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[Antonio the Sixth]

Why would Gore run with a Wall Street yuppie who mismanaged a city for a dozen years?

[Antonio the Sixth]

Roma (normal).

[Antonio the Sixth]

Ugh...

Because he is a fellow Baylor alumnus, I actually have access to his mailing address and contact info and it makes me really want to just find someone in China who can sell me a bulk order of dildos that I can then mail to him on a daily basis to totally f#$% with his mind until I run out.

He comes home from work? Dildo in a FedEx box on the front porch. He comes into the office in the morning? "Mr. Paxton, there is a package for you." Dildo. He's walking out to his car at the end of the day? Dildo on the hood of the car.

Eventually Ken Paxton will be found naked, crouched behind some bushes in his neighborhood, muttering, "Dildos...dildos...dildos everywhere!" to himself. The authorities will get involved. Mr. Paxton will quietly resign for personal reasons. His traditional, heterosexual Christian marriage will disintegrate. His children will be ashamed of him.

This is so f[inks]ing weird...

[Antonio the Sixth]

Defend pragmatic Republican swing-state Senators at all costs.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Absolute HP. I hate the establishment GOP almost as much as I hate the Tea Party.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Given that Darwin, Newton, Faraday, Galileo, and those of Abassad Caliphate were all great scientists, I'll go with yes.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Most movements don't actually consider the human costs of disruption of norms on actual living, breathing people, for whom such disruptions are not statistical aberrations but real crises with real consequences. Inaction is always easy to measure and quantify, action is trickier to justify or examine because those policies have not yet actually been instituted.

There's the kernel of a good cautionary tale in the first sentence here, but the rest goes deeply off the rails super fast.  Like, seriously, the idea that people are good at measuring and quantifying the costs of inaction just flies so directly in the face of every piece of evidence we have.  I mean, yes, of course "action for action's sake" is not something we should do.  But I'm quite confident that's not the problem we have right now, and behaving as if it is overcorrects us into absurdity.

To take one example, it is easy to call for "saner" environmental policies,

Ooh, good example.

but to what degree can we be sure that the (real) harm caused to future generations by climate changes outweighs the (equally real and immediate) harm to those whose livelihoods are dependent on producing coal, oil, and natural gas,

Okay, what about the real and immediate harm our current system has on people who get asthma and cancer from particulate pollution, or lose their water supply due to fracking, or are already getting hit with desertification, aquifer loss, more and stronger floods, etc? This isn't just some future-generation thing, even by your ludicrous standards there ought to be justification for some action seeing as there are victims already.  Unless of course victims of the status quo don't count as real victims in your mind.

or to the massive costs needed to renovate the power grid,

You think infrastructure lasts forever?  We'd need to renovate that sh*t sooner or later anyway, you don't get to count that as an extra cost.  And, anyway, there are a lot of investments that would pay for themselves over a pretty quick timeframe anyway, but for whatever reason (inertia, lack of upfront capital, bureaucratic obstacles) don't get built.  I mean, do you seriously think that there are no such worthy investments to be made? Not even just w/r/t the power grid, but in general?

or to the extra expense of transportation to those struggling to get by as is?

Oh, god, really? This disingenuous rot? Protip: those people who are actually most struggling to get by wouldn't see their transportation costs rise under a sane enviro policy.  To make that claim requires both a stunning ignorance of a) the reality for millions of people, and b) the actual sorts of solutions that are being offered on this point.

Also, BTW, our transportation system as currently designed is quite literally a grisly horror show. People getting maimed and killed trying to cross the street is a real crisis with real consequences.  But that's just the way it is, so those victims don't count, amirite?

(One of these days I need to start a thread about the invention of jaywalking, BTW– which is an underrated and forgotten case of societal change being harmfully thrust on people in exactly the way you bemoan.  Let's be perfectly clear– some changes are bad, and I'm happy to decry them when they should be decried. But I guess in your mind, it's been made, we shouldn't fix it, too late no backsies?)

We cannot quantify the harm of inaction over the next century, so how do we know the consequences of global climate change then outweigh the costs of action now?

[citation needed]

If you want to say that we cannot pinpoint things to the dollar and cent, sure.  But we can– and do– have enough evidence to make a reasonable, and overwhelmingly compelling, guess.  The plausible range might be wide but even on the lowest end of impacts/costs there are a lot of things we'd need to do. (And, of course, wouldn't a healthy risk-averse conservativism behave as if to prepare for the worst-case scenario?)  I mean, I guess you can be a radical skeptic if you so wish, but at a certain point I have to wonder how you square that with the existence of industrial and post-industrial technology in the world today.

Either that, or you're engaging in the most sharply sloping time discounting I've ever seen, basically to the point where future generations hold no moral weight in your calculus.  But, of course, there are people alive today who are those future generations.  Apres moi, le deluge?

This bias of action or just doing something to look like you're doing something over the alternative solution of actually weighing whether the consequences of inaction outweigh the consequences of action is very distasteful.

Again, no such bias actually exists!  You've given me exactly zero indication that you take the "consequences of inaction" seriously– or that people in general take it seriously.

Of course the well-being of people can be improved by the efforts of other people. I'm distrustful of any attempts to do that on a systematic level. You improve people's lives by covering for your coworker when she goes to take her kids to the doctor or by volunteering at your local food bank. That doesn't make the world a better place, though. The world is neither good nor bad, the world simply is. You can make other people's lives more pleasant and your own more pleasant by extension, though.

Again, what counts as "systematic"?  Was the New Deal too "systematic" for you?  What about the introduction of an income tax?  Or the Voting Rights Act?  Fighting Jim Crow was a pretty systematic societal change, now wasn't it.  Freeing the slaves, now that was a shake-up, pity the poor plantation owners being disrupted.  Are you saying that anything worth doing, is worth doing solely through small-scale private charity?  Are we floating in a sort of timeless jelly where past actions have no impact on the present, where present actions have no impact on the future?

Look, I'm not saying that you should have to view the world as "good or bad".  I'm certainly not saying that human civilization has an inherent teleology, that "the arc of history bends toward justice" (Though I will admit that MLK's quote, while not necessarily accurate, is useful for those of us who give a sh*t about trying to keep it from bending toward injustice.)  I'm not saying you have to believe anything. 

I am merely saying that you should acknowledge that the observable universe seems to obey predictable laws.  And that we can draw inferences from those laws, and act accordingly. In short, as Gully said that there is such a thing as evidence, and sometimes the evidence really does say, loud and clear, that action is necessary.

(I'd quote it in the GPG if I hadn't already shown my partiality with regard to that discussion)

[Antonio the Sixth]

If Republicans think that being hawkish and starting wars with literally every country is a great solution and will help them winning elections and appeal to moderate and younger voters, they deserve to lose.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Ahem...

[Antonio the Sixth]

The short answer is absolutely "yes."

Throughout history, there were many Christians in science such as Galileo and Linnaeus.  Evolution and quantum mechanics seem to have taken their toll on scientists' religion faith, and most scientists are now secular according to surveys.  However, there are still some Christian (and even YECers, though usually in a different field) scientists and a ton of Christian engineers/doctors, which I would consider a "scientific life" even though it's technically not a doctorate degree.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Thank God!

[Antonio the Sixth]

Bushie have you been eating at Sprouts during your lunch break or are you driving to get food?

I actually haven't had anything at lunch except a swig from the water fountain.  I only get 30 minutes for lunch and I want to be off my feet as much as possible during that short break.  I will probably end up bringing my lunch, or I may just get lunch after I get home if I work the early, early shift like I will to start the month of April (4:00-12:30).  I don't really feel like eating a turkey wrap at 8:00 am which would be my meal break, so I may just get a bowl of cereal before I leave for work and then wait to eat until I get home.  It will really be on a day-by-day basis.  I probably won't do the same thing each day because of the variety of shifts I can work.

While it's well known skipping breakfast is bad for one's health, skipping lunch isn't good either.  It slows down your metabolism during the times when your body could be burning the most (active in the daytime) due to 10 hours or so between meals.   You should ideally snack on mixed nuts during your job and have a small lunch packed with protein and veggies but few carbs.  Eating 2 meals a day just kills your metabolism.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Yikes!  This is the downside of course of government assistance. The powers that be can abuse the system, and start to unduly interfere in one's private life. The amount of money here is pennies relatively speaking, so it does seem animated by spite. I have serious doubts frankly about the Constitutionality of such a provision. It is unduly intrusive into one's privacy.  It is one thing for money to have some strings attached, another to make those strings unduly coercive and intrusive. There is a body of SCOTUS case law on that when it comes with strings attached to federal money to the states, and that certainly should apply even more so to individuals.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Disgusting.  The entire Arabian Peninsula is awful. 

[Antonio the Sixth]

I'm more interested in the fact that Dazey accused TNF of being 'Frankfurt School'. Clearly he either doesn't know much about the Frankfurt School or doesn't know much about TNF or both because that's hilarious. (On the other hand isn't the Frankfurt School the subject of some sort of right-wing conspiracy theory? Maybe it's in reference to that.)

[Antonio the Sixth]

Why does the left not favor scholarships or vouchers? Why are they insistent on keeping kids in public schools that are failing? They don't want private or charter schools to exist, despite them doing better than public schools. If they care about the poor so much, they should want poorer kids who generally go to worse off schools to go to better ones, increasing their chance of not being poor in the future.

If I had to guess, I would say its because they're (and by they I mean left wing organizations and big money) a puppet for labor and teacher's unions.

What evidence do you have that public schools are 'failing', relative to charter schools or private schools? The methods that have been invented to test how well schools and students are doing in school always seem to find that schools are 'failing' and students are falling behind precisely because that's what they were designed to do. Pretending otherwise is naive. We have no way of accurately comparing education statistics when the U.S. school system is not comparable between tiered systems like in Germany (and most studies erroneously compare the average American student with students in elite German Gymnasiums or the highest ranked students in Shanghai), and attempts to do so are disingenuous on the very face of it, because you're not using comparable tests. Beyond that, how does one even begin to quantify knowledge?

There's also literally zero evidence that charter schools perform better than public schools. Private schools may perform better in certain cases, but this comes in part from the fact that these schools are well funded by the parents who have the money to send their children to these schools in the first place. Nothing is more of a determinant of how well schools 'perform' than the access these schools have to adequate educational materials, teaching staff, learning facilities, and, most important of all, the socioeconomic background of the students in question. The children of the employing class have no problem paying attention in school on account of say, hunger. You can't say that about kids who grow up in working class towns or ghettos where a lot of them don't get enough to eat, especially when you take into account that half of all U.S. public school students live in poverty.

Education is not going to solve poverty. Poverty is the result of a lack of money, not the result of the lack of an education. There are plenty of PhDs working at McDonald's these days, or, even those who have managed to land a job aren't being paid all that much. Just using that example alone, in academia, the proportion of adjuncts to tenure track professors is heavily weighed in the former direction, which means a lot more workers without benefits, without a retirement plan, without job security, and with low wages. This is purely anecdotal, but I have a friend who works as an adjunct and only makes about $30,000/year. So much for education being a path out of poverty! The United States has plenty of people with college degrees who either can't use them for want of job openings or because they've been certified with skills that are obsolete or unneeded.

The fact of the matter is that the Left favors high quality public schooling for everyone because most people can't afford public schooling and even if they could, there's something inherently unfair about making people pay for the privilege of being educated. This is a debate that we had in the early 1800s and won because most people agree with the left that the circumstances in which a child is born and brought up in should not deny them the most rudimentary abilities of citizenship, i.e. reading, writing, etc.

School choice would ultimately result in private schools jacking up tuition (after all, they've got the voucher, which essentially subsidizes a good portion of their total income, so why wouldn't they try to make even more? They are a capitalist enterprise, after all!) and would result in even more racial segregation, combined with, of course, religious quackery being inserted into the day to day education of students. I for one am not willing to sacrifice millions of people to daily sermons from pedophile priests on piety or snake oil salesmen teaching whatever 'science' benefits the bottom line of the company who owns the schools.

The assertion that the left (which, I assume in reality you're talking about liberals here) is under the thumb of the teachers' unions is cute. The Democratic Party is full of full-time union-haters like Chicago's Rahm Emanuel, who forced the Chicago Teachers' Union into a strike three years ago and has shut down schools across Chicago and appointed his cronies to the Chicago Board of Education. In Philadelphia last year, the city government cancelled its contract with the teachers union and forced a strike, and in Seattle just recently, the Democratic Party controlled local government picked a fight with teachers. Barack Obama, the head honcho of this entire operation, has put in motion the stealth privatization of education via Race to the Top and the Common Core system, and he's backed to the hilt of course by right-wingers Arne Duncan and former DC public school superintended Michelle Rhee. DC, of course, with its entirely Democratic Party run municipal government, was a trailblazer in the effort to destroy teachers' unions and public education.

Andrew Cuomo wants to destroy the 'public school monopoly', and Hillary Clinton has likewise been a big-time backer of so-called 'reform' efforts. Perhaps the actual left is tied to the teachers' unions, but the liberal left, of which you and other right-wingers refer to when you ask these kinds of questions, is certainly not in the pocket of the teachers' unions.

You should do some research before you come in brandishing wild, nonsensical arguments about how much the 'left' doesn't care about poor kids because it doesn't want to subject them to PepsiCola Elementary School or the Church of the Holy Pedophile Middle School.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I haven't seen either trilogy in total.  But, come on, the Star Wars are legitimately terrible.  The Hobbit is boring and mediocre, but it's at least decent.  It has good acting performances, the dialogue makes sense, they're at least okay movies.

Star Wars Episode 1-3 are just awful.  The acting is trash, the dialogue is horrible, the script is shockingly bad, just all garbage.  The guy who plays Darth Vader is legitimately the worst actor of all time. 

I feel like you're regurgitating what you've heard/read on the Internet. The Prequels were not great films by any stretch of imagination but we're still enjoyable.

The Phantom Menace suffers from a lack of a protagonist and an annoying 9 year old Anakin. There was also not enough of a focus on Obi-Wan or his relationship with the one who would become his apprentice. But it also had excellent performances on the part of Ewan McGregor & Liam Neeson as Qui-Gon Jinn. Darth Maul also had a terrific turn as a truly terrifying villain while also producing what was perhaps one of -if not the greatest- lightsaber duel in the entire saga with the Duel of the Fates. All in all, a mediocre go bad film.

The plot in Attack of the Clones simply dragged A LOT and the romantic sub-plot between Padme and the now whiny adolescent Anakin seemed forced and lukewarm. Hayden Christensen is not a bad actor, but a lot of the lines he was given and the part he was written made it nearly impossible for anyone to give a good performance in the role. The introduction of Christopher Lee and a possibly sympathetic antagonist coupled with the Battle of Geonosis and Yoda's first duel made the third act very enjoyable, but it is possibly the weakest film in the trilogy.

Now Revenge of the Sith was by far the greatest Prequel, and my favorite film behind ESB. The action sequences were all beautifully choreographed, from the Battle Above Coruscant to the Duel on Mustafar. And John Williams was in top form on the soundtrack, especially on Anakin's Betrayal and the Battle of the Heroes. Aside from a few lines of bad dialogue, this film was a beautiful peace of Sci-Fi cinema.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I come from an Irish, northeastern, bleeding heart Catholic background.

This is true for me as well. My entire family is huge Kennedy hacks, and one of them even claimed that Kennedy was a better president than Lincoln.

Personally, I think he's vastly overrated. Choosing to begin American involvement in Vietnam was a bad move, and his tax cuts were too overzealous, but he had a positive impact on civil rights, got the ball rolling on space exploration, and the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was definitely needed. Had he not been assassinated, he probably would've had an even more lasting legacy, but he also would've had the potential to do more damage. I feel like a moderate hero because I already gave the last two presidents three stars, but that's what I'm saying here too.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Very underrated. Three stars.

Very refreshing coming from a right-winger.

[Antonio the Sixth]

If I had to pick three I'd say George McGovern, Tom Daschle, and maybe George Mickelson (a decent Republican Governor killed in a plane crash in 1993).

[Antonio the Sixth]

2008 Presidential/Congressional Comparison:



Dark red= Obama/DEM

Light red= Obama/GOP


Dark blue=McCain/GOP

Light blue=McCain/DEM



Map provided by Shilly.

[Antonio the Sixth]

IIT: The two biggest hacks on Atlas fighting, with King throwing good barbs here and there.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Just put the entire map in red pbrower2a, and by our failure to respond, you can take that as a sign that, as always, we all stand in awe of your inspired genius and perfect perspicacity, and that will be that, and the thread can sink off the front page of this Board. Deal? And given that you thread was reported (not by the now always gracious Simfan I might add), in exchange the ever tolerant Morden I am quite confident will not delete this thread. Deal?

Oh Gawd, now you are going to go through a waterboarding regime, where you are going to string out your mappies, state by state, post after post. Boo!

Morden, my vote is to move this thread to the "what if" graveyard as suggested below. Please your public!

[Antonio the Sixth]

Trump is more socially fascist, while Clinton is more fiscally fascist.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Anyone who openly posts here about wanting to hold office is probably not fit to hold office.