My favorite Tweet ever. Of mine.
You know what it’s like having a cockatoo in the house? It’s like having a flying pliers that yells at you.
I’d add diagonal to the pliers part. But true, none the less.
Funny. I thought I answered this earlier. It was before my last comment. Seriously. I wrote that a few people were seeing shit that she was going thru back then. And we were backing her. So she followed us… cool people. I guess.
Edit: Why would my previous answer just go away? Help? Anyone?
WaPo saw Maggie Haberman’s shameless asskissery of Ivanka at NYT and said, “Hold our beer!”
This is why Twitter is a mistake, and most comedy clubs don’t allow people to record sets.
I cannot imagine getting outraged over a bunch of joke tweets including the hashtag #cancelwhitepeople . if you can’t tell the difference between purposely distasteful joke tweets and directed harassment (Roseanne) something is wrong with your social media skills.
Because we are the devil.
Don’t trust anyone over 50, I always say.*
*I used to always say ‘don’t trust anyone over 40,’ but then I turned 40
She’s a main character on the classic Science Fiction series The Expanse so lots of people around here know of her!
I didn’t know her name, but I’m familiar with multiple roles she’s played. Her voice is more distinctive than James Earl Jones or Morgan Freeman.
The media is terrible at numbers, part 5,273.
Right now a !!!SHOCKING!!! headline is making the rounds that looks like this:
The actual Gallup poll this is based on is here.
Thing is, this headline is wrong. The poll did not in fact ask whether people preferred socialism to capitalism. The poll asked whether people had a “positive or negative image” of a bunch of different things, including capitalism and socialism. 47% of Dems had a positive image of capitalism; 57% had a positive image of socialism.
But you can’t step from there to saying overall Dems “preferred” socialism to capitalism. That’s because you can like more than one thing. I can have a positive image of both apples and oranges, and from only that information you can’t conclude which fruit I prefer. It’s clear from the numbers that at least some Dems have positive images of both systems (since 47+57>100) and based purely on the numbers cited in the poll you can’t rule out the possibility that 47% of Dems approve of both capitalism and socialism - but prefer capitalism - while 10% of Dems approve of socialism but not capitalism, and the remaining 43% of Dems just hate everything like me.
Likewise if you’re going to claim to have reached any conclusions about which system is “preferred” you also need preference info from the people who don’t have a positive image of either. You can have preferences about things you don’t like. I might not have a positive image of either Scylla or Charybdis, but if forced to choose I might consider Scylla to be far less terrible than the even worse alternative. Again, approval numbers cannot be used as a substitute for a direct head-to-head comparisons of two things. We saw this fallacy so often in 2012 it might be termed the Obama fallacy: many, many people jumped from “Obama’s approval is under 50%” to “therefore, whoever runs against him must necessarily win.” Which does not logically follow; the fact I might disapprove of Obama does not mean I am obligated to like any random alternative better.
TLDR: If you want to make a statement like “people prefer X to Y” you need to ask them to directly rank X and Y, not try to infer a ranking based on a question about something else entirely.
Even this slightly different formulation is wrong:
The Gallup poll isn’t ranking the intensity of feeling about the system, strictly the number who approve. The correct formulation of the headline is “More Democrats have a positive image about socialism than capitalism.”
One last caution: Bernie fans shouldn’t break out the champagne. Yes, approval of socialism is up 5 percentage points since 2010, but the poll press release cautions, “Attitudes toward socialism among Democrats have not changed materially since 2010.” I interpret this to mean the 5-point shift is within the subsample’s margin of error. (The margin of error for the entire poll is listed as 3%, but for the smaller subsample of Dems the MOE would be bigger.) The major movement is a fall in the approval of capitalism, not an increase in approval of socialism.
I think the Democrats would be wise to stay away from the term socialism for a while, at least until Venezuela finishes self destructing. It’s just going to give the GOP ammunition.
I think Democrats need to stop giving two figs what the GOP thinks about anything, but I suppose I’ve said that sufficiently often by now.
True, but caring about Independents is a different matter.
And a lot of those Independents are ex-Republicans looking for an excuse to return to their abusive relationship.
Now is the time to pull left. We have been allowing the republicans to continually pull the country to the right in this tug-of-war. Now they have overextended themselves and are off balance - it is the perfect time to give a mighty tug and change the momentum.
I have been hearing “New York Communist!” from everyone here in Texas.
I tell them if you didn’t elect Trump this wouldn’t have happened. What did you expect to happen?
So far at least, this has shut everyone up.
True. But Venezuela is more “Communist” than “Socialist” now, and it’s about time we start pounding home the fact we could be more like Denmark or Norway and have a happy, healthy, population.
As a Dane, I have to laugh at the delusions that (some) people in the US apparently have about Socialism, Danes and Denmark. Though it’s sad to see how divorced from any form of objective reality those delusions are.
I mean, how do you get from this:
To whatever that brain-diarrhea Trish Regan was spouting was? DK is very far from perfect, but there are very few places in the world I’d rather live (and none outside of Scandinavia).
It’s absolutely based in ignorance because they have no idea what they’re talking about and have never been there.
OTOH, America is different. Scandinavian countries feel like, i don’t know how to put it, there is a constant “eye” watching you; what is and is not appropriate, what is or is not socially acceptable. You need to be mindful of your neighbors, your city, your country. That is not what the US is like.
Americans have this (to the rest of the world) oddly individualistic view of society which actually would make living like Scandinavians sort of “painful” to a lot of Americans. Americans want to walk into Walmart in a moo-moo and sandals and get 50 lbs of coco puffs and bacon and ride their horse back to their farmstead, tossing trash the whole way home, and aren’t going to give a shit if you like it or not, because it’s their _____ (horse, house, city, state, whatever). They don’t want to be made mindful or guilty of anti-social choices.
It’s probably some kind of cultural echo of Anglo-Saxon sanctity of individual land ownership writ large across an entire society, every man is a king of his own petty castle, but enshrined as part of the social contract (by god you can’t make me do what you want me to do, commie bastard!). It’s hard for other countries to understand but Americans will often defend this selfish individualism even to the point of being self defeating.
This also means that because every man is his own country there’s much less mercy or tolerance for failure. Many conservative Americans deeply distrust social safety nets as being “un-American”.
If they didn’t elect Trump, you wouldn’t have been hearing “New York Communist”? What?
It’s just propaganda that’s effective on the type of idiots who vote for Trump. My uncle is a perfect example, he fully believes that Sweden is a Fallout-style post-apocalypse after they let too many Muslims immigrate and they took over. It’s a way for them to point to what might as well be Narnia or Mordor for these people and say “See? This is why we can’t have healthcare/immigration/whatever. We’ll end up like that place you ignorant fucks wouldn’t even be able to point out on a map!”.
My uncle was also a guy who suddenly decided he was super proud of his never-before mentioned Scottish ancestry and started running around with a kilt and a bad accent after he saw Braveheart. You get the idea.
There’s no point in trying to convince a bunch of energy industry Texans she isn’t a firebrand, guillotine loving commie, so i don’t bother. When in Rome, ect.
So the argument i use with them is that they knew how bad Trump was, and the voted for him anyway. So firebrand, guillotine loving commies is what they get.