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

[Malvolio]

And then there's the aspect of women's health that almost no one wants to talk about:

[Kirby101]

I think people are reading something into his comments that wasn't there. He did clearly say that this should not be minimized and that it should be focused on.

You're correct that the high maternal mortality rate among African-American women is a serious concern. What looks like bad statistics for Louisiana women turns out to be mediocre statistics for white women in Louisiana and catastrophically bad statistics for African-American women in Louisiana. The problem for them is worse than what the already concerning statewide figures would suggest.


Where does he say it's not a problem? Can you quote him?

: “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 as it’d otherwise appear. Now, I say that not to minimize the issue but to focus the issue as to where it would be. For whatever reason, people of color have a higher incidence of maternal mortality

"For whatever reason", how far away from, let's not worry about doing anything about it, can you get. You will put the best possible bullshit spin on this. But the rest of us see it as him straight up saying it's THEIR problem to solve. And being that he has continually voted against women's health, against funding for low income families, against anything that might help, it's pretty clear he doesn't care as long as it's more a black problem.

Your panglossian view of the GOP is boarding on the absurd.

[shooshoomanjoe]

And then there's the aspect of women's health that almost no one wants to talk about:

Add andropause to that. It's tough trying to get your doctor to prescribe you testosterone.

[Tami]

Can any Conservative explain what the attraction is for Republicans and Dictators/Authoritarians/any Anti-Democractic figurehead?

[Gray Lensman]

Can any Conservative explain what the attraction is for Republicans and Dictators/Authoritarians/any Anti-Democractic figurehead?

They make the libs go away. Or at least underground.

[Kirby101]

Can any Conservative explain what the attraction is for Republicans and Dictators/Authoritarians/any Anti-Democractic figurehead?

The modern Republican Party is fascist.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Can any Conservative explain what the attraction is for Republicans and Dictators/Authoritarians/any Anti-Democractic figurehead?

They hate democracy. They hate that people of color, women, gays and non-Christians are on an equal footing with them, something that isn’t the case in autocracies. Frankly speaking, I can’t think of any other plausible reason.

[kidfresh512]

They hate democracy. They hate that people of color, women, gays and non-Christians are on an equal footing with them, something that isn’t the case in autocracies. Frankly speaking, I can’t think of any other plausible reason.

Power and holding onto it by any means necessary. Even when the demographics of the country and attitudes and opinions of the majority are against what they stand for.

[BruceWayneJr.]

"For whatever reason", how far away from, let's not worry about doing anything about it, can you get. You will put the best possible bullshit spin on this. But the rest of us see it as him straight up saying it's THEIR problem to solve. And being that he has continually voted against women's health, against funding for low income families, against anything that might help, it's pretty clear he doesn't care as long as it's more a black problem.

Your panglossian view of the GOP is boarding on the absurd.

Hallelujah, testify.

[Tendrin]

Meanwhile, in what the GOP *actually* does to 'solve problems'...

COOKEVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Miranda Atnip lost her home during the coronavirus pandemic after her boyfriend moved out and she fell behind on bills. Living in a car, the 34-year-old worries every day about getting money for food, finding somewhere to shower, and saving up enough money for an apartment where her three children can live with her again.

Now she has a new worry: Tennessee is about to become the first U.S. state to make it a felony to camp on local public property such as parks.

“Honestly, it’s going to be hard,” Atnip said of the law, which takes effect July 1. “I don’t know where else to go.”

Here we have them criminalizing homelessness.

Meanwhile, Dave Chapelle is back on his transphobic bullshit. At a show opened by John Mulaney, he promptly went all in with the literal One Joke, the ONLY joke that conservatives know how to make about trans individuals, saying he 'was attacked with a gun that identified as a knife'. Ha ha. So funny. Meanhile:

375 transgender people were killed this year (2021), a figure that has risen since last year's total of 350.

The report authors say this makes 2021 the 'deadliest year' of violence against gender diverse people since records began. One in four of those murdered were killed in their own home.

The annual global list is released for Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR), held on November 20 each year.

The majority of the murders happened in Central and South America (70%). But like last few years, the most deaths in a single country occurred in Brazil, totalling 33% of global deaths.

Cases from Greece, Kazakhstan, and Malawi were reported for the first time too.

Just the deadliest year in records keeping for trans individuals. No big, right?

[Tendrin]

Here's more about Chapelle's 'jokes' from the show. If these turn out to be accurate descriptions ... oof.

https://twitter.com/handsinthepool/s...85757569986560

[godisawesome]

Can any Conservative explain what the attraction is for Republicans and Dictators/Authoritarians/any Anti-Democractic figurehead?

I voted GOP twice before I voted Dem, so here’s my personal perspective that led to me starting to flip - I think it’s insecurity, on a whole host of issues, including eventually denial, which starts a vicious cycle once someone becomes even marginally aware of their denial.

Especially in the age of Trump, the GOP became dominated by people who at once claimed to stand for strength, intelligence, tenacity, patriotism, Christianity, and tradition, but was actually defined by their weakness, foolishness, cowardice, treachery, self-deification, and regression.

Now, the fact they want the identity of the first traits but suffer from the second traits redefines what those traits are, as they get twisted into specific expressions of self-projecting paranoia, kleptocratic tendencies, xenophobic nationalism, and a weird, double-standard laden and hypocritical new “religion” mixing jingoism, belligerence, and only selected and at times contradictory elements of older faiths.

Now, the problem is that as mistakes pile up on the part of the leadership selected by the GOP, the amount of self-inflicted damage done to those voters on the personal level and on the state and national level, and perhaps more importantly, on the people they care about, the more defining and unbreakable the denial gets - someone made a misguided choice to support the “more capitalist,” “more Christian,” “more patriotic” candidate once, and each time their mistake got pointed out, the burden of admitting they were wrong got heavier.

It’s why eventually you get someone falling into the trap of fascism’s narrative of struggle - they want facts to reflect their feelings, so they start to support people who promises to dictate reality, and slowly but surely that becomes the main thing they want…

(For the record, communism *can* reach that level as well… but tends to encourage more analytical thinking in its followers, so it takes a longer amount of time, and more often communist dictatorships depend on having smarter, more cunning despots and hangers-on to get there.)

[Mister Mets]

Here's more about Chapelle's 'jokes' from the show. If these turn out to be accurate descriptions ... oof.

https://twitter.com/handsinthepool/s...85757569986560

It does appear that this person does not have the mental fortitude to go to a comedy show, and should not be taken seriously.

"By the time he was done, I thought I was going to throw up. My sister actually left and had a breakdown."

"Please reblog if you can, for evidence of his continued transphobia. I'd really hate for my Chapelle nightmare to be for nothing."

John Mulaney would be too edgy for people this sensitive. Comedy clubs are a poor fit for this kind of audience.

[Tendrin]

It does appear that this person does not have the mental fortitude to go to a comedy show, and should not be taken seriously.

"By the time he was done, I thought I was going to throw up. My sister actually left and had a breakdown."

"Please reblog if you can, for evidence of his continued transphobia. I'd really hate for my Chapelle nightmare to be for nothing."

John Mulaney would be too edgy for people this sensitive. Comedy clubs are a poor fit for this kind of audience.

Oh, look who's come riding to defense of transphobia again.

I’m somewhat aware of the controversy regarding Chappelle, but not super well versed in the matter other than that he said some things that were perceived as insensitive to the trans community in a special and that he has pushed back against cancel culture. I don’t follow comedians or Chappelle, so i don’t know much about him beyond that and that he got tackled.

For a guy who is supposed to be “cancelled”, his appearance brought the whole crowd (12,000 people) to their feet for a standing ovation. I was excited too. I’ve seen his old Chappell show clips on YouTube and they are hilarious. He then made a few jokes about the tackling thing, which were ok, before making a trans joke that just did not land at all. It wasn’t particularly insensitive, it just wasn’t funny. The crowd was completely silent and it came across really cringy. He then went on to do some crowd work and asked two teenage twin boys (I assume, i couldn’t see them) if they drove together. When they responded that their parents had dropped them off, he responded “GAYYYYY”, while laughing hysterically. I’m not sure if I missed a part of their response, or if there was something else that would’ve lended to the joke I was unaware of, but again the crowd was silent. To be honest at that point he lost me. The rest of his set was just meh. A chuckle here and there, but no real full laughter moments.

https://www.reddit.com/r/StandUpCome...mulaneys_show/

[worstblogever]

In both 2015, and in 2016, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” published profiles of Jim Buchy, a rather controversial member of the Ohio House of Representatives who served 9 terms from 1983-2000, and then after a decade out of office, was the hand-picked appointment of Gov. John Kasich to replace Jim Zehringer in his position in 2010. Buchy has continued running for office every two years since, putting his total number of terms in office to 12 over the past 34 years. Since beginning his second run in the Ohio state legislature, he has been criticized for making Birther jokes abortion in Ohio unless a mother's life is at risk, as well as a repeatedly pushing for a fetal heartbeat abortion ban that would place the ban on the procedure at 6 weeks (in other words, unconstitutional via Roe v. Wade). Buchy has also pushed for curtailing voting rights, voted to allow school employees to carry firearms on campus in that time, supported legislation to try and stop Syrian refugees from being resettled in his state, and supported "religious freedom" legislation. He thankfully has chosen to not run for re-election in 2016, and being that he is in his late seventies now, it looks like he's done in politics.

On this date in 2017, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” posted a profile of Rick Womick, a former Republican member of the Tennessee House of Representatives from 2010 to 2016. The Volunteer State has no shortage of GOP extremists, but Womick in particular, took it to a new level on various occasions, perhaps no more noteworthy than the time he reacted to the news that Gov. Bill Haslam would follow the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges ruling by suddenly calling for his party's own governor to be impeached. Womick's not at all hyperbolic statement went as follows, “And where is Tennessee’s leadership…oh that’s right…our Governor bowed down to the five self appointed gods in black robes just minutes after they issued their ‘opinion! He changed Tennessee state law and our State Constitution without ever consulting with the General Assembly.” Besides that huge civics class fail from Womick, only a year prior he declared Haslam a "traitor to our party" over what he called efforts by a political-action committee run by supporters to defeat opponents of Common Core education standards. Now, the end of Rick Womick's political career may have come from him lashing out repeatedly at his own governor, but maybe the Tennessee GOP should have realized he was unstable prior to that. Back on Veteran's Day in 2011, he figured it was a good time to call for all Muslims to be kicked out of the U.S. Military, because as he opined in a paranoid rant, “if they truly are a devout Muslims, and follow the Quran and the Sunnah, then I feel threatened because they’re commanded to kill me.” He then went on to further stoke Islamophobic hatred by declaring Allah is a "false God", and claiming that he had now ensured there was a "fatwa on my head". It further devolved from there into conspiracy theory territory where he said Iran had planned a "population Jihad" where they would take over the United States by pushing for Muslim immigrants to head here from all over the Middle East, and that had been their plan since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Only four month later, in March of 2012, Rick Womick was ranting about a whole other conspiracy theory, this time the threat of the United Nations' Agenda 21, which were no longer a bunch of environmental recommendations to be adopted, but instead, a sinister plot for global domination and to, as Womick explained, "a step by step methodical process that denies United States citizens their property rights".

Somehow, even after all that, Womick got re-elected to a second term in office. And in it, he started things off by once claiming in a hearing that the city of Shelbyville, Tennessee, was the victim of a "electromagnetic pulse bomb" detonated by unnamed terrorists for uncertain reasons. Now, the idea that the "terrorists" targeted the Tennessee state legislators is weird (you'd think using it in a major metropolitan area, if it existed, would cause more chaos), but nobody else seemed to know what the hell Womick was talking about but he insisted it was "in the paper". We don't really feel the need to get too much farther into this head case, but will note his voting record features support for all of the kookiest ideas to come out of the Tennessee state legislature from its past three sessions. Whether it's trying to restrict abortion or voting rights, nullify the Affordable Care Act, teach Creationism in schools, making the Bible the state book, allow guns in schools, or preserve the names of Confederate monuments... it makes us glad that Womick’s career has come to an end.