Michael Hardner

What are you using to post on here? A broke piece of slate and a broken off chunk of brick? But yes, politics is everything. Entertainment, religion, fashion... And it may have always been this way, but none of us lived before mass media fostered intellectual conformity

What you folks refer to as science most often turns into media reports about science, not sciences itself. The discipline of science has fared well, even against charlatans, for centuries since scholarly review was established.

1. Sorry I meant at the outset. We were waiting in the first few months for Russia to roll through and it never happened. So if the media is all lies lies lies, why were they not in lockstep? 2. Yes.

1. Hörse-shit. The media told me Ukraine would fall in days. Nobody said they're WINNING. The media is not in lockstep. 2. I'm not trying to say they are perfect, or excellent, or even adequate. My biggest complaint about Canada is the way we are dealt information and how easily we accept it, just like you say. But the answer isn't to flee institutions and replace them with unknown quantities that have no oversight, just because you like what they're saying. Surely, even you can see what is happening on that front in USA politics.

True enough, but you also have to accept that all of them will lie at some point for various reasons. Did your parents ever lie to you? Mine did. Clinton, Trump lied... and they were kept on as presidents. I believe that they lied about mask efficacy, but to prevent a run on masks. It's not like health professionals have a purient love of masks.

We have institutions that provide information on public health. This was never political until the current populist era. Now people go to crock-Pots for essential information.

My investment advisor called me yesterday and said he wanted us to get back into Apple. I was kind of surprised, given the offshoring mandate. He told me that the market is thinking that the sucking up to the president is working. This is where we are now. We have jumped back into the era of paying homage to monarchy and elites.

My in-laws have a fridge that is truly unholy. Jam-packed with half full jars...sauces, pickles, who knows. The primary most visible layer is all expired stuff... And if you lean over and look back, there's lots more rows of things 😕

I was called immoral by one of your teammates. Well I think it's immoral to bring up singular crimes as a rationale for mistreating large numbers of minority groups. Don't post your sad stories to me. I'm not moved by your propaganda, even if you truly are. You elected a despot with no principles. There's your morality. Now go away.

I did enjoy that ridiculous scenario. The premise seems to be that crimes done by foreigners are terrifying. This National inability to analyze things Dispassionately might be behind the fact that the USA can't do anything about crime despite being constantly enraged about it. ...

It's a strange claim to say he's an expert at trying to do something... Is that just another way to say he's an expert at failing? I do think he's very good at politics, but maybe because he buys into the same myths that followers do. And there's a limit. The experts were talking about how great the economy was under Biden, but somehow the voters felt differently. I agree that it's the economy stupid... As James Carville used to say. And since presumably most of us here are in the top half, we may not be aware of how Trump is playing out.

So much wrong thinking there, that it's clear that there's no point in responding. (Universities are worthless because that fraud Peterson was mistreated. Trade deals created by Legacy conservatives Thatcher, Reagan, Mulroney... Also worthless. Climate science is a hoax. Vaccines kill people. Homelessness is caused by asylum seekers. Conspiracies everywhere...) And the richest part is that I'm somehow the immoral one... Presumably because I don't believe every pebble-headed YouTube video that tells me how to think. Anyway, I've got stuff to do...

I never for a second thought that you would take my dry joke seriously.

A I mean it's happened on here, so... B. I support free trade, institutions, universities, public health, science... The populists seem to support isolationism, anti-intellectualism, vaccine ignorance, Voodoo economics and tribal ferocity. They argue out of ego, and to own the libs. They use politics as entertainment, rather as a forum to address common problems. I didn't say anything about morality here. I'm talking about how populists don't understand how things work. They seem to decry Hollywood but that's where they learn their worldview.

This is about the same number of people who die from skydiving in the USA annually. And yet somehow no one is basing a national presidential campaign on this problem. "I I'm okay with someone being murdered, as long as a foreigner isn't stealing our murderer jobs."

What I find hilarious is that paranoid Americans, who have received their education on the political economy from Hollywood paranoid thrillers, often cite The Matrix and V for Vendetta. Both are distributed by Warner Brothers, who also owns CNN. They are suckers

The Urban heat theory was discredited years ago. These things keep popping up, and strangely there aren't any new ones as the temperatures skyrocket.

Replace Mazursky with Spike Lee and I am in.

America is becoming corrupt, as a side effect of the partisanship. This did happen before as well.

Rather, I would say you're an opponent of intellectual honesty. I was asking a question of someone who was doing a brilliant tap dance and kind of still is. I'm a conservative by the way. Not a populist.

No, it's a question that you didn't answer. For some reason. 🤔

The Left doesn't hate Jews. This post is a troll.

" You own nothing and be happy." Ida Aiken, WEF https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You'll_own_nothing_and_be_happy#:~:text=The phrase is based on,on ownership of personal property.

Automation though... 😐

I suppose so. A degree doesn't guarantee anything, but that person should have been able to leverage that into some kind of career. All things told. I'm thinking of two of the sharpest program directors I knew in IT, one with a degree in French, the other a BFA in photography. They were excellent. The converse of that is, you probably don't even need a degree to be good at things. Degrees are good for learning a lot of things and challenging yourself. Wisdom is another thing. I'll never forget the guy I knew in third year, as statistics Wiz, who tracked what lottery tickets had been pulled in the past. They teach the memory list principal in the first week of school, meaning that his obsessive archiving was useless. I don't think he ever won.