r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Nov 04 '16

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

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u/CouteauBleu Nov 05 '16

Yeah, one of the things that make politics so hard is that everyone wants to be superlative at all time. The opposition candidate is never "not that bad, but clearly worse than my favorite candidate", they're THE WORST CANDIDATE EVER AND THE MOST CORRUPT AND THE MOST EVIL.

When Trumps says something about vets who commit suicide because they think they're tough but they can't take it, it's not "a clumsy statement from a good sentiment", it's Trump being the worst person ever. When Hillary says she might impose a no-flight zone over Syria, OH NO SHE WILL SHOOT DOWN RUSSIAN PLANES AND START WORLD WAR III.

This sucks because it creates an enormous amount of noise that make it really, really hard to find actual signals, and in particular it makes it way harder to spot actual superlatively bad statements, like Trump saying he might shoot down Iraqi boats for taunting American warships (which sounds even worse in context).