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

[Revolutionary_Jack]

When I said Republicans outperformed Democrats in the Georgia senate races, I just means that Perdue got more votes than Ossoff,

He was running on re-election and his campaign went into runoff. For a senator in his second term that's a sign of him haemorraging support even if he does eke out a win. I wouldn't use the word "outperform" to describe a comedown like that. "Scrapped through" is most like it.

I wasn't suggesting that Perdue or Loeffler ran better campaigns or anything like that.

You used the word "outperform" which always signifies some overwhelming victory. You play off an election in a state where you hold all the advantages that saw its electoral votes go blue, and which saw a Senate candidate running on re-election go into runoff as some big deal, that's denying reality and also the meaning of grammar. Again if this happened in a blue state, Dems would not call this overwhelming.

[Mister Mets]

So pretty much, the police are basically a fascist gang that is holding the nation hostage with the implicit threat of doing even more violence if we cut them loose? And this means that we should keep giving them MORE funding and the legal cover to keep brutalizing people? And what would we think if any other public institutions behaved this way? Can you imagine what the reaction would have been if the USPS and Amtrak had been sending veiled threats of sabotage if their funding had been cut, which it has repeatedly been? Also, just try to slow play this issue isn't going to work, because while there are good cops, the general atmosphere in a lot of these departments means that the bad cops tend to push out the good ones, particularly those that speak out against police brutality, and so over time you'll see more and more of the cops with moral qualms about what they're asked to do leaving, while the remaining hardliners double down on the extreme tactics, all while we keep throwing more and more money at them in the hope that they'll change someday.

The best strategy to deal with these problems is honestly rather simple - on a mass scale, people just need to stop cooperating with the police altogether. Of course they will respond with increased repression, but if enough people get behind this idea of simply pretending like the police don't even exist, then they will find it increasingly difficult to maintain their authority, and once this weakness becomes evident even their supporters will desert them because a police force that can't keep all the peasants in line isn't a police force that's worth supporting. Obviously this has the potential to go really badly if we don't go in with a plan, and of course we will have to establish community organizations that are able to settle disputes peaceably and fairly so that we can still maintain order without having to resort to calling the cops.

The cops aren't the ones making the argument that the people in the police force might otherwise join militias.

As for the idea of pretending police don't exist on a mass scale, you're unlikely to get enough of the population to go along. And how would you prefer to handle violent crime?

Not trying to be a d-ck here, rather a devil's advocate, but your strategy in real life was in fact put into effect. Those "community organizations that are able to settle disputes peaceably and fairly so that we can still maintain order without having to resort to calling the cops" was in fact attempted multiple times by different groups. In time they became the Mafia, Cosa Nostra, the Jewish Mob, the Italian Mob, the Chinese-American Mob.

GOODFELLAS spells it out:
That was it. No more letters from truant officers. No more letters from school. In fact, no more letters from anybody. How could I go back to school after that and pledge allegiance to the flag and sit through good government bullshit. Hundreds of guys depended on Paulie and he got a piece of everything they made. It was tribute, just like the old country, except they were doing it in America. All they got from Paulie was protection from other guys looking to rip them off. That’s what it’s all about. That’s what the FBI can never understand, that what Paulie and the organization does is offer protection for people who can’t go to the cops. They’re like the police department for wiseguys.
— Henry Hill


The drive towards community policing and so on, that can be done, but let's also keep in mind perspectives about what the language we are using refers to.

We kind of forget how bad things were before there was any law and order.

There have been some interesting writings on how things get safer as we develop authorities like the police.

Sociologists have made a distinction between honor culture and dignity culture. In honor cultures, people have to defend their honor because there isn't an understanding of the inherent dignity of every individual. In dignity cultures, we have that understanding and a legal system to allow people to seek justice/ redress wrongs. It is much better to live in a dignity culture than in an honor culture, but if the legal system goes away, we shift from the latter to the former.

Turns out she's lying. She actually did wear a mask.
https://twitter.com/QueenMaryBlair/s...158338/photo/1

To be fair to the maniac, she didn't say she wasn't wearing a mask, just that she advocated otherwise. One can follow regulations while suggesting it's a bad idea. Of course, wearing masks indoors during a pandemic is a good idea.

I'd say that the Georgia run off races are up-in-the-air, that it could go either way. I doubt there would be many who would change their minds or their votes, but turnout is another issue.

a) Republican voters are discouraged or turned off because Trump lost and has been silent for so long. Democrats, on the other hand, are charged up over how well they did. - In this scenario, one or both Democrats win the sneate race.

b) Republican voters are angry and determined not to hand the senate to the Democrats. Democratic Voters are also still charged up and the voter turnout on both sides is high. - In this scenario, the Republicans stand a slightly better chance of winning, but it will be close.

c) Republican turnout is high (see b), yet for some reason (I can't pinpoint any one reason for that to happen) the Democratic turnout drops. - In this scenario, both Republican candidates win easily.

I can't say if money will play a role in this, except to encourage those who didn't vote the first tiem or those who voted for the 3rd party candidates to vote either Democrat or Republican. If it is a close race, then that could be an issue.

In the end it is still about Trump, and Biden. Those who don't like Trump will want to give the Senate control to the Democrats. Those who don't like or trust Biden will want to keep the Senate control in the hands of the Republicans.

Those who don't care one way or another will just vote the same as they did before or not vote at all.

It could go either way, but Republicans seem to be favored in both races, and Democrats need to win both to have a Senate majority.

Democrats did two points worse in the first round. A two point deficit could easily be overcome in the second election, but it's better to start out ahead than to start out behind, especially given how few people are going to change their minds.

One bit of good news for Democrats with Scenario A is that Republicans could also get discouraged by the arguments that the system is rigged against them. Why bother voting for a Republican Senator if Atlanta Democrats could cheat even President Trump out of a win?

The bad news is that Democratic turnout could easily decline when Biden isn't on the ballot. There are a high number of voters who only care when it's a presidential election, or when they've got really strong feelings against a President they can't vote against.

It'll be interesting to see how Trump's actions change things. Will Democrats be more motivated to give him a final F.U.? Will he announce he's running in 2024, and convince Democrats he still represents a threat?

"My body, my choice"?!? Is this an attempted troll, or is she really that irony-deaf?

She's definitely aware of what she's doing.

Anyone else feeling this way?

Four Wasted Years Thinking About Donald Trump

I do often feel this way, although it's probably not a good thing to have spent so much mental energy on politics and Trump.

[PwrdOn]

I have watched and read a lot, and played a lot of games, I will admit, but...I get what you mean. It hasn't really been the same.

Sometimes politics and culture have this symbiotic counterpoint. If things are bad in one place but things are good somewhere else...it produces a weird mixture.

To give an example. I was a reader of 616 Spider-Man comics until OMD. That came out 2007-2008. That event demoralized me and depressed me and it made me quit reading superhero comics (I actually got into indie and non-mainstream titles) but then Obama became candidate and president at about the same time. And that to me kind of put my mind off the bitterness. I actually became re-engaged in those old issues with Spider-Man after Trump got elected. I joined CBR Community posting in Spider-Man boards to talk about issues that were inside me but unresolved since 2007. And the funny thing is, when Trump lost...some of that bitterness about Spider-Man kind of faded. Not that I think I am wrong (about OMD being a mistake and so on), it's like the intensity got dulled. I don't know how to explain it. So for me, a political optimism makes me less militant about culture, I find. A week before the election, I felt Spider-Man issues were life-and-death stuff, even during the Pandemic and Lockdown, now reality has entered and it's something I don't feel as strongly about as before. I haven't posted much on the Spider-Man boards lately.

I think that also applies to the big issues over the last four years...think of the Game of Thrones finale and how intense the backlash was. Sure it was bad and all, poor in execution, but the intensity of that backlash I think also stems from the overall disappointment people had to politics in that time. Their favorite show being bad was another level of disappointment and betrayal added to the disappointment of the real world. I was pretty upset about GOT myself but again that intensity has faded, not that I think it's good...it's like if I met someone who said they liked GOT now and the finale, before I would have given him a funny look and sarcastic eyebrow, now I might just shrug. The Last Jedi, the disapppointment felt by some (excluding the racist backlash of course), I think that also had to do with that. But while I still don't think TLJ is the masterpiece everyone makes it out to be (I think it's an overlong mess with interesting and good scenes mixed with weak ones but on the whole most interesting film of the Disney SW movies), the level of disappointment and so on has faded.

The Game of Thrones finale was kind of emblematic of this era we're living in, because yes the last season sucked and made no sense, but a big part of the letdown was the realization that the show had kind of been garbage all along, and had largely been running off of marketing hype this whole time. I mean, for almost an entire decade people had been extolling the virtues of this show about dragons and zombies because it was just so damn gritty and mature for daring to show all this nudity and sex and rape and incest and that was super groundbreaking because reasons. And now that the veneer has been scrubbed off and GoT has been exposed as another cringey, juvenile, genre fantasy series, our collective childhoods have been well and truly ruined, you can't even really go back and watch the earlier seasons anymore because it just reminds you how silly you were for liking it to begin with. And this is coming from someone who went and read all the books too, man does GRRM love writing extravagant descriptions of whatever food people happen to be eating in every scene.

And I feel like this is largely what so psychologically draining about the last few years. It wasn't so much that Trump was some kind of aberration in our history and that his intolerance and narcissism were somehow un-American and contrary to our values, but that he peeled back that veneer of comfortable lies that we tell ourselves about what kind of society this is and forced us to confront the ugliness that had been underneath all along. Trump will be gone soon, but that doesn't mean that we can just go back and gleefully relive the Obama years and pretend like nothing has happened, because just like the early seasons of GoT, the more you think about it the more you realize that the Obama era wasn't even that great to begin with. And fixing all of the problems that Trump created isn't something that will happen overnight but requires a long term plan of rebuilding our culture from the ground up. We are way too fixated on instant gratification these days, and I think by now everyone kind of realizes that just electing a black president didn't do **** to heal the racial divide in this country, because everyone just kind of patted themselves on the back for that symbolic victory and didn't bother to follow that up with concrete action that would change the material conditions on the ground. And I think that one area that we have improved since then is that we all now kind of realize that Biden winning doesn't mean that we can all just go back to brunch, and maybe even that constantly seeking this happy place where we can pretend our problems don't exist is the problem to begin with.

[Amadeus Arkham]

I’m not a big fan of Van Jones but I think he accurately describes the attitudes many felt when the election results had come in both 2016 and 2020

Van Jones reaction to 2016 election results.

Van Jones reaction to the 2020 election results.

[godisawesome]

Great article, thanks for sharing. Yeah the old "bad times are good for art" argument was always stupid, should have been gunned down, and dumped in a ditch.

The last 4 years were really hyper-politicized for better and for worse. For better because it made a ton of people politically engaged and having difficult conversations that should have been had a long time ago. For worse because politics has kind of replaced sports and culture. Who knows though where things go from here?

(Insert bitter joke about The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker having a perfect personification of Trumpism in the form of Kylo Ren and trying to make him a romantic anti-hero over the black male lead.)

The replacement of other forms of entertainment with politics really has been a drain with only a few breaks - Infinity War and Endgame for one... Kansas a city winning the Super Bowl for another.

[The no face guy]

Whatever the Democrats and the old school Republicans may have been, they were both the Parties of the Possible. Then you ended up with the Tea Party which was arguably the Party of the Impossible. Or, rather, the party of "We want one hundred percent our own way about everything and scrooge compromise" which is reality and the very nature of politics. But this led to Trump which might have been thought impossible.

But, more and more, the Republican party is becoming the party that cannot be reasoned with. It's like trying to reason with a Young Earth Creationist. There is a set of alternative facts/ alternate reality and there is no discussion. It may be only a bit of an exaggeration to say I would gladly have a rational discussion with a Republican. Now, just find me a rational Republican. I'm not talking about people at the top who are rationale but can't stay in office if they try to swim against the River Ignorance. But the everyday voter.

Strange thing to say here but... The average Republican voter today is an Evangelical Christian who is a Republican because they are against abortion. Why are they against abortion? Well, there's a long list of lies but it comes down to picturing the fetus as a newborn baby that it isn't and because the Bible says it's wrong to have an abortion (actually, it has women executed for adultery while pregnant and defines life as breathing on your own) and that's all that matters because the Bible is the Word of God because it says that in the Bible. It's the same with the anti-environment stance which a lot of it comes from the idea that "God" will step in and deal with all the problems since the Earth won't be here much longer anyway and it's all part of the divine plan, etc., etc., etc. In other words, baseless claims based on other baseless claims based on innuendo based on assertions without the slightest evidence. And that is what you're dealing with when you're dealing with the average Republican. And that doesn't even get into the whack job conspiracy theories which are becoming the norm.

Dealing with an extremist liberal is a bit different. It's just reaching too far too soon. You might get the occasional conspiracy theory but it's usually stuff like wanting to completely do away with Capitalism or things that may actually be good ideas but it's not going to sell, it's reaching for the stars and refusing to settle for the Moon when you could have had it. Now, the funny thing is that, in many ways, I think of myself as being at the Liberal extreme. I was certainly at the extreme when I was younger, in the 1970s, let's say. Gay Rights, Trans Rights, National Health Care, Income Equality and steps to insure it for all races and women. Nowadays, none of those are particularly extreme left. Doing away with Capitalism? Still extreme. Maybe I don't think of Liberal extremism as extremism because I tend mostly to agree with it. But just because it may be going too far too fast for a lot of people does not put it in the same category as Conservative extremism which, as I said, goes directly against science, facts and evidence and now even generates it's own alternate reality of alternative facts.

As an urban Canadian, I am a bit shielded from the Evangelical fundamentalism you have going on down there. For instance, in order for me to find someone opposed to gay marriage for biblical reasons, I would have to drive one hour out of the city to our rural heartland. (Though there are a lot of non Caucasian communities in the city that are very religious, and socially conservative, that oppose LBGT rights; Muslim, Catholic ect)

Your correct, the far right, particularly in the United States is more prone to irrationalism because their exposure to religious fundamentalism already has them primed and ready for believing in things that have no empirical basis to support them, so if you believe demons are influencing your behavior (Sexuality ect) than it's not a far leap to jump into right wing conspiracy theories about deep state governments and pedophiles. (This is still the fringe group thankfully)

The far left engages in irrationalism as well, whether it is the old Marxist left that your probably familiar with, or the new identity politics left, which engages in anti scientific behavior or historical revisionism to achieve their aims,(Ill avoid examples to keep it short) but at least I can find some scientific or historical documentation that supports their arguments, I can find no such thing for evidence for the existence of Qanon that is credible.

For me, I'm concerned about the creeping authoritarianism on both ends of the political spectrum, and how it is seeping into mainstream culture, but at present, until Trump rides off into the sunset with his anti covid funny farm followers, the far right has become a much bigger concern over the last 4 years, you will get no argument out of me there.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

The Game of Thrones finale was kind of emblematic of this era we're living in, because yes the last season sucked and made no sense, but a big part of the letdown was the realization that the show had kind of been garbage all along, and had largely been running off of marketing hype this whole time. I mean, for almost an entire decade people had been extolling the virtues of this show about dragons and zombies because it was just so damn gritty and mature for daring to show all this nudity and sex and rape and incest and that was super groundbreaking because reasons. And now that the veneer has been scrubbed off and GoT has been exposed as another cringey, juvenile, genre fantasy series, our collective childhoods have been well and truly ruined, you can't even really go back and watch the earlier seasons anymore because it just reminds you how silly you were for liking it to begin with.

Yeah, I was thinking about that piece someone did a year after the show, "its cultural footprint has been evaporated". Game of Thrones was a profound waste of time. I read the books too and at this point, I don't care if and when the next book comes out. I'll read it when it drops of course but am I eagerly marking down days and so on...nope. It's like this relief.

And I feel like this is largely what so psychologically draining about the last few years. It wasn't so much that Trump was some kind of aberration in our history and that his intolerance and narcissism were somehow un-American and contrary to our values, but that he peeled back that veneer of comfortable lies that we tell ourselves about what kind of society this is and forced us to confront the ugliness that had been underneath all along. Trump will be gone soon, but that doesn't mean that we can just go back and gleefully relive the Obama years and pretend like nothing has happened, because just like the early seasons of GoT, the more you think about it the more you realize that the Obama era wasn't even that great to begin with. And fixing all of the problems that Trump created isn't something that will happen overnight but requires a long term plan of rebuilding our culture from the ground up. We are way too fixated on instant gratification these days, and I think by now everyone kind of realizes that just electing a black president didn't do **** to heal the racial divide in this country, because everyone just kind of patted themselves on the back for that symbolic victory and didn't bother to follow that up with concrete action that would change the material conditions on the ground. And I think that one area that we have improved since then is that we all now kind of realize that Biden winning doesn't mean that we can all just go back to brunch, and maybe even that constantly seeking this happy place where we can pretend our problems don't exist is the problem to begin with.

Agreed.

(Insert bitter joke about The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker having a perfect personification of Trumpism in the form of Kylo Ren and trying to make him a romantic anti-hero over the black male lead.)

The replacement of other forms of entertainment with politics really has been a drain with only a few breaks - Infinity War and Endgame for one... Kansas a city winning the Super Bowl for another.

Not sure if that was at all Rian Johnson's intention (I actually like his movie KNIVES OUT a lot more and he should stick to doing those kinds of movies) but that's kind of what happened anyway. Under Trump, even Star Wars wasn't fun anymore.

[Malvolio]

Yeah, I was thinking about that piece someone did a year after the show, "its cultural footprint has been evaporated". Game of Thrones was a profound waste of time. I read the books too and at this point, I don't care if and when the next book comes out. I'll read it when it drops of course but am I eagerly marking down days and so on...nope. It's like this relief.



Agreed.



Not sure if that was at all Rian Johnson's intention (I actually like his movie KNIVES OUT a lot more and he should stick to doing those kinds of movies) but that's kind of what happened anyway. Under Trump, even Star Wars wasn't fun anymore.

Star Wars stopped being fun when The Phantom Menace was released. I mean, an entire film of exposition and foreshadowing for the next film, right?

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Star Wars stopped being fun when The Phantom Menace was released. I mean, an entire film of exposition and foreshadowing for the next film, right?

Well I actually do like the prequels...and I think there was a lot more to that movie than that, but I get your point.

[CJStriker]

GOP leaders in 4 states quash dubious Trump bid on electors!

https://******.com/article/election-...12a48835bc0dba

The theory is rooted in the fact that the U.S. Constitution grants state legislatures the power to decide how electors are chosen. Each state already has passed laws that delegate this power to voters and appoint electors for whichever candidate wins the state on Election Day. The only opportunity for a state legislature to then get involved with electors is a provision in federal law allowing it if the actual election “fails.”

If the result of the election was unclear in mid-December, at the deadline for naming electors, Republican-controlled legislatures in those states could declare that Trump won and appoint electors supporting him. Or so the theory goes.

The problem, legal experts note, is that the result of the election is not in any way unclear. Biden won all the states at issue. It’s hard to argue the election “failed” when Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security reported it was not tampered with and was “the most secure in American history.” There has been no finding of widespread fraud or problems in the vote count, which shows Biden leading Trump by more than 5 million votes nationally.

[Farealmer]

Having watched Bill Maher I think I get what this is all about. Obviously Donny wants to steal the election. But I think what the more likely back up plan is to scare people into voting con in the future to "balance out" the "obviously" dem stolen election. Though the real win is getting both. Both getting Donny a second term and then use the fact he had to "take it back from the thieves" to get people to go against the "evil dems".

[godisawesome]

Yeah, I was thinking about that piece someone did a year after the show, "its cultural footprint has been evaporated". Game of Thrones was a profound waste of time. I read the books too and at this point, I don't care if and when the next book comes out. I'll read it when it drops of course but am I eagerly marking down days and so on...nope. It's like this relief.



Agreed.



Not sure if that was at all Rian Johnson's intention (I actually like his movie KNIVES OUT a lot more and he should stick to doing those kinds of movies) but that's kind of what happened anyway. Under Trump, even Star Wars wasn't fun anymore.

Star Wars stopped being fun when The Phantom Menace was released. I mean, an entire film of exposition and foreshadowing for the next film, right?

I’d take Darth Maul and actually prescient and relevant usage of political lore work over deciding the Neo-Nazi School Shooter who was a great loathsome antagonist in the last film needs to be repackaged as a Long Haired Pretty Boy the universe revolves around. And part of the weird thing with TPM vs TLJ is that all that exposition and foreshadowing wound up ultimately being good enough to survive AOTC as well and produce a still more successful and engaging era of Star Wars, while TLJ found a way to shoot down most of TFA’s goodwill and drive away older fans *without* supplying a range of new fans in their place ‘cause Gen X whining about the PT didn’t stop Millenials from digging it, while Zoomers checked out on Rey and Finn when LFL checked out on them too.

Having said that, there are some works of art that have better used - or could use at a later date - some of the painful truths of our reality. As much as Johnson wound up accidentally making a regressive TLJ in spite of his intended progressive goal... Knives Out actually does use the times considerably better to flesh out the family pretty well as ultimately pathetic and banal bigots.

And as much as we used to love making fun of the Marvel Universe having a hilariously arbitrary prejudice against Mutants... if the MCU does that now, it’s not like we’d find it farcical at all. If anything, it might be too real.

[Castle]

About Trump conceding I don't think he will. He will just phase out himself quietly by January 20th. I have this feeling Trump may even exit the Whitehouse in the middle of the night, 2 days before Biden's inauguration.

[Joker]

I said that to someone recently. He's just gonna duck out one night. Dude is such a baby.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Anyone else feeling this way?

Four Wasted Years Thinking About Donald Trump

Yeah, it was damn hard NOT to think about Trump, he saw to it we couldn’t, but I managed to put him aside so I could enjoy things like sports, anime, movies, TV shows, comics, fiction novels, manga and music. I refused to let him poison my mind to the point where I was paralyzed by fear over what he might do. I wouldn’t let him cripple me emotionally or psychologically.

About Trump conceding I don't think he will. He will just phase out himself quietly by January 20th. I have this feeling Trump may even exit the Whitehouse in the middle of the night, 2 days before Biden's inauguration.

You’re not the only one who thinks Trump might skip out of the White House, if not the country in the middle of the night. That said, something should be done to make sure that doesn’t happen, like confiscating his passport. He has a date in a New York courtroom, and all steps should be taken that he doesn’t miss it.