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A Tale of Two Websites

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To mangle a phrase from Groundhog Day , well, it's election season...again. While lots of attention gets paid to ads and speeches, debates and town halls, interviews and more ads, not a lot of attention gets paid to candidates' websites. Which is kind of odd this far into the internet age, but also, perhaps not. Since political campaign websites became a thing, they've generally been rather lackluster, reminiscent of the mom and pop business that has a Wix site because they figure they have to in the digital age. The typical campaign website includes ways to donate (of course), ways to volunteer, a newsletter signup, a swag store, and somewhere beneath all that a fairly concise list of the candidate's achievements and policy proposals. What should be the meat-and-potatoes of a campaign is boiled down to a resume-length document that's more fat-and-sugar. This season, the official Joe Biden campaign website ( joebiden.com ) is no different. One is immediately greeted...

He Gets Us Template

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Thoughts on the GOP’s morality

This will be a post that I add to as more thoughts come   The GOP’s morality is a confessional morality. The highest good is to attest to what is good. Whether what is attested to ever follows is, at best, immaterial. At worst, failure to attain becomes a moral good, as it provides more opportunity for ever greater attestations!

king?

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Late thoughts on the Speaker of the House Humiliation

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Stepping into this subject late because I wanted to see how things played out before I stepped into anything icky. I'm glad I did. Also, I wanted to better understand the so-called concessions McCarthy made to get the speakership. But, more than anything, I’m on so many levels of disinformation, I don’t believe any of the framing around the 15 votes for Speaker of the House. Before I say more, I want to lay down that I simply do not see how the dustup damages the GOP in any sense with independents or winnable Democrats. This is inside baseball that those sorts don't even follow, much less remember two Novembers from now. The importance of the speakership vote can be and has been very easily overstated. Moreover, nothing about the vote was ever going to do diminish the prominence of figures like Matt Gaetz or Lauren Boebert, just as it didn’t raise the profiles of Michael Cloud or Anna Paulina Luna.  If the 20 holdouts had only gone for two or three rounds—that is, if McCarthy ...

What Kind of Women Do Men Love?

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Scripture and the Big Screen may offer some answers.  Recently, I was mulling over the not-inaccurate stereotype of powerful men carrying on with subordinate women. Some popular forms of this trope include: the corporate executive who takes his secretary as a mistress the college professor who is sleeping with his coed grad-student assistant the manor lord slipping behind the curtains with the scullery maid Then today, I saw an accurate tweet from Andrew Stratelates: Men don’t really care if the female lead is that attractive. As long as she’s a badass. https://t.co/J0Q06pbC7N pic.twitter.com/KZlkFYU7ni — Andrew Stratelates—Trad Anglican ⚓️ (@AStratelates) October 17, 2022 If the tweet is not visible (or deleted) Andrew responds to a post asserting that chuds only love strong female characters when they are conventionally attractive and conform to the male gaze by posting posters of Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 and Sigourney Weaver in Aliens. In the pictures, neither ...

Hanlon's Fig Leaf

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Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. Despite its rise to popular prominence by way of a joke book , the concept of Hanlon's Razor has won credibility among many very serious people. No doubt, some who cite it with reverence believe the maxim to be coined by a respected philosophical thinker and not, as the case seems to be, some rando from Scranton.   The adage as made popular in the early days of the internet goes like this:  Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.  The base notion holds some truthiness, no doubt. Winston Churchill once made a similar comment regarding the disposition of Charles De Gaulle. Then again, Churchill was a famous quipster, and no doubt intended the observation as such. My case against Hanlon's Razor isn't against a wry quip about human nature. After all, anything funny is most likely true. Rather, my issue is with the way an easy jibe has been elevated to a heuristic in absolute t...