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

[Revolutionary_Jack]

That is pretty nasty and personal, and reflects poorly on you.

I am sorry you reacted that way but at some point it's important to drive home the reality of what American Conservatism has come to represent.

I'm not contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.

Well you said this:

I do take stands. I'm frequently willing to piss off people on all sides of the political spectrum, be they to my left or right, or one some other gradient (IE- authoritarian/ libertarian.)

And that's a definition of contrarian. If you had said that my stands tend to piss off people on all sides but that's not my intention, that might have allowed you to skirt it.

Is the idea that people should go to where their preferred policies are implemented a standard you apply universally?

In so far as people who espouse ideas don't reckon with what those policies effected in reality actually look like...yeah!

Surely you can appreciate that, it's a classic Conservative rhetorical flex. Thatcher used it quite often and during the Cold War it had validity in that Armchair Communists didn't want to reckon with the Gulag, with the Cultural Revolution, with the Cuban government's persecution of homosexuals in the '60s and '70s. But it cuts both ways like all rhetorical flexes do.

I think that your discussion of conservatism in the present Post-January 6 world is hopelessly abstract and naïve, it fails to account for the stakes, and indulges in lame sophistry to deny the danger (which has consensus across different sectors of US society) America is in now. So making quibbles and insisting people not compare Trump and his supporters to the Nazis after they committed a Putsch and saying they haven't killed as many as Hitler or Stalin is basically downplaying the gravity of situation under the guise of an academic quibbling over categories. Conservatives used to pride themselves on recognizing reality, which usually of course was a reality that excluded other people, but at least it did have some resemblance to the real world. Now such talking points appear become hopelessly abstract and primitive.

To quote the wisdom of X-Men comics, "While you slept, the world changed."

I have been clear about that numerous times, including when I first said I'd vote for Biden over Trump in early 2019, one of my positions that turned out to be prescient, as well as popular.

How exactly? After all GOP flips was a negligible factor in Biden winning.

[Amadeus Arkham]

Trump blog page shuts down for good

[BeastieRunner]

Trump blog page shuts down for good

That thing was a jangled mess at best.

[worstblogever]

Yes. The best way to stop the anti-democratic erosion being committed by the GOP is to be okay with the idea of giving them more power in 2024 when most of the same people will still be in office. This makes a whole lot of sense.

"The GQP are showing anti-democratic, fascist attitudes!"

"oH, rEaLlY? qUiCk, GiVe ThEm MoRe PoWeR uNtIl ThEy ChOkE oN iT! tHaT's ClEaRlY tHe BeSt SoLUtIoN fOr It, RiGhT?"

[Tami]

Mom charged after shooting her 5-year-old son while trying to target loose dog, HPD says

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- A mother has been charged after accidentally shooting her 5-year-old son while trying to shoot a dog that was running across the street in north Houston, according to Houston police.

The incident happened at 700 Dunham Road on Saturday afternoon.

Angelia Mia Vargas, 24, has been charged with deadly conduct with a firearm.

According to neighbors, Vargas, her son, and another family member were riding bikes down the street when a dog ran out.

That dog, named Bruno, is a 6-month-old boxer puppy. Bruno's owner did not want to appear on camera, but told us what happened.

"I came out of my house because Bruno was barking and barking. I thought my brother was coming," said the owner, who thought Bruno's barking was to indicate his brother was at the door. "So, I open the door just a little bit and he comes running out."

In Ring doorbell video obtained by ABC13, you can see Bruno running out with the owner following immediately behind. The owner can be seen telling the dog to come back in the house. The dog roams out onto the street, and less than a second later, multiple shots rang out. Gunshots were then followed by extended screaming by the little boy's parents.

Vargas's 5-year-old son was rushed to the hospital in stable condition with non-life-threating wounds, police say.

The boy was struck in the abdomen by one of the three bullets that Vargas allegedly fired from a small caliber pistol, according to Detective J. Hasley with the HPD Major Assaults and Family Violence Division.

The boy was struck in the abdomen by one of the three bullets that Vargas allegedly fired from a small caliber pistol, according to Detective J. Hasley with the HPD Major Assaults and Family Violence Division.

[worstblogever]

In 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, as well as 2020, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of U.S. Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, a former pastor who has referred to same sex marriage as “an attack upon the family” while campaigning for office, thinks being gay is a choice, refers to climate change a myth, spoke at length about his frustration of endangered birds receiving more protection from the government than fetuses, blamed the Sandy Hook Massacre on “welfare moms overmedicating their kids to get more benefits” and in June of 2016 against a measure that would have made it illegal for firearms transfers to people who were suspected terrorists on the “no fly list”. His Christian principles lead him to believe migrant children should be thrown out of the country because in the Bible, being kind to strangers doesn’t specify that they should be citizens of the country you live in. Seriously, this guy is such a fanatic when he was asked about the national debt, his solution was to pray that it gets better.

He has spent years pushing for “religious freedom” legislation because he defines no being allowed to discriminate against gay people as “being targeted for his faith”, claiming they are the real victims in a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” situation. Lankford’s also prolifically absent in Congress when it comes time to vote, as he missed almost 10% of them from his final term serving in the House. Near the end of our 2015 entry about Lankford, we noted he had found himself amongst the #47Traitors, for writing a letter to the leaders of Iran trying to undermine the peace treaty that the Obama administration had arranged with them, and was campaigning to push for national “religious freedom” laws to allow for the discrimination of LGBTQ citizens and prevent them from having equal rights based on the supposed faith of who was discriminating against them. He has also voted to defund Planned Parenthood, voted to maintain the gun rights of people on the no-fly list so they could procure firearms for mass shootings, voted to try and block Syrian refugees from being resettled in the United States, and refused to consider Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court because “he isn’t conservative enough”, waiting a year to vote for Neil Gorsuch.

Since we last updated our annual look at James Lankford, he has made several troubling votes, including continuing to vote for every Trump administration nominee, no matter how unqualified or utterly appalling (including torture maven Gina Haspel to be the head of the COA), he voted against disaster relief funding for victims of Hurricane Harvey back in October of 2017,
and in December of 2017, he voted for the big GOP Tax Plan/Scam that benefited only the top 1% of the country.

For all that party line bulls***, does Sen. Lankford get any love from the White House. HA! No. Trump doesn’t even know his name, he calls him “Tom”. And yet… he still blindly supports him, by doing things like vote for Donald Trump’s supposed “national emergency” on the U.S./Mexico border.

Or in other key votes:

• February 14th, 2019: Lankford votes to approve the nomination of William Barr to be the country’s Attorney General, even though he was involved in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s. (SPOILER ALERT: He’s still crooked as a snake with scoliosis).
• January 31st, 2020: Sen. Lankford votes against witnesses being allowed in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, effectively making it a “trial”.
• February 5th, 2020: James Lankford votes against the first impeachment of Donald Trump, in spite of the mountain of evidence showing that he solicited foreign assistance in the 2020 elections by withholding Congressionally approved military aid from Ukraine.
• February 25th, 2020: Lankford co-sponsors and votes for the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, an insane piece of anti-choice legislation that would ask abortion providers to try to admit aborted fetuses to a hospital if they were “alive” after the procedure, which is medically impossible given the age that abortions can be performed at.
• February 13th, 2021: Sen. Lankford votes against the second impeachment of Donald Trump, because accountability for inciting a violent coup attempt is somehow anathema to the majority of the Republican Party.
• March 6th, 2021: Lankford votes against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, because he can’t be bothered to care if people need financial assistance during a pandemic.

James Lankford spent most of the Covid-19 pandemic fretting about the fact that people received any of their stimulus money, opining that they were being given a “disincentivize” from going back to work, and that a $1200 payment was “too generous”.

Because we know a pastor must have read the Bible and learned all the important lessons where Jesus thumbed his nose at the poor and sick. BUT SPEAKING OF PASTORS… Lankford has a 2022 GOP Primary challenger for his Senate seat, and it’s… another pastor! But before you go thinking there’s a Republican with a conscience to actually tout the hypocrisy Lankford has shown as a Christian… James Lahmeyer, his 29 year old challenger, is endorsed by the pardoned Trump-aligned felon, former General Michael Flynn, and will be attacking Lankford for not being loyal ENOUGH to Donald Trump.

Don’t get us wrong, we would love for the Senate to be rid of James Lankford but… not like that. Please, not like that.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Trump blog page shuts down for good

And absolutely nothing of value was lost.

[CaptainEurope]

No we can't.

Do we wait for Trump supporters to construct a dictatorship and orchestrate death squads and junta, or do we use the comparisons to signal the danger now and behave accordingly?

As a reader of Volker Ullrich's magnificent two-part biography of Hitler, the fact that shines clearly is that he benefitted from the unravelling of norms and a culture of leniency and impunity by the state which tolerated and licensed Hitler's actions including the Munich Beer Hall Putsch (aka the January 6 of the 1920s Weimar years) when they left him off with a slap of the wrist.

So the question is do we take action in Trump while he's in the stage of Munich or do we wait for the post-war Detrumpification trials to take a stand against him?

Because let's be clear, Donald Trump is a fascist. He wants to destroy democracy in America. That much is clear with Trump and his acolytes. If you cannot recognize that there's simply no point in continuing any discussion with you.

Even back then, the American media was obsessed with clearly deranged fascists "pivoting" to become business as usual. Exhibit A, what the New York Times wrote about on A. Hitler on his release from jail where he was locked up for treason after the Beer Hall Putsch:

[BeastieRunner]

Even back then, the American media was obsessed with clearly deranged fascists "pivoting" to become business as usual. Exhibit A, what the New York Times wrote about on A. Hitler on his release from jail where he was locked up for treason after the Beer Hall Putsch:

I see your pivoted news clipping and raise you THREE P.D. Eastman political cartoons!





The argument that current conservatives are making has been around since the 1930s ... not a good look and yet again, they can't see the forest for the trees.

[Ragged Maw]

Josh Marshall has the correct take on the 'lab leak' bullshit.

Again, they could’ve asked other sources besides conservatives and Qanon loons - sources that don’t make their income from fellating any party in particular.

[Malvolio]

Trump blog page shuts down for good

Well of course it failed. When the only response you can give is a heart-shaped "like," how much time are you going to spend there, even if you're a fan of the guy? I mean, the purpose of social media is to have a give and take where it's a level playing field. But "level playing field" is a foreign term to Trump.

[Malvolio]

I am sorry you reacted that way but at some point it's important to drive home the reality of what American Conservatism has come to represent.



Well you said this:



And that's a definition of contrarian. If you had said that my stands tend to piss off people on all sides but that's not my intention, that might have allowed you to skirt it.



In so far as people who espouse ideas don't reckon with what those policies effected in reality actually look like...yeah!

Surely you can appreciate that, it's a classic Conservative rhetorical flex. Thatcher used it quite often and during the Cold War it had validity in that Armchair Communists didn't want to reckon with the Gulag, with the Cultural Revolution, with the Cuban government's persecution of homosexuals in the '60s and '70s. But it cuts both ways like all rhetorical flexes do.

I think that your discussion of conservatism in the present Post-January 6 world is hopelessly abstract and naïve, it fails to account for the stakes, and indulges in lame sophistry to deny the danger (which has consensus across different sectors of US society) America is in now. So making quibbles and insisting people not compare Trump and his supporters to the Nazis after they committed a Putsch and saying they haven't killed as many as Hitler or Stalin is basically downplaying the gravity of situation under the guise of an academic quibbling over categories. Conservatives used to pride themselves on recognizing reality, which usually of course was a reality that excluded other people, but at least it did have some resemblance to the real world. Now such talking points appear become hopelessly abstract and primitive.

To quote the wisdom of X-Men comics, "While you slept, the world changed."



How exactly? After all GOP flips was a negligible factor in Biden winning.

I think what Mets was saying there was that he advocated voting for Biden in early 2019, months before Biden announced his candidacy. So he was prescient about Biden running and winning the nomination.

[Tami]

Top Loudoun school officials defend equity work against charges of ‘critical race theory’

Top school officials in Loudoun County gave a lengthy presentation defending and explaining the district’s racial equity work Tuesday night, following allegations from some parents that Loudoun is indoctrinating students with “critical race theory.”

The controversy dates back to last summer, when angry mothers and fathers began seizing on tidbits — such as the nearly half-million dollars Loudoun spent on an equity consultant, or later, a minutes-long video recording of a classroomin which a teacher discusses critical race theory — to argue that the system is teaching White students to feel ashamed of being White, because their race means they have historically been part of an oppressive system.

Critical race theory is a decades-old academic framework that explores how policies and the law fuel systemic racism. The theory in part declares that racism is the product of systems, not individuals, and therefore interwoven into daily life and history in America.

But some critics have used the term to refer more broadly to efforts to address systemic racism.

[babyblob]

Well of course it failed. When the only response you can give is a heart-shaped "like," how much time are you going to spend there, even if you're a fan of the guy? I mean, the purpose of social media is to have a give and take where it's a level playing field. But "level playing field" is a foreign term to Trump.

yea I laughed when my aunt went to it and she was like there is no way to leave a comment. I was like Why would he want any form of free speech and a way for people who are not boot lickers to tell him what they think?

[WestPhillyPunisher]

yea I laughed when my aunt went to it and she was like there is no way to leave a comment. I was like Why would he want any form of free speech and a way for people who are not boot lickers to tell him what they think?

Exactly that! Trolls from coast to coast were ready to put Trump on full blast 24/7 if he allowed comments, and he wasn't having it. At the end of the day, Trump put his ego and his perpetually thin skin ahead of giving his lemmings a forum to kiss his orange ass.