US Politics: The Republicans problem with small packages

[DMC]

2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

The elevation of their profiles could be more valuable. I just bought Freeman's The Field of Blood because I was impressed by a few interviews.

Well, I'd assume if the show goes longterm you'd need more contestants than just the academics that are already relatively famous and subsequently well-off.  There's still a lot of academics/experts that could use the winnings.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

10 minutes ago, DMC said:

Well, I'd assume if the show goes longterm you'd need more contestants than just the academics that are already relatively famous and subsequently well-off.  There's still a lot of academics/experts that could use the winnings.

Fine, the charitable donations would be matching you greed soaked monster.  

[DMC]

2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Fine, the charitable donations would be matching you greed soaked monster.  

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

4 minutes ago, DMC said:

 

I seem to recall you asking the hive mind if you should follow a path that paid $50k if it made you happy or $100 if you made you depressed. The correct answer is you should be making a lot more while being happy, lol. 

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, Xray the Enforcer said:

I didn't get a class warfare vibe from the post but that just be my confirmation bias speaking here. To me, it's very, very clear from both the statements made by the insurrectionists and the fact that they're mostly white-collar or otherwise generally well-off, that their main animus is racial resentment, even if the insurrectionists aren't quite ready to admit that to themselves. 

If one has ever read the accounts of the people who survived the white massacres of prosperous black communities, whether in Florida, St. Louis, Kansas and Oklahoma (which include massacre attacks on both African American prosperous communities and Native American communities), and in many other states going on from the beginning of the country until very recently (and it seems to be coming back) one will know that white people of a certain hideous sort simply cannot bear to have people do what they have told those people to do -- pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, live godly, frugal lives and work hard, make sure their kids get an education, and just work and work and work -- and then you'll get prosperity -- well, when that happens we have to KILL them and destroy everything they've made because they are actually doing well!

That is uppity and disrespecting WHITE PEOPLE, and so they must be destroyed. And so they were.

 

[GrimTuesday]

1 hour ago, Week said:

What do you mean by "addressing" here? I think we agree on the history and current state - lines blurred since civil rights and upward mobility.

I think that if you only try to address a single aspect of it, you are going to fail. If you only think of it from a racial aspect, you are not addressing the class based narratives that Republicans use to disguise their true intentions. There is a quote from LBJ that I find to be very apt, "If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket." We have to attack this on two fronts, first by attacking the institutional racism that holds minorities down, as well as the class elements that are being used to drive a wedge between people who have more in common than they have differences. We need to kill these notions of class based racism, welfare queens, urban crime, the idea that immigrants are leeching off the government. There are a lot of people who respond to these kind of messages, but don't consider themselves to be racist, because I think a lot of them don't understand what is racist about it, so teaching people the actual meaning of these things in such a way that also illustrates how this has been used to hurt them as well that can help in addressing that aspect of things.

1 hour ago, DMC said:

Ok Trotsky, we get it.  For an empirical exploration of what you're referring to see McCarty et al.'s Polarized America (2006).

I don't know if this was meant to be derisive, or not, but reading the abstract and a few reviews, I'm going to have to see about giving that a read.

1 hour ago, KalbearAnon said:

I think neither class nor race do well here.

The best indicator, IMO, is how likely you are to support authoritarian viewpoints. If Trump says that things were stolen there are people who believe he's the leader and that what he says is true and think it is their duty to support him. These people come from all walks of life, all education levels, and the main thing they share is a willingness to bend things like laws in favor of obeying who they think should be and is in charge.

Yeah, this is the continued bullshit that we heard in 2016. Putting minorities as equals hurts them and causes resentment, putting them below others hurts them and causes resentment. Them protesting silently causes resentment, their not protesting at all causes resentment. It isn't about class, at least not in the economic way that you're using it. A better way to describe it is castes. 

Caste is is wrong. castes are determined by a single factor whether societal or philosophical, class is a much more complex thing that include many factors that generally involve with economics, education, employment type, etc.

As for the "continued bullshit", no one is arguing that, and I sincerely doubt anyone one on the left who isn't some kind of class reductionist has ever said that.

[Argonath Diver]

The pillow guy and his bombastic Minnesotan-accented ranting made for a pretty unintentionally hilarious two minutes of Newsmax. Which is, coincidentally, the only two minutes of Newsmax content I've ever actually seen. I can only assume the rest of their content is as enthralling.

[Kalbear]

There were a lot of class reductionists in 2016.

[SpaceChampion]

1 hour ago, DMC said:

If the appeal is to get academics on as contestants - and especially if you're gonna slime them - I definitely think they should get to keep the money.

No, if they win the show puts a copy of their academic book in X number of libraries, where X is the number of points scored.

[DMC]

13 minutes ago, GrimTuesday said:

I don't know if this was meant to be derisive, or not, but reading the abstract and a few reviews, I'm going to have to see about giving that a read.

The Trotsky quip was just me being a smartass, it was meant to be good-natured.

1 minute ago, SpaceChampion said:

No, if they win the show puts a copy of their academic book in X number of libraries, where X is the number of points scored.

So more copies can be ignored?  This just seems like a waste of paper, way to kill the environment.

[Martell Spy]

Warren To Join Senate Finance Committee, Immediately Introduce Wealth Tax Bill
The progressive senator from Massachusetts wants to levy a two-cent tax on every dollar of individual wealth over $50 million.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/warren-senate-finance-committee-wealth-tax_n_6019c576c5b668b8db3c99d3

Quote

 

Warren pledged Tuesday that she will “press giant corporations, the wealthy, and the well-connected to finally pay their fair share in taxes” while on the committee, which oversees the Internal Revenue Service and the nation’s taxation policies.

If passed, her bill would levy a two-cent tax on every dollar of individual wealth over $50 million, with an additional tax on every dollar over $1 billion. She said in a tweet that it would be her “first order of business.” 

 

 

[GrimTuesday]

39 minutes ago, KalbearAnon said:

There were a lot of class reductionists in 2016.

Give me some names man, because I was very much so "online" during the 2016 election and I did not see anyone of significance who were actively class reductionist. And before you start on this, saying that the policies that Bernie Sanders represents would benefit minorities more so than the Clinton or Biden side of things and therefore they should vote for Bernie is not class reductionist, it may be a class based approach, but that is not the same thing as class reductionism.

For the record, those people do exist, a lot of them are the folks who are out there promoting the bullshit force the vote shit with Jimmy Dore and Michael Tracy, and are promoting a red brown alliance that is rightfully being called out by basically everyone of note.

[SpaceChampion]

18 minutes ago, DMC said:

So more copies can be ignored?  This just seems like a waste of paper, way to kill the environment.

Doesn't matter, it's the prize that will boost their egos.  You're familiar with the ego of academics, I imagine.

[DMC]

2 minutes ago, SpaceChampion said:

You're familiar with the ego of academics, I imagine.

I very much am - including my own!  Which is why I can confidently say more copies of their books gathering dust in libraries will not boost their egos.

[GrimTuesday]

3 minutes ago, DMC said:

I very much am - including my own!  Which is why I can confidently say more copies of their books gathering dust in libraries will not boost their egos.

I think a lot of academics would be happier with a hot meal and a warm place to spend the night. Then again, in my head all adjunct professors are adorable Dickensian street urchins. "Please sir may I have tenure?"

[DMC]

2 minutes ago, GrimTuesday said:

"Please sir may I have tenure?"

That's getting pretty uppity.  They should take the room, board, and adjunct pittance and say thank you.

[GrimTuesday]

Does Tommy Tuberville get his news via sky writing? Smoke signals? Does he have snow blindness that is stopping him from reading a news paper? Is there too much thunder to hear the radio?

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

7 hours ago, GrimTuesday said:

Does Tommy Tuberville get his news via sky writing? Smoke signals? Does he have snow blindness that is stopping him from reading a news paper? Is there too much thunder to hear the radio?

 

The more you read about this guy, just how did he find himself in the Senate? He knows nothing. There are multiple fraud complaints. He's largely a career failure. But he had one undefeated season in college football, so make him our leader! 

[Darzin]

11 hours ago, Xray the Enforcer said:

I didn't get a class warfare vibe from the post but that just be my confirmation bias speaking here. To me, it's very, very clear from both the statements made by the insurrectionists and the fact that they're mostly white-collar or otherwise generally well-off, that their main animus is racial resentment, even if the insurrectionists aren't quite ready to admit that to themselves. 

For Trump supporters it's definitely been shown that racial resentment is a key factor perhaps THE factor in his support, IDK if you could say the same about the riot though it was a riot of mostly white people* and it's chief targets, Pelosi and Pence where also white people. It seems to me that was more about the lacky of legitimacy of any liberal winning. I understand Kamal was also being elected by those votes but if Biden had chosen Amy Klobuchar as VP I doubt it would have gone any differently. 

And while I think racial resentment has been shown to be the driving factor in his US support, Trump has an international fanbase which is not driven by that. Anecdotally every non-European English speaking businessman I've met loves Trump, I've shared a flight with both a Filipino and Azeri business man who talked my head off about Trump. Trump enjoyed a surprising amount of popularity n China during the election and wechat groups I’m in for interpreting and international trading were buzzing with support for him and even now he's decently popular in China among the business community, a lot of people just can't let go of that TV business man image and I think there is just a certain type of personality who gravitates towards him. Which I’m sure happens as well in the US. (Racial resentment is of course a more important factor) 

*There was a decent amount of South Vietnamese participation and quite a few South Vietnamese flags were flown at the riot, I actually wouldn't be surprised if in a few years the South Vietnamese flag isn't tainted by being flown with hate symbols and viewed as right wing extremist. There are already certainly already a lot of issues with that flag vs the new flag in Vietnamese communities in the US, and if it continues to show up next to the confederate flag I could see it being seen as a hate symbol in it's own right by the general populace.

[Larry of the Lawn]

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1256461?__twitter_impression=true

 

This is like regulatory capture but for white supremacists.  ICE needs to go.