8 Comments

As always Carl, I love reading your calls for human decency. It makes me hopeful. And I do send my hopes, prayers and charity to the people facing these wildfires and horrible events. Thanks!!

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Thank you for the kind words!

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My only spicy opinion is that I hope my friends remain safe (they keep posting maps with dots where their respective houses are and reassuring everyone that yes, they have a go bag) and that the fires are under control soon. :(

Oh, and that all fires stay away from my family-by-marriage members who are not in LA, but are close to LA, and have already had to deal with evacuation once this season. So two spicy opinions.

(Where I am, the fires are awful, but they're not in hugely populated areas like they are in Southern California.)

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Thank you, Carl, for saying what some of us understand. The pile-on method of speechifying helps nothing and makes it that much harder to sort out fact from fiction. When did we become incapable of waiting for even a second to see how something develops? I am grateful for people like you for having a larger reach and using it to insert some common sense periodically.

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Thank you very much, Jeanne. I'm not sure about my "larger reach," but I do my poor best!

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Excellent points, Carl. BigBoob420 used to be relegated to the back of the bar or lunch counter, where he and a few buds could spew out some angry man BS, everyone would nod and otherwise keep their mouth shut. Mostly. Now Archie Bunker has been beefed up, amped up, bro’d out, armed and maddened by the constant flow of attention-seeking fuming outrage brought to you by your local bot troll, or Russia or China. He also doesn’t have a wife to calm him down. It’s sickening,

When I was younger, I thought the dark ages were over and the Internet would bring us equalizing information. But humans haven’t changed in thousands of years. The witch hunters and the flat earthers, the cruel and hateful and those without imagination or critical thinking skills never died. They’re still here with us, reincarnated into a deadly 21st century variety.

A sad state of affairs. If only those witches could have cast a few spells. 💔

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Sage advice; we're way to quick to use an ongoing tragedy to promote our own hobby horses. That said, I don't think it's prudent to *completely* abandon those talking points until things have settled down:

-Choosing which charity to support; some are total grifts, some do a great job allocating resources to those most in need. Which are still run competently, and which are run on a basis of equity?

-Evidence for suspected cases of arson cannot meaningfully be gathered when all the dust has settled.

Again, it's way too easy to only pay attention to culture war related issues, and to forget the real tragedies. Thanks for your reminder to stay human.

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You neglected the obvious fact that this is God's punishment for Trump about to assume the Presidency (joke! - I hope!).

But I've said the following before: "I feel that there's something futile every time I see a social media post saying "DON'T DO THE ATTENTION-SEEKING THING!". It's kind of like preaching temperance at a keg party."

Really, like the "War Prayer" you might as well write it:

"Let someone else get those sweet sweet "like"s. Forego the lifeblood of social media, the retweets, the clout, the INFLUENCE. Give up all those followers to someone else who will do it even as you won't. Be content in your humble virtue, resist the cheap rewards of the braggart vice. Let not the path of hot-take temptation stain your timeline ..."

I don't think you tell college students to avoid fornication too, but I suspect that'd be about as effective, Brother Jed (famous college preacher).

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