Am reading Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver. My first kingsolver book.

Wanted to know more about her:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Kingsolver

Saw this and it made me wince. I dont want the american-riff-raff coming to WV:

“…..Kingsolver was criticized for a Los Angeles Times opinion piece following the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11 attacks. She wrote, “I feel like I’m standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming at each other, ‘He started it!’ and throwing rocks that keep taking out another eye, another tooth. I keep looking around for somebody’s mother to come on the scene saying, ‘Boys! Boys! Who started it cannot possibly be the issue here. People are getting hurt.”[38] By some accounts, she was “denounced as a traitor,” but rebounded from these accusations and wrote about them.
……
………….Her major non-fiction works include her 1990 publication Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983
…..
……..Kingsolver lives in the Appalachia area of the United States. She has said that friends in the urban literary community disparage rural areas such as Appalachia, but also that the COVID-19 pandemic might change these types of opinions as people move away from cities to practice social distancing longterm.[15]….”

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Mackeyser wrote:

Also, I’m kinda like Thomas insofar as I’ve had what I can only describe as supernatural experiences which I can only interpret as divine.

I’ve seen things, ya see…

================

Yer talkin about the Proehl catch.

Granted, science cant explain it yet, but
I’m sure Nittany has some theory or other.

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Mackeyser wrote:

wv wrote:

Zooey wrote:

Liberals ARE condescending. Leftists, too. Maybe Leftists even more so. And so the masses hate universities and experts and everybody whom they feel look down their noses at them.
.

================

Well, i dunno, but I know that I find myself being condescending all the time. I also find myself fighting my own habit of being condescending all the time.
I do it. But i try not to do it. And the pattern repeats.

Why do i do it? Because I am dealing with people who choose some weird Bible phrase over Science. Religion over Science.
Or, they choose some comforting political-myth over actual History.

So when I as a leftist am trying to communicate with a right-winger it is a huge challenge. How does one communicate with someone who believes in Myths/Religions and rejects History/Facts/Science?

It often either devolves into me being condescending, Or, I just find a way to change the subject to Football.

But….I do NOT find rightwingers being condescending to ME. Mainly they just pray for me, or shake their heads.

So, my personal experience has been that lefties are condescending and righties are not.

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Well, that last part is just BS. Not your personal experience, of course, but the overall conclusion.

As a reformed conservative, there is TONS of condescension among righties, but it manifests differently.

The left condescends about facts, reality, policies and the actual record.

Liberals condescend about identity, association and convenient intersectionality. Facts will be condescended about ONLY if it brings up hypocrisy on the right or furthers the needs of their corporate/donor masters.

The right condescends about conservative dogma…which has changed radically over the past 40 years… well except for that Liberals are weak and the Left is dangerous. Are you churchy enough? Are you 2A enough? Do you wanna kill brown people enough? That can look a lot of different ways from jingoism to racism and all sorts of dark combinations.

The right condescends plenty. If you’ve never had someone go further than “bless your heart”, then God bless, cuz they out there. I guess living in FL, we have a more concentrated sample to draw from.

Maybe it’s because I used to be a conservative and I still speak the language or because I considered going to seminary and have been an elder at several churches or because I served in the military, but I’m usually able to have a conversation with conservatives.

I mean… I like guns. I do. I’m a devout Christian and know my Bible. I guess I get what’s important to them.

There is a method and it’s basically the same as how I became a lefty… ask them straight questions and let them come to their own conclusions.

Like…

Cons: I’ll never have a gay son. I’ll have a dead son, but not a gay one.

Me: Wait. You love your son so little that you’d kill him over that?

Cons: You bet. No. Wait. I love my son.

Me: So you’re saying you’re better than Dick Cheney? He shoulda killed his daughter?

Cons: What? No! But the Bible says…

Me: Now wait a minute. It says in Revelation that anyone that changes one word of the book is doomed for all eternity. Right? Okay, well, then how come the story of Lot in the Bible was rewritten after a US businessman in the late 1800s went to Germany to commission a Bible that changed that story?

Cons: Wait…what?

Me: And even if you don’t want to go that deep, talking about the Council of Nicea and how the Bible we read in English… one of MANY translations…has been changed from the original Aramaic and Greek… Didn’t Jesus tell us to love one another as he loved us?

Cons: Well, now I don’t think he meant all that. My Pastor says…

Me: So, it was okay for him to break bread with prostitutes and tax collectors who in the ancient world were literally the lowest of the low, but in a world with Greek traditions and a Hebrew Orthodoxy that recognized SIX genders at that time, Jesus wanted us to love everyone but the gays?

Cons: Six what?

Me: yeah…six.

Cons: How does that even work?

Me: Well… that’s another conversation, but suffice it to say that Jesus wanted us to love everyone…even our enemies. And if he wanted us to love our enemies, then how could he not want us to love our own children?

And… it goes on from there.

Now… this can’t work on anyone stuck in dogma and that goes for anyone of any stripe. I’ve had convos where folks had all the barriers torn down and they just said, “nope, not changing my mind because I don’t want to even as you’re pointing out why I’m wrong using my own reference materials” Not much you can do there.

If a conversation can be made, then I usually have good success talking about things.

But yeah, one way to sort of judo pivot away from condescension is to frame new information as being part of the group that’s “in the know”

We all had to learn sometime, right?

I dunno… I descended into riffing like half way into this post…

================

Now wait just a damn minute here, how can you be a Christian? 🙂

I knew you used to be one, but i figured you’d left that behind.

What kinda Christian are you? I mean, do you think a guy named Jesus rose from the dead and went up to heaven to save us, etc?

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Yale Study Says Medicare for All Would Save U.S. $450 Billion, Prevent Nearly 70,000 Deaths a Year https://t.co/NQPPbtSpfd

— Katalin Pota 🌹 (@katalin_pota) October 7, 2020

Biden and Harris have not done very well in the debates and it's partly BECAUSE they're centrists, and centrists end up getting into fights with the right over "who will cut taxes more," a fight the right will always win because it presumes their premises are correct.

— Nathan J Robinson (@NathanJRobinson) October 8, 2020

It annoys me, that so many things happen around the world,
that i know nuthin about. I mean who the hell is the Golden Dawn?
=============

Here’s the moment thousands of people in Athens hear the verdict declaring the fascist Golden Dawn party a criminal organization pic.twitter.com/dOKf4yndxz

— Noah Hurowitz (@NoahHurowitz) October 7, 2020

Unions:https://inthesetimes.com/article/union-density-workers-organizing-staff-experts-public-enthusiasm
A Bunch of Union Organizers Explain What’s Wrong with Unions
We asked the real experts about the gap between public enthusiasm for unions and the lack of actual union members.

“……The edu­ca­tion­al polar­iza­tion we see on right to left stuff has become a huge fac­tor in whether young, work­ing-class peo­ple want to union­ize. Indus­tries pop­u­lat­ed with poor, younger adults who are gen­er­al­ly overe­d­u­cat­ed like (ahem) dig­i­tal media or high­er edu­ca­tion, are super ripe slam dunks where you can trans­form an indus­try with hot-shop orga­niz­ing. Ones with most­ly poor­er, younger adults who are not edu­cat­ed, and are not most­ly based in urban areas, like retail and sup­ply chain logis­tics, have had cold work­ers that are not respon­sive enough to union dri­ves to make win­ning a pos­si­bil­i­ty. (Part of the equa­tion hold­ing them back, of course, is how that gen­er­a­tion of big-box retail and its sup­ply chain were built from scratch in such a way that unions could be kept out com­plete­ly and any rare com­po­nent that got infect­ed could be eas­i­ly shut down and dis­solved. But there’s an atti­tu­di­nal dif­fer­ence in the con­stituen­cies as well.)

A bright spot excep­tion to this has been fast food…..”

zn wrote:

waterfield wrote:

Biden is like a gatekeeper. If he wins he will open the gate extremely wide and many different views will be allowed into the arena. If Trump wins the gate will only be open for those who pass his loyalty test.

Trump is bad and we all know it.

Biden on the other hand has never opened and most likely will never open the gate to many different views.

He’s not as bad as Trump and we’ll have to settle for that.

==============

Yes. There is zero reason to think Biden will be anything but what he has ALWAYS been. He will certainly not move to the Left.

At any rate, he is kinda irrelevant. If the left is to ever become anything, it will have to start from the ground up. Smaller elections. One by one.
If the Left cant win those, then the rest is just smoke and dreams, etc.

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Trump may have to start a War, to get back in this thing. Or ramp up the vote-suppression.

=====================

Trump is getting destroyed LMAO https://t.co/n57l0wZhYm

— Good Morning, Sunday Morning 🥋 (@SocialistMMA) October 7, 2020

waterfield wrote:

<
My answer is never to tell people they are “wrong”. But to ask them questions-much like taking a deposition. If one says science doesn’t know everything-my question is “why do you say that”. Then they will say something like “I had a friend who…” Then I ask “do you personally know of others”. At some point the message comes across without them feeling they are looked down upon by someone who comes off as “having all the answers”. Might and likely won’t change their opinions but might give them a pause to think a second time about an issue. “Why do you ” are three very powerful words.

=================

OK, but at what point do you usually pull out an ice-pick and run it through their walnut-brain? Because i find that its best to do it just after I’ve asked them an ‘I have a friend’ question.

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Zooey wrote:

Liberals ARE condescending. Leftists, too. Maybe Leftists even more so. And so the masses hate universities and experts and everybody whom they feel look down their noses at them.
.

================

Well, i dunno, but I know that I find myself being condescending all the time. I also find myself fighting my own habit of being condescending all the time.
I do it. But i try not to do it. And the pattern repeats.

Why do i do it? Because I am dealing with people who choose some weird Bible phrase over Science. Religion over Science.
Or, they choose some comforting political-myth over actual History.

So when I as a leftist am trying to communicate with a right-winger it is a huge challenge. How does one communicate with someone who believes in Myths/Religions and rejects History/Facts/Science?

It often either devolves into me being condescending, Or, I just find a way to change the subject to Football.

But….I do NOT find rightwingers being condescending to ME. Mainly they just pray for me, or shake their heads.

So, my personal experience has been that lefties are condescending and righties are not.

w
v

Zooey wrote:

wv wrote:

===============

Well, its very tempting for leftists like us, to think the best strategy for HIM would be to lean left. But is that really accurate? I am not convinced.

I keep thinking about the senate: 99-1.

If i were a corporate-dem, why in the hell would i trust the folks who got the “1” elected, instead of the folks that got the 99 elected.

Sure the polls say, 60 or 70 percent of folks want M4A etc. But they dont VOTE that way do they. I mean even in a DEM primary, Biden beat Bernie. Straight up. Liberals/Dems had a choice — and they chose AGAINST the leftist.

So why would Biden lean left? If i were his evil-political-adviser I’d tell Biden to do just what he’s doing. Be bland, and lean towards Right-Center. The DNC strategy.

I hate it. But it is what it is.

w
v

I was pondering the old conundrum last night about why so many people vote for the GOP, counter to their own interests. And I was thinking that part of it is that those voters, like Trump supporters, are really low information voters, ya know. Nothing new there. But that doesn’t answer the question. They’re low information either way, so how does the GOP get their allegiance?

And then I thought, well, the GOP appeals to their core…values/lifestyle/myths…whatever. A lot of these people just wanna go to work, have a beer with friends, watch UFC, go to church, shoot some birds, ride their motorbikes, raft the river, whatever. No time to watch BS on the news, or read Atlantic Monthly. It’s not their thing. Life is immediate and local. So the GOP just taps into their gut instincts, their biases, their prejudices, and does so without fearing that they, as governors, will ever be inspected for their actions. These people aren’t following the budgets, or the political movements that swirl in Yemen. The GOP goes straight for the Id, and sometimes the Ego.

Democrats, OTOH, want to REASON with these people. Educate them on how their policies are better for them, and they are amazed when nobody bites that bait.

So…I start wondering WHY the Liberals/Left don’t go for the Id appeals as well. I mean…why not?

And I think that it’s because the Left and Right see other people differently. I am considering that maybe the Right actually has an advantage because they think of the masses as a commodity. People are widgets. They are just a different category of Materials necessary to conduct business on the one hand, and potential consumers of services and products on the other hand. They don’t care about the “human” aspects of their lives whatsoever. They are just there like clay, or steel, or tariffs, or tax breaks…just Things that need to be manipulated to their advantage. Appealing to their Id is just an efficient way to do that.

Liberals and the Left give them a little more credit than that. They see them as people with human concerns. But they see them as uneducated and, frankly, sometimes stupid. They are raw humans, Uncultivated Humans. So they/we are driven to try to appeal to them through a variety of “Don’t you see that THIS is in your best interest, and THAT is not?” kind of things, and then get frustrated when they turn the channel to The Masked Singer. Ultimately, I think that Liberals tend to look DOWN on the masses because they are FAILING TO GRASP THINGS. And the Left tends to be condescending to everybody, including Liberals, and even other Leftists.

Well…they HATE being condescended to. Everybody hates being condescended to. And here is where the Right has an advantage. They aren’t condescending to these people because they don’t place any human value on them in the first place. Nobody gets condescending to a horse because it’s a fucking horse. You harness it, and put it to use. So the Right can saddle up the masses partly because they don’t expect anything from them except their direct service. The left wants to…you know…SAVE them. Make their lives better. And when they don’t cooperate, well, it’s because they are Deplorable. They’re morons. They’re backwoods hicks and rubes and yokels.

So the GOP can bang the identity drums, and the people will march because they hear the drumming, and they feel welcomed.

The Democrats are hamstrung because they are trying to herd cats with shit like “Build Back Better,” whatever the fuck THAT is supposed to mean. And the Democrats don’t really have anything to offer because they aren’t committed to running on anything that will actually change lives. So it’s easy for the GOP to paint them as the party of giving away crap to OTHER people. And that’s totally believable because they certainly aren’t giving anything to ME. To US. To anybody in MY neighborhood. They’re trying to appeal to the masses without offering them a vision of anything other than Hope and Change and Harmony on the one hand, and a tall stack of Policy Papers on the other. Those just aren’t drumbeats that get them very far.

Biden is running as a Rorschach Test. He is largely a vacuum with an invitation to everybody to believe he is whatever they want him to be.

=========

All food for thought, for sure. There’s a lot there to unpack.

But what I think about all the fucking time — i cant let it go — is: Biden VS Bernie.

No republicans involved. None of their games came into play. This was totally a Dem Vote. And the Democrats rejected the Left. Just flat out rejected it. Democrats did that.

And sure, we all know that the powers-that-be did everything they could to get the Democrats to vote for Biden. All the usual shit. But Bernie’s message was out there. He’d been around for five years. People knew his message. The corporate media may have been tilted against him but people knew he was for an increase in Minimum Wage, free college, and M4A. And the DEMOCRAT voters rejected it. The Rep-thugs didnt even get in the game. The DEMOCRAT VOTERS rejected. Not the elites. The Dem VOTERS.

And while thinking about ‘that’ lovely dynamic, lets widen the perspective to include all the other Senate/Congressional Elections over the last fifty years. How many times have the DEMS (and Reps) rejected leftwingers? Almost Every fucking time. So, its not just something about Bernie.

Pretty dark picture. Why do i bring it up? I think its because I’ve spent time in the Left-twitter-bubble the last two days, and I am surprised at how often leftists FAIL to absorb and reflect on the awful historical facts. We are a small group. We are not a large uprising. We are not a great and powerful movement.

99-1.
The DEM voters freely and knowingly and willingly chose Biden over Bernie.

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NASA Discovers Evidence That Life Could Exist Outside America https://t.co/31RM0GaihQ pic.twitter.com/HgZ9zuN9iu

— The Onion (@TheOnion) October 6, 2020

InvaderRam wrote:

wv wrote:

Well he did say that he thought he was a little too conservative. But I dunno.

you’re right. but i’d also like to hear what he says after watching film. what was the defense doing to the rams offense? was the deep ball just not there with goff checking down? did goff have to audible out of plays based on what he was seeing? did he miss receivers downfield?

at first i agreed with you. i liked the methodical approach the rams were taking although i admittedly got nervous there toward the end.

i thought the comment posted in another thread about the rams having to scale back their running attack due to the absence of noteboom was interesting. maybe the giants noticed this in the bills game last week and the rams got more predictable in the run game? i have no idea. but it could partially explain why the rushing game wasn’t as effective as it was the first 3 weeks.

===============

Didnt know about the Noteboom comment Even more reason to stay conservative and safe, perhaps.

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