1623 Flabs.

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When I was younger I was very critical of average intelligence. As I’ve grown older I’ve seen that intelligence is a burden. The smarter you are the more likely you are to work out the dark machinations the world has in store for you before they arrive. It looks to me like living in the moment, and not thinking deeply is the happier way to be. No one expects too much from the average. If you’re smart everyone expects you to do so much more. Well, when people aren’t simultaneously hating intelligence, facts, data, or whatever. As long as your smarts are helping them not die, while also not inconveniencing them, they love that shit.
I’m sure I’ve said this before, but Maddison is a specific type of average. She’s aware that she doesn’t know things and actively wants help, or listens to people’s advice willingly, most of the time. That’s the best kind of dim wittedness. It’s the kind that exists in the film Idiocracy. People are aware that they are dumb and need help more often than not in that movie. What we have in the US right now is the worst kind of dim wittedness, which is the kind that thinks it’s smart, but is not. The kind that looks at 20 years of data and says “fuck you and your research, it still snows so the world can’t be getting hotter!” Or maybe the kind that has a child that is developmentally disabled and falsely correlates vaccines as the cause when reputable data points to no correlation. Then spends the next couple of decades facilitating the return of diseases that haven’t been a threat since the 50s.
Of course you can’t point your finger at those sort of people and just tell them they’re being stupid. They won’t listen. You just have to tell everyone else and hope you can mitigate the damage they are hell bent on doing. Ignorance you can’t reason with is fruitless to engage face to face. You need to find a third face and show that face the stupid face, so they know not to be like that face.
People tend to forget the mitigation of damage in that equation. Take the US election, for example, the best we can do now is constantly mitigate the damage that is going to be done. We’re going to have to watch that clown car every damn day for the next four to eight years just to make sure they don’t try to strip away rights we take for granted. It’s going to be brutal and exhausting. Not paying attention to it is a luxury we no longer have. Freedom of speech has already been threatened aggressively and the chair in the oval office isn’t even vacated yet…

I gotta tell you, today hurt. I knew it was going to but hoped it wouldn’t. Today was that day after you pull a muscle where it hurts the most before being less painful the next day for my whole body. I stayed up extra late yesterday to finish this page because I was afraid I was going to be useless today. It was a wise move. Most of the day it has felt like someone was trying to rip my left arm out of its socket. It’s always been my holding arm for drawing so it’s nopt abnormal for it to hurt, but man… I’ve had out my rollyback chair and everything. Tomorrow I should be more like normal again. Which is good because I’m going to have to take the teen to school at the ass crack of dawn, in the freezing cold. The spare tire seems to be fine so hopefully it holds out until I can buy a new set. The ones I have are about a decade old and have served me well. It’s time to send them to their reward. Which I assume is fire? Something not very rewarding if we’re honest. I feel like I heard that they grind old tires up sometimes, but I can’t remember what for…

65 Comments

Sometimes they grind up tires for playground mulch. I know my old elementary school just got a truckload over the summer. I hope you can find some replacements for cheap!

They grind up tires for a variety of purposes. One wonders if they couldn’t recycle the old vulcanized rubber to be used in new tires, but something to do with structural integrity tells me that’s probably being optimistic.

“Average intelligence” isn’t quite the same thing as “dimwitted”. To me it might as well be, but even so, it isn’t, not quite. Intelligence alone means something like “processing power”, but that’s only a small fraction of the story. There’s also wisdom, and cunning. Two things I don’t have much of though I have a bunch of that intelligence thing. There’s also perceptiveness, empathy, self-awareness, and intelectual honesty, things you don’t actually need to be super-smart for to have. There’s probably more.

What I think is going on in the ‘states (and thus, elsewhere too even if you don’t notice; the USoA being the current thought leader in what’s termed the western world) isn’t so much people being stupid, not to their own minds at least. Instead, they’re increasingly challenging the dominant religion, the worship of science.

If you look at it that way, then “science” is the usurper and challenging it any way you can is the good and Christian thing to do. Which in the ‘states happens along typical ‘stateside conflict fracture lines, ideological trench warfare. Compare the creationist/intelligent design battle tactics with the “pro choice/pro life” and “pro gun freedom/pro gun control”, even the “democrats/republicans” approaches to “discussion”. There’s no actual exchange of ideas. It’s all framing.

This isn’t to say that science is a religion. To those who actually do understand science, it’s not. But to many people, it might as well be. Surely so to certain politicians and the pressure groups influencing them. This means that a bunch of things need to be thought about carefully before one can effectively engage the antivaxers and the other nutcases, who in their own minds aren’t nutcases at all. It’s just that they don’t accept our view that what “science” knows is the actual truth as best as we can see right now, and that their standards of making shit up are just as good as ours.

And, let’s be honest here. A lot of the “research” going on, increasingly as time progresses, is hardly worth the name. Especially in the social “sciences”. It’s perhaps inevitable because “publish or perish” and frankly too many PhDs, perhaps too many people with supposedly scientific education actually hardly worth the name.

It’s not like the detractors don’t have a point, however poorly expressed. We tend to equate “science” with the hard stuff, like physics and chemistry, conveniently ignoring the softer stuff. But especially in the harder-to-check softer parts there’s a large body of “scientists” that are outright frauds or near enough as the layman can’t tell. Cherry picking, lying with statistics, making up data out of whole cloth, uncheckable conclusions hidden in mumbo-jumbo, decidedly unscientific tricks, it all happens in certain circles. Often enough to please the study sponsors, like big pharma. And if you only look at those, it’s easy to dismiss the whole “science” rigmarole as likely fraught with fraud.

Oh, and about the new guy? Remember the previous guy? The current guy was supposed to fix all the things the previous one fucked up, give back lost freedoms, and all that. He achieved nothing.

So while I think the new guy has some seriously out-of-whack ideas, there’s some things I agree with as well. And it’s not like he doesn’t have plenty of opportunity to do right. If he would, say, get rid of the TSA entirely, and do nothing else, his term would be a big win. Though even if he had a mind to try it’s doubtful if he actually could. The presidency is near-irrelevant as is, as we’ve seen. This might actually be a bigger problem than the things the losing people are so afraid of. So we’ll just have to see how it all turns out.

And concerning that new guy: as bad as he is, the alternative wasn’t any better.

I don’t think any white supremacists were on her campaign team.

And that has what to do with the price of tea in China?

Look, if Trump purchased his way into the White House to try and inflict his bigotry on the country, then he’s the idiot, because that’s the one thing the President CANNOT do.

Y’see… and sorry for the civics lesson for those who already understand, the USA has three branches of government: Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary. Law making falls under the Legislative branch: Congress. The President is in the Executive branch. Which explicitly does NOT have the right to make or pass laws. The best he can try is to use his veto to stonewall congress (like Obama did the past eight years) and even THAT can get overturned with a 2/3 majority.

Now, just to advise… Trump didn’t win himself any favors with how he basically stole the primary. In fact, he pretty much burned a whole pile of bridges with other Republicans. You know, the ones that he needs to get to make and pass bigoted laws because, again, he can’t do it from the White House. So, unlike Obama, he doesn’t have the full support and backing of his own party. Which means he’s going to be even LESS effective than Obama was.

Also note… congressmen are up for election every TWO years, which means they are always very keen on making sure that they don’t piss off the voting majority of their region. So when a proposal comes up that is going to blatantly piss off america? It’s gonna die in committee. It’s not even going to ever make it to a vote. Why? Because if you are a democrat, you’ll vote against it, because Trump backed it. And if you are a Republican, you’re screwed. If you vote for it, then your political opponent can crow ‘you’re a bigot!’. If you vote against it, then your opponent will decry ‘you aren’t a real republican, you voted with the democrats these many times!’, and if you abstain, then you are ‘a wishy-washy politician who loves to do a little side-step’. No matter which way you act, your political opponent for your next congressional race gets a ton of ammo. Solution? Kill it in committee so you never actually have to vote on it. The democrats will actively help, because again, they don’t want any part of anything Trump does. So no bigotry-based laws have a chance in hell of passing.

King Trump will find that he has become King Nothing, a petty little spoiled brat whining for attention. Then whoever runs against him in 2020 wins by a landslide, because whoever it is, it isn’t Trump. Unless Hillary tries again, in which case Trump gets eight years of being King Nothing.

Trump as a president is neutered. Hillary as president is dangerous.

Somebody throws that stuff in my face every time I suggest we might maybe want to keep an eye on things “because rules”. But presidents have a bad habit of finding ways around the rules. the more eyes on things the better…

Okay, so a more neutral viewpoint to balance this discussion. I think Shneeky is right about the president themselves not being much of an issue, and to their credit they are correct that a large reason for that is the checks and balances. But there are two important counter-points, once touched on by Mr. W pretty well, but the other ignored.

More so than the new guy’s existence as threat, its the people he brings in with him that are the ones we have to watch most. His picks across all of his administration have been regarded as exceptionally terrible choices, a bunch of amateurs and people with toxic agendas that are already established. This is where the brunt of the damage will be inflicted, and its where it will be hardest to track. The other point is that the new guy is walking into a presidency that is synchronized with a strong party holding in most of the checks and balances, meaning that it is very likely he will have much more free reign to impugn upon specific things that his party thinks are bad anyway.

Overall though, I do agree that we should mostly just remain vigilant rather than simply recoiling in hatred. It is possible that, like most other things with the new guy, his stance on many things were inflated with hot air and not as rigid as they appeared. It is also possible that he may actually do some good (he *is* taking a stance against the TPP, and that’s actually a very good thing).

You do have a valid point about the presidential appointments that are going to do damage in their respective areas, and I never intended to imply that we should not remain vigilant and keep a watchful eye on what is going on with our government, I was simply trying to point out that the sky is, in fact, not falling.

Sure, it’s not ideal, but ideal flew out the window the moment we had to chose between Hillary and Trump. Ultimately, I feel that Hillary would’ve been more detrimental to the nation as a whole than Trump will be.

That’s not to underestimate the egregious damage that will be left in his wake, particularly with foreign relations in Mexico and Saudi Arabia (for glaringly obvious reasons), but also our relations with the UK and EU are going to suffer badly from his ego.

But that can ultimately be repaired by the next administration, which is inevitably going to be Democratic (unless Hillary insists on trying again), unless the Republicans pull their collective heads out of their rectums and hold a primary against an incumbent for the first time in recording history (not bloody likely), so any damages caused abroad are only going to have short-term consequences.

“damage that will be left in his wake, particularly with foreign relations … and Saudi Arabia”
You mean the Saudi Arabia whose king promotes a religion that says kill all Christians because they are witches? The Saudi Arabia that sent 19 people to hijack planes to crash into our buildings at the behest of a Saudi citizen? The Saudi Arabia that is currently bankrolling and arming ISIS? The Saudi Arabia that expects the US to send our young men and women to die for their political desires while telling their people that we are the problem, not their monarchy?
That Saudi Arabia?
Oh heavens no, we must remain on good terms with them…

“The best he can try is to use his veto to stonewall congress (like Obama did the past eight years) and even THAT can get overturned with a 2/3 majority.”

Really? Obama has so far signed 12 vetos. That’s the fewest since Warren Harding who was only in office 2 years ending in 1923. The last two-term president who signed fewer than 12 vetos was James Monroe, our 5th president, 1817-1825.

In other words, you’re either horribly misinformed or horribly dishonest. Either way, not worth addressing anything else you said.

I’m just curious. Trump had white supremacists on his election team? Who were they?

The Breitbart guy. I forget his name. I also don’t know if I spelled that right.

Do you mean, Stephen Bannon? Yeah, not my favorite person in the world.
In my view, SB is the type of a far-right pr*ck, who should be kept out of Presidential staffs, just like I’d never choose ex-rocker, [ Ted Nugent], to be in the Federal Government.

[ Oh Jeezum! Now all of the Ted Nugent fans dislike me now!] : )

I would disagree based solely on the belief that corruption can be counted on to act in a self preserving manner and can therefor be worked around while incompetency comes up with new crap all the time leaving you wondering just what happened in the first place let alone wondering how to fix it.

That being said, we got the president we deserve (not the one we need. That one never made it to the ballot). Also, I desperately hope I don’t become the specific type of moron who every time his presidency is mentioned tries to claim he isn’t my president (for insert stupid reason here, or no reason. Both are equally as non valid…)

Wow! I guess a lot of people are still pretty fired up about this.

And no, she didn’t have any WHITE supremacists; their feelings of supremacy and entitlement went in different directions.

All I was trying to say — and I think most of the responders got it — was that neither choice was any good. Either a self-important, narcissistic, uninformed clown, or a proven liar, thief and murderer who has built their legacy on graft and corruption is not a choice.

“proven liar, thief and murderer” Those are aweful things to say about someone. In America, a person is innocent until proven guilty. In various formats, this person has been proven innocent, multiple times. As far as graft and legacy, I assume you mean money. Thing is, her money is public knowledge. Where she got it, what she did with it. Unlike Trump.

That is the theory but your own news reports, repeatedly, that people are guilty until proven innocent and even then they are guilty.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I disagree. One of the choices was good. But because of hearsay, such as “proven liar, thief and murderer”, nobody thought so. I wanted to dislike Hillary. Upon real research and investigation, I discovered she is probably one of the most moral people to ever run for modern presidency. And in that, you see the problem that happened. People did not look at real news and information to inform their vote. I am not going to tell you things you don’t want to believe. But I do challenge you to use real information. Not that it matters, this time.

She was a decent senator when I was in NY. She has faults, but who doesn’t? Mostly her problem is she’s no good at politics when facing the nation. I.e. she would have been better served apologize g for the emails and stating she learned from her mistakes. I’m not particularly a Clinton fan, but personally I saw her as a better option (at least after she changed her campaign slogan from the terrible ‘it’s my turn’ to a more uplifting “better together:

Am I still fired up about the election… Maybe. It’s been an emotional campaign. People are likely to be upset for a goodly while. If you happened to be on the winning side, please realise that some of us did lose. Please understand that maybe some people are nervous about some things the president elect said over the campaign trail. Please understand that even if we don’t agree with you that neither our opinions nor yours are the end of this country and that the president isn’t really as big a deal as we play it out to be.

Again, trying to be gracious in defeat here. Also, much respect for Clinton’s classy concession. She could have drug it out through a few recounts. It was close enough in a lot of places that it might have made a difference. Instead, we have an opportunity to work some of this out and start healing before the office change. I hope we use that time well.

When he gets to be himself and has his guard down, Reggie is actually a nice guy.

However, I think his naivety in having a food date is going to store up a lot of trouble for himself in the near future.

One popular use of old tires is fueling cement kilns. They’ve been used for that for decades, and it has only become more popular as regulations on dumping old tires have become stricter. The high temperatures in the process help ensure a very clean burn.

Abs day… gotta admit, wasn’t expecting that. The more I see of Madison, the more I find her endearing. Doesn’t hurt that on top of her personality she’s also friggin adorable looking.

To me, one of the biggest issues we face today is the very breakdown of intercommunication that you described. To quote:
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
? Isaac Asimov

The issue is, so long as we simply regard the ignorant as unsalvageable we deny the ability to actually teach them, and I think it is the other half of the issue. Takes two to tango, after all. They may be misinformed and stubborn, but those of us who know they’re wrong tend to not make good efforts to actually teach them. We tend to just bash them over the head with knowledge and ridicule them for being so misinformed.
A better approach would be to let them teach *us*, but keep asking questions for clarification along the way. If their stance is as shaky as we think, it’ll unravel very quickly. We don’t get anywhere simply talking to those we agree with, we have to speak to those outside of our viewpoints and be willing to listen to them. The most important thing is being willing to change if they can convince you, because by doing that you open them up to doing so as well. It is in that sweet spot where people exchange ideas and grow.

Phbbbt! As if!

You mean interact as adults? With respect, understanding and toleration? Seeking to know, understand and grow as individuals and a community?

Sorry. We don’t teach than anymore. Narcissism, selfishness, intolerance, bigotry and a sense of entitlement are so much easier to do.

In philosophy the idea is known as ‘Invincible Ignorance’. Basically, it means that if someone holds on to a belief hard enough, then no amount of persuasion, evidence, or anything else will make them change their belief. Such is often the case with anti-vaccinators, anti-climate changers, etc… I believe the Christians adopted and altered this statement to ‘There is none so blind as he who will not see’.

That being said, you aren’t entirely wrong about the whole listen and question method of changing their opinions. That being said, there is often a surprising amount of misinformation with no factual basis that a number of these people bring up as support. Personally, I have one person who found out I have the audacity to believe in global climate change and moreover admit it in public (in Nebraska, an agrarian state where such “opinions” are frowned upon, in large part because if they were truth it would be inconveniencing). He has since presented me with a barrage of articles about how windmills pollute more than coal plants, solar panels cause cancer, dams ruin rivers, etc… (The last actually isn’t wrong entirely. A poorly planned dam can cause lots of fish and wildlife issues, but we’ve improved over the ages). Also note that none of the articles presented have squat to do with climate change, just a denunciation of alternate energy sources, all of which I have refuted with logic while not outright decrying the information in the first place (re: the smoking windmill, for example. I likened it to a badly lubricated car engine. One windmill smoking out of how many hundreds of thousands? Moreover, it could be repairs or replaced if need be. Instead of “Oh, that story is outright bullshit, made up to malign power turbines”, the approach used by a coworker of mine. Guess which of us is still worth arguing to and which is a leftist commie pinko.)

I like to think that eventually I’ll get through to my guy, or that he’ll come up with some actual, pertinent evidence, but where emotion is involved (and lets face it here, people latch on to things emotionally then come up with a rationale for their belief afterword. I do it. You do it. All humans do it. It’s recognized by the psychiatric community.) logic and reason aren’t exactly applicable arguments.

I guess what I’m saying here is that despite some rather snarky responses above me is that you aren’t wrong, but that doesn’t make you right, either. Also the vice versa (you aren’t right, but you aren’t wrong either)

I’ll be honest, I’m a climate change skeptic (please don’t call me a denier, it makes me twitchy). I’m not going to start a debate or anything, but be cautious when making large groupings of people and claiming them as ignorant or unable to change their belief. That can just belittle them, and drive a further wedge between you, making discourse almost impossible.

I’ve found proponents of anthropogenic climate change to be equally hard headed when it comes to rational discussion, and more often than not I’ve seen some really smart people resort to adhominem arguments. Yes, certainly there are a group of people who refuse to accept the science for economic/social reasons, I don’t accept it for scientific reasons.

Though I grant you, anti-vaccination people, they do have a habit of being emotional about the issue. To my knowledge I can’t find anything wrong with the science that says there is no known link between anti-vaccination and autism or any other defects.

Perhaps its just more fair to say emotions hold sway over intelligence.

Let’s just leave it at, we strongly disagree on a controversial topic, for intelligent reasons… and there is no need for name calling! And there is definitely no need for a comment section bar brawl.

To me, much of the debate on climate change is a thing unto itself, and as such fairly uninteresting. Many people on both sides are betting money, perhaps entire careers, on their side having the right of it. So it’s not surprising it gets a little heated now and then, even though that doesn’t get closer to the heart of the matter.

I’m largely with The Governator on this, namely be the situation as it may, there’s problems that we really oughtn’t ignore. The sooner begun, the sooner and the easier resolved. And really, it’s the USoA that’s using the most energy per capita, therefore sports the most low-hanging fruit, and has all the advantages to work the problem of doing more with less energy, or at least less waste, unwanted by-products, and so on, while taking care of our children’s earth while at it, that it seems criminal negligence to do nothing.

To me this holds regardless of whether we caused the climate changes we’re seeing, whether the climate things we see are even real, and so on. This doesn’t necessarily make me a greenie. In fact a bunch of things they’re advocating I think are silly. But even so, a little care can go a long way. And I think we should care about this here one earth we share with everyone on it.

I am of the opinion that most of the people who say they don’t believe in climate change are quite aware that it is happening and that humans cause it, but it doesn’t affect them, so they don’t care.
Except that saying “I live inland, so if the oceans rise and a bunch of people in the big coastal cities lose their homes, it doesn’t hurt me,” sounds really selfish and petty. Much easier to say “I don’t believe in it,” or “it isn’t happening, it is all a scam” so you can sound like you are just voicing an opinion rather than being a prick.
But the joke is on them. The ocean effects (at least as far as sea level rise, rather than acidification) are going to be slow enough that we city folks can adapt pretty easily. The 30-50% reduction in rainfall in the agrarian states that deny global warming on the other hand…
You see, I am a bastard, but I am happy being one. When Trump was elected, I congratulated his supporters and then said “When you start realizing how badly you screwed yourselves, don’t ask me for sympathy, I am going to point, laugh, and say I told you so.”
I am quite happy to watch the Climate Change Denying Trump supporters lose their farms and watch their communities dry up and die. Poetic justice.

“the best we can do now is constantly mitigate the damage that is going to be done”

Because average people aren’t aware of the extent of the current administration’s damage yet…unfortunately.
Laws are not usually set to be enforced during the administration that passed them into being.

It is, also, better that Clinton lost, because now people should be more likely to pay attention to what is actually going on now;
It would be nice to imagine that people will now actually scrutinise what is happening,
Instead of giving away unprecedented amounts of freedoms through ignorance.

how did this sweet endearing girl in a webcomic create a political upheaval in a comment section powered by wordpress?

….. internet is scary.

It’s because [fast food] got discussed. That’s how the nation is right now: you can either be pro-burger king, or pro-mcdonald’s, but not both! Only choose one side! never surrender! [ hee hee hee.] ;D

Fuck that! Carl’s Jr. Or Wendy’s. Or Arby’s.

* Leaves the jousting tournament* Quite right. I concede the superior forces, of: Carl’s Jr., and Wendy’s, and Arby’s. : )

I really agree with the intelligence thing. I have a master’s degree (almost two, but one of em I never finished) so I spent (too) many years in academia. One of the things you find abundently in universities is a willingness to look down on “the masses”. Of course, not everyone does that, but it’s def a common trait. I was always uncomfortable with that. I have great respect for people in general. Being less educated, or plain straight dimwitted doesn’t mean you’re less important, less valuable, or have less to contribute to the world. Or that your culture, interests and preoccupations are garbage (i.e. popular things do not suck by default). This elitist “intelligence/education is everything” attitude is what stops the folks who are too enamored with their own smarts from trying to communicate with the less intellectual. Ultimately, it’s an attitude that hinders societies because it stops the most educated from taking the time and effort needed to popularize academic knowledge.

This being said, I have zero respect for the portion of the “masses” who actively advocate against knowledge and against social progress by virtue of elevating their ignorance and shortsightedness to the rank of wisdom. Especially when that ignorance turns to hatred or dismissal of particular groups.

Hey, J.T.!

First, ” If you’re smart everyone expects you to do so much more.” — It sounds like you worry too much about what other people think of you. It’s not that I don’t completely care, but I don’t let it bother me too much. As long as my conduct and actions fit my moral compass, I let others think what they will. I realize that even if I dedicated all my time to pleasing others, it wouldn’t work. No one is that “likeable”. So please yourself and try to live what you see as a good life and let others deal with their problems of perception. (I first had that epiphany at 15 years old and it has served me well over the years.) Good luck. And as for stupid, don’t worry about it or get sucked into such problems. As the bumper sticker says, “You can’t fix stupid”!

And while I hate to get drawn into political discussions (as they will never be resolved to either side’s satisfaction), I present my thoughts here not to actually change anyone’s position, but rather as food for thought. An attempt to clarify at least some conservatives’ thought processes.

While a lot of people voted for Trump in the primaries, there were a lot of Republicans who didn’t vote for him, too. I’m still not “all in for Trump” at this point. But when I read what you posted:

” Take the US election, for example, the best we can do now is constantly mitigate the damage that is going to be done. We’re going to have to watch that clown car every damn day for the next four to eight years just to make sure they don’t try to strip away rights we take for granted. It’s going to be brutal and exhausting. Not paying attention to it is a luxury we no longer have. Freedom of speech has already been threatened aggressively and the chair in the oval office isn’t even vacated yet… ”

. . . I was amazed at how well you articulated what a lot of us thought eight years ago and what a LOT of us felt EVEN MORE STRONGLY when faced with the idea of four or eight years with Hillary in the White House.

I do agree with a lot of the posters above have said about the limitations of whoever is in the White House, the role of congress, etc., etc. And I agree that we all need to watch Trump as well. But I think that Liberals are now learning to feel what Conservatives have increasingly felt over the last eight years, especially as Obama increasing used executive orders (i.e. by fiat) during his tenure. You don’t have to agree with the “other side” to be able to understand the feeling of being backed into a corner. This is, I think, the major failing of our system of government over the last decade or two. I don’t remember either side feeling like this back in the 70s or 80s or the early 90s. Things seemed to be heading down this road starting after the 1996 election.

Look at what you have written and imagine that those words were written by a die-hard conservative: We feel that rights have already been stripped away and freedom of speech has already been limited. If you really cannot allow even the possibility that that is true, then you haven’t been observing the Obama presidency objectively. I don’t want to “roll everything back”, but a swing back towards the middle would be a good thing. We’ll see.

So try to realize that a lot of people didn’t necessarily vote FOR Trump, but rather voted AGAINST Hillary. I, as a lifelong Republican, might have actually voted against Trump had the Democrats nominated a more moderate candidate. It’s just that Trump (believe it or not) worries me somewhat less than Hillary. I wish we’d have had better choices on BOTH sides.

Make of that what you will. Rest assured that not all Republicans will relax with Trump in the White House.

Okay, first off, worried about Obama? Yep, clearly one of the people Asimov warned about. Obama had to clean up after your President made a fine mess, one that the new President-Elect (still hoping for a miracle) will indeed make even worse, if not permanently soil. He is a walking, talking, security threat and also a conflict of interest in and of himself. He appoints people to his cabinet not by knowing what the job entails, but by what they are doing for him. This is not what “draining the swamp” looks like. You were worried about e-mails and about Benghazi, while Trump was able to pull “facts” out of his ass that no one could counter, because they were his “facts,” and Trump could believe them without needing verification. And you voted for that. There is no excuse. Clinton has been pretty transparent, and even apologized for things she may or may not have been guilty of. But Trump does not apologize. He does not care. He has swindled hundreds of thousand of people, has been involved in 3500 lawsuits in 30 years (as in actually taken to court), which in that same time Clinton has had only scandals, but not a whole lot to actually take her to court for, if anything. He lied to his supporters. He, if not supports racists and supremacists, certainly has no problem rubbing elbows with them, and even give one of the worst his ear. This is the man you chose to represent you. You chose him. He is your problem that you forced upon us. History will not remember you favorably.

You act as if as if Doug Pearson had said that he fervently supported Trump and not that he worried him slightly less than Hillary and entirely missed the point. Acting like this is because Doug Pearson is anti-intellectual is just elitism.

Conservatives (and others) were worried about Obama on a host of issues, such as blaming their support for their gun rights and religious liberties on their bitterness, his possible support for reparations for slavery, and his ‘rubbing elbows’ with racists and extremists.

Now that he’s almost finished serving, he’s the only president that was at war for his full presidency. He gave the executive branch the power to assassinate Americans (without due process) on foreign soil so long as they might pose a threat to security and continued to violate other nations sovereignty through spying and drone strikes. He said that we wouldn’t put boots on the ground in Syria and then did so anyway. He pushed through a controversial health care act that included a disgusting mandate. This same health care act has ravaged many smaller businesses and contributed to consolidation of their holdings into larger corporations. Title IX expansions have chipped away at freedom of expression on campuses and created toxic environments hostile to those who dissent. He received an award for transparency in a closed meeting with media uninvited and attendees disallowed from recording.

Acting like Bush and Trump are singularly bad and that Obama was working tirelessly to correct previous mistakes is silly. Obama perpetuated the same mistakes as Bush but got more of a free pass from the media, making him more dangerous. His worst mistake was in the great expansion of presidential power, especially now that we have Trump. And that power is why people are worried about Trump, even though they should have been worried for 20 years and for each president.

Tbh, I’m actually kind of enjoying their dynamic. Weirdly, it works.

But yeah, willful ignorance is dangerously rampant. It’s frustrating as fuck, since the rational answer is often so self-evident, and those kinds of people still seem to miss it. It’s like trying to convince someone a lamp isn’t a shoe, and you make obvious points like, it runs on electricity, it has a light-bulb, it lights up and people say, well that doesn’t mean anything, besides, it’s a shoe. And you say, but you can’t put your foot in it, it literally doesn’t resemble a shoe at all and they say, sure it does, it’s a shoe. And how do you fucking argue with that.

The dem fearmongering is getting stale. Also, the intellectuals’ elitism thinly disguised as “we’re just trying to save the general populace from themselves” STILL doesn’t make for a good starting point for an argument.

On-topic: eating on playgrounds isn’t illegal, but kind of dangerous if it’s as late as it looks like.

In the idea world, the productive coastal states would leave the union, and the welfare states in the middle would have to figure out how to get what their population wants without dragging down the productive states.
I’d love to see the Western and Northeastern states that voted against Trump break off and form two new nations. See how the welfare states do without the 75% of federal revenue that the states which generally vote Democrat provide.

I wouldn´t worry too much about the political state of things in America (or, at least, more than we foreigners already do). Outside observers look at Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, the NSA inner workings, and they are still taking notes about that. And with that, reaching fitting conclusions, that, in reality, a President or another wouldn´t change much the lane´s in which the USA steers its foreigns relationships. That is, the real interests of its political class, which doesn´t seem really the same of the general population in USA.

Hillary, outside of USA, is still known by its service as Secretary of State, that, and how Obama and Hillary didn´t bat an eye about the abismal wrong that was the war in Libia, and the confusing guidelines they used to the Syria conflict. The best decisions she could have made are somehow obscured by how Obama´s Administration might have fumbled over the years.

Trump, is known by its sucess as a bussinessman (and its financial tricks), and somehow reflects an image as the kind of gutsy guy some people would like to be; rich and carefree of being chasticed of expressing an opinion that it´s “uncorrect”. That would explain its popularity in India and other countries.

We, the foreigners who observe, we didn´t vote. We couldn´t make our pledge inside of the most powerful country of the world, whose, one way or another, can make things better, or worse.

But we live with that fact. It´s true. When USA sneezes, the rest of the world shudders.

Okay, you’ve got me. I ship it. She’s super cute with Reggie, and I like how he realized that Nina is out of the question In terms of dating. Him actually laughing is a first for the comociirc

50% of the population are below average intelligence.
But I think Laura Bush (Bush Jr’s wife) had a program to fix that.

Maddison and Reggie make a great couple. I think John and Alex do too, they balance each other. Reggie’s all serious, and Maddy’s adorable and fun. John and Alex seem like a good match too, He’s all shallow about things, and she’s super smart

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