All Purpose News and Politics Thread Part IV: The Center Cannot Hold

[aja_christopher]

"Armed Neo-Nazis marched with police protection during Detroit Pride parade'

An armed white nationalist neo-Nazi group marched, with a police escort, in protest during Detroit's Pride parade this weekend.

The National Socialist Movement (NSM) is considered to be one of the largest neo-Nazi groups in the country, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). NSM is known specifically for its "theatrical and provocative protests."

During the event, members of NSM were seen tearing up a pride flag while one man was photographed as he appeared to urinate on an Israeli flag, Fox News reported.

The NSM protesters also made Nazi salutes and carried weapons as they demonstrated on Saturday."

https://www.newsweek.com/armed-neo-n...parade-1443013

----
"Call immigrant detention centers what they really are: concentration camps"

"If you were paying close attention last week, you might have spotted a pattern in the news. Peeking out from behind the breathless coverage of the Trump family’s tuxedoed trip to London was a spate of deaths of immigrants in U.S. custody: Johana Medina Léon, a 25-year-old transgender asylum seeker; an unnamed 33-year-old Salvadoran man; and a 40-year-old woman from Honduras.

Photos from a Border Patrol processing center in El Paso showed people herded so tightly into cells that they had to stand on toilets to breathe. Memos surfaced by journalist Ken Klippenstein revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s failure to provide medical care was responsible for suicides and other deaths of detainees. These followed another report that showed that thousands of detainees are being brutally held in isolation cells just for being transgender or mentally ill.

Also last week, the Trump administration cut funding for classes, recreation and legal aid at detention centers holding minors — which were likened to “summer camps” by a senior ICE official last year. And there was the revelation that months after being torn from their parents’ arms, 37 children were locked in vans for up to 39 hours in the parking lot of a detention center outside Port Isabel, Texas.

In the last year, at least seven migrant children have died in federal custody.

Preventing mass outrage at a system like this takes work. Certainly it helps that the news media covers these horrors intermittently rather than as snowballing proof of a racist, lawless administration. But most of all, authorities prevail when the places where people are being tortured and left to die stay hidden, misleadingly named and far from prying eyes.

There’s a name for that kind of system. They’re called concentration camps. You might balk at my use of the term. That’s good — it’s something to be balked at.

The goal of concentration camps has always been to be ignored. The German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt, who was imprisoned by the Gestapo and interned in a French camp, wrote a few years afterward about the different levels of concentration camps. Extermination camps were the most extreme; others were just about getting “undesirable elements … out of the way.”

All had one thing in common: “The human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody, as if they were already dead.”

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-e...609-story.html

[ed2962]

The Trump campaign definitely wasn't strategizing on that or any other level, they were barely even trying to win. The election was just a combination of disillusioned left wingers who stayed home out of protest or apathy, and racist rednecks who were far more motivated than anyone could have predicted to vote Trump to own the libs.

I agree with most of this. Although I would add that a number of mainstream conservatives sat out the last election as well.

[PwrdOn]

A demand to maintain the social hierarchy is one of the primary roots of conservatism. It might be couched in other ways but it's /always/ about maintaining a social hierarchy, and in this case, it's a hierarchy that puts whites at the top.

The entire notion of a "white" identity only came about during the colonial period, when Europeans collectively decided that it was in their best interest to prioritize maintaining their status above the natives over whatever conflicts they might have between each other. Before that, they largely stuck to regional labels and there was no sense of a shared European identity of any kind.

I agree with most of this. Although I would add that a number of mainstream conservatives sat out the last election as well.

Yeah but "mainstream" conservatives in the sense of establishment corporatist Beltway types make up an wholly insignificant fraction of the electorate.

[ed2962]

Yes..maybe he wasn’t even fully committed to winning. That makes closeness of popular vote even more remarkable, surely.

If he runs again I think he will lose...as long as Democrats avoid running a disastrous candidate against him.

But in long term, losing next Presidential election is better for Republicans I suspect than another term for Trump.

Let’s assume that happens...and Democrats have run a fairly elderly candidate to win the Presidency (eg. Bernie Sanders or Hilary Clinton)..then in election after Republicans run a decent young candidate against the incumbent Democrat...straightaway I think Republicans would be favourites to win popular vote.

I really don’t buy theory that Republicans will never will popular vote again.

And therein lays the rub...it seems like some of the democratic establishment are hell bent on undermining frontrunners who could win over some those middle of the road voters and even a couple of Trump supporters in order to run some one more "safe."

[WestPhillyPunisher]

I agree with most of this. Although I would add that a number of mainstream conservatives sat out the last election as well.

My guess is they had little to no stomach for Trump, but voting Democrat, least of all, voting for Hillary Clinton was far more intolerable to them. If those same conservatives knew then what they know now about the unholy clusterfuck the Trump presidency has been, chances are they STILL would've sat out rather than vote for a Democrat. Party before country.

[Tendrin]

The entire notion of a "white" identity only came about during the colonial period, when Europeans collectively decided that it was in their best interest to prioritize maintaining their status above the natives over whatever conflicts they might have between each other. Before that, they largely stuck to regional labels and there was no sense of a shared European identity of any kind.

Sure. But there were other hierarchies to maintain before that. I'm not sure what this has to do with what I said.

[PwrdOn]

Sure. But there were other hierarchies to maintain before that. I'm not sure what this has to do with what I said.

My point was just that lording over subject races is central to the notion of being "white" and so unless we can invent some other substitute identity for these people, they will resist racial equality by any means necessary even if it ends up being self destructive in the end.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

I have a theory that no Rupublican president will ever win the popular vote again.

Democrats said it was impossible for Republicans to win the Presidency period pretty much all of Obama’s administration. 3 million in a country this big isn’t a giant lead, it’s basically California exists. There was a legitimate fair in the Clinton camp that she could win the Presidency and not the popular vote o efforts were made to drive up the lead in solid blue states.

Wouldn’t bet money on it. Don’t take things like that for granted

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

Easiest way to win back the white working class:

"Guys, you realize the GOP is a bunch of rich morons who are suckering you with empty promises and ridiculous claims that minorities are to blame... when it's the rich who are to blame for all your woes? No, really, there's proof of this. They literally have their campaign strategies spelled out that this is how they stay in power. F*** them, and don't fall for it ever again."

You have to market that a lot better

[InformationGeek]

It was on this date in 2015 that "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" had a profile of former Montana House of Representatives member Jerry O’Neil, a man who prior to entering politics, was being investigated for practicing law without a license, but soldiered on by outspending the entire $2000 budget of the Montana Supreme Court’s Commission on the Unauthorized Practice of Law. Eventually, though, O’Neil would (What else?) begin a political career is a Montana state legislator, where he stood out by trying to draft bills that would allow for people sentenced to prison to commute their sentences by instead agreeing to corporal punishment, such as large quantities of canings or spankings (really) and his demand that his legislative salary should be paid in gold, like the Constitution intended (there’s no mention of state legislators being paid in gold). O’Neil ended up being beaten in the 2014 elections by Democrat Zac Perry, and has apparently decided to call it a career, at least for now.


On this date in 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of the current U.S. House Representative for Wisconsin’s 7th District, Sean Duffy, a former contestant on MTV’s reality show “The Real World” (shown here gyrating in his underwear for his housemates). Duffy was yet another beneficiary of the Tea Party Wave, storming into office to replace twenty-one term Congressman Dave Obey back in 2010, and if you ask Sean Duffy, it’s a real struggle to survive on the measly $174,000 salary he gets as a member of Congress, to which some might advise him that he should have stopped having kids sometime before his ninth. Hypocritically, while refusing a pay cut on his own six figure salary, Duffy advises other public workers should accept pay cuts. Of course, with 8 children, it comes as little surprise that Sean Duffy is also a die-hard pro-life supporter. In January of 2016, however, he caused an uproar on the floor of the U.S. House after he decided to express that anti-abortion fervor during a discussion about the Black Lives Matter Movement by presenting inaccurate statistics to chastise the Congressional Black Caucus for not supporting black lives because they allow higher abortion rates racially than whites. That’s not only statistically incorrect but totally racist. Congresswoman Gwen Moore perhaps responded best that, “It’s painfully obvious that Representative Duffy’s concern for life ends as soon as the umbilical cord is cut.” But Duffy doesn’t always act like he knows it all, like the time he was asked at a town hall about his position on trans-vaginal ultrasounds, and he dodged the question by saying, “Well, I haven’t had one.” Of course, either quote could have been a worse statement… like the time Sean Duffy’s wife, and fellow “Real World” alumni Rachel Campos-Duffy compared abortion to slavery and the Holocaust, as Republicans are frequently in the habit of doing.

The more bizarre thing is that Wisconsin’s 7th District has only a +2 Republican lean according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index, yet Duffy won a fourth term in office IN 2016 with 62% of the vote in spite of repeatedly changing his endorsements as candidates dropped out of the race before settling on Donald Trump, saying that the racist billionaire demagogue “fit the template of the conservative movement” with his border wall and financial background. After the election, Duffy embraced authoritarian fascism in full, encouraging Donald Trump use his Twitter account to “push back against the media” regarding negative stories about his transition team (which considering they were all talking to Russians, it’s a good thing it didn’t work).

Within two weeks, Duffy was on CNN, where in an interview with CNN he was being asked why Donald Trump took WEEKS to condemn Neo-Nazis who began a spree of hate crime assaults, vandalism, and threats against minorities to “celebrate” Trump’s election, Duffy tried changing the topic by claiming that the Neo-Nazis were similar to the Black Lives Matter movement. Host Jim Sciutto was having none of that s*** on his network, and shut Duffy down, and fast. Only a few weeks after that in December of 2016, Duffy was being interviewed by Tucker Carlson, when he claimed that the city of Madison, Wisconsin, one of the few liberal bastions in the state what with the University of Wisconsin there, was “communist”. After he was widely criticized for this stupid, stupid remark, Duffy played the victim by getting on Twitter to post:


Ah yes. The sensible political strategy of embracing your inner ***hole. It’s no wonder Rep. Duffy was on the Trump transition team (no word on if they trusted him to talk to Russians, yet. YET.) But the real shock from Sean Duffy came in February of 2017, when he began arguing that the media was deliberately not reporting Islamic terror attacks (ones that they actually HAD reported on), Duffy started trying to claim that white terrorism didn’t exist, and even if it does, it wasn’t the same thing as Islamic terrorism because it has a “bright side”while embarrassing himself while arguing in defense of Donald Trump’s attempted Muslim ban in a CNN interview with Alisyn Camerota. He also added a bizarre claim that the man who shot Gabby Giffords was a Marxist. But hey, Duffy is an idiot, so what do facts matter?

Now, as we pointed out, Wisconsin’s 7th actually is supposed to have a +2 Democratic lean. In a year with so much Democratic momentum, somehow, Sean Duffy still won re-election with 60% of the vote. Thus, the moron we’re focused on in this article was granted a FIFTH term in office. He has since returned to Washington, and returned to being a total wanker:

• January 22nd, 2019: Duffy cannot be arsed to bother to vote against HR 676, which would prevent Donald Trump from doing the unthinkable and walking away from our allies in NATO to appease the Russians.
• January 23rd, 2019: Rep. Duffy voted against HR 648, because he was gleefully enjoying the longest government shutdown in history.
• February 28th, 2019: Sean Duffy votes against HR 1112, a bill which would have required universal background checks on all firearm purchases, and close the gun show loophole.
• March 14th, 2019: Rep. Duffy votes against HJR 46, which sane members of Congress voted for to reject Donald Trump’s “national emergency” regarding the U.S. border and his attempts to reallocate funds for a border wall without Congressional approval.
• April 4th, 2019: Sean Duffy is one of 158 Republicans who choose to vote against the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, likely because they feel the 2nd Amendment remaining absolute is more important than preventing people with a history of domestic abuse from owning a firearm (which statistics show, makes them more likely to use those firearms against women in their lives).
• June 4th, 2019: Duffy votes against the Dreamers Act, because he’s too xenophobic and partisan to care about immigration reform.

We’ll add that Sean Duffy apparently hasn’t learned his lesson about being interviewed by Alisyn Camerota, getting his ass handed to him again in a discussion about Donald Trump’s proposed border wall on CNN this past February, where he claimed that somehow people crossing the U.S./Mexico border were responsible for people in Wisconsin “dying from meth” and heroin overdoses. (At this point, the only person who sounds like they’re on drugs is Duffy.)

Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh. This guy. I tried my best. My family tried its best. My friends tried their best. We couldn't kick this ******* to the curve.

[Kirby101]

Leaked voting machine passwords add to North Carolina's growing tally of election security woes

But we can't question that Hillary "lost".

First there was the mini-disaster on Election Day 2016, in North Carolina’s bluest county by far, Durham. E-pollbook computers used by poll workers to check voters’ status as they arrive at the polls mysteriously malfunctioned in five Durham precincts, wrongly indicating either that they had already voted or that they were not registered. The story gained national attention when The Intercept later broke news of top-secret NSA documents suggesting that the e-pollbooks’ vendor, Florida’s VR Systems, had been hacked by Russian military operatives earlier that year. The story grew shadier still, early last week, with Politico’s revelation that just days before the election VR Systems technicians used remote-access software to log into Durham County election computers, potentially opening a digital barn door wide enough for a herd of those same Russian hackers to gallop into the county’s election system.

Now comes the state’s latest in a dizzying series of electoral embarrassments. Yesterday cybersecurity investigator Chris Vickery revealed on Twitter his discovery of an unsecured (that is, publicly accessible) online file in an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket belonging to the North Carolina State Board of Elections, containing what seemed to be election-related administrative passwords.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Trump Defiles 'Freedom of Speech' in a Bizarre Defense of His White Nationalist Supporters

If it's Sunday, it's time once again for Donald Trump's regularly scheduled Sunday Morning Tweetstorm. This is where the crybaby President of the United States of America lashes out at all of the perceived slings and arrows of outrageous paranoia. And on this episode Trump outdoes himself by fouling the foundational American principle of freedom of speech.

This isn't just another one of Trump's reckless slurs of the press in Stalinist terms as "the enemy of the people." Although he does, as usual, fling that bag of tweet-poop as part of his tedious and repetitive robo-ranting. That would be bad enough, but Trump higher, and more odious, aspirations on this occasion. So after complaining in several tweets that a story in the New York Times misreported that his "agreement" with Mexico on immigration was "fake news," (it wasn't), Trump unleashed this morsel of derp:

Twitter should let the banned Conservative Voices back onto their platform, without restriction. It’s called Freedom of Speech, remember. You are making a Giant Mistake!

To be clear, Trump is coming to the defense of some virulently racist white nationalists (e.g. his base) who Twitter and other social media recently suspended from their platforms. The bannees include cretins like avowed neo-Nazi Paul Nehlen, conspiracy crackpot Alex Jones, hate monger Laura Loomer, hoaxster Jacob Wohl, and boss of the violent, neo fascist Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes.

Trump not only wants these abhorrent stains on society returned to Twitter, he wants them returned "without restrictions," a privilege that no one else on Twitter enjoys. And according to Trump, not doing so would amount to a breach of their right to free speech.

Donald Trump, champion of the First Amendment----as long as it benefits him!

[Malvolio]

The entire notion of a "white" identity only came about during the colonial period, when Europeans collectively decided that it was in their best interest to prioritize maintaining their status above the natives over whatever conflicts they might have between each other. Before that, they largely stuck to regional labels and there was no sense of a shared European identity of any kind.

And they didn't even stick with that shared European identity once Irish immigrants and immigrants from Slavic nations starting coming over.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

And they didn't even stick with that shared European identity once Irish immigrants and immigrants from Slavic nations starting coming over.

Or Italians or the Polish

[JackDaw]

And they didn't even stick with that shared European identity once Irish immigrants and immigrants from Slavic nations starting coming over.

I wouldn’t pretend for a second that racism isn’t a factor in European politics (or Chinese, African, Japanese, American, etc, etc).

But in Europe over the years think class division has been far more important in real terms....at least in country (UK) I know the best.