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Richard S Russell Premium

A lefty (both senses) SF fan retired from a career in public service, currently living in Madison, Wisconsin, a state so wonderful people are willing to put up with the winters just to live here.

Recent Comments

  1. about 12 hours ago on Pearls Before Swine

     You obviously are picking out some bits to support your view and ignoring others if they don’t.

    I think you’re looking in the mirror.

    Think of it this way. Suppose you buy a dozen eggs, which you think of as a perfect dozen. You look at 11 of them, and they’re all in great shape. All I have to do to point out that they’re not a perfect dozen is direct your attention to the 1 cracked one you’ve been ignoring. So sure, I pick out the parts that don’t make a lick of sense and call your attention to them. Why waste my time on the other stuff?

  2. about 13 hours ago on Frazz

    Well, I’m retired now, so I do spend a lot of time in front of my computer. But I like to think that that time is actually accomplishing something, even if I’m not getting paid for it. I guarantee you I never had that much free time when I was a working person, which these two characters are supposed to be.

  3. about 13 hours ago on Pearls Before Swine

     What, you can’t accept that he could be truly killed but come back, even within what was written that he said?

    No, I can’t accept that he could be truly killed but come back, because it’s impossible. All I was doing was pointing out the inherent contradictions in the fable you’ve fallen for, starting with swallowing the impossible part.

     you can’t accept that they hadn’t understood or failed to have faith in what he said, when confronted with the horror of death by scourging and crucifixion, confirmed by a Roman centurion who stabbed him in the side to be sure?

    Stop and look at what you’re saying. The guy that they’d been following day and night for three years promised that he’d be coming back from the dead. They had his word on it, the word of a guy whose every single word up to that point they had totally fallen for. And not a single one of them wanted to pitch a tent, set up camp stools, bring a picnic basket, sit back, and be an eyewitness to the greatest wonderment to ever occur in the history of the world? None them? Despite his promise that he would?

    Put yourself in the position of a disciple. You’re saying that you, a thru-and-thru True Believer™, would’ve just shrugged and said to yourself “Oh, well, I guess he got the dying part right, because he’s clearly dead, but only an idiot would believe he’d come back from that, so he must’ve been just bragging or lying about that bit. Guess I’ll just have to get back to the fam and farm. Too bad. Fun while it lasted. I’m sure not gonna waste any of my precious time watching to see what happens within the next three whole days, which is such a huge commitment compared to the measly, puny three years I’ve already invested.”

  4. about 13 hours ago on Non Sequitur

    No, but DD is always ready with all the facts and analysis when something big is coming down. I think this sort of fluffy stuff is just not worth his time.

  5. about 13 hours ago on Monty

    For the same reason that you drive rather than walk to go grocery shopping.

  6. about 13 hours ago on La Cucaracha

    I’ll bet the showrunners were rubbing their hands in glee when ChatGPT was announced. “Finally, we don’t have to pay those greedy human writers for scripts we can just get for free from an AI.” That’ll last until about a month after they actually try to use any AI-generated scripts.

  7. about 13 hours ago on Frazz

    Works in the other direction, too. You may look quite a lot like your little sister right now, kid, but give it about a decade.

  8. about 13 hours ago on Doonesbury

    I was one of the few non-drinkers in my fraternity. When we’d get pledge-trip visitors from other chapters, they would occasionally get involved in beer-chugging contests. When we went on our own, I was invited to participate in one, but I said that I didn’t drink beer but would gladly chug Coca-Cola against any of them who wanted to give it a go. It was always a lot of fun to watch them once the bubbles kicked in. (I never lost; I chalked it up to my rigorous training regimen.)

  9. 1 day ago on Doonesbury

     it’s not true that clerics’ “paychecks depend on suckers.”

    Where else do you think they get their money from? Last time I checked in, God hadn’t been in the habit of just handing it out to his employees. (Kinda too bad about that, tho, because then we’d have some tangible way of measuring which ones were doing it the right way, because they’d be coming in for the periodic bonus or performance award.)

  10. 1 day ago on Frank and Ernest

    Well, there isn’t sufficient space in this comment section to go into detail about how mistaken you are and why, but let me aim you at a couple of books that can explain things in detail: Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress , by Steven Pinker, and Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, by Hans Rosling.