What too many people don't get is that there isn't a Republican Party.
There's a handful of upstarts, firebrands, who actually care about conservative Principles. But the rest of it is just...entirely captured. Entirely. It's a pile of gray-hairs who maybe have some economic beliefs about tax structure and budgets (but they bend in the end anyway), but they've completely quit on anything regarding culture. And they might as well be Democrats on issues of culture, because they react violently to the conservative upstarts.
What's great about the upstarts, is that what they seem to get is that the "Repooblican Party" wasn't that great a thing worth saving anyway. The "Party of Lincoln?" Who gives a shit?! Lincoln was a piece of shit tyrannical Hamiltonian anyway!
This is a time for upheaval. Anyone playing to get back to a middle is a fucking dope.
You literally never talk about anything else.
It's not untrue, though. And this comes from a Florida resident who is both a firm DeSantis supporter and someone who specifically moved here in 2020 because of DeSantis' actions and policies.
DeSantis shut a lot of shit down. And a lot of people around here are still really salty about it. A lot of people lost money in transactions, because that is what happens when you halt things. People lost out because they couldn't buy things because of government, and people lost out because they couldn't sell things because of government. People on the margins who couldn't handle a period of interruption went under.
Couple things about that is: Having come from a "soft shutdown State," it was relatively brief, which is HUGE. In my home State, the bars and restaurants and fucking ski lifts opened back up in a month, while the schools (LOL, BULLET DODGE) barbers, candy shops, and theaters stayed closed by decree hard for A YEAR and soft for 2 FUCKING YEARS.
Most people are incapable of accounting for the passage of time. Once you're on the other side of a span of time in which something about that time is meaningful, they have a hard time--or literally can't--recollect it. "Water under the bridge" is pernicious and the norm. NOT ME, BOYO. I remember all that time when I wasn't literally locked in my house, but might as well have been, since everything to go to was closed. Including all public services, like libraries, and parks, and COUGH SCHOOLs. Yeah you have 4 rugrats bounce around your house and your brain for a year, and you remember that shit. And this was in a "voluntary" lockdown State, in which most shit was closed not because it was demanded, but because in some bizarre manifestation of the rampant cancer that is the administrative State gone out of control, they largely assumed they should be closed.
Anyhoo. Hilariously enough, some Floridians are still really grumpy about that 21 or 30 or whatever days of shutdown they endured. Yeah, it happened. It did happen. It was lighter than anything any other State endured, and yes I'm including South Dakota in that because I've met and talked to that beautiful bitch personally, and PR aside, fully half her State still shut down because every Mayor ignored her Governor dictates and still did what they wanted, because in SD the Governership is way weaker than it is in any other State.
So yeah, FL, the entire State, did suffer shut-downs. Is this a good thing for Trump to sling at DeSantis? Jesus Christ no. WHO BUILT THE CAMPS, TRUMP. I'm a huge Trump supporter, and I think he got schlonged big-time by basically everything regarding covid--to this day! I think he got played and is still being played. The dude is still convinced that his biggest blunder: Accepting this up-jacked flu as a State of Ehmergency, and following through with the lunatic fiction that you can "vaccinate" against a highly-mutable airborne cold virus. This shit brought him down, no doubt about it, and yet he hugs it like it's his nighty best pal teddy bear. Embarrassing.
All this, and I still endorse Donald J motherloving Trump for (still) President.
Why? Because despite his obvious fuck-ups, and the likelihood that he will continue to fuck up, I legitimately think he's the best man for the job. The job is shit, by the way. If you've learned nothing else in your life, you should have learned this: That the office of the President of the United States, if done in the best possible way for the peoples of America, is shit. It's a throne of garbage, in the center of Washington D.C., which is inarguably one of human history's most evil loci. Even driving past it gives me the heebie-jeebies.
DeSantis rules Florida, which is right. Florida is not as secure a bastion of sanity as many think, it is truly a battleground State, and that is County by County, and neighborhood by neighborhood. Seriously--people fight about it, and they sell their holdings and move to RVs or out-of-State, or park their RVs and buy a holding, over it. FL is also being flooded by immigration, both blue and red. Territory is won and lost every day. DeSantis won big because he is He, but without him, the next Governorship could easily go some blue from the Miami region.
Then where would America be? Personally, I shudder to think.
DeSantis is needed in FL, and FL is needed for America to continue to Be. D.C. is a clownshow, and what it needs is an obstructionist clown. You're not gonna rehabilitate all this nonsense by getting really good Republican candidate in D.C. D.C. will continue to be D.C., until something big happens (my personal wish being that a maverick President just up-and-says he's moving the U.S. headquarters to Elephant Butte. New Mexico, overnight).
Back in the 90s, at the shopping mall, for awhile there was a sort of newfangled photo booth. The gimmick with this machine was that it would take a picture of what's inside the booth and then stylize it by making it look like the picture was being produced by hand with pencil. A screen on the outside would show the picture being developed, a line at a time.
I guess part of its "demo" mode that would run to advertise the thing while nobody was using it, was to use a picture in cache.
So, uh, yeah! Most of the time, as it ran through demo pictures--okay, cute idea, but not really all that interesting. But when it happened to demo one of the very few pictures it had in memory of people of a certain pigmentation, it would just start blacking the whole damn screen in, except for whites of eyes and teeth. Fucking disturbing and hilarious; taking pictures of smiling kids and automatically turning them into nightmare monsters.
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On the left side, there's an understandable emotion on every face. A normal person can look at literally any of those faces, and each one is very clearly expressing something different from the rest.
The ones on the right side have no more affect than a cereal mascot. It's all some variation of "DURR" or "BLAH" or, best-case scenario, bland affability. I'm familiar with enough of these characters too, and the underlying problem behind the art is that none have an actual human trait. They can be best described as "plucky (in a maximally non-offensive way)."
LOL she did a little dance falling backward like a Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! character getting KO-ed by a body-blow.
Yeah, and? I like the guy too, doofy bastard that he is. Doesn't make this joke any better though. He may as well shout "Play me off, keyboard cat!" as he leaves the room.
muh muh muh bluh bluh bluh try not sounding like a retard
Says you. I was born in a Country whose founding documents state that there are such things as natural Rights. They were already Fought for, and that is proved by the existence of this Country. I may have to fight to uphold that, but those Rights are my birthright by virtue of being born here. Blood was spilled. It may be spilled further, but it was spilled, to sign this contract.
Okay, they're "hyper anti-nationalist." Then what are they for?
What they're for is the super-State, the Globalist State, the hyper-Nation. They're for the trans-national Corporation, whether they realize that or not. If fascism is the marriage of Nation and Corporation, and these people are for the marriage of Hyper-Nation and Hyper-Corporation, would it make you feel better to describe these people as "Hyper-Fascists?"
I hope not. It's the opposite of that. Logic is rational, theoretical. What's he's saying is practical. You're talking Principles, and he's talking about what happens to Principled folk, when those folk are specifically targeted and undermined using their Principles as a weakness.
That's what this whole Age is about. It's about starting with an unprecedented clean slate and coming up with too good a plan for a fair, decent, and consistent Governance. And then 2 centuries of petty assholes and power-seekers saying "Oh, yeah!?" and probing for weaknesses at every turn, for generations.
Principles are great, logic is great. But they've got to bend to sheer practicality if antagonists specifically target Principles and Logic as weak points. There has to be some aegis.
Individualism, natural rights, and liberty, ya goon. The right of the little guy to be left the fuck alone to not have to engage with the machinations of sociopaths, or collections of cultists.
Just because you say "hence" doesn't mean there's an actual connection between what comes before your "hence" and what comes after.
You've made exactly 0% headway into explaining in any way, how your "toxic" behaviors can, or should, be tied to intrinsically male or female behavior. In fact, when given the opportunity to even describe typically male or female behavior, you dropped the ball, really, really, badly. You gave what you thought were iron-clad examples, and they have been dismantled by several people.
That's "back to the drawing board" time. Don't get mad, don't get petulant. Instead, examine your assumptions. Where did you learn what you thought you knew about spousal abuse and such?
You should salve your hurt butt with a refreshing trip to Applebees. Get a skillet of some kind.
I love the messy logistics of exactly how fucking lame this joke is. A sink is not light, and by all appearances, that is a real sink that he's carrying. It's got to be at least 20, maybe even 30 lbs. Carrying that in front of you, jutting a couple feet forward because it's a goddamn sink, against your chest, completely sucks.
The dude's worth more money than anybody can imagine. His brain is so good at some things that he's made billions of dollars. So much Money, and in the modern day, that means access to wonders that would make Mansa Musa raise an eyebrow.
Yet here the goofy fucker is, so desperate to be liked and thought well of by the fucking internet of all things, that he undergoes this discomfort to try (and fail) to land this obvious decade-old Dad joke.
Can you imagine? Can you really imagine, being that guy? Command of more resources than any despot, king, emperor in human history has ever had, but still such an eager puppy. Let that sink in.
It says it right in the post. What the hell is wrong with you people?
LOL fine then, fuck you too. But you still failed horribly both at elucidating and then--even worse--defending your position. Have fun with that. Might want to tuck your lower lip in before a bird perches on it.
You can't describe people you don't know. You can only project yourself onto them.
Who is like...the 137th person to use this toilet? What kind of human voluntarily steps into a place like that?
And I think you're standing on completely shifting sand regarding "optimal" versus "toxic," as I demonstrated by dismantling your single example. I could go further than this: If you take off the completely arbitrary limiter of "spousal abuse to the point of death," and look instead at "spousal abuse," it is far more common to be instigated and generally perpetrated by women. We know this through statistics regarding domestic violence among lesbian couples, and crime statistics referring to non-reciprocated domestic violence among heterosexual couples. Beating your S.O. is largely a woman thing (Beating to death merely shows that men tend to have greater efficacy when it comes to domestic violence--if you ignore stabbings--but not greater proclivity for it). Yet you used it as your prime example of "masculinity" gone awry to the point of being..."divergent from optimal," I suppose you would call it.
And so it goes. As I said, it was your one example, and it's flawed to the point of being completely backwards from reality. Again. Last time it was declaring a failure of impulse control as intrinsically male, now you've misidentified the tendency toward hitting a romantic partner as somehow intrinsically male. Swing and miss in both cases. I'm afraid you're going to have to do the work of explaining, in a factual and justifiable way, each and every example you have of "toxic" (or "not optimal") masculinity. Both how it is intrinsically "masculine," and how it is its definite connection to maleness, that makes it specifically male toxicity.
Of course, by doing so, you're aping a college Women's Studies pursuit. You'd be arbitrarily declaring things intrinsically this and that, based on your say-so. Why you would want to do such a thing is beyond me.
This is silly, and completely buys into the leftist assumption base that sex-categorized behaviors can be "toxic." You use their terms, you play their game, you've lost already. You don't resist leftist bullshit by absorbing their foundational assumptions. You agree to "toxic" behaviors innate to sex, you might as well start swinging around the word "problematic" next, for all the sense it makes.
It's hard enough to agree on firm, clear definitions of "masculine" and "feminine." If you can't universally agree upon them, then you certainly can't define aberrant, damaging behaviors as being intrinsically tied to exaggerated forms of masculine and feminine. Ex: A man beating his wife to death is an example of masculine toxicity? That's sheer impulse control failure--when a generally agreed-upon hallmark of masculinity is nothing but stoicism and impulse control. You can see the stupidity of the trap: "Masculine" comes to define not anything intrinsic to maleness, but is used as a catch-all for unwanted outcomes.
Which is really what it's all about, and why it's a stupid game to get caught in. "Toxic" isn't a useful signifier. It just means "An excuse to pathologize stuff I don't like."
That's a lot of contrarian verbiage to not actually disagree with the only debatable point.
It is always necessary to add more evidence onto the pile. You don't need to be convinced, I don't need to be convinced, but the world still does.
The problem here is that the liberals champion their shitty evidence, and their NPCs fall into line lock step to parrot "teh science" and "teh consensus". We need prominent voices of science to stand up and refute these political talking points.
Let's start back at point 1: Anyone persuadable by scientific evidence already knows what's what. Anyone else has their marching orders, and automatically puts evidence like this into the "heterodox" bin. The amount, the veracity, the diligence, the rigor, and the truth of such evidence is irrelevant. You can put on your Velma glasses and talk viral biochemistry and strain history all you like, and your opposition can blow a great big raspberry in your face, and they will be considered the stronger argument under the current political and media environment.
From the beginning, many "prominent voices of science" did in fact stand up to the incredibly stupid null hypothesis of "I dunno, I guess just wild bats then! And, uh, someone ate them!" What happened is they became not "prominent" anymore. Doctors who used to head foundations, won prizes in their fields, and had buildings named after them, are now considered no better than bus stop hobos selling pencils. Their prior credibility doesn't matter anymore--they toed the line, they stood silent, or they were destroyed, and it will take decades and several thought revolutions to exonerate them and turn them into smart people again.
It's all part of the same fucking mess. There's this great big ugly thing that has its tentacles everywhere, and it stomps out the small fires of opposition. It never doesn't do this. Anything resembling a rational approach to "covid" is part of this. I'm pretty sure you know this too, and we're just grumping at each other at this point.
Good work, but unnecessary. This is serious scientific inquiry, but everyone interested in legitimate scientific inquiry already knew this to be so. There was no other remotely reasonable explanation for the spike protein that is found in literally heretofore no wild coronavirus in history, yet is commonly used in labs when they want to cut down the time between generations, was the single most distinctive hallmark of sars_cov_19_2. No other explanation, other than some one-in-a-trillion freak chance, which is a sucker's bet.
The reason we know--have known since the beginning--it was tinkered with before it went endemic, is the same reason they were able to rollout "vaccines" so quickly: The "vaccines" target the spike protein, the same one we have no other explanation for being there other than people put it there. It's like finding a squirrel with a key fob that can unlock a Prius. You seriously expect us to believe that squirrel built the fob himself? Fuck no, somebody gave it to him. Duh. FUCKING DUH.
It's only the treacherous media that pretends that there's any chance that sars_cov_19_2 wasn't messed with before encountering the general population. It's such an incredibly stupid thing to pretend, that only the media could do so.
Says the guy who thinks that the fate of every community rests on who is DA PRESIDENT.
Just go fuck yourself. Nobody cares about you. Nobody cares about who you like, or who you think is better at what. Nobody cares about your GENRAL LECTION.
You call people psychopaths--people who don't buy into your monomaniacal obsession with who holds some sort of mercurial seat that's presumably (nominally) over several hundred million people.
Those several hundred million people don't care about that, or what you think. Stuff an oblong in it sideways.