You're stupid

 

Your face is stupid!

 

Pop the motor armature off (after inspecting the cables), I once had the brushes get stuck on a dead spot. Decarboned, no problems 5 years later.

 

You would be able to figure out the angle at which your sphincter is situated in your body by taking accurate measurements while doing so. Because, you know, science. If you could control the opening of said orifice you should also be able to control the speed at which you are propelled.

 

Apparently, "You used to be really attractive" is the wrong thing to say on Facebook in response to a girl who you knew in high school who is quite proud of the fact that she's managed to transform herself from soft-and-cuddly to chiseled-and-hard.

I don't get it...

 

Something bizarre and deeply unsettling happened yesterday.

I work in TV. No secrets there. For the past several days, we've been setting up for today's election coverage. Kind of routine.

One of our anchors requested that we set up her laptop with the 85" touchscreen on the main set, so she could interact with it via the touch interface, draw on the screen, and have the ability to take the laptop's display full-screen on air. Easy. One MiniDP to HDMI dongle, one HDMI cable, one HDMI to SDI converter w/ framesync, one reference cable, one USB extender. Took ten minutes, including the time to walk up to the storage area on the 2nd floor.

My guys got it set up, and I was demonstrating the operation to her. As part of this, she opened Twitter and logged into her account, browsed around a bit (using the big touchscreen), and saw that she had a friend request (or whatever they call it on Twitter) from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. To which she replied "Ooh, I need to accept that!"

Now, for context: this woman is my age. Like me, she is a first-generation American born of Cuban parents.

Cubans of our generation have some first-hand experience with Socialism, most of it very, very bad.

And she excitedly confirmed this tweetquest from a politician who is running on a pro-socialist platform.

I'm just dumbfounded.

 

And yet, you have no qualms about socializing with a godless commie on some forum.

 

Quite a difference between "Godless" and "Socialist"

 

Last time I checked, you nearly got yourself disappeared during a failed attempt at coup as a result of publicly voicing your opinions about the socialist government of [name of country redacted].

 

Why so afraid of the word "socialism" like you can't be a little bit socialist (healthcare, school, public services, basic needs) and not slide down the bread line into failed communism?

Our current system is already socialist and capitalist and will probably remain that way for the indefinite future. Ocasio-Cortez types really just want a newborn baby to not have to rely on its own bootstraps to thrive at a reasonable level until it's able to start making hostile takeovers in its club-collared shirts and suspenders.

 

Elbonia does not have a socialist government by any stretch of the imagination.

Yes. Elbonia.

 

Joe,

It was explained to me by an older Cuban recently that most people coming out of there in the last 25 years are ignorant people who don't have the education to know better. Many are functionally illiterate in their own language and speak "street Spanish" due to the collapse of the school system under communism. They received indoctrination and still believe much of what they were told but left to better themselves selfishly, not for political reasons.

I have no idea of the veracity of this opinion but can vouch for the fact that the ones I know under 40 can't spell common Spanish words for the blackboards at various restaurants around town. Pretty sad when you can't spell bistec salteado.

 

I kind of get that, partially.

Second-generation Americans often display this trait. Not sure that I can totally wrap my head around it for someone who actually grew up in that environment. Schools or not, I can't understand how a person can not differentiate between "the 'glorious communist utopia' I fled from" and "the place in which I find myself now."

The anchor in question, as I have said, is in her early 40s. She is college-educated and highly literate. (Again, this is a prime-time anchor on a major TV station.) She grew up in PR, in which I know from personal experience she must have been exposed to copious first-hand accounts from Cuban-born emigres of the horrors of oppression under the Castro government. If her ancestry is anything like mine (and, from what I can gather, it is), there are gaps in her family tree as a result of people and records which just mysteriously vanished during the communist revolution.

To be clear: she is highly conscious and aware of the image which she projects publicly. As we were setting up the "this tool lets me draw on the 85" touchscreen with my finger" application, she requested that the default pen color be set to black, as other colors could be construed as implying some kind of political bias. This woman is intelligent and perceptive.

And yet, privately and off-camera, she revealed an automatic and intuative loyalty to a socialist congressional candidate which I just cannot comprehend.

Full disclosure: I am a straight, white(ish) male, and have been told that this privilege biases my perception. And yet I cannot help wonder if this act was so motivated by an overriding sense of "OMG, a Hispanic woman running for Congress, who appeals to my viewership!" that logic and reason went right out the window.

I really hope that's the case. I want to believe that this reaction was borne of an intuitive understanding of how it would bolster her popularity, rather than being reflective of a genuine belief in the platform of the candidate.

 

You appear to have fallen into the trap that progressive == socialism == unbridled populist totalitarianism. Slippery slope greased by the incessant chants of this is how the US moves away from it's base ideals of individual bootstraps and into some type of apocalyptic dystopian future where healthcare is a single payer system.

Like Canada.

 

If by "fallen into the trap of," you mean "members of my immediate family, having experienced socialist rule at its limits, found it sufficiently distasteful that they waged guerrilla war against the government in order to repeal it, and paid with their lives," then you are correct.

There is no government policy which, once implemented, will not grow to the fullest possible extreme. (Source: literally all of human history.)

 

How 'bout you simply ask the anchor woman what her thoughts are on the socialist woman candidate?

 

And that's why we have this American experiment of checks and balances (which in my opinion are a bit out of kilter and in need of some recalibration, but seem nearly impossible in this current environment) and mostly safe and fair elections. I don't mean to diminish your anecdotal experience - though it gives insight into your thought process - but the much of our current problems are fostered by this increasing amount of hyperbole. And to counter the 2nd point rather easily - Prohibitiion.

 

maybe Joe has sexual cognitive dissonance. she's kinda cute, but very much defining the extreme boundary on the left.

 

Mostly because Talent > Engineering in terms of influence, and I really like my nice, cushy, high-paying job.

This is a good example of how corporate politics influence free political discourse.

(Also, she's single, past nominal child-bearing age, and I kind of have some plans here. Our two salaries combined would buy a *very* nice condo in River North, the swanky section of downtown. I'll admit that money can buy my silence.)

 

We moved our corporate unfriendly arguments to the weekly coffee shop bitch session - and usually we'd have to have listeners throw in flags for logical fallacies. We started to codify our fallacy calling like football referee's. Good times.