After Hours·5,442 discussions

The sky is falling….the sky is falling

Tags: Off topic

Just had a chat with my righty friend.

I felt it was my duty to remind him that the Dems now controlled all 3 branches of the government and that the squad was driving the bus.

He went ballistic with all the things that Fox news has twisted his brains with.

Trump won the election….the riot in Washington was caused by the Dems…..etc.etc.etc.

The more I laughed the hotter he got.

Scary that there are millions of my friend around the country.

Topic

What my friend s are asking for.

In reply to The sky is falling….the sky is falling

“Boring.” As in boring news. A break from daily “you got to be kidding me” news.

Also, an end to news about reality show people.

Boring would be nice

In reply to What my friend s are asking for.

I don’t expect that to happen any time soon.

Do something and the folks that wanted do nothing will scream.

Do nothing and the folks that wanted do something will scream.

This just in.

In reply to What my friend s are asking for.

Xi to Biden: Congratulations on your win. The wife and I wish that you and yours may live in interesting times.

Try talking with a lefty friend about other recent riots

In reply to The sky is falling….the sky is falling

The political polarization which as gradually been building up in the U.S. since Reagan’s time (I am not blaming Reagan) is getting frighteningly dangerous. Who is to blame? Quoting Carlyle, every man who did not do his duty; i.e. everyone who voted by ethnicity or family tradition or anything except the judgement on which candidate is most likely to fulfill the purpose of government; everyone with the ability to vote who did not do so; everyone who… ?.

Lefty friend

In reply to Try talking with a lefty friend about other recent riots

I’m not aware of any.
My group seems pretty neutral except for my brain rotted friend who has been taught by Fox and Rush.

no lefty friend?

In reply to Lefty friend

Perhaps you yourself are a lefty and so much so that your vision is skewed. And… is “neutral” the best position to view things? Surely the best place to view a game is not in the middle of the field but quite off it. Actually “lefty” and “righty” are not adequate to discuss the field of political possibilities, although they may be adequate to discuss the present game between two congeries of internally conflicting opinions.

Skewed…..yup

In reply to no lefty friend?

Skewed toward the middle.

I’m not in favor of following the Squad.

Don’t tell me the election was filled with fraud….show me.

When the attempts to show me have failed 50 different times stop telling me.

Protest….have all you want….peaceful/legal protest.
I may or may not much care about what the protest is about just keep it peaceful.

Maybe the middle isn’t the place to be

In reply to Skewed…..yup

If your righty friend insists that the election was stolen, give him a cup of tea or coffee and ask him his opinion on the theory of tittlebats. But we are tech people here, above such things, are we not?
The purpose of the state (at whatever level) is to secure such God-given human-natural rights as those to life, to liberty and to property. There are various proposals to fulfill this purpose. As far as the economy goes, we can distinguish corporatism, liberalism and socialism (I use these three words in their proper historical senses, of course, not in the perverted ways the lefties and righties of the USA often misuse them); together with the economy, all 3 proposals have extra-economic associations. Some people take the proposals and madly forget the purpose: the corporatist gone mad is a fascist, the liberal gone mad is a libertarian and the socialist gone mad is a communist. Those of us who are not mad can contemplate the possibility that some kinds of activity may have different ideal solutions from others (socialist postal service, corporatist medical services, liberal grocery service – just as examples, you understand, and as they are at present in the USA). The extremists cannot abide this idea. Can we look down at the 3-cornered field from above, not from its center?

Bob, imagine you’re on a three lane highway.

In reply to Skewed…..yup

You’re safely in the middle, while another driver is on either side of you. You of course are a good, law-abiding driver, and you’re aware that the others are not. Stay safe in the middle.
But. The others are hateful, lawless and intolerant. Independently they decide to eliminate you from their ‘safe, predictable’ worlds. You get squashed like a bug – in the middle.
If the road is life, is the analogy far-fetched? Ask the cop and the AF vet from San Diego, in DC.

Radical

In reply to Bob, imagine you’re on a three lane highway.

I have no control over the radical people…left or right…who are running around.

We have laws and police to try and keep these people going straight.

Radical pols like Trump-olini I can peacefully protest and vote.

Sorry. Wasn’t blunt enough.

In reply to Radical

We’re on that highway now. You don’t have to believe me, just read the posts here.
You certainly can imagine being in DC on business (Friday was a working day for dry cleaners. They’re all over a city like DC, full of suits.)
How far can a 9mm slug travel? How about a 12 ga. pellet? Your widow can pick up the suit and bury you in it.

Highway

In reply to Sorry. Wasn’t blunt enough.

The radical types have been with us since day one.
Most don’t cause much of a problem and those that do the authorities handle.

Then along comes an instigator who brings these folks together into a mass and gives that mass a cause.

Now we have a big problem.
It will be difficult to break up that mass and get our highways safe to drive on.

BTW…..in your past life did the name start with dr?

If you mean at SE, yes.

In reply to Highway

Who else rang in the Bible in discussions? 🙂

Who else

In reply to If you mean at SE, yes.

Well there was a fellow named James who would enter post based on some deity he believed in.

For some folks belief becomes fact.

Yep. Makes us easy targets for ridicule.

In reply to Who else

🙂

I can handle that, especially these days. It’s you mainstreamers who are being embarrassed by your system.

Didn’t you and I once have an ongoing discussion

In reply to Who else

about what you would do as President about the various problems in society?
You had some well-thought answers as I recall.
What do you think these days?

Think

In reply to Didn’t you and I once have an ongoing discussion

I think Joe has a serious mess to clean up.

Not only in this country but also with our allies.

Focus on covid and the economy.

Get those 2 areas moving in the proper direction and perhaps this country will calm down.

calm down?

In reply to Think

Biden has promised to rescind the Mexico City Policy and to put abortion firmly in Obamacare and MedicAid. Unless he thinks away from that we will not get anything right except by occasional accident. The Mexico City Policy and the Geneva Consensus Protocol (which Biden will unsign) may be the only good things Trump did in foreign affairs.

Biden has also talked about expanding the Supreme Court to make room for Lefty activists, after Trump (almost by accident) had nominated textualists; if that would become the norm we would have a much better judiciary generally, but Biden wants to go back to the contemptible practice of appointing activists, undoing the best thing Trump did internally.

I agree that a focus on CoViD this year is indicated, and there Biden will probably do better than Trump, but I think Biden has other priorities.

We cannot (and should not) calm down until the Republic is well oriented to the securing of human rights, the natural purpose of the state.

Sit tight

In reply to calm down?

You sound like my righty friend running around doing the ‘chicken little dance’.

Joe has not done anything yet.
There will be many people trying to pull him in different directions.

Wait and see.

IMO different directions ain’t the half of it.

In reply to Sit tight

That’s the danger of so much Blue (or Red, for that matter) concentrated. Makes your side think it’s a bloc, but it’s never block-like. Someone once said, A man’s enemies will be members of his own household. He meant families, over religion, but it extends well to almost any human endeavor. It’s how we are.

“I think Joe has a serious mess to clean up.”

In reply to Think

Wow! That’s insightful!
Just kidding. That has to be anyone’s #1 thought.
I’m reading about the Cuba backstep, which IMO is a waste of time. The missiles are long gone. Not the first time in Trump’s last days. But couldn’t you simply un-order whatever the outgoing guy ordered? Easy fix I think, and working on allies is always a good idea. In Cuba’s case it might lead to making the country an ally. Any economic support could be played up as replacing Soviet Russia’s from the old days; slap in the face for Putin, right?

Not optimistic on the calm down. 🙁

Cuba

In reply to “I think Joe has a serious mess to clean up.”

I think we should try to work with Cuba but Cuba has to want to work with us.

Joe could reverse the order but then he gets the anti-Cuba hawks jumping up and down.

We have enough groups in this country doing the jumping for one reason or another.

Joe wants to calm things down not make it worse.

Yeah, I forgot about the people still fighting Fidel.

In reply to Cuba

Worse. The emigres (not the Mariel criminals) mostly settled in Florida in the Sixties, and swore their grandchildren to everlasting hatred. Florida is of course a big Electoral state.
BTW Cuba had a whole generation of Russian-trained medical people. Che Guevara used to take them to Africa to fix up poor people so they could see the difference between colonialism and Communism. Anyway, when ebola hit, by the end Cuba had the most scrubs over there, risking their lives etc. Working with and on people that they had met decades earlier. Some of the Drs could still speak the language they had picked up. Very impressive, to “ignorant savages”, AKA working stiffs like us, who happened to be Africans.
Sometimes bad guys do good things. (By bad guys I mean mostly Che and his soldiers. ‘By any means necessary …’)
So, forget Cuba. (Although Biden will encounter pressure from the party’s left wing to roll back in Cuba, as you noted earlier.)
No Fifties Chevys for us. 🙂

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In reply to Highway

Yes, on SE of course. Read my profile here.

All three non-judicial branches:

In reply to The sky is falling….the sky is falling

Have you seen any group of politicians that can be trusted with that much power without doing something corrupt or just plain stupid?
Gonna be fun for us watchers.

Watch is the correct word.

In reply to All three non-judicial branches:

I keep an open mind and see what happens.

As long as things don’t go too far left or right I can live with it.

Curious. The subjects of his rant are facts to him

In reply to The sky is falling….the sky is falling

but of course opinion to most others. Your inflammatory statement about the bus driver was pure fact.

You’re a mean man, Bob. 🙂

Statement

In reply to Curious. The subjects of his rant are facts to him

The squad/bus statement was meant to pour gas on a fire.

The resulting blaze was quite enjoyable.

As for the DC riot I don’t understand how people can buy into the theories that allowed them to do that sort of thing.

Yep. Same old Bob. In fact I’ve heard some refer to you by just the

In reply to Statement

initials. 🙂
I’ve been waiting 60 years to use that joke. Got it from Robert Benchley.

The Bible explains the buying in.

Hah! Religion! Sneaked it in on you.

This is an opinion piece from Reuters yesterday.

In reply to The sky is falling….the sky is falling

It could be taken as an “I told you so”, but that’s not why I’m posting it.

(I’m not describing it, Bob, so you don’t have to click on it. Hey, at least it isn’t religious. 🙂 )
The rest of you might notice how true it all rings now – and how much of it goes back four years, or longer.
So the question arises, Why didn’t we tell ourselves so, long ago?

Bob Alert: religion coming.
History shows we’ve done this to ourselves many times, in aid of much stronger men than the Orange One. Men create systems; the systems go bad; men replace them with other man-made systems.
(The US gets the attention on After Hours because IMO it’s the native or adopted land of most here, as it was on Cnet/SE. But regimes are being tested worldwide these days, by vote or by violence, and many are being replaced. Beware.)

The Bible said long ago that it does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his own steps. (Jeremiah 10:23) Carlyle said he could, but only if directed by his rules. Carlyle is dead and not much studied anymore. And his rules are still ‘admired more in the breach than in the observance’. He did, though, admire strongmen.

Long before Langston Hughes wrote, Solomon said that deferring the dreams of deserving ones would lead to bad things all around. (Ec 8:9,11)

Anyone familiar with the Bible, and many who are not, know the Lord’s Prayer. The part that few meditate on is, “… on earth as it is in heaven”. Here’s what that means to me. How many of the problems we encounter each day – in the left lane, the right lane, or safely in the middle – exist in heaven? “None of the above” of course. That’s good government. But many see it as based in myth or superstition while many of us have found it to be otherwise. Those who use it to the full tend not to be a source of ‘any of the above’.
All from a book older, more widely read and admired and understood than Sartor Resartus.

Think about it.

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