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Right Angle: Backstage (09-14-2021)

The men of Right Angle convene in an estrogen-poor environment to hash out this week’s slate of episodes.

Right Angle: Backstage (09-14-2021)

The men of Right Angle convene in an estrogen-poor environment to hash out this week’s slate of episodes.

33 replies on “Right Angle: Backstage (09-14-2021)”

So Scott was so impressed with Romney’s civil treatment of Blinken in the congressional hearing. It was just so appropriate of Romney to give Blinken the honor due to Blinken’s office. Romney couldn’t give President Trump the kind of respect that was due to HIM in his office as POTUS!! I wonder if Scott is vying for the position of the Liberal Sherpa who used to be on Tucker Carlson’s show. Watch some Conservative sites Scott. It won’t hurt you. You’ve stayed at the CNN fair tool long.

What fairy land is Scott in, they are political prisoners, they are being held in violation of there civil rights, what the hell. There is footage of them being tortured in there cells, wake the f up Scott.

When Scott has not heard about a particular story or topic, he remains quite agnostic until the details are brought forth. This simply proves that most right leaning sites are not even covering this story even a little, and the left ones not at all.
It also means, sorry Steve, that Scott doesn’t go to PJ too often. Too busy watching CNN and MSNBC and C-SPAN so that I don’t have to do it.

… and I both like and appreciate that. There’s always the danger of the echo chamber and that danger is considerable. It’s more important to get real information than it is to hear only the things you want to hear.

We all have it to varying degrees but I’m always cognizant and wary of confirmation bias. I want real, not tasty, information. Anything else is just gossip and in the Marines we called gossip “scuttlebutt”. It’s named after the cask in a ship that corresponds to the office water cooler for a reason.

So I have no problem with Scott being a little obtuse when he hears something he has no direct experience with and I think it’s a good thing to hear his more measured, more reasoned and more two sided approach. Even when I don’t agree with him, I still think it’s a good thing to hear and to keep an open mind to other views.

If those other views are tested and found wanting, then they are. If not then it was even more important to hear them. Scott keeps us honest and that’s a very important role indeed.

Tortured in their (not there, their, but whatever) cells? Really? There’s video? Have you seen it? I’d like to see that for myself. I’m not a torture freak, I have other reasons which I will explain. I mean no reflection on you is intended but that just seems so unlikely that I reserve the right to believe it until I’ve seen it with as Bill so often puts it “My own lying eyes.”

Here’s why that’s important and why it means something more than just someone is getting beat up somewhere. Which often happens in jails and has nothing to do with politics. Or actual torture. It’s simply a byproduct of the environment and one of the reasons it’s a very good idea to stay out of jail if you can. Unless you’re tough enough to actively defend yourself without incurring further charges. It’s still a crime to assault and batter other people even in a jail and can get you a fresh felony charge defending yourself. I’m saying this because …

When people are no-shit tortured for purposes other than extracting information that is an indication they are not going to survive the experience and come back out, tell us all about it and display their scars, missing teeth or whatever. It’s pretty hard to fake a description of even waterboarding unless you’ve seen it or had it done to you but waterboarding is a means of EXTRACTING information not INFLICTING torture. Hurting people just to be hurting them is a very specific kind of action and if that’s being done I would like to verify it to a reasonable degree of certainty. It’s not a trivial accusation.

That said, it’s not at all uncommon for jailors to place people they don’t like, for whatever reason they don’t like them, in with violent or aggressive prisoners and turn a blind eye to a beating or two. That is also not actual, real torture, its just the meanness inherent in some people. It doesn’t feel any better from the victims standpoint but it is a different thing to real torture nonetheless.

Too, jailors are generally too savvy to actually abuse prisoners with their own hands. They leave that to other prisoners as a rule but that still doesn’t fit the description of “torture” that is occurring for political reasons. Actual torture of political prisoners is exceedingly rare in the United States. Especially in Federal lockups.

Federal officers working in those lockups know very well they can face charges too. So they usually take steps to put space between themselves and that sort of violence.

So allegations of torture are not trivial nor should they be tossed about lightly and hyperbolically to make political points. If torture is occurring to Americans in custody in American Federal detention by American officials in any capacity and there is video evidence of that I would really like to see it for purposes of analysis.

Bill’s right, there are safeguards in place to prevent an insane or addled President from destroying the world with an unmerited order for a nuclear strike of any sort. That is entirely too much power and too much risk to trust to a single man, any single man. I’m not going to go into those safeguards because the way to defeat a lock is to know how it works and I’m just not completely certain how much of the process is public knowledge. But those safeguards are there and they are very effective. There’s no need for the C-JCS to try to augment or skirt them.

It doesn’t matter if the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS), the highest commander in the military thinks the Commander in Chief, the civilian President is unfit. There are legal methods for determining that and that top commander is obligated by law to follow them and never, ever act on his own authority. If he does that, no matter who the Commander in Chief is at the time, he must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Why?

Because the top military commander is a fallible human being TOO. If you excuse Milley then the next time any C JCS thinks he has reason or says he has a reason, whether valid or not is immaterial — He can usurp the authority of the President of the United States of America. This is how you get a military that is beyond the control of the civilian government. This is how you end up with military coups. This is how you end up with a military that second guesses its civilian leadership and acts arbitrarily on its own volition.

This is how you lose control of the military attack dog and it turns to bite you.

If Milley did what he’s being accused of, that is a greater threat to our Republic than anything a bunch of face painted, buffalo-horn wearing nutjobs could possibly have accomplished last January 6th.

I say “if” because Milley like every other American deserves to be heard, investigated, tried if the investigation indicates a crime was committed and the Rule of Law fully applied to him. The Rule of Law is what must determine if Milley is guilty or not and if so what his punishment should be. It is that very Rule of Law that General Milley appears to have flaunted and ignored thinking himself above it. He’s not. Even so it protects him the same as it protects the rest of us and it must be used to hold him accountable the same as it would anyone else.

We are dangerously over-empowering the Court of Public Opinion and that needs to stop too. The public needs to be informed to prevent the concealment of wrongdoing but it is not up to public opinion to take corrective or official measures. If that were the case then we might as well be governed by Facebook “likes” rather than The Rule of Law. That is as hazardous to our Republic as anything else.

First off … I WANT that T-Shirt.

Secondly … Embarrassing my kids in public was one of my favorite pastimes when they were growing up. NOT humiliating, embarrassing. I didn’t belittle them or attack their own self esteem and didn’t try to pound them down in front of other people. I would do things that indirectly embarrassed them like putting on a display — One of my favorites was my “retarded hair-lip hunchback” act. I was really good at it too. I kept them from getting big heads and from putting too much emphasis on the opinions of others. The act was funny but you needed to grow a certain amount of hide to see the humor. If you were so caught up in your own petty ego that you didn’t see the funny side then I’d just go ahead and cauterize that hyper-sensitive ego a bit.

I knew I had succeeded when they both started joining me in the act, playing along, and didn’t give a flying rat’s distal alimentary exhaust orifice who saw us.

Thirdly …

I don’t know what Instagram is on a personal level. I know what it’s meant to do and how it works, but I have never used it, or Twitter, or Tik Tok, or any of the rest. I’ve never loaded those things on a hand device or a computer.

I do have a Facebook account but I never post to it, I use it to keep up with other family members and it is locked to only those immediate family members I allow. I use various tricks to keep Facebook and it’s insidious software out of my world even then. I.E. if you are a Facebook user you’ll appreciate it when I say that I have never in my life seen a Facebook ad and the little icons for that and the other ‘social media’ concerns are nowhere to be found on any webpage I visit. Nor does any but a directly intentional connection to the servers for those entities ever occur in my universe.

You might think that’s a bit peculiar for a guy that makes his living in Information Technology and has been involved in/with IT to one degree or another for over 40 years.

I watched the development of that phenomena as I was there during very nearly the entirety of the evolution from punch cards to a single device you could hold in your hand. A device that had more computing power than cumulatively existed in the history of the human race up until about 100 years ago or so. I have a deep appreciation for the leap that we now call the Information Age. I understand the implications as well as any and better than most.

It was obvious to me, not a particularly social creature to begin with, that what is now known as ‘social media’ is anything but actually sociable. It’s not social except in the worst, darkest applications of the word.

So I never got started in it and I don’t miss it one bit.

OK, I may have been listening with only 1 ear since I was multitasking to the 4th power during this: what T-shirt was referenced?

I think it was Steve’s mention of one “Give violence a chance” that led to Scott’s talk about “no room for hate” stickers in his son’s school.

Give the man a cigar. Yup, I don’t wear T-shirts with writing on them but I’d like to have one of those even so.

I think the social media self esteem problem is just People or Teen magazine in the checkout racks writ large. Instead of the blond bombshell in every TV ad or magazine that an impressionable 13 year old girl can envy, now they have someone they think is their peer looking that good and making them think they’ll never match up.
No longer are just the models air brushed to perfection but our friends’ selfie-cam pocket computers are able to prefect-ize their pictures and then drip feed us the results of everyone’s work, making our own selves look just not good enough. That we’re (the royal, society wide we) doing the same thing to them doesn’t get discussed much. The perfect houses, the perfect meals, the perfect vacations… perfect lives in perfect snapshots, to hide the ugly and terrible in between the frames.

It might be a caching problem. I saw your post when I came in here, but all the others were visible too. Then I composed and posted one of the comments I left above and all of a sudden all the other comment were gone, leaving only that one of mine. So I hit SHFT-F5 and they all came back again.

Interesting. I can only see the newest comments. No matter what I do though I suspect leaving the page and coming back will adjust things.

Jah, caching issue would seem to me the most likely culprit.

We’ve all gotten used to this stuff working so well and so reliably that many are at a loss when it doesn’t. That’s not their fault, they have every reasonable expectation that things will work the same as they have before.

I well remember the days of Windows 98 when the NT kernel had not yet been adapted to non-business environments (which came with Windows 2000) and you had to reboot your computer, or just power it off because it wasn’t responsive, several times a day as a matter of course. Windows 2000 came along and we techie types were all marvelling that it had been a month or more since we were forced to do a hard restart.

Now that kind of thing is so rare that I get calls from people when their computers are acting up. And I tell them “turn it off, turn it on and call me back if the issue persists”. I almost never get a call back but I hardly ever get the first call in the first place either.

Thought BIll might do something on the CA recall, but then I remembered that they record Tuesday morning.
Bill – time to get out of Kalistan. Lot’s of space still in the USA.

I have a friend that is going to leave Cali as soon as his house is sold. 5 years and it’s still on the market! He needs the proceeds to finance a home in another state. At this point he’s hoping for a wildfire for the insurance.

My wife and I will be Cal-Exiting the first of the new year, so I was unconcerned with the outcome of the recall. If these people want to continue with the leadership which has ruined the state, so be it. I’m gone either way.
For the price I sell my home in Orange County CA, I will pay off my mortgage, completely fund the movers and the purchase of my house in Free America! I should even end up with some cash left over, in a state with lower cost of living, gas prices, and less taxation. There is no downside.

I did that in 2013 and managed to convince the family members I care about to join me. You’ll like it, I know I do.

So according to Milley and Pelosi, anyone that doesn’t do things the way they’re done in DC by the narcissistic, corrupt freaks and weirdos that inhabit DC… well, that person is, in medical terms, crazy?

Uh huh.

Having just returned from South America with a nasty lower G.I. affliction, my answer is ‘Yes…so far.’

OK, that’s funny. A little gross, but very funny.
And you’ve lost too much weight.

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