TheSanSabaSongbird

Right? It's still the Jews? Really? WTF? East Indian Americans are rapidly outpacing "the Jews" in terms of elite professionalism, but it's still all somehow about the Jews?

What planet do these people live on?

But you could swap the sexes or have them both be men and it would still work, so I'm not sure that it really is sexist.

But who is the author of said thoughts? From whence do they arise? If you look carefully you'll find that there is no author and that the self is an illusion that arises from the nature of consciousness. This is the essential insight of Buddhism and other contemplative traditions.

Yeah, my Nancy Reagan does similar shit on the regular.

She's nearly lived up to her namesake in the sense that she doesn't really like anyone and is pretty strong on the "just say no" aspect of things.

I love her anyway in spite of her being a cold hearted bitch. In spite of all her great upbringing, she's never met anyone she wasn't prepared to scratch or swipe at, drawing random blood.

This is a pretty stupid point. Increasingly consequential national elections are exactly what you would expect in a country that, like ours, has become increasingly polarized since the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. The right keeps getting crazier and crazier, so of course the stakes keep going up.

Edit; it's also, simultaneously, to be expected that in a politically polarized country, in which each side has roughly equal electoral power, that no radical change will occur.

NATO needs a similar mechanism as well, but for similar reasons doesn't have one either.

I don't know why this should be an unpopular opinion. It seems to me more like a truth claim or a hypothesis that can probably be supported or refuted on the basis of research.

I read "Anthem" when I was about 19, I think, and at the time I liked it. I tried to read "Atlas Shrugged" when I was in my 30s, but didn't get very far before I put it down in as a waste of time. There's one data point for you.

True, but it still amounts to a vote for Trump, due to the electoral college.

Newspapers were a very different beast in Jefferson's day.

Yes it is. I guarantee you that someone who regularly reads a reputable major daily is going to be better-informed than 90 percent of the public. Your attitude is part of the problem too. The vast majority of Americans are functionally illiterate when it comes to news media and don't have any idea of how to evaluate credibility and accuracy.

I mostly blame the Internet for trashing the signal-to-noise ratio, but I also blame our education system and the profession of journalism itself for not giving people better epistemic toolkits.

The Biden administration is quite possibly the worst administration I've ever seen when it comes to messaging, and I am in my 50s. Someday in the future someone will write a PhD dissertation on why they are so dysfunctional in this respect, but for now I just don't get it. They are singularly inept when it comes to publicizing and taking credit for their wins.

As a longtime SAR guy --I'm in my 50s-- I always tell people to carry a gun in the backcountry if that's what makes them feel safe, but just know that you're far far far more likely to get in trouble from things like weather, terrain, rivers, meltwater, falling, exposure, hypothermia and just the elements in general than you are from any animal. The risk profiles aren't even remotely close. This is true even in places like Alaska where almost everyone is armed. As far as I'm concerned, a gun is dead weight. Lose it and concentrate instead on carrying the ten essentials and knowing how to use them