Phat Unplugged

Good to hear you're slowly doing better, that's always a priority. And yeah, I gotta agree, people have gotten very personal, I'd like to avoid that!

I'm glad to hear that your health is improving. Please keep that up if you can. I have tried, perhaps not successfully, to avoid getting personal. I was a Christian for maybe 12 years, though I will admit that it wasn't your version. It was perhaps closer to jar's version.

It doesn't concern you that you have gotten so determinedly weird that people talk about it? I don't understand why people are pledging not to take note of it. Naturally we all would like to avoid getting personal and just focus on the topic, but your behavior is beyond the pale. Simply ignoring it would be bizarre.Your diabetic problems are so persistent and so severe and having such a severe impact on your health (out from work for six weeks - wow!) that I'm very surprised you're not on a drug like semaglutide. You're either getting incredibly bad care or making incredibly bad decisions.If you don't want people to comment on your behavior than stop behaving like an insane person. If you don't like people getting personal then don't get personal yourself, for example byt calling us "a bunch of humanist elitists" (Message 1186) or this from your current message. You don't mean "critical thinkers and skeptics" in a good way. You mean that we're using critical thinking to reject the truth, in this case the truth of your brand of Christianity, as if religion should in any way be a political issue in this country. It's just more of your crazy thinking.And, not speaking for others, I have not chosen Harris over Trump. I have chosen "anyone who is sane and values democracy and hasn't committed fraud or rape or theft and isn't a racist" over Trump. Even Brian Kemp or Ron DeSantis would be better candidates then Trump. Trump would only be the better candidate if he were running against Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Green, George Santos, Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas.--Percy

Although this mentions the election, it is mostly directed toward Phat. So this seems to be the appropriate thread.This morning, I read a post by John Pavlovitz. It was about the upcoming election, and about why it seems so close.I'll note that while I am not a Christian, I am also not anti-Christian. John Pavlovitz is one of the Christians whom I regularly read. How is the Race So Close?He starts by giving a comparison of the two candidate, with one paragraph for each: Pavlovitz continues with several paragraphs about why he believes the race is still close. I'll quote just one of those: That's the paragraph that, in my opinion, comes closest to describing Phat.Many of us have noticed the change in Phat. As Percy suggests, these changes could be due to his diabetes. But it could also be because Phat has been listening to the purveyors of doom and gloom. John Pavlovitz is a much more optimistic Christian, and I seem to remember a time when Phat came across as more optimistic.To paraphrase Jesus, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle that it is for a social conservative to enter the kingdom. And Phat has been listening to social conservatives.And, to be clear, I am not trying to tell Phat how to vote. He gets to make his own decision on that. I am trying to tell him how some of us see him.

When I came back to this forum (Not that I posted a lot in the past, during a time when Creationism was a bigger problem), I really enjoyed Phat's contributions to this place and what he had to say.I still say that he's a nice guy and I look forward to engaging with him more, despite the fact that our views on things have pushes further apart.But also, especially in this past half year, he's been getting heavily bashed as this place has cooled down and he's one of the only contributors that's on the 'other side' of things.I get that we don't agree with him, I get that he's been getting more extreme and in many cases, disjointed in his responses and expressing his views and substantiating them with evidence. But more and more, it's feeling like a beat down.I personally am here to have as civil a discourse as I can muster, and sometimes, as with Candle, I go a bit too far with that, but I also think, Phat is staying around, because deep down, I feel he has respect for this place and for a lot of the people here and his history here. But were I in his place, and I was getting this kind of treatment, I would have left very quickly, because I would've gone "Fuck this, I've got better things to do"He's struggling, that's for sure, and to most here, he's making some really bad decisions in life, but generally, you don't help a person by slapping him with the stick.I might not be a Christian, but I believe in compassion and caring for a fellow human being. What's been going on here, even if deep down trying to shake him up and get him to really think about what he's doing and the choices he's making. Is not that, it's painful to read at times how ever so often discussions get into very personal territory.And it fuels the disconnect. I read a post a month ago talking about Jehovah Witnesses, and how the goal wasn't for them to convert people, because that rarely to never happens, it's to drive down that they are alone in a way, fighting an enemy only to return to their group and find the support they need, so that support becomes more important to them, invaluable in fact.With the problems that Phat's facing in life, he needs support more than anything, even if right now, we disagree on his political stance, on his choices, on his methods of debating.Even if he votes for Trump, I'd rather be here, knowing that when it got down to it, I helped him push for a healthier life style and feeling better, despite knowing I disagree with his political choices and his more extreme view on them.When push comes to shove, and in some weird event, Trump becomes the next president and he does crazy shit like we all expect him to do, because that's what he does, his cognitive abilities seem to be fading as well, he rambles like a crazy person. I think Phat will realize that he made a mistake in voting for him.I don't think I've ever been this passionate about anything on here before like this, I'm not a very smart guy, brain damage causes issues with my memory. But feeling wise, I really think Phat doesn't need to be told he's wrong in so many ways that are mean, to be called stupid in so many ways.I know for some, patience is gone, because it's been going on for a while now, but I think, in this unique situation where he's basically the only one on the other side to speak, the approach requires a lot more compassion and care, even if only to show him that he's got a place here.Like I said, I think he respect a lot of you deep down, and that's why he keeps coming back, he might even consider some of you friends.It's tough, this situation, but I personally just don't think the current approach will have any pay off.And that's my two cents on the whole matter. Sorry for hijacking my response to you, nwr, to vent my view on things right here, I don't think you're wrong in what you're saying, just the whole situation has been slowly boiling up in me in various other parts of the forum.

I hope most people who have known Phat for a long time (in my case, since 2003) don't really care who he votes for. It is what has happened to him as a person that we care about.--Percy

Watching Phat over the past few years seems like a classic case of self-radicalization based on selfishness, ignorance (fueled by a firehose of disinformation) and an almost total lack of empathy. Now he is lost forever to this bizarre cult and while they make up only about 25% of our population they can still permanently damage our civilization. Every time he shows up he seems more radicalized to me.

I've mentioned this before, even recommending the documentary personally to Phat in this very same topic. Reposting my Message 231 (12-Jul-2023): It's still available for free on YouTube, Roku Channel, Pluto, and other minor streaming channels and for rent on a couple others (fandango, apple TV) -- search on your own streaming device to find it.Phat replied at the time: More specifically, Jen Senko's father was cured by his wife unsubscribing him from the right-wing messages he was getting (kind of like unfriending such sources on Facebook) and not replacing his radio when it broke (not sure whether she had engineered that too) so he couldn't listen to Rush anymore as well as always tuning the TV in to more sane fare.&nbps; PS

The documentary doesn't mention it, but I think her father must have had the form of dementia where you forget things in backwards order. Events of the not very distant past fade first, then older events, and so on. Memories of childhood through early adulthood tend to remain very clear.I say this because he didn't care that his radio became broken during their move to assisted living, and his radio was ancient anyway. That he used a radio with an analog dial instead of a digital device or streaming on a computer (this would have been around 2005, I think) meant that he hadn't kept up with what was going on around him for a long while. Then when he was in the hospital for his gallstone procedure his wife unsubscribed his email from his conservative newsletters, and she subscribed to several liberal ones, and when he returned home he didn't seem to notice. His wife also reprogrammed the TV remote so it would no longer get Fox News (my guess is that she took Fox News off the favorites list) and he didn't seem to notice that, either.I've known people with this kind of dementia. They're always very much engaged in the moment, but if you spend a lot of time with them (say, by living with them for several years) you learn that they can only remember the topic of conversation for about 3 to 5 minutes. After that it's gone and they have to wait until they can pick up on the thread of a new conversation, or maybe rejoin the old conversation if it continues long enough. You'll hear a lot of the same stories over and over again. And whatever were their biggest concerns in their 40's, 50's and 60's seem to just melt away.I do agree that Phat has become caught up in the conservative tempest of anger and hate that has captured much of the media, from radio to TV to podcasts to streaming. To him, others are not just people with a different point of view. They're a threat to the country's very foundations who are blind and don't deserve any respect.The history of the conservative movement was interesting, too, even though I lived through the period she talked about. The most important part to me was where Ailes, I think it was, built a conservative coalition from groups of single-issue people, issues like abortion, religion, law and order, guns, etc. I was a Reagan guy not because I was conservative but because Carter, as nice a guy as he was, just felt like he just wasn't up to the task. It didn't seem that Reagan's more threatening positions, such as on abortion and on supply-side economics, would see much headway in the current environment.While inflation abated and the country resumed a robust economic track under Reagan, it was his policies that initiated and institutionalized the transfer and concentration of wealth with the rich. And it was Reagan who killed the unions, or at least got the process started, when he decertified PATCO. Not that unions hadn't gone a bit overboard by that time. A friend who was an electronic technician at Raytheon described for me how when a new piece of equipment was delivered to their lab, they couldn't touch it until the right union people arrived to lift it off the floor and place it on the lab bench.My own experience with unions was on a trip as a helper delivering an 18-wheeler of IBM paper into New York City. The building was a skyscraper, so down in the basement loading dock we'd wheel each pallet of paper onto the elevator where the elevator operator, sitting on a chair in the corner, would punch the button for the right floor. This wasn't a problem until 5 o'clock approached, at which point he announced that he only worked until 5 PM and that we'd have to resume in the morning. A $100 bribe solved the problem, and that was a lot of money back then.I guess I'm saying that maybe the pendulum had swung too far in one direction by the 60's and 70's, and with Reagan, who took office at the beginning of '81, things began to swing back the other way, but now they've swung way too far back the other way with a huge proportion of the money flowing to the rich and the country surrendering to nut jobs who don't believe they lose valid elections and who want to scrap the constitution as long as it means they get their way.--Percy

In high school and college I worked for my father, a master carpenter and general contractor -- for 8 years every day I wasn't in school I was on the job site, so when I enlisted suddenly having weekends free was a big adjustment.In order to be able to work alongside union carpenters, my father had to join the union (I'm not sure how the rules applied to me). He had to pay union dues and pay into retirement, etc, but he could never draw any benefits because he was management. Growing up, I saw that as unfair so I didn't have a very favorable opinion of unions.My views have matured since then. For example, one time my friend was on a business trip she met and talked with an HR rep for a big construction company (she had a talent for getting to know strangers). He talked to her about the difficulty they had finding skilled workers.But I should start with her question to me: "Where do construction workers learn their trade?", to which I answered, "In their union schools." Carrying on the training traditions of the guilds (as we all learned in school), you join a trade union as an apprentice and attend union classes while getting practical experience on the job site (plus making a living), then you graduate to journeyman and increase your skill level, then you finally progress to master. In a genealogy class the teacher had a copy of her German shoemaker ancestor's journeyman's book into which each master he worked for had made entries detailing what skills he had been taught and how well he performed -- when she learned that I knew German (eg, she showed us a record for the death of a German ancestor in German but until I translated it she hadn't known that it said that he had drowned in a canal), she gave me a copy.So that HR rep had told my friend the same thing that I just confirmed. With the weakening of the unions started by Reagan the number of apprentices (and journeymen, since this is a training pipeline) getting trained by the unions also dropped leading to a reduction in the size of the American skilled work force (in construction in this case). As a result, he was hard pressed to find skilled American construction workers and had to recruit foreign workers instead. Immigrants taking American jobs, but only because there weren't any Americans with the skills that are needed. Skills that used to be taught here, but no longer without the unions. Yeah, there are vocational schools and community colleges (I saw construction classes listed), but they are hardly up to the task like the unions were.And it's not a case of those immigrants doing the jobs that Americans refuse to do; eg, from my Message 534 (21-Jan-2019) reply to Faith: Rather, this is a case of immigrants doing jobs that Americans can no longer do because they cannot learn the skills due to the loss of the institutions which used to provide that training. It's like the Catch-22 I recognized even in high school: you cannot get a job if you don't have work experience, but you cannot get that work experience without having gotten a job.Which makes the threat of mass deportations of those skilled immigrant workers so dire to the American economy. Who's going to replace those essential workers if so few of us have the required skills? Even farm work requires skills which take years and we've already seen Florida farmers unable to harvest their crops because so many farm workers are leaving the state because of rabid GOP anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Tonight I am watching the debate between Harris and Trump. I am watching an angry and bitter old man being skillfully dismantled by an intelligent woman who has done her homework. She won the debate and my vote. About a year ago I was convinced that Trump was an antichrist. My opinion changed due to the persuasion of.some conservatives whom I respected. She sold me based on her intelligence and her lack of hate. The commentators pointed out her comment of Trump being a foil for dictators who fed his ego. His propensity for exaggeration and lies was painfully obvious. Maybe he is also too old, as was Biden. He looks weak when the crowd is not his base.My only concern is for the financial future of our Nation. None of you know enough about it yet but you will learn. One advantage of Harris is she may just unify the nation rather than divide it. We may collectively endure some tough times but such ti.es do not.need division.

Which ones, and what did they do or say that brought them your respect? Compared to Trump even Attila the Hun had a lack of hate, but why are things like intelligence and hate suddenly apparent to you? It's not like they haven't been overtly out there all along? It's been painfully obvious for years, like for at least 40 years. Where have you been? And you were doing so well. Did you know there's a row of keys above the letters for typing numbers? They're real handy for discussing financial topics. Ya think? Trump thrives on chaos, and nothing creates chaos so much as warring factions.--Percy

How many years have you been in these forums predicting the imminent demise of the US economy?I have no doubt that we will see a few recessions and rebounds in the coming decades, but that is entirely normal. In fact, it is usually a good idea to let recessions happen while limiting the damage. We are still the largest economy in the world by a ways, and our nearest competitor (i.e. China) is currently going through a sharp economic downturn while facing down one of the worst demographic collapses. Are there challenges for the US? Absolutely, but almost every country in the world would want to be where the US is right now.

Bullshit. You only care about your financial future. You are horrible figuring out what is best for your financial future. Giving the rich and corporations more money will not improve your financial future.

I'm glad to hear that you were willing to reconsider. I'm not seeing any reasons for concern.Yes, the national debt is too high. But if we elect Kamala Harris, she will work to improve this. (Trump would make it worse, as he did in first time in office).