Lawnmower Boy

I don't think that the GOP has decided to throw the election. The party isn't capable of anything right now. What's happened is that no-one sees any way of riding the party to victory, nor any clear idea what victory would look like. That's why the Republican slate in the last two elections was so underwhelming --Romney apart; and why the base was so underwhelmed by Romney himself. ('Cuz he wasn't going to deliver a meaningful victory even if he won.) Look at the constituencies: -No-one takes actual libertarians seriously. I'm sorry, for all the strength of the movement in America, they don't. They only look like a real movement when they reach out to the slavery-curious. (Oh, hey, Jerry Pournelle. I was just talking about you!) And while I have no idea how strong the "alt right" is outside of the Internet, I'm going to guess that the Rand Paul GOTV effort captures their actual, numerical salience. -Social conservatism is identity politics. It's not about winning on abortion and gay rights. It's about signalling values, and when that signalling turns into being actually mean to actual people that you know, the strength of the movement collapses. I'm amazed at the willingness of the big evangelical names to back Trump, but that's a case of following where their flocks lead. It's just not a good look on men who claim to be moral leaders, and you have to wonder where they go after Trump collapses into epic defeat. -"Pro-business" conservatives are, after 2008, that one guy in the car who smells really bad, but you have to give him a ride because --Wait. Why do we have to give him a ride again? I didn't agree to this! So who does that leave? Not many people, and obviously not a winning coalition. The GOP have won the popular vote once since 1992, and all the demographic trends are against them getting back to a majority even before the party's ideological police lost their mojo. Add in the party's disadvantage in the Electoral College, and why in Heaven's name would an ambitious politician even try out for the GOP? There are circumstances, but absent those, it's a bunch of clowns because that's all they can get. At the same time, I don't think there's much chance of the GOP breaking up. The party is in far less difficult situation than the Democratic Party after the Civil War, which similarly faced an incoherent and fractious coalition with a permanent disadvantage in the electoral college. But it clawed its way back into power eventually.

No-one here thinks you're dumb, Soar. I do think that you tend to argue yourself out onto a limb for the pleasure of arguing, but this here is a community, and we've all got our quirks. Why, some of our most upstanding citizens like Aquaman. Go figure! Here's the thing: America has a two-party system in which partisan identification spills over into many other social commitments. This is true both in terms of the town and state you live in, and, in constitutional terms, up-and-down ballot cohesion. The party ballot is espeically important, because electioneering is a pretty advanced art these days, and pretty much every Presidential candidate comes to the polls on the first Tuesday of November as a damaged brand. Sure, the voter says, in the end, we have to hold our nose if we want to vote for Bush-Mondale-Clinton-Dole-Bush-Gore-Bush-Kerry-Obama-McCain-Obama-Romney, but if we don't the They will appoint the bad person to the Supreme Court, and my Representative won't be able to legislate because the bad President will veto all his bills. This kind of up-and-down cohesion is consolidated in many ways, but one of the more important of them is an ideological project. Intellectuals produce a coherent belief system in which all the issues that matter at every level of the ballot are interdepent in a worldview that shows why someone who is pro-life is also pro-guns and anti-taxes, and vice-versa. That makes it really, really hard to repudiate Trump and embrace Hillary. There's down ballot, there's identity, there's belonging, there's a complete worldview to unpick. All that stuff. (Ross Douthat has a post up saying more-or-less this, and ending with "but but abortion!" I mean, seriously; for how many actual people is the current back and forth about abortion regulation at the margin a real deal-breaker? But clinging to it lets Douthat go on being a professional conservative.) But I think we can go deeper here. Consider the nomination process as it played out. Several candidates were presented as "conservatives with a track record:" Christie and Walker. Neither found favour with the electorate. Why? Well, to be brutal about this, Americans don't usually select and run fat guys or guys with weak chins. (Throw in baldness, and represent!) In the end, you have to wonder why these guys even bothered. One candidate was advanced with the "aura of inevitability:" Jeb Bush. I mean, Tafts, Roosevelts, Kennedys --there are Presidential families, right? Except those guys actually have a terrible track record. Americans don't like political dynasties. Ted couldn't win on his brother's mythic coat tails! (You give me Chappaquidick, I give you Terry Schiavo. Yes, they're not comparable, but they're both skeletons-in-the-closet.) Jeb's campaign was one long, "I don't know what they're thinking." Kind of like running a weaselly-faced guy who probably is a weasel, or an overweight, bully-looking guy who actually is a bully. Several candidates ran as America's Pastor: Huckabee and Santorum. There's been a lot of these guys, and not one of them has ever actually been elected. They run, to be charitable, in an evangelical spirit, to give some nice sermons on a national stage. There's an uncharitable interpretation, that they're the classic con-man/preacher. I'm happy to extend that to Huckabee. Santorum seems honest enough about most things, straight up and deeply felt. Still, there's enough weaknesses there, that, at the end of the day, you have to wonder how he came to run second to Romney in 2012 and, more importantly, stay in the race so long. The answer, I think, is a deep dissatisfaction with Romney. Which, what the heck, America? I wouldn't vote for Romney on account of his politics, and if his background as a Mormon dynast were better understood (that is, that he's part of a weirdly tangential faction of America's Natural Aristocracy , this not being a religion thing), he might suffer on that score; but apart from that, he was as good a candidate as you could ask for! And you toyed with Santorum, instead? I mean, look at Santorum! Where's your sense of decency? Did you not see Santorum on the stage, desperately pronouncing his heterosexuality while the whole freaking world was, like, "Go get a boyfriend and stop bothering us?" Prolonging Rick's day on the stage was as pitilessly unkind as making Trump dance and caper for us. (Because he's not an evil man; he's mentally ill. That will lead him to do terible things if he's elected, but he needs an intervention, not ridicule.) Then you had the True Blue Conservative candidate: Ted Cruz. Except Cruz is literally the least likeable man in America. It's a joke how unlikeable he is! His first college room-mate came forward to say that we shouldn't vote for him on character grounds, and they had classmates lined up from, you know, First Year Introduction to Prerequisites to Harvard Law lined up to say the same thing! He makes a terrible impression! It takes more than one person to run a Presidential campaign. So how did anyone look at Cruz and say, "You know what? I think this guy has a chance. I'm going to go work for him!" And, yet, Cruz ran second to Trump. Then you had this term's "reasonable Conservative:" Kasich. Except that everyone who knows Kasich reports major rage issues that should rule him out as a serious candidate, and the way he ran his campaign kind of underlines the fact that he does not play well with others. Again, compare him with the "reasonable Conservative" of the 2012 cycle (Romney), and you see the weaknesses of his candidacy. Then you had the libertarian true believer, Ayn Paul Kruegerrand Buddha. I think? Anyone remember him? I know I don't! At least his Dad's got a fun kooky vibe going on. Rand Paul was just going through the motions, it seems. Or was there something else going on? Because I think the takeaway here is that, given the choice, libertarian Republicans don't actually vote libertarian. They go for Trump. And, actually, this can be extended. The evangelical vote went to Trump, not Cruz, never mind Santorum or Huckabee. We're told that the Republicans are the business party, and that various deep-pocketed Republican businessmen will back the pro-business candidate and make him a shoe-in. Except that Trump is running on autarky. (I think), and the mighty Koch machine is revealed to be helpless against him. So. What's going on? Well, it looks like the evangelical wing doesn't want a Christian, pro-life candidate; the libertarian wing doesn't want a guy who won't bomb foreigners, rein in the security state, or protect civil liberties; the business wing is fine with a tariff-curious, immigrant-expelling candidate. A number of people have said that the core issue of the Trump candidacy is his outrageous racism, but I don't think that's right, either. Life history dictates who is likely to be racist (old, etc), and the Republicans win those demographics handily --they don't need to pander! Yes, Trump actually dared to explicitly appeal to racists, but that's been done in the past, and no-one who has done that has come close to winning a major nomination going back to Wilson. In the end, the fact that you have to win in November disciplines the candidates. And notice that the other candidates made gestures in the pandering direction. It had no effect whatsoever. What are we left with? In my opinion, ideological aporia. These things do happen. Berthold Brecht joked that popular discontent with communist rule in Germany ought to inspire the communist government to "dissolve the people and elect another;" the even more pungent formulation is that "Communism can never fail, only be failed." This is the downside of an ideological project. Discredited, everything fails. 2008 was bad enough: no-one believes in "trickle down economics" any more, although a few people are in denial about their disbelief. Throw that out, and the suposed ideological foundations of the Republican Party becomes a bottomless pit. What most Americans want, I gather, is a reversal in course on taxes. You know, raise taxes on rich people. And there's no way to say within the Republican party. So you say that you're "against trade," instead. Traditionally, evangelical Christianity has defined itself as a private world set against the public, secular sphere. This has been hard in the sense that you're compelled to at least pretend to be a Creationist, which can be hard when you're, say, an oil industry geologist in Texas. But then you get your global warming denialists, who saw this as a gravy train the could ride on. I think they were wrong, that "pretend" is key here, but maybe I'm being too optimistic. The point is, it's one thing to have funny claimed beliefs about what happened six thousand years ago. Denying the plain evidence of global climate change in front of us? That's for crazy people! And it is the official position of the Republican party. So what do you do if you want to abandon that plank without abandoning the party? Evangelicals? They've been led to comprehensively identify Christianity with hostility to the icky people, and they've been routed with precious little pushback. Belonging to a church is part of belonging to a community. Do you really want to identify yourself as part of a community that hates the gays? Really? Now? How about now? How about next week? This whole thing is something that opportunistic Christians and the more left wing members of the congregation aready want to be out from underneath of. How many church ladies does that leave, and do you really want to be part of a megachurch of church ladies? There's other things going on, too. The relentless drumbeat of assault rifle massacres, for example. How do you abandon Second Amendment absolutists without abandoning the party? We already "consciously disengage" from that argument because we sense we're pushing buttons that we can't unpush. Gun rights are an excellent example of how a conscious argument within the party is more likely to destroy its viability as an electoral coalition than to actually solve the problem. So how do you solve the problem? The same way that you solve every other unsolveable problem. You wait until no-one is looking, and you walk away, accepting that it's not going to be solved, or that somebody else will solve it, their way. This description should look normal to most readers. Remember how you cared so deeply about so much stuff in your early twenties? And then life got in the way, and now you see nuance, or, if you don't, you've lost the passion, or, even if you still have it, you don't really act on it? It's sort of an internal defection. This "internal defection" takes two forms in the GOP. One is disengagement; the other is casting a protest vote. That's Trump. He's a protest vote. The disengaged votes were the ones that didn't exist to elect somebody else, because all the candidates left after all the internal disengagement were the ones who didn't internally disengage. When there's a reasonable way out, the people who don't take it are not reasonable. That's your 2016 Republican Presidential candidate pool in a nutshell. They're the ones who didn't see the exit door in good time. tl;dr: The GOP is tanking this election, because they have no answers to the world's current predicament.

"It's okay to elect Trump 'cuz he probably won't get away with half the stuff he'd like to do."

Let me explain: "America" is the most awesomest scripted drama television show ever created for the Canadian market. (The producers also export it to Europe, Africa and Asia, where it does amazingly well, considering the language barriers.) To support this show, entrepeneurs have built "Americaland" theme parks with duty free shopping at all major Canadian border crossings,further monetising this entertainment experience, which soon spread to newspapers, magazines, comic books, and even the mass book market. However, the initial "slice of life" broadcasting, such as Leave it to Beaver, The Nightly News, televised high school football (What? I mean, seriously?) and Cal Worthington used car commercials began to pall in, I want to say, the 1960s, and the producers moved on to an "event" format, with "Presidential elections" the fall after the Olympics --I think? Every four years, anyway. "Presidential elections" featured life-and-death struggles between larger-than-life characters running for "President of the United States," or, possibly, "King of the World." (The writers often blurred the distinction.) As with the Olympics, their popularity soon overwhelmed the original, occasional-event format, and events were spread into the previous year. An alternative, rival concept, the "Off year election," was also successful, because while the stakes were smaller, the personalities were even more outrageous. For example, the comic geniusses who invented "Tip O'Neill" and "Newt Gingrich" got the Nobel Prize for Literature, for example. I think? I don't pay much attention to that stuff. Anyway, they should have. Eventually, however, the producers got greedy, and began to try the madcap, cast-of-thousands format of "Off year elections" with the high stakes and larger-than-life personalities of "Presidential elections." The critics are, understandably, divided about this. Some see it as the culmination of two generations of first-class entertainment, and look forward to a sequel, perhaps a remake of The Day AFter, or Terminator. Others think that increasing inputs will just lead to declining returns, and that America will soon be cancelled. We'll see! One thing is for sure, and that is that it'll make for some fun television. (Of course, for the poor, delusional crackpots who think that it is real, it's a world-historical tragedy unfolding in real time, but that's why they should be taking their meds!)

While we're on the subject of locations, put in islands, deltas, and mountains and you can get some pretty incongruous urban settings: -The hydroelectric plant in the mountains; -The Farm Village In the Middle of the Open Area They Can't Build In For Some Reason; -The local airport that can't expand because it's on an island or something (like a real airport, but small and rustic, which is actually kind of cool when you can just look across a 100 yard channel at high rises) -The mountain wilderness in sight of the city; -The desert island in the harbour; -the hillbilly farm right next to --Okay, now I'm just trolling Hermit.

What kind of jibber-jabber is this? There's one threat to American national security in this election, and it's Hit-lery! She wears pant suits! Pant suits! I don't have to LEAVE ME ALONE MOM I'LL GO LOOK FOR A JOB AFTER I FINISH POSTING ON THE HERO BOARDS AND PLAY CALL OF DUTY FOR A WHILE DID YOU REMEMBER TO BUY DEPENDS AT THE STORE explain what "pant suits" means. It means she's a shrill Femi-Nazi who has come to take your American manhood away by making you fight wars with everyone forever. Your manhood! Before you even get to use it! [Oops, need to drop this in the next draft in case someone thinks I'm projecting.] Whereas Trump swings his like there's no tomorrow. When he teabags someone, you know it! He says what he means! Like I do on the chats. Except with his real name! Ballsy. See? In conclusion, vote Trump on election day if for some reason you find yourself out of the basement and near a "polling place."

I read the account of the 1984 as Doctor Destroyer's recollection of events. Much of the narrative in BoD seems to be in Zerstroiten's point if view, and that point of view is, uhm, highly distorted. In reality, Vanguard handed Destroyer his head; but, as Destroyer's interactions with Thundrax shows, Destroyer is in the supervillain game in large part for the pleasure of being beaten up by bricks, so call it a lose/win scenario.

I'm Hermit and I hate Aquaman, Tennessee and .. apple pie, I guess? [Edit] Uhm, this account hijacking thing is hard. Could you just maybe lend me your password, Hermit, old buddy?

And someohw that means that it's too late to completely reimagine and rewrite the product, for some reason?

Thanks so much for the explanation.

I have to say that I'm being a terrible backer and waiting for the hardcover.

Hey, give the Trump campaign credit for getting one campaign pick right. Melania even sounds like a First Lady!

Not really random, but i don't want to upset Simon by putting it where it belongs.

As far as I know, Illithid brain-eating attacks were never save-or-die. On a successful attack, the Illithid establish a brain-eating grapple, and proceeds to do HP damage/round until the target is down to 0, at which point either the brain is eaten, irrelevant as that is for most PCs, or we're out of Russian dressing, and have to send the waiter back for more dipping sauce. Or it's time to roll up a new character. Whichever. Although the "daze/dominate" side effect that accompanies a successful brain-eating attack makes it dificult for PCs to extricate themselves, mind-flayers have the disadvantage that they are dependent on natural weapons to make this attack, and should be no threat to PCs properly arrayed with polearms in the second rank to keep the tentacled monsters at bay. (Gary is rolling his eyes as he looks down on us from Elysium.) In Hero, a Continuous Drain (must follow successful grapple) should cover it. Or you can add to the mythos of the CU by using the Migdalar. Might I recommend heavy emphasis on their smooth skin and stacked bodies, their enticing venuousity, their gamin sexuality, the thick lips of their pouting mouths, on their lower abdomen just where your eyes are helplessly drawn down to look just exactly there?

Who asked about Tarzan? 'Cuz the reviews are in. Well, one review. I think she liked it. http://www.emilywrites.co.nz/i-saw-tarzan-and-this-is-my-review-after-some-wines/

Or, people figure out how to do stuff, and then scientists arrive to explain how it was done. . .

Nayland Smith is the sidekick, Fu Manchu is the real hero.. . Wait. That doesn't work. It should work, but it doesn't. It's odd that we're willing to slyly rewrite the classic story to make Wang the hero, and Jack Burton the buffoonish sidekick, but for all the face turns in lterature, we're so unready for a Fu Manchu/Lo Pan as a hero that, as far as I can tell, no-one has ever done it.

But, eventually, you will be Soylent Green.

If by "misleadingly presentd," you meant to type "not misleadingly presented at all," then I agree! The rate is per million, and not absolute. Since there are fewer blacks than whites, it can be both true that more whites are shot by police, and that the rate per million of blacks being shot by police is higher than whites! If by "sad part" you mean that it's sad that most people are killed by friends and relatives, that is certainly a sad thing. (So, blacks by blacks, whites by whites, Albano-Greek Americans by Albano-Greek Americans, etc.) Murder is always sad. You know what else is sad? Being shot by police is sad. The police are supposed to be there to protect us, and we should really make some kind of effort to prevent it. Obviously, there are cases where police-involved shootings are all but inevitable. It's the cases where it's not --you know, twelve-year-olds with toy guns, unarmed men pinned down by several officers, law-abiding citizens pulled over in "driving while black" type encounters. That's where there's an argument for oversight. Or we could just smear them all with guilt by association. That works too. For a certain value of "works."

https://www.google.ca/search?q=sexy+ben+grimm&rlz=1C1CHFX_enCA542CA542&espv=2&biw=1680&bih=881&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjWg6Hq0_jNAhUH1mMKHdvfAEoQ_AUIBigB#imgrc=pBicZxBQvqWXiM%3A You're welcome.

It's not amazing at all. We understand that police-involved shootings emerge from circumstances in which police confront civilians. Confrontations don't just happen, like weather. There are realfactors, if sometimes misunderstandings, which lead the police to make the decision to shoot. In most cases, police shoot people who were cruising for some kind of bad outcome. With the caveat that this kind of argument can lead to, "Oh, sure, we executed him for a murder he didn't commit, but you know, he drove over the limit all the time," we can have some sympathy for the police. Here is the problem that some Americans keep dodging around: Police killed almost five black people per every million black residents of the U.S., compared with about 2 per million for both white and hispanic victims. These circumstances are, of course, no novelty. When I say, "you Americans," I have absolutely no reason to be smug. Substitute "First Nations" for Black; iand you're good to make exactly the same kind of criticisms in Canada. (Actually, it's a lot worse, if anything.) Australia? "aboriginal." New Zealand, "Maori;" in the United Kingdom, it has been a struggle of generations to get "Irish" out of this category, and central Europe has a persistent problem of police maltreatment of Roma and Cinti. Sweden? Lapps and Finns. North Germany? Poles, until ethnic cleansing, fortunately, he said, with intentional irony, segregated the populations. (Notice that while Christian north Germans notoriously have unfortunate reactions to Jewish Germans, the nature of the abuse of that minority has been very different in character.) China? Uighurs. Indonesia? Ethnic Chinese. Japan? Ethnic Koreans. The Philippines? Muslims. Here, in fact, is an acceptable generalisation: it happens everywhere. In particular, in regions of the United States with small and segregated visible minority populations, the same patterns of discrimination emerge against whites with visible markings of "white trash" status, and no-one is less happy about it than the people identified by their neighbours as "white trash." So do we explain this global phenomena, from Greenland's icy plain to the meth-addled trailer parks of Oregon, in which some police use force disproportionately more readily against members of low-status visible minorities than against members of high status majorities? The best explanation is that police forces are sometimes ineffective in preventing bullies from joining the ranks. Those bullies exploit opportunities to escalate situations, and in some small number of cases, those escalations go badly awrey, leading to a number of unnecessary killings. How do you address these problems? Well, for the neighbourhood in which Bill Gates lives, the answer is obvious. A policeman who is dumb enough to harass Bill Gates daughters hears all about it when he applies for his next job, at 7-11. (Notice that the way power works in society, Bill Gates doesn't have to ask for this, or even want it. It just happens, because who wants someone on board who has pissed Bill Gates off?) Oh, and also Bill Gates' nephews and nieces and --you know what? Just to be safe, let's not pull over any teens in expensive cars in this neighbourhood. Minorities, though? They don't live in Bill Gates' neighbourhood. They don't look like Bill Gates' nephew. They don't have this power. Again, because it is not possible to emphasis this enouogh, it does not matter which minority, which neighbourhood, because I could be talking about the slums of Ulaan Bator or Algiers as esily as St. Paul, Minnesota. Blacks in Minnesota, about Irish in Yorkshire, or Koreans in Osaka, it doesn't matter. The solution? Internal checks. No one likes being sat down in the office and asked "What the heck happened there?", but and take it from personal experience in one sector at least, unless you enjoy really long lineups at the checkouts, it sometimes has to be done. The problem lies in pushing the institution into making the effort, and sometimes this takes pushing. But let's get back to the whole bit about being puzzled. There is, of course, an alternative explanation for the problem: these minorities, as minorities, had it coming, because they're all like that. That's why I've placed heavy emphasis on the fact that this is a global problem, that the culture and country of origins (never mind "race") of the discriminate minority is pretty clearly irrelevant. A group can be a low-crime majority in one country, a model minority in a third, and a trouble-making underclass in a third tends to demolish the notion that we are talking about something intrinsic to culture or (God help us), "race." It's a nexus of class and visible markers! It's something we've known since kindergarten! Bullies are good at spotting people they can bully, and the people who can be bullied are the people who can't fight back! There is one further and particularly uncomfortable aspect of this, which is that we tend to externalise categories like "bully." It's of a piece of that whole "banality of evil" thing, where the belief that "I am a good person" serves to allow the self-perceived "good person" to participate in horrible crimes, since they can't be horrible, on account of their being a "good person." Sure in our goodness, we wander off and make ourselves feel a bit better in a situation by bullying someone. Someone who, we tell ourselves, "had it coming." To my shame, I've been there. I'm pretty sure everyone has. This is a universal human problem that demands constant and uncomfortable self-reflection. Do we feel uncomfortable when we are press on it! Of course we do! And, hey, you know who is really good at pressing this button? Bullies! It doesn't matter! The issue isn't that the other guy is being mean to us for a little "harmless" ribbing of poor Brenda! (I mean, some hypothetical individual who isn't a professor in New York these days, God, I'm sorry. . . ) The issue is that we did it, and we should probably stop and think about it before we do it again. And, you know, some twelve-year old with a toy gun gets shot down in a routine police encounter.

So I'm looking at my schedule for tomorrow and the next day. (What with changes, that's about as far out as you can plan your life.) It's pretty tricky. Saturday is the week end* and Sunday is the beginning of the next week. But as near as I can tell, I have Saturday, and then Sunday, and then, on top of that, Monday off work. Three days in a row without any work. Isn't there a law against this? Or, at least, some kind of tax I need to pay? I've tried googling it, but the results keep coming back as more Shakespeare. Something about a "long weekend?" That Shakespeare. he's such a scamp with the double entendres and all. Also something about "holidays," which I'm pretty sure were banned in the 90s and replaced by time-and-a-half days. So break it to me, guys. I'm going to have to spend Saturday in lineup at the DMV, getting some kind of forms filled out and paying a fee, right? *Weird fact: spellcheck thinks that "week end" is all one word. Like, there used to be a need for a noun to describe Saturday and Sunday put together. Do any of you language guys have an explanation? Maybe it's from Shakespeare? Like, "What ho, 'tis the weekend, well-a-day and donnybrooks"?

Second base isn't porn in any universe I'm aware of.