Listen My Children And You Shall Hear, Of The Midnight Ride Of Paul Revere. He Jumped In His Car And Stepped On The Gas, The Bottom Fell Out, He Fell On His...ONT

Welcome to Thursday night! So, Super Tuesday is behind us. Were any of y'all able to help out Nikki?

Election Update

The Dirty Little Secret of the 2024 Campaign

We all know what's going wrong for Biden: He's widely perceived as too old to be running again; Americans remain unhappy with the economy, deeply enraged over border policy and alarmed by the brush fires around the world. Biden came into office promising normalcy, and he has instead delivered chaos.

But there's something else going on, too.

Joe Biden is losing to Donald Trump because of a dirty little secret: Donald Trump is actually the moderate in this race.

On nearly every issue, Trump is closer to the median voter than Biden. Biden won the Democratic primaries over Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2020 because voters thought he would tack toward the center, away from the insanity of The Squad in Congress -- borderline psychotics like Reps. Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. Instead, he entered office believing that he had a mandate for transformation, that he could become our age's FDR or LBJ.

And so Biden abandoned the middle.

Here's my take, and it's worth every cent you paid for it. Trump can win if can keep the election about Biden. Biden can win if Trump makes the election about Trump. Unfortunately, keeping the focus away from himself is not Trump's strong suit. That's assuming that the election is relatively fair. I have no doubt that the Commies have been refining and preparing their fraudulent vote machine for the past 4 years. Trump can beat the margin of error. I'm not sure anybody can beat the margin of fraud.

What Really Grinds Your Gears?

That's tonight's question. I'll start. I really get annoyed when people ghost me. Look, say yes, say no, say you changed your mind, I don't care, but don't ask me to do something and then ignore me. This happened 3 times this week, all in Pa (so maybe it's Pennsylvanians who grind my gears).

Case one: A guy texts me saying he needs insurance, we scheduled a time to talk. We do, he picks a policy, we fill out the paperwork, but he doesn't have his payment info on him, he's at work. Asked me to call in the evening. I do, no answer. Next morning he calls me and apologises, says he'll call back with the info at lunch. He doesn't call, and doesn't respond to any of my texts or calls. Look, if you changed your mind, just tell me, I won't be mad, promise.

Case two: A lady asked me to get together all her options for a certain type of policy. I tell her it'll take me about half an hour. She says “great!”. I get the info together, but she never answers my call or responds to texts or emails.

Case three: A lady tells me what she needs. Part of it I can do, part of it I can't. I put her with another agent for the part I can't do and he takes good care of her, she's really happy. We schedule to take care of my part the next morning. Guess what happened the next morning? Poof! She's in the wind.

I know it's part of the business, but I really wish people would just answer when I do something that they've asked me to do. It's just so...rude!

So what grinds your gears?

The Poison That's Killing The West

We Are the Victims and Everything We Do is Justified

At the heart of everything from the debate over the Gaza War to DEI to toxic interpersonal relationships is a disastrous loop known as the “self-reinforcing victim/villain” cycle.

The self-reinforcing victim/villain cycle is a deceptively simple and incredibly destructive paradigm for any kind of relationship, national, communal or personal, in which one party constantly attacks the other while claiming that it is the victim fighting against oppression.

The paradigm is guided by the idea that there is a permanently fixed victim and villain, that the victim is constantly suffering attacks from the villain and that anything the victim does is justified because he or she has no agency except to resist the assaults of the villain.

While some Hamas supporters have lied or tried to cover up the atrocities of Oct 7, Ghazi Hammad, a Hamas official, initially denied them, but then burst out with, “the existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood, and tears. It is Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000 – everything we do is justified.”

“We are the victims”, “nobody should blame us” and “everything we do is justified” perfectly capture the cruel workings of the cycle. So many westerners have sided with Hamas because they accept, incorporate and make use of the same cycle in their own politics and lives.

If we can't bring back the idea of personal agency and responsibility for one's actions, along with a societal moral code of right and wrong, we are doomed.

Is This A Solution?

Four Lessons for a Fragile America

The United States’ sprawling geography has long encouraged the dispersion of people, but since World War II we have buoyantly pursued an American dream that has so disconnected us from each other that it is starting to look like an illusion. We’ve been allured by the siren songs of individual autonomy, national economic growth, and modernist utopian planning. These are fueled by consumption and carried out at a scale that discourages and distracts us from being persons in space and time. Today, physical landscapes are designed for vehicles rather than relationships, and many neighbors have nothing in common with each other besides geography. Our smartphones and other devices make us feel that we inhabit a digital space—a space that makes promises about belonging that it cannot keep.

The result of all these changes is predictable: We have endless choices, and yet feel alienated from our surroundings because we do not belong anywhere and feel powerless to do anything about our circumstances. Individuals experience growing anxiety, anomie, anger—and our society suffers from mistrust and polarization of our politics. The health of Americans has been declining relative to other developed countries for over four decades, a trajectory that significantly worsened in the 2010s (that is, pre-COVID). While we often talk about economic inequality, social inequality—differences in how much one is supported or held back by one’s family, neighbors, friends, and social network—is arguably a much larger problem.

The author offers the example of the Orthodox Jewish community as a solution, and he makes a lot of good points. He makes some bad ones too, but the biggest problem that I see is that the Orthodox Jewish community is separate and distinct from the larger society it exists in. The same is true of the other communities he points to: The Amish, Mormons and Catholics. All of them exits “in but not of” the larger society as a whole. Oh, and they're all religious groups as well. You could throw in Muslim communities centered on the local mosque as well. How do you make it work for a secular, multi-cultural America as a whole?

That's Just Plain Meme!

If Memes Are Illegal, All Speech Will Become Illegal

Mackey, the man behind the now-defunct Twitter persona Ricky Vaughn, was convicted on March 31 of this year of “conspiracy against rights” in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 241, a Reconstruction Era law designed to counteract the violent voter suppression tactics of the Ku Klux Klan. In October, Mackey was sentenced to seven months in federal prison.

Mackey’s alleged conspiracy? Posting a joke meme on Twitter.

Really. See for yourself.

The offending tweet features an image of a mock political flier, which, according to federal prosecutors, was aimed at deceiving Hillary Clinton voters with the text, “Avoid the line. Vote from home. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925.” Another tweet, also named in the suit, instructs readers to cast their vote by posting the word “Hillary” to Facebook and Twitter alongside the hashtag #PresidentialElection.

The case really is the canary in the coal mine of the end of free speech.

News From The World Of Sports

I just discovered "Ice Football" and it's one of the funniest things I've seen in my entire life

Also, German, which is a language that has a word for everything, doesn't seem to have a word for taunting.

Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by a Yakutsk* child:

*Russian Eskimos in Siberia

posted by WeirdDave at 10:35 PM

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