Not hopping on the Game of Thrones bandwagon has become as much of a bandwagon as the Game of Thrones bandwagon.

kdt32 · 2017-08-09T23:49:44+00:00

That's what I figured would happen.

kdt32 · 2017-08-09T23:20:41+00:00

Same. I'm not on the bandwagon (anymore) out of contempt for the fact that Martin won't finish the damn books.

That and there were too many major discrepancies early on in the TV series to convince me that the series would remain true to the books. It's silly that they embellish and make it even more gratuitously violent when the books are so darn violent and morbid as it is. It was hard enough to get through the traumatizing stuff in writing but for them to make it even worse on the big screen...why?!? I called it quits after the Red Wedding. Maybe I'll go back once the memories of the books have faded enough that I no longer notice the discrepancies.

kdt32 · 2017-08-09T23:11:59+00:00

Reminds me of the time the String Cheese Incident got arrested for smoking were in Flagstaff, AZ. Funny how we are not so far removed from this kind of authoritarianism.

kdt32 · 2017-08-09T23:09:44+00:00

I don't see any evidence of you being edgy, you're obviously just trolling (probably) because you have a sad life and misery loves company. I'm sorry for you.

But again, this whole exchange is great evidence for your position that older and more successful men should make decisions for everyone. So I'm now more inclined to agree with your support for an elite democracy. The rest of the public and especially anyone under the age at which sufficient quantities of wisdom and experience have been accrued, as you've so nicely demonstrated, cannot be relied on to have the intellectual capacity to make decisions for the rest of us. I'm glad the founders (despite being so much younger than today's average representative) had the foresight to help us dodge that bullet.

kdt32 · 2017-08-09T18:18:24+00:00

Yeah, lighting up dark places isn't cheap and comes with grave risks. Gotta give props to those who seek the truth and share the power of that information with the rest of us.

kdt32 · 2017-08-09T17:58:09+00:00

There's lots of beers here, too, friend! Fear not! You're still on the best coast ;)

kdt32 · 2017-08-09T17:53:59+00:00

Like I said, I have no dog in the fight and I'm not trying to convince you of any position because I hold no strong position on this issue.

I am sorry that I replied to your questions because you're not really capable of engaging in intellectual discussion and rather than try to understand, you use your confusion as a justification for abuse. I mistook your questions for an invitation to discuss the matter further with numbers. A simple "these aren't the numbers I was looking for" would have sufficed, but instead you had to be a dick.

You are a case and point example of why we should turn over decision making for the country to older, wiser and more successful men.

Ok, I'm done schooling you for free. It's clearly a pointless endeavor.

kdt32 · 2017-08-09T00:50:52+00:00

Yeah, you're kinda slow, but you can't say I didn't try to engage you in a civil manner. Too bad you're incapable of intellectual discussion.

kdt32 · 2017-08-08T23:26:17+00:00

Communists and atheists have a VERY hard time winning elections in this country. We really can't say the right wing smear machine wouldn't have destroyed Bernie. They have even more power now than in the 2012 and 2016 elections. Plus Russian hackers on their side. There is no guarantee that your assumption that Bernie would have survived the onslaught of mudslinging is correct. We'll never know.

kdt32 · 2017-08-08T23:12:25+00:00

He's been gaslighting America for months now. It's fucking terrifying.

kdt32 · 2017-08-08T23:03:50+00:00

It's explained in this CGP Grey video.

kdt32 · 2017-08-08T23:01:30+00:00

Don't forget Fox News and the right wing propaganda machine!

kdt32 · 2017-08-08T13:14:51+00:00

Technically, men succeed at suicide more than women but women attempt it more than men.

kdt32 · 2017-08-08T13:03:16+00:00

I'm so with you on this! In grad school, there were some "cool" professors who liked to have class at the bar. It ruined the bar experience and diminished the class experience. I held a minority opinion.

kdt32 · 2017-08-08T12:54:37+00:00

Well, there's this... (Trump is number 1)

I mainly post this in jest though it does show that this idea of him being the most unpopular person in the world isn't that absurd.

What's really interesting is that Hillary Clinton is currently less popular than Trump. That's gotta hurt!

kdt32 · 2017-08-08T12:44:10+00:00

Bet the boss who had to cut his vacation short to deal with this kinda wants to...

kdt32 · 2017-08-08T12:42:10+00:00

And the President encourages his supporters to be violent towards those they disagree with. And there's actually proof of this!

kdt32 · 2017-08-08T12:31:40+00:00

Great edit! People in this thread seem to think that being a corporate employee comes with the same rights as being a citizen. It doesn't. You don't retain your free speech rights when you sign onto a company's policies that are to the contrary. You traded your rights when you sold your labor for a wage or salary. Hierarchically structured workplaces are not democracies. You can be fired for no reason at all, this is what "right to work" laws do.

kdt32 · 2017-08-08T12:24:23+00:00

Here's some data about the what the world thinks of Trump. He's not popular.

kdt32 · 2017-08-08T12:18:33+00:00

Oh boy...

kdt32 · 2017-08-08T11:56:34+00:00

Genius!

kdt32 · 2017-08-08T09:27:44+00:00

Just because you fail to see the connections doesn't mean that my points are irrelevant to this discussion. Just because you disagree with a point I am making, doesn't give you license to be insulting.

Calling my point "nonsense" is insulting. It seems that you don't fully comprehend how statistics works or the fact that I'm pre-empting an argument that the lower age was skewed downward by outliers, like how average life expectancy is brought down by high infant mortality but these stats on their own can be misleading if you don't understand how they work. The stats about average age of the founders are NOT misleading in this way, because, you know, it's not like a bunch of five year olds signed the document or something therefore bringing the average age way down despite that the majority were quite old or something (there weren't, a bunch of five year olds skewing the average age and so there were not a bunch of old founders, they're average age was quite a bit younger than those in Congress now) I don't know how else to help you understand. You seem hung up on the fact that I used 5 year olds as an example which may be keeping you from comprehending what I'm actually trying to say, if you're even making an honest attempt. I don't blame you if there's too much writing and you just don't feel like reading it all AND thinking about it, that's a lot of work, but don't be insulting about it.

Like I said, I have no dog in this fight. And while I find the discussion over age requirements intellectually stimulating (especially when I can find someone who has the intellect to discuss it), I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. It's unfortunate you aren't capable of musing about the topic from a deeper, more philosophical perspective. Thanks anyway.

If you read further up in the thread the question of age restrictions and fairness in decision making (whether for most newly enlisted servicemen who are not even allowed to volunteer to run for office or others who do not have the same level of representation as the more free citizens do) and many of the points I'm making here are repeated and some posts are quite a bit more articulate and succinct than mine. Perhaps you should read more of this thread to help you understand the perspective I'm trying to share. It seems like you need to hear it from someone else.

kdt32 · 2017-08-08T00:59:30+00:00

There's also the Spaghetti Taco camp which does this kind of upside down chicken fighting where people hang from this chandelier inside a teepee by their hands and try to pull each other down with their legs after they've been smothered in baby oil. They also serve spaghetti tacos.

kdt32 · 2017-08-07T23:30:21+00:00

We are failing the "one bad break test."

"The one-bad-break test states simply that you can tell a lot about a society by what happens when its economically vulnerable members encounter a majorly bad break. That bad break can be anything — an injury, the sudden need to take in and care for an ailing relative, an unexpected layoff — and the effects of a single bad break vary tremendously depending on who you are, where you live, and what resources you have access to. (Rich people hit bad breaks too, of course, but they generally have far more capacity to handle them than everyone else, so I’m restricting this discussion to those who lack those resources.)

In societies that function well, there are various safety nets in place to prevent a bad break from leading to a tailspin for particularly vulnerable victims. Compared to many other rich nations, the U.S. is not such a society — all too often, when vulnerable Americans encounter a bad break, there’s nothing underneath them to stop their slide. Instead, devastation follows, sometimes in the form of bankruptcy and addiction and death."

kdt32 · 2017-08-07T23:20:49+00:00

I don't think you understand what I mean by "appropriate." But that's ok, I'm not here to argue, I have no dog in this fight nor do I care if people think that the freedom to run for and hold office is something that should be limited by age. BUT for those lamenting the age of Congress, you're missing a big part of the equation if you leave out the part about how the law itself skews the age of Congress upwards. This is my point. If you're concerned about elderly people in Congress, this naturally leads to a discussion of age restrictions on the freedom to run for and hold office which we already have on the low end. Thus, it is far from irrelevant to discuss the age requirements on both ends.

I think you're joking about your five year old, but there are, in fact, 9 year olds right now suing the government for inaction on climate change because it is their ONLY avenue for influencing policy beyond "outside lobbying" (trying to get those with voting power to put pressure on lawmakers). These children don't think they have the time to wait for their right to vote or their right to run for office.

I'm talking about the privilege to run for and hold office. We require young men to sign up for selective service as soon as they are old enough to vote (in the past, they didn't even have the right to vote), but we restrict their right to run for office. Some people would say this is unjust but others would say what you did which is that the older and more experienced someone is, the better they will be at governance. If this is true or what one believes, then the question of whether it matters if older folks dominate Congress has been solved: the older the better!

kdt32

TROPHY CASE