All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[shooshoomanjoe]

So Musk has always been an *******, noted, but he used to support the democrats. Can this be the reason why Musk has sided with republicans?

Tesla, Who? Biden Can't Bring Himself to Say It — and Musk Has Noticed...President Joe Biden calls himself a union guy and a car guy, and he’s embraced electric vehicles as vital to his economic and climate ambitions.

But there’s one U.S. car company he won’t talk about: Tesla Inc., the world’s most valuable automaker and the global brand most clearly associated with EVs.

Can Musk's sudden anti-democrat stance be caused by his fragile ego?

[jetengine]

That is the big fear tactic the GOP uses. "The Dems say if you are anti Trump you need to vote for AOC and Bernie Sanders!"

That is not the case. They just need to put their money where their mouth is and stop saying they are Anti Trump and then voting for JD Vance!

Or people like Lindsey Graham Or Mitch or on the 6th talked about how far things have gone and how the attack on the Capital is bad. Then after seeing how the cult wasnt buying into that and were calling the terrorists heroes and Fox News was gushing over them changed their minds and backed the big lie full force.

All they need to do is NOT VOTE. Tories took a kicking over here with the council elections. Why? Because not only did Labour do well, but a significant number of normal right wing voters either went elsewhere (Liberal Democrats, kind of a middle ground) or just didn't vote at all.

[Tami]

Out of the mouths of idiots and Bigots

Republican Bill Cassidy on Lousiana's high maternal mortality rate:

"About a third of our population is African American; African Americans have a higher incidence of maternal mortality. So, if you correct our population for race, we're not as much of an outlier."

[Mister Mets]

There are two interesting pieces I came across recently about modern politics.

Tim Alberta wrote for the Atlantic about the ways in which the evangelical church is becoming more divided and radicalized.
A major factor is conservative congregants looking for ministers who agree with them politically, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic, when many churches were temporarily closed. There was a revealing conversation with a minister who is careless about facts when it comes to secular issues.

Sitting inside a cramped office at the back of FloodGate, Bill Bolin is second-guessing himself.

We’ve talked at length about extremism in his church—the people who were certain that Trump would never leave office, the people who swear by QAnon—and Bolin seems, at some level, to genuinely be reckoning with his role in it. He says he’s worried about Christians getting their priorities mixed up. He tells me he doesn’t want his rants about Biden or the 2020 election—which are “nonessentials”—to be taken with the seriousness of his statements about Jesus, which are the “essentials” people should come to church for.

“I do make a separation between our religious perspective and our political perspective,” Bolin tells me. “I don’t view political statements as being infallible.”

That’s putting it generously. In the time I spent listening to Bolin preach, sitting with him for interviews, and following his Facebook page, I recorded dozens of political statements that were either recklessly misleading or flat-out wrong. When I would challenge him, asking for a source, Bolin would either cite “multiple articles” he had read or send me a link to a website like Headline USA or Conservative Fighters. Then he would concede that the claims were in dispute, and insist that he didn’t necessarily believe everything he said or posted.

It seemed a dangerous practice for anyone, let alone someone trusted as a teacher of truth. Many of the backwater websites and podcasts Bolin relies on for political information were the same ones cited to me by people from his church. In a sense, Christians have always lived a different epistemological existence than nonbelievers. But this is something new—and something decidedly nonessential.

At one point, I show Bolin a Facebook post he wrote months earlier: “I’m still wondering how 154,000,000 votes were counted in a country where there are only 133,000,000 registered voters.” This was written, I tell him, well after the Census Bureau had published data showing that more than 168 million Americans were registered to vote in 2020. A quick Google search would have given Bolin the accurate numbers.

“Yeah, that’s one I regret,” he tells me, explaining that he subsequently learned that the numbers he’d posted were incorrect. (The post was still active. Bolin texted me the following day saying he’d deleted it.)

Doesn’t he worry that if people see him getting the easy things wrong, they might suspect he’s also getting the hard things wrong? Things like sanctity and salvation?

“I really don’t. No. Not too much. I don’t,” Bolin says, shaking his head. “Firebrand statements have been part of the pulpit, and part of politics, for as long as we’ve been a nation. And there is a long history of both sides exaggerating—like in a post like that.”

Ezra Klein had an interview with Anne Applebaum about totalitarianism, and the influence of the philosopher Hannah Arendt.

Applebaum wrote an introduction to a new printing of Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism" which considered why some people wanted to live in a totalitarian state. This has implications today, with people embracing authoritarians.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Yes, I do think she’s pointing at something quite important, which is that human beings need to be in a narrative, as you said — we would now call it — or part of a community, as others would call it, part of a world where we share values with other people and we feel reinforced by that experience. The thing I think that we’ve learned in the last few years is that that experience and that narrative don’t even have to be real. So I think people are genuinely nostalgic for past institutions, or what they imagine past institutions to have been. So they’re nostalgic for small communities that they think they remember from when they grew up, when life was simpler and everyone believed more or less the same thing. They’re nostalgic for, I think, an experience of religion that doesn’t always exist anymore, you know, where everybody in a single community went to the same church and thus believed the same thing.

They’re nostalgic for those things, even if at the time — if you turned back the clock to the 1950s, which is, of course, as I said, when Arendt was writing, you might have discovered that the church where everyone believed thing ever the same thing was not that far away from a Black church, for example, where the community believed things that were very different, or felt things that were very different. So sometimes it’s imagined. And I think in the modern world, we now see that people are capable of being part of communities that exist only online. It’s a big change, technologically. I mean, maybe it’s not really a change in human nature, because the same thing took different forms earlier on. But I mean, QAnon is an excellent example of a community of belief.

Once you accept the basic premises of QAnon, you know, that there is a conspiracy, that American elites are involved in massive pedophilia scandals and complicated relationships with one another that involve abusing children, when you believe that there is a prophet out there named Q who’s going to tell you what happens in the future, and is going to shape reality for you — once you’re inside that world, you are constantly reinforced. So you join it. When you post things about it inside that community, people write back with enthusiastic acceptance and admiration. You read other people who believe the same kinds of things. You form a group that feels very strongly that all of this is true, and that you have — even more importantly, that you have access to special and secret information that most Americans don’t have. So you’re a community that has special knowledge. You’ve been gifted with this special access to a different reality.

And once you’re inside it, it’s extremely powerful. And it turns out that it’s more powerful than the real reality.

She responded to a question of why voters aren't supporting their own self-interest. In this context, "liberalism" means a respect for economic and political freedom, rather than left-wing values.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So I think this is a really profound insight. And it’s not really an insight about liberalism, per se. It’s an insight into something else, which is economism, which is a word that’s used to talk about one of the directions that liberalism went in the 20th century, but especially after the Second World War, in which — the idea was that all of politics is really about prosperity and wealth. So it’s not quite self interest, it’s about making people wealthier.

And actually, our politics in the last several decades, up until a few years ago, were divided that way. We were divided into a party that wanted a smaller state and a party that wanted a bigger state, one party that wanted more welfare spending, one wanted less. But these were all arguments about economic well-being, one way or the other. And one of the insights, not just of populists — but one of the insights, for example, of George Orwell, was that often those arguments can become trivial to people, or unimportant.

Orwell wrote a famous essay in — I think it was published in 1941. It was at the time that “Mein Kampf,” Hitler’s book, was published in Great Britain. And he did a very short review, which is worth reading, in which he describes the book and so on. And then he says at the end, the thing about this horrible book is that I also see its appeal. So here we are in Great Britain — and he was a socialist, of course, and we’re all worried about things like hygiene and water quality, and access to birth control, which was an issue at that time.

And he’s offering people something completely different. And the expression he uses is guns, flags and loyalty parades. So he’s offering people a way of being part of a spectacle. And the rest of us are over here arguing about things that can often seem trivial. And it is, of course, not necessary for liberalism to be about for futile things, or for those to be the main political arguments. But in recent years, they often have been.

I mean, in a way, the height of this was really the era of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. They were both excellent leaders. They were both excellent speakers. And they were both policy wonks who absolutely believed that if they could just get people in the same room and have them talk to one another, they would soon see the light, and rational conversation would solve all problems, and what people really wanted was better policies to deliver better things.

And that worked for a while, until it didn’t. And the insight of Orwell, and the insight of a number of autocrats, and the insight of some — in other parts of the political spectrum, too, actually, I might even include Bernie Sanders in this — is that people also sometimes want something more. They want to be part of a movement. They want to be part of a big change. They want to be on the cutting edge. They want to be marching in the parade. And when liberalism shrinks to being only about economics, that’s what can happen.

[The Cool Thatguy]

Out of the mouths of idiots and Bigots

Republican Bill Cassidy on Lousiana's high maternal mortality rate:

"If you don't count all the deaths, not that many people die!"

Even ignoring the racism, that's an impressively stupid comment

[Catlady in training]

LOL, how gracious and polite of you.

at least he thought the author was sincere.

"grow a pair" sounds somewhat better than "is this person a delusional idiot or a feckless liar?" (which, I have to admit, was my first reaction to reading that stuff)

if people don't like Chapelle then they shouldn't be giving him free publicity complaining about him on social media! they should focus on other stuff that they like. life is too short. it's not like all of those people who complained about "Married with Children" or "South Park" ever got them taken off the air.

That goes both ways. If people should only come to a stand-up comedy if they are ready to feel insulted, then people should also only come to a discussion about politics if they are ready to be called on their arguments.

I think that's the problem really. They're a hideously small minority so it feels needlessly mean to punch down.. Meanwhile if a comedian started making cracks about Chapelle being Black or a Muslim I have a strong suspicion he'd be pretty offended.

If we go with the theory that people who attack those they percieve as weaker then them, either individuals who are physically smaller or minorities, are actually insecure themselves and just need that feeling of superiority because they can't achieve anything meaningful by themselves. Then how insecure does someone have to feel to target the minority that is by all acounts at the very bottom of the social ladder?

[Catlady in training]

"If you don't count all the deaths, not that many people die!"

Even ignoring the racism, that's an impressively stupid comment

It reminds me of that attitude from the beginning of the pandemic: If we don't test so many people, we will not have that many confirmed cases of covid.

[The Cool Thatguy]

It reminds me of that attitude from the beginning of the pandemic: If we don't test so many people, we will not have that many confirmed cases of covid.

GOP: "Ignorance is our best defense!"

[Tami]

It reminds me of that attitude from the beginning of the pandemic: If we don't test so many people, we will not have that many confirmed cases of covid.

And Russia and countries like them, 'If we bury the dead in mass graves, no one will ever know how many innocent people we killed.'

[Ragged Maw]

If we go with the theory that people who attack those they percieve as weaker then them, either individuals who are physically smaller or minorities, are actually insecure themselves and just need that feeling of superiority because they can't achieve anything meaningful by themselves. Then how insecure does someone have to feel to target the minority that is by all acounts at the very bottom of the social ladder?

About this "social ladder"; who gets the final say on who goes where in that, exactly? Cause I know I have and am going to continue to see conflicting opinions with their respective justifications on that throughout the web. In a world where people across the spectrum down to the individual feel like "the underdog", that's an argument where ground won't be given easily.

[Malvolio]

I recently watched a bit of Dave Chapelle's "The Closer" on YouTube. He told that story about "Daphne," his transgender friend. So I have two points about that. First, I call shenanigans on Chapelle because I haven't heard from anyone on social media or anywhere else who might have seen this alleged "Daphne," or has a link to any video of her act. If anyone reading this does have a link to "Daphne's" act, please post it. I would love to see it. Second, Chappelle says he's done with it and this is the last you'll hear from him on the subject. Now, if the person who attacked him was trans, I could understand. But he wasn't. Yet Chappelle keeps making this the hill he's going to die on. Does he really want to be known as the "anti-trans" comedian? Give it a rest, Dave.

[Mister Mets]

I recently watched a bit of Dave Chapelle's "The Closer" on YouTube. He told that story about "Daphne," his transgender friend. So I have two points about that. First, I call shenanigans on Chapelle because I haven't heard from anyone on social media or anywhere else who might have seen this alleged "Daphne," or has a link to any video of her act. If anyone reading this does have a link to "Daphne's" act, please post it. I would love to see it. Second, Chappelle says he's done with it and this is the last you'll hear from him on the subject. Now, if the person who attacked him was trans, I could understand. But he wasn't. Yet Chappelle keeps making this the hill he's going to die on. Does he really want to be known as the "anti-trans" comedian? Give it a rest, Dave.

Daphne was real.

Her family thought Chapelle was a LGBTQ ally, according to a Daily Beast article that includes a Youtube video of her standup set, and links to material from her Instragram account.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/dave-c...rom-the-closer

[Ragged Maw]

Out of the mouths of idiots and Bigots

Republican Bill Cassidy on Lousiana's high maternal mortality rate:

Already posted. And yeah, still a statement I'd place a big red flag on.

[Username taken]

So Musk has always been an *******, noted, but he used to support the democrats. Can this be the reason why Musk has sided with republicans?



Can Musk's sudden anti-democrat stance be caused by his fragile ego?

Most likely.

A lot of "myths" around Musk were created by himself.

He's a pretty shady guy.

[babyblob]

If I hear one more member of the GOP say

"I am fine with equal rights. But not special rights." First off that is a Bull **** statement in itself.

Second being able to walk down the street with out worrying about being attacked and killed by homophobes, Transphobes or Racists is not a special right. Being able to vote as every citizen has the right to do is not a special right, being able to marry who you wish is not a special right, getting equal health care is not a special right, getting the same medical rights for your Trans child is not a special right.

The fact that so many people think that those wanting these rights are some how asking for special treatment is sickening in this country.