Is it just me, or does this not seem like a photo for our time?
Not just in Tennessee, but everywhere in this country. White man with the power and position and all the trappings. Arms folded, standing his ground against, well, everything. Looking like he has a cob stuck up his behind.
Wait, what? Who’s this guy? He has no right to be here! He doesn’t know his place! He has no right to challenge me! They must be stopped! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives, their nice little white power structure, their status quo.
All of us. Black. Female. Gay. Different. Open to people who are different. We are a huge threat.
Hopefully the iconic photo for our next phase is the white guy in the suit, with the folded arms and the angry look, lying on the ground near the podium, throwing a literal temper tantrum with arms and legs flailing, like a child in the grocery store.
And, hopefully, the one after that will be the adults (Democrats and sane people) walking him out of the store. If one of you guys have the skills to put that guy on the ground, flailing in a temper tantrum, in front of the podium, in a photo, video or animation, I will be forever grateful.
Wow. What a photo. pic.twitter.com/6w7TBB7j8d
— Keith Edwards (@keithedwards) April 13, 2023
Open thread.
Other MJS
Perfect.
ALurkSupreme
If one of you guys have the skills to put that guy on the ground, flailing in a temper tantrum, in front of the podium, in a photo, video or animation, I will be forever grateful.
That image requires no digital enhancement whatsoever, IMO.
Scout211
And that sour-faced guy secretly bought a $600,000 house in Nashville
Update from Jedd Legum who broke the original story. I guess “rules” only apply to those other people.
West of the Cascades
Perfect post.
Sexton looks tired, like he’s just driven in from Crossville.
bbleh
Unless I am mistaken, the Nice White Man being very patient as the Other Person plainly attempts to provoke a riot is Sexton, the Speaker of the Tennessee House, who as part of this extended episode has been revealed to have been conducting a years-long fraud with respect to per diem payments for travel by House members by claiming to live in, and commute daily to, his district, while in fact living with his family in Nashville.
No studio executive would have accepted this script from a writer. It’s just too much of a caricature.
Scout211
Leaked audio from the Tennessee Republicans:
Kay
@Scout211:
The funniest part is he doesn’t want to live out in the boonies with his constituents.
lowtechcyclist
Sexton, or whoever that is at the podium, looks like he stepped right out of 1963. Doesn’t look the least bit disoriented by the time journey either.
Kay
@Scout211:
It’s all such bullshit. They looked like corrupt hacks because they wouldn’t even acknowlege that there had been a mass shooting in a Christian private school. He made them look like that, and they were stupid enough to make that a national story. His big sin isn’t that he made them look like “racists”- it’s that he showed that he cared when kids were slaughtered, no matter who the kids were. He’s morally and ethically better than they are, and conservatves can bear anything but that.
WaterGirl
@bbleh: You are not mistaken!
I didn’t include his name in this post because my point is what he represents, but I figured that most of us would likely know who he is.
WaterGirl
@Scout211: Isn’t hiding something evidence of intent in legal proceedings? Showing the they knew that what they were doing was wrong?
Other MJS
@Kay:
Why aren’t the teachers at these schools armed if that’s what they think the answer is?
Eolirin
@Kay: And he did it while being black, which is twice as bad. Because more than just looking like racists, they’re also racists.
The white woman avoided explusion (even if only barely) for a reason.
SiubhanDuinne
@ALurkSupreme:
I agree. It’s perfect as is. No need to gild the lily.
West of the Rockies
I don’t know how people of honor can stand being polite to such assholes (be the asshole MTG, Jordan, Gaetz, Boebert, Clarence Thomas, Tucker, Ye West, Muskrat, Candace Owens, Lindsey Graham, Peter Thiel, McCarthy, etc).
The people in power, and their dreary enablers and schemers and apologists are all heinous.
WaterGirl
@Eolirin:
She avoided expulsion because ONE WHITE MAN was not going to vote against her. Why? Because they had charged her with the exact same thing they charged the other two with, even though she had not done all the things she was charged with.
So one white man took a principled vote and he caught holy hell for it. Listen for yourself at the link in comment #6. I listened to most of it yesterday and I am very grateful for the person who leaked the audio.
Was the leaker the same principled white man who wouldn’t vote against the white woman’s false charges? No idea.
Was the “principled” white man not as principled as I thought? It depends on his motivation. If it was “I’m not going to lump her in with those two awful black men”, then maybe no so principled after all.
WaterGirl
@Eolirin:
“Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backward and in high heels.” – Ann Richards
If women have to do it backwards in high heels, how do black men have to do it?
In chains with their arms cuffed behind their backs?
Mike in Pasadena
Seth Harold, the photographer, caught one of those iconic moments like the napalm-burned Vietnamese girl screaming or the little girl trying to attend school escorted by police or the Kent state woman crying for help. Not as dramatic, but nevertheless important commentary on our times.
WaterGirl
@Mike in Pasadena: I think so, too. A thousand words, indeed.
mrmoshpotato
Pout harder, Trump trash Sexton.
WaterGirl
@mrmoshpotato: I think he was going for powerful and indignant. Possibly disgusted, also.
Steeplejack
@Eolirin:
I’m still laughing about a Twitter comment from last week that said the TN legislature somehow managed to make expelling two people look worse than expelling three people.
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack: Good one.
RaflW
Imagine how Sexton and the rest of the GOP will look when the two Justins run their very well funded special election campaigns. The GOP has elevated these two guys tremendously (and they are both doing excellent work with this new attention), and the own-goaling of the TN Republicans still has a third act (to mix metaphors). Delish.
And of course the TN GOP just spiked a fairly modest gun bill and are seeking to end the session early, since they’ve maybe noticed they’re being spanked. Justin Jones can make the squashing of his gun bill, in the wake of the killings and the ridiculous anti-democracy moves, a major plank.
Hopefully both Justins will have lots of TV ads in two media markets going hammer and tongs against the GOP gun-humping.
Gin & Tonic
@Scout211:
These words “secret” and “anonymous” seem to mean different things than what I thought they meant.
snoey
@WaterGirl: As I heard it, he just wanted his 15 minutes in the spotlight to do a principled pirouette and then vote to expel her for what she had done.
RaflW
@Kay: His ex wife lives out there, I think. Not to drag her into this, because she’s entitled to privacy, but I wonder if the rumors about Sexton walking around on her are true? It’d be fine with me for the press to look a little closer at his personal life in that regard.
Eolirin
@RaflW: We have a tendency to get gleeful about this sorta thing, but I still don’t see anything really changing for long time, and it won’t be because of this in particular when it does change. They make themselves look ridiculous and then double down and pay no price for doing so.
Eventually this has to stop working, but no signs of it happening any time soon.
Hangö Kex
re open thread: Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is in a bad way, poisoning suspected (Didn’t see this here or in the previous open thread?)
Dangerman
Probably forgot to lube it.
Since this is an OT, yesterday was the final straw on the “spin the debit card machine around and tip me” thing. I’m sorry, but it’s no tip for a while after this event.
So, I was an idiot (you don’t have to all agree at once) and had a $500 deductible on my windshield replacement (for something like $20 a YEAR, the deductible drops to $100; what WAS I thinking, but I digress) and I’m paying the $500 on the debit card machine …
… when he spins it around and there’s the button for tips. 10%. 15%. 20%. WTF? Am I paying a tip on the $500? On the total cost of repair (which I don’t know BTW). Since when do I tip my auto mechanic? Chocolates at Christmas, OK, but 20% on an unknown repair cost? KMA.
I get it. Times are tough. But those machines should be outlawed for non-tipped employees. It’s ridiculous. A restaurant Server is always getting at least 20% even if he/she is the worst Server around. Obviously, most of the times, I get fine ones and they get fine tips well above 20. But tip Auto Mechanics? Good grief. Did I miss something in my social manners training?
Aj
Can we propose a tongue in cheek bill that all males must have a pole up their ass and all ova producers should wear a red cape?
schrodingers_cat
@Eolirin: It will only stop working when the only demographic that votes in the majority for Republicans stops doing so.
Another photo that signifies this moment in history
artem1s
@Eolirin:
Even worse, while being Black, he earned the undying respect of the children in that school and those who walked out. He demonstrated that someone was listening when they walked out and that their elected White representatives weren’t. He showed them up in front of their kids and wives and neighbors.
Eolirin
@schrodingers_cat: Well, sure, if white men stop voting for them, no Republicans will ever get elected. 🙄
That’s not really the tactic failing though. In the case of white evangelicals, who they can’t win without either, not doubling down probably loses them support faster, even.
schrodingers_cat
@Eolirin: Forget white men, that’s an uphill battle that can’t be won just yet. But if we are able to shave the margins among white women, Rs will lose a lot more.
Let’s see how many women (white and otherwise) who have been sitting on the sidelines can be now motivated to vote, now that Rs have launched a full frontal attack on them.
MelissaM
There’s something funerary about the marble, the flower urns, etc. I hope it’s the funeral of the GOP in TN and elsewhere.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
If we can shave their margins, it really doesn’t matter which demo we shave them from. But obviously, the GOP hasn’t declared war on white men.
patrick II
This is all good fun, but will it change anything? If they are passing a NRA-approved gun law a few days after a mass murder at one of their own white Christian churches, there is no slowing them down except voting them out of office. Which isn’t going to happen soon.
“Leadership says Barrett made them look racist” is especially telling. They just can’t see themselves as racist even when they kick out two duly elected members of their assembly for being uppity. And clearly still resent that the black sinners against natural order aren’t contrite and are even joyful and righteous in their return.
They can’t be changed. We all hope the next generation will be better, but it is Tennesse.
Kay
@Baud:
I think the politics of that is wrong, because it assumes white women are a voting bloc and they aren’t. Obviously. As shown by the split. The politics of abortion, specifically, show that. Abortion voting doesn’t turn on gender. It turns on attitudes toward women. The less one thinks of women – they’re liars, they’re untrustworthy, they’re stupid and easily led so need oversight and supervision- the more likely one is to vote anti choice. A man who likes and respects women is a much more likely “get” than a woman who dislikes and doesn’t respect other women.
zhena gogolia
@Hangö Kex: Ugh.
BlueGuitarist
well put!!
saw a comment on that image, “we crucified him and 3 days later he’s back”
“We called for you all to ban assault weapons. And you respond with an assault on democracy.“ Justin Jones
Tony Jay
A LETTER FROM BREXITANIA
Nu-Labour, Old Problems
We all must have been very, very naughty boys and girls on this side of the Pond, because, like it or not, there’s going to be a General Election here in the UK sometime in 2024.
It’s up to our flaming multi-car pileup on top of an exploding fertiliser truck parked outside of a leaking nuclear reactor built over an angry native burial ground excuse for a Government when it’s scheduled, meaning it’s a decision for Rishi ‘The Unctuous Homunculus’ Sunak, a man so out of his depth he’s got a second home in the Lost City of R’Lyeh. A year from now, maybe, in order to maximise the feelgood factor of Sizzling British Summertime paired with some carefully aimed middle-class tax-cuts and a cynical deluge of ‘ZOMG The Browns Are Coming!!!’ kulturkampf vileness designed to eke out a majority by carving off a just-big-enough slice of the milky-white prole vote or, alternately, or he could take a long, hard look at where the polls are likely to be and decide to hold off for another six months to give their bloated donors the maximum possible window in which to squeeze the very last drops of juice from our national lemon.
Whatever, whenever, there will be another chance for the Great British Public to have their more or less democratic say on what kind of country they want their kids to live and their olds to die in. Given the disastrous choices the GBP have made over the last decade and a half (to be generous, it’s actually getting on for half a century since the Thatcher-Level Capitaclysm was unleashed) you’d be forgiven for considering the very thought of those easily misled loons getting anywhere near a voting booth a terrifying prospect fraught with opportunities for junk-punching but, rough beast though it be, it’s still the only system of peaceful revolution we have available to us. And it’s a simple enough question they’ll be posed, do they want five more years of cruel austerity, lowest-common-denominator mugging to the tabloid media, stealth privatisation of the NHS, mainstreamed distain for do-gooder ‘Woke’ nonsense about equality and human decency and a general, all-pervasive miasma of flag-shagging cartoon ‘patriotism’ wafting around like mist in a Carpathian graveyard, or would they prefer to vote the Tories in again?
Ha! Yes! Do you see what I did there? But bear with me, I have venting to do.
Up until just a few weeks ago the odds of the Tory Party retaining their grip on power past 2024 were way, way, waaaaaay up there in the stratosphere, roughly on a par with my chances of spending ten uninterrupted weeks on top of the download charts with my Skandigoth influenced Joni Mitchell/Emo Phillips fusion cover-version of the Divynals’ classic “I Touch Myself” reimagined as a low-key paean to the raw sexual magnetism inherent in a bewitchingly lit Mitch McConnell slumped unconscious over a flatlining heart monitor with the back of his hospital-gown hanging invitingly open. Really, truly, it was cast in stone that they were on the way to a shattering (and comprehensively well earned) defeat at the ballot box. All that Sir Keir Starmer’s Human Centipede meets Oliver Stone’s Salvador version of Labour has had to do in order to post regular 20-point opinion poll leads over Sunak’s forlorn hope of a Government was to very occasionally roll a repurposed bomb-disposal robot in a wig up the ramp from Nu-Labour’s Thameside sweat-lodge to deliver an ‘annoying back-seat driver’ lecture on the mechanics (but never the morality) of Tory Party policies (“You’re going in the right direction, darling, but if I were you I’d go a teeny-weeny bit lighter on the accelerator when you’re driving towards crowds of do-gooder thugs. Ha! Missed one!”). The Tory Party that has given the country Flobalob Johnson, Lettuce Truss and Real-Boy Sunak have been far too busy self-immolating on a raging pyre of factionalism, greed and ‘gotta be incest somewhere in that family tree’ levels of gross stupidity to mount any kind of semi-coherent defence.
Those halcyon days of 2019, when a Tory Party forcibly purged of anyone even vaguely ‘moderate’ stood arm in arm with the entire Media Establishment, various foreign intelligence services and half the Parliamentary Labour Party to keep History’s Greatest Monster and his icky fascination with making poor people’s lives modestly better out of Downing Street? They’re long gone. The national mood, it hath changeth. Election Day in 2024 was shaping up to be like that scene at the start of World War Z when a seething mass of infected Philadelphians swarmed towards Brad Pitt’s modestly priced family car like a wave of feral Elon Musks in pursuit of the latest skinny, pale-skinned brunette to sport a Karma Banana tramp-stamp while touting badly thought-out business ideas on Twitch. Guesstimates were putting potential Tory losses in the three-figure range, with some typically over-excited prognosticators hinting that they could even get pushed below 100 seats. More sober pundits were talking about the marshmallow softness of Nu-Labour’s lead and the dragging effects that electoral boundary changes and the new Voter ID laws would have, but all of them put the likelihood of the Tories losing power – if not solely to Nu-Labour – so high that no self-respecting bookie would take that bet.
That was then, this is now.
Since Nu-Lab Central were instructed by their NDA-protected list of oligarchic donors to start laying the groundwork for a season of hard campaigning in the churned up mud and toxic chlorine clouds of darkest Toryland, it’s become increasingly obvious that basing every single policy offering around whatever a bunch of politically inept London-centric Pink Tories think most likely to appeal to Focus Group Stereotype A-13/Zeta (White, Male, Conservative, thinks climate change is Trotspeak for sending his money to Gollywog Land, watches reruns of ‘Top Gear’ unironically, likes his golf and the thrill of watching Man/Tractor porn in the office) is a pretty flawed strategy and far too blunt an instrument for a field of human relations where having footwork like Kobe and more faces than The Star of Africa are entry-level skills. The central plank of Nu-Labour’s entire Centrist Counter-Reformation (other than burning as many heretical lefties at the stake as possible) has always been to shift the Party hard to the Right on every metric in pursuit of centre-right voters (and Hard Right billionaires with cash to splash) who’ve become disillusioned with the Tories, while still expecting everyone to the left of its new ‘Adult’ persona to vote for them regardless of what they’re actually saying, doing and offering because, as their charming online representatives put it, “If you don’t vote for us you love Tories and want their babies!”.
Turns out, politics is harder than that. People want to be made to feel a little bit good about what they’re voting for, or if they can’t feel good about it then they want to feel they were justified in their choices. In electoral maths, as in 2am pick-up etiquette at Spankers nightclub, “I don’t really like them but they’re better than the other lot” is a quite acceptable alternative to “Your magnificent genitalia complete me”, but you’ve got to at least sell them on the necessity of the transaction with a modicum of conviction. Say what you will about their record, the Tories have understood this and had it down to a dark fine art for many, many years, and it’s a testament to the sheer scale and depth of their takeover by the Far Right and its associated lobbying cum bribery industry that they’ve left virtually nothing for their boys and girls in the world of political PR to work with. They’ve broken everything they’ve touched and systematically cut the hamstrings of every single advantageous bovine they had yoked and ploughing the electoral field on their behalf, whether it be their (undeserved) reputation for fiscal maturity, their (overstated) rejection of radical extremism, or their (well deserved) ability to keep intraparty schisms on the down-low to better facilitate the maintenance of power and continuity of Government.
From the lofty peaks of Cameron’s wolf in the henhouse austerity masquerading as ‘compassionate conservatism’ to the stygian depths of Truss whining about an ‘anti-Tory blob’ in just over a decade, with Brexit omnipresent as the instigator of and mechanism through which May’s rusty trombone of a Government, the Rise and Fall of Clown Putz Flobalob and (maybe) little Rishi Sunak’s current middle-management downscaling operation were all scuppered. It’s a black comedy of errors that the British Public seems to want to change the channel on, which is great for the Opposition. All they really need to do is present a blandly credible face and say vague things about working together to make things better, don’t they? The Tories are doing all the hard work of convincing the electorate that “They’re better than the other lot” for them. Surely, even they couldn’t fuck this up?
Could they?
This is the Rightwing of the Labour Party. Whaddayoothink?
In the past few weeks, we’ve had Chapter XXXVIII in the ‘Last Humiliation of Corbyn’, a drawn out (and quartered) gorefest scripted, directed and produced by the same coterie of insular, small-minded spitetards who spent 2015-20 going all Project Veritas on their own Party’s leadership and now have no greater purpose in life than to hang around in circles jerking each other off to the groans of other (better) people’s misery. I’ve gone on at some length here (Who? Me?) about the disgraceful way the chest-thumping revanchists now running Labour have treated the previous leader and why they’ve done it, but Sir Plastic Panderer’s shitty little vendetta reached some kind of apotheosis with his gloating relish after the Party’s National Executive Committee voted to ban Corbyn from standing as a Labour MP in the Islington constituency he’s held with landslide majorities since the 1980s.
It’s not even like the gutless little dweeb had to do it, because he didn’t. Corbyn’s threat to the Establishment has been well and truly neutered and not a single, solitary vote is going to column-bop in their favour because the Bearded One now has to stand (and probably win) as an Independent, but the cruelty is the point for those gobshites. Plus, and this is the key goal behind all of the relentless factional brutality of the last three years, they now get to spend countless man-hours and oodles of scarce Party funds scouring the social media accounts of insufficiently craven members and genuinely left-wing MPs looking for the slightest whisper of a glint of sympathy for old Jezza in order to ‘justify’ another orgy of suspension, investigation and expulsion in the run-up to the Election.
The way they’ve mistreated Corbyn is abominable, but the way they handled this is almost worse because it’s also so stupid and only appeals to a tiny sliver of factional bombards anyway. Despite the talking points their legion of bored interns are instructed to spew online, they didn’t ban Corbyn from standing because of how he responded to the 2020 Equalities and Human Rights Commission report into antisemitism in the Labour Party. They couldn’t, because, 1) He was 100% right in what he said, 2) The EHRC itself said his words were a perfectly acceptable example of protected political speech, 3) The recent Forde Report Sir Plastic himself commissioned confirmed that Corbyn was right in what he said, and 4) Accusing him of tolerating antisemitism in an official Labour Party proceeding would leave the Party wide open to legal action and allow Corbyn’s legal team to take the question out of newspaper comment pages and into a courtroom, which the Cult of St Blair the Disrespected DO NOT WANT, because they’d lose. They also couldn’t go with the word-garbling bullshit about Corbyn supporting Putin’s assault on Ukraine they were forced to fall back on when the Forde Report cut the feet out from under their smears about antisemitism, because that was another indefensible lie that, again, could be shown in court to be clear defamation of character. Sir Plastic may be a two-faced lying creep with the charisma of a leaky water-bottle half filled with lukewarm granny piss, but he passed the Bar exam, and as a lawyer he knows the difference between a media hatchet job and legally challengeable claims on official documents.
Anyway, what this meant was the NEC had to go with the ridiculous “Oh, the scale of the 2019 defeat shows he’s a drag on our electability and so can’t stand as a Labour MP” excuse, which is hot garbage for lots of reasons. But leaving aside the actual causes of Labour’s 2019 defeat, the low-rent cocktail party assassins Sir Plastic surrounds himself with couldn’t help but shake and spray a can of carbonated malice all over the Party’s nice, clean lederhosen when they decided to time their Corbyn-bashing announcement for the very same day that Ed Miliband, former Labour Leader and current Shadow Environment Minister was making a big speech touting Nu-Lab’s Green policies and attacking the Tories.
Now, they’ve never been comfortable with Miliband, who their faction didn’t want as leader back in 2010 and who they blame for the democratising changes in Labour’s internal election system that allowed Corbyn to beat them, twice. They much preferred his elder brother, the smarmy, Centrist one who trotted off to America rather than serve in his brother’s cabinet and currently has almost as many incredibly well renumerated ‘advisory’ and ‘executive’ roles on various private equity, corporate and lobbying boards as Tony Blair, so, yeah, definite Nu-Labour pedigree right there. You get the definite impression that they see the still quite well-liked Miliband as a potential future rival to their figurehead’s Absolute Power, so bigfooting his actually rather important speech about environmental issues with Corbyn’s defenestration was their way of splatting two heads with one shit.
Obviously, Miliband couldn’t regurgitate the nonsense excuse about having to dump people out of the Party who lost elections, because back in 2015 he made the mistake of listening to the geniuses now advising Sir Plastic and crashed to a defeat that was, in many ways, worse than 2019. If he tried to argue that Corbyn couldn’t be an MP because of 2019, the Media, who have more or less moved on from their ‘Stop The Evil Red Hitler’ narrative now that it’s served its purpose, would have just asked him the obvious question “Then how come you haven’t been kicked out yet, Ed?” and that would have been him splashed across the front pages for a day or two of humiliation. So, put on the spot, he fell back on the discredited antisemitism smear, which is doubly disgusting and hypocritical because Corbyn was one of the MPs who most strongly condemned the Tory Media’s disgusting antisemitic attacks on Miliband’s father back when ‘Red Ed’ was the target of the Right’s smear-cannon. The creeps at Nu-Lab Central who arranged all this must have been creaming their lycra pants.
That’s just how the Labour Right always rolls. A thug in the briefing room, a drone in the Commons, and a whore for the boardroom.
Not content with giving the Tories cover with yet another round of one-way factional shit-flinging (I think our lunatic Home Secretary was in bother for saying something stupid/racist and breaking international law that day, nothing for an Opposition Party to bother its empty little head about – rolls eyes), the donut-holes running Nu-Labour then dick-tripped their way into another easily avoidable faceplant over the small matter of Council Tax (locally raised taxes). Thanks to Tory austerity policies, councils across the country have seen their share of funding from central Government slashed over the last 13 years by up to 80% (for Labour-run cities) and have had to make up the shortfall as best they can with Council Tax hikes, which the Tories then turn into campaign fodder (“Look at the Left raising taxes again! Look at how they’re cutting your services! Vote Tory and win a Prime Ministerial favour – wink wink.”) It shouldn’t be beyond the capabilities of even a modestly educated pasta bowl to craft a popular policy for the upcoming local council elections around reversing Tory cuts and giving people more of their tax money back in Services.
It shouldn’t be, but where these fucking gasbags are concerned…
Sir Plastic came out one morning last week to launch Nu-Lab’s campaign with the eye-catching announcement that if he were Prime Minister, apart from the national reserve of permafix hair-gel being tapped as never before, there’d also be an immediate Council Tax freeze for a year, which sounded wonderful for about 20 seconds, but then there was an uncomfortable silence as people waited for the other shoe to drop. Would his hypothetical Government be making up the shortfall? How were councils supposed to fund local services? No answers from Sir Plastic, that’s not what he’s there for. He’d moved his oral cavity in the advised manner and made the noises his advisors told him played well with the all-important focus groups, job done, surely?
It got worse when the Party Chair, Annalise Dodds, about whom I have very little to say because she’s just so ‘Meh’, went on fucking Talk TV (Murdoch’s foetal Fox News clone that only half a dozen people watch, and then only because they’re in straitjackets and the asylum guards are messing with them) to say that the Council Tax freeze wasn’t actually going to happen in the first year of any future Nu-Labour Government, if at all, since the Shadow Cabinet hadn’t even discussed it. And then, and then, the cherry on top of this fetid meringue of utter incompetence, Sir Plastic took time out of a campaign foray to tell the Media that, nooooo, his absolutely firm promise (repeated, BTW, in an e-mail sent out to every Party member) wasn’t just a baseless hypothetical, because not only would it be paid for with a one-off windfall tax on Energy companies (which I have no problem with at all, except, well, that’s like the fifth or sixth short-term fix Nu-Labour have said will be funded by money clawed back from an entirely hypothetical pot of about £10 billion rather than general taxation) the Government could just steal the idea from them and implement it right now! See? See? Wait, why are you laughing? You can’t laugh at me, I’m a serious politician. Look at how serious my face is. Look at my furrowed brow!!
This, in a nutshell, is how crap Nu-Lab are at basic politics. I’m no political genius (you could tell that, right?) and I’ve been saying for years that if the Nu-Lab excuse for not having any policies other than “What the Government said, only better run” is that the Tories would just steal them (which they do, when they’re popular policies cribbed from the 2017 and 2019 Labour manifestos) then they should bloody well weaponise that. Announce a policy and, while you’re announcing it, DEMAND THE TORIES STEAL IT! Keep on doing that, build a narrative, get the credit for making good policy while painting the Tories as dried-up nothings who can’t come up with anything decent themselves. It says a lot about Nu-Lab that when they DO sort of try to apply this pretty basic idea, they fuck it up so badly. They’d already got beaten up and laughed at for trailing a hypothetical centre-right policy they had no plans to implement, whipping out the genius “A-Ha! What you didn’t know was that we meant the Tories should steal this policy off us!” line 24 hours later is a loser move because IT’S TOO LATE AND NO ONE IS LISTENING ANY MORE!
Oh, and while Nu-Labour were metaphorically scourging their own nuts with handfuls of stinging nettles, they were, once again, providing valuable cover for the Tories who would otherwise have had a couple of days being asked about, 1) the optics of Rishi Sunak (or his wife) paying for an otherwise unaffordable upgrade to his community’s local electricity grid so that it was capable of meeting the demands of his heated swimming pool, 2) ex-ministers, including the Disaster Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, asking for large fees just to appear on TV only a few days after a brilliant video sting by the Led By Donkeys activist group saw the same ex-ministers asking for £10,000 a day in order to ‘advise’ a fake South Korean company on how to lobby the Government, and 3) crazy Kemi Badenoch, the ambitious Business Secretary, lying through her gritted fangs about the (non-existent) benefits of the UK joining the trans-Pacific trade deal while ordering the Media to stop going on about Brexit.
Sigh. And it gets worse.
The most unforgivable self-own came a few days ago. After years of insisting that Nu-Labour can’t give any fodder to the Tory Press by saying much of anything in support of ‘divisive’ issues like fair pay, equality and diversity, predatory private landlords, arms sales to dictatorships, public sector strikes, etc, etc, there’s evidently been a change of heart in Sir Plastic’s conclave of handlers. Not about speaking out strongly in favour of working people or minorities or international law or any of those faffy Woke Agenda shibboleths, hell no, they’re not insane. Apparently, though, it’s now okay to rattle the cages with online ads attacking the Tories on a range of issues dear to the blackened hearts of the Daily Mail/Daily Express/The Sun devouring sections of the electorate.
Morgan McSweeney, the creep who was made Nu-Labour’s Executive Director of Elections and Campaigning (despite, or because of, his Blairite front group Labour Together working ceaselessly to undermine the previous leadership and being fined £800,000 by the Electoral Commission in 2021 for failing to reveal who its donors were) has evidently won the battle to decide between going high or sinking low, with a series of online adverts that ask a rhetorical question, frex “Do you think thieves should be punished?” or “Do you think it’s right to raise taxes for working people when your family benefited from a tax loophole?”, over a campaign style shot of a grinning Sunak, with the tagline “Rishi Sunak Does”. Pretty basic, yeah? All themed to present the Tories as soft on criminal behaviour while presenting Nu-Labour as the real Party of Law’n’Order. Your typical centre-right Tough Daddy posturing, though the tax-loophole one, aimed as it is directly at the forehead of Sunak’s billionaire non-dom wife and her tax avoiding ways, has my seal of approval.
The advert that has generated the most heat and a mile-wide avalanche of pushback from across the political spectrum, though, thus rendering the rest of them effectively irrelevant, is the one they put out saying that Rishi Sunak doesn’t believe in locking up paedophiles, because the arrest and imprisonment rate for kiddie-fiddlers has gone down since 2010. At a time when the Tories themselves are pushing a deeply racist dog-whistle (okay, foghorn) about men in the Muslim community being ‘culturally inclined’ to abuse young white girls, I guess McSweeney thought it was a great idea to insert a wedge-issue between the rabidly racist Tory-leaning voters of certain target seats and the brown man leading the Tory Party.
Where do you even start with how misjudged and shameful this advert is? For a start it’s easily batted-away nonsense that avoids what Sunak’s actually guilty of in favour of diving right into the dung channel and splashing odiferous pig-waste all over the Party that, only a year ago, was tut-tutting at Flobalob for claiming that Starmer was personally responsible for letting Jimmy Saville (imagine Dick Clark, Joe Paterno and Bill Cosby walked into the teleportation pod from The Fly and the resulting mess was played by Crispin Glover at his most malevolently creepy) get away unpunished for his appalling litany of crimes. Hear that hammering and sawing noise? That’s Nu-Labour’s platform from which they could legitimately decry the Tory Party’s habitual reliance on deceitful smears and faked-up misinformation being dismantled and reassembled as a podium their chums in the Media can mount to both-sides absolutely everything from now on. Well done, genius campaigning guru! You really hit that one out of the fucking park, didn’t you?
The crazy thing is, they couldn’t have picked a worse rock upon which to flounder their ship of fools. As Director of Public Prosecutions of the Crown Prosecution Service (third most powerful prosecuting lawyer in the country) Starmer did, at least, head up the organisation that decided not to charge Saville, even if he personally didn’t make that decision. Sunak has been PM for less than a year and an MP for eight and they’re trying to smear him with responsibility for a crap conviction rate going back to 2010? That’s bollocks. Worse than that, when he was DPP of the CPS, Starmer sat on the board that set those sentencing guidelines for paedophiles, the guidelines he’s now trying to blame on a guy who spent those same years over in California and New York getting filthy rich as a banker!
Plus, the actual reason there have been fewer cases brought and convictions sought (well, other than the pressure brought to bear by all the historical child-sex rings that infest the top of the UK’s overwhelmingly ivory-hued Establishment, probably) is because the Tories have austeritied the fuck out of the criminal justice and Police budgets, but we don’t hear a peep from Nu-Lab about that, because they’ve no intention whatsoever of even acknowledging, never mind fixing that particular problem. They just want to look as ‘tough on crime’ as any random 6-year-old in a plastic CHiPS helmet waving a toy gun, who, BTW, is at considerably more risk from the malnutrition, pollution and deprivation caused by the policies both major Parties have pushed for the last forty years than he is from rampaging gangs of dusky paedophiles.
It’s just so shamelessly incompetent. On the one hand they whine that they can’t offer the country anything hopeful or progressive because the Tory Press would just paint it as extreme and drive away normie voters, then they turn around and complain how unfair it is that the Media are attacking them for sinking into the sewer when they never hold the Tories to the same standard. To which I say TORY FUCKING PRESS, YOU MORANS! REMEMBER?
And then there’s the prissy, bullshit response to the quite justified outrage. It’s more or less the same talking-point they came out with to ‘justify’ hounding Corbyn and the Left in general out of the Party. Then it was “We’ve no intention of apologising and if you have a problem with authoritarian bullying, gaslighting the Party membership and our use of kangaroo courts our zero-tolerance of antisemitism, the door is that way.” This time it’s “We’ve no intention of apologising for being blunt, and if you think this is an easily deflected mistake that legitimises racist dog-whistles that law and order doesn’t matter, there’s the door.” It’s a delusional, preening attitude that simply refuses to acknowledge mistakes and aims its poisonous rhetoric not at the firmly Establishment figures accusing them of going too far into the gutter, including former Blair-era Ministers like David Blunkett, but at the people on the Left who are rightly pointing out how it trades in racist tropes. Their rebuttal to every bad review is basically just them spamming out a GIF of Starmer performing a hip thrust, pirouette, strut walk, pause, hair flick, down the camera smoulder, “You’re only jealous of me because I’m fabulous!”, mic-drop, cut to commercials moment, when in reality he’s taken a chin-first header off the catwalk and is lying face down in a pool of blood and snot with his knickers around his ankles.
Wankers.
Anyway. The upthrust of all this is that, in a week where the Tory Party’s former Chair has accused the Home Secretary of pushing racist propaganda, the UK economy has mustered a lower growth rate than Russia, water companies dumping millions of tons of raw sewage into our rivers is back in the news, junior doctors (the people who, along with nurses, keep the NHS functioning) have announced a wave of strike action, Joe Biden has (quite understandably) snubbed the Prime Minister of the ‘foreign policy superpower’ that is the UK by basically demoting him to “that guy I had a coffee with that time”, and a million other cascading fuck-ups in the slow-slow-fast collapse of Great Britain into a Lesser Ireland, His Majesty’s Opposition (and that looks weird written down) have done sweet FA to hold them to account and instead have underlined the growing narrative that no one really has a fucking clue what Nu-Labour or its transparent mirage of a Leader actually stand for other than whatever they think might appeal to a small subsection of voters who may or may not be as racist and homophobic as Nu-Labour’s moronic brain-trust hope they are.
When’s the meteor coming? I for one welcome the arrival of our new catastrophic overlord.
Villago Delenda Est
Goddamn uppity ni*CLANG*s…
Kay
@Baud:
If abortion is murder then anti choice voters believe that tens of millions of women are murderers. Have murdered. Will kill again. They have to.
Villago Delenda Est
@Tony Jay: That’s quite the rant. The two Pitts are probably rolling over at near relativistic speeds in their graves right now.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
Me being a white male has allowed me to be in positions in my life when I saw white men being exactly what you are describing. I saw this attitude in the 7th grade from a white male PE teacher. He didn’t care about your color but he really, really cared that you feared him. He stood us in line, walked down the line and picked up any boy who seemed to not be paying deference to him. By the throat with his hand around it. Off the ground so you were looking him in the face. He did it to the kid next to me and I thought, if he does that to me I’m kicking him in the balls. It wasn’t necessarily a racist thing it was a power, “I’m better than you and you will listen to me” thing. He didn’t pick me up and I’m not black but that is the concept that you are talking about, subservience. Yes he was the teacher but he was one of the worst human beings I’ve ever met. That was what 60+ yrs ago and I have that moment seared into my brain. I can fully imagine seeing that “be fucking subservient to me” far more than once in the life of a black person in this country/world. And I saw it in the military as well, not to that degree but I saw it. There were people that out ranked you who treated you with respect because they knew that it was respect for the uniform, not the asshole inside, that we were to follow. And there were people that deserved a kick to the groin for thinking the opposite.
WaterGirl
@MelissaM: I noticed that, too, but I couldn’t figure out how to work it into the post! Glad I’m not the only one who thought that. :-)
E.
Hello all, just here to say that anyone looking for a little energy boost should really take a listen to the audio linked by Scout211 at comment #6 above. It’s delightful listening.
WaterGirl
@Kay:
Yes!
Jackie
@Eolirin: There’s a leaked audio with the GQP Tennessee state house members squabbling about double crossing; apparently one of the repugs changed their vote, thus failing to expel that white woman “insurrectionist.”
WaterGirl beat me by a mile! Drat the unfair time distance between ET and PT!😉
Kay
@Baud:
Alternately, and there’s only one other possibility than “murderer”, they believe women are so stupid, so easily led and incapable of managing their own lives that they are being tricked into getting an abortion.
You can’t be anti choice and think well of women, because unless they outlaw abortions women keep getting abortions, which in the anti choice theory means they’re all either monsters or morons. The commonality is not gender- it’s disdain for and distrust of women.
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: So you are saying that women who are pro-life and vote for Republicans disdain other women.
Kay
@WaterGirl:
It comes out in surveys of attitudes toward womens rights more broadly. You see that anti choice voters have a whole host of negative opinions about women. They’re consistent.
It’s really foundational to the legislation too. “Women are liars” is the assumption the laws start with. Why can’t they have a rape exception? Because women lie about rape. Why can’t they have a health of the mother exception? Because women lie about their health.
C Stars
@E.: Delightful is not how I would describe it, but they do seem like a tangle of brain-dead vipers.
Burnspbesq
@Kay:
I’ve been to Crossville (there’s an Electrify America EV charging station just off I-40 there). That’s not hard to understand.
Will
It’s not an iconic photo and it’s not going to change anything in Tennessee. That state is lost for generations.
trollhattan
Did John Doolittle change his name and move to Tennessee?
We exchanged him for Tom McClintock, a hard lesson that the monster you know isn’t necessarily worse than the replacement monster.
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
People who are anti choice have negative/paternalistic views about women across the board. Anti choice views are just one the views they hold in a whole set of consistent negative views – they also believe women lie and exaggerate workplace discrimination claims, make false rape allegations, are easily tricked by clever men into having sex or taking birth control or having an abortion, receive jobs or promotions they haven’t earned and on and on.
Tony Jay
@Villago Delenda Est:
We could use them to hit our green energy targets.
E.
@C Stars: Okay so different strokes. I personally get delight from the Racism Forever crowd shitting the bed and suspect others share my little thrill.
Chyron HR
@Will:
Are you folding your arms when you say this, with a sour frown, perhaps looking slightly downward in disdain? Just an image that came to my mind for some reason.
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
It shocks even me how stupid they think women are, because to believe that women are being tricked into an abortion means women really can’t handle managing any of their healthcare. Someone smart and devious could trick me into removing my eye rather than just getting an eye exam! I better take a man along to supervise. God knows what I’ll get up to alone.
delphinium
@Kay:
And yet these same assholes then think that these “stupid” women should be raising a bunch of kids? (without any kind of governmental support of course). Also, funny that these coveters have to continually lie about fetal development and the real potential harm/death from pregnancy in order to push their “strongly-held beliefs”.
RedDirtGirl
@Tony Jay: I followed most of that, but would love more background on the smear of Corbyn. I sort of bought into the charges of anti-semitism that I had read about over the years, although I clearly didn’t do a deep dive.
And who is Sir Plastic?
Ruckus
@E.:
They still shit the bed.
Because they think shitting the bed is fine and what they get to do. It’s not their bed they are shitting in. They don’t understand better, they don’t want better, they like being the shitholes they are.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Kay:
This. I’ll add that they still maintain that slut/mother dicotomy. If she was raped, she’s a slut. Otherwise, she’d already be married and happily producing many white babies for her man.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
FWIW, I think they did look like racists, and that’s a problem for them, too. It says a lot about them that they’re choosing to focus on racism rather than them being heartless apologists for the gun industry. I assume that’s because “he makes us look like racists” is something that plays well to the Republican base, while “we did nothing after a bunch of White kids were murdered in a Christian school” does not.
I would object to saying he made them look like racists, though. They made themselves look like racists, probably because they are racists. He may have provided the pretext, but nothing he did forced them to act that way. “He made me look racist” is a racist’s way of blaming someone else for their own misdeeds. That’s exactly why it plays so well with the Republican base: so many of them have said that exact thing.
RaflW
@patrick II: We all hope the next generation will be better, but it is Tennessee.
TN is still strongly majority white, but it’s decreasing. And a LOT of young people have been at the capitol, repeatedly, since that recent school shooting.
From Univ. of TN, Knoxville, crunching census data:
Unfortunately, the GOP-locked legislature will continue to draw district maps, both for state and federal elections, that really dilute the voting power of the more progressive and diverse cities.
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
After Coney-Barrett was confirmed there was lots of polling on abortion and one of the polls that interested me was a poll of just anti choice voters. They want women punished criminally for an abortion by big margins- 65%. Of course they do. If you actually believe abortion is murder you have to, unless you believe women are so much not “people” that they have no agency at all- not even the agency or capacity to commit a crime. Murderers OR morons/children. I think I actually prefer the anti choicers who think women are murderers rather than the anti choicers who think millions of women are children. The first at least gives us credit for some level of adult agency.
Tony Jay
@RedDirtGirl:
I think Al Jazeera cover most of it here. Funnily enough none of the British media outlets who spent years howling about the threat posed by The Red Hitler have thought it worth their time to mention any of it. Can’t think why. /s
And Sir Plastic is what I call Sir Keir Starmer, the current Nu-Labour figurehead. Because he’s so transparently awful.
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
I said abortion voters. They could also be voting for Republicans because they don’t care about abortion/womens rights and they like tax cuts, or their parents always voted Republican, or they vote based on whiteness and most white people vote Republican. You won’t reach them at all with abortion, men or women.
But pro choice/anti choice voters break down not along gender lines but along negative views about women lines.
RedDirtGirl
@Tony Jay: Thanks!
StringOnAStick
@Tony Jay: One of my close friends has a British friend that she considered moving in with and fake claiming marriage in order to escape the rising tide of fascism here. I had been reading your rants and passing on a summary, when her British friend then made it clear that moving to the Queen’s isle was going not just from the frying pan and into the fire, but diving straight into the hottest coal in the pile.
Sorry for you, your family and your Murdoch media infested country; I appreciate your rants and abhor what caused them.
delphinium
@Kay:
It is always interesting how women’s agency changes for them: It is the woman’s (or child’s) responsibility to avoid being raped by not dressing a certain way, flirting, drinking too much, fighting back enough, etc. But once pregnant, the woman/child suddenly has no agency and must submit to whatever some unrelated RW representative or nut job coveter believes regardless of whether is is medically sound. Then of course, once the baby is born, the woman/child once again has agency and must care for and bring up their child in the right manner without provided assistance.
rikyrah
The attacks on the Justins in Social Media is that the way they talk is ‘ phony’
Jones is originally from California. But, he went to Fisk University and is now in Vanderbilt Divinity School.
How he speaks makes absolute sense to me.
They also love showing a picture from Pearson from when he was a student a Bowdoin College, running for Student Government.
Pearson, born and raised in Memphis – is a Preacher’s Kid – 2 times over (BOTH of his parents are ministers). That he speaks the way he does…he’s heard it his entire life. They are so mad that both Justins know how to Code Switch.
They can stay mad…LOL
Yesterday, one of those phucking bigots was trying to justify the horrible bill by stating that he was ‘ following the Bible’.
Then, Justin Jones broke out with Scripture and Verse, calling him out for his hatred and bigotry. Jones was called ‘ Out of Order’. For what? Telling the truth.
Scout211
@Kay: New polling by Gallup is encouraging, though. As the laws get more restrictive, the percentage of people dissatisfied with the laws increases. And now is at an all-time high.
. . .
Tony Jay
@StringOnAStick:
Ah, we’ll be okay. If all else fails we can just claim to be the long-lost kin of Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. Then we’re Texas’ problem.
patrick II
After that photo, Cameron Sexton should legally change his name to Pontius Pilate
Another Scott
Meanwhile, Phys.org:
(Emphasis added.)
Worth a click.
VoteRiders used to be my Amazon Smile charity. Since Amazon killed that program, I give to VoteRiders monthly now. They do good work.
I’m not surprised by the findings – these laws are working as designed. And they need to be repealed and we need uniform federal voting standards.
Cheers,
Scott.
Tony Jay
@RedDirtGirl:
De nada.
I may also have had something to say on the topic around this gaff. Occasionally.
delphinium
@rikyrah:
They always use the cover of ‘the Bible’ for their heinous shit because they know they can’t say the real reasons for their actions, which pretty much always boil down to hate, racism, and misogny.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Trump is a buffoon but he had good instincts for working a crowd, mirroring its anger and fear back to it, even though he personally seems has no core beliefs other than that he’s the center of the universe and should be entitled to all the things.
In 2016 when a pundit asked Trump if he thought women who had abortions should be punished, he said something like, duh, yeah, you have to punish the women!
Like you said, it’s logical if you believe people who have or perform abortions are murdering babies, so when simulating the anti-choice position, Trump fucked up and followed their logic to its ultimate conclusion. He had to walk it back .
Another Scott
Meanwhile, Science.org – Now we know why hibernating bears don’t get blood clots:
I wonder how Stephen Colbert would cover this news…
Cheers,
Scott.
Gretchen
On that secret tape of TN legislators arguing about the expulsion vote, one guy says he can’t stand seeing Jones walking in *these hallowed halls* in this great country that his daddy defended in WWII. It bothers him that those black guys can even be there. And they’re worried that the vote makes them *look* racist.
Betsy
@Kay: You are always right in your assessments, but with this you are even more correct than usual!
Sister Golden Bear
Meanwhile Missouri’s Republican AG effectively just banned gender affirming care for most trans ADULTS as of April 27 under an emergency rule. Good thread explaining this.
Much like the tactics Republicans are using for abortion, it technically remains legal, but imposes such onerous restrictions that no one can actually get it. It’s the first ban nationwide, but it certainly won’t be the last. This is what #TransGenocide looks like.
It also bans trans medical care for trans person suffering depression — which isn’t uncommon because 1) being gender dysphoric is depressing, and 2) living in a world where Republicans are trying eliminate trans people is depressing.
It also bans trans health care for people diagnosed with autism, which is infantilizing, by saying they can’t give consent to their own bodies.
Aside from those transitioning, trans people whose bodies no longer produce our own hormones — and are currently receiving hormone replacement therapy — will now face long-term risks of osteoporosis and other health problems.
Both abortion and trans healthcare are about bodily autonomy, which Republicans are taking away.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Chris Matthews. I hate Tweety as much as anybody– it was finding people who found him as repellently fascinating as I did that led me into this whole “blog commenting” thing, but he was on a similar buffoonish wavelength with The Beast that could lead trump to revealing things like that
It was Tweety who made the appropriately gross– both for the observer and the observed– observation that trump “listens with his tongue”, he gauges his rhetoric on the response he gets in real time. As I recall he thought both “the wall” and “drain the swamp” were dumb when his advisors proposed them, then he fell in love with the response he got for both
brendancalling
@Other MJS: I think they were armed, some of them.
delphinium
@Another Scott:
Yeah, I remember hearing that WI closed or severely restricted the open hours of DMV locations in Dem heavy districts. Also TX (and perhaps other states too) that allows handgun licenses to be used for voting id but not student ids. We definitely need to overcome this in future elections.
brendancalling
@Eolirin: I know Gloria, and she is FIERCE. She helped me when I needed to apply for my covid benefits. She has been calling out the GOP for their racism too, including asking “why didn’t they expel me, what’s different about me?” and it’s been a lot of fun.
Betsy
@MelissaM: There are rules about where flowers belong and it’s not in statehouses. The White House, the governor’s mansion, yes — those are residences. But this seems weird like they’re trying to emulate a house-of-worship setting in the legislative chamber. It’s weird. It’s a work chamber where business is done. That’s not where vases of flowers go.
They could go in the lobby of the building or something, that’s different.
Basically — WHERE IS EDITH WHARTON WHEN YOU NEED HER???
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
Telling the truth.
They know the truth. It’s just that if they tell the truth it takes away every last scrap of their power/bullshit/lives. It makes them like everyone else. Their power is in being white males, take that away and their egos have nothing to stand on. Elon is a perfect example of this. His whiteness and money make him special. And he may not even be all that obviously racist but he grew up in a place that may have been worse than the US in racism/white power and it’s exploitation, South Africa.
twbrandt
@Tony Jay: an acquaintance of mine is seriously considering moving from Scotland to the US. I look at all the awful stuff going on here and wonder why on Earth he wants to move here.
And then I read your rants and understand more of his motivations.
Paul in KY
@Tony Jay: Whew! Thanks for the update, Tony. Is Arsenal beginning to sweat a bit?
Betsy
@WaterGirl: just saw your comment after replying to Melissa.
Sandia Blanca
@MelissaM: The thing that first struck me about the photo is that Rep. Jones looks like he’s on the cross, and that Sexton is the cross.*
*He is from Crossville, right?
Betsy
@delphinium: Don’t you know that raising kids is an easy task, just need some dumb female instincts and you’re good to go. 👍
(Kinda like teaching school!)
Paul in KY
@schrodingers_cat: And themselves, and blacks and poor and so on and so on…
Edit: Also ‘pro-life’ is usually said around here as ‘anti-choice’ :-)
Paul in KY
@RaflW: The day Tennessee votes Democratic will be the day I have officially seen it all…
I sure hope to see it, though.
Tony Jay
@twbrandt:
Aye. Even if it gets its independence, Scotland is going to have a hell of a time of it. I can well understand someone wanting to get the hell away from this toxic island.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Biden mania sweeping Ireland (photo 1) (photo 2)
Tony Jay
@Paul in KY:
I hope not. They’re an exciting young team and they’re not Citeh, so I’m cheering them on.
Then again, even if they do get pipped at the post it’s only a temporary wait for the title that’ll come when Citeh get nailed for lying about their finances and stripped of all their titles and trophies from the last decade.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
It’s foundational to all kinds of anti-women attitudes, not just abortion related. They don’t take any women’s issues- rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment, etc.- seriously. They claim women are making it all up.
WaterGirl
@Betsy: I’m a little confused because I didn’t think I had expressed that thought anywhere, so I was glad that you had. ?
rikyrah
@Sister Golden Bear:
they stated that this was about THE CHILDREN.
of course, that was bullshyt.
they blew right into hurting ADULTS.
WaterGirl
@Roger Moore: Not to mention doctors who either don’t believe women or don’t take them seriously!
siddhartha
It is clear (and probably has been for years now since I’ve been reading this blog since before ABL had to fight these SAME battles) that BJ is a space for white women. WOC must plead, argue, suggest, implore, and explain things that, at this point, anyone who claims to be a feminist should have internalized. There is CENTURIES worth of research, teaching, activism out there. And yet, white women in this space blithely persist, as though one even has any ability to talk about gender UNLESS one ALSO analyzes race, sexuality, etc., which are INSEPARABLE.
Schrodinger’s Cat, you are absolutely correct. White women as a voting bloc have consistently upheld white supremacy. White men cannot perpetuate white supremacy without white women, who are both agents and beneficiaries. White women as a voting bloc have consistently chosen their own diminution and subjection FOR white supremacy. (What a telling picture given who is around DeSantis.) Election strategies are created and geared for white women as a voting bloc. WOC in building coalitions with white women have to fear what white women will consider too much and withdraw their support. Some WOC have experienced the worst discrimination from white women who voted for Obama.
It is not possible to talk about women. That experience is inherently raced. Just as the experience of race is inherently gendered.
We can focus on stereotypes of “women” as liars, untrustworthy, etc. as though these apply to or play out universally to all women, which they do not. People certainly do not have a problem believing white women (or their famous tears) when it comes to “a black man kidnapped my children” or “a black man raped me” (centuries of lynching) or a “black man is threatening me” (by asking me to leash my dog) or “a black woman is being aggressive, angry, and mean.”
But let’s continue the discussion about abortion as though one of the most CRUCIAL issues is not the pending minority status of the white population and the “replacement” by the hordes. And how racism is at the crux of the “pro-life” evangelical movement. Or as though white PEOPLE would not have abortion clinics at every street corner if it were just about black women. Hell, black women would be driven to those clinics in limousines.
I will say this: most of the WOC I have known over decades of doing this work (research, teaching, activism, FOUNDING the fields of critical race theory, intersectional feminism, nonwestern feminism, etc.) say that they would rather deal with white men of any stripe than allegedly liberal white women. The reasons for this (social, political, historical, etc.) are pretty well-documented. But let’s proceed (because we took a class in law school) rather than internalize what WOC are saying in THIS VERY SPACE (and then do the research) as though one is a finished product of history because one is a “feminist” or votes for democrats.
It’s “not ALL white women” for me, but “all women” for thee because WOC are apparently just a subset of the (unmarked, unnamed, white) norm.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
The first time I read a (then proposed) Ohio anti choice statute I thought “that’s odd- they’ve disappeared the pregnant person in this law”. She’s just not there. It’s fetus/infant and doctor/provider. She’s a mute, mindless vessel who apparently wandered into the abortion clinic thinking it was a laundromat.
I loved when Trump was asked about punishing women and he was “hell yes! hang the bitch!” (paraphrasing!) because I think that’s the logical extension of what he was told, which is it’s murder. He doesn’t know he’s supposed to feign concern for the mother :)
Kay
@siddhartha:
But white women don’t vote as a bloc. If they did 55% of them wouldn’t vote for Democrats.
leeleeFL
@Tony Jay: I got about half-way thru your AMAZING rant and really had to stop and get ready for work! I will finish it over the next few days! You are an absolutely fantastic writer, Sir, and I enjoy your informative rants!
Eolirin
@RaflW: I would settle for their senate seats.
We have enough population in blue states that we can make a go at winning the house even with red state gerrymandering. And if we can hold it with enough senators we can fix the gerrymandering.
The senate is going to be the real problem. Even if we have a functional lock on the Presidency by shoring up our margins in the midwest and Nevada and adding Arizona, Georgia and maybe North Carolina on top of that, and even if we can consistently hold the house, holding 50 Senate seats will still be a heavy lift.
Manchin and Sinema kneecapped us during the best window are likely to have for a decade on voting rights changes. If we’re supremely lucky we manage to get Gallego in AZ and hold every single at risk seat we have this cycle (minus Manchin because I don’t think he has a chance in hell of holding his seat), win the House back and pray there aren’t any other secretly against killing the filibuster on voting rights Senators who were using Manchin and Sinema as cover. Otherwise our next best chance will be after a Biden second term, given the senate maps we’re looking at for the next few cycles. We have very few pickup opportunities and a number of hard to hold seats.
Kay
@siddhartha:
Well, 45% of them nationally, probably a majority in Florida with DeSantis. Anytime you add “as a voting bloc” you’re always going to be talking percentages and then you’re going to immediately run into the Hispanic vote, which often approaches 50/50 and was actually a majority DeSantis. These are the numbers.
trollhattan
It’s abundantly clear a whole lot of things must align in order to retain the senate, much less regain congress. I’m more confident in a Biden reelection than I am of winning either the senate or house.
Paul in KY
@Tony Jay: My wife is big Arsenal fan. I love Saka. What a great young player.
Eolirin
@siddhartha: I am broadly sympathetic to this, but it’s also still white men that are the core problem, both by voting patterns and actual power. White women would not be able to benefit from white supremacy either if white men abandoned it. They need each other for it.
Doesn’t abdicate the responsibility of white women to be better, but white men are even worse, statistically speaking. They’re the top of the shitpile that everything rolls down.
EntroPi
Since it’s an open thread…
I’m in Providence, RI. About 3, maybe 4 (depending on how you count) blocks from this incident:
https://www.golocalprov.com/news/police-officers-injured-in-gun-incident-involving-reported-gang-members-at
that park has at least a few “gun related incidents” every year. Last one over New Years, that I remember
On the other hand, one block in the opposite direction is our current Secretary of Commerce’s former house.
It’s a “fancy” neighbourhood. But still we have had multiple people killed by random/drive-by shootings in the past few years.
Not sure how to reconcile these things.
WaterGirl
@siddhartha:
I don’t understand what you are trying to convey in the above paragraph..
Are you saying that racism IS at the crux of the anti-choice evangelical movement?
My (white) sister is rabidly anti-choice and evangelical. I am not aware of race playing a part in that movement. Can you say more about that?
Every rabid anti-choice person I know think it’s murder, and I don’t see them thinking that it’s okay if you’re black. It appears that you believe that the statement to be is true. Can you say more?
Eolirin
@trollhattan: I am too. And the next two maps are nearly as bad; if we suffer actual loses this cycle there’s no way to make up for them for multiple cycles.
WaterGirl
@siddhartha:
I can read the anger and the sarcasm, but I don’t know what you are saying there. I would like to understand what you are saying. Maybe you could rephrase?
rikyrah
@siddhartha:
it’s why I said after the 2016 Election that I blamed White Women.
Nobody said that they had to vote like Black women…
But, it was…when faced with an obviously qualified woman
versus that piece of male human garbage
they chose the male human garbage
The numbers don’t lie.
UncleEbeneezer
I think his track record of Racism and Misogyny suggest that they are indeed core beliefs, not just something he pretends at for popularity. It seems like he will always choose Racism/Misogyny except when he thinks there’s a big and immediate cost to him for doing so.
Kay
@rikyrah:
You blamed the 50% of white women who voted for Clinton for Trump’s win?
rikyrah
@trollhattan:
The House? Yes.
I believe that it being a Presidential year, those GOPers who won in Biden 2020 districts should be worried.
The Senate? sigh.
Paul in KY
@siddhartha: IMO, any woman of any colour who votes GQP is voting for their own diminution & has it in for anyone in any disadvantaged class.
Jeffro
The GOP is going to get CRUSHED in 2024 (assuming they even make it to next year as a party, of course)
Immanentize
I taught Dobbs today to one of my constitutional law sections. One of the advantages of teaching con law is that I get to carefully review and consider very important life changing (for better or, in this case, worse) cases to make sure I am prepared for whatever. The bad part is re-angering myself when I do that.
One of my students came up after class and said, “I know Thomas listed all the things that should fall in light of Dobbs, but Alito syas that nothing in the case should be considered as precedent for any other right. So they wont really over turn the other rights based on substantive due process will they?” It is true that Alito said this in the court’s opinion. My understanding was that it was the price of Kavenaugh’s vote. Even still — oh dear student, my sweet summer child.
scav
Oh, liberal women allegedly vote. And they allegedly show up in women’s marches. And they allegedly are the third member of the Tennessee Three. But none of this counts — sit down, shut up, and the (theoretical) WOC savior will do all as she knows all inerrantly. Not everyone believes in this collaborative listen to alternative viewpoints BS. Pish. (I’m also somewhat concerned how little space that perspective allows for WOC to have individual reactions and opinions and worldviews.) It’s all subsumed in rhetorical flourishes — sortof another one-drop rule. One drop of Caucasian blood dooms a body to political inferiority.
Otherwise, agree it’s a complex mess.
Kay
So if 50% R is a voting bloc for white women what would be the number where they broke that voting bloc? 51%? Would 55% D be a voting bloc the other way? And that’s national. If it’s 70% D women in liberal areas then is that a voting bloc of white women the other way?
Eolirin
@WaterGirl: The history of abortion being turned into an issue amongst the Evangelical community is a direct and explict reaction to desegregation and the removal of tax exempt status for white only Evangelical schools. It was not a concern in the Evangelical community until the mid 70s, being more of a Catholic thing, and definitely not the fanatical no-exception position it is now.
It’s a manufactured wedge issue because the leaders felt they couldn’t say we don’t want blacks in our schools out loud without pushback.
There’s also a significant movement in the white Evangelical and QAnon worlds around replacement theory, of declining white birth rates being a deliberate ploy to eradicate the white race in favor of more rapidly reproducing minorities. And so there’s a strong push to do things to increase white women having more children, all of which have a creepy women as breeding vessels vibe.
This latter position is not as mainstream though. The wedge issue to try to build a coalition that would then be able to undo desegregation was straight from the mainstream leaders of those movements.
Barbara
@siddhartha:
Well, yes. Although I would also say that this is a much more obvious motivation now than it used to be. I don’t think that’s true for all of them — many of them really are motivated by religious dogma, not GRT. For instance, I can remember when anti-choice groups tried to appeal to non-white groups by taking out billboards that referred to abortion as racial genocide based on the disproportionate share of abortions among non-Caucasian women.So, yes, I definitely agree that the “great replacement” hysteria feeds into the desire to restrict abortion, and, basically, coerce white women into having more babies.
But regardless of their motivation — they are restricting abortion for all women, although they are almost certainly making it even less attainable relatively for women whose kids they don’t care about and would wish away if they could. Those are the women who have more difficulty meeting strict deadlines because they have more difficulty raising funds to obtain abortion, which is even more of an issue if they need to travel further, and lose a few days of work in the process. And so on.
Which means that in working to reverse those restrictions we are likely going to help exactly those women who are excessively burdened by those restrictions. What would be unacceptable is to reduce those burdens in a way that mitigate the harm for subgroups. Since I oppose all regulation of abortion that is based on gestational age I wouldn’t want to see that anyway, but any suggested compromise absolutely has to be viewed through the lens of equity and impact on more vulnerable women.
Immanentize
@scav: I really do not believe the one drop rule pertains at all anymore. Back in the worst of the miscegination laws days, the question was “who is black?” One drop of blood, yes, black. Native americans were black, chinese immigrants are black, Hispanics? black. Poles, italians, czechs, hungarians — the n-word. Even Irish immigrants got the “black” treatment.
Now, the question is much more “who is (allowed to be) white?” I think that post WWII gradual acceptance of a number of people who were, yes, black or brown or previously villified, but served in wars, were famous entertainers, were willing to be outright racists themselves were allowed into the “who is white” club. Ali Alexander? white, Tario? whitest of white. Herman Cain, Tim Scott, Candace Owens — all in the white club.
But Barak Obama is still black.
The modern world is much more complicated for racists, I fear.
Eolirin
@rikyrah: I feel like this puts way too much responsibility on women for the shitty behavior of men, and I’m really not down with it. If white men were closer to 50/50, white women wouldn’t need to have done any better than they did in 2016. It’s that 60-40 or better that lets the GOP win.
Men were presented with the same choice, and we shouldn’t dismiss their agency in not choosing the qualified woman over the clown. They failed the test even more.
prostratedragon
@Will:
Well, not compared to this: Oh wait!
Kay
70% of white women in Massachusetts voted for Clinton in 2016 so it seems inaccurate to include them (just as an example) in our “white women GOP voting bloc”.
Tony Jay
@leeleeFL:
And they say hate is a non-productive emotion. Pffffft. Take that, Yoda. 8-)
@Paul in KY:
Whisper it, he’s the natural replacement for Salah when he eventually hangs up his booties.
Paul in KY
@rikyrah: This is true.
Geminid
@trollhattan: I’m not worried about the House. I think Democrats will pick up 20 to 30 House seats in 2024, and more if Trump is on the ballot
Paul in KY
@Kay: We are blaming the other 50% that voted for Cheetolini. I’m blaming any POS that voted for that scumbag.
Immanentize
@Kay: This is such a great observation, I think. What does a block mean? Brooks today called the current Republican party one of “populism and working class voters.” Not empirically true, unless we all just accept that the “white” is silent before “working class.”
Betty
@Scout211: I read that it is for his new family. Old wife not pleased.
Paul in KY
@Immanentize: They are so cute & optimistic at that age…
Immanentize
@Kay: YAY FOR THE MASSHOLES!
Kay
@Eolirin:
It’s not “50-50” anyway in any way that counts when counting Presidential votes anyway. It’s 70/30 in liberal states (or liberal cities within red or swing states) 45/55 in Ohio and probably 50/50 in Wisconsin.
I’m not arguing with Cat that white supremacy doesn’t exist – I’m arguing with her that white women vote as a bloc. They just don’t.
Barbara
@Kay: All statistics on how white people vote are significantly skewed by the grossly disproportionate white support of Republican candidates in Southern and mountain states. The numbers are much closer in many states. Not all white people vote based on their white identity.
Kay
@Immanentize:
Most of the white men in Mass voted for Clinton too, but white women are REALLY Democratic there, and I think Cat lives in Mass. If I’m not mistaken.
Paul in KY
@Immanentize: I don’t think the poor Irish immigrants back in 19th and early 20th century really got the ‘Black Treatment’. They got a good taste of it at one time & in certain sections of the country, but they were still white & if they could fake an accent, they could pass for a ‘better’ white, etc. etc.
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: In Massachusetts a majority of white men voted for Hillary Clinton as well. We are talking about national averages here. If the rest of the country voted like Massachusetts we would be the one of the most progressive countries on the planet
Immanentize
@Paul in KY: I know, and I fear that my experienced, jaded views may feel like bitterness to them. Too bad, they need a little shake up.
I was reviewing my old con law exams and in 2020! my final law exam asked students to analyze whether a pending state law attempting to ban the sale of mifepristone violated the constitution. I think I deserve some credit for knowing which way the wind was blowing, even if it includes a cynical edge. No weatherman was involved.
Paul in KY
@Immanentize: Herman Cain, Tim Scott, Candace Owens are more like ‘useful idiots’, to me.
Baud
Where the white women at?
Eolirin
@Kay: Voting for Democrats is not the standard. Voting and more importantly behaving in ways that undo the effects of White Supremacy is.
And even when electing liberal politicians, white men and women in most parts of the country tend to be bad about that. We don’t need to “not all white women” this; it’s indisputable fact that there are a bunch of shitty racist white women. And they’re part of what holds power and oppresses both minorities and also women. I really don’t think there’s space to disagree with that.
I personally think it’s more effective to focus on men, because if you fix that so much else gets fixed along with it, but women are still people, and people are still frequently awful.
Immanentize
@Paul in KY: If you are a Michael Harriot fan, or even if not — this is a nice article about the Irish, “NINA” laws and general comparisons to blacks.
When the Irish Weren’t White
True, it was much easier to pass, but still, just like italians, slavs, greeks and other immigrants, the Irish had their “they are legally black” moments.
The Lodger
@Will: There were probably a lot of photos taken in Tennessee in the 60s that looked just like it.
UncleEbeneezer
According to Pew Research Validated Voter Poll, the gold standard of election polling because it uses an actual dataset of verified voter results, White Women in:
2016 chose Trump 47%, Hillary 45% (the rest going to Johnson/Stein)
2020 chose Trump 53%, Biden 46% (no significant 3rd Party choice)
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
But even with national averages it’s most white women. A majority. So tell me when it’s a “bloc”. A majority isn’t a bloc, so what is? 55% Because now you’re headed toward Latino numbers.
Again- all I’m objecting to is your insistence that white women vote as a bloc – I’m assuming your belief is white women vote as a bloc for white supremacy rather than as a bloc for their own rights hence the constant challenge to me on why they don’t vote as a bloc for abortion rights. My answer is always the same. They don’t vote as a bloc. Because if “white woman” was the determining factor – the only commonality- we wouldn’t see 70% in Mass or 60% in Columbus OH.
You can’t just exclude liberal states from your theory. That’s tens of millions of whte women you’re making no effort to explain and they seem to contradict your theory.
Barbara
@Immanentize: Oh it most definitely is used as a short hand to mean working class white men who don’t have college degrees. It doesn’t mean women doing hourly paid service jobs and it definitely doesn’t include the many non-white men who also work in hourly based occupations, whether construction, manufacturing or something else. It’s infuriating.
schrodingers_cat
@Paul in KY: Yes.
The Pale Scot
HMMmmm……
Seems like a job for Deepfake……….. and Pornhub
Paul in KY
@Tony Jay: I, personally, would rather see him at Liverpool than at Arsenal.
Immanentize
@Kay: Yes Cat, I believe, lives in the unpopulated, unsophisticated wilds of western Mass; unlike Erudite Enlightenment fellows with penises like me.
Actually, I do agree that the women in Massachusetts are very Democratic voters. This is not only true now because of the last President and the current Court. It is an FDR thing, then of course, as is often said,
“They don’t make ’em like the Kennedys anymore.”
Immanentize
@Eolirin: But I think voting for Democrats is a pretty good stand in these days.
Kay
@Eolirin:
Absolutely. But that’s a different argument. It’s not the argument Cat makes. Cat says if white women voted as a bloc for Democrats Republicans would never win again, with the implication (I think, and I’m fine with itif that’s her belief) that they are not voting as a bloc for abortion rights because they are voting as a bloc for white supremacy. So I’m asking what counts as a bloc.
scav
@Immanentize: I was referring to a more allegorical one drop rule where that caucasian taint means your political body & views are assumed to be vile and aimed at subjugation, no matter what one’s actions and voting history actually were.
Who gets to be “racially” what is a real issue and games do get played. The whole are Jews, Eastern Europeans, the Irish is a top-tier example with obvious national political import. But it gets played with castes and accusations of being oreos etc, with real impact depending on exact context and scale. The who’s in who’s out game as though it could be resolved with binaries.
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: In the 2020 elections 55% white women voted for Trump.
You have the number backwards.
Last time I checked 55 >50
Eolirin
@Kay: Cool, I wasn’t responding to you there though, and the context in which I was responding was the national averages. Getting to 50-50 nationally on the white male vote means a reduction of white male assholeishness in areas where white men are particularly awful.
And there are blocs, they’re just not “all” white men/women. They’re college educated urban vs high school rural, and no religious affiliation vs white Evangelical, married vs single, with additional breakdowns across gender. But that’s a lot of words to have to include every time you want to talk about what end up being large fractions of the electorate, and the context makes clear that subsets are being discussed anyway.
Immanentize
@scav: This is right on. But I still think the overall conception has moved from defining people out of the group to defining those allowed in the group. I think this might in part be true because of demographic necessities.
Everybody (in law life that is) remembers Harlan’s dissent in Plessy as a great statement about the suffering and necessary of integrationist equality for Black people after the civil war. What we generally were not taught (and still do not all teach) is this part of his dissent:
Eduardo
@schrodingers_cat: Saw this picture in the early am and it shook me. the way they are dressed, the demographics, and the triumphalism — they don’t seem to be actually happy, it seems something else that i can’t quite put in words.
i don’t think i won’t forget that picture. Just like I never forgot when I was calling people to defect an antigay referendum in Miami Dade in 2002 that one lady that told me she was voting for it. She was exquisitely proper, not one word could be characterized as antagonic but the coldness, determination and meanness was all there.
Paul in KY
@Kay: I think a ‘bloc’ can be any particular percentage that reliably votes one particular way. It can be 5% or 33% or whatever.
Immanentize
@Eolirin: I agree that changing the interests/voting patterns of men generally would have more of an impact over time; but I think that given the issues of the day, women (white, hispanic, and other races except perhaps balck which is pretty maximalized) are currently more “getable” than the guys. But I think both genders of the younger votes are moving decisively toward the democrats these days. I will be very interested to see what that might mean for national politics in 20 years down the road.
UncleEbeneezer
@schrodingers_cat: 53% is the figure from the validated voter poll. Still bad, and Trump actually gained votes from White Women from 2016->2020, but lost ground with White Men (many who probably just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary but could do so for Biden).
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
So if it goes to 55% has the bloc flipped for white women? I just want to know the national number, since apparently that’s the only one that counts. Not ever in any real campaign or race, but on this blog, per the theory.
Dangerman
@WaterGirl: Back in the days of Operation Rescue (Randall Terry?), I did Clinic Protection once … and only once. It really wasn’t the thing for my mental well being (such as it is).
One of the most amazing things I saw (and it goes back to that well being thing) is that the OR Folks would go after the Caucasian Women to plead their case …
… and part like the fucking Red Sea if the Woman was African American or Hispanic.
Racism on a scale I couldn’t handle and I only did it once (as noted above).
.
scav
@UncleEbeneezer: Trump seems to have gained in minority support in 2020 as well (mostly black males & Hispanic females apparently). Shit’s complicated.
The Lodger
@Gretchen: The rep said his daddy was part of “D-Day + 4.” I’ve never heard that phrase used to refer to an Allied operation.
Eolirin
@Immanentize: Maybe, but if we aren’t trying we won’t see success either. This is going to be generational no matter what we focus on. We’re not going to have much success trying to change people who are really settled in their identities, it can be done, but it’s slow, hard and very individual, and likely to get lost in the wash of that kind of change going the other direction for other people.
So it’s mostly a play for the youth. And I agree, I think we’re finally getting traction with Gen Z. It’s the most hopeful part of everything we’re facing.
Kay
@Paul in KY:
So if it’s 50% reliable D for white women and 50% reliable R for white women (and it is – across years with +/- 3) then is it a D bloc or an R bloc? Because while “Republicans wouldn’t win w/out white women voters” is true so is “Democrats wouldn’t win without white women voters”. Democrats also wouldn’t win without their 35/45 of white men voters, incidentally. The whole “wouldn’t win w/out” doesn’t mean much.
Immanentize
Here is my law question of the day:
How can states outright ban “gender affirming treatments” or any such treatment like puberty blockers when, if the State tried to do that vis a vis prisoners, it is a well understood per se violation of the eighth amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments?
The answer can’t be that these folks needing such care (mostly juveniles) aren’t in prison.
Burnspbesq
@Tony Jay:
Hah! They’ll punish Everton for City’s sins.
Immanentize
@Eolirin: I was on the front lines of the AIDS crisis in the late ’80s — public defender in Miami Florida. Oh, the shit I saw and my friends and clients endured….
But that is a case in which societal opinions changed. Dramatically. Almost overnight, at least in political time scales. I am starting to have the same feelings about people’s views of unrestricted gun laws right now. Too many people they know and look like them are dying. The death count has become unacceptable.
schrodingers_cat
I get it. White women are never wrong and can only be wronged. Even discussing demographic statistics of the vote is an affront to them. And it enrages the commenters of this liberal blog who take that as a personal insult.
So let’s just focus on white men.
Eolirin
@Kay: The national averages are a stand in for the proportions of the various blocs of voters that are pretty consistent in voting with each other, and the aggregate mix that they end up at.
If you’re actually running a campaign you need to care about the fine grained detail. Obama was a master at this. If you’re having a blog discussion in which you’re mostly venting frustration at the behavior of a group of people, it’s enough to point at the aggregate with it being clear that you’re taking issue with the part of it that’s causing the behaviors you have issues with.
We can narrow this down if you like; without rural white Evangelical women voters the GOP cannot win elections, and if, say, 20-30% of them decided to vote differently the Republican party would cease to exist as a going concern.
Steppanhammer
@The Lodger:
I’ve seen the successive days labeled D+x quite often when reading about the whole operation, so I’d assume he means a later landing? When all the beaches were well cleared (IIRC) and nothing like the imagery he’s intending to conjure, of course…
Eolirin
@Immanentize: Can’t it? They can move to another state, and the prisoner can’t. /s
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
Well, I don’t think that’s fair. I discuss this with you all the time and never say “white women are never wrong”. While it is true that 50% of white women reliably vote for Rs and that is bad, 50% of white women reliably vote for D’s so if they’re a bloc half are a D bloc and half are an R bloc. They’re 44% of the vote in Mass (which is a pretty white state, as you know) and that’s part of the reason Mass is so blue- because there are so many of them and they vote 70% D.
Immanentize
Why did this pop up in my mind?
UncleEbeneezer
@scav: Yes, and BOTH are a problem. But especially White voters seeing as how we were still a significant majority of the Electorate in 2020.
Immanentize
@Eolirin: I know you were snarking, but can they? That is never an answer to a constitutional problem. You always MAY move to another state, but you cannot be compelled to do so. So, even if a state could manage it, it couldn’t force a prisoner into another State’s prison because they refuse treatment.
I am seriously trying to work this through…. And really, your answer was helpful!
Eolirin
@Immanentize: People’s attitudes on who is and isn’t part of the in group can change really suddenly because those impulses aren’t individual, they’re culturally mediated.
It’s much harder to change things that are core parts of an individual’s identity, like which party they vote for if they vote consistently. Or which religion they identify with, or, most importantly to this conversation, whether empathy is weakness or diversity is strength.
Young people are doing a better job of caring about each other, or it feels like it anyway.
Eolirin
@Immanentize: They’re not being compelled, they also have the option to not receive care.
Also snark, but I’m glad it was helpful.
WaterGirl
@Jeffro:
That’s quite the understatement for describing women who have just lost the right to self-determination.
Kay
@Eolirin:
Oh, I’ll give you 50%! I don’t think “national” is a useful or meaningful measure but I’ll give you it. It still doesn’t work as a bloc because it’s 50 reliable D and 50 reliable R. It’s as much a D bloc as an R bloc, unless you want to go into other ways to split the demo- urban/rural, south/north, religious/non -fine with me – but then we’re outside of the “white women are a voting bloc where the commonality is whiteness” and into subgroups.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@siddhartha:
@UncleEbeneezer:
What I can’t figure out is why white women are held more distain than white men, when far more white men vote for patriarchy and white supremacy based on the results of the same poll. Could it be that women in general are held in distain because misogyny is heavy embedded in all parts of our community including among communities of color? White men below..
2016 chose Trump 62%, Hillary 32% (the rest going to Johnson/Stein).
2020 chose Trump 57%, Biden 40% (no significant 3rd Party choice).
Abortion and misogyny are crucial topics and we will keep talking about them. White supremacy is also critical and we will keep talking about that too. It isn’t a zero sum game.
I’ll also add in a quote from the 2020 link that UncleEbeneezer. “Virtually all validated voters with consistently liberal values voted for Clinton over Trump (95% to 2%), while nearly all those with consistently conservative values went for Trump (98% to less than 1% for Clinton).” If we define liberal white women as voters with consistent liberal values, explain to me again how they are responsible for Trump?
Eolirin
@Kay: The commonality of the large part of the group that fucks with minorities is their whiteness.
The rest of the group, the minority, and it is a minority, because even dem voters are part of it, and even if it’s still a sizable minority, it still isn’t a majority, that are genuine allies, are being excluded from the conversation.
Minorities that actively have to put up with shit from white people shouldn’t need to qualify what they’re talking about to this level.
WaterGirl
@Eolirin: Okay, thank you. I understood some of what you wrote.
But this part?
How is the right to abortions and self-determination related to the issue of blacks in their schools.
edit: I also get the forced birth vibes around creepy white evangelicals who seem to want more babies for adoption. But they get white babies and brown babies and black babies.
So, again, I don’t understand how this is related to blacks in their schools.
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
If the 50% of white women who reliably vote for Republicans are a bloc who vote on whiteness are the 50% of white women who reliably vote for Democrats also a bloc who vote on something other than whiteness?
Immanentize
@Steppanhammer: Yes, this was normal for people who were absolutely part of the larger invasion plan. For example, my Great Uncle was in the 28th Inf. Div., “arrived in continent D/48,” moved up to some real shit in France in the Battle of Hurtgen Forest and he was eventually captured in the Bulge.
Paul in KY
@The Lodger: I have. It means you hit the beach 4 days after D-Day. My dad was D-Day +18.
Paul in KY
@Kay: There’s 2 blocs, silly. One of Dems & one of GQPer shitheels.
Eolirin
@WaterGirl: It’s not related, they figured it was an issue they could use to mobilize their communities to turn out to vote for candidates who would also be segregationists. And it worked. White Evangelicals were not a consistent voting group for the conservative movement until they turned abortion into an issue. Now they’re the most consistent voting bloc for the party.
They created a product and then sold it to their voters as a way to get them to get behind stuff they otherwise wouldn’t care about.
They do something similar with gun rights. You turn an issue into a cultural marker and make it something under attack that needs to be defended and you can turn out the group that identifies with that thing really consistently.
Paul in KY
@Burnspbesq: Ha! I hope so.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@schrodingers_cat: I’m not enraged by the statements bashing white women. I think they aren’t useful, like treating all hispanics as one big homogenous group. I left rural white America because I had NOTHING in common with those people and they hate me just as much as they hate you.
Barbara
@schrodingers_cat: No, white women can be wrong most definitely, but complaining about white women without recognizing the nuances of how they vote doesn’t move the ball forward even an inch. The white women on this blog already vote for Ds, overwhelmingly. Understanding which white women might be gettable requires looking at something beyond their skin color and figuring out how to appeal to them based on that. You never acknowledge that. Like, not ever.
WaterGirl
@Immanentize:
Interesting view! Question. Is the club still “white?” Or is the new club “privilege?”
Paul in KY
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Any white woman (or black, yellow, orange, fuchsia, etc.) who voted for TFG is by definition a shitheel of some type.
Immanentize
@Paul in KY: I am always amazed at what an epic planning and logistical effort that whole invasion was.
Tony Jay
@Burnspbesq:
I bet Everton’s owners are praying to the FSM that the authorities’ leniency towards Citeh extends its protective arms around their misdeeds.
But it’s Everton, so the shit is just bound to come raining down.
WaterGirl
@schrodingers_cat: Does it even make sense to talk national averages when there is so much disparity between states? And regions?
Paul in KY
@Barbara: When derogatory statements are made on this blog about ‘white women’, I assume The Shoe Don’t Fit, for our White Lady Jackal’s & they should understand commenters are talking about the loser white women who do vote GQP. That’s how I approach it.
Immanentize
@WaterGirl: Well, that is the heart of the question. The club certainly promotes its own access to privilege, but it is also very identified with white supremecy — which is still the majority of the club even if Italians can now be considered “white.” So, both?
OK, gotta go!
WaterGirl
@Immanentize: Absolute credit for seeing which way the wind was blowing. I want to know if the soon-to-be legal eagles thought it violated the constitution.
Paul in KY
@Immanentize: It’s amazing how they managed to have the Nazis thinking they were going to attack right across from Dover and not where we did. Just some world class deception there!
You are certainly correct that the whole undertaking was a marvel of planning & determination.
WaterGirl
@UncleEbeneezer: Surely 8% didn’t go to the third parties?
So how do you get to 99% like the results in 2020?
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Paul in KY:
Completely agree.
Eolirin
@WaterGirl: I think it did actually.
Third party vote was larger than Hillary’s margin of loss in the Midwest. It was atypically high in 2016. Lots of Russian propaganda pushing Stein.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Paul in KY:
Considering that siddhartha specifically bashed liberal white women for discussing abortion that doesn’t apply.
WaterGirl
@Immanentize:
I think that any woman of any race or color that isn’t already “gettable” because of Dobbs, just isn’t gettable at all.
So from that perspective, I would say that Dobbs already “got” us all the women that Dobbs is going to get. Now, seeing what they want to do with the abortion medication, I suspect that will “get” us some more women.
And as soon as it becomes more clear to women – who don’t pay a lot of attention and don’t see what’s coming with birth control – I think that will “get” us a lot more.
So again, from that perspective, it seems that trying to “get” men would be the biggest bang for the buck.
Another Scott
One for our friend Pennsylvanian:
(via nycsouthpaw)
Cheers,
Scott.
Eolirin
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: That’s not how I read that. The allegedly is doing some heavy work as a modifier to liberal.
And besides, liberal white women can be just as racist as their conservative counterparts. Voting for a Democrat isn’t the same as being willing to support actual equality. Blue states are as or more racially segregated when it comes to education as the south is, and there’s a ton of resistence to fixing it. We just do it via economic disparity and real estate discrimination. Or you can look at the recent Wisconsin election results, where the liberal Supreme Court justice won with large margins, but the ballot measures around criminal justice reforms that are shitty and will disproportionately hurt black people won overwhelmingly. There was a ton of crossover vote there.
I think being pissed off about all of that is fair.
WaterGirl
@Eolirin:
I suspect that white rural evangelical women are the least gettable people of all. Does anyone else think that’s true?
Barbara
@WaterGirl: The most “gettable” voters male or female of any race are those in groups or subgroups that already vote for you, but vote at lower rates than other groups. GOTV is the best investment of all.
I have probably already mentioned this, but I once did a deep dive into voting statistics by presidential year and came to the conclusion that Bill Clinton was elected because there were still enough Roosevelt Democrats alive to vote for him. As they died off, the odds changed, but especially in Southern states. It made me realize that yes, it really is about generational trends and propensity to vote at all.
Old School
@Another Scott:
Did they have their arms around him? Weekend at Bernies style?
Eolirin
@WaterGirl: I agree, it was more to the point that those people are actually causing harm, as a collective group of people. They’re unlikely to wake up to that, but it would sure would be nice if they did.
Even if they just shrank by that much as a voting group it’d have a similar, though not quite as dramatic of an effect though.
WaterGirl
@Eolirin: Okay, that makes sense to me. thanks.
schrodingers_cat
I am tired of having to explain myself. For the last I am talking about a demographic group in aggregate. Yes I do know that actual voter targeting by campaigns is more fine grained and not as coarse grained. I am not talking about you. You don’t have to # not all white women at me. If it doesn’t apply to you no need get all huffy.
R men are hiding behind women, yes mainly white women to pass these laws.
Only other white women can take them on successfully. Instead of policing me on what I can and cannot say. Take them on
Eolirin
@Barbara: I’m talking how we affect the culture, not sway voters, which is what creates those generational differences.
Not doing anything about gun violence is causing a shift. The damage to our educational systems by Republicans in red states is likely to cause a shift, though exactly in what directions is harder to tell. Things like social emotional learning in schools and anti-bullying campaigns matter. How we allow social media to function and proliferate matters. AI is going to matter. The economic and environmental conditions kids grow up into will matter. It’s possible to influence all of those things. It’s possible to be on the right or wrong side of them and that can lead to generational advantages.
Barbara
@Eolirin: Yes, this is true. The real fix for education is probably in creating larger districts to broaden distribution of resources. The hardest places are where everything is done at a tiny municipal level — like New Jersey, which incidentally, is one reason why the tax burden is so high. There are something like three times as many governmental units in NJ as in California. Older states to some degree reflect political line drawing that existed before any kind of expedited transportation mode, but it has definitely led to grossly disproportionate funding of public schools.
Funding isn’t everything, but it’s a lot.
Paul in KY
@Old School: I was laughing thinking about that! The visuals and also him being dead…
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Eolirin:
Maybe, but I’m really skeptical.
Completely agree.
Kay
@Paul in KY:
Just to be clear I am arguing just on the question of “if these voters did that, then this”
If the discussion is something else- white women who are liberals and vote D are also racist in a black woman’s experience (or some black women, or most black women, depending) then IMO we’re no longer talking about how they vote and I don’t question or contest that experience.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
The fundamental principle underlying all anti-abortion stuff is that the fetus (or embryo, or zygote) has more rights than the person pregnant with it. It’s as if pregnancy legally destroys the pregnant person’s rights. They no longer have the right to make decisions about what happens to their body. All decisions have to be made to serve the baby-to-be, even when the “baby-to-be” is guaranteed to die the moment it’s born or even if it’s already beyond medical help.
This is why I think it’s a bad idea to get into arguments about whether or not the twitching of cardiac cells in a 7 week old embryo really constitute a heartbeat, or when exactly a fetus can feel pain. They have already conceded the key point that if the fetus is a person, it’s rights automatically triumph. No! Nobody loses their right to bodily autonomy when they become pregnant. It doesn’t matter whether the fetus is a person or not; its rights don’t trump the right of the person pregnant with it to make decisions about their life.
Steppanhammer
@Immanentize:
Yeah. I didn’t mean to imply that his family member wouldn’t have seen some very real shit very soon after – just that, I don’t know if most people are that familiar with the extent and size of the whole thing, but they probably know about “D-Day” and have seen clips from Saving Private Ryan.
WaterGirl
@Eolirin: I didn’t know that 8% of voters were that stupid.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@WaterGirl:
I think white rural evangelicals (men and women) are the least gettable. The women aren’t worse than the men, and in some cases they are more accepting than the men are. Toxic masculinity as a social value boxes the men in more than it does the women.
UncleEbeneezer
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: White Men are much, much worse than White Women on every metric! Period. Because we have all the privileges and the whole system of White Supremacy is designed to benefit us, first and foremost. I feel that way 100% and not a day or minute goes by that I’m not deeply angry and embarrassed by the collective, garbage behavior of White Men.
But the reason why I think White Women get more flack in recent years is because White Supremacy does way more to screw y’all over than it ever will to us Men. It’s not hard to understand why 60-70% of White Men support the GOP. The benefits are completely obvious and there is very little (relative) cost to us for doing so. Of course I think it actually does hurt us to do so, but that belief is very much in the minority and most white men would disagree. Also, aside from a handful of activists and organizers I know, most white men don’t even pretend to be in solidarity with Women, PoC, LGBTQ people etc. We don’t collectively go to PoC and argue “hey we are all in this together” the way white women do. So I think most people have simply given up on us ever changing our ways simply based on the numbers. With White Women, y’all are much closer to getting it and being a valuable part of multi-racial coalitions. I know when I’m trying to bring people onto our side on any number of issues, I’ll try and put most of my effort towards white women, just because I know from experience, white men are the absolute hardest sell for anything progressive. It’s the privilege of low expectations and the reality that we will be the absolute last demographic group to join any progressive table.
Barbara
@schrodingers_cat: I actually do get it, I don’t feel personally slighted, I don’t care if some white women are embarrassed or angry or put on the spot, I just don’t see that your framing of it provides useful insight for where to go from here.
Barbara
@Eolirin: Yes, no doubt, it is broad societal trends that push change at levels significant enough to change political arrangements. The pandemic, gun violence, disinvestment from schools — combined with the ascent of technological change — it’s all going to make a difference. To a certain extent I have given up and hope the next generation is wise, and mostly I am showing up to prevent serious erosion at the level of personal rights.
The Pale Scot
“I’ve been called a racist, a misogynist, a white supremacist more in the last two months than I have my entire life,” Cepicky said, audibly angry. “And by golly, I’m biting my tongue. And I’m telling you, all due respect, those days are wearing thin right now.”
Hmm…
What could he possible do to prevent that from happening?
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@UncleEbeneezer: Thank you for clarifying your thoughts.
WaterGirl
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: @Eolirin:
I read it the same way Sister Machine Gun read it.
So I don’t know if your interpretation of what was said is right. I will read the original comment again.
If we’re going to be able to talk about complicated things here, with a minimum of misunderstandings, it’s not helpful to use code words that not everyone understands. If the meaning rests on a code word or a specific word in “quotes” we are going to have misunderstandings that help derail the conversations.
As for your middle paragraph, I would be surprised if every person on BJ didn’t think being pissed off about all that is fair.
WaterGirl
@Barbara: I totally agree about GOTV. We should start fundraising for GOTV on Balloon Juice. :-)
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
I’m glad VP Harris doesn’t believe that since she seems to be the point person on abortion and they’ve now won on it for two cycles.
WaterGirl
@Eolirin: I also wonder how many people turned out to vote for the SC race in Wisconsin, but didn’t vote the rest of the ballot.
I would like to see the ballot initiatives vote breakdown for people who voted for Judge Janet for SC.
It would be good to know if some of those were NO votes, or if they were left blank. (By “NO” i mean voting against the best interests of black people; I’m not sure how the question was worded so I wanted to clarify that.)
WaterGirl
@schrodingers_cat: Can you say who you thought was getting huffy? I didn’t really see that today, but as we are finding out, not everyone sees the nuances the same way.
WaterGirl
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
I think you’re right about that. I guess I was writing from the perspective that if Dobbs didn’t “get” rural white evangelicals to vote Dem, nothing would.
Gvg
@Paul in KY: nope. They got treated pretty bad. Actually being treated as Irish was its own kind of bad. Pretty sure it was worse in Great Britain but comparing racial mistreatment gets pretty pointless. Just take it from someone descended from Irish who has several relatives into the history…it was bad. Evil stuff.
Gvg
@WaterGirl: it has been explained before historically. Books and such. As I understand it, the reactionaries wanted to keep the schools and races apart and wanted to use the GOP leadership to get around the new civil rights laws mandating equal funding and mixed schools. What they needed was reliable voters. They hit on using antiabortion laws to create one issue voters who would vote Republican no mater what else they did because the democrats were killing babies. see? Then they got weakening of minority voting rights, less fair districts, funding going to charter schools that were private and could exclude students they didn’t like, also lots more funding for police which somehow always locked up more minorities especially black americans than whites. The religious voter never hears about that direct racism although there is the background kind of put down. They aren’t the leaders or in the know. They are just the votes who are trained and the marks who are taught to give money. This is what that repeated line about Falwell hadn’t heard about abortion 4 years ago (soon after moral majority was founded I think) is about. Segregated schools and political power. Abortion was chosen as a cause because power hungry men thought it would work, not because they actually cared about that issue itself. They discussed other possibilities.
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: I hope she succeeds where HRC failed. Gaining the support of white women.
schrodingers_cat
@WaterGirl: I sense a lack of empathy. This feels like a cross-examination.
WaterGirl
@schrodingers_cat: lack of empathy from whom?
If you are referring to me, I am just trying to understand your huffy comment. That’s not a cross examination.
The Pale Scot
@Immanentize:
Two things that struck me was the slavers keeping their slaves and Irish workers separate for fear of treasonous views being proselytized.
Why did slavers hire paddies? Slave were expensive, some jobs like canal construction had a high death rate from yellow fever and Malaria. Don’t want to lose property unnecessarily don’t ‘a know
scav
I think that’s a very important point. Also, although no doubt an emotionally satisfying rhetorical flourish to the orator, it can be counter-productive if the speaker is actually trying to persuade allies or have allies or just convince people that what one says is, in fact true, and not just some emotional self-care.
schrodingers_cat
@WaterGirl: If you want to understand my comment read this thread from my POV. A miniscule demographic minority who is an immigrant and does not have the support system you do.
WaterGirl
@Gvg:
Wow. Nice slam.
GibberJack
@Sister Golden Bear:
What republicans really want is to load them in the back of a panel van and drive them around with the tail pipe redirected back inside.
Along with anyone else they deem untermenschen. You know it and I know it.
Gretchen
@The Lodger: DDay was a multi- day operation. The guys who landed on the first day had a very high mortality rate, but they kept them coming for several days and got enough landed who survived that the invasion was a success. My own dad landed on the third or fourth day and survived to fight his way across Europe to Germany.
Paul in KY
@Gvg: I’m still sure it wasn’t as bad as our black brothers & sisters had to endure.