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

[JackDaw]

Keep on telling that to yourself if you want to feel better. Of course, racism and exceptionalism had a big part in the Brexit vote

It had some part, of course.

But not sure how anybody could reasonably quantify it.

But at the time of the exit, I was taking a very active interest in politics…watching Daily Politics show and reading 3 papers everyday, and talking to a lot of people.

The overall debate was much more nuanced than it’s often portrayed…usually by people who got much less involved than I was!

For example, a lot of the in/out voting did not follow traditional Party lines, with (for example) many traditional Labour/ left wing areas wanting out and Conservatives/ rightwing areas wanting to stay in.

It was all complex…but I learnt long ago that most people will never accept that.

[Tendrin]

My dad's uncle was in Vaudeville, and Vaudeville could be extremely sexual. People like Mae West came from Vaudeville!

It's conservatives like Mets who have this weird idea of a kid-friendly that never existed. They want to go back to a time that is a theocracy fantasy.

Mets is, at this point, implying the accuracy of the propaganda that is leading to violent threats against drag shows. This is no surprise.

[Dalak]

Mets is, at this point, implacying the accuracy of the propaganda that is leading to violent threats against drag shows. This is no surprise.

I don't understand your term, but he is definitely trying to imply that there is something worth protesting at these shows so I'd like to know how much he actually knows about them.

[Tendrin]

That's because there was an edit failure.

[Mister Mets]

What is the difference between old drag and new drag shows, specifically the ones that are child friendly where kids are encouraged to come? Have you studied them?

Anyone with more familiarity with the topic is free to correct me, but from my understanding, modern drag is more of an offshoot of gay culture. This does not mean that every drag queen story hour is inappropriate for children, although there are viral stories every now and then about someone going too far. That said, it's likely the viral stories are about a handful of flawed volunteers/ struggling artists, and not representative of the performers or the parents who think it's a good idea.

No, the specific question was whether you thought he was guilty, specifically not whether he would be found guilty by a Jury and you sidestepped it in the most kind interpretation. The story you are using to throw out the 2 witnesses we the public know of to frame it like this is the only issue left out why one of them wouldn't pass a Jury, but we don't know that there aren't any more nor does it invalidate the literal Venmo evidence either. This is what we are talking about when you say that you are defending these sorts of reprehensible people/acts.

When dealing with ambiguity, civil court procedures can be a really useful heuristic, because the standard in a civil trial is that it just has to be more likely than not that the defendant is in the wrong (criminal courts are based under the much stricter beyond a reasonable doubt standard, the idea that ten guilty men should be allowed to go free for the sake of one innocent man.)

I don't think this would currently be enough to get a judgment against him in a civil trial, which is the American legal system's way to determining that it's more likely than not a wrong occurred.

You say that we don't know if there's more evidence or witnesses, and I fully agree. It could very well be that new stuff comes out that changes my opinion of whether he committed this crime from "He might have; I don't know" to "Oh yeah, he's obviously guilty."

[Gray Lensman]

To be fair there are oddly adult and sexual things that pop up in 'kid' stuff all the time. Animaniacs was famous for it:



Still, you have a point.

Everyone points to this and never references the one - two between Wakko (as King of Anvilania) and Hello Nurse of
"Sire?"
"Wait till we're alone!"

That one doesn't get enough notice.

[Reviresco]

Anyone with more familiarity with the topic is free to correct me, but from my understanding, modern drag is more of an offshoot of gay culture. This does not mean that every drag queen story hour is inappropriate for children, although there are viral stories every now and then about someone going too far. That said, it's likely the viral stories are about a handful of flawed volunteers/ struggling artists, and not representative of the performers or the parents who think it's a good idea.

When dealing with ambiguity, civil court procedures can be a really useful heuristic, because the standard in a civil trial is that it just has to be more likely than not that the defendant is in the wrong (criminal courts are based under the much stricter beyond a reasonable doubt standard, the idea that ten guilty men should be allowed to go free for the sake of one innocent man.)

I don't think this would currently be enough to get a judgment against him in a civil trial, which is the American legal system's way to determining that it's more likely than not a wrong occurred.

You say that we don't know if there's more evidence or witnesses, and I fully agree. It could very well be that new stuff comes out that changes my opinion of whether he committed this crime from "He might have; I don't know" to "Oh yeah, he's obviously guilty."

Gaetz is a well known sleazebag, who has gotten away with any number of things because his daddy is a Republican state senator -- whose company was also the subject of a lawsuit for Medicare fraud. Medicare fraud must be a requirement for republicans holding office in FL. He was also accused by two congressmen of showing off nude pictures of his sexual partners, even on the floor of the House. At the very least, he should have been removed from his committees, if not office by McCarthy, but we all know how spineless and morally vacant McCarthy is. That's the difference between the Dems and the Republicans. The Dems ran Al Franken out of office for a photo of him being an idiot, but the Republicans, despite claiming to be the party of family values, won't do a single thing to actual predators and pedophiles -- except keep them in office.

[Dalak]

Anyone with more familiarity with the topic is free to correct me, but from my understanding, modern drag is more of an offshoot of gay culture. This does not mean that every drag queen story hour is inappropriate for children, although there are viral stories every now and then about someone going too far. That said, it's likely the viral stories are about a handful of flawed volunteers/ struggling artists, and not representative of the performers or the parents who think it's a good idea.

So what I understand you are saying is that you have no idea what could be happening wrong here, so you just wanted to bring up Vaudeville as an attempt to compare to something that wasn't as sexually explicit in your mind. Well as has been pointed out Vaudeville is more risque than many want to remember. As far as I've been able to tell, Gay culture isn't really different than any other culture except that they are vilified for being Gay. They have in jokes like any other group, but being sexually attracted to the same sex doesn't make them some sort of different people culturally as each culture has its own LGBT subculture. Unless you suspect that dressing in drag and reading stories is going to make the kids gay as opposed to teach them that they shouldn't treat people like that like any differently than anyone else, I don't see any reasonable reason to protest this.

When dealing with ambiguity, civil court procedures can be a really useful heuristic, because the standard in a civil trial is that it just has to be more likely than not that the defendant is in the wrong (criminal courts are based under the much stricter beyond a reasonable doubt standard, the idea that ten guilty men should be allowed to go free for the sake of one innocent man.)

I don't think this would currently be enough to get a judgment against him in a civil trial, which is the American legal system's way to determining that it's more likely than not a wrong occurred.

You say that we don't know if there's more evidence or witnesses, and I fully agree. It could very well be that new stuff comes out that changes my opinion of whether he committed this crime from "He might have; I don't know" to "Oh yeah, he's obviously guilty."

There's a difference between simply claiming you don't know if he's guilty and bringing up questions as to the validity of the evidence and witnesses to make it seem as if he shouldn't be found guilty/didn't do it. You are doing the latter in this case as you have in many others, so don't complain that you are being insulted if others point this fact out. There are very few reasons to explain why a reasonable person would continue to do this time and time again, and considering how you leap to assume the positive for the GoP and assume others towing the liberal line have ill-intent they don't fit your circumstances.

[Dalak]

Everyone points to this and never references the one - two between Wakko (as King of Anvilania) and Hello Nurse of
"Sire?"
"Wait till we're alone!"

That one doesn't get enough notice.

There were many of them, but that's always the first to come to mind as it's surprisingly not subtle at all.

[Tendrin]

Gaetz is a well known sleazebag, who has gotten away with any number of things because his daddy is a Republican state senator -- whose company was also the subject of a lawsuit for Medicare fraud. Medicare fraud must be a requirement for republicans holding office in FL. He was also accused by two congressmen of showing off nude pictures of his sexual partners, even on the floor of the House. At the very least, he should have been removed from his committees, if not office by McCarthy, but we all know how spineless and morally vacant McCarthy is. That's the difference between the Dems and the Republicans. The Dems ran Al Franken out of office for a photo of him being an idiot, but the Republicans, despite claiming to be the party of family values, won't do a single thing to actual predators and pedophiles -- except keep them in office.

Please please please remember it was not one accusation that laid Al Franken low, it was eight.

[williamtheday]

I hear Snowden is going to become a Russian citizen; does that mean he's going to join their army?

[WestPhillyPunisher]

I hear Snowden is going to become a Russian citizen; does that mean he's going to join their army?

Possibly. With panicked Russian men getting out of Dodge on anything that rolls, floats or flies to avoid becoming fatalities in Ukraine, I doubt the army will be at all picky about who they conscript.

[Catlady in training]

I guess few (any??) countries are free from the taint of racism, with some extremists in the mix….so if you wait for complete absence of that evil you won’t be visiting many places.

But I do smile at times when leaving EU is cited as proof that UK is becoming far right when countries like Hungary, Poland, Italy, France remain in EU…however misguided leaving EU may have been, perceived economic advantage was main driving force in exit, rather than some bizarre wish to become an ultra right wing state.

Poland and Hungary's top politicians like to talk big about leaving EU, but I doubt they ever will. They get too much money out of it. It's just a performance for the voters who need someone to blame for their miserable lives. But they love the easy money, which is why it's important for EU to finally put their foot now on Hungary - they seem to be doing that now, they just need to stick to it.

I don' know much about Italian politics, but I heard the new leader has similar talk which doesn't surprise me.

It had some part, of course.

But not sure how anybody could reasonably quantify it.

But at the time of the exit, I was taking a very active interest in politics…watching Daily Politics show and reading 3 papers everyday, and talking to a lot of people.

The overall debate was much more nuanced than it’s often portrayed…usually by people who got much less involved than I was!

For example, a lot of the in/out voting did not follow traditional Party lines, with (for example) many traditional Labour/ left wing areas wanting out and Conservatives/ rightwing areas wanting to stay in.

It was all complex…but I learnt long ago that most people will never accept that.

That's what happens when parties on both ends of the political spectrum take money from russia (or in some specific cases maybe do the dirty work for free because they have a hard on for dictators, though I doubt that was the case for anyone in UK).

I hear Snowden is going to become a Russian citizen; does that mean he's going to join their army?

Why not, they have a lot of use for internet trolls - no idea if those are part of the army or a completely separate unit, but that probably doesn't make much difference.

[Mister Mets]

Mets is, at this point, implying the accuracy of the propaganda that is leading to violent threats against drag shows. This is no surprise.

Nope. Mets addressed a technical point, although he is concerned that if the way people on the left talk about a topic is so transparently false, it will discredit legitimate concerns about bigotry.

Gaetz is a well known sleazebag, who has gotten away with any number of things because his daddy is a Republican state senator -- whose company was also the subject of a lawsuit for Medicare fraud. Medicare fraud must be a requirement for republicans holding office in FL. He was also accused by two congressmen of showing off nude pictures of his sexual partners, even on the floor of the House. At the very least, he should have been removed from his committees, if not office by McCarthy, but we all know how spineless and morally vacant McCarthy is. That's the difference between the Dems and the Republicans. The Dems ran Al Franken out of office for a photo of him being an idiot, but the Republicans, despite claiming to be the party of family values, won't do a single thing to actual predators and pedophiles -- except keep them in office.

There really doesn't appear to be enough to kick out Gaetz right now.

A CNN report that unnamed sources say that Gaetz did something sketchy and immoral (showing nude photos of his then-girlfriend) is not grounds for any penalty. The witnesses could come forward, and call him out for behavior unbecoming a member of Congress, but that would be a different situation than what we right now have. Would we want congressional leaders kicking people off committees due to any accusation made in a newspaper?

As for the comparison of Democrats and Republicans, Democrats seem willing to toss their own overboard when the replacement is likely to be a Democrat. Al Franken resigned, and the Democratic Governor was able to replace him. Democrats try to take the moral high road by insisting that reasonable Republicans vote for a Democrat in the general election. A big example of this is the push to kick out Ralph Northam when he was Governor of Virginia, which evaporated when it turned out the next two in line had different scandals, and Northam's resignation might lead to a Republican Governor.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/06/polit...eral-blackface

So what I understand you are saying is that you have no idea what could be happening wrong here, so you just wanted to bring up Vaudeville as an attempt to compare to something that wasn't as sexually explicit in your mind. Well as has been pointed out Vaudeville is more risque than many want to remember. As far as I've been able to tell, Gay culture isn't really different than any other culture except that they are vilified for being Gay. They have in jokes like any other group, but being sexually attracted to the same sex doesn't make them some sort of different people culturally as each culture has its own LGBT subculture. Unless you suspect that dressing in drag and reading stories is going to make the kids gay as opposed to teach them that they shouldn't treat people like that like any differently than anyone else, I don't see any reasonable reason to protest this.

You seem to be responding to points I haven't made.

It seems to me the suggestion that "drag queen story hour" is largely a spinoff of vaudeville is inaccurate or dishonest. It's better to argue for why this variation of modern drag is a good idea than to claim that it's something it isn't.

There's a difference between simply claiming you don't know if he's guilty and bringing up questions as to the validity of the evidence and witnesses to make it seem as if he shouldn't be found guilty/didn't do it. You are doing the latter in this case as you have in many others, so don't complain that you are being insulted if others point this fact out. There are very few reasons to explain why a reasonable person would continue to do this time and time again, and considering how you leap to assume the positive for the GoP and assume others towing the liberal line have ill-intent they don't fit your circumstances.

I understand the suggestion that we should avoid saying certain true things lest it be weaponized by bad people, but it's a dangerous attitude to have.

We should all be encouraged to say things that are true, and consider it repugnant to lie or to push against the truth.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, as well as 2020, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” published profiles of the U.S. House Representative from Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, Steve King, the sitting U.S. House Representative from Iowa's 4th Congressional District, a guy who is perhaps the most unapologetically racist member of the GOP (and that's saying something). Steve King is a man who seems hell bent on being the most venomous xenophobe in the entire Republican Party, showing his contempt for illegal immigrants by often comparing them to animals (considering he’s also proudly defended dog-fighting, it’s not surprising to see him hold as much concern for these human beings as he does animals), and making ludicrous, paranoid claims about how much of a threat they are to the general safety of the average American citizen. He literally has described the process of immigration in the United States as “a slow motion terrorist attack”. Years before Donald Trump ever wanted to build a border wall, Steve King was pitching a giant electrified fence that would keep out illegal immigrants because "it works on cattle". King’s also a huge war hawk, and has defended any action by the United States in the Middle East for the past 15 years, not even taking issue with the atrocities committed in the Abu Ghraib prison by American troops. He’s equally insane on the home front, having once argued that girls are frequently kidnapped out of playgrounds, raped, then taken over state lines to get an abortion, and returned back to the park before anybody knows they’re missing. (Really. I mean, those would be some really oblivious parents, to have the kid missing long enough for a predator to pull all that off before they notice.) In 2015, Steve King chastised President Obama for "apologizing for slavery" because he feels "there's nothing to apologize about". He has complained about undocumented immigrants "bringing in Ebola and beheadings", and defended Donald Trump's comments about Mexican rapists, saying that "Central Americans were doing the raping", in addition. Steve King gave everyone a waft of bigotry strong enough that is was like a blast of smelling salts on the first day of the 2016 Republican National Convention when in the midst of participating in a panel on MSNBC moderated by Chris Hayes, Rep. King gave his thoughts that no "non-white sub-groups" had ever contributed to civilization. The panel erupted in protest at King's ignorant, near-white-supremacist statement, and Hayes had to dump to commercial to avoid it devolving even further than that. Also in 2016, Rep. King compared Syrian refugees to “poisoned grapes”, ranted about the Obama administration’s LGBTQ protections showed they wouldn’t "be satisfied until all students are “transgendered [sic] vegans”, that the country was going "downhill" because women had contraceptive rights, argued it was racist and sexist for people to put Harriet Tubman instead of President Andrew Jackson on the twenty dollar bill, responded to Colin Kaepernick's protests against racial inequality at NFL games by kneeling during the national anthem by accusing him of being in league with ISIS, and while the featured guest of anti-immigrant hate group FAIR, talked about how "no one would have been shot" if everyone in the Orlando Pulse nightclub had a gun (they had an armed off-duty police officer on the premises) and that the GOP shouldn't try and win over Hispanic voters because "we are all God's children". Steve King's own office at the Capitol now proudly has the Confederate flag on display on his desk, even though the last time anybody checked, Iowa wasn't in the Confederacy in the Civil War. Rep. King already has a pretty well-established rapport with European white nationalists like Marine LePen of France and Geert Wilders of Belgium, and one weekend in March of 2017, on his Twitter account, he posted an Islamophobic cartoon, then quoted Wilders and said he was right about refugees because “We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies”. After wide criticism in the following days, Steve King not only refused to apologize, but doubled down, saying, “I meant exactly what I said” and that he wanted the United States to be “so homogenous”. By that September, King was practically gleeful upon hearing the news that Donald Trump had announced he was going to allow the delayed deportation of Dreamers, or DACA, to expire, and went on Breitbart News to mockingly say that the action would effectively “create a Peace Corps-like force” that would allow deported Dreamers to teach their home countries “how a civilized people interact with each other.” In December of 2017, after a jury found the killer of Katie Steinle not guilty of murder, Rep. King reacts by accusing several of his black and Latino House colleagues of having “deified criminal illegal aliens” and fostered “an anti-white, anti-Western civilization culture.” In September of 2018, Steve King quoted White Supremacist Lana Lokteff in a Twitter post where he accused “Leftists” of being the “real Nazis”. Later that month, only hours before reports emerge of MORE accusers coming forward to report sexual assaults they had committed against them by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Steve King decides to join the chorus of Republicans defending him by saying, the charges amounted to “character assassination” and normalized sexual assault by saying “If that’s the new standard, no man will ever qualify for the Supreme Court again”. On January 11th, 2019, Rep. King wonders out loud, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive? Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?” and two months later in March of 2019, King disparaged survivors of Hurricane Katrina, saying, “I saw that from the air and from the ground and went back and did what we could to help those folks down there. But here’s what FEMA tells me: ‘We go to a place like New Orleans and everybody’s looking around saying, who’s gonna help me, who’s gonna help me?’ They’re just always gratified when they come and see Iowans take care of each other, so that’s a point of pride that spreads across the country.” In August of 2019, Steve King, unprompted, started discussing what he feels are the merits of rape and incest, musing, "What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled those people out that were products of rape and incest? Would there be any population of the world left if we did that? Considering all the wars and all the rapes and pillages taken place and whatever happened to culture after society? I know I can't certify that I'm not a part of a product of that.” Later the same month, King laughs when talking about how he heard the Chinese government forces detained Muslims to break the tenets of their religion and feed them only pork. Now, here’s the best news we’ve had to report in some time… Steve King was finally bounced from office by a primary challenger in 2020 and go back to gathering wood for cross burnings.