Got two questions that I'm expecting will be unlikely to be given reasonably intellectually honest answers by most anyone posting anywhere on the net today, right or left, but I've always been willing to annoy nearly everyone, if I can rationalize my life-long love of annoying my two brothers into some kind of excuse for seeing myself as attractively standing upright in babe-admirable fashion to defend my core values.
Yeah, I usually am
that bored with city life here in the Springs. It's the small town I was raised in, over-grown small town, always collapsing, version of the thing. Here's the first question that I just created such an annoying stage for introducing it...
Would Trump have been more likely, in your own understanding, to have penalized the prince, or to have smeared the intelligence report in some way more or less along the lines of being his at-the-moment best, off-the-cuff or off-the-wall, take on how to do the most possible damage to both undermine the report, and to destroy the credibility of anyone who might support whatever is the truth of it?
If you can understand that sentence, you have a shot at offering an intellectually honest answer to those people on this Forum you yourself have called your 'friends'. If you just react or lash out at me, you will not seem likely to me to be committed to intellectual honesty. Instead, I am apt to see your reaction in terms of my own personal idea of 'fake news', and most often ignore it accordingly.
Second question: If you cannot see either Biden's or Trump's behavior as some kind of universally human behavior that even you somehow have it in you to do your own personal version of it, then on what grounds do you suppose you understand either man well enough to understand why they did what they did, or would have likely done?
BONUS: Should anyone listen to you for actual insights into yourself, their selves, or anyone else?
Not talking morals here. Just understandings.
Enjoy the OP if you wish, but please don't fail to consider whether it's just a bit of entertainment, not useful otherwise. The world really does not need you to voluntarily sacrifice yourself to become another one of it's fools. There's already a whole public relations industry rolling fools off its assembly lines night and day, designed and targeted to somehow support their owner's personal interests and agenda. Truth is your only truest ally and defense.
Not me. Truth.
Every human community is in one way or another stiffing to anyone living in it, in terms of how that community will impose on them the in-the-box thinking that amounts to being the limits to how its members are permitted to see reality, before they become strangers and outsiders in the community's eyes. It's one way social animals evolve to help them unite as a group in order to survive. If you aren't aware of this, you're corralled. No escape, friend, until you at least can see the fences you need to jump.
Folks who see themselves as strong freedom-loving individuals staunchly opposed to socialist tyranny are the right's version of people who can look at themselves while not knowing they are only seeing their fences, and not who they really are as persons in any way autonomous and free to be true to themselves. The left is even better at deceiving itself. It's statistically better educated than the right -- hence, more likely to have all sorts of things that are potentially suicidal weapons for self-deception, laying about the house.
But I got to wonder what kind of crazy idea for suicide by proxy it is to attack scholars and scholarship as personal enemies because one is somehow capable of seeing in their local human version of being a snob about how they think of their egos, as an actual reason to refuse to accept any useful truth from them that they pass out to anyone more or less free, and upon request, in the books they write. In any Age of Lies, not just this one, honest scholars are everyone's warriors, and they know it -- with the usual, routine consequences for when any ape gets it into their head they are somehow the big ape by virtue of their own touchy-feely sense of the worth of their personal virtue to every other ape.
Scholars show their respect for you by the effort and lengths they go to in order to get it right, spot on, and intellectually honest in what they say to you. Are you so needy that you can't accept they respect you unless they also kow-tow to your ego? Since when we're you better?
The Lakota put to death the scouts that lied to them in their nation that had no concept of a rightful and legitimate death penalty. The same Lakota believed Truth was the universal, cosmic mother of its warriors, for its warriors were defined by the one and only one duty they actually owed to the nation -- all they had to do in life was to fight for everyone equally, and against all odds, no matter what it cost them. How does circulating lies about scholars stack up as honor against that notion of manhood?
I don't even see
myself as coming close to that notion of what it means to be an adult, male version.
When you think about anyone's intellectual allegiance to any community of any sort, you might wish to consider taking into consideration that they are in some fundamental way you -- as expressed by the Human genome in its currently present, individual version of you.
After that undoubtedly alarming moment of coming within a few miles of seeing both yourself and someone else as 'human', you've done what I would consider something along the lines of showing some decent measure of genuine respect for yourself. At least that.
After that, I usually go on to skim the next post, see if I want to slow down enough to read it with understanding, while background plotting my next barroom gambit to pick up babes. I'm only likely to post when I want to practice my writing skills using the OP or whatever as a prompt. It's then, I start looking to understand the post well enough that I can see if there's anything I'd like to say.
Make of this my 2 cents, if you're
that desperate for any sum at all of pixelated money. If so, forget my post -- this is a much better way to calm yourself...