Here you will find the stockpile of the social media associated with the Creature's Cookbook experiment. You can scroll through it, or simply use the search feature to find posts by keyword.
Familiar enough to suspect he is related to me, but also quite young, as he was very good at dealing with some people, but bad at impressing others. He wasn’t terribly skilled as an operative. My former employers would not have hired him.
Don’t be. You’re hearing media do what it does: harp on one person’s lack of enthusiasm and make it seem that that one opinion is held by thousands.
This race went precisely as I thought it would. Precisely.
And it was absolutely a massive success.
So let me tell you why, so that you feel better and can easily put down the annoying crowing that republicans are going to do, because they managed to cling to a few things.
If the votes fall as I believe they will, the democrats will have retaken the house by some 30 seats. This is impressive and somewhat unique in our country’s history. The GOP, upon taking the house originally, gerrymandered these districts in impressively screwball ways. Wherever that rigging has been overturned, the districts have gone blue. Which is, of course, why they did it. Democrats have the house now, 30ish flips in republican rugged districts. 15 of those being female candidates.
That is absolutely impressive.
A few key candidates to whom many people were paying close attention did not perform as people desired. Abrams, O’Rourke, Gillum. Well…I’m not surprised. Abrams faces absolute state wide fraud. Her opponent being the person also in charge of voter registration, withholding some 50k votes of which 70% were black. Voter intimidation. This is blatant corruption. And yet still…her race was very close. So too with Beto. Ted Cruz was a presidential candidate! When he took Texas, he did so with a wide margin. Last night in Texas he was fighting tooth and nail. Gillum’s gubernatorial race for Florida was a figurative dead heat. 99% of the vote in—49% Gillum, 49.7% DeSantis. These are CLASSICALLY and FULLY republican regions in which Trump took the presidency by huge margins. That these races, with all those challenges, were as close as they were PROVES that something unprecedented happened.
3-400% voter turnout increases for a midterm election. Mostly with the youth.
But let’s talk about what it means to have the house.
Now I know you’re probably concerned about the federal judgeships that are about to pop up for consideration, and it’s true that the Senate was needed to stop approvals of those candidates, but…
Control of the house means that Democrats now take hold of some critical committees. These committees are the very ones that will be overseeing corruption allegations. Ways and Means, energy and Commerce, Financial Services, Intelligence, appropriations, foreign affairs, armed services, judiciary, transportation and infrastructure, and…government reform.
How do you feel now?
The worst political fallout of a GOP controlled government, the worst sound bites that weren’t Trump’s, the worst slaps across the face? All came from footage of those very same committees. Those committees now belong to Democrats.
Massive policy shifts also occurred in many classically conservative states—legalizing marijuana votes, Florida giving the vote back to former criminals who’ve served their time thus giving the vote back to a HUGE portion of the African-American Community that has been held in check by a racist and classicist policing method, then there were upsets in many small ways too.
I promise you…this is all excellent and it will have truly important and forceful impact. In 2020, if we can keep that same enthusiasm and rage, the entire government will shift. But that can only happen if we keep moving forward, if the candidates who won keep their noses to the grindstone and push back hard, if you and I and everyone on the ground continues to talk about this and force out bigots and greed.
Do not be discouraged. I promise you…this was an amazing election. Don’t focus on a few bright stars and think that all is lost because they fell. There is a great deal happening here, and one thing I know from being at sea—when a wave is building, there is first a terrifying shift, as the water level begins to rise. The ship will first dip, surrounded by walls of water, and then of a sudden, the swell. The ship raises and passengers suddenly realize that they are much higher than before, with an incredible view. Then the wave crests and takes the ship with it.
We didn’t see a wave crest tonight. So what? That means it’s a much larger wave than we realized. It will crest in the future. But only if that fluid pressure is maintained.
This is good. It is. So long as everyone keeps working. This is good.
Calm down. Have a glass of champagne. A cup of tea. When they Trumpet all their noise…say nothing. Nothing needs to be said. You’re higher than you were with an excellent view of the ending. So relax. Don’t fret.
For anyone who found spelling errors in this post, I apologize for the errors, but wrote this on a cell phone at 4 in the morning using the Speech to Text function. I have a difficult time typing on touch screens and my Siri cannot understand my accent. Which means that there are often the obvious sorts of errors like “Crews” instead of Cruz. It also will sometimes completely change whole phrases, because I tend to speak in a way that doesn’t match its grammar correcting software. Pardon me for being old and formal in my diction.
So that we are all aware: I am a polyglot. I am an historian in a very real sense. I know the history of the English language in depth and very intimately. I am also a published author in the English language. So please do know that I am actually capable of spelling, and don’t for one second think that a few typos in any way detract from what I have said.
This was a stellar election. And if you are enough of a prick to attack the merits of my argument with ad hominem retort, I will delete your comments. Because you are an asshole and I don’t tolerate such rudeness.
This is why we don’t vote third party in a two party system.
Ted Metz is libertarian so it seems more likely his voters would have voted republican over democrat
True, but that’s not the point. The point is we don’t vote third party and expect change. The two party system makes a third party vote utterly useless.
Which is why we need to convert to a four to five party system.
How do you imagine you’re going to get officials who’ve benefited from two party electoral votes to approve constitutional amendments that would do such a thing?
You have what you have. Diverting effort from immediate difficulties and placing it into impossible things will only ever fatigue you.
That’s…fair. Just wish we had spent the last 40 years on infrastructure.
This is why we don’t vote third party in a two party system.
Ted Metz is libertarian so it seems more likely his voters would have voted republican over democrat
True, but that’s not the point. The point is we don’t vote third party and expect change. The two party system makes a third party vote utterly useless.
Which is why we need to convert to a four to five party system.
How do you imagine you’re going to get officials who’ve benefited from two party electoral votes to approve constitutional amendments that would do such a thing?
You have what you have. Diverting effort from immediate difficulties and placing it into impossible things will only ever fatigue you.
I have six iphone handsets, all identical. Each one is in a lifeproof case. I switch among them daily. Average lifespan for any of my handsets is six months even with these precautions.
I am very hard on touchscreen tech. I am not exaggerating. This is not a joke. I tell you in honesty and good faith, I interface with electronics. I once dialed my phone from ten feet away. No hands. I frequently “butt dial” people. And any time I take a phone set to a repair person, I hear things like “I’ve never seen this before” or “I have no idea why it’s doing that.”
As I’m sure I’ve just said recently in a post about the letter E. I find the policing of spelling particularly egregious as a fault in a person’s character.
I have been speaking English since the 1500′s in all its forms. I came before the first dictionary which made up most of its spellings. I am well-versed in most of its root tongues. I do not give a fuck what you think of spelling errors.
But let it be known, I have difficulty with electronics. For a number of reasons. My fingers have no friction ridges, I have long “nails” and in addition to this, I frequently interface with these electronics in unusual electromagnetic ways, which causes the phone to stop responding, type on its own, or shut down applications at random. I have to switch between my phones often to prevent them from fatiguing. Most recently, the new iphone iOS update has done terrible things to my spellcheck, which I must leave on, because of my fingers and their inability to use touch screen effectively. Because of this, I’ve been using the “speech to text” function, which has an absolutely terrible time understanding my accent.
This means that all the entries I write on my phone, including ones that go viral, are unfortunately laden with errors. I cannot help this, it’s due to a “disability” So please take your fucking language lessons and shove them right up your back entry, if you please, and know that when I know there are errors, I always return and fix them on my computer when possible. However, this often transpires after the post has already been reblogged. So please do sard right off.
I can scratch stone. hard limestone, hard sandstone. Not granite. I file my claws on my countertops while I’m baking. It’s enough to make a dull spot on the marble. I can cut through most plastics. Thin metal sometimes, mostly aluminum or the soft metals.
Trump’s supporters don’t care about whether or not he lies. Don’t bother with calling him a liar.
Instead ask what they think about the media. Get them to tell you it’s all Fake News. Then ask “Why does that bother you? Why does Fake News matter?” Let them tell you that they don’t like lies. Then say, “I’m confused…if you don’t like lies, and truth is important, why doesn’t it matter to you that the President has been caught in over thirty lies a day in the last few months?” If you like, you can carry on and not let them answer.
They don’t care because they don’t know. Most of them can catch one lie or maybe two, but not all of them at once. Because they don’t like that they’re not geniuses, they tend to see fact checking by the media as a pernicious kind of nitpicking, done with an intent to hurt Trump. It’s mean, you see, for the media to fact check him. What they hear from Trump is an ignorance that reflects their own. What they hear is an opinion that reflects their own. They don’t care if he lies, because he’s speaking their truth.
So don’t call Trump a liar. Get them to say they don’t like lying, and then ask them if what they really don’t like is finding out that reality diverges from their idea of it.
They don’t want America. They want their version of it, which doesn’t actually exist. It’s a fiction. It’s a lie. They don’t care if he lies, because they know that what they want is a lie. That’s why they’re so desperate.
To make America into their version, extraordinary things must be done. They can be, but to do them, those people have to accept hypocrisy and cruelty and upturn even sacredly held beliefs. They have to perform exhausting mental gymnastics. That can only carry them so far.
Truth and compassion have an incandescent and pure power that requires very little effort from you. All you have to do, is not be an asshole. That simple. While they have to become more of an asshole.
So let them. They’ll wear out. You just keep asking questions. Always. Questions are how you win arguments. Questions are how you force introspection.its not manipulative so long as the questions you ask are focused and need answering. Stay away from logical fallacies or can’t point out theirs. (Which is itself a fllacy but hahahahaha I do love the irony created by dealing with higher intelligences)
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