Read it. Enjoyed it. I felt the ending needed something more to flesh it out or be connected to something earlier.

Hey! We agreed that in public his name is bob! Don’t disrespect bob. In public.

Eh… gimme a 2,3; a 2,2; a 1,3; aaaand, why not, a 1,2.

I think it’s more that baseball has slowly become an ‘elite’ sport, and republicans (who have their cultural image shaped by elites) want to be elite. Rich kids can definitely still pursue baseball as an alternative to polo. Meanwhile, basketball is still viewed as a sport where you can go to that basketball hoop at the park, work your way up from a kid through school trying hard, and make it (even if basketball players now have the same ‘academy’ style training facilities that they came from just like baseball has had for a few decades). I have at least one acquaintance who did the whole ‘traveling high school team’ thing for basketball now.

The image still in people’s head though, is of charles barkley and (shit I can’t remember his name) the other houston rocket guy who played at their local community center before playing for the rockets. The center still had their pictures and stories up on the wall when I was last in houston. It still feels like people come from that path. Contrast that with my acquaintance from high school who eventually played pro baseball where it was more something along the lines of: moved to a high school with an elite, known team; went to a baseball trainer after school; played in the amateur, organized leagues outside of school; had parents arrange meetings with scouts, coaches at colleges, and toured each program; played in college; kept going to a trainer during college; then finally went to amateur/pro baseball.

Interesting. I know japan has that weird kfc-at-christmas because of the successful ad campaign, but it’s always korean fried chicken that I hear about being special.

I think the people at the top are supposed to represent the ideal that the side wants. Republican farters want women in dresses and men in suits (likely doing business), where the democrats want, I guess, casual friday? It’s accurate for the red dicks, at least.

There are soldiers who can describe standing guard over growing poppies. Americans heard the old saying about left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing and decided to add modern weapons to the mix.

Aye, this is one of those weird things that I’ve noticed. The conversations somehow broadcast outside the vehicle much louder than music. Something about how voice calls are handled by the sound system is different, whether it’s volume boosting or something else.

It’s more about the threat, isn’t it? If the other side believes you might be suicidally crazy, they might not want to fight the war, even if otherwise it would be a one sided victory.

Don’t discount the ability of people to follow simple directions and manuals. Also, don’t discount that there are a large number of otherwise intelligent people who are maga. They have plenty of people who can do calculus, program in an IDE or on a circuit board, and carry on with all the other things you might view as impossible to ever happen at a republican convention. We all have strengths and weaknesses, and few are immune to propaganda. There seem to be a large number of people who have a peculiar weakness to ‘simple’ logic and strongmen blowing their own horn.

Anyway, without going into the weeds, let’s just take a moment and appreciate that there was a very long and large chain of command that carried out the literal listed example of a war crime on pete’s orders. There would absolutely be no issue for them to secure the weapons for a red government that told them to do such a thing.

Agreed on the number of bad ones. I just read the first book of a james patterson series, and I don’t understand how it was ever greenlit. I know there was that quote about 90% of everything being trash, and it was just ‘in the old days’ that we never saw anything but the 10%, but I just struggle to see harry potter now as part of the 10%. I’ve read too many good books and series to believe it does have a place in the 10%. I know, on some level, that they aren’t that bad, but I just have this whiplash from the feelings I had about them as a kid and how I read them now.

The economics of the red states will pale in comparison to the question of where the weapons end up. There are a lot of nuclear weapons in deep red areas.

The poisonwood bible. I loved it in high school, because I was an oppressed little atheist/agnostic with hyper religious parents at a christian school. It was brilliant, vivid, groundbreaking, and wild in its defiance of cultural norms…

and now it’s just a sort of sad story of how the christian mindset mirrors colonial/empire ambitions and everyone gets hurt.

Oh my god. I never even thought about black beauty influencing me. I always chalked it up to robin hood, star fox and some weird fusion of the dragonriders of pern and the heralds of valdemar.

The books are good for what they are: children’s books that take you from ~8-13 years old. I loved them when I was a kid, and now it’s just hard to get through them because the writing is just average at best, and the plots are so basic they undermine the actually interesting setting and prevent it from being as mindblowing as they could have been.

He seems almost entirely complacent about the other aspects of his and everyone else’s oppression. He even scoffs at the rumors of rebellions and mocks those who would try. The one thing he cares about is his lack of sex.

gestures wildly around at america

I think that’s the most humanizing and realistic part of the writing, honestly.

That’s odd; I’m almost the opposite. I definitely enjoyed lord of the rings more as a teenager, and struggle to really even appreciate them now. I still like the world, but the writing just seems off.

I’m dead in a month as soon as any major part of our infrastructure/supply chain crumbles. yaaaay.

I do wonder if I’m on somebody’s list.

Humorously, they have an actual tool on standby for this in the boot camps. Apparently there are (or were, I haven’t actually checked in the last two decades) enough rubes coming in who always had button flys while growing up that it was an occurrence about once a week.

Meanwhile the ‘small town’ has everything bad about cities, but they simply gloss over it.