What's the point in allowing something to be "taught" like creationism if you say there has to be a caveat that it isn't real? That's dangerous and opens the door to a whole lot of other nonsense to be "taught" to impressionable children

Trump is great. So interesting. The last of a dying breed. He embodies a lot of the values of some deteriorating but still significant generations and his difference in personality to what's come to be the sort of standard for political play acting is I think quite jarring for a lot of people. So he's getting absolutely destroyed everywhere. And every piece of disdainful press comes with the unwritten sub-headline that all of his supporters, are, in fact, "crazies." And at the moment it's a self perpetuating popularity generator for the guy because he refuses to back down and that's one of the old school qualities appealing to people.

Americans have shown they will elect famous non-politicians and so I don't know how far it all goes but it's great to see something that's at least different toy with the notion of viability.

he prolly woulda capped trayvon too!

karn wrote:Trump is great. So interesting. The last of a dying breed. He embodies a lot of the values of some deteriorating but still significant generations and his difference in personality to what's come to be the sort of standard for political play acting is I think quite jarring for a lot of people. So he's getting absolutely destroyed everywhere. And every piece of disdainful press comes with the unwritten sub-headline that all of his supporters, are, in fact, "crazies." And at the moment it's a self perpetuating popularity generator for the guy because he refuses to back down and that's one of the old school qualities appealing to people.

Americans have shown they will elect famous non-politicians and so I don't know how far it all goes but it's great to see something that's at least different toy with the notion of viability.

I hope he wins the Republican nomination.

Racists have found their spokesman. He's not dog whistling it like so many others.

I don't know if it is s blessing or a curse for the ther candidates. On one hand they are overshadowed until he goes away. On the other that means they can't get past their potential negative traits/past publically until he is gone.

He's simply more blunt with their message. He's more honest. It's a blessing for us all.

karn, you understand the difference between brash openness and outright racism right?

There's little difference with the subject matter.

jerseyhoya wrote:Saletan is quite clear that he thinks Greenpeace is deeply, destructively wrong

You're zigzagging so much you're confusing yourself. At issue in the article is GMOs - not Greenpeace. Your issue may be greenpeace. Saletan's - here - is GMOs.

drsmooth wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Saletan is quite clear that he thinks Greenpeace is deeply, destructively wrong

You're zigzagging so much you're confusing yourself. At issue in the article is GMOs - not Greenpeace. Your issue may be greenpeace. Saletan's - here - is GMOs.

You said you didn't read my reply, responded to a downstream post about it incorrectly, and are now telling me I'm confused. Great job all around, doc. Top notch work as usual.

jerseyhoya wrote:You said you didn't read my reply, responded to a downstream post about it incorrectly, and are now telling me I'm confused. Great job all around, doc. Top notch work as usual.

I'm just concerned that you believe, incorrectly, that Saletan thinks GMOs are unequivocally virtuous, when he doesn't. I would not want you to embarrass yourself by continuing to hold up his long, rambling article on GMOs, and insisting that that is what he believes. because it would make you look foolish. I'm sorry for you that you want to do otherwise.

Speaking of sorry, I'm sorry now that I listened to Kasich's campaign announcement speech. I'm not sure I've ever listened to him speak before. He is not good at it. Painfully not good.

Here comes another fucking guy, this time Ohio Republican governor John Kasich. A guy I think can govern OK even if I disagree with him. He has no chance.

drsmooth wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:You said you didn't read my reply, responded to a downstream post about it incorrectly, and are now telling me I'm confused. Great job all around, doc. Top notch work as usual.

I'm just concerned that you believe, incorrectly, that Saletan thinks GMOs are unequivocally virtuous, when he doesn't. I would not want you to embarrass yourself by continuing to hold up his long, rambling article on GMOs, and insisting that that is what he believes. because it would make you look foolish. I'm sorry for you that you want to do otherwise.

Let's try bullet points since you can't read, and I haven't insisted that he (or I) believed GMOs are unequivocally virtuous at any juncture in this discussion

-Knowing an item is a GMO tells us little about the quality/content/production/health of the product
-Genetically modifying food has done more good than harm on the whole
-The probable direction moving forward is for this gap to widen further
-The case against GMOs has been full of shit and shifting goal posts
-The case for labeling GMOs lacks merit and only seeks to exploit the full of shit case against GMOs

jerseyhoya wrote:-Knowing an item is a GMO tells us little about the quality/content/production/health of the product
-Genetically modifying food has done more good than harm on the whole
-The probable direction moving forward is for this gap to widen further
-The case against GMOs has been full of shit and shifting goal posts
-The case for labeling GMOs lacks merit and only seeks to exploit the full of shit case against GMOs

I know these things and have pointed out we agree on them. You had not expressed yourself this explicitly until this very point.

Glad to see you're returning from orbit.

Saletan - and apparently, now, you - understands that the jury is out on whether there may be issues of concern in the unfettered production distribution and consumption of GMO products. That more education is advisable.

His (your?) tactical hyperventilation about GMO labeling is ... well, mostly just that. It's kind of a red herring. Let's learn more about these GMO things, make sure people have a chance to know more about them. We'll probably learn there are disagreements of fact and disposition about GMOs.

fwiw i think jerseyhoya has been pretty clear about his opinion on GMOs whenever the subject arises

Being a billionaire is a complex matter

What a sad, strange time this may turn out to be for the 0.01%. A guy pretends to be amongst them, loudly, in public, and none of the rest of them can stand up and say "this guy is a batshit crazy liar, he's not worth close to what he says!" for fear that someone will insist they themselves present accounts of their own quite literally incalculable wealth.

And then the whole house of cards starts to wobble. Because if you can't calculate it, it probably the value of your pile isn't everything you're saying it is. Because it's certainly not at all as much as Trump is saying. Any fool - even a journalist - can see that. And if one insistent not-actually-a-billionaire is in fact not a billionaire, how many of the other billionaires are not actually billionaires? And if it's impossibly complicated to compute their possible billions, are their billions billions? And what of the integrity of the bankers who presumably are prepared to treat those billionaires' billions as actual billions - but maybe not to treat your actual hundreds as your actual hundreds? Hmmm, maybe we should sit down and take another look at the charters they've been issued to conduct business.....

Soren wrote:karn, you understand the difference between brash openness and outright racism right?

Sure. I never even said that I like him. I think he's interesting. But he appeals to a lot of people and as a corollary to what he said about illegal immigrants, not all of them are bad people. That's where his supporters and the larger group who just flat out dislike the guy (which will obviously keep him from ever winning) simply differ. Those supporters don't see him as racist, don't see themselves as racist, even if others prescribe that they do in fact meet those standards. Again, it's almost a generational or even geographic thing and so far the more he's been hammered on racism or on the insensitivity over the weekend has only worked to garner more staunch support.

One way or another they are going to need to break that cycle and really frame him in a light that's going to drop his 15-20-25% (whatever the grand total winds up being) back down into irrelevence and then present a candidate that those same people can still feel happy with supporting following what (in their mind's) will have been the "media takedown" of Trump. It can be done but right now they're not close and will need a strategic revaluation because what they are doing right now isn't working (well, we'll see after more recent polling comes out)

CalvinBall wrote:fwiw i think jerseyhoya has been pretty clear about his opinion on GMOs whenever the subject arises

my interest wasn't in his opinion about GMOs, but about his misrepresentation of Saletan's, and the detrimental effect doing so might have on perceptions of jerz's own opinions, whatever they might be