Yeah, like zn said, keep us updated.

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Mackeyser wrote:

I guess what I’m getting is that we just cannot have any more distraction, even when it’s healthy. From now on, it seems we’re gonna have all this until we truly and fully deal with it… and it’ll suck the entire time.

I just hope we get it right this time.

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Have you noticed any regional differences, Mack? North vs South?

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Mackeyser wrote:

I have strong feelings on this.

I really thought that what Raffaela DeLaurentiis tried to produce with David Lynch was fucking AMAZING.

The problem is that both her and Lynch with Frank Herbert’s blessing sought to “remake the Space Opera”. So they made a 5 hour and 30 minute epic.

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I had never heard that. Wow.

I’ve always thought the biggest problem with that movie was it was too short, undeveloped. The movie was like the last episode of Game of Thrones. Rushed through everything.

That would have been great, had it been five hours.

I never did get used to the music in the film though.

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“…Further complicating the matter, on Wednesday, Don’t Shoot Portland accused Wall of Moms of “anti-blackness” for “leaving vulnerable Black women downtown after marching, failing to support those on the ground that put trust in them” and not informing Black leadership about officially registering as a nonprofit with the state. They said the organization “was not started for BLM, but to get the feds out of PDX” and that “combined with a lack of care for and disregard of Black women, we were used to further an agenda unrelated to BLM.” As a result, a separate group called Moms United for Black Lives has splintered off from the organization. Family members of Wall of Moms founder Bev Barnum said she would not comment on the allegation….”
——————

Yup. Put ten leftists in an organization, and within three weeks you will end up with 11 factions.

Leftists.

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In looking over this ‘greatest sci fi’ list at NPR, it dont look like there’s many notable NEW Sci-Fi stories. At least not with the NPR crowd.

NPR:https://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139085843/your-picks-top-100-science-fiction-fantasy-books

I thought Carl Sagan’s Contact was a decent movie, btw. It’s no.50 on the list.

A very very under-rated book, imho, btw, fwiw, fyi, is — The Last Unicorn. There’s so many beautiful poetic sentences in that fantasy book. No.55 on the list.

I wouldnt mind seeing Le Guin’s Dispossessed made into a big film. No.78.
Also, Perdido Street Station might make a good film. No.98

I didnt even know C.S. Lewis wrote a Sci Fi book. No.100.

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The good news.
—

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

Look at how you phrased that: There’s a lot of evidence the old playbook MAY not be working.

I dunno.

And the poll you posted said something like 54 percent or 52 percent — whats the margin of error on that?

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Well it;s not just a poll, there’s an entire perception out there if you read around. And it’s not just 52%, it’s 52% v. 30%.

If I didn’t post a poll and asked you to guess the percentage who would NOT buy the law and order rhetoric v. those who did, would you ever have come up with 52% on the former v. 30% on the latter?

Those numbers mean something.

Trump is doing worse on that than he is on the pandemic, in terms of approval ratings.

For right now, though, I am content to say just this: keep an eye on it. Because what’s happening is unique.

Now in terms of this:

but thats not the same thing as supporting the violent-protestors.

But…that’s not important. NOBODY supports the violent protesters. Even BLM in Portland has been criticizing them. All you need to deal with that issue is to recognize it’s just few hundred graffiti warriors in a 2 block area of Portland (I don’t have the same amount of detail on Seattle). They have no significance. When Trump tried to make it seem like they were significant, it did not work.

Compare that to the fact that according to different estimates 15-26 M Americans participated in at least one protest. It’s boulders on one side of the scale, and a few pebbles on the other side.

….

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Yeah, yeah, you said not to worry before the playoff game against the Vikes in 99.

And look how THAT turned out, Mr Numbers.

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zn wrote:

wv wrote:

I dunno. Law And Order is not just some ordinary issue that he’s made up. Its an issue that has a long history of working with the middle-classes in many places.
Thats why Biden is making sure not to alienate the police too much.

I think the protests may be starting to cut towards Trump AT THIS POINT. Not at the beginning, but i suspect, maybe, the Mainstream White Middle-Class is getting tired of them. I’d like to see some poll numbers that show the TRENDs, month by month on the protests, etc.

At any rate, Waterfield is just a worrier. So am I. This is like, in 99, when the Rams had clinched the playoff berth…but we knew they had to play the Vikings.
Its no use reasoning with us. We are haunted. Trump is Joe Kapp.

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I get worriers. But the law and order thing was ALWAYS racial…at heart, if not just plain openly. And now? This is what I mean about the shift in perceptions. Poll after poll shows the MAJORITY side with the protesters when it comes to issues of racial justice, and a majority also says that something like the Floyd killing is not an isolated incident illustrating a “bad apples” problem but an example of systemic racism in law enforcement.

We did not have numbers like that before this summer. Ever. Ferguson had the majority siding with the police and denying systemic racism.

Polls are polls, you can’t hang too much on them, but they are never JUST polls…and this is a big change. Now I don’t know if it lasts, but that’s only because I am always wary about saying things in the social/political world last.

The significance is this. Put the polls side by side. So again, the majority sides with the protests and with the idea that law enforcement has a problem with systemic racism. AND ALSO, the majority does NOT buy Trump’s law and order rhetoric about the protests and in fact, sending the Feds to Portland actually backfired on him. To borrow (not inappropriately) from Harry Potter, turns out the wand’s not really his and the curse rebounded on him.

Those 2 things go together. Majority sides with protests against systemic racism, majority not buying the law and order schtick.

There’s a lot of evidence that the old playbook may not be working.

…

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Look at how you phrased that: There’s a lot of evidence the old playbook MAY not be working.

I dunno.

And the poll you posted said something like 54 percent or 52 percent — whats the margin of error on that? And what was the exact wording? And when was it taken? And is the TREND going in one direction or the other?

I wont dismiss the polls, and in some ways a lot of things are encouraging these days…but things are still very fluid. Thats what i think, anyway. Very fluid. Which means i see Waterfield’s point.

And its one thing to say in a survey “I support the protestors” — but thats not the same thing as supporting the violent-protestors.

Can Trump convince mainstreamers he supports the protestors just not the ‘violent protestors’? Thats the question. Thats the worry.

Trumps approach worked with immigration. Same playbook. He supports immigration — just not ‘illegal’ immigration. Etc, and so forth.

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nittany ram wrote:

At the risk of offending the old timers on here, I have to admit that I really like the new helmet.

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Of course, ‘you’ like it — it’s a Genetically Modified Helmet.

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Even Entomologists are struggling with race knowledge these days.
—–
bug-blog:http://bugeric.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-problem-with-murderanything.html

“…the fact that i can speak more intelligently about social wasps, than people of color is disgraceful….”
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This is an interesting little piece on the ‘Peekskill riot’ which happened at a Paul Robeson concert in 1949.

======
fortune:https://fortune.com/2017/09/08/pledge-of-allegiance-francis-bellamy-immigration/
How a Socialist Ended Up Writing the Pledge of Allegiance
By
Charles Dorn

Bellamy later admitted writing the pledge with an eye toward the ritual entailed in reciting it rather than an understanding of its meaning. “When you analyze it,” he claimed, “you find a mouthful of orotund words, most of them abstract terms—a bunch of ideas rather than concrete names . . . this pledge would seem far better adapted to educated adults than to children.” Nevertheless, school boards around the country began compelling student recitation as part of a morning flag salute. In 1898, New York became the first state to legislate the requirement, passing its statute one day following the U.S. declaration of war against Spain. By 1917, with the eruption of nationalism accompanying America’s entry into World War I, pledging allegiance to the flag became a fixture of public education in America….see link….

Billy_T wrote:

Written by the author of The Evolution of God, which I also loved, it’s basically a very intelligent pitch for a kind of secular Buddhism, with mindfulness meditation at its heart. Wright is an evolutionary psychologist, and gets scienzy (at times) in the service of the Buddhist Way, showing how it fits with natural selection, and can offset the “environmental mismatches” our evolution has created. Where it becomes relevant to the above discussion is via psychological studies regarding how easily we humans are led, misled, our opinions (re)shaped, altered, via (at times) very simple suggestions. And that’s all of us. We all are subject to this, to conditioned responses, etc.

(Wright asserts that strong meditation practices can help us break free of that conditioning to one degree or another).

Capitalist marketing weaponized/weaponizes all of the above to a degree we’ve never seen before, and the right does capitalist marketing far, far better than the left. It’s not even close.

But we’re all “naturally” susceptible to this, for these illusions and delusions, cuz they once helped us stay alive/spread our genes into the next generation. Passing on our genes is our Prime Directive, as biological units. Wright contends that the secular Buddhist Way can help us get beyond that Prime Directive, rebel against it if need be, and it often is needed, given those increasing environmental mismatches.

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Well i basically agree with all that.

Cept i would qualify it with somethin along the lines of…I suspect that once Corporate-Capitalism has damaged a human brain so utterly that it has, say, turned them into a Neo-Nazi, or NeoCon or whatever– I am not sure any form of ‘meditation’ could save them. Ya know. Too much capitalist-damage at that point. They might just meditate and become even more focused assholes.

I just dont believe everyone can always come back to the light. Take, Zooey for example…

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zn wrote:

wv wrote:

I think to understand it, one has to think about Corporate-Capitalism. And the Corporate-Capitalist Education System. And the Corporate-Capitalist-Media. And ‘Advertising.’ And ‘Marketing.’ And ‘Public Relations.’ And Political Campaigns in a Corporate-Capitalist system. And ‘lobbying.’ And cover-ups and injustice. All of it.

Ironically a lot of that comes from people who believe they are actually resisting “the system” when they have actually misidentified the target.

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Oh, absolutely. Totally.

Of course I know, you only say that because the Deep State has mixed liquefied sheep brains in with the fluoridated water in Maine.

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