JCauto

Sounds like you speak from experience. Seems the details are what caused most of the strife then?

So you don't give credence to the numerous examples of Trump sexually assaulting women, bragging about "grab them by the <kitty>. You can do anything", the "catch and kill" scheme for Stormy and Karen McDougal that the Publisher of the National Enquirer has already testified to in court under oath, the E. Jean Carroll civil trial where it is no longer even allowed for Trump to testify that he didn't sexually assault her because it's now a matter of record within the courts...let's face it, you wouldn't accept the reality of Diaper Donnie being a sexual predator if he was in the middle of your living room doing it to your wife.

You expect there to be evidence from a third party to a two-party horizontal tango? But I reckon there would be hotel rooms being booked by said person, evidence that they were in the same town at the same time etc. So we'll just wait for the devastating evidence to be presented by the Trump Defense lawyers to disprove it. After all, he can easily disprove these intimate details, right?

You never asked. And it doesn't make the slightest difference what I think about it since I'm not one, that's up to the individual. How can I know what's going on in their head? Plus, when one debates enough online there's a distinct desire to really NOT know what's going on in other people's heads. What they're comfortable sharing is more than enough to make me despair for the limited time the human race has remaining.

Yawn. The same old BS tropes. Yes, I'm woke, no my hair's not blue, yes I cohabit with a woman and have children whose gender has not been reassigned, etc. What y'all don't "get" is that being woke is SOOOOOOOO much more than that, it's more about just having liberal and humane values that come down to "you do you". You just keep taking the most extreme examples and try to characterize everyone who's not to the Right of Jesse Helms as being "typical" of that when they're actually the middle of the road politically. It's just that you've gone so far to the Right it looks like they're tar Left.

LOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!! Without it the GOP would have a completely blank slate as their political platform. It is absolutely true that every accusation is a confession for these people. You actually do post things with a modicum of sense once in a while, what keeps you tied to these maroons?

I'm with you about the male dominance (discussed above) and the focus on college admissions. However, I don't think your claim that you can get into engineering at a decent school with a low or no SAT requirement passes muster at least to my knowledge. Engineering schools have only gotten more insanely competitive since I graduated (long ago). The DEI measures at schools are no doubt providing some dispensations for the various POC and women I would think, but I doubt it comprises very much of the overall percentage of the class. Are they worse engineers because they didn't do as well on their SATs or in high school? I know I was not great in high school but was still able to get in (lower requirements then) and scrape by just because I wasn't inspired by classroom learning (especially early in the morning). So I didn't attend, but I learned the material and became quite a competent and successful engineer because I loved the work. One reason I was successful is that I was more social than my engineering peers so was able to get better jobs and gain more responsibility quicker. The bookish nerdy guys have to take the long route. All this to say that not all good engineers are the same, you need different and diverse ones especially when you work in teams. The failure to inspire kids in maths and science and point them to why they should be interested in it via the possible careers it opens is to me a major failure of the educational system. I had an uncle who was an engineer working in the aerospace industry who took me around and showed me what he did and that literally changed my life.

If the only basis were demographics, sure. But that's not the case, as you're no doubt well aware. Your point about there being an overwhelmingly male supply of engineers though is valid and relevant here - as a civil engineer, our demographics were similarly skewed towards men and the primarily male-dominated workspaces further ensured that there were few women working in the field. I don't know if that's changing or not, suspect that if it is, it's changing slowly. There's still too few people in general getting into STEM and not enough women for sure. The male dominance in the workspace makes it also more challenging for women, another reason it's not attracting very many. As an engineer whose field involved a lot more interaction with the general populace and other sectors, I understood the value of diversity and the need for being aware of cultural, gender and other factors when designing projects and ensuring we were getting the information and opinions of everyone who was going to be affected by the project. That's just sound engineering. Perhaps in mechanical you're separated more from the users so have less need of that? Both fields are very diverse and have many different work scenarios. Working within teams to undertake major projects requires a range of skills, outlooks and abilities. Watch any pro sports team and you understand implicitly that while there are the stars who make or break the team's chances, they don't win without the lower-skilled guys doing the grunt work. Teams of all A+ Alpha Dogs are both impossible to find unless you're throwing money out of helicopters and don't play well together regardless. Engineering at least of the sort I was doing requires the different viewpoints and knowledge of women, community development experts, agronomists, rural business people, district government agencies etc. A team of all-white engineers would be ineffective.

I am still searching for "fungible talent and DEI" but can't seem to find a single article that supports this as being a feature of the DEI initiatives. It would instead seem that the idea was to diversify the talent within the organizations and keep that diversification afterwards, otherwise why would they bother with it? So I'm sure you're going to provide us with that reference, after all, you wouldn't be disingenuous and pretending to be debating but actually be acting in bad faith? I mean, if you were doing that, you'd do things like put a reference into your post but not enable it to be linked to so people wouldn't read it. However, of course, you could just say "I forgot", and then "why didn't you just copy it and paste it into a new Browser Tab?" So I did. Guess which words do not appear within that article? If you guessed "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, DEI" then you're a winner! None of those words or the acronym made it in. The reason? They weren't relevant, it was an article discussing data analytics and platforms at Boeing so that they could improve their efficiency and avoid duplication and disconnects. So you put a fake link into your response because it was by the same company pretending that it was McKinsey saying something about Boeing that presumably pointed to their issues with DEI, but in fact it had nothing whatsoever to do with DEI. Then you added an anecdote from your work and implied that this "fungible talent" idea is somehow both connected to DEI and McKinsey. It's basically a fake response with no meaning that avoids actually addressing the crux of the matter (that one of the world's leading business consultants has studied this specific issue of DEI and that it equates to far better financial performance by the companies that practice it) and instead constructs a fake response that purports to show the same people saying something different when in fact they did no such thing.

Sorry, I'm just catching up to the latest campaign being waged by the Right - I now see that it was apparently DEI that caused planes to fall apart at Boeing. I'm sure that this national campaign that seems to include every Right-Wing talking head from Tovarich Tucker Carlson to Diaper Don hisownself isn't just the latest disinformation blitz that is aiming for the 2024 election and being magnified on every media platform. I'm sure you just had a strong interest in aircraft safety and corporate performance. LOL. You guys are too easy.

I presume you're referring to the likes of myself. At least I hope so! So which rabbit hole am I down and is it something I should be concerned about? I mean, by most indicators I'm doing okay - I have a beautiful wife and kids who still speak to me and love me even though they're out of the house and doing their own things, I own several businesses and have built those with my partners and employees, I have a great group of friends in several different countries whom I enjoy and who would support me if I needed them. What's not to like? Is it because we're all "Wokies" that we're so nice to each other, pleasant to be around and successful? Perhaps that is the difference. I did work hard and was focused on achieving my objectives but fully understand that I would never have made it without the support of others, the mentorship of older friends, colleagues and relatives, the hard work of my employees, good fortune and a number of other myriad factors that are too complex to discuss while keeping eyes open. Unlike you macho men of the Right, who made it entirely on your own without any help from anyone at any time ever, and who have fought against the tides of the Woke trying to provide your dark-skinned and accented-English competitors at your expense to somehow succeed mainly through the hard work you put in (not at all from exploiting your employees). So yes, I guess we Wokies have basically joined together (like COMMIES!) to cooperate and build a better world that helps more than just the top of the pyramid and in doing so we're destroying society! At least, that is, we're destroying YOUR society, the unjust one that the diapered dolts of the Me Generation are using their stolen wealth to try to maintain as they head increasingly for their dirt naps. Don't get me wrong, I'll be headed that way soon myself, but I'll do so with a smile on my face and happy in the knowledge that the kids are alright.

When did you come to the conclusion that "modern civilization is based [on] merit"? I'd say the opposite is true - modern civilization is about removing the artificial barriers that elevated some at the expense of others that was entirely based on meritless criteria (skin color or religious preference), as well as recognizing that there were enormous reservoirs of untapped talent that hadn't been tapped because there were entire large groups of people whose otherwise merit-based progress was being impeded by unjust laws and prejudice. If you examine the evidence of the DEI initiatives, many of which were voluntarily put in place by corporations once the research showed they were based on sound principles as well as contributing to social justice. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/diversity-wins-how-inclusion-matters You will note that this research and report were undertaken and published by McKinsey, a noted communist organization dedicated to the advancement of colored and under-privileged people. That's sarcasm by the way, I know you Boomers sometimes don't look carefully before you start shouting at the computer.

Exactly! Which is why the Right opposes this 100% of the way - they're malleable (you can just redirect their anger and rage to the next target with this one being immediately forgotten), they're naive (they actually think that they're going to somehow turn the clock back to the 1950's by forcing people to only read books that would have been written during that era) and gullible (they think Donald Trump is a heroic Christian savior).

I don't get it - we're already at page 2 and the German flag dude who only posts "Deport him" hasn't showed up yet. What gives?

I think one thing that everyone is not discussing that underlies a lot of this protest is that the students and their generation are looking up at a very different world than the one we grew up in. They see houses that they'll never be able to afford to live in, skyrocketing rent that extracts most of their income and nothing but one existential threat after another coming down the pipe from catastrophic climate change to biodiversity collapse to the Singularity and these are likely to occur in their lifetimes. They feel quite correctly that they've been given a raw deal and have very little in the way of hope for the future. This protest happened to coincide with this and so provided a vehicle for the younger generations to express their anger and contempt for how the older generations have left them high and dry, and continue to play global political games without caring much about the consequences to the poor suckers who are on the receiving end of their country's weaponry. It's been abetted by a massive disinformation and propaganda campaign that was directed at them by the Russia-Iran-China coalition and which built on a century of psychological warfare knowledge and experience in media manipulation. It leverages the widespread remnants of minor anti-semitism that have existed since the Jews have and which provide fertile ground for the separation of a group as the villain for their anger. The younger generations are also much more removed from the events of WWII and have received much less information about what happened and caused that so are fertile ground for the propaganda. It also has to be mentioned that by electing the farthest Right government in her history, the Israelis are also to blame since the Netanyahu government has played in many respects right into the hands of Hamas and their handlers from Iran. I have yet to see them concerned in the slightest about what is happening in the many other countries in the world that are engaged in awful conflict where the innocent are similarly dying in droves.

What a hypocrite! You and your Right-Wing cohort have been telling us for years that a well-armed society is a polite society, and that guns don't kill people, the people firing the gun do. Texas has open carry laws too I think. So why are you denigrating the peaceful protesters when all they're doing is following their god-given right to carry around a weapon that can easily kill people if they feel like it? This is what you and your lot have been telling us is "freedom" for all these years. What therefore does it have to do with the protesters being peaceful?

No, not uncommon. But in this case, it just shows a complete lack of class. This wasn't just a random dude running his motorcycle into a wall, instead the article focused instead on the man's accomplishments, history and ties to Thailand. It's as relevant in this case as commenting on his taste in shirts. Yes, I understand that for many bottom-feeders that's all they can see when they look up from the muck, but why they feel the need to spread their filth is beyond me. I suppose that's why there are trolls.

What a loathsome individual you are - a good man who has done more during his time in Thailand than the vast majority of posters has passed and those who admired his work along with several who knew him and called him friend are here to pay tribute. You who knew nothing of he or his work choose as your contribution to the tribute to a good man's life into a bored speculation on the cause of his death, listing a number of negative possibilities despite there being zero evidence presented as to what happened. This tracks well with your other postings, showing similar depth and understanding of the subject and people involved and great empathy to those who deserve it. The saving grace is that your so-called "friends" will probably not even bother to engage in bored speculation once you meet your end, it won't merit even a passing thought in their conspiracy-filled heads.

There's a clear nexus between those willing to believe children's tales imagined from the past as actual history and those inventing new sci-fi children's tales for the latest batch of gullible fools. They rely on completely impossible scenarios that could only happen if the believer suspends their faculties and instead relies on their "faith" in the children's stories as this pleases the Big Bunny or whatever other idol or persona is the hero of these absurd tales. Must be awful to be suspended in a pseudo-reality where all these boogeymen appear out of nowhere almost daily, as the Conspiracists are busy writing the new holy books every evening while consuming who knows what sorts of dope.

A Time Traveler! Should always proofread one's post, even when you're pounding angrily on the keyboard. Yes, it's terrible the way Biden has managed to grow the economy and bring the unemployment rate down from the disasters of the Trump regime. Tell me, did you think Trump's handling of the COVID pandemic was well done?

This is what we call "clutching at straws". How about Karen McDougal?

You're being ripped off, man.

Look, I don't get a lot of practice going at people who defame Canadians. Most people are nice to us. Give me a bit of time to refine my ripostes. And of course, thanks for saying "sorry".

Did you observe the high class post I was responding to? At least he took the high road.

This is always one of the amusing things to me - often Conservatives have grown up listening to and loving rock'n'roll and have good taste in music, including this excellent song by what was the best incarnation of the Jefferson Airplane. Yet when they try to play the songs they love at their political rallies, it's just a matter of time before the "cease and desist" letters arrive from those artists that they so love, because those same artists find the policies advocated for by the Conservatives to be so appalling they don't want their music associated with it. This is why you end up with musical luminaries like Kid Rock as the top of the bill for the Republican Party. LOL.