Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Mike]

Yep. The high-wage factory jobs ain't coming back, no matter who says they are. A better use of time is to figure out a new game plan rather than banking on some kook to turn back time.

[hack]

Good passage from a meh essay (http://granta.com/why-were-post-fact/):

Fragmentation, combined with the disorientations of globalization, leaves people yearning for a more secure past, breeding nostalgia. ‘The twenty-first century is not characterized by the search for new-ness’ wrote the late Russian-American philologist Svetlana Boym, ‘but by the proliferation of nostalgias . . . nostalgic nationalists and nostalgic cosmopolitans, nostalgic environmentalists and nostalgic metrophiliacs (city lovers) exchange pixel fire in the blogosphere’. Thus Putin’s internet-troll armies sell dreams of a restored Russian Empire and Soviet Union; Trump tweets to ‘Make America Great Again’; Brexiteers yearn for a lost England on Facebook; while ISIS’s viral snuff movies glorify a mythic Caliphate. ‘Restorative nostalgia’, argued Boym, strives to rebuild the lost homeland with ‘paranoiac determination’, thinks of itself as ‘truth and tradition’, obsesses over grand symbols and ‘relinquish[es] critical thinking for emotional bonding . . . In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unreflective nostalgia can breed monsters’.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Clinton up 15 (!) in new McClatchey-Marist poll. Marist currently has an 'A' rating among pollsters. Just saying.

http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/

[Dr. Strangelove]

Coal industry doing right by the people of West Virginia! New study showing high levels of birth defects near mountaintop removal coal mining is under attack by the industry. They insist the natural proclivity of West Virginians to inbreed is more likely the cause. Nice!

http://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/20160803/national-academy-of-sciences-to-study-mountaintop-removal-health-effects

[SeattleLionsFan]

Good thing corporations never kill people.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Donald Trump is the candidate that conservative intellectuals have conditioned their base to desire - and they now want to disown him. Couple months old but pretty damning stuff

https://praxis.ink/2016/06/donald-trump-is-an-apotheosis-not-an-aberration-of-american-conservatism/

[Dr. Strangelove]

Trump's Numbers among African-Americans in latest polls

Marist: 2%
FoxNews: 1%
NC: 1%

Trump used to claim he would get 25% of blacks' votes

[SeattleLionsFan]

I just saw he was FOURTH among 18-29 year olds in the Marist poll. He's sinking his entire career as a name and entertainer if he loses that demo.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Hoping the Clinton camp isn't getting overconfident. I've read that they are already halting ads in Colorado and Virginia, so comfortable that both are theirs (Not that they can't restart ads if things narrow again)

[Dr. Strangelove]

[ame]https://twitter.com/markfollman/status/761412906713878528[/ame]

[hack]

Arguing like children. Yikes.

[Cody_Russell]

Hannity is right that the establishment Republicans are bad.

[froot loops]

I'm not sure what those establishment Republicans are supposed to do. They have a candidate running for president whose whole message is creating controversy.

[hack]

That said, they've both argued like children on their own and in their own ways in the past. Perhaps this is just Murdoch ops.

[Mike]

It's people like Hannity that created the opening for Trump.