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U.S. Politics- This Is Us, Basically Fascists


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Disenfranchisement experiment in full stream in Kansas.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/08/new-documents-show-trumps-election-integrity-commission-was-preparing-report-on-voter-fraud-without-proof/

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The documents also revealed that the commission’s report was planning to promote use of the Interstate Crosscheck Program, a system that he created and is overseen by his office in Kansas. In an email to the commission’s executive director last July, Kobach indicated that he would share the Crosscheck program with the White House as well as the commission. It is unclear whether the program would be made available for commissioners to inspect or in order to somehow use it in the course of its work. The programcompares state registration lists in order to identify duplicate registrations and potentially fraudulent activity. But Crosscheck has an abysmal track record. Academics at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania found that Crosscheck produces false matches 99 percent of the time, and that for every fraudulent vote stopped, it would impede 2,000 eligible voters from casting a ballot. Yet Kobach has called it a model for the nation.

 

People already had to register twice because they were 'mysteriously' purged from rolls there. Saying it's better to register republican to hope they don't get purged lol. And people expect elections to work. This + cambridge analytica == ?

 

Meanwhile noted libertarian from the party of Treason invites Russian agents to Washington after visiting for his performance review. Russian 'lawmakers' lol.

 

 

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11 hours ago, Altherion said:

There's an element of faith in the institutions responsible for obtaining the society-wide facts positing that these institutions are both honest and competent and this faith has been considerably diminished (at least in the US).

Agree on the above but it's not like that somehow just happened gradually over time. There has been a concerted attack on the truth and fact based policy making almost entirely by one side of the political spectrum

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16 hours ago, S John said:

While you very well could be right, I think we should wait and see how the midterms and 2020 beyond that turn out before we get too upset.  The right has surged in the US, but a pendulum kinda situation isn’t really out of the norm.  To me what is disconcerting about this iteration of the pendulum swing is that large elements on the right simply don’t care about facts.  Like, at all.  But we’ll see.  America might say we’ve had enough in 2018 and/ or 2020 and this’ll all seem like a weird hiccup.  No doubt Trump is causing real damage though.  I’m just not ready to go full gloom and doom yet.

The disconcerting thing is that one of your parties is apparently deeply involved in criminal activities. And it seems unlikely any of the people involved will face any real consequences. Things like that are what break a society, especially when these people are still around next time the pendulum swings back to conservative/reactionary politics again.

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Tomorrow is primary day for Michigan. The most interesting race (for me at least) is for governor, where we have Shri Thanedar (purportedly a progressive), Gretchen Whitmer (establishment) and Abdul El-Sayed (also progressive) on the D side. I've made up my mind already (not hard to guess who it is lol), but it would be interesting to see if the polls manage to capture what is actually happening.

As I've mentioned numerous times, MI is really tough to poll, and with it being a primary with lower voter turn out, anything can happen. The one bad thing about MI primaries is you cant cross-vote across party lines, because there are a few Republicans who are more horrible than others that I would probably vote against if I could.

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4 hours ago, butterbumps! said:

  

I think @Deadlines? What Deadlines? was closer to it above, but I think it's beyond being "passionate about claims."  Simply put, I think all these people- specifically white people- are super passionate about not feeling racial discomfort, and Trump makes them feel special.  I think it's really easy to underestimate just how virulent the white resentment and fragility are amongst these fake facts adopters.   But it seems to me more a case of emotion influencing which facts to seek out and adopt than distrust in epistemology and institutions or whatever have you.

The "facts" they spew to justify their continued support are more like fig leaves as I see it.  They don't truly believe these audacious things, at least initially (though maybe they start to believe the lies in some cases), but it affords them cover.  They can't just come out and say "I support this guy because I'm racist, and that's more important than anything else to me" quite yet (and in some cases, can't or won't understand that they're racist af to begin with, but know evil libruls and elites will make them feel uncomfortable for articulating anything non- PC).

 

I think BB is right! Alas.

Though yes, faith in public institutions is broken for so many reasons.  These institutions included all of them, from police to banks to transportation.  They've all let down the people they supposedly serve, with graft, corruption and just not doing their jobs.

 

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How Trump Radicalized ICE
A long-running inferiority complex, vast statutory power, a chilling new directive from the top—inside America’s unfolding immigration tragedy

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/trump-ice/565772/

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The work undertaken by Sessions, Hamilton, Miller, and their ilk is based to some degree on a theory first developed by Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state. Over the past year, Kobach has emerged as a prime bête noire of the left because of his ferocious, ultimately doomed attempts to stamp out a phantom epidemic of voter fraud. But for many years, he served as a lawyer for an offshoot of the Federation for American Immigration Reform—the loudest and most effective of the groups pressing for restrictive immigration laws. In that position, he helped write many of the most draconian pieces of state-level immigration legislation to wend their way into law, including Arizona’s S.B. 1070.

Kobach set out to remake immigration law to conform to a doctrine he called self-deportation or, more clinically, attrition through enforcement—a policy that experienced a vogue in 2012, when Mitt Romney, campaigning for president, briefly claimed the position as his own. The doctrine holds that the government doesn’t have the resources to round up and remove the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the nation, but it can create circumstances unpleasant enough to encourage them to exit on their own. As Kobach once wrote, “Illegal aliens are rational decision makers. If the risks of detention or involuntary removal go up, and the probability of being able to obtain unauthorized employment goes down, then at some point, the only rational decision is to return home.” Through deprivation and fear, the government can essentially drive undocumented immigrants out of the country.

 

 

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The Battle to Be Trump's Javert in New York
The Democrats vying to be the state’s next attorney general are making a similar promise: to take on the president in the seat of his business empire.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/trump-teachout-attorney-general-new-york/566819/

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It is that role—Trump’s Javert in New York—that James, Teachout, Maloney, and Eve are all vying to fill. And none is vowing to pursue the president with quite as much zeal as Teachout. Continuing the lawsuit against his foundation would be only the beginning, she told me. If elected, she would investigate and likely sue the Trump Organization as well, and she would add New York to a lawsuit filed against the president in Maryland and the District of Columbia that seeks to force him to divest from his businesses. Teachout has already sued Trump as president, joining and advising a case brought against him soon after he took office alleging that he violated the Constitution’s emoluments clause. A federal judge dismissed that suit in December, but the case brought by the states is proceeding.

 

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3 hours ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Observe this human.  I believe she is sincere, regardless of the lie about her political histotry.  Ask:

  • Is this someone who can be swayed by rational argument?
  • Is this someone who is merely unclear of the facts?

I'd say it's obvious.

 

Yea- that's a particularly unhinged example, but what's driving her is clearly immune from reason.  Trump makes these people feel good about themselves, glorifying their shittiest, most venal traits.  What motivation do they have to be swayed by evidence that could threaten to remove that sweet, bigoted high?   Confronting them with facts makes them even less willing to engage; defending Trump becomes a sacred cause.  I mean, I'm fairly skeptical about how much of this shit they truly believe, versus how much they consciously post-rationalize to keep regressive systems of power in place.

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American Capitalism Can No Longer Afford to Let Workers Retire in Dignity

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/american-capitalism-is-forcing-seniors-into-bankruptcy.html

And yet, it’s now clear that access to a decent retirement is rapidly contracting, anyway.

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New research shows that the rate of bankruptcy among Americans over 65 has tripled since 1991, while that among 55-to-65-year-olds has also risen sharply. According to this new study from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, the bankruptcy rate among Americans over 65 was 3.6 per 1,000 between February 2013 and November 2016 — up from 1.2 per 1,000 in 1991. Meanwhile, Americans over 65 now account for 12.2 percent of all bankruptcy filers, up from 2.1 percent in the early 1990s — an increase that far outstrips the growth in our nation’s elderly population in the interim.

 

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1 minute ago, Martell Spy said:

American Capitalism Can No Longer Afford to Let Workers Retire in Dignity

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/american-capitalism-is-forcing-seniors-into-bankruptcy.html

And yet, it’s now clear that access to a decent retirement is rapidly contracting, anyway.

 

Didn't the Bush admin pass a law that made it more difficult to declare bankruptcy?

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2 hours ago, Lany Freelove Cassandra said:

Good.  He can host his own damn videos.

Sometimes I might get carried away, sometimes I might come close to the line, but I would never advocate violence against someone for their speech.

Alex Jones?  After Sandy Hook?  He wants to build an empire tormenting the parents of murdered children?  I hope he loses everything.

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27 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Didn't the Bush admin pass a law that made it more difficult to declare bankruptcy?

Yes, and they made it especially hard on holders of private student loan debt and made it so they can't discharge their loans, much like public student loan debt.

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