Biden Thread

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This is also more pressing now that Republicans are radicalizing in a way that poses a threat to future democratic stability, raising questions about how Democrats can highlight this to the public.

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Democrats should take a page from Chris Wallace (Fox News, for gods sake!!!): (start at about 1:44)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpKSe_fZLw0

When presented with facts, Congressman Banks lies and then blames progressives...:rolleyes:

Here's the truth about how much Republicans give a shit about police:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/con...fused-n1271130

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“He just stared at me. I asked him if he was going to shake my hand, and he told me that he didn't know who I was,” Fanone said. “So I introduced myself, I said that I was Officer Michael Fanone, that I was a D.C. Metropolitan police officer who fought on Jan. 6 to defend the Capitol and as a result, I suffered a traumatic brain injury as well as a heart attack after having been tased numerous times at the base of my skull as well as being severely beaten.”

Fanone said that Clyde then turned away from him and the congressman pulled out his cell phone and appeared to try to pull up an audio recording app on his phone.

“As the elevator doors opened, he ran as quickly as he could, like a coward,” Fanone told CNN about the interaction. “I took that particular interaction like very personally but I also took it as a representation of Andrew Clyde giving the middle finger to myself and every other member of the Metropolitan Police Department and U.S. Capitol Police that responded that day.”

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Does the phrase "suckers and losers" come to mind?

And then there's these 12 blow-hards that voted against honoring the Capital Police who defended them against rioters:

https://www.businessinsider.com/repu...t-riots-2021-3

The same kind of messaging should've been used when, after the COVID relief bill was passed, Republicans went home to their constituents, and took credit for all of the ways it benefited said constituents when not a single GOP lawmaker, Senate or House, voted for the bill. Dems should've taken to every media platform available to point out that hypocrisy..........nope...........barely a whisper from Dems....:quiet:

That's WEAK SAUCE.

And here's the President showing a similar form of weakness:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/bid...ge-2021-06-26/

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U.S. President Joe Biden on Saturday withdrew his threat to veto a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill unless a separate Democratic spending plan also passes Congress, saying that was never his intent.

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A handful of GOP lawmakers whine, and Biden caves in. Dr. No has made it quite clear that he opposes Part II of the Infrastructure Bill because he refuses to fund it by walking back a portion of Trump's 2017 tax cuts, which mostly benefited the rich. Sleepy Joe doesn't care to lead from the front, but hides behind the likes of Joe Manchin and other conservative Democrats, because at the heart, he is a corporate politician himself...:inquisitive:

If the additional package isn't tied to the first, it has a minuscule or no chance of passing. If only Part I gets passed, here's what's missing in the bi-partisan bill:

https://www.vox.com/22549410/infrast...ipartisan-jobs

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The bipartisan infrastructure package comes nowhere close to meeting Biden’s goal of cutting US climate pollution 50 percent by 2030 compared to 2005 levels. In some sectors, the funding is a small fraction of what Biden proposed in his American Jobs Plan, and an even smaller fraction of what experts have modeled to transform the economy. But in most cases, there’s no funding at all for cleaning up the power sector and building pollution and addressing racial injustices.

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Now there's no way of knowing what will be contained in a reconciliation bill, as it hasn't been penned as of yet, so some of these omissions might be included. But since that Vox article was written, Biden has already walked back his commitment to vetoing the bipartisan bill if it isn't accompanied by the reconciliation bill.

The next three months makes or breaks Biden's administration. If only the bi-partisan version makes it into law, Biden will have fractured the Democratic Party even more than it is, by completely alienating progressives, who supported him on his promise to do at least some of the things progressives wanted. If neither proposal makes it into law, then good luck trying to get people to vote Democratic when you can't make good on your campaign promises (remember the whole "Build Back Better" spiel?)....:shrug:

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Originally Posted by Montmorency

You gave me something specific that undermines your own case, unless your case is that conservatives must enjoy exorbitant privilege over all they survey. Which I would naturally decline.

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Ok, let's cut things down to the core: it turns out that you can't be bothered to quote as much as a single sentence to back up a non-trivial assertion that you've made (about Damore's memo). That indicates little interest in engaging in any meaningful debate (as does labelling a normal post as 'sounding hysterical', but hey).

What a precious little Nazi punk.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1409686555359289344 [VIDEO]

Roberts on the Supreme Court, 2013: Killing the Voting Rights Act federal oversight of state election laws is good because racism is over, and anyway Section 2 prohibiting discriminatory rules is still operative.
Roberts on the Supreme Court, 2021: Section 2 is over. What Congress wrote doesn't matter. We offer instead a new set of standards: the status quo ante.

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Originally Posted by ReluctantSamurai

Now there's no way of knowing what will be contained in a reconciliation bill, as it hasn't been penned as of yet, so some of these omissions might be included. But since that Vox article was written, Biden has already walked back his commitment to vetoing the bipartisan bill if it isn't accompanied by the reconciliation bill.

The next three months makes or breaks Biden's administration. If only the bi-partisan version makes it into law, Biden will have fractured the Democratic Party even more than it is, by completely alienating progressives, who supported him on his promise to do at least some of the things progressives wanted. If neither proposal makes it into law, then good luck trying to get people to vote Democratic when you can't make good on your campaign promises (remember the whole "Build Back Better" spiel?)....:shrug:

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If only the bipartisan bill passes, then that would really be a shame, as to gain even theoretical support from some Republicans it comes loaded with corporate giveaways and privatizations.
https://prospect.org/politics/on-inf...-than-no-deal/

I don't know who these guys are, but their statement (found while googling for the Prospect article) is basically correct.

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“This bipartisan proposal is a bad deal for working-class Americans. It seems like the Senators who put this deal together are more interested in having less Infrastructure investment in order to justify keeping in place a rigged tax code that favors corporations and the rich rather than actually coming up with a plan that solves the enormous challenges that our country faces. The proposals instead would raise money to pay for infrastructure by implementing an electric vehicle tax, selling off large portions of our infrastructure to private companies, and using unspent COVID-19 relief funds to pay for revamping transportation, broadband and water infrastructure.

If the choice is between a good deal and a bipartisan deal, Democratic Senators must choose the good deal. They must prioritize doing what the American people are asking for, which is to raise taxes on the rich and corporations. Two-thirds of voters support raising taxes on corporations to pay for President Biden’s infrastructure investment.

The American people are not asking their elected representatives to pay for critical investment in our country by passing the bill down to working class families or redistributing COVID funds. They want the wealthy and corporations to finally pay their fair share like normal Americans have for decades. We strongly urge Democratic Senators to deliver on their promise to the American people and raise taxes on corporations and the rich to pay for any infrastructure deal.”

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Originally Posted by Viking

Ok, let's cut things down to the core: it turns out that you can't be bothered to quote as much as a single sentence to back up a non-trivial assertion that you've made (about Damore's memo). That indicates little interest in engaging in any meaningful debate (as does labelling a normal post as 'sounding hysterical', but hey).

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I am absolutely not interested in debating a well-settled issue like the Damore memo, as you evidently don't care to present any reason to dislike "social justice" or elaborate on what effects you see it having.

For me, the core is then, if you feel ineffably uneasy about people talking about racism or sexism, yet deride the articulation of extreme infractions against civilized society - to put it mildly - by the far-right, then you're not encouraging me to have a reaction to your vague concerns other than 'Good. Be afraid.'

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Originally Posted by Montmorency

I am absolutely not interested in debating a well-settled issue like the Damore memo, as you evidently don't care to present any reason to dislike "social justice" or elaborate on what effects you see it having.

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I presented a relevant example on potential effects that you refuse to discuss. The ball is firmly in your court.

And what is "settled" supposed to mean, do you have references to peer-reviewed papers "settling" this matter? I would not expect much less from that formulation.

For me, the topic of Damore's memo is also very much settled, which is why I brought it up as an example in the first place, since it was ready for use.

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For me, the core is then, if you feel ineffably uneasy about people talking about racism or sexism

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An example of a much more natural starting point for debate than talking is how historical statues are tore down not after political decisions (an important topic in and of itself, obviously), but by mob rule.

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yet deride the articulation of extreme infractions against civilized society [...] by the far-right

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What is this in reference to? Is opposition to minimum wage an example of an "extreme infraction against civilized society"? (not exactly an inherently nationalist position, at any rate; capitalist is more like it)

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Originally Posted by Viking

I presented a relevant example on potential effects that you refuse to discuss. The ball is firmly in your court.

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The ball has been in the court of the supremacists for hundreds of years, and they have fumbled every time. At great cost.

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An example of a much more natural starting point for debate than talking is how historical statues are tore down not after political decisions (an important topic in and of itself, obviously), but by mob rule.

What is this in reference to? Is opposition to minimum wage an example of an "extreme infraction against civilized society"? (not exactly an inherently nationalist position, at any rate; capitalist is more like it)

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I don't care about your fear of hooligans knocking over statues - let it be the most beloved and beautiful statue of the greatest person who ever lived, if there is such a thing - if you're, minimally, dismissive of widespread political suppression and aristocratic tyranny. Anything that would put the two together is bound to be unworthy of attention. It's bad enough, for example, when the Allied war crimes are invoked to diminish Axis war crimes, as opposed to a restricted discussion on the facts of the former, but in the contemporary context there isn't even a remote correspondence of such flaws between sides. In that light it's up to you to defend your priorities.

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Originally Posted by Montmorency

The ball has been in the court of the supremacists for hundreds of years, and they have fumbled every time. At great cost.

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So vaguely formulated that is says practically nothing at all.

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]I don't care about your fear of hooligans knocking over statues - let it be the most beloved and beautiful statue of the greatest person who ever lived, if there is such a thing - if you're, minimally, dismissive of widespread political suppression and aristocratic tyranny. Anything that would put the two together is bound to be unworthy of attention. It's bad enough, for example, when the Allied war crimes are invoked to diminish Axis war crimes, as opposed to a restricted discussion on the facts of the former, but in the contemporary context there isn't even a remote correspondence of such flaws between sides. In that light it's up to you to defend your priorities.

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Weird comment. Many dictatorships have their roots in hooliganism, or by extension: militias. Such as those of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini.

You have one or more radical rag-tag forces taking the fight to the streets. At some point, such a force gains adequate political power to install a dictatorship and ends the instability of the preceding years.

GOP lawmakers caught on video telling activists to thank Manchin and Sinema for not blowing up the filibuster: 'Without that, we would be dead meat'

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Several Republican lawmakers were secretly filmed imploring conservative activists to flood a pair of centrist Democrats with messages of gratitude for holding firm on the filibuster, a 60-vote threshold that most bills need to clear the Senate.

The Democratic activist Lauren Windsor posted the video on Friday, two days after posting another one showing a GOP congressman calling for "18 more months of chaos" to jam Democrats. Both sets of remarks were made on June 29 at a Patriot Voices event attended by a large group of conservatives in Washington, DC.

In the newest video, Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona could be heard saying Democrats were "pushing as far as they can" to enact President Joe Biden's agenda.

"Fortunately for us, the filibuster's still in effect in the Senate. Without that, we would be dead meat, and this thing would be done," he said. "Then we'd be having a little bit more frantic discussion than we're having today."

"But thank goodness for Sinema and Joe Manchin," he said, referring to Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, both of whom have resisted a mounting chorus of Democratic calls to abolish the filibuster.

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Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator and 2016 GOP primary candidate who attended the event, acknowledged the difficulty Republicans face in rolling back social programs once they're in place — possibly a reference to their failed attempt to scrap the Affordable Care Act in 2017 and to others proposing cuts to safety-net programs like Medicare and Social Security.

"It's a lot easier to pass giveaways than it is to take them away. And everybody thinks, 'Oh, well, you know, we'll just take them away,'" he said in the video. "No, we won't! No, we won't."

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:wall:
@ReluctantSamurai

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Originally Posted by Viking

Weird comment. Many dictatorships have their roots in hooliganism, or by extension: militias. Such as those of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini.

You have one or more radical rag-tag forces taking the fight to the streets. At some point, such a force gains adequate political power to install a dictatorship and ends the instability of the preceding years.

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Again you speak in abstractions. If you imagine that typically-anarchists vandalizing statues is a portent of left-wing dictatorship, leave aside that your historical consciousness is rusty; your knowledge of contemporary politics in any country under common discussion is in urgent need of remediation.

Here's your democratic process nevertheless:

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Four years after a woman was killed and dozens were injured when white nationalists protested the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va., workers removed the statue on Saturday, along with a nearby monument to Stonewall Jackson, another Confederate general.

The larger-than-life-sized statue of Lee was hoisted off its granite base shortly after 8 a.m. as a crowd of about 200 looked on. As the flatbed truck carrying the bronze statue rumbled down East Jefferson Street, a toot of the truck’s horn prompted cheers and applause. Jackson was removed about two hours later.

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The decision by the city on Friday to finally take down the statue of Lee came more than four years after the City Council initially put forth a plan to remove it from what was then known as Lee Park, prompting scores of white nationalists to descend on Charlottesville in August 2017 in a “Unite the Right” rally to protest the removal.

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Really now, it would have been just the worst authoritarianism for someone to have pulled it down clandestinely a couple years ago. Just about the end of the American Experiment.

Attachment 24961


Honestly you strike me as consistently too biased over the substance of various social developments to register any credible objections over process.

Here's what I care about.
https://twitter.com/hannnahmmarie/st...25903716593665
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1413955463939600390 [VIDEO]

Are you prepared now to propose any legal protections on behalf of the Gebrus (in case you've forgotten)? If not, what are you moaning about?

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Several Republican lawmakers were secretly filmed imploring conservative activists to flood a pair of centrist Democrats with messages of gratitude for holding firm on the filibuster, a 60-vote threshold that most bills need to clear the Senate.

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My question has always been is the "flooding" been simply messages of gratitude, or something more....:deal2:

Perhaps like this:

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/01/10121...s-climate-push

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McCoy was tricked by the activists who said they were job recruiters. He talked about working with "shadow groups," supporting a carbon tax that he believes will never happen and influencing senators to weaken climate elements of President Biden's infrastructure plan.

"Joe Manchin, I talk to his office every week," McCoy bragged to the interviewer. He called the Democratic senator from West Virginia a "kingmaker" and discussed how "on the Democrat side we look for the moderates on these issues" in their efforts to stop policies that could hurt the company's business.

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:kiss:

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Originally Posted by Montmorency

Again you speak in abstractions. If you imagine that typically-anarchists vandalizing statues is a portent of left-wing dictatorship, leave aside that your historical consciousness is rusty; your knowledge of contemporary politics in any country under common discussion is in urgent need of remediation.

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The people in question that tear down statues operate in a space where some degree of organization and ideology exist; the statues are not just local issues, but form a big part of a larger national issue. That is why these acts are interesting.

You implicitly labelled acts of 'hooliganism' as of little interest, while the fact is that troubled streets were an important step on the path of several totalitarian regimes. Which is to say that this type of 'hooliganism', given the context, is of great interest. Both because it is of significance in and of itself through the level of escalation that it represents, but also because of its potential to evolve and help bring the country into an extreme situation, both in terms of violence and volatility. Lasting extreme situations more readily facilitate an authoritarian takeover of whichever radical group comes out on top. Describing these acts as a portent of dictatorship is a straw man.

The reason why this year's storming of the US Congress is as interesting as it is, is of course also due to its context. Any mob storming a parliamentary building will create waves, but the severity of the event is of an extra order of magnitude when it is part of something bigger. Any sufficiently large obscure cult could have caused the same scenes; but it would have been a very different event in terms of its implications for the future of a country's democracy.

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Honestly you strike me as consistently too biased over the substance of various social developments to register any credible objections over process.

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In democracy's case, it is for the most part really about following a formal process.

Ignoring the democratic process in an established democracy in order to achieve specific goals will necessarily undermine the democracy in question.

This stands in contrast to civil disobedience in its strictest, non-violent sense, where the outcome of a democratic process is protested through illegal means, but where ultimately only the democratic process can decide the final outcome.

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Are you prepared now to propose any legal protections on behalf of the Gebrus (in case you've forgotten)? If not, what are you moaning about?

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I brought up Damore's case as a sample of the status quo, not because I thought he needed legal protection (or sympathy, for that matter; a subjective evaluation). The concept of wrongful dismissal is a separate topic that I am in no hurry to debate.

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Originally Posted by Viking

The people in question that tear down statues operate in a space where some degree of organization and ideology exist; the statues are not just local issues, but form a big part of a larger national issue. That is why these acts are interesting.

You implicitly labelled acts of 'hooliganism' as of little interest, while the fact is that troubled streets were an important step on the path of several totalitarian regimes. Which is to say that this type of 'hooliganism', given the context, is of great interest. Both because it is of significance in and of itself through the level of escalation that it represents, but also because of its potential to evolve and help bring the country into an extreme situation, both in terms of violence and volatility. Lasting extreme situations more readily facilitate an authoritarian takeover of whichever radical group comes out on top. Describing these acts as a portent of dictatorship is a straw man.

The reason why this year's storming of the US Congress is as interesting as it is, is of course also due to its context. Any mob storming a parliamentary building will create waves, but the severity of the event is of an extra order of magnitude when it is part of something bigger. Any sufficiently large obscure cult could have caused the same scenes; but it would have been a very different event in terms of its implications for the future of a country's democracy.

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Again, the problem is that you speak abstractly without specifying the context. Cracking apart a statue as protest itself reflects no particular constituency toward politically-dangerous "escalation" - and historically never really has - especially when considering that leftists gaining much more power would ipso facto promote a peaceful and orderly removal of objectionable statues, by the sort of formal means you might notionally approve. By the way, even in the ultimate case of pure iconoclasm leading to the proscription of ALL memorializations of real persons in public spaces - which very few people of any political persuasion would support to be clear - this would be but an aesthetic disappointment to those in disagreement, because no one's core political project or identity depends on the existence of statues.

The entire mainstream liberal movement condemns such tactics, on the other hand, and the factions that advocate them have approximately zero representation in politics, which one would think would cheer you depending on how one perceives your interests.

Meanwhile, the riot at the Congress was significant far less for being at the Congress - comparatively this sort of thing happens all the time around the world - but because:

1. It was aimed at overthrowing the elected government of the country.
2. The then-President and his allies fomented and organized the uprising.
3. The then-President took steps to mitigate a security response to the threat, a response that would have readily stopped or prevented it in most other circumstances.
4. The entire political party of the then-President agrees with the substantive goals of the insurrection, agrees with the former guy that it should have succeeded, and is increasingly-prepared to make 1/6 a metaphorical Beer Hall Putsch.

Had Trump been telling the whole truth about the election, such a reality would have licensed even more drastic measures than he and his supporters have undertaken and carry on in the event. And depending on what the truth is about various historical personages, then liberal politics dictate examining the worth of monuments on those personages.

If Trump and his supporters (i.e. the entirety of the American RIght) are vile fascists bent on domination, then it would be an ethical failure on the part of the entire left-to-center spectrum to not be profoundly escalating the repercussions they face for their crimes and transgressions.

So the analysis still seems to be that your priority is feebly deflecting from real problems to undermine the very, and ultimately only, groups and people who do or can confront them.

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In democracy's case, it is for the most part really about following a formal process.

Ignoring the democratic process in an established democracy in order to achieve specific goals will necessarily undermine the democracy in question.

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Again taking such a statement gnomically and detached from context (as to put it in context leads your stance into self-contradiction), it is telling that you would focus on veritably the most marginal circumvention of formal processes today, in terms of both character and breadth,

Remember, it is not just that you are pounding this while ignoring a government breaking its laws in the interest of state actors or business stakeholders or sheer sadism, failing in its legal and constitutional obligations, subjecting people to cruelty or force without recourse or due process, waging unaccountable military and foreign policy with real detriment to millions of people, but that you ignore the latter and more while striving to underscore the former as a threat to democracy by way of intended discredit to the cultural Left as a political force.

Your stance that iconoclasm is a constitutional threat to a country, alongside openly dismissing documentation of "Der Ewige Konservatismus," remains totally irredeemable and contemptible, really in almost any conceivable set of circumstances too. But in these circumstances the members, across all levels of political and socioeconomic hierarchy, of one political side here formally and explicitly promote and pursue beliefs and behaviors that are known comparatively to lead to societal breakdown, state failure, and totalitarianism, whereas this is not remotely the case with the other. All before even designating evil as such.

Your position would actually be more reasonable and defensible if you were arguing that instead of going after inanimate objects, militant leftists should be seeking to harm political and religious leaders on the Right. It's that fucked up.

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I brought up Damore's case as a sample of the status quo, not because I thought he needed legal protection (or sympathy, for that matter; a subjective evaluation). The concept of wrongful dismissal is a separate topic that I am in no hurry to debate.

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The status quo is that labor is expendable to management (in a New Gilded Age trajectory). That there is an extent to which decent cultural values have spread such that capitalists perceive even a little liability to the manifestation exposure of formerly-unassailable bigotries is, like, a silver lining here. I'm not interested in mourning for people who fear that, rather those who do should be making an argument for why my values aren't consistent with being glad for their fear.

Tennessee just fired a top public health official in part for pointing out that teenagers are legally-emancipated to pursue vaccination regardless of parental wishes. Also:

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Tennessee abandons vaccine outreach to minors — not just for COVID-19

The Tennessee Department of Health will halt all adolescent vaccine outreach – not just for coronavirus, but all diseases – amid pressure from Republican state lawmakers, according to an internal report and agency emails obtained by the Tennessean. If the health department must issue any information about vaccines, staff are instructed to strip the agency logo off the documents.
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After the health department's internal COVID-19 report was circulated on Friday, the rollback of vaccine outreach was further detailed in a Monday email from agency Chief Medical Officer Dr. Tim Jones. Jones told staff they should conduct "no proactive outreach regarding routine vaccines" and "no outreach whatsoever regarding the HPV vaccine." Staff were also told not to do any "pre-planning" for flu shots events at schools. Any information released about back-to-school vaccinations should come from the Tennessee Department of Education, not the Tennessee Department of Health, Jones wrote.
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Decisions to ratchet back outreach comes amid pressure from conservative lawmakers, who have embraced misinformation about the coronavirus vaccine, said Dr. Michelle Fiscus, Tennessee's former top vaccine official.
[...]
The Tennessee Department of Health began backing off vaccination outreach in the wake of a contentious legislative hearing in mid-June where several conservative lawmakers chastised Piercey for efforts to vaccinate teenagers. Lawmakers accused the agency of attempting to circumvent parents and peer pressure minors to be vaccinated, then discussed dissolving the entire health department to stop its vaccine advertisements.

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This is in the context of most Republican states attempting to legislate unvaccinated status into a protected class, in some cases for all vaccines.


I don't know if this is the first time notorious neoconservative David Frum has admitted that Trump is a fascist, but I'm willing to extend that not "once a whore, always a whore" if he can logically follow to labeling "the Republican Party and its adherents" thus.

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“I became worse.” That’s how double impeachment changed him, Donald Trump told a conservative audience in Dallas last weekend, without a trace of a smile. This was not Trump the insult comic talking. This was the deepest Trump self. And this one time, he told the truth... Outright endorsement of lethal extremism? That was too much for Trump in 2017. But now look where we are. In the first days after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Trump supporters distanced themselves from its excesses. The attack had nothing to do with Trump, they argued. He had urged only a peaceful demonstration. If anybody did any harm, that person was a concealed agent of antifa. But in the months since, the mood has shifted. Once repudiated, the attacks are now accepted, condoned, and even endorsed.

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The answer arrived on Sunday morning, when Trump phoned into Maria Bartiromo’s Fox News show to deliver his most full-throated endorsement yet of the January 6 attack on Congress. The ex-president praised Ashli Babbitt, the woman slain as she attempted to crash through the door that protected members of Congress from the mob that had invaded the Capitol: “innocent, wonderful, incredible woman.” He praised the insurrectionist throng: “great people.” He denounced their arrest and jailing as unjust. And he implied that Babbitt had been shot by the personal-security detail of a leading member of Congress. “I’ve heard also that it was the head of security for a certain high official. A Democrat. It’s gonna come out.”

The relentless messaging by Trump and his supporters has inflicted a measurable wound on American democracy. Before the 2020 election, about 60 percent of Democrats and Republicans expected the election to be fair. Since Trump began circulating his ever more radical complaints, Republican confidence in the election has tumbled by half, to barely more than 30 percent, according to polling supported by the Democracy Fund.

The Trump movement was always authoritarian and illiberal. It indulged periodically in the rhetoric of violence. Trump himself chafed against the restraints of law. But what the United States did not have before 2020 was a large national movement willing to justify mob violence to claim political power. Now it does.

Is there a precedent? Not in recent years. Since the era of RedemptionPresidential-era Trumpism operated through at least the forms of law. Presidential-era Trumpism glorified military power, not mob attacks on government institutions. Post-presidentially, those past inhibitions are fast dissolving. The conversion of Ashli Babbitt into a martyr, a sort of American Horst Wessel, expresses the transformation. Through 2020, Trump had endorsed deadly force against lawbreakers: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted on May 29, 2020. Babbitt broke the law too, but not to steal a TV. She was killed as she tried to disrupt the constitutional order, to prevent the formalization of the results of a democratic election. after Reconstruction, anti-government violence in the United States has been the work of marginal sects and individual extremists. American Islamic State supporters were never going to seize the state, and neither were the Weather Underground, the Ku Klux Klan killers of the 1950s and ’60s, Puerto Rican nationalists, the German American Bund, nor the Communist Party USA.

But the post-election Trump movement is not tiny. It’s not anything like a national majority, but it’s a majority in some states—a plurality in more—and everywhere a significant minority, empowered by the inability of pro-legality Republicans to stand up to them. Once it might have been hoped that young Republicans with a future would somehow distance themselves from the violent lawlessness of the post-presidential Trump movement. But one by one, they are betting the other way. You might understand why those tainted by the January 6 attacks, such as Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, would find excuses for them. They have butts to cover. But Hawley is being outdone by other young politicians who weren’t in office and seemed to have every opportunity to build post-Trump identities—including even former Trump critics like the Ohio Senate aspirant J. D. Vance. Why do people sign up with the putschists after the putsch has failed? They’re betting that the failed putsch is not the past—it’s the future.

What shall we call this future? Through the Trump years, it seemed sensible to eschew comparisons to the worst passages of history. I repeated over and over again a warning against too-easy use of the F-word, fascism: “There are a lot of stops on the train line to bad before you get to Hitler Station.”

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Two traits have historically marked off European-style fascism from more homegrown American traditions of illiberalism: contempt for legality and the cult of violence.

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Sadly, this is absolutely untrue and reveals insufficient attention to, principally, the history of 19th century America, the history of the American South, and the history of the FBI and CIA. And of course the entirety of the Bush era, of which we should always remember Frum was lionized as a leading intellectual proponent. Back in the day.

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Presidential-era Trumpism operated through at least the forms of law. Presidential-era Trumpism glorified military power, not mob attacks on government institutions. Post-presidentially, those past inhibitions are fast dissolving. The conversion of Ashli Babbitt into a martyr, a sort of American Horst Wessel, expresses the transformation. Through 2020, Trump had endorsed deadly force against lawbreakers: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted on May 29, 2020. Babbitt broke the law too, but not to steal a TV. She was killed as she tried to disrupt the constitutional order, to prevent the formalization of the results of a democratic election.

If a big-enough movement agrees with Trump that Babbitt was “wonderful”—if they repeat that the crowd of would-be Nancy Pelosi kidnappers and Mike Pence lynchers was “great”—then we are leaving behind the American system of democratic political competition for a new landscape in which power is determined by the gun.

That’s a landscape for which a lot of pro-Trump writers and thinkers seem to yearn.

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You are living in territory controlled by enemy tribes. You, and all like you, must assume the innocence of anyone remotely like yourself who is charged in any confrontation with those tribes and with their authorities—until proven otherwise beyond a shadow of your doubt. Take his side. In other words, you must shield others like yourself by practicing and urging “jury nullification.”

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Those words are not taken from The Turner Diaries or some other Aryan Nation tract. They were published by a leading pro-Trump site, the same site where Trump’s former in-house intellectual Michael Anton publishes. They were written by Angelo Codevilla, who wrote the books and articles that defined so much of the Trump creed in 2016. (Codevilla’s 2016 book, The Ruling Class, was introduced by Rush Limbaugh and heavily promoted on Limbaugh’s radio program.)

We are so accustomed to using the word fascist as an epithet that it feels awkward to adjust it for political analysis. We understand that there were and are many varieties of socialism. We forget that there were varieties of fascism as well, and not just those defeated in World War II. Peronism, in Argentina, offers a lot of insights into post-presidential Trumpism.

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In the United States, the forces of legality still mobilize more strength than their Trumpist adversaries. But those who uphold the American constitutional order need to understand what they are facing. Trump incited his followers to try to thwart an election result, and to kill or threaten Trump’s own vice president if he would not or could not deliver on Trump’s crazy scheme to keep power. We’re past the point of pretending it was antifa that did January 6, past the point of pretending that Trump didn’t want what he fomented and what he got. In his interview on July 11—as in the ever more explicit talk of his followers—the new line about the attack on the Capitol is guilty but justified. The election of 2020 was a fraud, and so those who lost it are entitled to overturn it.

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I do not consider myself guilty. I admit all the factual aspects of the charge. But I cannot plead that I am guilty of high treason; for there can be no high treason against that treason committed in 1918.

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Maybe you recognize those words. They come from Adolf Hitler’s plea of self-defense at his trial for his 1923 Munich putsch. He argued: You are not entitled to the power you hold, so I committed no crime when I tried to grab it back. You blame me for what I did; I blame you for who you are.

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Every day is a Flight 93 moment.

For emphasis:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/14/polit...rpt/index.html

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The top US military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley, was so shaken that then-President Donald Trump and his allies might attempt a coup or take other dangerous or illegal measures after the November election that Milley and other top officials informally planned for different ways to stop Trump, according to excerpts of an upcoming book obtained by CNN. The book, from Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, describes how Milley and the other Joint Chiefs discussed a plan to resign, one-by-one, rather than carry out orders from Trump that they considered to be illegal, dangerous or ill-advised.
[...]
Milley spoke to friends, lawmakers and colleagues about the threat of a coup, and the Joint Chiefs chairman felt he had to be "on guard" for what might come.
"They may try, but they're not going to f**king succeed," Milley told his deputies, according to the authors. "You can't do this without the military. You can't do this without the CIA and the FBI. We're the guys with the guns."
In the days leading up to January 6, Leonnig and Rucker write, Milley was worried about Trump's call to action. "Milley told his staff that he believed Trump was stoking unrest, possibly in hopes of an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call out the military."
Milley viewed Trump as "the classic authoritarian leader with nothing to lose," the authors write, and he saw parallels between Adolf Hitler's rhetoric as a victim and savior and Trump's false claims of election fraud.
"This is a Reichstag moment," Milley told aides, according to the book. "The gospel of the Führer."

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The Tennessee Department of Health will halt all adolescent vaccine outreach – not just for coronavirus, but all diseases

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I had a conversation not too long ago with someone about my age that held the same ignorant views that most anti-vaxxers have. I asked this person to roll up their sleeve. [Quizzical look] Roll up your sleeve, I repeated. I pointed to the familiar dimple on his upper arm signifying that he had gotten his polio vaccine, the MMR vaccine (mumps, measles, rubella), and likely several others. I stated that I've had both of my COVID shots, and that I'm pretty sure that tableware won't stick to my forehead, although if he happened to be carrying a fork, we could test that out...:rolleyes: My final statement as I walked away was that chances are very good that he wouldn't be alive today if it weren't for vaccines.

God these people are effing stupid...:wall:
Here's an idea....~:idea: Instead of making vaccines mandatory, let's pass legislation that bans anti-vaxxers from having access to them, and ship all those excess jabs overseas. I'm sure the ensuing hizzy fits about constitutional rights will provide enough material for several news cycles.....~D

@ Monty

It just gets dirtier and dirtier:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/exxon...b09f0145f5075f

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New analysis of campaign disclosures found the six Democratic senators ― Mark Kelly (Ariz.), Maggie Hassan (N.H.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Chris Coons (Del.), Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and Jon Tester (Mont.) ― received a combined total of nearly $333,000 from lobbyists, political action committees and lobbying firms affiliated with Exxon over the past decade.

“This is a story about how lobbyists curry favor, and specifically about how Exxon’s current lobbyists have spent decades currying the favor of these six Democrats to position themselves to do things like safeguard fossil fuel subsidies and pare down infrastructure packages,” Rees said. “Exxon has hired these firms and lobbyists because they’ve contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to these Democrats, both before and after they were hired by Exxon.”

“On the Democrat side, we look for the moderates,” McCoy said. “So it’s the Manchins. It’s the Sinemas. It’s the Testers.”

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Seems like petty cash, right? But:

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But a 2017 Ohio State University study indicates the donations have a measurable effect, particularly as they enter the five-figure range. For every $10,000 a lawmaker received from a major industrial polluter like Exxon Mobil, their probability of voting for pro-environmental legislation decreased by 2%, according to the study of donations between 1990 and 2010 published in the journal Environmental Politics. For Democrats, the effect of the donations was even stronger, reducing likelihood of a pro-environmental vote by 3%.

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Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel at the watchdog Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said corporate lobbyists “expect something in return” when they make political donations.

“As a result, when Exxon’s lobbyists, PACs and lobbying firms make donations to particular senators, we have to ask ourselves what do they expect and what did they get in return,” said Canter, a former ethics counsel for the Obama and Clinton administrations.

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An expansion of the earlier NPR link:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/joe-m...b001b8d59bbbd8

And the hits just keep on comin'...:guitarist:

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Originally Posted by Montmorency

So the analysis still seems to be that your priority is feebly deflecting from real problems to undermine the very, and ultimately only, groups and people who do or can confront them.

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Again taking such a statement gnomically and detached from context (as to put it in context leads your stance into self-contradiction), it is telling that you would focus on veritably the most marginal circumvention of formal processes today, in terms of both character and breadth,

Remember, it is not just that you are pounding this while ignoring a government breaking its laws in the interest of state actors or business stakeholders or sheer sadism, failing in its legal and constitutional obligations, subjecting people to cruelty or force without recourse or due process, waging unaccountable military and foreign policy with real detriment to millions of people, but that you ignore the latter and more while striving to underscore the former as a threat to democracy by way of intended discredit to the cultural Left as a political force.

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I discuss and bring up topics that either interest me or seem to warrant greater attention than they currently receive.

You may wish to discuss the topics that grab the headlines of mainstream media and how they are usually presented there, but those perspectives are, evidently, already well-exposed and on peoples' radar; and debating them is often more akin to kicking up an open door. Unless you are actually facing any of the (typically wacky and probably not very intelligent) radicalized individuals that these articles concern. Interests aside, focusing on these individuals is also simply inadequate to understand a society and predict where it is headed.

There are other dubious individuals and movements to follow and debate, and this is where a lot of my focus is here and now.

Obviously, sloppy intellectual work will be exposed for what it is.

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Again, the problem is that you speak abstractly without specifying the context. Cracking apart a statue as protest itself reflects no particular constituency toward politically-dangerous "escalation" - and historically never really has - especially when considering that leftists gaining much more power would ipso facto promote a peaceful and orderly removal of objectionable statues, by the sort of formal means you might notionally approve. By the way, even in the ultimate case of pure iconoclasm leading to the proscription of ALL memorializations of real persons in public spaces - which very few people of any political persuasion would support to be clear - this would be but an aesthetic disappointment to those in disagreement, because no one's core political project or identity depends on the existence of statues.

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Abstractions help sever links between a subject and clichés, and entrenched views associated with it. If something seems off, the problem is not the abstraction

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The entire mainstream liberal movement condemns such tactics, on the other hand, and the factions that advocate them have approximately zero representation in politics, which one would think would cheer you depending on how one perceives your interests.

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Maybe it lacks political representation now, maybe it doesn't; but such changes might not require more than an election or two to change drastically, so that is no guarantee going forward.

This a quote from an actual Democrat in an article linked in another thread:

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“As a survivor myself, who’s got a femme-led team, many of whom are also survivors, we’ve all been triggered.”

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At some time during the last 5-20 years, some of the terminology used here might not have been used by any democrat of much significance, but fringe views can make their way to the mainstream; and they have here, in some sense (the candidate's team seemed even more fringe-inspired). I do not register that the relevant fringe groups where such terminology originated faces that much opposition from the 'progressive' side; frequently, it seems that the opposite is the case.

Currently, the path of the Democratic party seems to be one of transformation, not steady state; and some fringes seem to be heading for the mainstream.

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Meanwhile, the riot at the Congress was significant far less for being at the Congress - comparatively this sort of thing happens all the time around the world - but because:

1. It was aimed at overthrowing the elected government of the country.
2. The then-President and his allies fomented and organized the uprising.
3. The then-President took steps to mitigate a security response to the threat, a response that would have readily stopped or prevented it in most other circumstances.
4. The entire political party of the then-President agrees with the substantive goals of the insurrection, agrees with the former guy that it should have succeeded, and is increasingly-prepared to make 1/6 a metaphorical Beer Hall Putsch.

Had Trump been telling the whole truth about the election, such a reality would have licensed even more drastic measures than he and his supporters have undertaken and carry on in the event. And depending on what the truth is about various historical personages, then liberal politics dictate examining the worth of monuments on those personages.

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This is context, like mentioned.

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Your stance that iconoclasm is a constitutional threat to a country

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Nope.

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alongside openly dismissing documentation of "Der Ewige Konservatismus," remains totally irredeemable and contemptible, really in almost any conceivable set of circumstances too. But in these circumstances the members, across all levels of political and socioeconomic hierarchy, of one political side here formally and explicitly promote and pursue beliefs and behaviors that are known comparatively to lead to societal breakdown, state failure, and totalitarianism, whereas this is not remotely the case with the other. All before even designating evil as such.

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To tar such a heterogeneous group of people, which is not well-defined anyway, and whose definition likely varies from country to country and over time, makes no sense, and is a breach of debate etiquette.

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Your position would actually be more reasonable and defensible if you were arguing that instead of going after inanimate objects, militant leftists should be seeking to harm political and religious leaders on the Right. It's that fucked up.

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If you are going to use physical force, you better be stronger in terms of arms and manpower. The radical 'left' in the US is not in this position currently, so it would likely end poorly. But this state does not have to last forever, particularly in a country that is going through rapid ethnically demographic changes as well as changing politically landscape, and changing political attitudes.

These groups are not there today, but one day they might be strong enough and radicalized enough that they could want to take on the radical 'right' in the streets. Statues are one interesting point to watch then, since it represents low-level radicalization: no one have to get hurt, but it is still a case of might makes right.

One observation that might not seem very important, but that ultimately is telling something, is that in many (most?) cases, they really did have the might to tear down the statues. If anyone did come out to defend the statues in these cases, they weren't strong enough. So the radical 'left' has space to operate successfully in the public space through means of force. An important question is if such groups will seek to expand this space, and risk more open confrontation with the radical 'right', who might not adequately care about protecting statues to prevent many of them being toppled, but who presumably will mobilize more strongly for other things. I make no predictions here.

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The status quo is that labor is expendable to management (in a New Gilded Age trajectory). That there is an extent to which decent cultural values have spread such that capitalists perceive even a little liability to the manifestation exposure of formerly-unassailable bigotries is, like, a silver lining here. I'm not interested in mourning for people who fear that, rather those who do should be making an argument for why my values aren't consistent with being glad for their fear.

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What happened with Damore was an example of where 'liberals', many of whom traditionally might have been happy to use science as a weapon against conservative religious individuals, turn down science when it contradicts notions of equality. Ironically, because the kind of equality that e.g. human rights would imply is inherent to the person and not dependent on its nature. So if science is supportive of differences in the distributions of personality traits between men and women, and someone is fired for incorporating such science into their own hypotheses, this is cheered on.

Considering that men women are based on lineages where the two groups have had very distinct physiologies for anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of years depending on the perspective, differences would be expected. In other words, suddenly "Team Science" is batting for "Team Intelligent Design".

I say traditionally above, as there appears to have been a bit of a turn towards a more pro-religious stance among 'progressives' (or that such views are more commonly expressed now). Particularly in defence of Islam, but more liberal versions of Christianity would presumably also pass without too much issue.

Some of the edgier Internet Right speculate that, because the advance child tax credit is so popular among conservative voters, the Republican Party elite will finally embrace Strasserite redistribution and win permanent majorities.

Let's see how that one comes through.

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Originally Posted by ReluctantSamurai

@ Monty

It just gets dirtier and dirtier:

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There isn't any news there in terms of the filibuster. We still can't conflate the bare fact that donors influence the decisions of politicians, and vice versa, with resistance to overcoming the filibuster; all national Democratic politicians benefit from large donors, yet the vast majority support filibuster reform.

Because the equation fundamentally remains that the most bought-and-paid-for Democratic senator can contract out their liberum veto to their "handlers" in order to pass legislation redounding to their party's and their own political benefit, while also watering it down to protect - even lard it to reward - whatever donors or constituencies they might need to. Whereas if no law, then no nothing.

E.g. the lobbyist-written U.S. Innovation and Competition Act enacted a month ago.

Thus Sen. Tester supports filibuster reform, Coons has gone from one of its most active defenders to quiet dissatisfaction, Hassan has voiced support for AFAIK everything but abolition, and all first-termers - including Kelly - are reformist on the question. In my opinion individual, non-fungible, characteristics are most relevant in the case of Sinema and Manchin.

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Seems like petty cash, right? But:

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Not every politician can go big league, but state and local pols are probably the likeliest to sell out on federal felonies over a few grand.

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Originally Posted by Viking

Abstractions help sever links between a subject and clichés, and entrenched views associated with it. If something seems off, the problem is not the abstraction

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Maybe it lacks political representation now, maybe it doesn't; but such changes might not require more than an election or two to change drastically, so that is no guarantee going forward.

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See, disregarding the logical flaws in your polemic by escaping to the level of meta-abstraction - defending the mere availability of abstraction - does not increase the credibility of your initial attempt here, which was to insinuate jeopardy in the public discourse on subjects like race and gender.

Notwithstanding one's opinion of the Vietnam War, someone urging that American forces ought to be recalled to the mainland in order to stave off Native American genocide of the White majority, in connection with the emergence of the American Indian Movement, could be dismissed without further thought.

You should expect to do a lot of heavy lifting to explain why unsubstantiated potentials from an unsubstantiated harm (that is more often part of an affirmative good) have some kind of precedence over an ongoing national crisis.

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At some time during the last 5-20 years, some of the terminology used here might not have been used by any democrat of much significance, but fringe views can make their way to the mainstream; and they have here, in some sense (the candidate's team seemed even more fringe-inspired). I do not register that the relevant fringe groups where such terminology originated faces that much opposition from the 'progressive' side; frequently, it seems that the opposite is the case.

Currently, the path of the Democratic party seems to be one of transformation, not steady state; and some fringes seem to be heading for the mainstream.

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Is your point that this terminology or the concepts they denote are bad and dangerous, that it is as bad as you think toppling a statue is, that the two are somehow related, or that they represent a path of objectionable extremism for the Democratic Party? You will, as before, have a very hard time actually supporting any of the above with more than appeal to infinite possible worlds.

But as a matter of fact "trigger" and "survivor" have been mainstream terminology since the Obama era. Hope that doesn't undo you.

For my part, I'll explain why I think fascism is bad. Fascism is bad because it is a violent and wasteful system of governance that is proven to be unstable and destructive to human (and nonhuman) life and potential; the belief and practice that a class of humans are entitled to subjugate and parasitize others has some of the worst outcomes in human history.

Now your turn on why talking about sex crime and nonstandard genders and orientations manifests danger from the left.

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To tar such a heterogeneous group of people, which is not well-defined anyway, and whose definition likely varies from country to country and over time, makes no sense, and is a breach of debate etiquette.

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Here's the problem again. You're wounded when I recount the specific actions of what is certainly a well-defined group of people, primarily in the context of modern American politics no less, yet you see no breach of etiquette in implicitly condemning the broad left on the basis of almost literally nothing but vague discomfort.

I'm going to demand a higher performance of etiquette from you.

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One observation that might not seem very important, but that ultimately is telling something, is that in many (most?) cases, they really did have the might to tear down the statues. If anyone did come out to defend the statues in these cases, they weren't strong enough. So the radical 'left' has space to operate successfully in the public space through means of force. An important question is if such groups will seek to expand this space, and risk more open confrontation with the radical 'right', who might not adequately care about protecting statues to prevent many of them being toppled, but who presumably will mobilize more strongly for other things. I make no predictions here.

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In principle those statues can easily be stood back up unless damaged, in which case it's a matter of bureaucratic will to pay to re-accession them; you'll note a few dozen black-clad rioters lack the force to prevent the government from accomplishing that. As it happens, local governments in 2020 tended to be unwilling to generate confrontations over statues in the context of national protests and generally-similar statues being removed bureaucratically in the low-hundreds. Vigilante iconoclasm is nothing new or escalatory in the living memory of America, but the massive protest movement directed willing bodies to the act while also affording them political cover they would not normally have had, and which they no longer have. This make good sense when you further include the international context of 'it always works that way!'

The real space of confrontation you probably ponder would most naturally expand in the circumstance of a Republican seizure of the national state in the near-future. You would expect to see organized, including formal political, resistance to federal authority in blue states, as well as pogroms in red states. This is at least a realistic scenario. Take care to note that such a scenario does not hold out some endogenous change of behavior over time, where politically-moderate insurance lawyers wake up one morning determined to lob Molotovs in the name of Wokeness, but a mass direct response to near-unprecedented escalation of civil conflict by those in power.

Notably, if one opposes the left taking "more open confrontation" under such circumstances, one would be explicitly pro-fascist.

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If you are going to use physical force, you better be stronger in terms of arms and manpower. The radical 'left' in the US is not in this position currently, so it would likely end poorly. But this state does not have to last forever, particularly in a country that is going through rapid ethnically demographic changes as well as changing politically landscape, and changing political attitudes.

These groups are not there today, but one day they might be strong enough and radicalized enough that they could want to take on the radical 'right' in the streets. Statues are one interesting point to watch then, since it represents low-level radicalization: no one have to get hurt, but it is still a case of might makes right.

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It sure as hell shouldn't last forever. Pretty wild to tut at someone twitching their fist when they have a gun in their face. But as it turns out (see last year's threads) we even have real-world case of extremism on both sides that signals the mismatch in perspective: last year's Trump-enabled public execution of killer anti-fascist Michael Reinoehl by a federal death squad, a downright intensification of the Horst Wessel archetype. But whatever, to channel the relevant rhetoric: maybe the Gay Agenda will drive another self-hating cuck to pick up a gun sometime soon.

But, again being realistic, militant far-left organizations would only proliferate in the event of the ongoing collapse of the US as a polity and the total failure of the institutional Democratic Party to offer meaningful guidance and organizing; otherwise the grassroots energy gets directed through elite-managed channels. In this scenario these fearsome lefties are quickly overwhelmed by Republican-aligned militias and police, and the prospects for resistance fall back onto the electorate (such as through a general strike).

Designating left-wing radicalization a point of anticipation is dubious when we've had generations of right-wing radicalization outpacing it by an order of magnitude. We already know what's going on here.

So in summary, statue violence has an unclear connection to cultural leftism in general or the development of the Democratic Party, the indicia of radicalization are responsive to conditions outside the activities of the Left, and it is uninformative to analyze current events without actually setting them in current events.

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What happened with Damore was an example of where 'liberals', many of whom traditionally might have been happy to use science as a weapon against conservative religious individuals, turn down science when it contradicts notions of equality.

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That is of course not what happened.

"If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions.”

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Considering that men women are based on lineages where the two groups have had very distinct physiologies for anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of years depending on the perspective, differences would be expected. In other words, suddenly "Team Science" is batting for "Team Intelligent Design".

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I am not always going to be present to call you out when you engage in this dishonest tactic of motte-and-bailey abstractions. The issue at hand in the Damore controversy was never whether there are non-zero differences between men and women as groups.

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I say traditionally above, as there appears to have been a bit of a turn towards a more pro-religious stance among 'progressives' (or that such views are more commonly expressed now). Particularly in defence of Islam, but more liberal versions of Christianity would presumably also pass without too much issue.

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Liberals and leftists the world over continue to get less religious by the year, but freedom of religion has always been a liberal plank. For example, most Evangelical Christians are scum, but that's not an excuse to discriminate on a group level. Evangelical Christianity was originally the birthplace of progressivism in the United States, so maybe that's what you're thinking of, but those days are very long gone.

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You may wish to discuss the topics that grab the headlines of mainstream media and how they are usually presented there, but those perspectives are, evidently, already well-exposed and on peoples' radar; and debating them is often more akin to kicking up an open door. Unless you are actually facing any of the (typically wacky and probably not very intelligent) radicalized individuals that these articles concern. Interests aside, focusing on these individuals is also simply inadequate to understand a society and predict where it is headed.

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So just say what you mean, and make sure it's interesting.

My sense is that you disagree with the cultural Left on values, perceive them as more of a threat to your worldview than fascism, and by that pretext launder some of your own unpopular views on race and gender and civics by inflating criticism of an unpopular impulse among part of the cultural Left. Hence why you don't rely on the old standby of an imminent Communist uprising coming to ban private property, because that particular fish doesn't get at which of your oxes is presently being gored.

For instance, peep this state history curriculum about to be enacted in Texas, with regard to the struck-out clauses. I doubt you would think to have any substantive objection to the authors' agenda.
https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87...f/SB00003I.pdf

It would be something else entirely if you sought out perspectives on how societies should go about memorializing figures as such in public spaces over time. There's at least scope for a grounded discussion; I've read multiple non-worthless thinkpieces in that vein. Or if you just wished to register displeasure at vigilante iconoclasm, I wouldn't pressure it.

But spare me the 'ZOMGbbq teh statues SJdubz gone mad' crap that you clearly can't justify up front.

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There isn't any news there in terms of the filibuster. We still can't conflate the bare fact that donors influence the decisions of politicians, and vice versa, with resistance to overcoming the filibuster; all national Democratic politicians benefit from large donors, yet the vast majority support filibuster reform.

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Except the "Justice Democrats" who don't accept corporate bribes...err I mean donations. Abolishing the filibuster is a non-issue....it will never happen unless one side or the other wins a clear, decisive majority. The current legislation on the Congressional agenda wouldn't require a 60 vote majority if the corporate Democrats voted to enact law for the people of the United States instead of their donors.

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Whereas if no law, then no nothing.

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What law are you referring to?~:confused:

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In my opinion individual, non-fungible, characteristics are most relevant in the case of Sinema and Manchin.

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And it should be obvious by now that those "non-fungible" characteristics most relevant to Manchin and Sinema are fealty to their corporate donors. There's even Manchin on tape actively seeking donors to bribe an out-going GOP senator in an attempt to garner the required 60 vote bi-partisan majority, just so he can avoid criticism for the "far-left". Bribery and corruption has been in politics as long as there has been politics. What's needed more than ever, is to call out that corruption, and to at least attempt to vote those who are corrupt, out of office. And there needs to be pressure from within the party to get on board with the extremely popular Democratic agenda. But of course this president has little stomach, or back-bone for pressuring the Manchin's and Sinema's, because he's just like them...:inquisitive:

In the coming days, His Royal Highness will most likely show his true colors on the climate change portions of the infrastructure bill:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/14/polit...nge/index.html

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"I know they have the climate portion in here, and I'm concerned about that," Manchin said moments after Biden met with Senate Democrats in the Capitol on Wednesday.

"Because if they're eliminating fossils, and I'm finding out there's a lot of language in places they're eliminating fossils, which is very, very disturbing, because if you're sticking your head in the sand, and saying that fossil (fuel) has to be eliminated in America, and they want to get rid of it, and thinking that's going to clean up the global climate, it won't clean it up all. If anything, it would be worse."

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Eliminating major sources of CO2 emissions like coal, actually makes climate change worse? WTF!?!

Ohhhh...this might be an explanation for that brilliant piece of stupidity:

https://prospect.org/power/manchin-p...ying-group-me/

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Sen. Manchin expressed skepticism about the Biden administration’s goals to halve greenhouse gas emissions from their 2005 levels by 2030, a policy target for which there are still no binding laws. In the current Congress, Manchin’s vote would almost certainly be necessary for the Senate to approve plans to reduce polluting emissions, which would require a clean-energy transition for the coal industry of West Virginia.

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Skepticism over how to finance "green energy"? Or maybe someones got some numbers skewed incorrectly? Maybe climate change is "fake news"? Anything? Something? Ahhh....good old fashioned greed:

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Manchin earns hundreds of thousands of dollars each year through coal sales to power plants that supply Edison Electric Institute member companies. His family company, Enersystems, is a contractor of American Bituminous Power Partners (AmBit), a coal power plant located near Grant Town, West Virginia, that provides energy to Monogahela Power Company, according to documents from the West Virginia Public Services Commission (PSC). Also known as Mon Power, the electric company is a subsidiary of energy giant FirstEnergy and an EEI member.

Manchin founded the coal brokerage Enersystems in 1988 and helped run the company, handing control to his son Joseph upon being elected West Virginia secretary of state in 2000 and reportedly moving his holdings into a blind trust between 2005 and 2010. In Manchin’s most recent financial disclosure, covering the fiscal year 2020, he reports that his non-public shares of Enersystems, a “contract services and material provider for utility plants,” are worth between $1 million and $5 million, and sent him an income of $492,000. His total income from the company since joining the Senate is more than $4.5 million.

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So 4.5 million reasons for opposing the move away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. But there's more:

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A 2017 report by the Energy and Policy Institute, “Utilities Knew,” documented the role of electric utilities in blocking lawmaking on polluting emissions while continuing to invest in fossil fuel facilities, despite EEI sponsoring climate research in the 1970s and early 1980s. “For example,” the report writes, “EEI and Southern Company spearheaded the 1991 Information Council on the Environment ad campaign, which aimed to ‘reposition global warming as theory (not fact).’” Also in 2017, an Energy and Policy Institute report found that utility companies funded by ratepayers sent $760 million from 2004 through 2015 to EEI in member dues, which then spent a total of $130.6 million on lobbying and political expenditures, 14 percent of its total expenses.

The event where Manchin spoke, called “The Road to Net Zero,” also featured Eric Holdsworth, director of climate programs for EEI, who previously served as deputy director of the industry group Global Climate Coalition that attacked climate science and lobbied against climate policy in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Edison Electric Institute spends more than $8 million a year on lobbying the federal government, according to OpenSecrets. The trade association’s lobbyists have raised money for the Democratic House and Senate campaign arms. Last year, EEI used efforts by FirstEnergy as case studies in boot camps for executives on how to defeat clean-energy campaigns, including through interference with initiatives brought to voters through ballot measures.

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"Non-fungible" characteristics indeed! :ballchain:

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Originally Posted by Montmorency

See, disregarding the logical flaws in your polemic by escaping to the level of meta-abstraction - defending the mere availability of abstraction - does not increase the credibility of your initial attempt here, which was to insinuate jeopardy in the public discourse on subjects like race and gender.

Notwithstanding one's opinion of the Vietnam War, someone urging that American forces ought to be recalled to the mainland in order to stave off Native American genocide of the White majority, in connection with the emergence of the American Indian Movement, could be dismissed without further thought.

You should expect to do a lot of heavy lifting to explain why unsubstantiated potentials from an unsubstantiated harm (that is more often part of an affirmative good) have some kind of precedence over an ongoing national crisis.

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Designating left-wing radicalization a point of anticipation is dubious when we've had generations of right-wing radicalization outpacing it by an order of magnitude. We already know what's going on here.

So in summary, statue violence has an unclear connection to cultural leftism in general or the development of the Democratic Party, the indicia of radicalization are responsive to conditions outside the activities of the Left, and it is uninformative to analyze current events without actually setting them in current events.

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The idea is not that the Democratic party is likely to be taken over by authoritarians within the next few years, but your point seems to be that authoritarian or totalitarian movements no longer will spawn on the 'left' today - which raises the question, what are Jughashvili, Mao, and Saloth Sar doing today? Playing Civilization or staying involved with the 'alt-right'? Even if that were the case, you can be confident there are new names to replace them.

The point is that people are dangerous, not the 'right', not the 'left', not 'fascists', not 'communists' - but people. All dictators, murderers etc. were and are people. When (sub-)movements with clear anti-intellectual and anti-democratic inclinations appear, they are worthy of attention, and many of them are found on the 'left'. That is a fact.

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Is your point that this terminology or the concepts they denote are bad and dangerous, that it is as bad as you think toppling a statue is, that the two are somehow related, or that they represent a path of objectionable extremism for the Democratic Party? You will, as before, have a very hard time actually supporting any of the above with more than appeal to infinite possible worlds.

But as a matter of fact "trigger" and "survivor" have been mainstream terminology since the Obama era. Hope that doesn't undo you.

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The point is of course how fringes can make their way closer to the Democratic mainstream over the years.

I don't think use of the word 'triggered' this way was particularly common in mainstream usage 10+ years ago, particularly not in combination with a phrase like 'femme-led'.

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Now your turn on why talking about sex crime and nonstandard genders and orientations manifests danger from the left.

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But spare me the 'ZOMGbbq teh statues SJdubz gone mad' crap that you clearly can't justify up front.

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I brought up statues because it is much more relevant than talking; and now you bring up talking again. Politics is of course never just about talking. Implying so is disingenuous.

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Here's the problem again. You're wounded when I recount the specific actions of what is certainly a well-defined group of people, primarily in the context of modern American politics no less, yet you see no breach of etiquette in implicitly condemning the broad left on the basis of almost literally nothing but vague discomfort.

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Reasonable debate is what is wounded. Yes, you bring up specific actions by specific people to condemn a very large and very heterogeneous group of people that has nothing to with said actions. I have not addressed the 'left' in general, but specific individuals and subgroups, in particular one group that has defined itself through its actions (toppling statues).

If you mean US conservatism, then state so. Even then, tarring aside, implying that people like Trump and Milton Friedman are basically the same is not very useful, to put it mildly.

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That is of course not what happened.

"If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions.”


I am not always going to be present to call you out when you engage in this dishonest tactic of motte-and-bailey abstractions. The issue at hand in the Damore controversy was never whether there are non-zero differences between men and women as groups.

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Except it is exactly what happened. The memo presented an alternative science-based hypothesis for the hiring pattern in technology (coupled with criticism of related corporate practices), and this argument was perverted, either intentionally or out prejudice, by people such as the CEO to justify Damore's firing (quote: "To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK."")

As long as you cannot substantiate your claims, you have no credibility on this topic, so this is pointless.

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Liberals and leftists the world over continue to get less religious by the year, but freedom of religion has always been a liberal plank. For example, most Evangelical Christians are scum, but that's not an excuse to discriminate on a group level. Evangelical Christianity was originally the birthplace of progressivism in the United States, so maybe that's what you're thinking of, but those days are very long gone.

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This plank seems to occasionally provide a cover for Islamists (i.e. 'fascists').

Veering slightly from the original topic here, but freedom of religion is nothing but special treatment of religions. There is nothing here that should not already covered by concepts like freedom of speech, assembly, association, and so forth - unless special treatment for religions actually is the goal.

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My sense is that you disagree with the cultural Left on values, perceive them as more of a threat to your worldview than fascism and by that pretext launder some of your own unpopular views on race and gender and civics by inflating criticism of an unpopular impulse among part of the cultural Left. Hence why you don't rely on the old standby of an imminent Communist uprising coming to ban private property, because that particular fish doesn't get at which of your oxes is presently being gored.

[...]

It would be something else entirely if you sought out perspectives on how societies should go about memorializing figures as such in public spaces over time. There's at least scope for a grounded discussion; I've read multiple non-worthless thinkpieces in that vein. Or if you just wished to register displeasure at vigilante iconoclasm, I wouldn't pressure it.

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The problem is that you keep practising as a hobby psychoanalyst, looking personal reasons instead of sticking to the sentences that are actually written down and not rely on more context than what is logically necessary to interpret the sentences.

I have to admit, this is amusing.
https://twitter.com/itsdylan46/statu...02191467941888 [VIDEO]

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Originally Posted by ReluctantSamurai

There's even Manchin on tape actively seeking donors to bribe an out-going GOP senator in an attempt to garner the required 60 vote bi-partisan majority, just so he can avoid criticism for the "far-left".

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We discussed this a few weeks ago, and I explained my thoughts on how the story reflects on various perspectives of Manchin.

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In the coming days, His Royal Highness will most likely show his true colors on the climate change portions of the infrastructure bill:

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Given Biden's most recent statements, dovish on the filibuster and on voting suppression (upholding the idea that sufficient mobilization can reliably overcome the latter), I think he's no longer in the driver's seat. That is, regardless of whatever Biden's private beliefs are on the matter, I think he's given up on Congress.

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What law are you referring to?~:confused:

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I'm referring to the idea that a bird in hand is better than two in a bush. To the extent that corporations can be alleged to micromanage legislators, particularly marginal or swing legislators, it is to their advantage to encourage the passage of legislation that contains goodies for them (such as actually happened earlier in the year with the aforementioned U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, or even, arguably, the individual market component of the ACA). Whereas if it were true that corporations, broadly, are buying Senators to block any major investment from being enacted, they would typically be harming their own interests compared to the possibility of tilting that legislation in their favor.

For example:

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So 4.5 million reasons for opposing the move away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. But there's more:

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It would be pretty easy for Manchin to secure Big Coal a bailout (as they have been begging for over the years), or even a subsidy for his own business concern, as a precondition to passing Biden's/Democrats' agenda. He would notch a win for himself, for his party and its electoral prospects, and for the bottom line of whomever he wishes to favor. There are many worlds where everyone's wheel gets greased. Yet he doesn't want to do that.

Another example from the other direction: Here is a letter to Congressional leadership calling for Medicare price negotiation to be included on the agenda right now. Rep. Katie Porter is a signatory, but included are centrists such as Malinowski and Slotkin. Indeed, most of the signatories appear to be centrist/moderate from competitive districts. Now, to be sure, Medicare price negotiation is very far from a radical proposal, yet some other Democrats - from safer districts - categorically reject any such policy in legislation. Take Jake Auchincloss, a freshman from Massachusetts who opposes price negotiation and received heavy pharma PAC support. Now here is a politician I could easily believe would take a different view on things under different political circumstances (which I do not affirm as the case with Manchin or Sinema). Is it because he's corrupt? Well, his district, and Massachusetts as a state, are pharma hubs, and he barely won his primary (where some of his opponents explicitly supported drug price controls). If the pharma lobby decided to spend hundreds of thousands on a friendly challenger, or signaled to the relatively-high number of pharma-industry-and-adjacent constituents that there is a problem with their Representative, that would present a threat to his political career. While constituting a sort of selfishness, the motivation behind resisting drug price controls suddenly looks a lot less like "corruption"...

Take the celebrated liberal lion John Dingell, after all, a New Dealer and "old-fashioned social Democrat" to his end just a few years ago, basically Sanders-wing. One of his last contributions was this op-ed calling for the abolition of the Senate. He nevertheless demonstrated an outsized level of deference to the auto industry throughout his career; he represented part of Detroit.

And, as always, if you suspect a pol is bought, you should be eager to test the honesty of their graft, to see whether your side can sway them with a better offer. Donald Trump - the ultimate byword for corruption, yes? Now tell me if he would accept $10 billion cash from Uncle Sam to stay out of politics for good. Nah, some things can't be bought.

Look, even Harry Truman - as we now know - was personally corrupt. Manchin or Sinema could be corrupt as well, if perhaps in more licensed ways. But it's often not explanatory of political behavior. Or at least you need a direct case, not a gesture. I think Manchin's putative corruption affects his beliefs about energy policy, and what policy action he is willing to tolerate, but simultaneously has about as much to do with his filibuster stance or his bipartisanship stance or his voting rights stance as Harry Truman's corruption has to do with the Korean War.

I just think your narrative for why what's happening is happening is too "just so."

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Whereas if it were true that corporations, broadly, are buying Senators to block any major investment from being enacted, they would typically be harming their own interests compared to the possibility of tilting that legislation in their favor

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If it were true? C'mon man, you can't really think that that statement in any way, shape or form, holds water? Please explain how a corporation bribing a congressional official (legal in most forms here in the US) harms their own interests. I could cite a litany of examples from the energy sector alone, but you can just find all that yourself. Start with Exxon/Mobil.....(who, by the way, has had direct dealings with Joe Manchin, in the past)

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But it's often not explanatory of political behavior. Or at least you need a direct case, not a gesture.

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I've given direct cases already (more so for Manchin than Sinema). Digging up more seems like it will do no good...:shrug:

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I think Manchin's putative corruption affects his beliefs about energy policy, and what policy action he is willing to tolerate

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We will know about his views on energy policy in 2021, before the end of summer...:inquisitive:

But somehow, I don't think he's changed his stance in 10 years:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xpk...ergy-committee

In semi-relevant news, Manchin has been hinting that he intends to stand for reelection in 2024 (which will almost certainly be a terrible year for him to run).

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Originally Posted by ReluctantSamurai

If it were true? C'mon man, you can't really think that that statement in any way, shape or form, holds water? Please explain how a corporation bribing a congressional official (legal in most forms here in the US) harms their own interests. I could cite a litany of examples from the energy sector alone, but you can just find all that yourself. Start with Exxon/Mobil.....(who, by the way, has had direct dealings with Joe Manchin, in the past)

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You're not understanding me, and I'm not sure what else I can do to make myself understood.

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I've given direct cases already (more so for Manchin than Sinema). Digging up more seems like it will do no good.

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The bottom line is that 'There are companies who could be harmed by some versions of Democratic legislation, they financially support Senator Manchin, therefore he presents as a filibuster advocate' is not a sound or sufficient syllogism for me. At least answer me this: Can Manchin be paid off to support ending the filibuster, and if not, why can he be paid off to oppose ending it?

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Originally Posted by Viking

The idea is not that the Democratic party is likely to be taken over by authoritarians within the next few years, but your point seems to be that authoritarian or totalitarian movements no longer will spawn on the 'left' today - which raises the question, what are Jughashvili, Mao, and Saloth Sar doing today? Playing Civilization or staying involved with the 'alt-right'?

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So, once again, it was seen that all your initial premises are unsupportable, and the best you can do is cite the existence of armed revolutionary insurgencies in radically-different situations in agricultural societies a century ago. What are those individuals doing today? They're dead, and their projects have evaporated.

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Even if that were the case, you can be confident there are new names to replace them.

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I'm pretty sure we can be confident of the opposite, and you can't show me wrong. If we're making historical comparisons, note that KPD-like street militias or even mass movements essentially do not exist anywhere in developed countries, and when they did exist they were outnumbered at least ten-to-one by fascists and monarchists in the likes of Germany and France, pre-war. Nowadays what passes for "far-left" in the US are tantamount to postwar European social democrats, and revolutionary illiberal militants on the Right might now outnumber those on the Left a hundred or a thousand-to-one. Now THAT is a world-historical development worthy of attention and explanation.

It takes a very specific kind of perspective to engage with this reality by demanding respect for alarmism about the Left.

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The point is that people are dangerous, not the 'right', not the 'left', not 'fascists', not 'communists' - but people. All dictators, murderers etc. were and are people.

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Again, vacuous as anything but advocacy for Precrime programs, Huxley's Brave New World, or "the Giant Meteor." That "people" are dangerous doesn't tell us anything about anything, and is no more relevant to this thread than the phrase "Solar flares are dangerous" would be.

But I'll tell you who are dangerous: political, economic, and religious elites uniting in destructive purposes. Comparisons of the attitudes and practices of factional elites in the United States are too numerous to repeat, but no discussion is worthwhile when not undergirded by awareness of them.

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When (sub-)movements with clear anti-intellectual and anti-democratic inclinations appear, they are worthy of attention,

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You have done nothing to justify this statement or your existing application of it.

'When national states with clear military capacity and traditions appear, they are worthy of attention. Now let's talk about why Norway could be an existential threat to its neighbors and world peace.'

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and many of them are found on the 'left'. That is a fact.

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An alternative fact perhaps.

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The point is of course how fringes can make their way closer to the Democratic mainstream over the years.

I don't think use of the word 'triggered' this way was particularly common in mainstream usage 10+ years ago, particularly not in combination with a phrase like 'femme-led'.

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Two hundred years ago, "liberalism" and "universal suffrage" were fringe concepts that made their way to the mainstream. What's your point? You have a problem with that? And what does it have to do with "anti-intellectual" or "anti-democratic" inclinations?

Where were you when anti-intellectualism became the mainstream of the Republican Party under Reagan and Bush? Was that not worth attention?

Right now, radical national reorganization and disenfranchisement of political enemies are the mainstream of the Republican party, both its elite and its base. The mainstream of the Democratic Party is civil rights and access to healthcare. You can only ever insult my intelligence by redirecting attention to the possibility - in the sense that "anything is possible" - that one day the Democratic Party might get even a fraction of the way the collective Right has gone, at that on account of the existence of both queer people and Joseph Stalin.

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I brought up statues because it is much more relevant than talking; and now you bring up talking again. Politics is of course never just about talking. Implying so is disingenuous.

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Why is it relevant, and to whom? You started all this by wrongly insinuating some sort of noteworthy, inarticulable "danger" arising from the cultural Left.

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Reasonable debate

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whar!

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Yes, you bring up specific actions by specific people to condemn a very large and very heterogeneous group of people that has nothing to with said actions.

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The entire political movement is vocally organized around said actions.

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I have not addressed the 'left' in general, but specific individuals and subgroups, in particular one group that has defined itself through its actions (toppling statues).

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Again, you inserted yourself to say there is cause to be afraid of people who talk about race and gender, as somehow illustrated by the existence of statue toppling and James Damore. You're the one making connections.

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Even then, tarring aside, implying that people like Trump and Milton Friedman are basically the same is not very useful, to put it mildly.

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Naturally I never mentioned Milton Friedman to you, nor equated him - or any other Republican - to Donald Trump. But if your angle is that few Republicans are personally equivalent to Trump in character, it won't take you far.

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As long as you cannot substantiate your claims, you have no credibility on this topic, so this is pointless.

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I'm telling you, I have waning patience for flagrant insults to my intelligence.

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This plank seems to occasionally provide a cover for Islamists (i.e. 'fascists').

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College Republicans also exist, but moreover the Federalist Society is the world's Number One source of judicial terrorists. Are you among those who imagine that 'tertiary education = Communism'?

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but freedom of religion is nothing but special treatment of religions.

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You want to know why the US and most European countries constitutionally specify the freedom to practice religion? I would expect your European education to have elaborated this to you - that you should know what it is, mind you, prior to agreeing or disagreeing - far better than my American one.

The issue of communal practices of religion, plural religions, and their relation to the state is one of the defining factors of the development of what is sometimes called "the West." The history of conflict over religious status and practice was so intense and so durable that Christian-dominated countries eventually came to a strong Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment consensus that noninterference in religious affairs should be a core social tenet. Therefore many of their national constitutions specify that religious affiliation or practice is to be explicitly protected as an important factor of its own and not as a mere derivative and subsidiary of freedom to association, speech, or belief. Even the outlier secular French constitution mandates that "No one may be disturbed on account of his opinions, even religious ones, as long as the manifestation of such opinions does not interfere with the established Law and Order."

A specification of a right to undisturbed religious practice or belief, where not derivative or subsidiary to other rights, is nevertheless not to say that religion is being treated as an isolated right distinct from its relatives.

You may, of course, disagree with any and every historically-informed feature of modern societies. Some atheists want to ban religion for example. Some neoreactionaries wish to reinstate hereditary autocracy. I could be persuaded toward banning ethnostatism.

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The problem is that you keep practising as a hobby psychoanalyst, looking personal reasons instead of sticking to the sentences that are actually written down and not rely on more context than what is logically necessary to interpret the sentences.

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You act as though I've never read anything you've written outside this thread. Or as though you're not recapitulating the same exact schtick I've seen from innumerable reactionary liars over years. But even from a blank slate your input in the thread has been incoherent in its basis and layered with distinctly-biased editorialization. Enough theater criticism. In the name of God, put up or shut up.

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At least answer me this: Can Manchin be paid off to support ending the filibuster, and if not, why can he be paid off to oppose ending it?

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I have never tied Manchin's corruption to the filibuster, mainly because, as I've mentioned previously, the filibuster is a non-issue. I'll clarify that---would it be easier for the Dems to get legislation passed without the filibuster in place? Of course. Is removing or revising the filibuster absolutely necessary to get said legislation passed? No, not if the Dems voted as an entire caucus. Bringing up the filibuster is a DOA issue in the Senate at this time, so why waste time and effort talking about it?

What is important is can/has Manchin been paid off to insist that certain energy proposals that are likely to be included in the Dems-only infrastructure bill, be removed before he will support it? When the bill gets drafted, and we get to see the actions/reactions of Manchin and the other conservative/corporate Democrats, only then will we get to see whether these Dems vote for the people, or for their donors. I'm betting on the latter because money talks....:inquisitive:

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Originally Posted by ReluctantSamurai

I have never tied Manchin's corruption to the filibuster, mainly because, as I've mentioned previously, the filibuster is a non-issue. I'll clarify that---would it be easier for the Dems to get legislation passed without the filibuster in place? Of course. Is removing or revising the filibuster absolutely necessary to get said legislation passed? No, not if the Dems voted as an entire caucus. Bringing up the filibuster is a DOA issue in the Senate at this time, so why waste time and effort talking about it?

What is important is can/has Manchin been paid off to insist that certain energy proposals that are likely to be included in the Dems-only infrastructure bill, be removed before he will support it? When the bill gets drafted, and we get to see the actions/reactions of Manchin and the other conservative/corporate Democrats, only then will we get to see whether these Dems vote for the people, or for their donors. I'm betting on the latter because money talks....:inquisitive:

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Huh, well I'm stumped, because the second graf has nothing I disagree with. It's been a few weeks, but IIRC our exchange was initially about Manchin's motivation in resisting the Dem agenda overall (including re: filibuster), and specifically the For the People and John Lewis Voting Rights acts.

To summarize where I stand at least:

1. Manchin's private and public attitudes, and legislative behavior, on energy policy, labor law, and any number of other issues are influenced by such factors as campaign finances, personal finances, his upbringing and social circle, and more. What it amounts to is conservatism.
2. If Manchin is refusing to pass anything at all on the agenda from now on, whether supra-filibuster or by reconciliation, drawing from the claimed principle of bipartisanship and its inadequate fulfillment, then that is rooted in his personal beliefs/ideology and not on external contingencies.

Sounds like you're saying the first point is most relevant to what you were talking about all along.

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Sounds like you're saying the first point is most relevant to what you were talking about all along.

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Yep. Except that I don't equate being conservative (a very valid way of thinking) with being corrupt. But with Manchin and the 8 or 9 other corporate Democrats, the external contingencies are all about giving their donors what they want. Those donors are multi-billion dollar enterprises, who don't hand out money without expecting something in return.

We shall see....:shrug:

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Originally Posted by Montmorency

So, once again, it was seen that all your initial premises are unsupportable, and the best you can do is cite the existence of armed revolutionary insurgencies in radically-different situations in agricultural societies a century ago. What are those individuals doing today? They're dead, and their projects have evaporated.

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Dubious individuals on the 'left' show up all the time in mainstream media if you pay attention. Here is just one recent example:

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Cullors weaves her intellectual influences into this narrative, from black feminist writers like Audre Lorde and bell hooks, to Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong. Reading those social philosophers “provided a new understanding around what our economies could look like,” she says. Reading Lorde and hooks “helped me understand my identity.”

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https://time.com/5171270/black-lives...trisse-cullors

Evidently, there is residue left after Mao's brew evaporated. Notably not one critical follow-up question about a mass-murderer (Mao) and an authoritarian (at best) like Lenin being an inspiration in matters of economy.

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Nowadays what passes for "far-left" in the US are tantamount to postwar European social democrats

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What is found on the actual 'far left' in the US are groups that some post-war European social democrats would be bothered enough about to engage in illegal surveillance of, as a matter of fact. Post-war European social democrats were of course also part of the founding NATO to protect against the Soviet Union.

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and revolutionary illiberal militants on the Right might now outnumber those on the Left a hundred or a thousand-to-one. Now THAT is a world-historical development worthy of attention and explanation.

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This is not happening in Venezuela, an actual 'left-wing' authoritarian government to take up arms against. State power has its benefits.

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That "people" are dangerous doesn't tell us anything about anything, and is no more relevant to this thread than the phrase "Solar flares are dangerous" would be.

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Except that the subject is threats to democracy rather than threats from natural disasters.

The equivalent debate would be that person A talks about the threat from flooding, person B points out that solar flares also pose a threat, which person A refuses to concede because only floods are worth talking about on this forum.

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But I'll tell you who are dangerous: political, economic, and religious elites uniting in destructive purposes. Comparisons of the attitudes and practices of factional elites in the United States are too numerous to repeat, but no discussion is worthwhile when not undergirded by awareness of them.

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There are many dangers out there, but in intellectual debate, there is no need great need to create a direct competition between them. If you don't want to discuss threats to democracy stemming from the 'left', then don't; but don't pretend they do not exist.

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An alternative fact perhaps.

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Just by using normal distributions - which tend to show up everywhere - for traits like opposition to democracy, it would be the case that you would find plenty of individuals on the 'left' with this trait. Inferring from your posts, it seems that you think this distribution at some point would take the shape of a cliff at one end; which would be quite a remarkable distribution.

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Two hundred years ago, "liberalism" and "universal suffrage" were fringe concepts that made their way to the mainstream. What's your point? You have a problem with that? And what does it have to do with "anti-intellectual" or "anti-democratic" inclinations?

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The individual in question seems to be on the wacky side, and there is plenty more where she comes from. If irrationalists that care little for a rational understanding of the world make it to the mainstream, that is a big problem, yes.

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The mainstream of the Democratic Party is civil rights and access to healthcare. You can only ever insult my intelligence by redirecting attention to the possibility - in the sense that "anything is possible" - that one day the Democratic Party might get even a fraction of the way the collective Right has gone, at that on account of the existence of both queer people and Joseph Stalin.

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It was you that brought up the mainstream of the Democratic Party, my focus were on the street and political fringes.

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The entire political movement is vocally organized around said actions.

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There is no single movement that all (US) conservatives take part in.

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Again, you inserted yourself to say there is cause to be afraid of people who talk about race and gender

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Do you want to be taken seriously?

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Naturally I never mentioned Milton Friedman to you, nor equated him - or any other Republican - to Donald Trump. But if your angle is that few Republicans are personally equivalent to Trump in character, it won't take you far.

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Topic was conservatives, not the US Republican Party.

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I'm telling you, I have waning patience for flagrant insults to my intelligence.

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Huh, intelligence? Every person has to demonstrate their credibility by showing that they grasp a topic. Proclaiming that a topic is settled does of course not demonstrate that it is understood. No one can force anyone to debate a case, but of course their credibility relating to that case - and closely related topics - will suffer severely if they categorically refuse. No one is going to take your word for it that your analysis is correct.

Alternatively formulated:

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put up or shut up

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Are you among those who imagine that 'tertiary education = Communism'?

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I suppose the answer to my earlier question is: no, you don't really want to be taken seriously.

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You act as though I've never read anything you've written outside this thread. Or as though you're not recapitulating the same exact schtick I've seen from innumerable reactionary liars over years. But even from a blank slate your input in the thread has been incoherent in its basis and layered with distinctly-biased editorialization. Enough theater criticism. In the name of God, put up or shut up.

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To return the favour of psychoanalysis, you come across as having a superiority complex, attacking the character of the people who oppose you in debate and interpreting their statements in just about the least charitable manner that you can, so that you can easily strike down your interpretations of what was written - in an aggressive and condescending manner. On top of that, when you are expected to substantiate a claim, something that is expected of any participant in a debate, you claim to have been insulted.

Potentially some good news? Maybe?

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Klobuchar says in press call that she, Manchin and Warnock met with Schumer this week and are "very close" on an agreement for the For The People Act

Klobuchar says senate legislation will include provisions that address election subversion

Klobuchar doesn't say specifically what provisions are included in new bill, but mentions anti-gerrymandering, vote by mail, automatic voter registration as areas being addressed. "This isn't one of those 'oh maybe we'll get it done,'" she says.

Mentions discussions around filibuster - carveout for voting rights, standing filibuster as possibilities she suggests. Says they wouldn't be moving forward if they thought they couldn't get bill done

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Would be interested in what exactly these provisions are, but I guess we will see.

Viking, you must really hold an expectation that a liberal is someone too broadminded to take their own side in a quarrel, like so

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SjSnpvoZbQ

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Dubious individuals on the 'left' show up all the time in mainstream media if you pay attention.

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Audre Lorde is of course one of the most celebrated philosophers and activists on the American left, and you clearly don't know enough about her contributions to venture which ones are dubious.

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What is found on the actual 'far left' in the US are groups that some post-war European social democrats would be bothered enough about to engage in illegal surveillance of, as a matter of fact.

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99% of the far left here is within the mainstream of those post-war European social democrats, and post-war European social democrats were far enough left to be illegally surveilled in the United States themselves. Unless, again, your specific concern is with the cultural element that doesn't really have a counterpart in historical European politics.

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Except that the subject is threats to democracy rather than threats from natural disasters.

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If that's the subject, you haven't addressed it so far in a single post. You can't be allowed to enjoy the benefit of invisible quantum goalposts.

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The equivalent debate would be that person A talks about the threat from flooding, person B points out that solar flares also pose a threat, which person A refuses to concede because only floods are worth talking about on this forum.

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Your first posts in this thread, entrained as it was with the decline of American society to far-right insanity, were to loudly declare that the contemporary open discourse on social problems was a matter of concern because people are dangerous.

A yet-more-generous analogy would be to question the relevance of a thread on climate change with the ostensibly-valuable hypothetical of a future alien invasion overwhelming our ecosystems.

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There are many dangers out there, but in intellectual debate, there is no need great need to create a direct competition between them.

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See above on your framing a competition. I would love to have an honest and stimulating exchange on which aspects of left politics I value more or less (to the extent I keep drafts of topics), but I have lost faith in your maturity or capacity.

And in the final analysis, fascism is a set of actions to oppose, not an idea to debate, so I don't put stock in whatever you consider your parameters for intellectual debate.

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Just by using normal distributions - which tend to show up everywhere - for traits like opposition to democracy, it would be the case that you would find plenty of individuals on the 'left' with this trait. Inferring from your posts, it seems that you think this distribution at some point would take the shape of a cliff at one end; which would be quite a remarkable distribution.

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According to this invalid invocation of the concept of the normal distribution, I could speculate that 10-year-olds will present the same mortality distribution as 100-year-olds. And I am absolutely certain you know better.

In reality:

https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-conte...itudes_01a.png

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If irrationalists that care little for a rational understanding of the world make it to the mainstream, that is a big problem, yes.

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Your ostensible assumption that nonheteronormativity is in itself irrational is a nasty one and an example of your present indifference to persuasive argumentation over ipse dogshit.

Also another example of the implicit competition in dangers you endorse, to so smoothly print a phrase like that in a thread like this. On one side, an acute and total fulfillment of your claimed fears, and on the other, 'well, people are dangerous, so maybe we should be worried about something or other someday.' But, you know, gotta defend the putative honor of the conservatives who spent a lifetime wrecking this country. Maybe save that #NotAllConservatives for when it's really apropos, such as after Trump declares himself God-Emperor for Life. One just has to love that intellectual debate.

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It was you that brought up the mainstream of the Democratic Party, my focus were on the street and political fringes.

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No, you yourself suggested that they may gain power over the mainstream of the Democratic Party somehow, and indeed there is no plausible mechanism to justify a focus on some construal of "potential" threat from "street and political fringes" on the Left except thereby.

The alternative, which more closely reflects almost all recorded instances of an authoritarian left seizing political or social power, is overt armed conflict, a scenario here perhaps too ludicrous even for you to gently palpitate.

I mean, you literally contradict the quoted with your preceding sentence and pretend like every sentence is a capsule, my god.

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Again, you inserted yourself to say there is cause to be afraid of people who talk about race and gender

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Do you want to be taken seriously?

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Originally Posted by Viking

Essentially, you seem to not recognize that societal and political developments related to 'social justice' present any risks to 'good people'. In actual reality, people generally present a risk to other people in one form or another.

It becomes strongly ironic when a lot of relevant ire is directed at the police, an organisation with a core purpose of supressing antisocial behaviour and facilitating delivery of justice. An organisation that is furthermore funded by the state and not run in accordance with capitalist ideals of maximizing profit.

What would a good person have to fear from an organisation that has such noble goals and that can not make profit? It's not coming for you (plural), is it?

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It's bad enough that you never even took the easy path of sticking to your stakes and organizing some propositions around "developments related to 'social justice'" or the threats they post - this is like one of the lowest possible bars in current conservative thought, a whole ubiquitous genre, that you couldn't clear - but now I even have to relive the sheer mendacity of the police analogy!

But yes, people are dangerous, a premise equally-rationally pursued here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTOWIMJkKpc

So seriousity. Many logic.

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There is no single movement that all (US) conservatives take part in.

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Yes, as I said, many of them are Democrats, and until fairly recently were the party's center of gravity. Something to think about.

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Huh, intelligence? Every person has to demonstrate their credibility by showing that they grasp a topic. Proclaiming that a topic is settled does of course not demonstrate that it is understood. No one can force anyone to debate a case, but of course their credibility relating to that case - and closely related topics - will suffer severely if they categorically refuse. No one is going to take your word for it that your analysis is correct.

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What is advanced without evidence (or coherence) can be rejected without evidence. Notwithstanding that most of my positions have been evidenced. You're the one interjecting yourself with disconnected bald assertions and gnomicisms, so the onus to actually generate some sort of argument is on you. Trying to put it on me while you're being so evasive and illogical is bound to be taken as disrespectful.

I've given you so many opportunities up to now that I don't believe you have anything interesting to say.

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To return the favour of psychoanalysis, you come across as having a superiority complex, attacking the character of the people who oppose you in debate and interpreting their statements in just about the least charitable manner that you can, so that you can easily strike down your interpretations of what was written - in an aggressive and condescending manner. On top of that, when you are expected to substantiate a claim, something that is expected of any participant in a debate, you claim to have been insulted.

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Your statements were interpreted as you wrote them, so the fault lies in their writing. I attack your character specifically for this low-grade effrontery, and if at some point the same repeated action produces the same reaction, you should refer to Einsteinian insanity. You don't have my unlimited charity when you consistently degrade it. From my perspective you chose to invent some protean debate for me to participate in and conducted yourself execrably in terms of speaking clearly and seeking truth.

Here's a bit of usable psychoanalysis if it's yet unclear: My personality is deeply responsive to reciprocity in interactions.

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Originally Posted by Viking

If you don't want to discuss threats to democracy stemming from the 'left', then don't; but don't pretend they do not exist.

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Take the effort to show your meaning and your work.

The problem is not that there can't be more than one subject of discussion in the world, even among disparity of import and salience.

The problem is not that there is nothing to criticize about any aspect of Left politics or ideas.

The problem is not that there are no imaginable or realizable conditions under which powerful authoritarian movements or organizations can emerge from Left politics.

The problem is that you refuse to submit considerations on any of these worthy topics. Instead you quite consciously derailed a thread to:

Allege spectral dangers from ill-defined elements of the left without clear reasoning and with constantly-shifting rhetorical postures.
Most passionately denounce proportionate, detailed, condemnation of perfidies on the other side of the spectrum.
Bleat about etiquette and psychoanalysis while pinballing around concrete issues and primly resisting numerous opportunities to remedy flaws and gaps in your literal positions.

As though such could ever make for a respectable and rational exchange of ideas, rather than preemptively dissolve any atmosphere thereof. Be decent and pick up your end of responsibility to actually articulate and defend an argument, or how can you complain if you end up being treated with less esteem?


As much of a sucker as I am for Discourse, I'll give you a hand in your performance art routine.

Plenty of Cassandra-like observers from the 1960s on through the 2010s reported that the American Right, having briefly accepted liberalism (in the international sense) as legitimate following WW2, was clearly following a track to aggressive illiberalism and authoritarianism, spearheadeded by its revisionist economic, religious, and media leaders as a top-down project - one that finally escaped and consumed them. The result is that, a half-century after the height of the Civil Rights Era, the Republican Party is a full-blown fascist vanguard in a symbiotic semiotic relationship with its tens of millions of supporters. The American center-right have no electoral options other than the Democratic Party, which they have been successfully lobbying for more than a generation but with fewer prospects in the future of an activated progressive base and unresolved national needs.

Is it plausible that the Democratic Party is on a similar long-term trend as the Republican Party?

To argue that it is, you would have to:

1. Demonstrate an understanding of the history of American politics and its two major parties.
2. Explain milestones in the contemporary development of the Republican Party and historical indicators of its degradation (include key terms such as "John Birch society," "radical resistance," "Southern Strategy," "Moral Majority," "James McGill Buchanan," "Lewis Powell Memo," "Roe v Wade," "Phyllis Schlafly," "Iran Contra," "Rush Limbaugh," "Contract with America," "Fox News," etc.).
3. Provide a general thesis of how political coalitions can become antisocial.
4. Develop the thesis against the context of the contemporary Democratic Party.
5. Follow standard conventions of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. 2000-3000 words, Times New Roman, double-spaced. MLA citation format.

Hint: You couldn't if you tried (which you won't), because in relevant analogies between parties the component is outright missing for the Democratic Party. To the extent factors have overlapped - bipartisan commitment to American imperialism and the security state, and state support of capitalism - anyone criticizing the Democratic Party from the right falls into an awkward space, if they have any sense of shame at least.

But I suppose all that is context.


Something more worthy of notice:

https://i.imgur.com/hKmq8dh.png
https://i.imgur.com/psMQ0I9.png
https://i.imgur.com/5eCjlCM.png

This is certainly not going to help the Democratic Party going forward:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/31/u...using-aid.html

There is certainly blame to go around, from the overly complex application process to receive federal aid (only around 3 billion of the 47 billion set aside has been disbursed), to the typical "wait until the last possible moment" government muddling, to huge multi-national corporate land-lord companies.

Make no mistake, there are companies and individuals who stand to make billions as hundreds of thousands of people get evicted from their homes and apartments (click on the link to view the PDF report):

https://ips-dc.org/cashing-in-on-our-homes/

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America’s 61 billionaire landlords have wealth totaling $240.9 billion – and have seen their wealth increase $24.4 billion since mid-March 2020. The top billionaire residential landlords in this report have wealth totaling $194 billion and have seen their wealth increase $21.2 billion since mid-March 2020.

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To wit, federal, state, and local agencies, bear the brunt of the failure to disburse the CARES Act funding:

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The piecemeal eviction measures at the federal, state and local level provide some tenants important protections but have left too many people unprotected or unable to access them. The regulations have been extremely difficult for economically stressed families to navigate during the COVID crisis and have not prevented landlords from filing evictions against tenants. While many evictions filed during the ongoing pandemic may be illegal, as they are against renters who are covered by various eviction moratoriums, it is the tenants who bear the heavy burden to defend themselves. They must show up in court during a health crisis and make a complicated legal case that the filing violates the various moratoriums. This could force them to miss work and potentially expose them to the coronavirus and requires tenants to research, understand and make complex legal arguments regarding numerous and ever-changing eviction policies and regulations. And there has been little to no public education for tenants, who are already struggling to keep themselves and their families safe, healthy and fed during a pandemic.

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There is certainly one group that is smiling at the coming debacle:

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Not content with reaping billions from their existing holdings (read: our homes), leaders and owners of corporate landlords are openly delighting in plans to profit once millions of Americans are evicted, seeing housing as an “opportunity sector” where they can extract more wealth for investors and themselves. They are poised to profit from the pandemic economic downturn much as they capitalized on the 2008 financial crisis and mortgage meltdown, with plans to buy up more real estate and increase their stranglehold over the residential housing market. As Starwood Capital CEO Barry Sternlicht said on a 2020 quarterly earnings call: “When it’s really ugly, it’s a good time to invest.”26 The Wall Street Journal reports that Invitation Homes, the largest U.S. single-family rental company, has raised $1 billion to purchase more homes. This is just one example of how dozens of companies, as detailed below, are raising billions — what we refer to as “cash on hand” — to profit from our suffering by buying up more homes, raising rents and repeating a deadly, racist cycle.

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Irregardless of the blame game, the optics of throwing hundreds of thousands, and probably millions out of house and home during the worst global pandemic in a century, is not going to look good for an administration that's already struggling with following through on promises made during the 2020 campaign run-up. That this is happening under Biden's watch will not be lost on voters in the 2022 mid-terms, and the 2024 presidential election.

What a shitshow.

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That this is happening under Biden's watch will not be lost on voters in the 2022 mid-terms, and the 2024 presidential election.

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TBH I think you really overestimate the memories of voters.