urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
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User ID: 226
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
So, the people could vote for representatives to elect the people who hold power? That makes sense. Maybe the first-tier representatives could even pledge themselves to a particular second-tier candidate, so people know what they’re getting.
Since the job of the first-tier representative is to elect a second-tier representative, maybe we could call them “electors.” And we could even combine them into a larger body of electors, an electoral college. Heck, while we’re redesigning the election system, we could even have these people vote on the president, too!
I kid. And obviously the chief complaint about the electoral college is that it’s designed to favor rural voters and small states. But if we redesigned elections around this particular model, maybe we could collapse a bunch of federal elections into one, while reducing the number of people per representative so the representation is more granular. I recall reading a proposal for something like that a while back, but I don’t remember where.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
And yet his most famous work, A Christmas Carol, which he described as "a sledgehammer blow for the poor," ends with the wealthy capitalist seeing the error of his ways and adopting the very traditional concept of noblesse oblige, "endeavour[ing] to assist the struggling family" of Bob Cratchit, his employee. I read him, and see very clearly the arguments of classical conservatives who opposed industrial capitalism with all the fervor of a Marxist.
George Orwell, another author with contempt for the condition of the working masses but ambivalence towards socialism, wrote of Dickens that:
The ideal to be striven after, then, appears to be something like this: a hundred thousand pounds, a quaint old house with plenty of ivy on it, a sweetly womanly wife, a horde of children, and no work. Everything is safe, soft, peaceful and, above all, domestic. In the moss-grown churchyard down the road are the graves of the loved ones who passed away before the happy ending happened. The servants are comic and feudal, the children prattle round your feet, the old friends sit at your fireside, talking of past days, there is the endless succession of enormous meals, the cold punch and sherry negus, the feather beds and warming-pans, the Christmas parties with charades and blind man's buff; but nothing ever happens, except the yearly childbirth. The curious thing is that it is a genuinely happy picture, or so Dickens is able to make it appear. The thought of that kind of existence is satisfying to him.
If you don't think of the Shire when you read this, I don't know what to tell you.
Dickens obviously hated the Tories, but I believe he had more in common with them than he understood. He was a commoner who appealed to noblesse oblige, he was a city boy who wrote of the slow life, his happy endings revolved around domestic bliss and social calls. He may not have known much of agricultural labor, but he certainly seems to idealize the lifestyle of the rural aristocracy. His complaint, of course, was that the aristocratic lifestyle was not accessible to the common worker. Perhaps he would like our condition today -- I have never thought of Dickens as an exceptionally spiritual man.
All that to say, yeah, I think you're right and I made a mistake. But there was something I was gesturing at, some commonality between the epic dreaming of Tolkien and the saccharine dreaming of Dickens, some sort of distinctly British idealism and whimsy that unites everything from Jacob Marley to Albus Dumbledore. There is an anti-industrialism and pastoral idealism embedded in both Dickens and Tolkien, even if Dickens did not realize how pastoral his vision really was.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
I think that some people have a rose-colored glasses view of Victorian England because it would feel nice to imagine that it was a beautiful society full of people who played violins while eloquently debating the finer points of the latest geopolitical news from the continent, while maybe overworked yet fundamentally good and noble commoners dutifully worked the machinery in the factories.
What's interesting is that I've long held the opposite intuition -- but that certainly comes from having read the works of classical opponents of Industrial Britain like Charles Dickens and JRR Tolkien, who valorized rural, pre-industrial ways of living. No one can read Hard Times and come away with a positive impression of Victorian factory labor.
Not that farming in pre-modern times was very nice either. Wistful conservatives, even Anabaptists, often forget that agricultural labor was considered to be a curse.
The unique gift of contemporary liberalism is the extinction of the material threats that have plagued our existence since the Fall the Agricultural Revolution. But this gift comes with a curse: the extinction of the spiritual means that unite people and enable them to endure hardship. Nietzsche once wrote, "he who has a why to live can bear almost any how," and though we have fixed a great deal of the hows we find ourselves increasingly befuddled as to the whys. And a house of cards built upon the how instead of the why is liable to catastrophic collapse.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
· Edited 9mo ago
When I met my girlfriend in college, she told me in no uncertain terms that she never wanted to have biological children -- but she might consider adoption. Her reasoning was that she was deathly afraid of pregnancy, and never wanted to go through it.
Of course, I was a 20 year old guy, I didn't know what I wanted, and I certainly wasn't thinking about having children at the time. So I just kind of shrugged.
Oh, how times change.
It was gradual, but I do think she hit 24 or something like that and immediately developed an irresistable urge to bear children. Whenever we go to a store and we happen to walk by the baby clothes, she can't help herself but wander over to them and point out the cutest ones, and then look at me with those puppy dog eyes that look suspiciously like fuck-me eyes. She tells me frequently that I'm going to have to put a baby in her soon. And our theoretical children who haven't even been theoretically conceived yet already have names: first, middle, and last.
(We both independently had the same idea for our son's name long before we met each other, she liked the name so much that in high school she named her dog with it. So my heir is going to have the name of my girlfriend's literal dog. "You were named after the goodest dog I ever knew.")
When I bring up that she once disavowed the idea of ever bearing a child, she says just exactly what everyone here is saying: not only her mother but her mother's mother's mother's mother did it, some of them several times, and if they could do it under social and medical conditions much worse than we have now, she can do it too. But also she just really wants a child, and she wants them to be her own.
I do wonder if what's happening is that Pope Francis had a rare moment of being unfathomly based and some women are redirecting all of their maternal instincts and desires towards animals, leading to the "Dog mom" effect.
No, Susan, your corgi is not your son, and you're doing a disservice to both yourself and your dog if you treat them like a member of a species that they're not. I'm especially satisfied with this claim because the author of the original post describes herself by saying her favorite things are her "fam & pets", because heaven forbid her human companions get more letters to describe them than the animals who don't understand a damn word she's ever said to them.
But also, my interpretation of the past hundred years of human history is that disagreeable women (I'm using this not as a term of abuse but purely descriptively, to describe women low in OCEAN-trait-agreeableness), who for various personality-based reasons are much less likely to find satisfaction and enjoyment from caring for children, have taken the reins of what describes womanhood and shifted it massively in their favor. The Wikipedia article for trait Agreeableness literally has as its illustration a painting of a woman with her daughter entitled "Agreeable Burden," and I find this so unbelievably apropos that I'm afraid I'm on a hidden-camera show.
The author of the original piece has another post where she describes her belief that "masculinity is real, but femininity is invented" -- this is a sure indication to me that this is a disagreeable woman, someone who doesn't statistically "fit" in her sex, which averages higher than men in agreeableness. I believe women like the original poster commit the typical mind fallacy, and believe that because they are a woman with the personality they have, that women who naturally do have a strong inclination towards sacrificing for others and putting the needs of their children first are simply disagreeable women being suppressed by The Patriarchy. It's sort of like the Western conception that people all across the world are simply liberals being repressed.
I mean, we really absolutely hate that we have to be feminine for you, and you guys just don’t understand this. You think that’s just the awful feminists. The cunty man-haters. It’s why you want a nice trad wife who just LOOOVES being feminine. Guess what? She doesn’t. It’s all bullshit. No woman likes it. She’s just putting more chips on betting she can get more out of you, faster, with less effort.
The above is an actual quotation from that other post, and I edited it in after the fact. Frankly, I'm not convinced this woman isn't an actual psychopath, with that kind of deranged and zero-sum take. And why would I listen to what a psychopath has to say about companionship or self-sacrifice?
Sorry, Kate, but you haven't met my mom, and you probably wouldn't like her if you did. But she's the greatest and most wonderful human being of either sex I've ever known, and I respect her a great deal, because she always respects and considers the needs of others. I frequently tell her that she's the best mother in the world, and I mean that literally. If anyone deserves a "Medal of Honor" for motherhood it's her, and it's precisely because she'd never ask for one that she deserves it. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.
Only the fittest will survive the coming population decline, and we can only hope that people (either male or female) so disagreeable and self-oriented that they'd begin their post on childbearing with a Barbie-movie meme that insinuates parents waiting for their children to get out of school are chumps, won't make it. Blessed are the agreeable, for they shall inherit the earth.
I didn't intend this to be a personal attack, but I believe it's more fruitful to describe these things in terms of personality differences than to make it about the cost-benefit analysis of childbearing, and the more I dug into this author the more intensely I realized how utterly spot-on all of my asssumptions about her personality were. If your children are the result of a cost-benefit analysis to you, then you shouldn't have them, and I wish people like Kate well in their free choice -- I mean that.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
· Edited 9mo ago
Ok, don't know why I have a tab open with this slightly older comment, but I liked it apparently, lol.
What your dichotomy makes me think of is the Meyers-Briggs distinction between "P" perceivers and "J" judgers -- this of course has poor test-retest reliability, I myself have tested on both sides of the silly line -- but it's not entirely silly in its concept.
True to what the MBTI people would say about me, I find myself on both sides of this spectrum. I have different dispositions depending on the subject, my mood, my interests, my needs, etc. In theology, for instance, I tend to be conclusion-driven, because my goal in studying theology is finding a church home. That doesn't mean I don't love collecting facts, but I do so with the goal of making decisions. When it comes to history, I tend to be fact-collecting, because I just find historical events intrinsically interesting and memorable, I like hearing stories and telling them. With psychology, it's more conclusion-driven. With philosophy, it's intensely conclusion-driven, because I find the people I disagree with on basic philosophical topics insane, even if I try to be charitable towards them. With computing and IT, it's a mixture, sometimes I want to get things done but sometimes I find myself reading the Linux File Hierarchy Standard on the train because I just think standards are neat. With astronomy and space science, I'm the "I Fucking Love Science" idiot, I'm sorry, I just like outer space, I will always be a little bit the tiny boy who made pillow forts in my childhood bedroom and pretended they were spaceships.
All of this kind of gets blended together into my best guess at a cohesive worldview. This can seem like fact collecting, but I distinctly remember in college all the various disciplines I took courses in started to connect together like puzzle pieces and at the end I felt like I had a much stronger sense of myself, my views, and my place in the world. If I could make a positive argument for a liberal arts education, it would be that. (Now if only what most people were learning in those sorts of courses had anything to do with verifiable fact.)
My girlfriend comments constantly that I seem to know random things from all over the fact spectrum -- but of course the joke's on her, she gets the same comments from her coworkers. But it's important to note that for me, like my professor father before me, sharing trivia facts is anything but "dry" or "impressionless" -- my father gets emails from students about how much he makes them laugh. It's all about storytelling, and being genuinely excited about sharing the things that interest you with other people. I'd freaking love to be an instructor, and 100% of the people who know me well say they can't imagine me ever being anything else. Now if only universities were looking for cis-het-white-male adjuncts with contrarian tendencies...
But if I had to pick a side -- it would be Judging, because I get very annoyed at people who seem so charitable to all sides that they become unable to pick a viewpoint, or so open-minded their brain falls out. Looking at you, religious studies students.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
· Edited 9mo ago
I think it has more to do with a general tendency towards aniconism in general, rather than a rejection of the substantial presence. Though there still remains a gap where theoretically someone could say the Eucharist should be adored but we shouldn't have icons -- it's just that it's never happened, depending on how you understand the sacramentology of the Byzantine iconoclasts. nvm, my amateur opinion is this was probably exactly what the Byzantine iconoclasts thought.
Lutherans are happy to display images -- and the trad Lutherans are very insistent that crucifixes are a traditional Lutheran custom. They don't assent to Nicea II however, and hold a position (condemned by the council and rejected by the Pope) suspiciously similar to that of no less than Charlemagne that images should be displayed as reminders and teaching aids, but never venerated.
I suspect this view was rocking around in western Europe for a long time, and it was only the Calvinists' iconoclasm that forced the Latin Rite to enforce orthodoxy on that point. Eastern Europe has the Triumph of Orthodoxy, Western Europe has the Baroque period. And both times the attitude was something like, "you don't like us venerating images? Fine, we're going to venerate them even harder."
You find a mixture of crosses and crucifixes in Lutheran churches in the United States, though in my experience it leans towards bare crosses, presumably under Calvinist and credobaptist influence. Though almost always these crosses in Lutheran churches are paired with images and statues of Jesus prominently displayed.
Further, Latin Rite Catholics are perfectly happy coexisting in communion with various rites where the tradition is not generally to display the corpus in a central location, or even to have a prominent cross at all. The difference is those rites* don't object to depictions of the crucifix and use them in other contexts.
Just to say that I believe it's more complicated than you're saying. The mass would still be the mass even if there were a bare cross, though I agree it's an important aid to religious devotion and suits the Latin rite well.
*assuming they find 3d religious artwork acceptable at all
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
· Edited 9mo ago
When Life of Brian, the Monty Python comedy, was released some were offended by the last joke that has the crucified sing "always look on the bright side of life", and one journalist asked whether we'd find it all so funny if it weren't crosses but gas chambers, whether the amount of time that has passed influences us so much.
Historically, depiction of the cross is the only artistic Christian universal -- what aniconists of both the Byzantine crisis and the Protestant Reformation had in common was a belief that the cross (and the sacrament) is the only acceptable religious imagery, which is why their churches look like this.
But I've heard historians argue that in early Christian times, when crucifixion was still an active form of punishment in the Roman empire and one to which an insistent Christian might be subjected, there was extreme reluctance to depict it. They assert that this is why the earliest Christian art prefers motifs like the good shepherd, loaves and fishes, St. Mary and the Christchild, etc.
When Christianity became legally protected, and crucifixion faded into the past as a form of torture, this school of historians argues that Christians became more willing to depict the cross as an explicit image of the death of Christ.
There's also a recent Christian sect -- let's call it what it is, it's a cult -- called the Iglesia ni Cristo, which outright rejects the depiction of the cross, and makes fun of mainstream Christians for depicting it with the same sorts of dumb gotchas that edgy 14-year-old atheists use. "If Jesus died in the electric chair, would you wear necklaces with electric chairs?" To which I respond, yes.
I've heard that the LDS church is also reluctant to depict the cross, but when you ask Mormons their reasoning, it's something along the lines of "we don't depict the cross because Jesus isn't dead any more," which is just a folk theology explanation plucked from evangelical Protestantism (like a lot of things in Mormonism), as it's the same argument that lay Protestants invoke against depictions of the cross-with-corpus, i.e. the crucifix.
So, yeah, historical horrors do seem to fade with intensity over time, as living memory of the reality is lost and they become more like distant symbols.
But it's worth noting that the cross maintained significant symbolic importance for Christians (we would not remember it if it did not!), just as the holocaust maintains significant symbolic importance for Jews. The OP contains a link to a Jewish man Singalularly singularly distraught over any attempt to mock or trivialize the holocaust, which rather reminds me of my own youthful offense at artistic depictions that seem to mock or trivialize the cross.
I'm sure Jewish people will remember the Holocaust long after everyone else has forgotten it. But remembering historical events is kind of their thing, a tendency which they imparted to Christians.
(Intriguingly, there's an overlap of concepts as "holocaust" is sacrificial terminology, and Christianity of course interprets the crucifixion of Jesus as singularly sacrificial -- and D-R literally has "holocausts" as a translation for "burnt offerings" in that passage. I was hoping to make a grand point about the significance of historical events in theological identity, but of course the preferred Hebrew term for the holocaust is "Shoah," which doesn't have anything to do with ritual sacrifice.)
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
It's a good reminder that Twitter must be destroyed. This point is so crucial we should repeat it like a prayer, like the kyrie:
Twitter delenda est,
X delenda est,
Twitter delenda est.
No one, literally no one, not even one, comes off well on Twitter. Even people I have profound respect for seem like unhinged lunatics. I barely use it, and have never posted, but every time I open it up and I'm greeted by the firehose of insanity, I realize why our discourse has gone so insane. There's no room for nuance, no room for discussion, no room for tone of voice or personality, it's spicy takes all the way down. There's no value in it.
The only use for it is formal, simple annoucements of objective events, like the posting of an article or video elsewhere. Any other use of microblogging is haram.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
Yeah, that makes sense now. In particular, why the liberal black female judge who penned the awkward decision to use copyright to conceal the diary would go along with it — it was an attempt to shield a young successful black (lesbian?) woman from undue attention.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
functor, raakaa, DTulpa, and urquan each have 1.
Not to toot my own horn, but I believe I have more than just one.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
It’s not just self-sorting — Hollywood has been intentionally purging itself of right-wing talent for far longer than the term ‘woke’ has even existed. The rural purge happened in the early 70s.
Any inability of Hollywood to appeal to middle America is its own fault. If they’re suffering for it now, it’s just the chickens of decades of purposeful ideological and cultural homogenization coming home to roost.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
Applying vote counting rules only to specific counties has shades of Bush v Gore and equal protection. Not that that case was supposed to set precedent. 🙄
Could this one go all the way to SCOTUS? Even if Pennsylvania's court doesn't change anything, they could.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
Thing is, I have absolutely no confidence the crime problem will ever be dealt with, and so all of my views on urban and transport policy are shaped by my desire to do everything possible to insulate myself from the failures of urban policy. My ideal is actually much more public transit, but only if it’s clean, safe, and efficient.
I don’t like cycling, but I’m more than warm to making more opportunities for people to cycle if they wish.
Issue is, in America the people who like reduced-car transport and the people who like tackling crime are almost entirely separate circles. Convince the Democrats to tackle urban crime, then we can have discussions about tackling car culture. Until then, I will continue resisting attempts to restrict the freedom and safety afforded to me by my automobile as an attempt to expose me to risks to life and property, and respond accordingly.
The war isn’t between you and me, but between you and the one-party states that rule America’s cities.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
Given that it's actually the school that owns the copyright (apparently "sorry our daughter killed your family, here's the copyright to her writings" is a thing now...), my guess is that there's discussions of the school environment in her writings that the school believes would be damaging, even if the ground truth is actually anodyne.
Even very light discussion of "my school didn't affirm my gender identity and led me through Unfixable Trauma, they're horrible homophobes and transphobes" could very easily rile up the rainbow mafia against them. From what we've seen of her writings, and especially considering she hated these people enough to kill them in cold blood, my guess is she wasn't afraid to call them all sorts of evil names and accuse them of all kinds of wickedness. It would be even more damaging if we set aside my assumption of good faith on the part of my ingroup and assume these accusations were of genuinely terrible things that really happened.
I don't think this is an action by the woke mob, I think it's an action in defense against the woke mob. Given that the parents who transferred the rights to the school liked it enough to send their child to there, I expect that their action was in solidarity with them.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
because of the fucking connotation
I see what you did there.
And yeah, the whole gender studies "gender has always been different from sex, we have always been at war with Eurasia," thing is just retroactive claiming. I don't doubt that wacky gender idealism has been cooking in the academic pot for a long time, but the smarmy way in which progressives like to start talking about how "actually gender is different from sex and This Is Known" like we're describing electron orbitals and not human constructs is quite annoying. There's definitely a motte and Bailey going on where gender is a social construct when they need it to be and a totally reified pure science of raw material fact when that's more useful. And certainly different people believe different things on that note, each gets sold the propaganda that will convince them.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
Yeah. This also feels like the first real internet election in the sense that the memes are defining the campaigns. That’s why the election feels so fake.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
Presumably this presidential election will have one of the largest gender splits in a while.
In a lot of ways this election does seem to be the men vs. women election -- abortion, childless cat ladies, blowjob Kamala, Republicans are weird, couch fucking, horse semen. Everything's just so... sexual.
I realize we've had discussions about politicians' sex lives before, but this election is simply NSFW. Genuinely. I've heard way too much about candidates' sex organs than I would have liked to hear in a lifetime. It's like the story of our election is being written by a horny teenager. Is this just what happens when you throw off all sexual restraint and couple it with mass sexlessness?
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
This is almost certainly being dragged down a bit by a lower than desired marriage rate. No idea if that’ll get fixed.
This is news to me. What do you think is causing this?
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
The religious revival is notable for only really happening among heterosexual white men. I believe this is because it’s become clear to everyone that the ruling belief system has no place for heterosexuals or white men, and they’re searching for an alternative belief system and community that values and valorizes heterosexuality instead of rejecting and demonizing it. The young straight men I know are either depressed and demoralized, or they’re religious.
Old religions have the social proof and track record to do this. They’re also attracted to personal development and ideological purity, which is why traditional Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and to a lesser extent confessional Protestantism, are the religions of choice. Evangelicals bend too far to try and appeal to the world with laser shows and electric guitars, and mainlines try too hard to appeal to the world with ideological indifference.
But the problem is it takes two to tango, and straight women are the movers and shakers of the ruling belief system. So you’re ending up with straight men crowding into Latin masses and Divine Liturgies, with the women there so crowded with male attention that it might as well be Tinder or so obsessed with a rigid sense of gender roles that no spiritually-sensitive man could ever be masculine enough for them. The one exception I’ve found is the genuinely rad-trad Catholics who are comfortable attending mass at SSPX chapels, where there do seem to be a lot of women. This certainly has a lot to do with having 7 children to a family, approximately half of which will statistically be women.
I don’t actually know if this current wave of religious revival will last, if it can’t reproduce it can’t persist. Rad trad Catholics will, but I don’t have much optimism for the future of Eastern Orthodoxy in America as I think the orthobro converts will burn themselves out, and the evangelistic and phyletistic contradictions at the heart of Orthodox ecclesiology will eventually show their ugly face.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
I honestly don't think Musk Thiel Vance are especially intelligent and capable.
I’m honestly curious, this isn’t a gotcha — if they’re not, could you name some public figures who are?
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
Obama did, but he stopped pulling down ticket races up by his coattails in 2012.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
He's the bullshitter, he's the guy that has to inflate every single thing he does.
Well, he is a politician.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
I'm not completely sure what you mean. You could make a good argument for trade apprenticeships not being college, but people who get associate's degrees in HVAC or IT or aviation maintainence get them at community colleges, and they're counted as college degrees.
I know I worded it weirdly, what I was trying to say is, "While four years may be unnecesary for many, some sort of post-secondary education (whether an apprenticeship or two-year degree) is ultimately necessary for most people who want to progress farther in a career than low-skill service jobs." I'm not saying we should get rid of 2-year degrees, or anything like that. In fact I think they're a great alternative to a lot of four-year programs for many people.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
9mo ago
AAQC'd. This is the best writeup of the past 15 years in American politics I've ever seen.
My girlfriend talks a lot about how the 2016 primary was a ridiculous joke, just a stage full of jokers. The fact that Trump was able to stampede over everyone speaks to how dire the Republican party situation was at the time.
But it also definitely speaks to the contempt that a lot of grassroots Republicans felt, and feel, towards the GOP. There's a feeling, grounded in truth, that the GOP never fights and never wins, they just keep compromising, while the left keeps winning. So Trump stood up and talked tough on immigration, and American greatness, and manufacturing, and even his facile ways of showing affinity for the working man (anyone remember him miming a pickaxe in a miner's cap?) was enough to win the undying loyalty of a lot of people. There's a forgotten America, and they don't want to be forgotten.
Yes, that’s the case.
Because of the virulence of vaccina, the virus used to inoculate against smallpox, smallpox vaccines are more dangerous than most other kinds of immunizations. For example, I have chronic eczema, and so it would be a very bad idea for me to be vaccinated against smallpox — there’s a risk of vaccina infecting the skin and causing a major infection.
And it should be noted that we’re seeing a dramatic increase in eczema… so if there were to be a monkeypox pandemic, there’s a huge chunk of the population that couldn’t be safely inoculated with the old smallpox vaccine.
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