I really like reading comments from you readers – witty, smart, and on point. I have to admit and apologize that I kinda fell down on reading and moderating the last couple of months, though. We had a volunteer that took over moderation for a number of months for me so I could write more, and do some other political activism as well, but she can’t continue so it has fallen back to me again. However, I did have to delete almost 21,000 of them from an email folder I had set them with a “rule” that automatically did the routing for me (yes, I kept a lot around).
So, “Promoted from the Comments” – in the spirit of “catching up”, I’m going to aggregate some of them here. First, I wanted to echo something that Steve had left in a comment on his post “One Grokster’s Opinion is Not ‘Our’ Opinion – We are Not a Monolithic Hive Mind” in which he pointed out:
- We’re not a mouthpiece for the Republican Party but for the PRINCIPLES it says it supposedly believes in; we’re not a Party organ that will just play its tune.
- There are differences in opinion between the writers – and that’s fine with me. If necessary, I will talk to them. YOU may talk to them (or about them) in the comments.
- You don’t like what we write about you? Tell us where we went wrong about what you said or did. However, if you DID do what we reported you said or did…
And then left a comment to reinforce that when NHnative asked for we writers to comment more often instead of “writing then scooting” (emphasis mine):
This is absolutely a town square in print. And each speaker owns their words.
If you’ve got an issue with those words take it up with them. If the words get vicious or threatening, take it up with me or Skip.
And I know I do not spend much time in comments because most days I do not have the time to spend. I’ll see if I can work on that but I’m re-starting a large project so best intentions may be about as far as that goes for now.
And you can bet that I will do something about it. And as I have seen, the writers HAVE been trying to do more interacting. Which also means, I have to, once again, resurrect GrokMeetups…
Even though Steve admitted that he got caught by a parody Tweet on “Misgendering a Pet Can Result in Serious Microsubconscious Distress” , Commenter NHnative has this that still applies to what we all see what’s been done to our Society (emphasis mine):
I was just about to post this very thing.
I feel like they are turning our country into a psych ward.They spend too much time lost in their own head.. surrounded by like minded people.
They wind up in an unhealthy ‘eco-system’ if you will.. it’s an echo chamber where there is nothing at all there that we’d call ‘normal’ penetrating their bubble.
Ann Marie Banfield has “Johnny Can’t Read or Do Math, but Philanthropists Are Making Sure He Learns ‘Equity’” lamenting that schools have become Therapists instead of Educators. Yeah, that will help our students compete in the real world (see image, topmost). Commenter Julie has this stunningly sad statistic that conforms with a few studies we found that that mirror “Go Woke, Go Broke” but adapted it to “Go Woke, Go Stupid” (emphasis mine):
Dover NH. math in 2019 scores per NHDOE 38%, 2010 they were 78% …
My post, “Blogline of the Day – I’ve Been Saying This for a Long Time. It May Now Be Here” which brought up that with the Federal Bank raising interest rates, “…the INTEREST payment on our National Debt could be our largest line item in the budget”. Commenter NHnative went into the why of it (emphasis mine, reformatted):
Skip I am so glad you bring this up.
I have been wanting to see a money/finance person start writing for Grok because money and politics is essentially ONE. You cannot manage money if you don’t have a firm understanding of geopolitics and vice versa.
First of all.. we have a band of criminals in the White House that are not trying to fix anything- they are trying to break it all because they think that is how they can fix things.. And we are, like you say, getting into dangerous territory here.
I don’t think that many people get that we are not looking at INFLATION. We are looking at the decreased value of the dollar. And when you get this, then you see it’s pretty bad and scary.
We’re going to wind up like the Venezuelans if the adults in the room don’t take the wheel soon.In my opinion the Fed needs to go…we’ve been enduring a heist since the Fed was created. The printing presses need to go, we need gold backed money because as we can all see, running an economy on consumerism and debt – then printing the money to support the planet- it’s not working out so well for the diminishing American Taxpayers.
Another reason I like Donald Trump is because he has such a good knowledge of all this stuff…Joe Biden can barely speak clearly.
And one more – again from NHnative (er, she is PROLIFIC!) on Steve’s “Sex Toys for Justice!“. His post is summariezed in two sentences:
There was a time when expressing your sexuality in a public space was inappropriate. The new rule is to lay it out there and demand others acknowledge it.
It seems that the Left believes that we are mere slaves to our emotions and urges AND YOU WILL LIKE IT! Her comment (emphasis mine) was in response to a previous one:
Omg I am so sorry this is happening to you…But guess what.. stories like this are happening to darn near all of us now.
We were raised here in NH, by very conservative NH native parents– and in a red state even. My sisters went to work in the local school for no reason other than to work mothers hours and get out of the house. Now some 30 years later they are both stark raving mad Democrats. My mom says “I cannot get over how dumb they are! I did not raise these kids this way..”
Mum and I have been told not to discuss politics at the holidays or anything at all that makes them feel uncomfortable– which is just about anything and everything. Yes, it’s very stressful and we don’t even get together anymore now at this point. There are so many families today that are just destroyed.. it’s so sad.
I sounds like you need to have your sister buy out your half of the lake house. I cannot fathom being in a deal like that with her. There are plenty of lake houses out there, get yourself a new one and put a couple states between hers and yours.
Which is exactly what the Left wants – to go tribal politically instead of on the nuclear and extended family. No longer E Pluribus Unum but the Balkanization of America is their end goal. After all if no one is talking to each other, so much the easier to control them by changing Society out from underneath them (as it seems that the Government School system did to her sisters).
I’ll do the other ones later.
