Biden Thread

[Montmorency]

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:

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.
[...]
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.
[...]
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.

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.

“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.

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every day is a Flight 93 moment.

[Montmorency]

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

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."

[ReluctantSamurai]

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

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... 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...
Here's an 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.....

[ReluctantSamurai]

@ Monty

It just gets dirtier and dirtier:

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

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.”

Seems like petty cash, right? But:

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%.

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.

An expansion of the earlier NPR link:

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

And the hits just keep on comin'...

[Viking]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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:

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

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.

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.

This is context, like mentioned.

Your stance that iconoclasm is a constitutional threat to a country

Nope.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Montmorency]

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.

@ Monty

It just gets dirtier and dirtier:

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.

Seems like petty cash, right? But:

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[ReluctantSamurai]

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.

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.

Whereas if no law, then no nothing.

What law are you referring to?

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

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...

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

"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."

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/

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.

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:

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.

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

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.

"Non-fungible" characteristics indeed!

[Montmorency]

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.

btw this is the sort of thing I was talking about.

(Context: The 9 most conservative Dem Representatives refuse to support a party-line reconciliation package until the Senate compromise is passed in conference, among other things.)

Notably, the moderate House Democrats have been loading up the reconciliation bill with a series of conflicting demands. On the one hand, they have been complaining about its overall size and pushing to shrink down the headline number. On the other hand, they have been making their own costly demands. Josh Gottheimer, one letter signer, has been crusading for a restoration of the state and local tax deduction, a benefit for some of his affluent constituents. Jim Costa, another signer, wants to protect the heirs to massive fortunes from any taxation on their windfall.

These demands, notably, are not designed to protect the Democratic Party from the left’s unpopular baggage. Most of the broader debate has focused on the toxic brand damage of slogans like defunding the police and Green New Deal, but the moderate Democrats are, in this case, threatening to tank a highly popular agenda of taxing the very rich in order to give broad middle-class benefits. The moderate Democrats are the biggest obstacle to making the math work, simultaneously complaining about the size of the bill while ordering more expensive goodies for themselves.

Thaaaaat's the good old stuff.