It basically doesn’t matter where I go nowadays online or off, comments go like this
1/ 50% of the commenters take the red side and use it as an opportunity to conflate it with the blue side being pro/anti trump/putin/racism/xeno/lgbtq/etc
2/ 50% of the commenters take the blue side and use it as an opportunity to etc
3/ OPTIONAL, you *may* have the odd one or two comments from someone local to the event with some first hand knowledge, it usually won’t fit in with either the red or blue team or the article itself, so it will simply be ignored… go back 24 hours later and it is often gone.
EG there basically isn’t any debate, it’s a pre riot shouting match and that’s all there is.
My first flying experiences were on stuff like this (which I suppose dates me quite badly, but perhaps it also explains an early love of harleys..lol)
and that’s what you would see out of the window, props turning, piston engine sound and propeller sound and shake, flames from the exhaust (specially at night) you walked to and from the plane <> terminal, your ticket and passport were checked by the stewies as you entered the plane because basically everyone could mingle in the airport itself, the smells were oil and high octane, not kerosene, and the one that personally stands out most is there were rivets everywhere and neatly labelled access hatches all over everything.
Flying passenger was one step away from flying bomber, they were basically very similar planes.
And of course there were apocryphal stories, because most of the commercial pilots were ex air force bomber pilots, so you got stories about Frankfurt TC chiding a BOAC pilot for not knowing his approach vectors, and asking hadn’t he ever been to Frankfurt before, to which the BOAC pilot replied “Many times, but I never tried to land, we were dropping bombs…”
Everyone recognised the connies and super connies (back then you could tell the car make from a silhouette too) because of the look of the tailplanes, and everyone liked them because the bigger slower 3 bladed props (you don’t want a prop tip going much over supersonic) made for a smoother ride… earlier planes shook as much as early helicopters, we’re talking wooden roller coaster levels of shake here.
Nevertheless, I’ve been in endless red / blue team arguments with people who have never flown prop or turboprop, only tubofan or turbojet, about what is was like to fly connies and what they were good at and crap at.
Just last week some guys got in a fight serious enough for the ambulance and po-po to be called, over whether star wars or star trek is the greatest.
politics has been the same way for at least 20 years, you’re red team or blue team and the other team are all fucking inbred paedo scum.
sport of course has gone the same way for at least 30 years.
Long and short of it here is that debate and dialogue and discussion and communication are all dead, it’s a moot point whether or not the MSM was a leader or follower or just went with the flow on this, the damage has been done and I’m reminded of biblical tales of the tower of Babel.
They’d have been doomed anyway as stone isn’t strong enough to support its own weight to build something to orbit, nor is steel, nor is anything else we know of, but, a lot would have been learned in the attempt.
But either way it’s either all fiction and god doesn’t exist, or it’s not fiction and right there god sowed the seeds for much of mankind’s future troubles by *deliberately* making it impossible for all to communicate… so god ain’t good and caring and loving… oh hello, I just made a red / blue team argument.
Yellowstone, I’ve mentioned it a lot here lately, same shit, either it’s all alarmist and its never going to happen, or its game over man, and it’s frankly impossible to have a sensible debate about the old faithful webcam that’s less than a year old and donated free by Canon still not working (two weeks now) and the work crews will get around to it when they can spare the cherry picker, which may be next week or may not, it’s not like anyone gives a fuck.
Because that leads you into a debate about all the anomalies in the seismic recordings, they could be full of anomalies and have the wrong calibration and so on simply because nobody really gives a fuck.
Of course, that makes it impossible to use that data for its intended purpose, to study the caldera and to possibly predict any major activity, it doesn’t have to be fuck all is going to happen / game over man they know it’s a cover up.
It doesn’t *have* to be, but it is, because we don’t have intelligent debate.
The thing that should terrify you is this, it doesn’t matter if red team or blue team and their policies prevail, THEY ARE BOTH WRONG, and they are both wrong simply because they exclude debate, and that makes intelligent and nuanced and dynamic responses impossible, all the good stuff, by definition, gets sent to /dev/null… hell I (and about a thousand other geeks) used to call myself Dave Null because it was creeping into the IT trade as soon as all the fucking AOLers and the rest got online.
Yet again we have a fake story about the dangers of chiiillldruuuun using tinder maps, fucking crickets about fuckbook, so I’ll suspect fuckbook of planting the story about tinder, and that’s par for the course with everything, I don’t give a fuck about uber, but I suspect the constant bad press is not entirely dissociated from a competitor / enemy, actually I suspect it’s a damn sight more than that, I suspect there is a close association, but nobody will talk about that… there are “waymo” important things to rant about (sic)
Intelligent discussion and debate has now become impossible, everything has become sectarian, but there are so many lines and divides that society now is like safety glass, when it breaks it won’t be into several large lumps with sharp edges, it will be thousands of tiny shards, and good luck to anyone who thinks they can take advantage of that and get a whole bunch of those shards to unite under one banner.
It’s seems, once again, Life of Brian was eerily prophetic… splitters..
I know of a small local business, A, run by a man and staffed by 3 more, who has one customer which is another local business, B, run by two wimminz and staffed by two more (all of whom are divorced and hate men), so B supplies material to A that A treats in certain ways and returns to B, the problem is, B doesn’t like A because they are all apparently misogynists, unfortunately A is the only game in town, so B is forced to do business with A.
A has now taken to sending his wife to deal with B, because no matter what A does, B will not listen, and will not supply A with suitable carefully handled material of the correct sizes, it’s always hacked off and crumpled and often too small, A’s wife, being a wimminz too, just lets it roll off her back and is happy to go three time to collect materials to do a job that could have been done right first time.
I’m a bit out of the loop here so I don’t know if B are too retarded to get something so simple right, or if B just refuse to do anything that a man (A) says to the letter, so deliberately ignores them.
B is using material at a rate of 200% over what they should, and taking five days to get product back that could be done next day.
A is getting to the point where even with his wife handling all interactions with B, he’s considering blacklisting B as a customer.
Classic example of everything I have been talking about here, though in this case I can sympathise with A, he is just trying to do a job and get paid and not fuck around.
It gets troubling because B isn’t the only retarded customer that A has, and put all together all the B’s add up to just over 50% of A’s customers and turnover.
A tells me I am *lucky* not to have many / any customers like B, I tell A luck has fuck all to do with it buddy, why do you think I probably only work 25/30 hours a week…. I have always purposely avoided putting myself in any place where I *had* to work for a B to stay afloat.
A’s face closes down and he tells me I just don’t fuckin understand, it’s not like I’m running a *proper* business or anything.. A storms off.
Some time later it occurs to me that A only stopped by to ask me if I could do something for him, we never got to that because he started venting about B, and because I didn’t pick the right side he walked out.
Yesterday I unsubscribed from my last active internet forum, yet another warning about fucking profanity, it wasn’t directed at anyone, they just don’t like cuss words and that is all OK, their site, their rules, and I’m all good with that, but it fucking comes to something when you get warnings and posts deleted on a harley specific site for saying fuck and bastard and shit, so I’m outta there and so long and thanks for all the fish… and along with me goes my politically incorrect 40 years of engineering experience and 30 years of riding harley experience, I guess they can do without me.
Today for shits and giggles for the first time for at least 5 or 6 years I went back to look at a board (*s*n*t) that I used to frequent heavily 20+ years ago, then around 18 years ago the trolls and aolers and politically correct asswipes moved in, it got all sectarian and name calling, and around 10 years ago activity dropped off a cliff, so I stuck my nose in today and saw, lo and behold, literally 1 post a month or less, and a good proportion of what was there was still one or two of said asswipes, still going on about me, even though I walked away a decade ago… yup, the ones who fucked it still going on trash talking those who gave them shit when they first turned up and starting crapping all over everything like pigeons… ten years after everyone else quit and moved on (or died in some cases, we weren’t all young 20 years ago)
Nobody gets to pay the full consequences of their actions any more, and everyone else sees everyone else always get away with everything, so they think fuck it, sauce for the goose…
Pay attention to the non participants in the red / blue schism, they are the *only* ones who are not necessarily the majority part of the problem.
They aren’t talking because nobody else wants to talk.
They are the ones everyone else should have been including and listening to.
Enoch Powell, rivers of blood.. when interviewed a few years later and asked for his thoughts, he said when I made that speech and gave those numbers for the future numbers of immigrants, everyone said I was being insanely alarmist and vastly over estimating the future numbers, now that that period of time has come to pass, we know for a fact my numbers were much lower than the actual numbers that came to pass, so that is my only regret, everything else I stand by, I just wish I had been more extreme, more forceful, and more ACCURATE in my predictions.