gehringer_2

Engender more fear, drive more turnout. Maybe you are just as racist as Trump but immigration really isn't that big an issue for you in Springfield SomeotherState. because your town is still snow white. If Trump succeeds in getting a media conversation going that makes you think that your town could be next for 20K people you don't like the look of, you just might get off your John Deere and decide to vote though you normally don't bother. That's what I take from Pete's arg.

Pete’s point is that when MSM does a story to debunk ‘dogs and cats’ Trump knows that all his target audience is going to hear is “20,000 of ‘those’ people in central Ohio God’s country” and have a conniption over it.

Pete has moved to Michigan hasn't he? Eyeing Gretch's gig?

So the number out there for the debate rating was 67M, but I'm reading that does NOT include streamers. If so 80M+ is quite possible.

Shocked, shocked!

He believes there are way more of his than there are of the rest of us - so he doesn't care about new people. And the racial/immigrant scare is what he views as the primary fear generator to get his to the polls. In that frame work the rhetorical strategy is correct. Look at the company he keeps, the circles he travels in, and the fans he has brought to himself. In none of those places do you see anywhere near the range of America. He is in the bubble with his supporters.

And regardless of whether a person views Truth as a moral imperative or a practical political one, a democratic society cannot function when there is no reliable public truth to support successful public decision making.

and that is indeed what makes it so interesting. We *know* that when people live in terrible, brutalized conditions, you end up with more violent people. If you raise living conditions, violence *will* go down. I think that raises two interesting questions: The first is the obvious one around holding people responsible for behavior we know - at least at a statistical level - is the result of outside social forces beyond 'personal responsibility' - again as I think we both see, society doesn't want to go there because the disruption to the regime of legal responsibility is too much at risk once you start down that path. And it would probably rapidly become too complex if attempted. But a more subtle question might be: Are people from the better standard of living environment actually "better", more altruistic people, or do they just have more 'civilized' ways of being bad to each other without physical violence? (e.g. the despicable office boss, embezzlement instead of robbery etc.). The question being whether the 'better' environment is only changing the instrumentalities that people are using to express the 'same' natures. Of course legally it makes a big difference because physically knifing your coworker on the ditch digging crew might get you life or even a noose, while knifing your coworker metaphorically to get his job in the executive suite might get you 7 figures ($) and a total pass from John Law. But how much different is the basic sentiment? To the question of what make people what they are - that certainly cuts to the very nature of existence and sentience and I'm skeptical we have that much better handle on that today than than the Greeks did. Practically/politically speaking, I don't think there is that much denial that better sociology/education creates a better society regardless of religious conviction or lack thereof. (the exception probably being addiction). To me, the argument over the utility of improving social conditions is simply the age-old political problem of moving resources/opportunities from the haves to the have-nots when the haves don't want to.

He doesn't even know how detached from reality he is. I wonder if he knows anyone who has ever tried to 'walk off' with a live adult Canada goose. They happen to be able to fly away in case no-one ever told him that. If one does let you get close enough its as likely to lacerate your fingers as let you catch it. There is a reason hunters shoot them first instead of just strolling to a nearly park to pick one up. The only thing more moronic than he is is people who slurp this stuff up.

Hyperloop was pretty hilarious. He gave away a lot of money to engineering schools to work on it and they cynically took it all knowing it was nonsensical. I watched a team of students spend a year and plenty of Elon's money building a prototype contraption in our student project center to Elon's criteria even though all but maybe the freshmen knew it was windmill tilting. I don't know much about Elon's STEM skills, but I know he can't understand much about engineering scaling not to have dismissed hyperloop 10 minutes after he thought it up. There is a fine line between having the genius to successfully step beyond conventional wisdom and the recognition that you still have to do it inside the envelop of real physics.

Good and evil can be defined from a non-religious standpoint, altruism and sadism exist in the world even if God doesn't and by common secular definition most people would call the 1st good and the latter evil. Even if you want to argue that its all operant conditioning, at the end of the day the result is still individuals that exhibit behaviors that will be judged as good and bad by the general culture. I grant "evil" does carry more religious semantic baggage than "bad", but practically speaking I don't know how much difference that word choice makes to how people evaluate the actions of others. Stepping back, It's attractive but in the end difficult to assign environmental blame for every screwed up person. Trump's older sister was a respected Federal Judge. It's true even siblings in the same home do not have the same experiences, but if the same parent has to be defined as a good parent to one child and a bad one to another in so many cases you're almost left with the outcome being randomly determined, which practically speaking is indistinguishable from saying the personality outcome was latent in the individual maybe subject to some combination of particular environmental triggers - which sounds close to how you frame it above. And absolutely everything we know about genetics and the brain argues there must some spectrum of genetic traits that affect personality but as a culture we still hold each person responsible for themselves in all cases short of a diagnosis of clinical incapacity. We don't have much choice because law as the organizing principle of society collapses if we ever accept a general proposition that people cannot overcome the environment they developed in, even if we sort of nod to the idea informally.

Had to happen. The ultimate grift for the ultimate grifter.

and SuperMcKinstry turns back into a pumpkin.

Tork get the hanging slider on the 3rd pitch but fouled it off. Could only keep it alive for McKinstry.

Nothing confusing really - you start knowing you have a major league hitter at about 500 AB, pretty sure one way or the other by 1000, and even then some guys might still go either way (Torkelson).

but it's the perfect feedback loop inside the MagaSphere. Given: Immigrants ruin the country. Posit: There are immigrants, Conclusion: The country must be in a state of ruin. Corollary: Evidence presented that the country is doing well must be fake news.

and the wheels fall off in the top of the 9th.

OTOH, if sticking pins in a Trump doll could work he'd have been gone a long time ago.

why not both? I've known gentle, sweet, mentally ill people.

He had an up and down year at AAA. Good April, lousy May and June and then really picked it up in July and has been hitting ever since, so he's actually got 3 pretty good months in a row now including the promotion to Det.

To be clear I think there is zero to it, but OTOH I'd stick with 2,3 and 6. #1 is probably easy- just look around at recent history around the world, or given that the planning is coming from a future Prez, you can probably persuade him he would be protected. #5 is probably also not much of a hurdle. Nixon, Bush, Obama, Trump himself on 1/6. We've had plenty of Presidential admins without too much scruple about people getting killed as collateral damage.

yeah - just for a recent example, Baddoo started out much better than Sweeney has and has flamed out. Trey is looking promising but he's got a ways to go to show you can start making plans around him.

I imagine he will get a full opportunity to outplay Javy in ST.

Neither he nor Trump place any value in truth but for somewhat different reasons. Trump has psychological pathologies. He only processes reality through the filter of his narcissism. For Vance, whatever ethics he may have actually held in his Hillbilly Elegy days or before have been subsumed under the needs of his ambition. So for him it's more like game play, it's cynical, nihilistic. He's clever enough to formulate the inventions that serve his purposes into the form of arguments and he thinks that makes him persuasive. A sophist, if you take the classic definition of one who argues professionally to make the worse appear the better cause. In the CNN clip where he is defending spreading the Springfield stories you could see it was all just a game for him. I would have thought any other human with functional antenna should be able to see that and dismiss him out of hand. But for enough people, if they are being told what they want to hear, they turn off their brains.

tying runs on the bases for Angels with 2 out top of the 9th. Angel got one in the 9th but games ends 6-4 Twins.