The fence is down and the people are back on the grounds for the first time since the attack on the US Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump pic.twitter.com/4HsSL5HwPm
— Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) July 10, 2021
"I can get excitement watching rain on a puddle. And then I paint it… I want life to be thrilling and rich. And it is. I make sure it is." Happy birthday David Hockney, born 9 July 1937 —pictured here with fellow artist-icon, Joni Mitchell#DavidHockney pic.twitter.com/iO63Kwh7Xd
— David Wright ?️??️⚧ (@DWUnabridged) July 9, 2021
Intriguing argument from Adam Gopnick, at the New Yorker:
… Donald Trump invented a game: of bullying, lying, sociopathic selfishness, treachery, and outright gangsterism, doing and saying things that no democratic politician had ever done or even thought of doing, and he did it all in broad daylight. (A notorious line attributed to Nixon—“We can do that, but it would be wrong”—was about paying hush money. Even Nixon wouldn’t pardon his henchmen. Trump did.) It was a game designed for Trump alone to win, but all too many got drawn into it. It was a game that some credit to a Russian model of disinformation but actually seems rooted in old-fashioned American Barnumism, weaponized with John Gotti-style ethics. It was designed, in plain English, to throw out so much crap that no one could ever deal with it all. Trying to bat the crap away, you just got more of it all over you, and meanwhile you were implicitly endorsing its relevance.
Biden, by contrast, insisted that the way to win was not to play. In the face of the new politics of spectacle, he kept true to old-school coalition politics. He understood that the Black Church mattered more in Democratic primaries than any amount of Twitter snark, and, by keeping a low profile on social media, showed that social-media politics was a mirage. Throughout the dark, dystopian post-election months of Trump’s tantrum—which led to the insurrection on January 6th—many Democrats deplored Biden’s seeming passivity, his reluctance to call a coup a coup and a would-be dictator a would-be dictator. Instead, he and his team were remarkably (to many, it seemed, exasperatingly) focussed on counting the votes, trusting the process, and staffing the government.
It looked at the time dangerously passive; it turned out to be patiently wise, for Biden and his team, widely attacked as pusillanimous centrists with no particular convictions, are in fact ideologues. Their ideology is largely invisible but no less ideological for refusing to present itself out in the open. It is the belief, animating Biden’s whole career, that there is a surprisingly large area of agreement in American life and that, by appealing to that area of agreement, electoral victory and progress can be found. (As a recent Populace survey stated, Biden and Trump voters hold “collective illusions” about each other, and “what is often mistaken for breadth of political disagreement is actually narrow — if extremely intense — disagreement on a limited number of partisan issues.”) Biden’s ideology is, in fact, the old ideology of pragmatic progressive pluralism—the ideology of F.D.R. and L.B.J. Beneath the strut and show and hysteria of politics, there is often a remarkably resilient consensus in the country. Outside the white Deep South, there was a broad consensus against segregation in 1964; outside the most paranoid registers of Wall Street, there was a similar consensus for social guarantees in 1934. Right now, post-pandemic, polls show a robust consensus for a public option to the Affordable Care Act, modernized infrastructure, even for tax hikes on the very rich and big corporations. The more you devote yourself to theatrical gestures and public spectacle, the less likely you are to succeed at making these improvements—and turning Trumpism around. Successful pluralist politicians reach out to the other side, not in a meek show of bipartisanship, but in order to steal their voters.
… With so many Americans in the grip of a totalized ideology of Trumpism—one that surmounts their obvious self-interest or normal calculations of economic utility—the way to get them out of it is to stop thinking in totalized terms. You get people out of a cult not by offering them a better cult but by helping them see why they don’t need a cult. This is a difficult wisdom—and one that, perhaps not accidentally, was offered often during the campaign by the man who is now Biden’s Transportation Secretary. Pete Buttigieg said at the time that you can’t defeat a cartoon villain by being a cartoon hero. You defeat a cartoon villain by helping people remember that life is not a cartoon. He put it simply to the press: “Trump appeals to people’s smallness, their fears, whatever part of them wants to look backward. We need to be careful that our necessary rebukes of the President don’t corner people into the kind of defensiveness that makes them even more vulnerable to those kinds of appeals. What we really need to do in some ways is talk past Trump and his sins.”…
raven
Joni Mitchell – Coyote (Live at Gordon Lightfoot’s Home with Bob Dylan & Roger McGuinn, 1975)
Xenos
Thanks for the link re. Hockney! very refreshing read.
Not sure what to make about Gopnik – I thought this was all pretty obvious all along. The problem I have not seen a clear answer is how to manage the unavoidable structural disadvantage where one side is trying to use the institutions of government to build consensus and move policies forward, and the other side wants to burn it all down rather than compromise. Fire-eaters will do anything to capture the state, and failing that will turn against it and instigate civil war.
It sounds like the GOP leadership has already committed themselves to conflict. I fear the rest of us need to do likewise. The South did not wait for Lincoln to do anything – IIRC, they committed to rebellion before he was inaugurated. When it is clear there is no other route to power for the GOP, what is left of them will go to the mattresses against 3/4s of the country.
HinTN
Good morning, @raven: That’s a wonderful start to my day. Thanks!
germy
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
as if the mirage was proven by Howard Dean in 2004, Edwards in 2008, and Bernie the First in 2016.
germy
Tempting.
Rusty
This should be reposted in a couple of years during the heat of the election. My only quibble is that while there may be narrow differences between voters, there are much bigger differences between the the parties. Have a good Sunday everyone.
Baud
Pete is so good with words.
A Ghost to Most
Meanwhile, 4 christian supremacists were arrested in Denver, after setting up a sniper’s nest overlooking the site where crowds will gather for the All-Star game.
matt the somewhat reasonable
I’m not really buying that Gopnick bit. I think the wages of reaching across the aisle can be seen with the Sinema-Manchin congressional clusterfuck that’s going to consume the time until the midterms.
RandomMonster
@A Ghost to Most: Nothing says Christian like sniping people from afar.
HinTN
@Baud:
Amen!
satby
@A Ghost to Most: 4 christian supremacists
They can claim to be followers of Christ, but no one else has to allow them that (obviously false) conciet.
I am not a Christian, and neither are they. Aspiring murderers is what they are.
artem1s
The message here isn’t for MAGAs. It’s for Democrats, liberals, progressives, and anyone else opposed to the blood sport the GOP has turned governing and campaigns into. Those who vilify a candidate as not having ‘charisma’ or isn’t exciting enough or not likable; those who demanded voters bend the knee to the latest hairdo and fad campaign slogan; those who were counting rally attendance as if they were votes; those were the ones who are demanding Dems play the losing game. Pete seems to actually understand how a fancy exciting campaign can be more dangerous to the people’s needs, even if it wins. The media has been waiting for the Democrats to find a new Cult of Personality to replace the Kennedys to lead the party since 1963, Even as they knocked them off their pedestals and made certain that each new JFK or RFK would fail to fill The Anointed’s shoes. Weird that they finally got one of their early favorites to replace JFK in the WH. Of course now that they caught that car they don’t know what to do with it.
Kay
@Rusty:
I will never understand swing voters. Obama to Trump to Biden. Come on. These people are just voting randomly. Real swing voters, not the fake ones. There’s a whole section of voters who get some kind of perverse pride out pretending they’re “open” to the Democrat but then the Democrat does something completely normal for a Democrat- “he wants to regulate guns!?” – and they pretend they’re forced to vote for the Republican.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone ???
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
Baud
@Kay:
I actually started off as an independent, but it became clear to me quickly that I was going to consistently support the Democratic candidates in elections given the way the GOP was heading.
Baud
So much for “Baud! 20XX!: A Better Cult!” as a slogan.
Low Key Swagger
@A Ghost to Most:
Trying to find an article that these guys were Christian supremacists?
zhena gogolia
@Low Key Swagger:
All I see is that one was upset over a recent divorce. Domestic violence seems to be the biggest common denominator in these incidents, not Christianity.
Kay
In some ways it’s amazing Democrats do as well as they do. Unlike Republicans, they have to tell people they have to pay for things. It would obviously be much easier to sell “every government program you use is…. free” like they do. Ohio Democrats (mostly- they needed some Republicans and got them) just passed an “equitable public school funding bill” which means they need to collect more state taxes because the law allocates more state funding to poorer districts to make up for the fact that poorer districts can’t collect as much tax on property. It’s a good law but Republicans added a tax cut so I’m reading along and I get to the GOP part and I’m “oh, this is the fantasy part”.
Low Key Swagger
@zhena gogolia: That’s all I could find as well.
debbie
@Baud:
Don’t know when he said this, but they’re already in their corners.
Baud
@Kay:
When Republicans are asked to pay for things, they either say that they’ll cut welfare, or waste fraud and abuse, or that economic growth will pay for their plans.
debbie
@satby:
Where are people coming up with actions like this?!?
tokyocali (formerly tokyo expat)
@Baud: Agree. I think Pete B. could be our first gay president after a little more seasoning and that would be awesome.
@A Ghost to Most: We’re a big baseball family. My two youngest played here in Japan in jr. high and high school and my husband subscribes to the MLB season app. We have baseball on all the time. I’m not sure if all the fans I see in the stands are vaccinated, but it it uplifting to see people vs. cardboard cutouts. There’s something joyous in the cheers and excitement that go with each team. These people who seek to destroy the innocence of such an event are twisted and as unAmerican and unreligious as you can get.
NotMax
You spelled insipid wrong.
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
Up there in your blue state, you forget that everything is women’s fault. //
Wag
@zhena gogolia:
3 men and a woman. All the men arrested for unlawful possession of firearms by felons. https://www.9news.com/mobile/article/news/crime/arrests-downtown-denver-hotel/73-cca8dcfd-1283-4b34-85b6-9d8498b4104a
debbie
@Kay:
I believe they also increased funding to charters.
tokyocali (formerly tokyo expat)
@satby: Quick question. Are you the one who works at an ophthalmology office? If so, I was hoping to be able to contact you off list to ask a few questions.
ETA to add that I am working on a character for a romantic suspense novel. I want the character to have vision issues and would like some input, if possible.
debbie
@tokyocali (formerly tokyo expat):
I used to hop on the subway to watch the Yankees. This may seem obvious to others, but what a difference between live games and games on television!
Eolirin
@matt the somewhat reasonable: I think he’s talking more Biden’s redefining bipartisan as being what the majority of Americans want, and less the performative bullshit Manchin and Sinema are engaging in.
Though I’ll note, Manchin and Sinema are in fact pretty decent at stealing Republican voters. They would not be getting elected otherwise.
Wag
A little more info about the situation in Denver.
Kay
@Baud:
Ohio Republicans always say economic growth. It’s never once been true- Kasich, who is portrayed as this centrist straight shooter- lied about the budget every day he was in office. He was just moving money around and eventually one of the holes he created showed up but by then he was all but residing in New Hampshire.
tokyocali (formerly tokyo expat)
@debbie: Oh yes! Two years ago, Mr. Tokyo and I visited CA. together. We went to both the Oakland As against the Yankees and a Giants game against the Mets. What fun it was! My husband traveled with my middle son (baseball player) and took him to the Padres and Giants and it was so different for him compared to Japanese games. If you’re not into baseball it may not make sense, but if you are, you’ll understand that watching your team in a stadium is magical. Right now, we need as much magic as we can get.
Matt
Check out the rhetorical Tony Hawk move here:
straight into, without pausing:
The “other side” is a fascist death cult; attempting to perform “bipartisanship” with them IS the “theatrical gesture” and pretending like they’re negotiating in good faith IS purely a “public spectacle”.
We’ve been playing the “we just need to be nice to Republicans” game for THIRTY YEARS, and all it’s gotten us is a Republican party that’s now open white nationalists – maybe it’s time we admit they’re never going to let us kick the football, and start making policy without them.
Chris Johnson
From downthread this morning: I worked out something interesting.
The whole confederate statue thing is literally critical theory. In fact it is critical race theory, to be specific (just veiled).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory
Rather than make use of authoritarian control they put up statues, influenced media, and tried to sway the marketplace of ideas in favor of the Ku Klux Klan and murderous lynchings, since they didn’t technically have what they wanted under cover of law and government. This seeking to produce actual results through influence of people’s awareness of the context of everyday things is what critical theory MEANS and it was being done in the service of racism.
And it clearly fucking worked. We should be embracing critical theory, especially since we seem to like market capitalism so damn much. Critical theory is a really effective lens for facilitating social change. WE should be using it, not the Confederates
And to add a final thought:
IT IS ALWAYS PROJECTION. ALWAYS.
They are freaking out because we took THEIR weapon and dared use it for justice.
Percysowner
@Kay:
I actually kind of understand the Obama to Trump to Biden swing voters. Trump is almost entirely a con man and he’s good at that. The swing voters you mention bought the con, pure and simple. When they realized they had been conned, they went with Biden because they wouldn’t be fooled again..
You also can’t ignore how HATED Hillary Clinton was. The press stoked that hatred as much as they could. Trump would probably have not beaten another opponent, especially a MALE opponent. But the con, sexism and Clinton Derangement Syndrome won in 2016.
debbie
@tokyocali (formerly tokyo expat):
Agreed, which I think was the motivation for all those cardboard cutouts. There’s a real sense of belonging and togetherness at games which I think people need as much as the athleticism.
debbie
@Kay:
Because at heart, they are cheapskates. It’s their money.
Kay
@debbie:
They did. They also expanded vouchers even though Ohio vouchers are undersubscribed at current levels. They have more vouchers than they have people who want them, or schools that will take them, because the voucher amount is low so better private schools don’t accept them as full payment on tuition. Kind of mid-level private school tuition in Ohio is about 9-10k and the voucher would only cover half that. Fancier schools are twice that. The whole pitch is dishonest. They cannot, in fact, “choose” any school. They can choose certain low cost private schools. “Basic” as the kids say. People eventually figure this out, hence the lower than projected demand.
Matt McIrvin
No, there was not. There was a broad consensus against the specific kind of segregation they were doing in the Deep South.
tokyocali (formerly tokyo expat)
@debbie: The cardboard cutouts were better than the empty stadiums. These were real people with real stories. Americans are suckers for a good story and there were plenty of them. We need that connectiveness. I think Biden is trying to remind people of how much better we can be if we focus on what connects us rather than on what divides us. I hope over time his strategy works.
Eolirin
@Matt: Biden is actively reaching out to Republican voters but mostly ignoring Republican politicians. That’s the right way to do that. The whole push to redefine bipartisan as meaning what most people want regardless of political affliation instead of what the political parties both agree on is a powerful tactic for exactly this reason.
Even if it only erodes a precentage point or two of support for a Republican politician that can flip close elections.
Baud
They never did pin down the motive for the LV shooter, did they?
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Kay
New Hampshire. So insane. Just a reminder- this what Republicans chose to spend three months on the summer before schools open after covid. They’re drafting teacher punishment tribunal rules. It will be completely impossible to enforce because it’s a contradictory, vague mess, as poorly considered and stupid as the original “anti cancel culture panic” that spawned this one, but never mind. On to seating the tribunal! For…free speech!
Ksmiami
I think this article is mostly junk. There’s nothing to gain by attempting fake bipartisanship and it looks like the Democratic Party is desperate to be loved. The reality is the other party is a murderous death cult that lives on lies, while our party is trying to make life in America better for most…Stop wasting time reaching out to vipers
Baud
@Kay:
They are still reviewing The Collective Works of Torquemada and have no comment at this time.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
There is a low double digits (was the number I saw 12%?) portion of voters whose vote is straight up random. You can’t influence them. They are always like that. There is a percentage who flip back and forth just to flip back and forth. There is a percentage who always vote in one primary but the opposite in the election. This makes talking about ‘Obama-Trump-Biden’ voters tricky, because no one compares their numbers to the numbers that always happen.
I say ‘no one’ but I bet Biden’s team had them calculated. It’s just a fact that gets left out of public discussions.
Dorothy A. Winsor
So yesterday I went on this old people bus tour of Chicago. We’re not from here, so I wanted to see, and I was eager to get out again. My political antennae may be too sensitive, but I thought even on this trip, there were two moments that felt tense to me.
First, the guide pointed out Trump Tower and said the bottom level, meant for offices and shops, had never been occupied. Someone asked why, and the guide hesitated. A man called out, “Careful now.” And the guide finally went on to say the spaces were hard to access and some people didn’t want to be associated with the Trump name, which appeared to end the matter.
Second, when we came to Lake Shore Drive, the guide said there was a move to rename it after a “mixed race” person who did something I can’t remember (du Sable, maybe?), but as a historian, he thought the name should stay the same. Why not name it after Marquette or Joliet? Somehow, he got off onto how it was bad to remove monuments. (This was the day the statues in Charlottesville were being removed.) He said they should be left to show our history. And a guy on the bus (possibly the same one) called “Amen.”
I may be too touchy right now. The guide also said Lincoln was our greatest president and FDR was second. So he seemed hard to sort. I guess it was my fellow tourist guy who really made me sad.
satby
@tokyocali (formerly tokyo expat): Optometrist’s office who also co-manages cases with two different opthalmologists offices, yes. You can email me at my store’s email: skinluvvers (at) gmail dot com. Happy to help!
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Was Lake Shore a confederate traitor?
Cheryl from Maryland
@zhena gogolia: True, Misogyny is poison. However, some Christian sects’ doctrine has women as lesser, submissive beings, eg built-in Misogyny. Misogynist’s loss of power, which is considered a God-given right, leads to rage, which then leads to violence.
Lacuna Synecdoche
Adam Gopnick via Anne Laurie @ Top:
I think Gopnick misidentifies the source of Trump’s game. It’s rooted in the lies, resentment, xenophobia, extremism, and shit-stirring of Nixon, the authoritarianism of Stalin, the rhetoric of Hitler, the flamboyance and performative gestures of Mussolini.
Yeah, it’s American all right, but not in sense of Barnum’s hucksterism – it’s as American as the KKK.
satby
@Dorothy A. Winsor: A portion of LSD was very recently renamed for DuSable, who was the first non-indigenous settler in Chicago.
tokyocali (formerly tokyo expat)
@satby: Thank you! Will do. I’ll put Balloon Juice in the subject so you know who it’s from.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Baud: Lake Shore is a treasure!
I’m not familiar enough with Chicago politics to know what’s triggering the renaming, and I have no feelings about it one way or the other. But I wondered why the guide felt the need to say du Sable was “mixed race.”
Dorothy A. Winsor
@satby: That sets a context for me. Thanks.
debbie
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
That’s Midwest-speak for “non-White.”
satby
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Because he wasn’t white. EOS.
Though a nice parallel to another person of mixed ancestry who is creating another landmark on the SouthSide of Chicago ?
and debbie got there first
Procopius
@A Ghost to Most: I’m using Chrome on Windows 7. My default search engine is Qwant, but I also tried duckduckgo and google. Because you didn’t provide a link, I entered the search phrase, “4 christian supremacists arrested Denver.” All the responses that came back (at least on the first page) were about WHITE supremacists, and most of them were at least six months old. When I tried just “christian supramecists”, Qwant barfed — qwant is temporarily unavailable. Guess I’m gonna have to go back to duckduckgo, but that doesn’t seem to be a lot better. It’s chilling that the main search engines are blocking queries about “christian supremacists.”
ian
https://www.newsweek.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-says-crt-should-outlawed-teachers-fired-spot-1608594
She goes on to call teacher unions communists. What a peach.
dmsilev
@Dorothy A. Winsor: The bottom floors of Trump Tower were unoccupied and a complete financial disaster long before he rode down that golden elevator. It was just really horribly conceived and designed for retail. Start with the only real ground access was along the riverwalk, which has vastly less foot traffic than the surface streets one level up. But putting exterior access for retail at ground level would have spoiled the “Me build monumental hotel” look that TFG likes to boast about, so…
Chief Oshkosh
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I don’t think you were too sensitive. The tour guide should not have opinionated on such a hot topic.
debbie
@ian:
Someone should have stood up and shouted, “What do you have against truth?”
Baud
@debbie:
Same thing the Wicked Witch of the West had against water.
Frankensteinbeck
@Lacuna Synecdoche:
He does. It’s plain old asshole narcissism. Anybody in an abusive relationship recognizes it. Hell, it’s standard Republicanism. McConnell has been doing it as long as I can remember. The difference with Trump was that he was crude, obvious, stupid, under the biggest spotlight in America, and would go on and on with it even when it obviously wasn’t going to work, which people in an abusive relationship will also tell you is fucking terrifying to be in the power of.
MagdaInBlack
@Dorothy A. Winsor: My Urban History Prof. used to guide some of those tours, but she was excellent at staying away from the current political climate. But then it wasn’t quite so volatile. She was same age as me ( i was a non-traditional student) and I know her views. I suspect she would have a tough time now.
Wag
@Procopius: This is a rapidly evolving story. I’m not certain that the arrested people have absolutely been identified as Christian Supremacists. If you google Maven Hotel denver arrests you’ll find information.
Kay
@Ksmiami:
The Democratic Party is desperate to be loved :)
I think we can make a distinction between bipartisan outreach as to voters and as to GOP politicians.
There’s no downside to reaching out to voters, like Pete is doing. Assuming good faith is not just the right thing to do it’s the smart move. They may get some and if they don’t they haven’t lost anything.
Bipartisan outreach to GOP politicians comes with a cost. I see why the Dem base objects to that but there’s no cost to being decent to voters.
m.j.
I’m just wondering how many newborns will be named Donald, ya know, to own the Libs.
PST
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Welcome DAW. Glad to have you as a visitor. The Trump Tower is, in my opinion, a gorgeous building. I used to have a view from my office window, which was nice for a year or so until the huge name was plastered on. It was built on the site of the old Chicago Sun-Times building, which didn’t need walk-by traffic. I’m sure hostility to Trump plays a part in lack of ground floor tenants, but it is poorly located for retail. It is a very short walk to Michigan Avenue and ought to be good for residential, hotel, or office use, but someone needs to go there on purpose. Also — and I say this in the best BJ tradition without any actual knowledge — I’ll bet it’s terribly overpriced.
raven
@Dorothy A. Winsor: You need to take one of the Chicago River Boat Architecture Tours
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
In personal relationships there are good reasons to not tolerate Republicans. In political strategy, I absolutely agree. If 95% of Republican voters are death cultists who will never vote for anything except ‘fuck you, libs’, peeling away that remaining 5% would have gigantic electoral effects. Plus, large portions of the Democratic voting base demand that we be the reasonable, non-hateful adults. It is why they vote Democratic.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@PST: The guide also said it was a beautiful building. He said that in his opinion, the two things making Chicago stand out as a city were the long lake shore access and all the modern architecture.
We moved to Barrington three years ago. Before the pandemic, we took the train into town and took the architectural boat tour, which was great
Dorothy A. Winsor
@raven: We did that before the pandemic. It’s a great tour. And we can get downtown fairly easily because there’s a Metra station about half a mile from us.
raven
Kay
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I went on the boat tour in June and our guide just treated the Trump property straight, as architecture. I was glad – I think that’s the way to do it. Not a lot to talk about on the architecture so we spent 30 seconds or so on it. I don’t want to talk about Donald Trump on a tour. That’s WHY he plasters his big stupid name on everything- so we’ll all have to talk about him and his horrible family.
I would resent the advertising if I lived in one of the apartments. I don’t want to pay for Donald Trump’s billboard.
WaterGirl
@m.j.: Are you kidding? The real FU will be from the people who use “Trump” as their kid’s first name. :-)
raven
@Dorothy A. Winsor: cool
Kay
@Frankensteinbeck:
It’s why the GOP laws on voter suppression are such outliers in politics. You don’t go after VOTERS. You’re supposed to go after the other sides pols, the voters are off limits.
Can you imagine if white conservative churches had “souls to the polls” and Democrats got rid of Sunday early vote? I can hear the screeching of pundits from here. My God, they’d collapse into a puddle of outrage. That’s a twofer- it’s an attack on them as people and it’s an attack on their churches.
MagdaInBlack
@raven: I believe that’s who my professor worked with.
SiubhanDuinne
Anybody else watching Richard Branson’s space launch? The craft is rolling now. MSNBC.
Another Scott
@Lacuna Synecdoche: It goes back farther than that. E.g. McCarthy in the 1950s and the Robert Taft wing of the GQP in in the late 1940s-1950s. And Father Coughlin in the 1930s.
Unfortunately, it’s been increasingly weaponized over the last 40+ years. Our elites, and the mainstream press, and mainstream media, used to be able to swat this stuff down. Now, they chase clicks and “engagement” and the almighty dollar above else…
“We need better elites.” – Kay.
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@Frankensteinbeck:
Sigh. Tis true.
Edmund Dantes
@matt the somewhat reasonable: it’s simple.
“Outside the white Deep South, there was a broad consensus against segregation in 1964;”
this is a bullshit line and makes me question every bit of the other analysis.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘outlier’. The racist party – first Democrats, then Republicans when those voters and politicians switched parties – have been relying on voter suppression since the Civil War. This is another aggressive round attacking what they think won the last election, but it’s what they do all the time.
That old double standard. Of course, one of the big reasons is that the vast majority of pundits are rich old white men who believe that Cletus is the definition of a true American whose vote defines what the American people want, and anyone brown is a special interest. Suppressing brown people’s votes is just tactics!
Sure Lurkalot
@Baud:
I agree that Pete is a good communicator but still I tire of the “any criticism of Nazis just makes more Nazis” take.
Baud
@Sure Lurkalot:
I don’t think it’s about making more Nazis. It’s about whether they will be lazy or active Nazis. There’s a reason the Republicans and right wing media try to gin up fear and outrage all the time.
satby
@Edmund Dantes: It’s wrong and lazy. There wasn’t much of a consensus against segregation, but there was a growing revulsion against the brutal tactics of racial suppression in the Jim Crow south.,
Damn, my tablets are all fighting standard English AND linking today.
debbie
@Edmund Dantes:
My first exposure to blatant racism was in Boston MA.
Ksmiami
@Kay: I meant wasting time with overtures to Republican representatives but do remember that they are a reflection of their voters…
Another Scott
@Frankensteinbeck:
I think this is a really, really important point.
“Where you stand depends on where you sit.”
If all you hear talked about are narrow perspectives and sound bites from one tiny bit of the political spectrum, then you’ll think that’s normal and the way things are and the way things ought to be.
People are complicated. Life is complicated. If there were some magic incantation that would get people to act or think or vote the way someone wanted, then we would have uniformity already. We don’t.
Messages and approaches have to be tailored to the person and the circumstances. Sometimes emotions will work, sometimes fear will work, sometimes idealism will work, sometimes shunning will work. We have to be willing to try everything that makes sense.
Ultimately, people have to find their own way, but they can be nudged in a good direction (just as they can be in a bad direction). We can’t write normal people off (even as we fight the monsters who feed them dangerous nonsense).
(via TheRealHoarse)
Cheers,
Scott.
Soprano2
@Frankensteinbeck: I keep saying, over and over, that to the press the “average voter” is still a white straight Christian man who lives in the Midwest, which is why they obsess over Trump voters so much. They think that whatever those voters want is what the “average” voter wants. No matter how much the electorate changes, I think they’ll cling to this for a long time because before recent times that’s how it’s always been. It’s why they rarely do stories on Biden voters, and hardly interviewed Hillary’s voters at all – they saw them as outliers, even though there are millions more of them.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
I think there’s a group of true swing voters who really want white supremacy but not if they’re personally suffering. So when the country seems to be going great, they vote for the Republican, but when the Republican manages to screw up badly enough, they’ll vote for the Democrat.
Geminid
@Another Scott: Dean Acheson called those people “the Primitives.” Acheson was Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, and they were a particular thorn in his side.
m.j.
@WaterGirl: They’ll have it tattooed on their little pink asses.
Brand is everything.
PST
@satby: DuSable is an important character in the city’s history and by no means forgotten, but I sincerely doubt the new name will catch on in daily usage. Renaming a street that we often can’t be bothered to call anything longer than LSD as “Jean Baptiste Point DuSable Lake Shore Drive” seems futile for anything more than symbolism. However, it is also something that was hard to oppose without sounding like a resentful bigoted whiner and hard for anyone who doesn’t live on LSD to get worked up about. I suspect that this will be like the bridge named for DuSable that everyone still just calls the Michigan Avenue Bridge. On the other hand, DuSable has a high school and a museum bearing his name, and of course people call them that.
JWR
NBC just cut into Press the Meat to cover Richard Branson’s space hobby. (ETA his spaceship launch.)
PST
@Kay:
Shhhhh! Don’t give them any ideas!
Another Scott
@JWR: I’ve been mildly interested in the events today. Branson’s name is on it, and he’s putting up a lot of the money, but it’s really Scaled Composites and Burt Rutan’s work. He’s retired now, and SC is owned by Northrop Grumman now. And they did this sub-orbital thing in 2004 and won the Ansari X-Prize for the effort.
Progress is good. Zillionaires getting free press for spending money is kinda meh.
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@PST:
Where would they get the souls from?
DesertFriar
@JWR: Was able to see the chem trail from separation from our house in Las Cruces.
MattF
OT. The front-page essay in today’s NYT Book Review section is… remarkable, so I’m remarking on it. It’s a review of a novel about Jews, and I guess I’ll now have to read that book. I’m not at all sure how the rest of the world will see this essay, but it kept me glued to the page.
Frankensteinbeck
@Soprano2:
We are very much on the same page here.
Another Scott
@Baud:
“Jesus wants you to
Be Rich!!Go Vote for Voldemort!!”:-/
Cheers,
Scott.
CaseyL
@Roger Moore: I think a lot of Obama-to-Trump voters really wanted someone who would dismantle or burn down The Establishment. I know some of those; their vision goes no further than Burn It All Down.
Obama-to-Trump-to-Biden voters… could be what you said, white supremacists who vote for Democrats only when their own personal comfort is at stake. But some may have been experimenting, so to speak, with the idea of a total outsider who said he was going to upend the system. Then they learned what that meant and voted for the candidate who could fix what TFG broke.
I’m still gobsmacked by the voters who didn’t go for Trump in ’16 but did vote for him in ’20. They’re the ones who genuinely liked the corruption, brutality, and reckless disregard for human life; who wanted more of it.
Nora
I suspect the Lake Shore Drive thing is like the new bridge over the Hudson River between Westchester and Rockland counties. Sure, the official name is the Mario Cuomo bridge, but everybody on both sides of the river still refers to it as the Tappan Zee Bridge, which was its name forever. You don’t change the name of something that’s so ingrained it can be referred to by its initials (The TZ, the LSD). Not easily, anyway.
stinger
@Dorothy A. Winsor: The county I live in was originally named after a US Vice President who owned slaves and never set foot in this state. Two weeks ago, the county was officially renamed after a native of the state — and the first Black woman in the US to earn a doctorate in History.
The county name itself remains unchanged.
https://littlevillagemag.com/lulu-merle-johnson-county-name-change/
JWR
@Another Scott:
Yeah, that’s pretty much where I’m at with thus stuff. I just hope they land safely, which they’re about to do
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Yesterday I got on nextdoor.com, a forum that creates locality-based discussion groups (mostly for giving away or selling stuff, or looking for repair people). I got on because there was some stuff I was thinking of listing for giveaway.
But then I got distracted by a couple discussions. One was a guy advertising a petition to abolish property taxes. As you can guess, that discussion was full of the old chestnut, “why should I pay for schools if I don’t have any school-age kids?”
And then I saw another one talking about the Bed Bath & Beyond that closed down during the pandemic. I loved that store. Apparently they’re going to be replaced by a Hobby Lobby. And that discussion was full of “hooray, a good Christian store”.
Not that I know any of these people, but they are my neighbors and I now know a lot more than I wanted to about the Fox influence in my neighborhood.
Kay
CPAC yesterday had an event that made me laugh:
“Buckley to Reagan to Trump” blah blah, where do we go from here type thing.
Guffaw. They disappeared the whole Bush family! I just love how they get to create their own reality.
If that were Democrats the whole event would be Democrats correcting the title, many of them outraged :)
Another Scott
@CaseyL: My best friend from high school loved him some TFG. He hated HRC with the heat of a thousand suns. “ABC, baby – Anybody but Clinton”, etc. He worked for the City of Dayton, went to TFG’s rally at the Dayton Airport, etc., etc. He was smart and thoughtful in school, (had to leave college early because he couldn’t afford it), but went farther and farther to the dark side as he got older, was always angry, probably transferred his anger at his bad marriage to politics, etc. All of his friends were in a similar boat, so I’m sure it contributed to his outlook.
Died early of leukemia. :-(
I don’t know if he would have voted for Biden, but do know that his picture of HRC as a horrible monster was unique and nobody else (at least nobody male) would have driven such a visceral reaction. The GQP and the press driving Hillary hatred for 30+ years ruined lots of people. :-(
Counter-factuals are fun!! :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@ian:
She’s a perfect example of the Republican party degenerating into all trolling, all the time. Nothing matters except owning the libs.
Delk
Trump Tower Chicago was the last big development that treated the Chicago River as an afterthought. Since then all new buildings have embraced the river. The original plans for the retail spaces were scrapped and that made them difficult to access. Oddly enough the whole retail section feels like a handicapped access to nowhere. Since then the Riverwalk has exploded while the trump brand has imploded. I think the only way those spaces could be successful is if they put each family member in one and charged the public to throw dog shit at them.
dr. bloor
@Another Scott:
I’m willing to tune in and cheer them on for spending that money if the public will to fund progress through government isn’t there. And honestly, Branson is easier to cheer for than are Bezos and Musk, or the stockholders/board members of most other aerospace concerns.
CaseyL
@Delk:
Throw in McConnell and I’d fly to ChiTown just to do that.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud:
It would be damn interesting if the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago was a Confederate traitor! LMAO!
Kay
If you’re in a red place you do get a little “try too hard” with voters. You want to make the sale :)
LITTLE needy and desperate. You should the reaction when a new young person walks into our county group. I think we may be scaring them away – too clingy. Maybe act like it’s exclusive?
evodevo
@Edmund Dantes:
Yep..people seem to forget about Boston’s Southies and CA’s Oakland and East St. Louis – Randy Newman’s song Rednecks even talks about those…
CaseyL
@Kay: Some people have strong adverse reactions to a too-warm welcome. I’m one of them: my initial reaction is that the flowers-and-kisses folks are trying to sell me something or convince me to join a cult. (Early experiences with people who were doing exactly those things.)
Kay
@Frankensteinbeck:
I mean the GOP attacks our voters. When Biden gives his voting rights speech he won’t go after Trump voters.. He’ll go after conservative pols and judges.
Republicans voting laws are “Democrats are all presumptive felons, so here’s our fix to remedy their lack of ethics and propensity for committing felonies”
It’s fucking outrageous behavior on its face. No Democratic pol does anything like it
cope
@Another Scott: It just warms my heart to see a billionaire get something he wanted. And with plenty of branding along the way, just not enough Colbert. Although, what does it say about me that I watched it?
evodevo
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
It’s more informative as to the numbers of Trumpers out there than the Letter to the Editor page in the local paper or election yard signs…it’s enlightening how many there are …makes you thankful we actually won what we did in Nov….
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Yeah. It’s disturbing.
Kay
@CaseyL:
True. I get caught up in the competitive aspect. I don’t really want them. I just don’t want the other side to have them :)
Roger Moore
@Kay:
The problem is that for bipartisan outreach to Republican voters to register, you also have to make a show of reaching out to Republican politicians. This is a bit counterintuitive. You’d think the best strategy would be to do what voters want and let them infer that they’ll get what they want by voting for Democrats. But if you are seen as not even trying to reach out to the Republicans, voters who prefer the Republicans will see that as an attempt to cut them out. You have to reach out your hand and have it slapped away to make it obvious that the only way to get what you want is to elect Democrats.
NotMax
@PST
Oh my. Sounds like a review of a gallery exhibition of black light posters.
;)
Another Scott
@evodevo: Yup.
Chicago (supposedly) was the most segregated city in the country (though I’m sure there are many top contenders). In college I remember walking from the lake and heading straight west and it was incredibly obvious when one crossed neighborhood/red-line boundaries.
King Institute:
The Boston school desegregation riots were incredibly ugly too.
Racism is an American stain, not just a southern one.
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
Woodrow/asim
Forgive if I’m just saying what you and others know: Don’t have to imagine. Getting Evangelicals to start voting in large numbers was the backbone of the Moral Majority and related movements.
Since their target population, when they started in the late 1970s, was fairly mobile and well-off, the effort centered on so-called voter education cards. These cards, along with pastors preaching about the sinful world, was enough to get Evangelicals moving to the voting booths en masse.
All that is on the edge of legality around political activity in churches, of course. But it’s an obvious, and on-going, example of how White Evangelicals and the power they have accumulated has changed how we do politics, in America — for the worse.
mrmoshpotato
We locals have first pitches, so don’t book that flight just yet – there are a LOT of us!
NotMax
@Woodrow/asim
Bigots to the ballots.
Less euphonious, intensely more insidious.
debbie
@Another Scott:
My youngest brother tried to assure me that he thought Trump would be magnanimous and pardon Hillary. That one statement drove a metaphorical stake into the heart of family cohesion.
mrmoshpotato
@debbie: How long did it take to find your eyes after they rolled out of your head?
PST
@CaseyL:
I know some Obama-to-Trump voters like that too. My late mother, a very conventional midwestern homemaker, was one. Her interior life remains mysterious to me, but she seemed drawn always to whoever seems like the biggest outsider. It was useless to talk to her about it in terms that were logical to me. Over the course of almost 90 years I never once heard her say anything that I would remotely interpret as racist, yet she was incapable of recognizing (or perhaps just acknowledging) the racism of Trump and Trumpism.
Patricia Kayden
@matt the somewhat reasonable
The Sinema-Manchin capitulation to McConnell and Republicans which pretty much kills President Biden’s agenda in its cradle.
Roger Moore
@m.j.:
Not many. You can look this stuff up on the Social Security baby names web site. Donald peaked in popularity during the Great Depression, when it made it all the way up to 6th most popular boy’s name. Trump was named a bit after the peak, but it stayed as a top-20 name past when Trump was born, all the way through the 1950s. Since then, it’s been in a long-term decline as a name, ranking lower on the list practically every year since then. There were only 444 boys named Donald in 2020, which should put an upper bound on the number of parents willing to name their child that to own the libs.
Note that since this is part of such a long-term trend, it probably doesn’t reflect that much on Trump personally. Baby names are very subject to swings of fashion, and names like Donald (e.g. Ronald) just aren’t trendy right now.
Woodrow/asim
@Another Scott: Racism in the Northern US is a very real thing.
For a while, in my early 20s, I wanted to move back to Western Mass, where I went to college. I was too…unaware, at that time, that a lot of the hostility I had seen at college, the many many microaggressions I now know I dealt with, was Northern Racism.
I was used to Southern style racial hostility. I didn’t know, and didn’t know to ask, about what I’d see up North.
Small Example: Decades after college, and just before the rise of Uber/Lyft, I was in Boston, ill. Hotel ordered me a taxi I took to a CVS, picked up my meds, and forgetting where I was, tried to hail a taxi back to my hotel. That…did not work out well.
That’s just one example, and something that my life in the much smaller, yet still urban, South — or even my schooling in Mass — didn’t prepare me for. It reminds that racism is complex and baked deep into how many of our daily institutions and processes operate, in ways that are designed to be as invisible as possible, to evade confrontations that shine a spotlight on its effects.
It’s why I buy Biden being shocked into a new stance by Charlottesville, by the by. It’s easy for even good people, people who have actually seen racism up close (as Biden did with the Obamas) to still miss how insidious it was.
For better and worse, the poison that Trump pumped into the mainstream opened a lot of people to the depths of racial animosity in our society.
We shall all see now, if that was enough.
Roger Moore
@satby:
I think there was a growing consensus against “segregation”, which in the minds of the people answering the question meant the kind of legally mandated and enforced segregation present in the South. There were obviously a lot of White people outside the South who were very happy with the more subtle segregation as practiced outside the South. Part of what made Nixon and Reagan so successful was hooking into the outrage when it turned out the Democrats were against segregation in general, not just the more extreme, Jim Crow-style.
CaseyL
@PST: Racism was the interior sea she swam in; nothing overt, but a lot of assumptions built on what is known as “implicit bias.” Until a POC crosses some line the person themselves may not know is there; e.g., a Black man being elected President. The person experiences a shock the likes of which can change their entire personality: maybe they realize their implicit bias and strive to overcome it, or they turn overtly racist.
jimmiraybob
@Baud:
Beauregard T. Lake Shore or Bob Lake Shore?
Kay
@Woodrow/asim:
True. In 2004 my volunteer job was to go look at precinct numbers (which are publicly posted in Ohio). I went out to a rural precinct and my heart just sank. All the minvans with the Christian radio sticker in the window. Democrats were doing GOTV calls from my house and when I got back I stayed out in the garage for a bit because I was afraid they could read my face- I knew we were going to lose. The hardest part of losing for me is how disappointed the volunteers are. It kills me.
Have you seen this though? The white evangelical vote is tanking in terms of numbers. This tracks what I see anecdotally locally in this very conservative county. They just aren’t the big force they used to be. They lost too many young people. Those young mothers I saw coming out for Bush are almost 20 years older now. They weren’t replaced. I guess it would be THEIR KIDS who are fleeing the churches.
There are now support groups for young women who were raised in the evangelical “purity movement”. They want to have normal sex lives. It’s really interesting. Many of them are still religious. They just want to be ordinary modern women.
jimmiraybob
@ian:
She (Margorie Taylor Greene) is very Stalinesque for an anti-communist.
mary s
@Matt McIrvin: Agree! More generally, I really can’t take anyone who downplays the role of white supremacy in American politics very seriously. The pundits who keep doing this are usually white and male . . .
Another Scott
@cope:
Bargain!!
Hehe.
Cheers,
Scott.
Woodrow/asim
I wish more people understood this.
I’d bet, to this day, a lot of people who ID as white see Redlining as normal, and not racist at all.
It’s not the foaming-at-the-mouth Nazi/KKK folx that keep America Racist. It’s the people who are eager to keep all the good stuff they get from racist policies, so long as someone can justify them.
From Victorian-era Scientific Racism to modern-day “Don’t make white students feel bad about race!” laws, time and again people are well-paid and lauded when they ensure the racial (and gender, etc.) status quo. Hell, you can throw in Creationism and even the hack scientists the tobacco lobby paid to “prove” that smoking wasn’t harmful.
This is the real fight for a better world; not the Sinemas and Manchins, caught in a vise of their own devising, nor even the McConnells and Trumps, as horrific as they are.
No, it’s really and truly the very people discussed in the New Yorker article, to bring it home. Those folx would claim that Black Lives Matter, but run like hell if those Black Bodies moved next door. They are the squishy, easy-to-push racism on folx, that Dr. King railed against in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail:
If Biden is moving those people, getting them to better understand the world we live in today, getting them to start accepting they have to let go of their privilege, in order to get a better world for themselves and their kids than holding fast to racism will ever allow?
Hell yes.
Kay
@Woodrow/asim:
It started dropping in 2010, so Bush II was the peak. At the time it felt permanent and unstoppable.
It’s millenials. They fled.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
I guess the big question is how many of the people fleeing Evangelical churches will remain staunchly conservative even as they give up on their church. I assume the number is substantial. That’s not to say it won’t make a difference- even if they’re conservative, it may well be a less toxic breed of conservatism- but we shouldn’t expect this to result in a dramatic change in voting patterns.
m.j.
@Roger Moore: Good information. Thank you.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
I wonder. As I have repeated here many times I think the women are reachable. It’s easy to be a white evangelical man. The whole belief system elevates them. It’s not so great being a white evangelical woman. They really get the sucky side of that deal. They choose not to understand this but GOP economic policies do not actually encourage traditional families. It’s a low wage ideology. Hence, evangelical women get all the second class status of women in that ideology with none of the financial security. That wasn’t the deal. They were supposed to be hemmed in but also protected.
Another Scott
@Kay: I blame/credit lead. [/Kevin Drum]
Seriously. Lots and lots of things started the long process of getting better when we took lead out of paint and gasoline.
I think things will get better still with the passing of many more of the lead-poisoned RWNJ preachers, but it will continue to require work.
Cheers,
Scott.
debbie
@mrmoshpotato:
My eyes were tightly closed, I was so angry, so no assistance needed.
trollhattan
Branson wins. The battle of first billionaire into space, that is.
Now the rest can scramble to become first billionaire in orbit. Do it, guys, push that technology. What have you got to lose?
Roger Moore
@m.j.:
I love the Social Security baby names site, which is odd because I don’t have any children and I’m not particularly interested in raising them. But I think it’s a fantastic example of the great stuff our government does for us, and it’s a wonderful source for all kinds of data analysis.
Mart
Amy Siskind says, °Experts in authoritarianism advise to keep a list of things subtly changing around you, so you’ll remember.°
debbie
@trollhattan:
Did he even get up far enough to reach space? I think I heard Bezos pointing out that he would be the first to reach space because Branson wasn’t going high enough.
m.j.
@trollhattan: They race to nowhere. It’s the bored billionaire show.
debbie
@m.j.:
I wish they’d all just face off in the shower and leave the rest of us alone.
PST
@CaseyL:
I think that’s right for some people, but it doesn’t explain Mom. She voted for Obama not just once, but twice, and I can’t remember her ever criticizing him. Then she voted for Trump. She didn’t live to do so a second time, but again I never heard her criticize him either. Back when I was a debater, in my youth, we used to call some judges “coins” because they were clueless but not perverse. They had a 50-50 chance of getting it right. I don’t think Mom was a coin, though. Some kind of inchoate dissatisfaction she could never articulate seemed to draw her to candidates who were, by her lights, further from the mainstream.
Woodrow/asim
Also true here — I live 5 minutes from Bob Jones University. This city went, in 2 decades, from being in the grip of its thrall to a Democratic and fairly forward-thinking City Council.
That said, I think a lot of this is that the Evangelical grift that empowered the Reagan “revolution” has changed. Social media has replaced church pressure, and even hooks in people who formerly wouldn’t have touched any of this with a 100-foot pole, like the Atheist communities. QAnon and the Alt-Right, I suspect, bring in a lot more people, at likely much younger ages. And, of course, there are the various uber-wealthy folx who fund not just the obvious “media” outlets, but the many, many “dark money”-empowered setups to coordinate and plan out how to take out Progressive ideas. They used to need Evangelicals to fund and run much of that, but now they just sip off the money of these billionaires, as well as the all-too-many “regular” folx donating to the front companies.
(NOTE for general readers: I know the above is…pretty depressing. Yet I think if we start to understand the situation “on the ground,” we can actually get to solutions. The world, and politics, have changed, yet as someone who’s damn likely to be “up against the wall” if these assholes take full control? I know there’s still hope, if we focus and work the field.
I don’t put my hope in people like Machien(sp), or even Biden. I put it in the people willing to knock on doors, to discuss, debate, and fight the rising tide. Those are the folx who’s work pushed laws that freed me from the bonds of Jim Crow, and who we need to be focusing our work and energy in support of.)
Another Scott
@debbie: The BBC story talks about that (85 km vs 100 km). The X-15 got to ~ 108 km.
What happened today doesn’t seem too different to me from the Ansari X-Prize effort in 2004. It’ll be interesting to see how Bezos’s Blue Origin does (how quickly can it be recycled and reused?).
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
Their lives. This stuff is still very risky. For all the Elon Musk talks about colonizing Mars, he hasn’t displayed much interest in going into space himself until it’s a lot more developed than it is. He’s not going until all the bugs are worked out.
germy
@debbie:
Tax them at a high rate and use some of the money to fund a real space program.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
The people I know who are swing voters only care about their personal and business finances. Low taxes are appealing to them. With the Obama administration, the regulations were well intended but often conflicting, confusing, and problematic to implement. That kind if thing ticks people off. The GOP does recognize and successfully appeal to those folks, but the extremism and their screw ups are a turnoff too.
m.j.
@debbie: I wish we could tax the shit out of them and do some real good instead of facilitating their infantile fantasies.
debbie
@PST:
Maybe you just didn’t hear her talking to her like-minded friends and associates. I caught brief flashes of Obama mockery from my family members, but I had no idea they were as far gone as they turned out to be.
StringOnAStick
For folks commenting about the Next Door app, it tends to skew heavily towards bitter complainers, e.g., R’s. Oh sure, it didn’t start out that way and there’s always new people going on it and checking it out but the ones who aren’t bitter complainers tend to drop off and leave the core set of grumps to continue to self concentrate.
trollhattan
@debbie:
Can’t you just see that conversation?
“I went into space.”
“Did not. Space starts a mile higher than you got.”
“I dated an actress.”
“I mean, is she really an actress? What’s she even been in?”
“I have a Ferrari.”
“Is it really? I thought a Ferrari had to be a V12, that thing is a V8.”
“Check out my yacht.”
“‘Yacht?’ That thing’s not even five-hundred feet. More like dinghy.”
Tough crowd, those billionaires.
debbie
@germy:
I did not like that they privatized the space program.
germy
@trollhattan:
Math is for dick measuring.
PST
@trollhattan: Who wouldn’t rather be the billionaire John Glenn than the billionaire Alan Shepard? Glenn got the better press.
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
Yeah, that’s kind of the point. Drag them into doing something really dumb and fiery.
Still hoping Musk decides to decamp for Mars.
Kay
@Another Scott:
I think for the young women I would credit social media more. Not “political” social media but reading other young women- what they do, what they’re interested in. “Purity culture” is really repressive for women. They see enough of the outside world to know they could be more free, just to enjoy ordinary things. Cause it has a kind of boomerang effect. They’re raised to believe that their bodies are so dangerous -such a threat- that they’re hobbled in a way and defined completely by not having sex. That’s just another way of treating them as sexual objects. The support groups are about becoming ordinary, multi-faceted people. It’s such a small demand.
debbie
@trollhattan:
One way to shut them up: Who likes you the most?
germy
@debbie:
Yes, the privateers and profiteers are going to take over space. Isn’t musk already ruining the view of astronomers with the low orbit stuff he’s launching?
m.j.
@germy: By, “a real space program.” I hope you mean robotics, because anything else is highly unrealistic. Humans have no place in space.
Another Scott
@trollhattan: “And you’re not even a real billionaire!”
Yeah, we should expect the competition-thing to be a driver. Forbes’ list of billionaires has caused a lot of damage…
“Grandpa, you’re only 27 on the Forbes’ list now. What are you going to do to pass Jack Ma? You’re much better than he is…”
(sigh)
Cheers,
Scott.
germy
@m.j.:
Robotics, and a joint venture of cooperation between nations.
Not these billionaire speed racers.
Uncle Cosmo
@SiubhanDuinne: Fuck Bezos and fuck Branson for parlaying a couple of stupid meaningless stunts into media coverage. What “Virgin Galactic” is doing was done over 60 years ago and represents ZERO advance. In fact it’s only “space flight” by virtue of some bureaucrats who arbitrarily set 100 km as the “boundary of space” so they could call X-15 pilots “astronauts.” As for Bezos, “Blue Shepard” has the right initials: it’s BS from the gitgo. What Musk accomplishes when he (eventually) gets a Starship to orbit and back down again in one piece, crewed or not, will be FAR MORE CONSEQUENT than any of this Cosmonautical Kabuki.
Roger Moore
@PST:
I’d rather be the billionaire Yuri Gagarin.
Uncle Cosmo
@m.j.: Humans have no place in space.
Another arrogant Jackal knowitall heard from. How the fuck would you know???
debbie
@germy:
Don’t forget that damn car of his he launched.
Another Scott
@germy: Another good thing about Biden and Team D winning is that they’ve been able to convince Congress that other nations are actually investing in R&D and not just talking about how great they are.
NextGov:
Private investment in space technology is a good thing. But government is still paying for most of this (Scaled Composites is part of Northrop-Grumman; SpaceX has lots of government contracts; Starlink has government contracts; Iridium has government contracts; etc.).
Cheers,
Scott.
m.j.
@Uncle Cosmo: I guess I don’t. I just have this idea supported by billions of years of evolution on this particular planet that maybe we aren’t suited for such a hostile environment.
I suppose I could wave a magic wand and make that all go away.
Kay
My middle son had his journeyman induction at the IBEW yesterday. It was cool. They gave him a knife with his name engraved on it. To cut wire, I suppose. The apprenticeship is 5 years, so I’m pleased he stuck it out. It’s awful the first two years. Between 11 and 15 an hour and they do all the worst tasks. He says he spent two years on a ladder :)
He’s “traveling” now because he’s single and hasn’t seen the country and they pay “traveler” electricians quite well. He built a bed to put in the back of a van because he’s too cheap to spend his per diem – the younger travelers sort of “camp” in groups, which he would like- he’s very quiet but he likes to be in a group. His next stop is Duluth, Minnesota. I envy him a little.
trollhattan
And then there are the supremely cynical politicians–Tories in this case–relying on billionaires to step in and do their jobs for them.
There go two miscreants
@stinger: Thanks for the article about Lulu Merle Johnson; that was very interesting and well-written!
MagdaInBlack
@Kay: I envy him a wee bit too ?
germy
@m.j.:
I suspect the billionaires spent their childhoods watching lots of low budget sci fi movies and tv shows, the ones where it takes a day or so to travel between planets (“warp speed!”) and every spaceship has full gravity where people can walk around like they’re on a cruise ship and enjoy hot meals.
germy
@Kay:
To be young and skilled is the best way to be, in my opinion…
m.j.
@germy: If they were fans of Kaiju maybe we’d be watching monster fights, for real.
Fair Economist
@Roger Moore: What I find interesting about baby names is how much more diverse they are. In 1950 the most common boy’s name was James, with 4.7%; in 2020 it’s Liam at 1.07%. Similarly girls went from 4.4% Linda to 1% Olivia in 2020. In 1950 *most* children had a top 20 name; now it’s about 1 in 7.
Generally speaking, I think this is an improvement because IMO your first name should ordinarily identify you in a social gathering.
I suspect the greater diversity of name will reduce the faddishness somewhat since names won’t get so painfully associated with a particular name cohort – like Donald is with old people right now. In 60 years maybe everybody will know some old person named Liam – but not 5 or 10.
debbie
@MagdaInBlack:
Seconded.
mrmoshpotato
@debbie:
LOL! Now what do you mean by that? ?
Kelly
One of my best friends for the last 40 years always based his politics on this. The overt racism of TFG and his cultists completely turned him around to supporting liberal positions. TFG’s utter incompetence and McConnell’s perfidy sealed the deal.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Another Scott:
McCarthyism was a Senatorial spin-off of the HUAC, of which Nixon was a member as early as Feb. 1947.
Please, I’ve been noting that GOP conservative craziness began with William Howard Taft, in the 19-oughts, for over a decade on this site:
Let’s not forget that Teddy Roosevelt ran against Taft in 1911-12, and founded the Bull Moose party, in reaction to the conservative direction WH Taft was taking the GOP.
And that’s only the second comment I found. I’m sure there are earlier comments from me on this site about Taft’s conservativeness, but I don’t have all day to look for them.
Anyway, the comment you’re responding to wasn’t about the source of GOP craziness. It was about the source of Trump’s “game,” meaning the performative conservative/wingnut/fascism he’s been playing and running on for the past 6+ years. And that I attribute to performative influences from Nixon, Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@A Ghost to Most: any of them work in the rockies front office?
mrmoshpotato
@Another Scott:
You mean how quickly it can be made erect again? (Way to be subtle, Jeff!)
Kay
@germy:
They go to catastrophic events or massive ramp up retrofits. A refinery in Duluth burnt down so they’ll pay a premium to get it up and running. They’re from all over- California, Nevada, Georgia. I would have loved that at his age.
Chetan Murthy
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
I had that experience here in oh-so-liberal SF: neighbors complaining about the homeless encampment by the Safeway, how they ought to be moved on, diseases, etc, etc. Right at the beginning of the pandemic. Boy, talk about taking the bun off the hamburger, seeing worms. Blecch. I deleted my account pronto.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@debbie: democrats are from lilith faire, republicans are from margaritaville.
frosty
@Kay: That’s great news about your journeyman electrician son. I get the bit about not spending his per diem. I would have done the same at that age … heck, I’d do it now at my more advanced age!
MoCaAce
Bullshit! Republicans invented the game decades ago. An enraged circus peanut ripped up the rule book shit on the scraps, rolled in it, then smeared it a all over the referees and flung it into the crowd… AND THE CROWD WENT WILD!
germy
the view out Branson’s window:
Kent
@Kelly: I have relatives who are swing voters. Elderly aunt who is a retired nurse. She gets the GOP bullshit fed to her by her church. She sort of knows better on issues like healthcare and such. But she pays so little actual attention to politics that she just ends up voting on instinct and perception. I expect she was an Obama to Trump to Biden voter. Basically just following the popularity contest.
Another word for it is stupid I suppose.
Another Scott
@Lacuna Synecdoche: It wouldn’t be a long Balloon Juice thread without reminders that every comment was said before and better by an actual expert. ?
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
stinger
@Kay: He’s a literal journeyman!
burnspbesq
Somehow I don’t this this is going to work with Tesla owners.
germy
Kelly
@Kay: My brother retired from a career that started with building big high voltage powerlines all over the west. Excellent wages and benefits. Final 5 years running heavy equipment on local ordinary power lines. He was in IBEW and it is a great union.
He spent part of one summer standing on a helicopter skid hanging insulators then wire on big steel towers in the Colorado Rockies.
mrmoshpotato
@Kay: Congrats to him!
Kent
@MoCaAce: The GOP has been doing it all along at the lower level races and via toads like Gingrich. And of course, Palin. Trump is the one who elevated the same shtick to the top of the ticket. Looking back, Romney, McCain, and even Bush weren’t really like that. They all had message discipline and were all very traditional GOPers unlike Trump.
Kent
@burnspbesq: Tesla owners aren’t a cult. They are more of a modern country club. It is the new way to buy status in many parts of the country.
m.j.
@germy: The view from a balloon.
mrmoshpotato
@germy: Yeah, dude in his truck…
(Sees second picture) ???
stinger
@There go two miscreants: I’m very proud of my county! Didn’t have to do this — nobody knew the first name of whoever it was named for, or anything about him. We had a unit on state/local history in grade school, but this never came up. Johnson is such a common name, could have been Andrew Johnson or LBJ or Early Settler Johnson. Nobody thought to look into it. Until someone did. And then we acted! And now we know about Lulu Merle, who was an amazing person.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@Baud: “south delays rising again for another year” remains a great headline from theonion. & obviously, from over two decades before t. herman’s mercantile news became an adjunct of #ourrevolution.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@Kay: karl rove’s monkey’s paw is a fickle b*tch.
mrmoshpotato
@burnspbesq: Hehe, what about this Tesla owner?
Soprano2
@Kay: Think of the GQP attitude toward voters this way – conservatives have attacked non-white voters forever, ever since the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. They see these people as illegitimate voters and citizens, who are not worthy of what they believe is the privilege of voting. They don’t try to block our white voters, who they believe are wrong about things but in their eyes are valid voters.
James E Powell
@Roger Moore:
I don’t have children either, but I teach high school and the comes & goes of names is interesting. I show it to students and they love playing with it.
When I started teaching, I had about 15 students named Jasmine – spelled in a variety of ways. It was about 14 years after the release of Disney’s Aladdin. Coincidence?
Ruckus
@PST:
trump was selling himself as a business man 50 yrs ago. His father was a slum lord and I think that trump saw that he could con a larger audience. Even the financial press just accepted his “estimates” of his vast holdings value. Forbes ran that he was worth well over ten billion for years, and was accepted as fact, but when they actually ran the numbers his wealth figure in the Forbes wealthiest dropped over 10 billion dollars. His scam was paying for his name on things he didn’t really own more than a tiny scrap of. A lot of people don’t read the financial press, they see what’s in front of their eyes and what that was were trump lies, which is more commonly known as bullshit. He started out by taking money from his siblings to create an amount of money that could actually have led him to have that 12 or 13 billion dollars if he had invested it with other people/companies, but instead he went his bullshit way and ended up deep in debt and worth far less than just putting that money in an interest paying bank account would have, let alone the money that he claimed he had. He is a con artist, but his art is crap, what he really is, is a racist POS. He inherited that from his father as well. All he’s done is build upon the racism he inherited, not the money.
And that story was sold by many outlets, that he was wealthy, that he was a self made man. And if he’s anything it’s mis-made man. But for some reason a segment of the public loves a riches to riches story about a white racist man. I believe it’s that they believe someone who hates can be successful and famous, because that’s who they are, racist haters. Even if they hide it well. This country has really never settled the question of slavery and racism. We act like we did but the entire premise of a conservative political party is to conserve some part or all of the past. And in many countries that means racism and wealth are the leading indicators and should be the powerful. This is one of them
Oh, and by the way, break is over.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@Roger Moore: don turnbee did nothing wrong.
Roger Moore
@Fair Economist:
I don’t think that’s going to happen because that’s not the main reason people pick the names they do. People pick trendy names because they’re chasing fashion, not because they’re avoiding the old. A lot of the most popular names these days are actually chosen because they sound old fashioned. The top 10 lists are full of old-timey names like Olivia, Sophia, Charlotte, Oliver, and Henry.
trollhattan
@Kent:
They’re literally too common now in California to be culty. Back when it was just the $80k+ Model S, they were genuinely exotic and people noticed. Have a pic taken in a Costo lot of one with a big-ass wing bolted to the trunk. Somebody tired of being anonymous, I guess.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@Another Scott: but now kevin drum blames the liberals for the culture wars.
proof, as if we needed more after the rise of nate silver, that polymathematica isn’t a thing.
Roger Moore
@stinger:
Just to pick nits: journeyman doesn’t come from them traveling. It comes from the French “jour” meaning day. A journeyman was paid by the day rather than signing up for a long-term indenture like an apprentice or running his own shop like a master.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@Roger Moore: i want to be the new laika.
Kent
@Fair Economist: I’m waiting for Roman names to make a comeback. There are so many cool names from the Roman days…
Gaius, Lucius, Julia, Aurelia, Octavia, Marcus, etc.
Roger Moore
@germy:
The claims about efficiency are rationalization. It’s really about priorities, not about efficiency. Billionaires want to keep their money so they can spend it on themselves rather than other people. They don’t give a damn that the government was able to send people to space 60 years ago. They want to be able to go to space themselves, and the government wants to send qualified experts rather than wealthy tourists.
Roger Moore
@James E Powell:
If you want a name that’s totally plucked from a movie, you can’t do better than Madison, from the mermaid played by Daryl Hannah in Splash. In the movie, her choosing that name was a joke because no woman would ever be named that, but people really liked it. People started naming their girls Madison immediately after the movie came out, and it’s been a very popular girl’s name ever since.
Omnes Omnibus
Pot, kettle.
MagdaInBlack
@Ruckus: Glad to see you back ?
Omnes Omnibus
@Kent: Go to Italy.
Fair Economist
@Kent: There is some use of Roman or near-Roman names, including the current #1 girl’s name Olivia. Julia used to be common but is on a bit of a period timeout. I agree Roman names are often good.
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus: Or Romania.
Fair Economist
@Roger Moore: A big effect of greater diversity will be reducing the time identification of names. People tend to avoid their grandparent’s names and use their great-grandparents, roughly. But if most names are rarish then there won’t be any granny names to avoid. Plus while there are still Madison and Jasmine style new name fads, those fads have less punch.
Geoduck
@Wag: At one level.. thank goodness these people are so stupid, leaving their huge pile of guns and ammo in a hotel room for the housekeeper to find. At another.. how did these people get so stupid?
Geoduck
@stinger: King County here in WA state did the same a couple of decades back, officially ditching the original pro-slavery nonentity in favor of MLK Jr.
Steeplejack
@Procopius:
“Christian supremacists 2021” gets 3.5 million results in Google for me.
debbie
@Ruckus:
Back when I was living in NYC, Trump was treasured by the media because he gave them so much to write about. Media columnists like Liz Smith were quite fond of “Our Donald,” if only for the absurd things he said and did. At the time, he was seen as obnoxious, but no more dangerous than any other publicity whore (and there were plenty, even then).
Wecome back, by the way.
NotMax
@Kent
Hilarius.
;)
stinger
@Geoduck: Yay! More of this, please!
Ann McClenahan
I visit Balloon Juice daily and mainly lurk. But I have to respond to the photo that started this thread. The fence around the Capitol was unimaginably horrible. It’s such a relief to see it’s gone. Though one of the sad consequences is that less visible security perimeters and forces will expand as a result of 1/6/21.
Elizabelle
@Ann McClenahan: Welcome. Agree with you about the fence, and 1/6’s effect on DC.