I suppose today is the right day to announce my new publication in @RadHistReview, a review essay on Rock Against Racism, which argues that defeating the political advances and street violence of fascists required creative & daring political organizing. https://t.co/XGJ00flBh4 pic.twitter.com/3IOljR7GgS

— Stuart Schrader (@stschrader1) September 30, 2020

Well its tough to sweep an entire division. I am guessing the Rams have never ever swept the NFC East. All four teams.

I’m guessing the Over The Hill Gang learned a lot from the Giants.
I say this is a week for one of those weirdly-bad Goff-games.

Washington: 17
Rams 16

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]….”

============
w
v

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.

w
v

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.

w
v

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?

w
v

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.

w
v

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.

w
v

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