help us make sense of what we're seeing -- or not seeing. There's value in that.
That's reasonable. On the other hand, it's not really "news" until an event actually occurs.
I don't imagine Jon Stewart is anyone's favorite cup of tea at this table. Neither is he often mine, but a good helping of cream and sugar sometimes makes his hyper-histrionic and profanity-laced schtick tolerable enough to let him get to his point. Which sometimes is a pretty darned good one.
To wit, considering this thread of yours and Wilhelm's that I've been following with interest, I submit this brief story (when the flag asking for "support" appears, you can click on 'continue without supporting' to get the story) and suggest you start the video at 10:50 and give Stewart a chance to make it to the end...
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/jon-stewart-goes-off-on-cnn-msnbc-and-fox-news-wildly-speculating-on-the-future-during-trump-trial/
Love him or hate him, it's sort of hard for me to disagree with him on this.
That’s more JS than I’ve watched since the second Dubya term. 🫠 And I liked him less back then, even if I wasn’t a Dubya voter. (I wasn’t a fan of the overspending.) As you note, I, for one, certainly wasn’t anywhere near JS’s ideological beat.
Not a complaint, per se, but I haven’t had cable TV in over a decade, so his romps through cable and broadcast “news” content are outside the media I consume.
Should there be nothing written on an election until the day after? As some might say, Naw dog.
In my humble opinion, the news media's responsibility is to inform, educate and entertain. Sadly, the infotainment is what you get when you have networks that have 24 hours to fill but won't hire reporters. (I shan't bother with naming names.) The BBC and NYT do a better job at balancing the three things. (Informing should be Job One, of course.) But there's no center-right equivalent of those two. The WSJ seemed to be headed that way, but even it's getting weird. Trump apologists seem to be everywhere these days.
That's why I read the mothership. They try really hard and are pretty successful at meeting my meager standards.
"Should there be nothing written on an election until the day after? As some might say, Naw dog."
I agree. However, an election is going to require action on the part of the general public. Therefore, the public needs information. Supreme Court decisions do not require action by the public: they're going to decide what they decide when they get around to it, whether or not I even know they exist. (Sort of like the Finance Council at my church ...)
Sportball games are more like the Supreme Court. For the viewer, information in advance of the game can be entertaining, but it doesn't affect the outcome for either the players or the viewer ... unless either the players or the viewers are gambling, of course.
I do more than my share of griping about the infotainment industry. But to be fair they have a problem that they can’t unify an audience around foreign policy stuff since it requires too much base knowledge. And infotainment works by clicks and eyeballs. Heightened emotions achieve those, which means the subject matter has to be stuff everyone readily comprehends.
The media just aren’t any good at forcing news consumers to eat their spinach first and foremost. So they just capitulate and serve sugary snacks 24/7.
It reminds me of something Chris Stirewalt, I think, wrote about "pseudo-events," by which he meant a government or corporate entity scheduling an event to make an announcement, introduce an employee, read a statement, etc. He said that the journalism industry loves this, because they know the who-what-when ahead of time and can schedule their employees' time and their publication of what occurs.
I think stories of the "Here are some things that aren't actually an occurrence at this time" are kind of like that: an efficient allocation of writers' time and the interwebs' electrons.
The article's main point is that not every song (or poem, or novel) is autobiographical about the writer. Songs can be fictional. Also that songs featuring violence and misogyny are not new.
While reading the above, I kept thinking back to this fine piece:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/happy-fun-cold-war-2-update
I wonder if China is showing the Five Eyes lots of looks on purpose. Is one of them Patton at Calais?
That was a fine excursion of doom and gloom.
Makes me want to rewatch “Dr Strangelove.”
Ripper: A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
Sounds startlingly like RFK Jr., doesn't it?
Scary, scary stuff.
And it seems the perfect way to keep the international community dithering. China can make the case that it's NOT conducting a blockade, because that involves another nation. And even the US doesn't recognize Taiwan as another nation.
Hilarity does not ensue.
Definitely a situation of No Fun.
This headline from the WaPo seems appropriate for today's topic:
Deceased New Jersey congressman wins Democratic primary election
Rep. Donald Payne Jr. (D-N.J.) died following a heart attack in April. More than a month later, he won the Democratic primary for New Jersey’s 10th District.
Did he win the graveyard vote?
Its Jersey. What do you think?
Good morning.
"A mockup of Taiwan’s presidential palace has been built in a remote desert military training ground. There’s also a replica of the streetscape around Taipei’s parliament house and executive government centres."
This reminds me of the preparation for the October 7 attack on Israel, which included mockups of the kibbutzim to help the attackers plan the murders and kidnappings.
I think it’s time for the US to get serious about Taiwan, openly announcing an alliance and even finding a reason to station US military on the island. That will PO the CCP, with likely economic repercussions, but it will signal our resolve and make an invasion much less likely. (And we need to be less economically tied to the PRC anyway).
But neither our current President or his wannabe successor are likely to move in that direction. Trump in particular admires Xi Jinping, as he does all dictators who hate the US.
KDW’s item yesterday comparing Trump and the PRC was strong on the point, too.
I'm just so bored with Trump.
Absolutely.
I'm bored with Biden, too, but he's actually the president right now, so he's influential.
I can remember prior elections that didn’t involve attention-obsessed celebrity candidates. There were actual discussions about what each candidate’s positions were on foreign policy. I recall, too, thinking at the time that the debates were silly and superficial…
But trying to guess what a Trump foreign policy would look like is highly uninteresting, since even taking him at his word results in unintelligible mumbo-jumbo from a man whose only consistency is in being inconsistent.
"I think it’s time for the US to get serious about Taiwan, openly announcing an alliance and even finding a reason to station US military on the island."
I would support that. I think it would be a safer world for everyone if evil dictators expected the United States to do something for our fellow democratic countries other than, at best, shrug and mumble.
If the CCP moves to active invasion, they’ll only need to declare it an anticolonial effort in order to find full support of US academia and legacy infotainment.
Well, ya hafta do what the Chinese Communist Party tells you, even if you're an American. They're a government too, so their instructions have to be legitimate and binding on everyone everywhere, because it's a global world and all that, and besides it wouldn't be polite to say no. The Chicoms would have no reason to think it's OK to overstep, right? So what they're doing can't be overstepping. /heavy sarc
Well, right. I think I read that.
Ah, so apparently someone somewhere already said the quiet part out loud. ;)
Funny but depressing.
And the U.S. Government, I expect.
Oooh! Oooh! I know the answer! Its too much to ask.
Sadly. I’m inclined to agree.
Crushing morosity for the win!
Its having a moment, isn't it?
*sigh*
It seems as though, a dozen times a day, I yell at the ceiling, "Just do your damned job!!!" This is not specifically aimed at the ceiling, which is adequately supporting the upstairs, but at many people out there in Life. The ceiling is just a proxy.
Well, first, I am relieved that you don't expect the ceiling to do more than the job for which you "hired" it. Second, the whole proxy thing doesn't seem to be working.
No, it's not working. Once in a while, involving a higher authority works. I was able to get some action out of one of our parish's employees when I started emailing some people I know at the Diocese.
It does not give me a better impression of a person when she replies to my emails only after a more senior figure copies her on an email saying, "I don't understand why your parish coordinator isn't helping you with this." If I hadn't decided that the one important thing was getting the information I needed, I would have replied-to-all, "I don't understand it, either, but I have some theories. For example, one could certainly get the impression that she doesn't want to assist Hispanics."
That would have been fun!