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

[Xheight]

Well, duh.

that is why i laugh - i cant take such a claim seriously.

[babyblob]

that is why i laugh - i cant take such a claim seriously.

Thats a Hell of a thing to say when I think of all the things you have posted lol.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

With what you said I can see why you choose the Punisher pic, lol.

Is it really that bad in Philly? I can imagine how it is to live in a city that has a criminal record like yours. Where I live now there is almost no crime at all, though I grew up next to a small ghetto.

There were 500 murders here last year, an all time record, and numbers are so far running higher this year. Yeah, it’s that bad.

[thwhtGuardian]

or just low hanging fruit in a tree full of rotten stuff

Then where's the really heinous behavior?

[Gray Lensman]

I don't disagree with that for a second.

But when I see so much crime in specific locations...the police problem has to be a tiny fraction of the cause compared to more obvious reasons if you're talking about lives ruined.

They often feed into each other. The demographics of those who distrust the police to the point of never calling them no matter how desperate probably match closely with the ones screwed over the most by their lack of accountability.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

While this is loosely political , Sinclair Broadcast Group has decided to get out of the wrestling business. The company sold Ring of Honor to Tony Khan (who owns AEW). The right wing company basically went into deep money issues and they had to sell the pro wrestling company they had owned since 2010 or 2011.

[Mister Mets]

Then where's the really heinous behavior?

There's Joe Morrisey, the Virginia state senator who knocked up a teenager forty years his junior.

https://wset.com/news/at-the-capitol...ns-senate-seat

Ralph Northam, of the blackface scandal, pardoned him as one of his last acts.

https://www.wric.com/news/politics/n...age-secretary/

Of course, former Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax is much worse.

https://richmond.com/news/plus/fairf...6c3ecd9d8.html

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's mess took down the president of CNN.

His successor as New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman resigned in disgrace for physically abusing his girlfriends.

Congressman Henry Cuellar will still be making it to a runoff after the FBI raided his office and house. I don't bring this up because he's especially bad in the context of flawed politicians, but the election was yesterday.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/ele...s-nbc-n1290565

[Mister Mets]

The thing that gets me about the Law in Texas. Is these are the same people who bitched about Covid vaccine mandates. because medical care should be up to each person and their doctor. Same for the vaccines mandates on children. It is up to the parents they said. Government has no right telling people what they can do with their bodies.

Now when it comes to Gender affirming care it is not up to a Transgender person, the parent, or a medical professional. So medical care is up to a person and medical professionals and parents. No in this case it is up to the "Keep your laws out of my medical decisions" GOP!

Figuring out Gender Identity and sexuality is a very hard thing for many adults. I am 40 and I still struggle with mine. let alone kids whos peer groups are very cruel at times. At times Parent s are really the only support these kids have. And it is hard on a parent trying to help their kids through this and get them the help they need.

And the GOP has no problem making things harder. Making things as traumatic for all involved as they can. And hey if the suicide rate goes up? Who cares less of those people to deal with.

It is sick and there is no defense. The fact this is a debate blows my mind. I hate the phrase "Wrong side of history." I think it is arrogant and over used. But here it fits. The people behind this law and those who support are very much on the Wrong side of history.

The Texas laws are mainly about hormone treatments and surgery.

You'll find hypocrisy on both sides when it comes to questions of agency. Some on the left have correctly pushed against child marriages, working state by state to make it illegal in the United States, even if the children and the parents are both in agreement.

People are figuring things out about themselves at 40, but that doesn't suggest that fifteen year olds should be making permanent decisions.

It's an important point to consider what's the right side of history. Progressives were right about racial discrimination, and wrong about eugenics and prohibition. I do wonder what the understanding of human sexuality will be at the time history is decided, given how much things have changed very quickly.

It's not popular among ignorant people sure, but when has that been a good reason for defending evil? Women's rights weren't popular with small-minded people, but we did it anyway. Civil rights laws weren't popular with ignorant racists, but still we enacted them. Gay rights weren't popular with the same terrible people...but we still told them to suck it up and deal with because it was the right thing to do. And it's the same here, there's no excusing this movement; it's denying people basic human rights and punishing those who support those people which is just heinous beyond reconning.

There's no defending this point of view. Period. Reasonable people can disagree on tax policy, government subsidies, student debt, inflation...but basic fucking human rights? Nope. There is no reasonable alternative there, you're either a decent human being who affords everyone the same rights...or you're a garbage human being.

Previous victories on civil rights took a long time.

This has been a fast moving societal change, which means there are still unresolved questions, especially in policies involving children.

[Tendrin]

So yes, Mets is in fact defending an executive order aimed at terrorizing trans kids, rooted in a transphobic misunderstanding of gender affirming care and showing there is no low that the conservative movement can stoop to that he won't try to find some way to defend.

[Zauriel]

There were 500 murders here last year, an all time record, and numbers are so far running higher this year. Yeah, it’s that bad.

I don't live in Philly, but I can guess it may have been the fault of corrupt politicians who are too busy filling their own pockets with taxpayer money to pay attention to the crime problem.

[CSTowle]

Persistent narrative of aggrievement - who is being stepped on? I suppose if you wake up everyday thinking how you being exploited everything is an offense - sure voting is more difficult than changing channels on your TV but it is no more difficult than getting your driver's license and certainly easier than filing for your taxes.



Detached from the mainstream is what I would call it but that is not what we are talking about here rather the groundswell of support that one president got and the other is now finding does not exist if he ever had it in reality.



Could they not be referring to the shift in identification and the return to normalcy that doesn't allow for such numbers of virtual voters? No doubt that the GOP has it's elite candidates I never said they don't but the new dynamic in the party is the winning majority based in populism. That you and some others equate populism with white supremacist is a construct of Left opinion built out of simple fact that the country is still majority white and the working class as well.





People died because there was no vaccine and his presidency drove the invention of one, that is the realism of his presidency not the BS hand holding two faced rhetoric that one gets without relief from the Elites and the elite dominated Democratic party.

On the difficulty of voting, as I've said we could make it easier and incentivize citizens to vote quite easily. But some people, those elites you claim to be against, are the ones who keep their thumbs on the scales to keep it from being easy for the average citizen because they're not interested in the concerns of the average citizen. Especially not certain groups of them. You don't need to make it impossible, just slightly more difficult (or greatly, if you remove polling places and make lines hours-long and many miles away for those without transportation, or cut down on absentee or mail-in voting) and you can shave some votes off of the total of the opposing party. And as the last election showed, it doesn't take much to swing an election. We all know this, including you (even if you don't want to admit it here on the boards). To pretend otherwise is dishonest.

On Biden and Trump's relative level of support, Trump's numbers have gone down. Biden's are too, but he's the guy in charge so everything bad that's happening is attributed to him (whether that's fair or not). So continuing Covid protocols and restrictions, continuing deaths, inflation and supply chain issues and rising energy costs, the Russia/Ukraine situation and our leadership in NATO being involved, etc. all together makes things not great right now for the US and by extension for President Biden. It means a bad time during the midterms as none of this is likely to be significantly better (maybe Russia/Ukraine) by the fall. But that was seen coming a while back and is no surprise to anyone who pays attention, and 2024 is an eternity from now politically. I wouldn't count your fat, orange chickens.

On the vaccine, go back and reread what I said. I was talking about Cuomo, not Trump. I don't give credit to Trump for doing the bare minimum, even though for him that was an extraordinary effort. If he had done what would have been the bare minimum on coordinating a Federal covid response as far as mask and distancing protocols rather than leaving it up to the states we might have saved a few hundred thousand grandmas and grandpas. It'll be a cold day in hell before I give him credit on his Covid response. In that he is similar to Cuomo, so perhaps the confusion is justified.

I am going to ask this as politely as possible: how is this possible that so few people seem to care about the war? I am barely sleeping, following news non-stop, crying half of the time, but when I visit this site, there's a small discussion here, but everywhere else, it seems like business as usual, people talk about movies, all sorts of usual BS, as if nothing was happening.
Is this how it looks for the average Americans, like if it was the same as constant wars in Middle East, etc, that we have become indifferent to over the time?
Can you please illustrate to me how it looks in your area, do people realize how catastrophic this is and how much worse it can still get? I am sking here, because this forum and one other is where I usually get to talk to people from around the world and the other one does not allow political discussions. I have seen people reacting on twitter and providing all kinds of support, but I know that twitter is not exactly a picture of the real world.

Americans are both largely ignorant of European and former Soviet bloc country relationships and politics and also far enough away not to have to worry as much as a Poland/Finland/etc. Most of us largely (and justifiably) view Putin as a bad actor on the world stage (though he's gaining quite a positive reputation on the right, which is as baffling as anything else we've seen from the right and at the same time almost makes sense). We know almost nothing about Ukraine (again, I'm generalizing and also speaking for myself). Russia might have some justification in not wanting NATO on its doorstep. It probably doesn't have justification to "liberate" an area from another country, even if they speak Russian and are more culturally close to Russia than Ukraine, or even at some point want to become a part of it. That can be done without violence. Also, we don't have a lot of moral authority as a country when it comes to "liberation", bombing, invasion, false justifications, etc.

So more or less, a lot of "I don't know, and don't want to opine on what I don't know". For those who do, please feel free to share info and context. Not necessarily propaganda, as I've seen on sites like Reddit and 9gag (mostly pro-Ukrainian, and I get it, but reminds me way too much of the feeling of the early days of the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars that look foolish a couple of decades later).

What about training the police for the jobs you are thinking of? I wouldn't want to be a police officer without proper arsenal to defend citizen in a city or a hood with a high tolerance for violence. I believe the cops in the US are having a hard time being cops. Underpaid and always in danger of being shot.

just a thought.

I don't want any cop to have an "arsenal" to do their job. I don't want them to look at every person (especially those who might not look like them or live in their neighborhoods) as a target for said arsenal. I don't want to abolish them, and yes "Defund" was a boneheadedly stupid way to market the idea. But the idea of reform is long overdue. And that reform shouldn't include a greater weapons budget. Also, don't think any "hood" has a "high tolerance for violence". They deal with the reality of violence on a daily basis, and don't need even more from the people who are supposed to be helping them.

LOL Brexit was Putin's doing? Yet he couldn't win over a Ukrainian majority through what social media and disinfo?

Completely? No. Did he work to push that narrative and play on the tribalism and xenophobia of UK citizens in order to get them to vote that way? Of course he did. Weakening alliances, splitting up or weakening societies and governments that are political/world rivals, using propaganda to undermine institutions that represent a threat to Russian world interests is what he does. It's what we do to those who oppose us (though we also use bombs, crippling debt, arming opposition groups, etc.).

It's why he loved Trump. The guy was a walking wedge issue. He promoted and defended racist nationalists, he pushed tensions about immigration, he undermined our alliances and isolated us further from the world. He undermined NATO. His supporters are openly questioning the legitimacy of elections here and the continuing existence of a United States led by a Federal government. There's nothing in the world Putin would want more (other than for this Ukraine situation to go better for him) than to see the mighty US fall apart and balkanize into tribal/political fiefdoms. It's always nice to have useful idiots to do your work for you, though.

[Tendrin]

(CNN)A district court judge in Travis County, Texas, granted a temporary restraining order Wednesday to prevent the state from performing a child abuse investigation of a family seeking gender-affirming health care for their transgender child.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Texas and LGBTQ civil rights organization Lambda Legal filed a lawsuit Tuesday on behalf of the parents of a transgender girl. The child's mother, an employee of the state's Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS), had been suspended from her job because of last week's legal opinion by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton saying gender-affirming treatments and procedures for transgender children can constitute a form of child abuse.
Paxton's legal opinion prompted Gov. Greg Abbott to instruct DFPS Commissioner Jaime Masters "to conduct a prompt and thorough investigation of any reported instances of these abusive procedures in the State of Texas."

https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/02/us/te...ing/index.html

[Tendrin]

In a Wednesday court filing, the special House committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 attack said for the first time that it had gathered evidence indicating that former President Donald Trump and others "engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States" by pushing false theories of election fraud and pressuring former Vice President Mike Pence to invalidate the 2020 election.

"The evidence supports an inference that President Trump and members of his campaign knew he had not won enough legitimate state electoral votes to be declared the winner of the 2020 Presidential election during the January 6 Joint Session of Congress," the committee disclosed in court documents. "But the President nevertheless sought to use the Vice President to manipulate the results in his favor."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...?ocid=msedgntp

[Tendrin]

Meanwhile, from Texas:

Jeff Younger is running for congress as a Republican on an explicitly anti-trans platform. So anti-trans, in fact, that he lost custody of his own transgender child.

WBE-EEEeee, this guy *definitely* needs your attention. He's a piece of work.

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2021/12/...m-transphobia/

For years, Jeff Younger has made national headlines for vehemently opposing his transgender daughter’s ability to live as her true self. After years of legal battles, Younger eventually lost custody of Luna (a name he refuses to acknowledge) to her mother in August. He also lost custody of Luna’s twin brother.

Now Younger is running for the Texas House of Representatives with a platform entirely based on transphobia.

“The state of Texas is trying to transition my son into a girl,” Younger says on his campaign website to explain why he is running.

Continuing to deadname and misgender Luna, he claims supporting her gender identity is child abuse and that her life is in danger, along with the lives of other transgender children in Texas.

This is the republican party.

[Zelena]

I am going to ask this as politely as possible: how is this possible that so few people seem to care about the war? I am barely sleeping, following news non-stop, crying half of the time, but when I visit this site, there's a small discussion here, but everywhere else, it seems like business as usual, people talk about movies, all sorts of usual BS, as if nothing was happening.
Is this how it looks for the average Americans, like if it was the same as constant wars in Middle East, etc, that we have become indifferent to over the time?
Can you please illustrate to me how it looks in your area, do people realize how catastrophic this is and how much worse it can still get? I am sking here, because this forum and one other is where I usually get to talk to people from around the world and the other one does not allow political discussions. I have seen people reacting on twitter and providing all kinds of support, but I know that twitter is not exactly a picture of the real world.

Be assured, Catlady in training, that I’m very worried… I have my personal problems but, in here in France, we don’t speak about anything but Ukraine although there’s, in a month, a presidential election.

People who know well Putin found him changed… not for the better and he has nuclear weapons…

We have barely finished with the Covid pandemic and the war and the sanctions will probably trigger a crisis and not only in Russia…

A lot of people send money, goods to Ukrainians knowing that these latters are facing an enemy much more powerful that will become nastier and nastier facing a determined resistance…

European leaders tip-toe at the moment to help the Ukrainians without adding fire to the fuel: they send “defensive weapons”… After decades of relative peace in Europe, we have entered in unchartered territory…

In closing, I really don’t know why these news about American policies are so important… I suppose they are… but Russian missiles can reach the US.