[FRIAM] SCOTUS

[Steve Smith]

Yeh, like that...

When I played competitive tennis it was a truism that "you only get 
better by playing people better than you" and I took it seriously by 
being willing to play with people who needed someone "better than them" 
while looking for opportunities to "play up" myself.   Too many of the 
other players took the aphorism to mean that *they* should never waste 
*their time* playing down.    Of course skills and gameplay like tennis 
is not a single-valued domain and everyone actually has something to 
teach you even if overall you may have the advantage, there are things 
to learn from anyone.

Your parable about "leave it better than you found it" and 
drunk-hillbilly-car-shooting-practice reminded me of the one-liner 
"everyone who goes through this door makes me happy, some by entering, 
others by leaving!"

with that, "I'm out!" (for the evening)...

On 6/24/22 6:54 PM, glen wrote:
> I've wanted to move overseas my entire adult life. But now I'm kinda 
> inclined to stay *just because* the jackasses seem to be winning. I've 
> even thought about the Free State Project <https://www.fsp.org/>, only 
> instead of moving to a place to turn it into a libertarian dystopia, 
> move to a right-wing dystopia and try to raise its score on the 
> [u|dys]topian spectrum.
>
> Ultimately, though, I'm a fan of the old camping adage: Leave it 
> better than you found it. Anyone who moves away *now* is leaving it 
> *worse* than they found it ... like a bunch of drunk hillbillies 
> towing old cars to the forest for target practice.
>
> On 6/24/22 10:16, Steve Smith wrote:
>> Tom-
>>
>> Even before the NY CC Gun decision and now Roe v Wade, I have had 
>> more than a few people asking me similar questions.
>>
>> I don't have an easy answer.
>>
>> Well, the answer to whether *any* northern European wants to enfold 
>> us as refugees is probably "not even"... yet I know plenty who have 
>> expatriated themselves to such places without becoming permanent 
>> residents (much less citizens).  Maybe buying a villa (or whole 
>> village) in an (otherwise abandoned) village for EU$1 (anecdotally 
>> something like that happens in Italy and maybe Greece and Portugal?) 
>> will be enough of a stake to be permanent resident?
>>
>> BTW I find the Scandinavian (at least Norway, Denmark, Sweden) more 
>> appealing due to the relatively lower population density and high 
>> natural resource context, but only if I am being a selfish-greedy 
>> fellow who wants to avoid my own discomfort more than I want to make 
>> the world a better place.
>>
>> A new friend/colleague I met here is 75 and was raised in NYC but 
>> left the US as conscription raised it's head in the 60s. He came to 
>> NL and eventually naturalized, but has lived in Ireland and Iran for 
>> significant amounts of time.
>>
>> I'm still interested, myself, in what the implications are of mass 
>> defection from the US (or just red-states) by Progressives? I believe 
>> many expats around the world maintain (thinly justified) voting 
>> registration in the US, but that seems a bit questionable in several 
>> ways?    I'm also interested in the opposite flow... what if enough 
>> Blue folks purple up some Red states to shift the Senate to something 
>> more representative?
>>
>> This is fairly abstract even to me as I have plenty of red-tinged 
>> neighbors and family that I can't even begin to shift purple even if 
>> I talk myself blue (or purple) in the face with them.   Most are 
>> probably dancing in glee around the Abortion and the Gun debates.   
>> Actually, my sister and her husband are not pro-gun at all and 
>> probably as pro-choice as they are pro-life, yet somehow they voted 
>> for Trump *at least* once! They were also pro-mask/vaxx...   hmmm?   
>> I think they just like hypercapitalistic extractive industries and 
>> "owning Libs"...
>>
>> - Steve
>>
>> On 6/23/22 8:37 PM, Tom Johnson wrote:
>>> Steve:
>>> Given today's reports of the SCOTUS decision on guns, do you think 
>>> the Dutch would accept two refugees from the U.S.?
>>> TJ in Malta
>>>
>