US Politics: What will the InJustice League do next?

[Zorral]

54 minutes ago, BlackLightning said:

Human rights violations there are like apple pie.

Yes, they are the apple pie of the USA.

[Larry of the Lawn]

52 minutes ago, BlackLightning said:

 

China has a very ugly, very bloody history. Human rights violations there are like apple pie.

Kind of the point, isn't it?  That if people from a country that has a poor history of human rights pity your country, it's probably for a good reason?  

Also,the US has a horrible record in human rights.  Are US citizens not allowed to call out human rights violations or sympathize with people living in a shitty situation?  

So yeah, that was a very patronizing response.  

[Zorral]

So much for the foney idea that centerism is safety.

"‘They are preparing for war’: An expert on civil wars discusses where political extremists are taking this country"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/03/08/they-are-preparing-war-an-expert-civil-wars-discusses-where-political-extremists-are-taking-this-country/

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 A:  .... And what scholars found was that this anocracy variable was really predictive of a risk for civil war. That full democracies almost never have civil wars. Full autocracies rarely have civil wars. All of the instability and violence is happening in this middle zone. And there’s all sorts of theories why this middle zone is unstable, but one of the big ones is that these governments tend to be weaker. They’re transitioning to either actually becoming more democratic, and so some of the authoritarian features are loosening up. The military is giving up control. And so it’s easier to organize a challenge. Or, these are democracies that are backsliding, and there’s a sense that these governments are not that legitimate, people are unhappy with these governments. There’s infighting. There’s jockeying for power. And so they’re weak in their own ways. Anyway, that turned out to be highly predictive.

And then the second factor was whether populations in these partial democracies began to organize politically, not around ideology — so, not based on whether you’re a communist or not a communist, or you’re a liberal or a conservative — but where the parties themselves were based almost exclusively around identity: ethnic, religious or racial identity. The quintessential example of this is what happened in the former Yugoslavia.

Q: So for you, personally, what was the moment the ideas began to connect, and you thought: Wait a minute, I see these patterns in my country right now?

My dad is from Germany. He was born in 1932 and lived through the war there, and he emigrated here in 1958. He had been a Republican his whole life, you know; we had the Reagan calendar in the kitchen every year.

And starting in early 2016, I would go home to visit, and my dad — he doesn’t agitate easily, but he was so agitated. All he wanted to do was talk about Trump and what he was seeing happening. He was really nervous. It was almost visceral — like, he was reliving the past. Every time I’d go home, he was just, like, “Please tell me Trump’s not going to win.” And I would tell him, “Dad, Trump is not going to win.” And he’s just, like, “I don’t believe you; I saw this once before. And I’m seeing it again, and the Republicans, they’re just falling in lockstep behind him.” He was so nervous.

I remember saying: “Dad, what’s really different about America today from Germany in the 1930s is that our democracy is really strong. Our institutions are strong. So, even if you had a Trump come into power, the institutions would hold strong.” Of course, then Trump won. We would have these conversations where my dad would draw all these parallels. The brownshirts and the attacks on the media and the attacks on education and on books. And he’s just, like, I’m seeing it. I’m seeing it all again here. And that’s really what shook me out of my complacency, that here was this man who is very well educated and astute, and he was shaking with fear. And I was like, Am I being naive to think that we’re different?

That’s when I started to follow the data. And then, watching what happened to the Republican Party really was the bigger surprise — that, wow, they’re doubling down on this almost white supremacist strategy. That’s a losing strategy in a democracy. So why would they do that? Okay, it’s worked for them since the ’60s and ’70s, but you can’t turn back demographics. And then I was like, Oh my gosh. The only way this is a winning strategy is if you begin to weaken the institutions; this is the pattern we see in other countries. And, as an American citizen I’m like, These two factors are emerging here, and people don’t know.  ....

 

I've brought this up here before, and the response was pretty much the same as she got at UCSD:

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So I gave a talk at UCSD about this — and it was a complete bomb. Not only did it fall flat, but people were hostile. You know, How dare you say this? This is not going to happen. This is fearmongering. I remember leaving just really despondent, thinking: Wow, I was so naive to think that, if it’s true, and if it’s based on hard evidence, people will be receptive to it. You know, how do you get the message across if people don’t want to hear it? If they’re not ready for it.

 

[karaddin]

14 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

That’s 45 minutes from my house… what the hell?

The part that felt the most odd to me was the state then organising and demolishing the rest of the monument in less than a day due to "public safety". I would have thought they'd want to preserve the scene for an investigation and that would have kept the scene off limits for said public in the first place.

But nope, clear it all away and accomplish the goal of the terrorist that blew some of it up while destroying the evidence

[Zorral]

This is why we have no gun control in the USA.  It's all political all reich.  A terrorized pop is a docile pop.

As I have observed here, more than once:

"Guns are destroying public life"

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/07/highland-park-shooting-aftermath-guns-freedoms-public-life.html

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.... While Highland Park captured the most media attention, all in all, 220 Americans were shot and killed over the holiday weekend. That doesn’t include five people who survived being shot during the fireworks after an Oakland A’s game—hit by stray, apparently celebratory bullets from a high-powered rifle fired outside the ballpark. Or two police officers shot—again perhaps by accident—at the Fourth of July fireworks display in Philadelphia. In a grim, resigned statement that seemed to sum up the bloody holiday, Mayor Jim Kenney said, “We live in America, and we have the Second Amendment, and we have the Supreme Court of the United States telling everybody they can carry a gun wherever they want. This is what we have to live with.

It feels like an inflection point in the balance between the right to bear arms and the right to, well, do just about anything else. The triumph of guns is throttling American public life, chipping away at our experience of school, shopping, protest, celebration, debate, electoral politics, and even the writing of laws.

You’d be hard-pressed to find an institution in this country that isn’t buckling under the weight of a gun fetish that has seen domestic firearms production triple since 2000 and a steady rise in mass shootings, as right-wing courts and state legislatures repeal rules and politicians and gunmakers stoke fears of tyranny and civil war. America now has more guns than people, according to one estimate. ....

 

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

10 minutes ago, karaddin said:

The part that felt the most odd to me was the state then organising and demolishing the rest of the monument in less than a day due to "public safety". I would have thought they'd want to preserve the scene for an investigation and that would have kept the scene off limits for said public in the first place.

But nope, clear it all away and accomplish the goal of the terrorist that blew some of it up while destroying the evidence

Wow.  That was on private property as far as I knew.  I always had an interest in visiting just never made the time.

:

[JGP]

16 hours ago, Mindwalker said:

 

 

 

Ammosexual masculinity, a subset of Toxic, appears kind of confused.

 

 

 

[Kalbear]

I get why it's not publicized heavily by Biden but...this is good news!

 

 

[Zorral]

Yes, but can we believe her?  Can we trust she'll even remember?

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), an institutionalist in the Senate, said Thursday that she would vote to reform the filibuster if it’s necessary to pass abortion protections.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

What it's like in TX.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/07/texas-abortion-ban-republicans-may-regret-it/

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.... Abortions are all but impossible to obtain in Texas now. Whole Woman’s Health, one of the largest abortion providers in the state, announced it is closing its four clinics in McAllen, Fort Worth, McKinney and Austin and decamping to New Mexico, where abortion is legal.

In New Mexico, existing clinics have experienced bedlam as women not only from Texas but Oklahoma and other Southwest states with abortion bans flock to get care, resulting in a backlog of four weeks for an appointment. So women will be having abortions later in pregnancies thanks to the forced-birth law.

The Dallas Tribune reports that “those four weeks could mean they would become ineligible for abortion medication in lieu of a procedure, or they could have to spend two days at the Albuquerque clinic instead of one.” If one lives in, say, Houston, the drive may take more than 10 hours, and with the cost of gas spiking, it could be prohibitively expensive.

The Tribune captures the recent experience of women in Texas with snippets from the University of New Mexico Center for Reproductive Health in Albuquerque:

“She’s under eight weeks, for an appointment at 8 a.m.,” one clinic employee whispered to her coworker while on the phone with a Texas patient. “But the latest flight out [of Albuquerque] is 5:25 p.m. — do you think she would make that flight?”
Another employee walked in to tell the receptionists not to count one woman who was supposed to be in the clinic about an hour earlier as a no-show. She was on the way, the staffer said, still driving in from Oklahoma. . . .
“If they’d just been able to go to Dallas, and they live near Dallas, they could go tomorrow,” said Dr. Amber Truehart, the clinic’s medical director. “But they have to figure out how to travel here and get child care and funding, and all of that stuff is delaying them.”

Considering that at least some patients have been victims of rape or incest or are otherwise suffering from medical complications, the ordeal seems even more barbaric.

The implications are profound for the most vulnerable women. If doctors and nurses are unsure about the legality of a medically advisable abortion, a woman carrying a nonviable fetus may have to go through the agony and emotional torment of giving birth. And given the statistics on maternal mortality and complications, Black and Hispanic women forced to continue their pregnancies will die in disproportionate numbers.

If forced-birth activists thought this situation would be popular, they have greatly miscalculated. A new University of Texas/Texas Politics Project Poll finds only 37 percent of the state’s residents support the new law; 54 percent oppose it. Contrary to the new law, the poll reports, only 8 percent and 13 percent of Texas voters would ban access to abortion in the cases of rape and incest, respectively. ....

 

[Jace, Extat]

2 hours ago, KalVsWade said:

I get why it's not publicized heavily by Biden but...this is good news!

 

 

This is why there's nothing good to be gained by declaring some victory in the field of immigration prosecutions: 

13 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Yes, but can we believe her?  Can we trust she'll even remember?

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), an institutionalist in the Senate, said Thursday that she would vote to reform the filibuster if it’s necessary to pass abortion protections.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

What it's like in TX.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/07/texas-abortion-ban-republicans-may-regret-it/

We've lost everywhere else 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

11 hours ago, Larry of the Lake said:

Kind of the point, isn't it?  That if people from a country that has a poor history of human rights pity your country, it's probably for a good reason?  

Or maybe just an example of really effective propaganda. That's not to excuse the US for anything, but China doesn't get to lecture us and their citizens are for the most part unaware or supportive of their countries own horrible policies. 

[Durckad]

11 hours ago, JGP said:

 

Ammosexual masculinity, a subset of Toxic, appears kind of confused.

 

 

 

Again, the right is all projection.

Pretty sure the only people nutting over their guns are the conservative gun nuts.

[Larry of the Lawn]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

Or maybe just an example of really effective propaganda. That's not to excuse the US for anything, but China doesn't get to lecture us and their citizens are for the most part unaware or supportive of their countries own horrible policies. 

How the fuck do you know what Darzin's students awareness of events is?  If China "doesn't get to lecture us" then you don't get to fucking comment on their human rights abuses either.  What the fuck makes you so special?

Eta: how do you know whether these students, who hold the exact same (I assume) position on forced birth as you do (that's it's fucking wrong) are somehow deluded or brainwashed or whatever?  100% bullshit.  

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

3 minutes ago, Larry of the Lake said:

How the fuck do you know what Darzin's students awareness of events is?  If China "doesn't get to lecture us" then you don't get to fucking comment on their human rights abuses either.  What the fuck makes you so special?

Are you that ignorant to the levels of propaganda that occur in China? Seriously? 

[Larry of the Lawn]

4 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Are you that ignorant to the levels of propaganda that occur in China? Seriously? 

Is there any propaganda in the US? Are you ignorant of the propaganda that's been rotting your brain and mine?  You can't even consider the fact that someone from China could have arrived at a very basic position of human decency without propaganda.  

Eta: not to mention, these students are not men, which gives them better perspective on this than either you or I can offer.  

Eta2: "unaware but supportive" could just as easily describe the US.  The US drone strikes innocent people.  US states have criminalized bodily autonomy.   How can you have any opinion on anything if Darzin's students can't?

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 minutes ago, Larry of the Lake said:

Is there any propaganda in the US? Are you ignorant of the propaganda that's been rotting your brain and mine?  You can't even consider the fact that someone from China could have arrived at a very basic position of human decency without propaganda.  

Lol, whataboutism comparing the US, yes an imperfect country, to totalitarian China on propaganda and human rights. Okay dude.

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Eta: not to mention, these students are not men, which gives them better perspective on this than either you or I can offer.  

Maybe he should ask them about the tens of millions of missing girls due to the one child policy.

[Week]

26 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Lol, whataboutism comparing the US, yes an imperfect country, to totalitarian China on propaganda and human rights. Okay dude.

Maybe he should ask them about the tens of millions of missing girls due to the one child policy.

Bud. Decrying whataboutism and then furnishing you're own -- with a healthy dose of condescension -- ain't it.

I think that they probably know.  You're really not making good points here. We don't need to entirely relitigate it -- but the US is probably closer, in terms of human rights, to China than Germany.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

5 minutes ago, Week said:

Bud. Decrying whataboutism and then furnishing you're own -- with a healthy dose of condescension -- ain't it.

That was the point! Do you think I was unaware of doing that?

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I think that they probably know.  You're really not making good points here. We don't need to entirely relitigate it -- but the US is probably closer, in terms of human rights, to China than Germany.

No, it's really not. 

[DMC]

6 minutes ago, Week said:

but the US is probably closer, in terms of human rights, to China than Germany.

In terms of violations upon its own people?  Uh, no, this is absurd.  Here are recent human rights reports on China from Amnesty and Human Rights Watch.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

12 hours ago, JGP said:

 

Ammosexual masculinity, a subset of Toxic, appears kind of confused.

 

 

 

I have so many questions about this guy and his shirt. 

What on earth does he do with his beloved AR-15?!? I just assume he uses it as a sex toy. I am not judging him, but that's the message I get from his shirt. Why else would he lubricate it with liberal cum. Is this some gay subculture thing? Does he travel to darkroom parties in the bay area, where a group of guys form a circle to provide him with his lubricant of choice? How does he verify it's actual liberal cum, and not conservative? Do the guys have to take a questionaire before they start jacking it on his weapon?