Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive biology, social behavior, morality and history.
Etiquette
DP Etiquette
First rule: Don't be a jackass. Most people are good.
Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.
He continued, “The other day you saw him with a vanilla ice cream shake. Had a straw in it. Again, that tells you everything.”
Walz used a straw for a milkshake. Fox News is absolutely right to attack his masculinity.
Straws, as all the bros banging plates around down at the gym will tell you, are the least-masculine way for a man to drink a vanilla ice cream shake.
Not clear how Tim Walz's masculinity will recover from 'strawgate'
More important, the sharp-eyed Watters absolutely NAILED Walz by noticing that he was consuming his vanilla ice cream shake with – and if you have male children in the room, make sure they don’t hear this – a straw.
I was looking back through some of the hardcopy correspondence I had many years ago with my Christian stepkids. Here’s an interesting little tidbit I found, and presented them with:
Well, that’s quite the “story.” I don’t know about you, but my head is still spinning. 😵
Questions:
Is that all this chronology is, a “story?” Metaphor woven into something humans can relate to (complete with protagonist, antagonist, hero, foil, etc.)?
Other than my overly dramatic style (which I pride myself in 😉), what did I get wrong there in my writeup? Not nuanced enough? There are missing details that really matter?
What kind of person gives this bizarre scenario a pass; that is to say, willingly accepts it with no questions asked?
Make sense of this God story for me (something I would call themain premise of the Bible), because I’m at a loss. No offense but I’m just calling it like I see it. I’m sayin’ there seems to be only one perverted/mixed up/confused Character in this story (no Names mentioned 🤐).
Bible Title Redux
What would you rename the Bible:
God… Profile of a Psychopath? Or,
God… An exercise in the workings of the human psyche? Or,
Lots of reporting about what DJT says is his usually language ambiguous language. He uses ambiguity to give him room to weasel out of what he says in case he makes a boo-boo. But this time, he unambiguously said that he lost the 2020 election to Biden. At ~0:10 to 0:32 of this 5:22 video, DJT says he lost "by a whisker", which is actually true.
"I lost" -- WTF??
Here DJT publicly denies his core lie. Stolen election!! That was the lie that underpinned his 1/6 coup attempt and has dominated his rhetoric since the 2020 election. That is why red states have been frantically passing voter suppression and election subversion laws, purging voter rolls and getting rid of voter data collection and analysis. They intend to steal the 2024 election in secrecy.
Q: Will DJT and/or his campaign pull a classic DJT and respond with something like this?
Of course not.
He obviously said what he didn't say!
Honestly, DJT may still believe it never was a lie. I guess that converts his assertion from bullshit (not a lie, which is knowing and intentional) to a mere falsehood. Stay tuned, politics fans. More malarkey to come.
Various sources have been reporting that billionaires see themselves as genetically superior and want elites like themselves to rule the world. One source reports:
Elon Musk has used his large platform on X to promote a theory that a free-thinking “Republic” could only exist under the decision-making of “high status males” – and women or “low T men” would not be welcome in it.
The theory, written by an anonymous user, suggests that the only people able to think freely are “high [testostrone] alpha males” and “aneurotypical people”, and that these “high status males” should run a “Republic” that is “only for those who are free to think.”
“People who can’t defend themselves physically (women and low T men) parse information through a consensus filter as a safety mechanism,” the post reads.
“Only high T alpha males and aneurotypical people (hey autists!) are actually free to parse new information with an objective ‘is this true?’ filter,” it adds. “This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.”
“Aneurotypical” is not a word but one can assume the original poster meant neurodivergent people.
Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take ‘control of human evolution.’
Sitting in their toy-filled family room on a sunny September afternoon, Simone and Malcolm Collins were forced to compete with the wails of two toddlers as they mapped out their plans for humankind.
“I do not think humanity is in a great situation right now. And I think if somebody doesn’t fix the problem, we could be gone,” Malcolm half-shouted as he pushed his sniffling 18-month-old, Torsten, back and forth in a child-size Tonka truck.
Along with his 3-year-old brother, Octavian, and his newborn sister, Titan Invictus, Torsten has unwittingly joined an audacious experiment. According to his parents’ calculations, as long as each of their descendants can commit to having at least eight children for just 11 generations, the Collins bloodline will eventually outnumber the current human population.
Aw, ain't that cute. But why only 8? How about 14? We can only hope that little Octavian, Titan Invictus, and Torsten will soon be joined by little Hercules, Artemis, Tiberius, Athena, Genghis, Loki, Ereshkigal, Augustus, Tiamat, Vlad the Impaler, and Donald Trump Jr. Jr. in the family herd. After they grow up, they will each make their own herd of genetically superior oligarchs!
The mainstream media has totally failed to live up to
the challenge of covering Donald Trump
The media, led by The New York Times, keeps downplaying Trump's scandals and lies, making him look normal
Ever since Donald Trump appeared on the scene, the mainstream media has struggled with how to deal with him as a candidate. At first, they were enchanted by his sheer weirdness, which made for great copy and footage. But when Trump flooded the field with lies, they couldn’t bring themselves to use the term. They used “falsehoods” or “claims without evidence.” Most of all, they treated Trump as if he were just like any other candidate, even when he was anything but.
You would think that by the third time around, the media would have learned its lesson. If anything, the media has gotten worse. This election cycle, reporters at major outlets seem to be going out of their way to treat Trump ever-so-gently, normalizing his most dangerous behavior.
Perhaps the worst offender is the self-appointed paper of record, The New York Times. When the scandal broke about Trump illegally filming for a campaign ad at Arlington National Cemetery last week – while his aides physically assaulted a worker – the Times reported that the “campaign clashed with an official” at the cemetery, which downplayed just how brazen Trump’s actions were. The paper then followed up with another story about how Trump “returns to the politics of forever wars,” as if that was the story instead of how the Trump campaign broke the law prohibiting using the hallowed ground for political purposes.
In short, the politics became the story, not the scandal.
Or look at the paper’s coverage of Trump’s cognitive decline.
Instead, the Times decided to run a story about Trump’s truly bizarre rantings at his rallies. They didn’t question the stability of someone who worries about being eaten by sharks or praises Hannibal Lecter. Rather, they came up with this humdinger of an appraisal: “It is difficult to find the hermeneutic methods with which to parse the linguistic flights that take him from electrocuted sharks to Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, windmills, and Rosie O’Donnell.”
Who are we kidding here? Trump’s inability to think linearly hints at cognitive issues. He is now the oldest candidate to run for president. Instead of a serious look at whether he’s displaying exactly the kind of problems that the Times took Biden to task for, the paper came up with a cutesy little piece that quotes English professors instead of geriatricians.
Reporters think that criticism is a sign that they are doing their job. They have the same sense of infallibility as the pope does.
But the fact is that the press has spent the past nine years normalizing a man who is not normal. They treat him like any other candidate – indeed, better than any other candidate. If Kamala Harris did a campaign event at Arlington National Cemetery, the press would be all over her. Never mind a credible story about a $10 million cash bribe from Egypt. You probably haven’t heard about that one, but that’s another Trump story that has come and gone over the past few weeks.
The scandals, the increasingly bizarre behavior, the felonies, the insurrection – it’s all too much to fit into that template. So it falls by the wayside. When it comes to the task of telling the truth, too much of the mainstream media isn’t up to the job.
That speaks for itself. Disappointingly, the opinion did not mention DJT's kleptocratic authoritarianism. He is not just abnormal. He is far worse than merely abnormal. In my opinion, commentary like this is significantly deficient if those two aspects of his character is not at least mentioned when it is appropriate to a piece of reporting or commentary.
I give this criticism a rating of semi-woke but acceptable.
