Biden Thread

[Montmorency]

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

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

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)

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.

[Viking]

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

So vaguely formulated that is says practically nothing at all.

]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.

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.

[Montmorency]

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'

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.

[...]

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."

@ReluctantSamurai

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.

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:

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.

[...]

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.

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.




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?

[ReluctantSamurai]

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.

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

Perhaps like this:

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

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.

[Viking]

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

[Montmorency]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.....