Re: 2020 Democratic Challengers: Who ISN'T Running At This Point?
So you don’t know what they mean. It’s ok to just say that.
Kepler and trix, a five-act play:
K+T: Reparations bill
K+T: They probably didn’t even read it
K+T: They definitely didn’t read it
K+T: Racists!
K+T: Argument won *smug high fives*
If you two extremists want to be taken seriously, maybe make serious proposals that actually will have the intended effect. I like you both but this is hilarious.
I can't speak for trix but I don't feel I have to make any serious proposal, at least not yet (Booker doesn't and I'm not even sure Ta-Nehisi Coates
has). I can see the sense in reparations but it's not my fight. I'm for flaying the rich alive. Whitey will have to wait.
The thing that was worth doing was showing people that their shrieking irrational terror of a word was (1) ahistorical, (2) an overreaction, (3) really convenient to those who want the status quo to remain stagnant. Mission accomplished. If you want to talk about the nuts and bolts of reparations, sure, I'll do that, though maybe
a dedicated thread since we both know this won't be the defining issue of the nomination.
As long as people are trying sincerely to argue towards the truth they are OK with me, and I will give them the benefit of the doubt for a long time. This is, for example, why for the longest time I was cool with Bob Gray and even flaggy, who I assumed was doing a Bit designed to get us to reflect on the idiocies we allow to occupy our minds without reflection or critique. I didn't figure out forever what he was really all about, in large part because until that Toronto dude I'd never even heard of an incel before. And Bob... well, I still have a soft spot for Bob. The whole Christ complex thing isn't a deal breaker for me -- my Mom taught CCD FFS.
Most people here possess the quality of honesty. There are only a few who are apparently here because they want to win an argument and don't care about its merits, they just want to win. Those are the only people to truly despise, because they're the enemy of the open exchange of ideas.
Now let me suggest an improvement to the play:
Kepler and trix, the full Ring cycle:
K+T: Reparations bill
K+T: They probably didn’t even read it
T: They definitely didn’t read it
K: I'm sure they can't even read it
T: Racists!
K: And morons!
K+T: Argument won! *smug high fives*
That's how it felt here, anyway.
Here's why I like you and it doesn't matter to me one bit if we agree on things or not. You're trying to find something and you don't much care whether that thing is ascribed to you in the end or not. If it gets found, you are richer for it. Now, you aren't an as-shole, so you're still polite about it, and that makes you a better person than I and much more fun at parties.
But even though I'm lazy and a fool I'm motivated by the same thing: find the new thing that's true that I didn't know. I've learned plenty for myself from the Cafe that I didn't know before, and, well, just think about that -- that's amazing. Where on social media does one find even the slightest bit of actual discovered knowledge, as opposed to the recapitalization of the safe stupidities of the general population? We have no right to expect that and yet it happens here sometimes.
The way I have learned to help that happen, which is unpleasant, is to never give any quarter to the dimwittery that is expected of public discourse, and to play whichever role is needed at a given time to move the f-cking puck out of the dummy zone and into the smart zone. I do not care who scores -- almost every person on the Cafe is smart enough to score, assuming they have a chance rather than stopping and picking their nose to whatever the safe, unexamined "gerede"* of the day is.
I just want to see goals. Well, and girls. But that's not happening here.
*
as used in Being and Time as "the everyday speaking of the public world" -- the inauthentic burble of people touching antennae not to learn but to establish conviviality. Literally the German for "chatter," but a bit more than that. A technical term meaning the auto-speech we do at say a cocktail party or a work lunch. Vacuity. Inauthenticity.
We go through this like every few months 
. Insanity definition 
