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
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