winsor

50 years ago was 1972, and I recall all sorts of havoc wreaked upon people who would fit into the 'entitled' mold these days. If you were insulated from it, good for you. I wasn't.

While I agree that this particular legislator is an idiot - or plays one on TV at the very least - it strikes me that neither side has the market cornered on stupidity. For every blithering idiot elected to office by one side there is an absolute moron counterpart on the other. The yin and yang of politics as it were.

I've seen pictures of him, but do not recall having heard his voice.

The biggest problem with football is the lack of time outs for commercials. Without commercials, how would you know that Anhauser Busch products are 'beer?' They certainly are not in compliance with Reinheitsgebot.

Thanks.

Okay, some of these things are confusing, like Anheuser-Bush suing some posers for calling their beer "Budweiser." The fact that it's brewed in Budweis, Czechia is a pretty weak excuse, so they settled out of court. It seems they were given orders of magnitude more than years' worth of sales would generate, so you have to look for 'Czechvar' on the shelves these days.

I'm kind of indifferent to drug and alcohol use per se. I recommend against it, but someone told me it's a free country or something like that. If this is accurate (consider the source): https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-admin-to-fund-crack-pipe-distribution-to-advance-racial-equity/ the problem I have with it is that its rationale is racist. To imply that one's race makes drug addiction more or less likely is, I don't know, racist? Rather than equity, what's the problem with equality? Why can't we treat injustice without applying a racist/sexist lens to the issue? I know the idea that the law, in it's evenhandedness, applies the same penalties to a rich man stealing a loaf of bread as it does to a poor one and all that, but that doesn't change the fact that 'reverse discrimination' is still discrimination, and is still a bad thing from where I sit. With the best of intentions, the law of unintended consequences will bite you in the ass every time. In Yugoslavia under Tito, everyone was on their toes and largely got along. Once everyone was free of the Communist yoke, people remembered long buried animosities where Albanian, Bosnian, Croatian and Serb peoples recalled longstanding animus and began killing each other. Iraq under Saddam Hussein was similar. While I dislike Communism in practice, I also dislike the discrimination where one group gets a pass due to their ethnicity/religion and another is treated very differently (say Catholic/Protestant during the Troubles in Ulster). If you contend that having different 'rights' for different populations is okay, be careful what you ask for. Your goal might be to foster different standards between European stock people and indigenous sorts, but you may then find out that Apache don't see eye to eye with Navajo, or that Lakota aren't on the same page with Cheyenne and so forth. To bring it around, there just may be the odd person of Black African lineage who finds offensive the presumption that they are more given to addiction than the average, or that they need 'help' with Math, or that they are inherently given to single-parent unwed-mother households or whatever. From what I hear, that's as racist as it gets (okay, so white hoods and nooses is a more unpleasant variant). From what I've seen, equality is the best standard to which one might aspire in practice. "Equity" is just another flavor of racism. BSBD, Winsor

Are you talking about the football where you don't actually use your hands, or the proper American football where feet are used for running - except for when they occasionally trip over the ball?

Perhaps they consider it the baseline within the beltway so they focus on other things. Again, I contend that accusing Trump of lying is giving him credit for knowing the difference, or even what constitutes 'truth' by any measure. It seems that he simply blurts out whatever crosses his mind without any filter.

I really don't know much about Joe Rogan, but apparently he tends to get Woke panties in a knot as a matter of course. What I don't get is, given that the Woke consider it to be a god given right to be completely out to lunch, why don't they extend that opportunity to others? In any event, if he had quoted any number of rap titles and lyrics, I am sure he would have provided plenty of material for the accusatory clip that went around. I am fully confident that, if we get past the current crop of cancel culture proponents on the right and left, there will be more in the future. These things appear to run in cycles. BSBD, Winsor

Nah, he's just trying to be funny. 10,000 comedians out of work...

Okay, so it's a given that Woke is an exercise in stupidity. It is unfortunate that anyone would seek to fight fire with fire, and thus attempt to achieve a similar level of stupidity: https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/In-his-fight-against-woke-schools-DeSantis-16838200.php Both sides of the issue seem hell bent on proving my thesis that our only inexhaustible natural resource is stupidity. To expect a nuanced treatment of history at the K-12 level (or even in most University curricula) is too much to ask. Having said that, putting feelings over facts turns out to be the downfall of both Woke and anti-Woke. "Oh, so you want to be brain-dead assholes? Well, two can play at that game!" Was there slavery? Uh, yeah - for thousands of years. Did the original residents of the Americas get screwed coming and going? Pretty much from top to bottom, by E) all of the above. Did Asians get the shit end of the stick at every turn? Any oversights were not for a lack of trying. Having said all that, is any group without fault? None comes to mind. Dominant cultures are often on top by virtue of being just a bit more evil than those they displace - but when the tables are turned the formerly oppressed cultures are routinely just as bad, and examples are legion. There are temporary exceptions to this, but it's a pretty good rule of thumb. The mechanics of things Woke is very much an exercise of stupidity and denial, but I am impressed that the opponents of Woke in Florida are doing their best to counter stupidity and denial with even greater stupidity and denial. Twas ever thus. BSBD, Winsor

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Get specific. If you are going to attribute anything to me, cite it.

Could you point to what I 'claim to stand for?' I don't seem to recall making such a claim.

You first.

The Great Barrington Declaration is a statement of opinion, rather than Truth (tm): https://gbdeclaration.org/ It is, however, viewed as heretical by the COVID orthodoxy. BSBD, Winsor

"Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages." Samuel Johnson, The Idler, 1758 Or, more succinctly: "The first casualty when war comes is truth" Hiram W Johnson 1917 When we declare war on much of anyone or anything, the torrent of bullshit that ensues is simply awesome. Whether it be the "War on Poverty," the "War on Terror," or whatever is the issue du jour, the noise to signal ratio is guaranteed to drown out any rational considerations. This is not to say that poverty isn't bad, but the key is to stop having babies you can't afford. Period. The way to fight terror is not to be a pussy (pusillanimous). "Take not counsel of your fears" and all that. It was fascinating to watch our battle with AIDS, where 'high risk people' complained about being singled out. A coworker complained bitterly that Republicans didn't mind AIDS killing "faggots" (he later died of AIDS). From the standpoint of Bad Craziness attendant upon fighting a pandemic, the Black Death is rather the gold standard. Ripples of the insanity spawned during the mid-14th Century are still with us. I suppose the level of insanity to which we are now subject is proportional to that of the latter 1300s when corrected for virulence. Your odds of succumbing to Yersinia Pestis were a lot worse than to SARS-CoV-2. I am sometimes startled by the patriotic/religious zeal with which some people take one stance or another regarding the pandemic. "The vaccine is absolutely safe!" (not hardly) "The vaccine is more dangerous than COVID-19!" (not hardly) "<the other side> is all a big conspiracy!" (Hanlon's Razor) and so forth. I suppose it's like LSD. By and large, the people who took acid and became unhinged weren't too tightly wrapped to begin with. Similarly, people who appeared pretty well adjusted but waxed incoherent in the face of the pandemic may have been fundamentally sort of fucked up. It all tends to reinforce my faith in Nihilism. BSBD, Winsor

Upon entering the USSR we were lectured on how such Bourgeois institutions as tipping were considered offensive to the proud residents of the Socialist Worker's Paradise. At dinner, my father tipped just like he would have in New York. Any time that we showed up thereafter, the staff were tripping over each other in order to serve him. So much for being insulted by a generous tip. In a 'free market economy' the best you can hope for from the government is an impartial referee. If governmental employees have skin in the game, it becomes corrupt immediately. You can quibble all you want about the definitions of various systems of government, but I'll take Switzerland over Venezuela any day. BSBD, Winsor

Turns out the biggest rabble rousers were FBI ( not 'antifa') plants. Surprise, surprise.

To disagree with the Obvious Truths espoused by the Democrats? Madness!

Nah, just a gauntlet thrown.

During "The Troubles," the baseline in Ulster was "an acceptable level of violence." Similarly, in various places I've lived - Cook County, IL, Philadelphia, PA et al. - any election is accompanied by the usual " irregularities." No big thing. Compared to the election of 1876, 2020 was a picture of decorum and civility - to include 06 January. BSBD, Winsor

In the same sense that I am puzzled about the specifics when the last president blathered on about "Fake News!," I am unsure of quite what got Neil et al. worked up about "disinformation." Precisely what do you claim was wrong, and what do you claim is right? On what basis? What are your data? If someone puts forth a thesis with data that support a more effective model of virus propagation, suppression or whatever, I'm interested. If they simply say "you're wrong, that has been discredited!" without anything to back it up, it kind of rings hollow. Saying that disagreeing with one stance or another will be met with severe consequences constitutes Argumentum ad Baculum, or appeal to force, which neither supports nor refutes one stance or another. It's on a par with "confess or we put out your eyes!" Joe Rogan may or may not be spreading disinformation. I really don't know, since everything I know about him I got secondhand. I would be much more impressed if Neil and Joni were to hold a news conference where they used rock solid data to refute whatever it was with which they disagreed, irrefutably line and verse. Saying "if you disagree with me, I'm taking my bat and ball and going home" makes one suspect they don't personally have a clue either way. As Frank Zappa put it, "Shut up and player guitar." BSBD, Winsor

The inelegance of your attempts at humor makes Boy Scouts look polished and sophisticated. Straight out of Kruger and Dunning's work.