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jason from volo wrote: Thu Jul 29, 2021 9:07 pm BTW, I'm fine smothering away this thread for now. Seems like most thought it was a bad idea to begin with.

If others want to carry on, that's fine, too.

I've appreciated your thoughts, and the other folks too- either way it goes.

losthighway wrote: Thu Jul 29, 2021 8:11 pm

Geiginni wrote: Thu Jul 29, 2021 6:54 pm There's this processed cheese at Trader Joe's called Green Goddess Gouda. It's basically un-aged process gouda with green goddess herbs mixed in. Kinda weird for sure, but I added little cubes of it to a batch of Hawaiian mac salad that I made to go with some teriyaki chicken and yaki-tori beef and it was pretty good in that capacity.

Fascinating. Green Goddess dressing had a near cult-like status amongst some of the women in my family years ago. I can't remember the taste well enough to picture it in gouda form, but I'm curious.

Also, what is Hawaiian mac salad? Pasta salad with ham?

No ham. It's part of the oddball food culture on the west coast of the Hawaiian Plate Lunch, which usually involves some quasi-japanese barbeque chicken, a version of Salisbury Steak with a fried egg on top, traditional Kailua barbeque pork, SPAM, or a mixture of these items, usually with a side of white rice and the mac salad.

https://interactive.wttw.com/playlist/2 ... ks-country

At it's best, it's not too sweet, or too mayo-ey, and has the bite of cider vinegar right in the noodles, and enough shredded onions, carrots, and perhaps celery and scallions (I'll also add Mama Lil's peppers from time to time) to not just feel like empty calories.

losthighway wrote:

jason from volo wrote: Thu Jul 29, 2021 9:07 pm BTW, I'm fine smothering away this thread for now. Seems like most thought it was a bad idea to begin with.

If others want to carry on, that's fine, too.

I've appreciated your thoughts, and the other folks too- either way it goes.

Likewise, I appreciated your thoughts, though I avoided adding my own. I was mainly responding to the apparent derailment by some who think their critical thinking skills are a whole lot sharper than they are in actual practice.

Geiginni wrote: Fri Jul 30, 2021 1:19 am

losthighway wrote: Thu Jul 29, 2021 8:11 pm

jason from volo wrote: Thu Jul 29, 2021 9:07 pm BTW, I'm fine smothering away this thread for now. Seems like most thought it was a bad idea to begin with.

If others want to carry on, that's fine, too.

I've appreciated your thoughts, and the other folks too- either way it goes.

Likewise, I appreciated your thoughts, though I avoided adding my own. I was mainly responding to the apparent derailment by some who think their critical thinking skills are a whole lot sharper than they are in actual practice.

+1. My comments so far have tried to ensure the thread contains an actual exchange of ideas.

The title of this talk between Chomsky and Natalie Wynn is pretty misleading, but the conversation is still worth listening to. It's misleading because most of this conversation is about the electoral politics of the moment and comparing the present moment to the 1930s. As you might expect, the Prof talks more than Natalie does, and he's showing his age. Still, a few good things in there, e.g. actual optimism.

As a sidenote, I think it's interesting to observe how easily some people are duped into believing things that are blatant propaganda. I mean, the whole Qanon thing was so obviously horseshit from the first glance, and yet some people went along with it. Similarly things like breitbart, whose entire raison d'etre is to propagandise on behalf of billionaires to help them stay rich and keep ordinary people down, and yet you get these ordinary people who swallow it hook, line and sinker.

Obviously there are different reasons for it - sometimes it's playing into people's preconceived notions and prejudices, other times it could just be that they subconsciously like being in a subservient role and to give over their power to people they perceive as their 'betters'. There's also the idea that a lot of them are just 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires', therefore siding with the oppressors through some false notion of kinship.

People sure are strange.

Welp, the center-right have succeeded in making a halfassed effort to write a voting rights bill, sabotaging it by attaching a substantial infrastructure rider, and then, after it got shot down, going whole hog... on just the infrastructure rider.

jason from volo wrote: Fri Jul 30, 2021 8:26 pm FM CP: it’s happened consistently throughout history and definitely isn’t constrained to modern day USA.

Oh absolutely.

Also, apparently I was quoted by someone else but I can't see why because they're on my blocked list.

I must have hit a nerve.

It's funny how these right wingers can dish it out but not take it. They love to play the victim, you see it time and time again. I guess some of them take their cue from the traitorous tyrannical two faced totalitarian toxic tangerine toddler.

jason from volo wrote: Fri Jul 23, 2021 7:39 pmOh well. I still think the USA is in need of a prominent third party, but it's not Libertarian. Probably a centrist party consisting of New England republicans and southern democrats. Someone who I could actually consider voting for.

This sounds like what I imagine the current Democratic party to be...? Please enlighten me. What are these two groups like? Some people I may know?

American third parties can serve only to split the vote, like Ross Perot or Ralph Nader. I think the idea Sanders, Abrams, Cortez et al have to push the Democrats to become an actual leftist party is a good one. It sucks that the Pelosis, Manchins and Schumers of the party are doing their best to put the token in token resistance, and everyone seems to have completely given up on the voting rights bill.

That's because other countries by and large use some form of proportional representation and we use a plurality system. Plurality always creates a system where third parties split the vote because it always creates a de facto two-party system.

So the way to get around it is to form coalitions, and they form and split a lot slower than they do elsewhere. It makes the system inflexible and unresponsive to voters' needs. The partisan realignment in the 1960s is a perfect example of the coalition that formed the Democratic party breaking up, with factions like the Dixiecrats forming a new coalition within the GOP. The RINO exodus is a reverse example of the GOP breaking up and former Republicans forming a coalition within the Democratic party.

With a PR system, voting third party isn't going to shift the dial by the .000000001% it will take to ensure that one party gets no seats and the other party gets all the seats. The parties get a proportional number of seats and that's that. It's a superior system by far.

And coming up in politics...

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... law-arent/