US Politics: Russian Roulette Republican Style

[OldGimletEye]

23 hours ago, Dr. Pepper said:

The cake case was heard at the SC today. The basic outline is that a gay couple went into a bakery to place an order for wedding cakes, an item the baker sells, and were denied due to the baker claiming some sort of religious mumbo jumbo.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/us/politics/supreme-court-same-sex-marriage-cake.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

Obviously, it's not about a cake, but about discrimination.  I'm legit worried about this case as a ruling in favor of the baker opens the door for businesses to discriminate on just about everything and blame their religion for it.  I wish Kennedy would have just fucked off sometime between 2009 and 2015 so we weren't being held captive by his seemingly eeny meeny miny moe approach to judging cases.

Kennedy might not go for this unless there is a federal statue that covers this sort of thing. If we don't have one, we need to get it. Now I don't read a lot of supreme court cases. But, when Kennedy sided with the liberals to overturn the ban on gay marriage, he could do it under the 14th Amendment due process and equal protection clauses, as that restrains governments, but not private actors. Most likely the 1964 Civil Rights act needs amended to cover these sorts of cases.

ETA:

Okay, I should have read the article more thoroughly, before I opened my big mouth.

Anyway, I don’t get Kennedy’s free speech  or free exercise of religion argument here.

[OldGimletEye]

I mean thought the rule was basically that religion wasn’t grounds to break a law of general applicability . I mean I think even Scalia signed off on that principle (unless the issue was about hippies getting punished, then who knows what his rule was).

[Dr. Pepper]

I think the problem is that there generally aren't legal protections for LGBTQ folks.  This case is hoping to set the precedent that if you can't use religion to discriminate against a black person/couple, then you can't do it for a gay person/couple.

[OldGimletEye]

23 hours ago, Dr. Pepper said:

I think the problem is that there generally aren't legal protections for LGBTQ folks.  This case is hoping to set the precedent that if you can't use religion to discriminate against a black person/couple, then you can't do it for a gay person/couple.

When I first saw your post (without reading the article first) I thought the issue would be about there being no federal statue on point to cover folks like these.

But, then I read the article, and it seemed like it was some kind of free speech or free exercise of religion thingy, which doesn’t make sense to me. I mean under that rationale should be people be able to discriminate based on a persons race? I mean of course not. And nobody would defend that or should.

I don’t know, what the state of the free exercise of religion jurisprudence is, but it seems like conservative justices are trying to change it, from what it used be, which was: You can’t use religion as a reason to break the law. I mean I think there was case way back when, the peyote case, where that’s what Scalia wrote.

[Mexal]

Tucker Carlson is so fucking dangerous. There has to be a way to stop this shit.

 

[DMC]

39 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

You can’t use religion as a reason to break the law. I mean I think there was case way back when, the peyote case, where that’s what Scalia wrote.

Yeah it was this case.  That's always a fun one to teach.  The facts of the case are fairly different.  I'm not confident in Kennedy's decision either, but it's really hard to tell based on oral arguments in general - and especially with him.

[Tempra]

38 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

When I first saw your post (without reading the article first) I thought the issue would be about there being no federal statue on point to cover folks like these.

But, then I read the article, and it seemed like it was some kind of free speech or free exercise of religion thingy, which doesn’t make sense to me. I mean under that rationale should be people be able to discriminate based on a persons race? I mean of course not. And nobody would defend that or should.

I don’t know, what the state of the free exercise of religion jurisprudence is, but it seems like conservative justices are trying to change it, from what it used be, which was: You can’t use religion as a reason to break the law. I mean I think there was case way back when, the peyote case, where that’s what Scalia wrote.

The Supreme Court granted certiorari only on the free speech question and declined to hear the free exercise of religion argument.   Nonetheless, whether the free exercise of religion clause protects the baker would likely have turned on whether there is a valid exercise of free speech.  Here is what Scalia wrote in the peyote case (Employment Division v Smith):

"The only decisions in which we have held that the First Amendment bars application of a neutral, generally applicable law to religiously motivated action have involved not the Free Exercise Clause alone, but the Free Exercise Clause in conjunction with other constitutional protections, such as freedom of speech and of the press, see Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. at 304, 310 U. S. 307(invalidating a licensing system for religious and charitable solicitations under which the administrator had discretion to deny a license to any cause he deemed nonreligious); Murdock v. Pennsylvania, 319 U. S. 105 (1943) (invalidating a flat tax on solicitation as applied to the dissemination of religious ideas); Follett v. McCormick, 321 U. S. 573 (1944) (same), or the right of parents, acknowledged in Pierce v. Society of Sisters,268 U. S. 510 (1925), to direct the education of their children, see Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U. S. 205 (1972) (invalidating compulsory school attendance laws as applied to Amish parents who refused on religious grounds to send their children to school). [Footnote 1]

Page 494 U. S. 882

Some of our cases prohibiting compelled expression, decided exclusively upon free speech grounds, have also involved freedom of religion, cf. Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U. S. 705 (1977) (invalidating compelled display of a license plate slogan that offended individual religious beliefs); West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624(1943) (invalidating compulsory flag salute statute challenged by religious objectors). And it is easy to envision a case in which a challenge on freedom of association grounds would likewise be reinforced by Free Exercise Clause concerns. Cf. Roberts v. United States Jaycees, 468 U. S. 609, 468 U. S. 622 (1983) ("An individual's freedom to speak, to worship, and to petition the government for the redress of grievances could not be vigorously protected from interference by the State [if] a correlative freedom to engage in group effort toward those ends were not also guaranteed.")."

Although the free exercise of religion question isn't at issue here, the conservative justices don't seem to be treading new ground--merely fitting this case into a well-established exception.

[LongRider]

 

 

[Altherion]

4 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

Well to some extent yes. But, it seems like it was also a revolt of our high "libertarian" overlords as well, as an article you posted recently seemed to point out. People like Peter Thiel for instance and Mercer. You know, the sorts of people that the peasants of the future may have to battle when AI becomes a thing.

There are very few revolts that succeed without having at least part of the well-off on their side. For example, Saint-Just was of the minor nobility and Trotsky was the son of a wealthy (though not noble) landowner. That said, the election of Trump wasn't the revolt -- at best, it was a warning.

[Week]

32 minutes ago, Altherion said:

That said, the election of Trump wasn't the revolt -- at best, it was a warning.

To anyone that believes in the personhood and rights of women and minorities.

[DMC]

So while @Fez noted earlier today that Trump hadn't technically done anything about the embassy move to Jerusalem, it's now being widely reported that Trump will indeed officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel tomorrow.  Also, it's the main story on HuffPo right now and they totally took my description of this as a "Powder Keg."  Buncha pinko thieves.

1 hour ago, Triskele said:

Erik Prince is supposedly working with Oliver North on a private CIA of sorts that will of course be accountable only to Republicans. 

This may be my favorite part of the story.  While it is very concerning (although as has been noted Dubya obviously had a similar "arrangement" - with Erik Prince), I do find dark comedy in Ollie North being Prince's mentor on this.  That's a great way to learn how to be convicted of multiple felonies by a federal prosecutor.

1 hour ago, Mexal said:

Tucker Carlson is so fucking dangerous. There has to be a way to stop this shit.

During the Bush-Kerry election my school invited Carlson to participate in a mock debate in which he would represent Dubya against a Kerry representative (don't remember who it was, think it was a staffer of some sort).  Carlson's side of the debate entailed him denouncing both candidates and encouraging everyone not to vote.  That's right, he came to a college campus and encouraged a room full of 18 year olds not to vote.  So yeah, he's dangerous in a very piece of shit type of way.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

On 12/4/2017 at 4:27 PM, Kalbear said:

I don't; I think they are willing to support them, and are unwilling to change their minds based on those facts. If you point out that they're supporting bigots they'll dismiss it or deflect it. 

I think it's more reasonable to make extremists losers. Until this kind of thing isn't excusable by getting other things they want - like being in a party of winners - then doing basically anything else to kick them off of that isn't going to do shit.

I was specifically talking about the Adam Serwer article, as well as several at 538. 

Unfortunately I disagree, because of the nature of conservatives in the US and how they track in their viewpoints. The majority of the GOP at this point has to be considered white nationalist given polling and viewpoints. The way conservatives work is that they use their party to identify themselves, and fit in to their tribe, and ingroup feelings are hugely important. Same goes for climate denial (like my sig says). They may not care deeply about it (though it looks more and more like that's the case), but they will start saying the slogans and start believing it because their friends and politicians do. 

I understand your points, and I think you make a lot of sense. Extremists have no place in the conversation. Those flag waving white supremacists in Charrlottesville are people I don't want to have a discourse with--though, I'll be honest, they're so extreme in their views, I wonder if a great number of them won't look back on these years with a great amount of shame. The rigid belief in ideology they hold is often easier to break than the moderate beliefs, the hand wavers, those who make excuses because they don't believe their party is that bad. Those middle of the road people? Those are the difficult ones to persuade of anything. 

The article you linked shows so many eerie similarities between Trump and Duke that it is shocking that 2016 was the year we elected an extremist monster. Things are looking terrible right now. 

Still, I also think liberals use their party to identify themselves as a tribe as well. Whether or not Sword knows it, he/she has an angry vitriol against the other and assumes none of the other has any value. A lot of what follows isn't directed at you, Kal.

But the anger of people like Sword solves nothing. He builds strawmen ("while you're debating, black people are being murdered by cops"), and he seems to hold hatred in himself too.

I've shared openly on this board about how the police arrested my elderly father (who has Alzheimer's), broke his ribs, all because he was walking with a hoodie on (they wrote that in the report). If I've aggressively campaigned for anything, it's a reduction of police power, because that does not equal talking to my students or my neighbors. The police represent an establishment of abusive power. People are just pieces of that.

Either way, I've shared openly too, that when I deployed overseas in 2004, and went to Gitmo to work in the prison camps that I was the biggest Bush supporter and flag waver. I hated terrorists. I wanted America to hurt everyone who might be responsible for 9/11. I believed everything I was told by that administration. When I got to Gitmo and saw how much deception we were fed back in the states, it absolutely crushed me. I came home really uncertain of what kind of person I was. I saw men being tortured, and I did nothing. I know most of those men were not terrorists. I remember making excuses, "Well, I wanted McCain, not Bush. Maybe I sold out my conservative ideals." I was angry, suffering from PTSD, and I went back to school to become a teacher. While in school, I felt more outnumbered than ever. When I engaged in these kinds of discussions, I feel like they were of tact that Sword brings to these threads. Angry vitriol.

But you know, I remember there was this professor who would observe these interchanges unfold in his class. He never piled on, but tried to help me navigate through that minefield. One day I went to his office for help on an assignment, and we ended up talking a lot about the ideologies I had believed, why they'd been broken, and he kindly helped me see the bigotry of many of my thoughts. I didn't realize I was bigoted, or privileged, but he helped me put it into context, frame it through my experiences at Gitmo, and I changed. I haven't been the same since.

Because of his intervention, I believe for every person I shout down and argue against with absurd logical fallacies, that's a person who could have been searching for a way out of their self-destructive patterns. I don't know if I have ever helped anyone as a teacher or a friend or a parent in that way. But I'm not going to resort to bitterness.  

I write all of this and come back to the point of us vs the other. When I went to Gitmo, I wanted to eliminate the other. They were everywhere, and if we had them in Gitmo, we had a good reason. No doubt about it, I figured. This rigid thinking was bigoted--ethnocentric at the very least. 

 

Edit: Oh, Kal, I wanted to respond to something you said in locked thread. You questioned why some of us think it's easier to convince a republican to vote dem, as opposed to firing up a base of un-enthused dems (paraphrasing). I say this: it's not either or--we can do both, and as to the latter, I don't have delusions of truly changing republican ideologies, but I do believe I can help people see their prejudices and bigotry.

For example, if a Trump-like figure somehow hijacked the democratic party, could I vote Republican to avoid voting in a rapist, bigot, etc.? This is a hard analogy to make at the moment, so let's use someone like Susan Collins (who I don't get at the moment) or Kasich. Either of them, while I disagree with their politics, I believe I could vote for if I had to step away from someone like Trump.

We have people like Roy Moore and Trump elected because people can't fathom crossing party lines. Think of the damage it will do to the House! Or the Senate! Better to have a rapist in there than someone different from my political ideology! No, I say, if someone like Roy Moore was running in the dems race, and I could vote for Susan Collins instead--then, I would.

Sometimes morality does play a role in these decisions. 

[Centrist Simon Steele]

On 12/4/2017 at 6:06 PM, OldGimletEye said:

One thing here:

When Karl Marx wrote his magnus opus he basically stole David Ricardo's old idea that wages were set by class conflict. Neo classicals (Ricardo and Smith were classicals) responded with marginalist theory, which basically, according to the marginalist refuted Marx's (and Ricardos claim) and that the factors of production were compensated by their marginal product.

And ever since, ardent right wingers have peddled the marginalist story (at least a simplistic version of it) as a justification for income disparity.

Now personally, I find marginalist theory useful, at least in analyzing short run phenomenon. But, I've never been quite comfortable with the idea that it's the sole reason of how incomes and wages are set, which may often depend on a variety of social norms and practices.

And I would say, this article adds to that suspicion.

Marx also saw socialism as an historic event as opposed to an economic system. He viewed socialism, in a sense, as a final, Utopian evolution of society. I don't think he stole ideas, but built on them to promote a historical worldview of class. The responses were all quite small in comparison because I don't think a lot of Marx's critics understood the vision of his ideas. Though, I suppose some Republicans now hold to Capitalism like it's a gift from God and the end of societal evolution. 

[Centrist Simon Steele]

9 hours ago, Relic said:

Ok, honest question....does anyone have any hope a this point? 

Yes. I think people might realize they have to start doing something (like voting), and that not all candidates are exactly the same (South Park's old douche vs. turd sandwich argument). Some of my republican family members were on facebook a couple of weeks ago trying to spread the word about the danger to net neutrality. They had zero idea that this was a Trump thing. When I showed them articles pointing it out: "fake news!" responses of course. But when I showed them Trump tweets condemning net neutrality? Grumbling and silence. One of them even liked a New Yorker article I reposted about the danger of the Republican tax plan. So I say, maybe. MAYBEEEE.

[DMC]

32 minutes ago, Simon Steele said:

Because of his intervention, I believe for every person I shout down and argue against with absurd logical fallacies, that's a person who could have been searching for a way out of their self-destructive patterns. I don't know if I have ever helped anyone as a teacher or a friend or a parent in that way. But I'm not going to resort to bitterness.  

I write all of this and come back to the point of us vs the other. When I went to Gitmo, I wanted to eliminate the other. They were everywhere, and if we had them in Gitmo, we had a good reason. No doubt about it, I figured. This rigid thinking was bigoted--ethnocentric at the very least. 

Well put.

To veer entirely off course, the Right is Scrambling to Prevent a Shutdown:

Quote

House GOP leaders’ strategy to avert a government shutdown was thrown into uncertainty Tuesday amid growing demands from conservative hard-liners and defense hawks. [...]

Leadership had been prepared to forge ahead with a clean Dec. 22 CR, but then abruptly delayed a House Rules Committee vote on the two-week funding bill that was planned for Tuesday. The Rules vote, now set for Wednesday, means the House may not bring the stopgap funding bill to the floor until Thursday, just one day before current funding expires.

Also, @Mexal Re: Collins' potentially flipping:

Quote

Another complication on a funding bill is the commitment that McConnell gave to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to help win her vote for the tax-reform bill. McConnell pledged to support passage of two bipartisan ObamaCare fixes before the end of the year, which could be attached to a funding bill.

But House conservatives say they oppose the measures and see them as simply propping up ObamaCare, raising questions about whether the measures can pass the House.

In addition, Ryan’s office told a meeting of staff from the top four congressional leadership offices on Monday that the Speaker was not part of the deal between McConnell and Collins, and does not have the same commitment to pass the ObamaCare bills, according to a source familiar with the meeting.

Ryan told reporters Tuesday he was having “continued discussions with our members” about the health-care issue.

Collins told reporters Tuesday when asked about objections from House conservatives that she would have to have “absolute assurance” about the ObamaCare bills passing if the vote on the final tax bill comes before that.

This will probably all be worked out, but leave it to the House Freedom Caucus to remind us that the GOP isn't really a governing majority.

[Crazydog7]

As far as my feelings on the Trump Presidency go I think the Simpsosns said it best. 

 

Are we honestly living in a world where a qualified competent moderate Democrat is in a statistical dead heat with a pedophile? 

Where the President of the United States is honestly kicking around the idea of his own private network of spies? 

God.  Life in Donald Trump's America may be horrifying but at least its never boring. 

[ants]

23 hours ago, lokisnow said:

One more thing about "bloat" and how as a criticism it is probably related to race and gender.

As a criticism "bloated federal bureaucracy" has its appeal to authority roots in the business world. Run the federal gubmint like a biznes amiright? Get rid of all that bloat!

well why does the business world say that? Well the business world has persisted at <90% white-plus-penis forever, it's never faced a fundamental demographic adjustment. Sure women can join firms as an associate, but the only people who will be given real tracks to partner are the ones who meet the white+penis criteria. Same in any other business, maybe a few tokens, but no fundamental demographic change to disrupt the <90% "natural" ratio. Boards have changed slightly in the last ten years, they've gone from 90% to 80% mostly in response to research showing they're losing money with bad decisions with a 90% composition.

So what happens when a world whose promotion criteria is based on melatonin and genital equipment meets a meritocracy that doesn't acknowledge either (by law)?

functionally, it is like two alien nations meeting for the first time. Like the United States in the 1950s finding out Vietnam is a thing that exists somewhere in the world.

People like McNamara never even really considered the possibility that these incomprehensible others that don't look like us were rational parties . McNamara admits this, on camera, the DOD never even considered the question of what the Vietcong were fighting for.  And this is after they prided themselves internally on doing such a great job in understanding the shared human qualities of the (White male) Russians counterparts in the Cuban missile  crisis. 

It never once occurred to the DOD that the other side was human, they were instantly other. Inhuman. Invalid.

Lets win hearts and minds by killing their women and children to break their spirit. 

That's how the business world is operating when it talks about government bureaucracy, like McNamara DoD.

The bureaucracy is an unlike other that is invalid and incomprehensible because it is so alien and unlike them. And the more the bureaucracy diversifies but the business world stays the same the more the business world will hate the "enemy" and want to lay down the napalm on it.

So VERY SERIOUS PEOPLE say the government is bloated, bloated is code language for women and minorities. When they say they're going to get rid of waste fraud and abuse they mean they want to fire women and minorities until the bureaucracy seems less "alien" and "threatening" to them. if they can't do that (legally) the best option will be destroying the alien entirely. Shuttering the EPA or Dept of Education for example.

imagine how galling it would be for someone like pre president trump--who is used to grabbing women by the pussy--to be told by a black female bureaucrat to comply with something in the law. He doesn't even recognize her gender as people! And here she has authority over him! And she didn't like all his very funny jokes he told her about sex stuff! She's part of the problem. She must be incompetent! How dare she!  Got to get rid of that waste fraud and abuse and bloat! Got to get of HER and everything like HER.

imagine how galling it is for mark halperin or Charlie rose to have Elizabeth warren not flatter them like all women are naturally supposed to, to not laugh at their very funny jokes about sex stuff, to think that's she's smarter than them, to tell them they are wrong. What a rotten person she must be, so unreasonable and mean and loud and intractable. Just turrble! And those emails! Wait who were we talking about?

what they really mean "by get rid of all that bloat" is they mean let's repeat the "brown va board of education massacre" no one likes to admit it, but there were three first order effects of student integration. One, students were integrated. Two, almost all former black public schools were closed (because white students can't be expected to attend a building that was once blacks only!), and Three, 98% of black teachers were fired (and the Supreme Court refused to hear any case representing the teachers for wrongful dismissal, like the Moberly, MO one, my hometown).  

So this "bloated" mythology needs to stop, and democrats need to stop enabling it and agreeing with it and promulgating it.

 Do the math sometime on say the DMV. if there's 100,000 people in a small city (with one DMV) that need driver's licenses, and they're open 250 days a year, 8 hours a day, that's 400 people a day that need drivers licenses, or 50 people per hour.  If you have two clerks processing applicants, they each need to process 25 people per hour or one every two minutes. that's assuming that demand is evenly distributed throughout the year, based on birthdate, but birthdates cluster in some months more than others, so demand is unequally distributed.

Anyone who has ever been to the DMV could tell you that your portion, not any of the waiting, but just having the data entered, document confirmation, takes a lot longer than two minutes. Delays are fundamentally built into the system as staffed. and the system grinds on, day after day, always nearly 400 people (often more) that need to be served, and if in one moment, probably coming back from an official break, one clerk isn't grinding away non stop, people at the DMV, irritated at the delays, will always notice and always attribute that person not grinding away that particular instant (that they noticed the clerk) as the cause of all delays (and their own personal delay in particular) at the DMV at all times.  

ergo the DMV is a horribly bloated and inefficient bureaucracy that personally harms me myself and I.

How dare they process 100,000 drivers license in 250 days! So much obvious waste fraud and abuse in just typing that description!

How do you reconcile that argument with the fact that conservatives in many other countries make exactly the same arguments, but those countries have none of the issues you're talking about?  Howard, Costello and Kennett cut the Australian government spending significantly due to these arguments, but that was departments that were significantly white male (e.g. the electricity sector) as it was areas with a greater female proportion.  We don't even have the racial issues.

In the UK, the Torries want to cut a whole heap and again I don't think the areas they want to do that to have anything to do with race or gender.  Its a fundamental tenet of conservatism to want small government.  

I'd also point out that from an Australian perspective, the DMV example is ridiculous.  Apart from the fact its made up numbers, I visit our DMV equivalent about once every 10 years.  

You've made these claims, and you've now said similar will happen due to race and gender to social security and medicare.  Do you have any evidence to back it up? Because I've got two against it - the Republicans are still gung ho for the military despite historically high level of non-male/non-white participants, and basketball and NFL (well, until the kneeling) had historically high levels of support, despite both having considerable numbers of non-white participants.  

[OldGimletEye]

On 12/6/2017 at 1:05 AM, Simon Steele said:

Marx also saw socialism as an historic event as opposed to an economic system. He viewed socialism, in a sense, as a final, Utopian evolution of society. I don't think he stole ideas, but built on them to promote a historical worldview of class. The responses were all quite small in comparison because I don't think a lot of Marx's critics understood the vision of his ideas. Though, I suppose some Republicans now hold to Capitalism like it's a gift from God and the end of societal evolution. 

I'm not saying he didn't come up with his own original ideas. But his theory of value basically came from Ricardo.

[The Anti-Targ]

8 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

You can’t use religion as a reason to break the law.

What does that mean in terms of gay weddings? If a gay couple wants to get married in a place of worship which is owned by a religious organisation that opposes gay marriage, is it illegal to refuse to let the couple use that place of worship for the wedding ceremony? I guess this is a private property thing, and I suppose you can deny entry onto private property for any reason, or even no reason, and the law can't say otherwise. The organisation could deny a black couple, or white couple access I suppose.

[Martell Spy]

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/06/tax-plan-glitches-mistakes-republicans-208049

'Holy crap': Experts find tax plan riddled with glitches
Some of the provisions could be easily gamed, tax lawyers say.

Gottheimer and Lance make last-ditch effort to save SALT deduction

https://www.politico.com/states/new-jersey/story/2017/12/05/gottheimer-and-lance-make-last-ditch-effort-to-save-salt-deduction-133711