Overheard political conversations

At Burger King yesterday, in California.

These were Tea Party-leaning old dudes.

Person 1: "So when these Democrats look at California, why don't they see all the problems with it?"
Person 2: "Because they are emotional creatures, not logical, and a pretty speech by Obama or Brown makes them feel good."

Now, I'll agree that California is an ongoing disaster area, I like the "other side isn't rational!" ideas.

Any other good conversations you've overhead?

Noise cancelling earbuds are a great complement to morose political fatalism in my experience.

Note that I can boil down to a cute few lines of dialogue like you did, but there's a strong pro libertarian and pro Ron Paul sentiment going amongst my co-workers. Something about that ultra-rational humanity-denying philosophy seems attractive to the more literal minded programmers. So I have to hear a lot of crap about the gold standard and how America screws businesses.

There's nothing ultra-rational about a rejection of important, relevant data when building your models.

The salient point of XPav's original quote as that these two idiots are starting with a false premise: liberals don't see any problems in California. Making up false positions for your political opponents isn't at all rational.

"I don't like most talk radio because it's all just bias and opinion, twisting real events to make things look different than they really are. That's why I only listen to Rush Limbaugh, because all you'll ever get from him is the god's honest truth." -- Over-the-Road driver trainer, fifteen minutes into our seven day ride together. It could be said the dude was talking to me, but I wasn't taking part in that conversation, so he basically talked to himself all that week.

To tangent for a sec -- what's with the term "over the road"? "OTR Driver" seems kinda synonymous with "driver", unless there are some who drive under the road.

Rather than delve into the etymology of the term, I'll just tell you how professional drivers currently use it. Truck drivers (and the companies they work for, and job listings etc) typically categorize their work three different ways:

Over the Road usually means driving 48 states, and/or sleeping away from home pretty much every night while on the job. When a driver goes over the road it basically means she gets into her truck and doesn't come back till her day off. Most OTR truck drivers stay out for 2-4 weeks at a stretch, and then come home for 2-5 days (typically about 1 day per week away from home), before heading back out again.

Regional means driving within a certain segment of the country, but not coast to cost or anything. An example would be West Coast Regional, which is often comprised of 11 Western states. These jobs also require truck drivers to sleep away from home for some, or all, of the time while on duty. Most of these jobs keep drivers away from home 1-5 nights a week, and/or only return them home for weekends.

Then there's Local gigs, which typically have them home every single night.

There are other qualifiers and categories, but these are the big ones. In a broader sense, it basically just means a delivery or route that requires one to sleep away from home.

In a conversation about news media:

"I watch Fox News because it's the only channel that isn't Democrat propaganda." (After someone suggested the BBC.)

"I may not agree with everything Fox says, but they're telling the truth."

"Most news reports falsehoods and half truths. Fox News doesn't. They really are "Fair and Balanced"."

"I don't see where Zimmerman did anything racist or even 'profiling.' He saw somebody walking around his neighborhood that looked out of place and looked like they were up to no good."

I hope this isn't veering towards threadshitting but when I hear stuff that's gratingly bad like that, I dunno, I don't even try to process it ironically, I just want to turn it off. I know it exists, I don't want to ignore its existence, but actually experiencing the ionizing radiation of stupid pouring off of people like that decreases my quality of life.

Overheard in the barbershop last Tuesday, between the 70-something Midwestern barber and the Italian stereotype hanging out in the waiting area.

Barber: Did you know? I just saw on the news that by 2030, Muslims are going to be the majority race? It's already happened in places like France and Germany. There are more Muslims than Germans in Germany!
Guido: You know where they went wrong? Giving back Palestine. If Palestine was still a British protectorate, there wouldn't be any Muslims.
Barber: And then we wouldn't have had 9/11.

And people wonder how these nutjobs keep getting elected to US office. Le sigh.

I get that, believe me. I'm not trying to shit up your lives by reporting what I've heard, but the thread kinda made for those moments. I don't tend to engage them either, though I know I should; I've just conceded that it's generally a waste of time.

The dude who uttered those fantastic lines is a poster-child conservatron. Literally every opinion he expresses could have been handed to him directly from Bill O'Reilly. When you confound him with evidence that doesn't fit that narrow worldview, it's "democrat propaganda." He really is a walking stereotype, and he's not even dumb, but his stubbornness and his need to march in lockstep with other right-wingers overrides his intelligence every time.

To me, that just means "dumb" has been defined too narrowly. Someone doing that with their information inputs is dumb and an ass in very significant ways even if they also can do calculus in their head and donate their time to charities.

Whatever you want to call it, my point was that he's intelligent enough to know better, but chooses not to allow in any information that will conflict with his assumptions. I agree that doing so is a dumb thing to do. Either way, this is all pretty tangential to the thread.

As recently as five years ago I overheard two seniors in the gym locker room blaming the country's woes on rap music. Rap music! I didn't realize this actually happened outside of movies and sitcoms.

Dude, I hear that from my own friends who are in their 30s. Not blaming the country's woes, per se, but just the general "I can't believe what those kids are listening to these days, that crap isn't even music, it's just noise, it's time for my prune juice and gosh darn it where are my Depends??"

When I point out that our grandparents said the same thing about rock & roll, they look a little sheepish, but maintain that this is different. Uh-huh. Suuure.

The joke among my friends is that I'm the crochety old man standing on his lawn, shaking a rake and yelling "Darn kids!"

For the sake of clarity, when I prefaced my earlier post with an apology about threadshitting I meant like "stop me if this becomes threadshitting," not, "sorry but I have to kind of threadshit." Similarly when I say I reflexively turn away from people saying things that make me facepalm, I'm just talking about my reaction, not prescribing one. Ideally people would ignore what they know about social science and treat that shit as a teachable moment, if they're masochistic enough.

That aside. Hearing the "that isn't even music," Compaint About Rap regurgitated in a rote way, unchanged since it was first blathered in 1990 or whenever does, for a moment at least, lend a bit of credibility to the idea of "memes" in the lazy-but-pre-internet sense: little idea bubbles propagating within culture like a virus without any brains having to be switched on at any point.

When I say "that's just dumb" I don't mean "stop the thread people are being dumb," or "you have bad friends" or that I don't know people who say that kind of stuff, or that I consider myself a superior being to the various friends/relations/community members that think and talk like that.

But that sort of blithe comment causes a moment of alienation because you think, shit, no common ground here. Not caring for a type of music isn't the point at all. It's the spouting of the the cliche that's an intellectual shibboleth screaming about the other party's likelihood to reflect on their own cultural awareness, their familiarity with what philistinism is in a basic way, etc.

This is me going on a tangent Jason T. :(

I don't think some (I have no idea how much) rap is music because I hold there to be a difference between music and beat poetry.

That's not just because of a meme in the classic sense, or because it's "an intellectual shibboleth", it's because I happen to have made categories where things get filed, as is the human wont, and one thing might get filed into a different category in my head than in yours.

To discuss that constructively, you have to deconstruct and go a level down. What does it mean for something to be one thing or another? What are the reasons why something might go into one classification or another? Does the person hold that to be an inherent moral judgment, or is there a place to discuss the merits of it, and regardless, can one discuss the merits of things within mutually different classifications on their own merit?

I don't think that "The Real Slim Shady" is music. But that doesn't mean I think it's necessarily bad.

While I could be wrong, my assumption is that the overwhelming majority of times I've heard "rap isn't music," it wasn't followed by the unspoken parenthesis "it's better categorized as a form of popular art more akin to beat poetry."

Probably followed by "now that Lee Greenwood, that's music."

You're probably right. :(

I think you need to recalibrate your brain.

Your assertion does not a valid argument make. :)

You would be wrong about that, though.

So I got a haircut today. I go to a barber, he's pretty good.

I'm sitting at the barber waiting for my turn, and, of course, all the old white guys here in Republican California start complaining about Obama.

Things I learned, all of them second-hand from talk-radio.

1) Some random restaurant franchisee is going to fire dudes because of Obamacare (standard talking point)
2) Government ruins everything (says the retired Marine)
3) Obama legalized a bunch of illegal aliens to vote for him in the election (wut?)

I just sat there reading The Hydrogen Sonata, where a bunch of sentient machines that semi-rule over a semi-permissive and mostly-decadant culture decide how they're going to deal with post-human issues (where humanity is very, very loosely defined).

Two things. One: the idea that they have convinced themselves that liberals want the country to be just like California is pretty hilarious. Who actually wants that? Does anyone?

Beyond that, I wonder what they think is the cause of California's problems? Do they really even understand why California is so broken? Because the answer is not "because it's so liberal," even though (I suspect) that's what they believe.

I'd like at this point to interject that California is actually doing an ok (fucking painful, but ok) job at balancing austerity and taxes, has made a serious stab at pension reform, and is projected to have a budget surplus in a year or two, up from a really massive deficit under Governor Terminator. Thanks Governor Moonbeam! <3

I don't think California's problems can be laid at the feet of any one party or person. They are clearly systemic and have to do with our unfortunate experiments in direct democracy coupled with the history of conflict between far left and far right* (for instance Reagan v. Berkeley). I'd say that the general "liberal" mindset is a rousing success in that it has kept the state afloat for so long in spite of the problems. One example would be that our hippie-commie subsidization of higher education has led to California as the center of modern innovation that other states are only barely starting to catch up on (in Austin, Boston, KC, etc) so that the relationship of hippie-commie spending on education and true economic benefit is unequivocal.

*far left and far right in US terms, not in Euro terms. ;)

They can be laid at the feet of the dumbass voters, I think.

Other than the moronic initiative system California is starting to get a handle on some of its systemic problems. I don't think we can overstate the significance of changing the budget from a two-thirds vote to simple majority back in 2010. The Californian Republican party was into total obstruction long before all the cool kids started doing it in Washington. But we digress...

I live in a small cul-de-sac and during Halloween our neighbors have a tradition of gathering together with lawn chairs and picnic table in one of the corner houses' driveway. This is a pretty nice way to spend some time catching up with the neighbors while handing out candy in assembly line fashion to all the neighborhood kids. Since our neighbors are elderly I suspect it has the added bonus of keeping the kids off their lawns since they don't need to go house-to-house.

Anyway, two elderly gentleman had a brief discussion on politics and I could overhear one exclaiming to the other emphatically (regarding Obamacare): "It's a TAX!"

Not much of an overheard conversation but notable to me because, partly due to my neighbor's aged looks, I couldn't help but envision General Akbar as a GOP spokesman for some SuperPAC add.

I suspect they're a step behind you, because even as you wonder what they think the cause of California's problems is, I doubt that they even have the same idea of what constitutes "California's problems" as you do.

Ackbar is an ADMIRAL, sir. Have you, at last, no shame? Turbolasers at dawn!

Goddammit! First my flub in the hobbit thread re: the extended cut of LotR and now I've accidentally mangled Dr. Zoidberg's most famous cousin's rank. My nerd cred can't repel failpower of that magnitude.

OBI GYN KENOBI, YOUR MY ONLY HOPE!

(Or should I have gone with Vice Principal Thrawn?)

While getting my driver's license photo taken just now, overheard one old guy who worked at the DMV talking to another employee there:

Nerd Trolling Status: Great Success!

Battlestar Galactica was a fun show.

Alternate troll: Oh man, that's a pretty sweet mashup of Castle, Suburgatory, Chuck, Homeland, Suits, Terminator and three other losers no one's ever heard of!

I thought it was Dollhouse, Dr. Horrible, The Cape, Stargate: Atlantis, V, Cleopatra 2525, and I have no fucking idea who the other two assholes are.