holy shit this new Biden ad is good pic.twitter.com/Azat0U6e5o
— Florida Chris (@chrislongview) September 7, 2023
Republicans can only win office through an electoral college system that is a relic from slave owning days, gerrymandering, voter suppression, media stupidity, propaganda, and Russian interference. https://t.co/9OZzIr1G6J
— HawaiiDelilah™ 🟦 #MauiStrong (@HawaiiDelilah) September 8, 2023
Unless they're still entertaining primary fantasies, which is only a tad less delusional at this point.
— Not up for trouble, please stop asking (@agraybee) September 7, 2023
Our Failed Major Media, Part [X + infinity]…
Funny he didn’t tell a print reporter so this very newsworthy thing could be told to the world.
Glad he got a big advance tho. Yay us? https://t.co/H18qQ4JIPO
— Clean Observer (@Hammbear2024) September 8, 2023
Kudos to Farrow for putting it in print in relatively quick fashion, rather than @WalterIsaacson, who held off vital, newsworthy information to buckrake with his book. For shame, Walter. https://t.co/nxO5GcAGGy
— Clean Observer (@Hammbear2024) September 7, 2023
doubling down on this prediction https://t.co/wTpYkJoGXO
— Joshua Erlich (@JoshuaErlich) September 7, 2023
Drone strikes on bitcoin servers should be legal. https://t.co/nrULo5gqxs
— Clean Observer (@Hammbear2024) September 7, 2023
Powerful. Unprecedented.
For the first time ever, a joint-statement was released by the presidential libraries of Obama, Bush 2, Clinton, Bush 1, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, LBJ, JFK, Truman, FDR & Hoover, sounding the alarm about the state of the U.S. https://t.co/dfpZaWswMr
— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) September 7, 2023
On The Road – Dagaetch – World Tour Part 5D – New Zealand
zhena gogolia
Love the Biden ad!
Baud
No, the plan is to getting people worked up about making Biden withdraw. Then, when Biden and the rest of us give that idea the back of the hand, make people feel resentful about Dems for being arrogant and uppity, thus discouraging turnout.
ETA: they did the same thing with EMAILS!
“SHE’S NOT TAKING IT SERIOUSLY!”
Matt McIrvin
The traditional American way for a bigoted white-supremacist order to deal with changing demographics is to let some acceptable fraction of minorities into the white club (Germans, Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans) and set them against the people they really don’t like (e.g. African-Americans, Native nations) to keep the numbers up.
I see signs of this happening with some Hispanic groups, particularly. Is there a reason it won’t work this time?
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
It’ll work. But if the GOP is forced to become more diverse, it can’t stay exactly the same as it is now.
lowtechcyclist
“To infinity, and beyond!”
hilts
Jonathan Martin’s toolishness runneth over.
Spanky
Damn near every link I could find about the joint statement by the presidential libraries goes back to one AP article by Gary Fields.
Here’s the (short) statement via the LBJ library.
eversor
@Matt McIrvin:
It is working, and it’s working with Asians as well. It’s working in churches. The majority of my extended family is Asian or Latino. Those who attend church are all GOP conservatives and their online media is so batshit it puts Alex Jones to shame. Anti abortion, moms should be in the home and do all chores, wives submit to your husbands, man is head of house. True Christians, not that made up hippy bullshit version of them. They are entirely against every single socially liberal issue surrounding sex, gender, patriarchy, and more that the Democrats stand for even if they hate GOP economic policy. Christianity comes first though.
The GOP is morphing from a racial to a religious party and has since Saint Ronny was elected.
lowtechcyclist
@hilts:
@jmart < K-Mart < 0.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Tony Jay
@rikyrah:
Good morning to you.
Geminid
This morning’s Politico Playbook has a fairly long piece on relations between Mitch McConnell and Kraven McCarthy. Probably the most important short-term differences between the two concern the prospect of a government shutdown at the end of the fiscal year, September 30, and military aid to Ukraine.
House Foreign Relations Chairman Michael McCaul (TX) will apear on CNN’s “State of the Union” show this Sunday. McCaul can be expected to advocate for more military aid for Ukraine.
Meanwhile, over on “Fox New News Sunday,” host Shannon Bream will be lobbing fat pitches to Virginia Governor Glenn “Foungkin” Youngkin. The Murdocks want to showcase Youngkin, who some think can be the “White Knight” who will save the GOP from a Trump nomination next year. He’s plenty White, that’s for sure.
One question Ms. Bream probably will not ask Youngkin will be his thoughts on the prospective government shutdown that members of the House Freedom-Lemming Caucus are trying to engineer. Virginia is singularly affected by government shutdowns, and Youngkin is trying to win General Assembly majorities this November. He does not want to think about a shutdown of the federal government, much less talk about one.
EarthWindFire
@zhena gogolia: It made me cry. How did we get to this place where we have to remind Americans of what an American president is supposed to stand for?
p.a.
Chyron Fux “news” approx 6:30am today (paraphrasing):
Iowa caucus voters discuss chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal
😂😂😂😂😂 They really got nuthin’. They’ve always relied on the MSM to get their b.s. out of the bubble, but the MSM will have to do some heavy lifting this cycle.
Baud
@p.a.:
Challenge accepted!
Kay
@eversor:
No one can predict that far out. I wouldn’t have predicted Gen X would be more Right leaning than the generation on either side of them, yet here we are.
It’s complicated. There’s a big gender gap in the Latino vote that is much less prominent in the Asian vote. Latino men are much further Right than Latino women. The “demographics is destiny” claim is too easy, and so is the “religion determines everything” claim, and so is the “education determines everything” claim. There are PLENTY of expensively educated Trump supporters.
Kay
So, since the US is HUGE and diverse and shifting all the time and no one can make these sweeping predictions the best one can do is do the right thing and hope that’s enough and get comfortable with a lot of uncertainty.
Baud
@Kay:
Last I saw, Gen X voted more blue than older generations.
@Kay:
This x 1000. Liberals need to leave predictions to Nostradamus.
Tony Jay
kalakal
Spent yesterday going through the flooded library. Didn’t look as bad as I feared with the standing water removed but still a mess. Saved a lot of the archives but I fear for a lot of the stock and the microfilms going to be toast. We’ll be closed for a month is the current guestimate.
To cheer myself up I have just voted in the only election where every candidate is super cute and it’s a pleasure to read their bios. Yes it’s
Penguin of the Year!
Tony Jay
@kalakal:
Urgh. I read about your travails last night. May the Hairdryer of Restoration dry out all your soggy historicals.
Penguins are awesome, though. The only natural predator of the Polar Bear, exiled to the South Pole for the safety of us all.
Kay
@eversor:
There’s gender differences in turnout too. AA, Latino and White female turnout is higher than male turnout. Not true for Asians. But the gender difference lessens as people age so by the time they’re 65 male turnout can be higher than female turnout.
Steeplejack
Re the presidential libraries: what’s going on with Eisenhower’s? Notable by its absence from the list.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: According to this Pew study, younger generations voted consistently more Democratic than older ones in 2016, 2018 and 2020, though the difference between GenXers and Boomers is pretty small:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory
That gap shrank in 2020, and you can maybe see an effect in the age brackets in 2020 where older Boomers are less right-wing than younger ones on the edge of GenX, but it’s so tiny it could be pure noise.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Tony Jay: Careful, Tony. I don’t know how much of a strategic sarcasm reserve Britain has these days, but I know that Brexit is drawing heavily on the snark at the same time it screws up the logistics of sarcasm replenishment.
Brit in Chicago
“The Republican Party lost the popular vote 7 out of the last 8 Presidential elections.”
And in the 8th election they won only because the administration had told lies to justify an election, and Bush jr. had then run as a “wartime President”.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
The gap ranges from 6 points to 11 points. Not huge, but not nothing.
The point is that Gen X is not more right than Boomers. Age matters on a sliding scale.
mrmoshpotato
@kalakal:
LOL! 🥰 Thanks!
Kay
@Baud:
Maybe Right leaning is too broad. They’re the reactionary generation, but on the older end of X:
As I said I wouldn’t rely on it that much if I were a Republican. There’s much more productive ways to slice the electorate than by “generation” which is sort of a bullshit David Brooksian category anyway. I think Democrats should think more about gender differences. I think white working class young women are underpitched, politically. They’re more liberal than the men. Obama went after them and I think it worked.
Brit in Chicago
@Matt McIrvin: From one Presidential election to the next, approximately 5% of the voting population dies and is replaced by people turning 18. (This is the true version of the ‘replacement theory’!) My hope is that this will lead to a steady increase in the number of progressives.
The big question is whether progressive young people will become more conservative as they age. I think there’s some hope that they won’t. I don’t think Bush jr. or Trump inspired a lot of young people, but Obama certainly did, and those early political identities tend to stick.
Anyone got more evidence than I do?
MisterDancer
Shudder. Best of luck!
MisterDancer
Was getting ready this morning and thinking on this, actually! So much of our political issues feel like trying to fill in the uncertainly with something. Finding that One True Issue that explains why things are bad, even if the explanation doesn’t pass the smell test.
Tony Jay
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
Fortunately a recent subsidence problem in the Black Country was found to be caused by illegal mining of previously undiscovered Sarcasmite deposits by an unlicenced Gulf State contractor under cover of building a new football stadium. The Army was sent in, Professor Quatermass did his thing, and everything was secured.
We’re flush. Pity the no-bid contract went to a cousin of the wife of the Prime Minister’s podiatrist, but I’m sure everything will be absolutely fine.
Brit in Chicago
@Tony Jay: “a centre besieged by twin extremes” For a moment I was genuinely confused by this, until I saw it was by Will and remembered who he is. (I’d prefer to forget,) I can’t understand the mind-set of people who think Biden, or his administration as a whole, is extreme. This worries me.
Ken
I’m sure any small glitches can be fixed by turning a few more municipal wastewater systems into privately-owned for-profit entities.
Baud
@Kay:
That author went from talking about Gen X to talking about white voters. Jeez.
Anyway, the polling shows Gen X to be evenly split, even if Gen X republicans are more radical. Not a group of people to write off.
Kay
@MisterDancer:
It’s not easy for anyone – I hate surprises. I think it’s why media are failing so obviously now, though. They aren’t comfortable with uncertainty so they keep trying to jam things into boxes where they don’t really fit. I read these political articles and it’s all this supposedly insightful “Trump could win!” or “young people could turn Right!”. This is news to political writers? That things could happen?
Kay
@MisterDancer:
It’s not easy for anyone – I hate surprises. I think it’s why media are failing so obviously now, though. They aren’t comfortable with uncertainty so they keep trying to jam things into boxes where they don’t really fit. I read these political articles and it’s all this supposedly insightful “Trump could win!” or “young people could turn Right!”. This is news to political writers? That things could happen?
Spanky
@Steeplejack:
eversor
@Kay:
Trump won the white vote, the upper income vote, the rural vote, and the Christian vote. So if we are going to allow sweeping assumptions about white people, upper income people, and rural people than Christianity has to be on the table as well. Because if you look at the sort of white people and rural people who voted for him it’s DIRECTLY related to Christianity. Just as if we look at the gains made by the GOP among minorities it’s both related to men and Christianity. The Texas GOP even admits they are making their Latino gains through churches and how liberals aren’t down with Jesus’s own demands for patriarchy, hierarchy, and gender roles (you cannot be an actual follower of Christ if you are not a support of patriarchy and gender roles he demanded it).
But take education! Leonard Leo is highly educated and founded The Federalist Society for CHRISTIANITY to rule supreme. The economic shit was just how to get there. Hell even his latest billion buck donatior was done by a Christian who wanted to help push Christianity. Barr, Alito, openly admit constantly they did what they did because of Christianity. So really that education gap boils down to the Christian portion going GOP and the fake Christian, agnostic, athiest portion going Democratic.
So we are either going to confront the giant cross in the room and deal with it or voting and everything else is just kicking the can till we all get crushed. The younger generations are through with the “no true Scottsman, Hitler made the trains run on time, but there are good Germans” excuse surrounding the horror that is Christianity. It can be removed with a little pain now, or it can be removed with a lot of pain and then crushed into dust later, but it is going away. We are negotiating over if the Bible is a bunch of horrific ideas and evil created by bronze age nitwits or getting caught with one is a Mein Kampf level of offense. Pick one!
Republicanism is the symptom, conservatism is the cancer, Christianity is the raw carcinogen being pumped into the public. It’s not enough to just treat a symptom if you don’t treat the cancer. Treating the cancer does no good if you don’t remove the carcinogen. Sure not all people who smoke get cancer but smoking sure as shit causes cancer. And smoking went down due to massive social stigma, the same will happen to Christianity in a few decades
MisterDancer
So, for those who missed the “Fani Willis pantsed Jim Jordon” discussion, here’s a brilliantly written, AAVE-friendly description of the missive: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1699930135124746674.html
A sample of the prose:
gene108
Looking at the Electoral College, and how it benefits Republicans, and what seems like a near impossible chance to amend the Constitution to repeal it and go with a national popular vote, I’m always flabbergasted at how the 16th to 19th amendments were ratified within decade of each other.
Same with the 23rd to 26th amendments ratified within a decade of each other.
I just can’t imagine super majorities of Congress and states agreeing on major changes to the status quo.
Barbara
p.a.
Going waaaaayyyyy back to my college days, there are of course multiple influences on voting choice, but the most predictive is religious affiliation. Don’t think that’s changed since that before-time.
There was not the degree of “unaffiliated” and “not religious” then, so that’s a new data point.
The US’s recent arrivals are such a diverse group I think one must get really granular to at least attempt to predict future voting patterns, but looking at religion I’ve seen numbers that indicate Hispanics are leaving the Catholic church for the chaotic multiplicity of evangelical churches, often “storefront” churches. My completely uninformed impression is that these are more conservative than even the anti-abortion Catholic church they are leaving.
And sadly, why shouldn’t we expect new groups to reprise past immigrants’ “get up on the ladder and kick out the lowest rungs” action.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@kalakal: Love the penguin contest! I posted it on Facebook and @d my DIL who’s a big penguin lover.
I’m glad the library did better than you feared. A friend who’s a librarian in Cork had a flood right after they moved to a new library. They found books in the rafters.
Suzanne
Got home about 20 minutes ago from getting SuzMom to the hospital, prepped, and taken back for surgery. Then got a venti PSL with 1/3 the amount of syrupy stuff. Breathing slightly easier.
Tony Jay
@Brit in Chicago:
Re-check the name on that snippet of ‘article’, I’ve been at the verisimilitude again.
Kay
@Baud:
I sometimes think younger people are more interesting than those who came up in the 1990s because they came up in a time where events had more import – bigger things happened. My eldest son’s political views started with the contested 2000 election and ran thru 9/11, the whole WoT insanity and now into the Trump, let’s face it, Right wing terrorism. He never had a period of relative calm. He never had a period where the biggest fight was school uniforms :)
Tony Jay
Looks like it’s
turtlesChristians all the way down!Come plumb the abyssal depths of Lethean swill with the one and only Pope of Predictability, the Raconteur of Repetition, the Sultan of Said It All Before. Spewing bunk ahistorical like a tween-lit taught oracle, using contrarian reasoning that needs far more seasoning, he’s a supermassive black hole of ennui d’arsehole, you can correct him all day but that might make him stay, it’s the one, the only, the great trollalollyphony, it’s… you know what, never mind, bored now.
Realworldrj
new: but his age
Old: but her emails
older: but Benghazi, irs, Kenya birth certificate ate
older older: swift boat vets
etc etc etc
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Suzanne: Hope all goes well
Kay
@eversor:
If I were working as a political operative in the county where I live and I wanted to reach Trump voters, I wouldn’t go to church. I would go to the Eagles. To a working class, older persons bar. My clients who are Trump voters (I have a lot of them- it’s 70% Trump here) are for the most part NOT religious. They are people in their 50’s and 60’s who divorce, drink, smoke, spend too much so are always in debt and have sort of chaotic, unhappy, bickering families – both their extended family and their own family.
If I had to look for a common thread it would be that – “miserable”. They’re unhappy people. Bitter. Chip on their shoulders. Feel they have been cheated. Feel they “deserved” more than they got. Have a nutty level of nostalgia for the 1990s which ends up being “nostalgia” for fucking consumer products. Maybe they did get ripped off, after all, if what they seek and miss is so shallow and fleeting.
Scout211
It makes a difference to have a Democratic supermajority, but I’m still proud of our legislature here in California:
California lawmakers prohibit bans on gender, race-related books in public schools
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: All the analyses in the media have one unspoken assumption, the voters they are referring to are white.
So when they say that the working class votes R, white is silent. Replace working class with any other demographic.
Democratic voters of any demographic are invisible to the MSM.
Albatrossity
The Eisenhower Foundation, headquartered in Abilene KS, did not sign the statement for reasons as yet unknown.
Repatriated
@gene108:
The electorate, and the elected officials, were a far more homogenous group then. Much easier to get consensus when it’s just tich white guys doing it.
Jeffro
Good morning peeps. I am cooling my heels in Savannah’s airport after my morning flight home was canceled. Here’s hoping I catch on to the later flight (I’m on standby). Am I supposed to tip the gate attendant, make goo-goo eyes at her/him – what works best to get me on that plane??
Anyway with a little extra time on my hands, I noticed that writer Austin Kleon’s first item in his newsletter was in reference to writer Hanif Abdurraquib’s recent tweet-thread about being a member of the Church of Minding One’s Own Business.
H.A goes on to talk about how well it has served him – far fewer distractions, easier to focus, and a deeper appreciation of the things he actually DOES care about.
My only additional thought there is: think of the money he’d make selling t-shirts!
Anyway, happy Friday peeps and send some good standby thoughts my way!
Subsole
@Kay:
I think it goes back to something you said the other day: they inherited their attitudes toward politics.
Their Clinton hate, their yearning for a firm, reasonable Republican father who will play catch with them after setting the world to rights, their snippy disdain at those shrewish, domineering Liberals and their acceptance of women’s issues, their inability to consider that workers come in any model but hard-hatted, beer-drinking, Christian, enpenised, and available in white only…the constant freakouts over Political Correctness and the punditocracy’s genuine, beflopsweatted terror that jokes they told in junior-high can actually make people recoil from them now that they are in their 50s.
Listen to the media today and you can hear the echoes of my youth, resonating through layer upon layer of amber.
They are flailing because they are essentially refusing to update priors which are over a quarter-century old. Again. They are lazy. They never bothered to forge their own opinions. They just inherited the Dubya-era press corps’.
No wonder these assholes can’t tell you anything useful. They don’t even know what year it is.
Mousebumples
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/07/wisconsin-impeachment-supreme-court-protasiewicz/ – apologies for the lack of gift link, but I found this on Bluesky. Some excerpts…
1) Dem turnout was insane for a boring February primary April election last year where next to nothing else was on the ballot. We will continue to turnout, especially if they try to take our rights away.
2) Probably wish casting but Hagedorn (previous conservative swing justice) isn’t a certain conservative vote on gerrymandering. (potentially on abortion – see the next snippet – but he voted with the liberals on some prior redistricting cases)
I’m calling my reps today. I think OO indicated plans to call yesterday in a prior thread.
If you live in Wisconsin, join me/us! I am also probably calling my parents’ super conservative reps. (I grew up in the WOW counties, though I haven’t tracked real closely who represents them anymore. Used to be a mom of a old soccer teammate – could totally reason with her!)
Baud
@Kay:
I find young people less interesting than I used to because they now have the numbers to dominate elections. So I’m more interested in action than talk.
tobie
It was hardly 2 or 3 years ago that Isaacson took to Twitter to claim Elon Musk was a genius, a latter day Thomas Edison, and we all should be dazzled by his intelligence and imagination.
I lost all respect for Isaacson then and there.
Tony Jay
@tobie:
Thomas Edison the salesman who leeched off other people’s inventions and used the media to smear people who wouldn’t genuflect to his fictional personae?
Talk about a writer missing the lede.
Kay
@Subsole:
This is an opportunity for Democrats though and it really doesn’t matter if media count them- they exist.
Like everyone there’s things I follow and things I don’t. I followed Obama’s efforts to make labor rule changes for home health aides. Some of the hardest working and most essential members of the working class, right? 85% female and black or brown. Obama pointed that out. Said “look at these working class heroes who don’t have trucks or hardhats!”
I think D’s know they’re ignored and consider it an opportunity.
AM in NC
@eversor: Republicans in my flamingly blue University town peeled off A LOT of Asian voters here last cycle by beating on the UNC Affirmative Action case. Cast 100% as Asians suffering at the hands of Black admits. It was depressingly successful.
Trivia Man
@Brit in Chicago: and cheated in Ohio
Kay
@Subsole:
One thing i have found amusing about people on the Right – and my fellow white people- is their admission that representation matters. They whine about black and brown people in advertising because representation matters and they fucking disappear or something if every ad doesn’t depict them exclusively.
So black and brown people were correct – being visibly at the table and part of the country matters a lot. If it didn’t white people wouldn’t be so upset that they no longer have a monopoly on being “seen”. That’s the whole “shoved down my throat!” caterwhauling – they’re mad that they see people who don’t look like themselves now. They’re SO mad that it must matter A LOT.
cmorenc
@Matt McIrvin:
This is exactly the dynamic wrt Tim Scott becoming a US Senator and Nikki Haley an ex-Governor of South Carolina. They are both a close cultural fit with the predominaely white GOP establishment in SC, with their respective ethnicies diluted to little more than a good suntan.
tobie
@Tony Jay: isn’t it strange the kind of hagiography surrounding Edison?
The myth of the great white man, bucking the establishment, doing what everyone else said was impossible is such a powerful drug.
Geminid
@gene108: There is a possibility that the Republican Party’s efforts to marginalize itself through radicalism will succeed, and produce Democratic supermajorities in Congress and the states by the early 2030s. But in the short and medium term, we clearly have to “run the machine as we find it,” and keep winning elections within existing political structures.
Brit in Chicago
@p.a.: I’m not at all a religious person (went through an agnostic phase, but settled into straightforward atheism a long time ago). But I was taken to church as a child, and the Jesus I heard about sure sounded like a Democrat to me—taking care of the poor, turning the other cheek, loving your neighbor. How did Christianity come to be so right-wing in this country?
Kay
@AM in NC:
There’s a municipality in southern CA that is using the SCOTUS affirmative action decision to block affordable housing – read “housing that may integrate a white area”. As usual no pundits considered how the Right extends these decisions to impliment the whole agenda. They’re just not good or careful thinkers. If one backed the affirmative action decision on narrow grounds get ready, because a whole bunch of other stuff one didn’t back will riding in on it.
It’s how the anti cancel culture “liberals” ended up backing book bans in Florida.
This happens over and over and over.
NotMax
Forgot how enervating is air travel across multiple time zones. Other than an absolutely, positively essential short jaunt to the bank and post office, the bulk of Thursday spent intermittently napping.
gene108
The shifts in voting patterns of white voters rarely gets mentioned as doom for the Republican Party, whereas similar shifts in minority groups are catastrophic for Democrats.
More at the link.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/
Geminid
@Jeffro: Too bad you don’t have time to visit Tybee Island. That’s a cool place.
Don’t be surprised if you have delays on the Virginia end of your flight. We’re supposed to catch some heavy thunderstorms this afternoon and evening. But I trust you will be home safe and sound in time for the big game tomorrow!
gene108
@Geminid:
Believe it when I see it.
MisterDancer
100% agree. I had a mentor who, beneath the upbeat surface, was miserable as hell — and determined to drag me down as well. I had to cut him off when he decided to send me, post-9/11, Islamphobic chain emails.
I get that it seems like Christianity is the Universal Bond, but it’s not. The above guy wasn’t a Christian. The Pagan community still has a horrific White Supremacist issue, as does the org my mentor and I were in, the Society for Creative Anachronism.
The reason the Lost Cause took hold is…complex. But it wasn’t just because they were all “Christians”. It was far more because they had not only lost a War, they had broken the shallow economic engine of the South along the way, and the North was (rightly!) in no mood to make nice, in those early post-War years. It was the turmoil and upheaval, the loss of face, that made the fertile grown to build a myth about the War’s origins and causes.
So, too, with today’s Conservatives. There’s a brilliant 2 part article (part 1, part 2) I read this AM on the influence the anti-Semitic lies about the Trilateral Commission had around the run-up to the 1980 GOP convention. And although you’ll see “Christian” mentioned in the article and documents he posts, they do not mean #AllChristians.
They mean their kind of Christians. “Real Christians”. People like, say, Dr King, are not Christians in this worldview. And it’s the worldview of most Evangelicals, these days.
And it’s a worldview that, even without the Christians part, plays into the disaffected of all ages and genders, far too well. It’s why Evangelicals accept someone like Trump, because “Christian” or not, he’s clearly one of them.
For people like that, it’s far more important to believe in Hate, than to believe in Christ.
Their Ministry is Misery.
Kay
I had a generally good experience with religious people as a child until I reached about age 7 or 8 and found out I really resented their “charitable” view. It just read phony to me. I thought they wanted something. I would rather dig a fucking ditch than take charity from a weepy, mewling religious person is the truth. It’s part of why I get so het up with anti abortion people – I see the same kind of saccharine sweet Hallmark card approach to women and pregnancy and birth. Women and pregnancy and birth are actually tough as nails. It’s not sweet and I just would never trust someone who deludes themselves into thinking it is. They’re no help and probably a harm. Well, not “probably”. As we’ve seen they’re actively ahrming women. I knew they would.
Tony Jay
@tobie:
He was very good at selling a larger than life version of himself, and he made an absolute mint doing it. What do they say about the myth being larger than the man?
Hell, I remember comics from the 90s/2000s that were otherwise very, very on point with their deconstruction of American mythology that – still – portrayed Edison as a superheroic genius inventor. Though thinking back, maybe that was just a double-back mocking of the myths of the period the story was set in.
It’s doubly ironic that Musk gets (approvingly) compared to Edison’s myth, when the real Edison was the man more or less responsible for destroying Tesla and all his actual genius.
fancycwabs
I wrote a lengthy piece about some of the ways Republicans put their thumb on the scale in Tennessee:
The Nine Ways Democracy in Tennessee is Attacked
Kay
I did like the upbeat, slogany parts of religion as a child though. I liked VBS (vacation bible school) – I liked “bloom where you are planted” and “try to think of other people”. Good advice! But you could get the same thing from any Friday Night Lights coach lecture, so obviously I wasn’t plugging in on any deep level. Probably a lack in me rather than them.
Doug R
The “he’s old” shit is a wedge that has the dog whistle undertone of taking advantage of racist and misogynist feels against Kamala Harris. trump is only 3 years younger and in terrible shape, it’s not about health.
Ksmiami
Can’t stand proud until the Republican Party is obliterated. They’ve made a mockery of the Court, of our democracy and are trying to destroy the country.
frosty
@Tony Jay:
Masterful prose! I, on the other hand, just make use of the pie filter (genuflects in Cleek’s direction).
Geminid
@gene108: Believe what? That the Republican Party will marginalize itself through radicalism? They’re working on it.
Now, I wasn’t saying that there would be big structural changes in the next decade, just that the requisite superrmajorities could be there. I rather think that if Democrats are as electorally successful as they could be, interest in structural changes like increasing the size of the House, eliminating the Electoral College etc. will decline, although they may be an “evergreen” topic on political blogs.
JWR
I watch Amanpour & Co pretty regularly, and Walter Isaacson strikes me as not that bright, and his interviews with Repubs are disappointing, to say the least. Nothing in the way of follow-up questions, just a lot of Chuck Todd nods. “Uh huh. Yes. Uh huh. Yes, yes..” Give me Yamiche Alcindor any day.
Franklin Foer was on the show last night talking up his Biden book with Christine Amanpour, and they spent the entire first half of the interview talking about Biden’s age, and the rest wasn’t all that interesting either. (Though they did talk about Biden’s “catastrophic” Afghanistan withdrawal.)
Also, can’t we just declare Elno an enemy of Democracy and deport him, along with “Coach” Tubs?
@Tony Jay: Thanks for the repeat! I was afeard not too many people would see that in the “dead” thread below.
Ksmiami
@Kay: and they live in a false paradigm. In fact, I think often about why we allow religious groups to own so much of the hospital network in America and it’s shameful.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@tobie: I’ll never forget J. Michael Straczynski’s comment in his book on scriptwriting, explaining that the movie business settled in Hollywood because that was as far away from Thomas Edison as they could go without their cameras getting wet.
EarthWindFire
@Tony Jay: My blood pressure has never reached extremes like this – well done, sir.
Matt McIrvin
@Brit in Chicago: In social science this kind of question seems to be phrased as “age/period/cohort effects”. Do changes in behavior depend on how old people are, when the data were taken, or what birth cohort the people belong to? For voting preferences the studies I’ve seen show a mix but are all over the place. The second one here (on Swiss voters) seems to show an abrupt shift at retirement age, but it’s not the whole story.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260009270_Ageing_and_generational_effects_on_vote_choice_Combining_cross-sectional_and_panel_data_to_estimate_APC_effects
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0176268021001026
AM in NC
@Kay: For me (non-believer) my thoughts on Christianity come down to my mom, possibly the most Christ-like person I have ever known. She died just over a year ago and had been a church-goer almost all her life. Her mother was Jew-ish, father Protestant-ish, but they were both pharmacists and had to work on Saturdays, so religious instruction came on Sunday. This was in heavily, heavily Catholic New Orleans, so Mom’s upbringing was very ecumenical.
By the last years of her life (she was totally healthy until a quick, deadly cancer got her) she had given up church, but she ALWAYS stayed true to the messages SHE got from her faith – love everyone; do what you can to help others (particularly the powerless and children); try not to judge people; be kind kind kind; material possessions are mostly worthless.
Her faith made her a Democrat. And her ethics made me one, without the religious trappings. So much of the message of Christ is liberal and progressive and moral. So much of organized religion is the antithesis of the message. My solution is take the morals and drop the trappings.
Tinare
@eversor: Yet their front runner is the devil, basically.
JWR
@Kay:
I may be wrong, but I think that’s Huntington Beach, the same city that’s bothered by Trans rights. ~sigh~ Just another day in the Culture Wars™
ETA. And mask mandates, too!
Jeffro
@Geminid: it’s funny – I did drive out there (Tybee) on my first day here! It reminded me a lot of Rehoboth as I drove through. The beaches themselves were nicer and wider, though.
Yes – hopefully, fingers crossed, double-plus please FSM that I make it home in time for tomorrow’s game!
eversor
@Kay:
Christian charity, even per Christ, has two forms. The first is you give up all your worldy shit and become poor to help the poor… ain’t nobody doing that. The second is you give them the gospel. That ammounts to private donations to the local church where the poor, homeless, and addicted can go get a sandwhich as long as they sit through a lecutre on why to be Christian.
In the end when it falls all Christians are going to be judged by supporting this system, out of their own free will, and at best making excuses for why it should not be wiped out. Willing acomplice for your own reasons won’t matter, you supported it, you own it, you are now judged. Every Christian is going to own Dobbs and the abortion issue because if you did not leave the Church and try to bring it down you at best sat passively and made excuses for it.
We are staring down three generations of people who know this and realize we are in a religious civil war first and foremost. And that when this ends hate speech has to be banned and that includes most of Christianity. One side will win, the other will be culturally destroyed. So pick the side now because this is rapidly happening among the youngs and those over 45 don’t have a choice in it.
Dorothy A. Winsor
The likely two candidates are Biden vs Trump. At that point, age will be harder to talk about as disqualifying. However, the damage may be done by then. The sliming of HRC was a cautionary tale.
Geminid
@fancycwabs: That is some good, clear writing.
H.E.Wolf
Roughly 50 years ago (mid-1970s), a minority of conservative, fundamentalist sects aggressively co-opted the word for themselves. They intended to erase other meanings of the word, and knowledge of other practices that exist under that religious umbrella, from people’s thoughts.
In this they were aided by lazy journalistic behavior, and by human nature. Ignorance and gullibility are neutral in themselves, but dangerous when bad actors exploit those qualities.
It was pretty effective, as we may observe at Balloon Juice from time to time.
It’s similar to the attempted co-opting of the American flag by Republicans.
catclub
Were they too busy eating fresh sweet corn?
tobie
@Tony Jay: Nailed it! You are on a roll this morning…or rather afternoon your time.
Spanky
I opened the WaPo website just now and see that Isaacson has an op-ed on how Musk supports Ukraine. I wish I were joking
Eta – I just zipped past the op-ed to get to the comments. Fortunately, readers are having none of it.
Tony Jay
@frosty:
@JWR:
Apart from being a metatextual rumination on retaliatory repetition, I just enjoyed writing it. It’s sad that someone who is actually damned interesting on other topics is such a one note pub-ranter with eliminationist tendencies on this one.
Mai Naem mobile >
@Doug R: you nailed it. I find it particularly offensive coming from Nikki Haley.
tobie
ETA: These excerpts probably need a trigger warning.
@Tony Jay: If you can stomach it, here’s a sample of Isaacson’s prose from 2021:
and this:
Excuse me while I go gag for a bit.
MomSense
Just had to pop in this morning and say that I met HCR last night and her husband B – was fangirling so ridiculously. She is everything you would want – gracious brilliant and wonderful. He is a classic Mainer and wicked handsome.
Steeplejack
@Spanky:
Thanks. Why do I suspect it’s run by some crusty old fossil who’s a ride-or-die Republican, if not an outright Trump supporter?
Geminid
@Jeffro: I hope to spend a couple days in Tybee Island this winter when I finally get to visit my friends in Atlanta. Some people say Tybee is “a drinking town with a fishing problem, but I’ll do a lot of walking and a little drinking. No fishing.
I want to visit the old fort I’ve driven by on the way into Tybee from Savanna. I think it’s Fort Pulaski. I’m into Civil War stuff, and Ft. Pulaski scored one of the Confederacy’s many firsts in that war. It was the first masonry fort ever to be destroyed by rifled cannon. The Union ships did not actually destroy Fort Pulaski, just blew holes in it until the Conferates raised a white flag.
MisterDancer
So allow me to introduce you to Catholics for Choice. They’ve been fighting within the church to make change. And as you’d expect, they don’t get a ton of media attention, but I know of their work because I found them when I started Reproductive Rights work myself in the early 1990s.
And that’s just one example. The entire Unitarian congregation is not only officially Pro Choice, their sex education is considered amazing and progressive, being inclusive from both a gender and racial POV.
So no, it’s again not all Christians sitting passive, and hasn’t been for decades. Just because you’ve not heard of them doesn’t mean they don’t exist, no moreso than the many activists working hard daily to, say, get people who need Abortions to clinics.
Tony Jay
@EarthWindFire:
“What is the most lib-baiting and enraging take on any particular issue, and how much will I get paid for draping 2000 words of filler around it?” is the question every modern infotainer asks themselves each morning as they drown memories of the reporter they once dreamt of being in a tall glass of absinthe and ex-wife’s tears.
Eolirin
@Subsole: Laziness isn’t real thing. No one’s lazy. That’s just a way to denegrate people for not behaving the way you think they should be behaving, without trying at all to understand why, and has a deeply racially coded history as a pejorative. It should be avoided.
They’re not lazy. They are entitled, isolated to a social bubble that limits their access to alternate points of view and, broadly, are lacking in imagination, curiousity, and self awareness. They’re dealing with a social dislocation that leads to defensiveness as well; their part of the social order is used to deference and it isn’t getting it anymore.
Baud
@MomSense: Whoa. I didn’t realize you were a bigshot in Maine. What was the occasion?
artem1s
This is a very important point to keep in mind concerning the whole question about why even more mainstream GOPers can’t let go of their addiction to TIFG. He’s their last hope of keeping control over all the voter suppression tactics that have been utilized as part of the Southern Strategy. That’s the drug they can’t give up. As LBJ noted after the Civil Rights Act passage, it meant losing the South for a generation (more than a couple as it turned out). Losing the EC battle means losing control of the WH and probably the House for maybe the rest of this century. And they will also lose control of several purple state offices and reverse the deep reddening of a couple of states like OH. It could mean the GOP goes the way of the Whigs. They will have to regroup under some new brand altogether. As well they should – because the only thing that has kept them together anyway was they could claim to be the Party of Lincoln – and they abandoned that brand a long time ago.
p.a.
@H.E.Wolf:
Also, their focus on the King James bible. James authorized that translation as weapon in his struggles w Parliament. The translators focused on interpretations that supported authoritarianism as opposed to delegated authority. Not always successful, the translation team was not a monolith (see the book God’s Secretaries).
re the KJV, see some of slacktivist’s posts on how often the most direct translation of, usually the Greek IIRC, “justice”, which implies the obligation of the powerful to the weak, was repurposed to “righteousness”, which means, some amorphous proper conduct.
eversor
@MisterDancer:
And yet Catholics still own the abortion issue. You don’t get a vote in this one. Your vote is leaving the Church and condeming it, if not you are pro Church. The middle ground never existed really. It’s now just dragged out into the open with the young.
Brachiator
@Kay:
Coming late to the thread…
Can’t get to the underlying article, but this is some weird cherry picking. Did voting stop in 2012? And “safely Republican” and “Republican leaning” is not the same thing.
And as you suggest, a deeper dive looking at gender, education, income could reveal important distinctions.
Kay
@Ksmiami:
I resent the dishonesty. Okay, so “Catholic Charities” gets massive federal funding. So maybe stop calling it “Catholic Charities” since it’s public money.
They’re government contractors. It’s fine! There are a lot of government contractors! But stop putting on airs and get in line for funding with the rest. And stop crediting “Catholics” with taxpayer funding that everyone pays for. What nerve.
Revenue of 5 billion, 3 billion of which comes from government. Give me a break. Be straight with people.
I have spent a lot of time around fundie religious and there’s this kind of nasty “the heathens must be trickedfor God” mindset. It’s 100% how Amish operate. They think it’s A ok to cheat “English”. Not a fan of that – it’s dishonest. Amish aren’t all apple butter and buggies. They’re often really dishonest actors in land sales. They think it’s justified because the person on the other side of the transaction isn’t Amish. Talk to auctioneers about Amish. Slippery. Get the cash up front.
Frankensteinbeck
@MisterDancer:
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but… sigh. What a disappointment.
Tony Jay
@tobie:
Jesus Windsurfing Christ, that’s appalling. I haven’t seen a jaw crammed that full of flaccid wrinklemeat since the behind the scenes after-party pictures from the set of King Kong came out.
Is Isaacson by any chance a 5’7, pale, wide-eyed brunette who likes wearing Catholic schoolgirl outfits and not being able to pronounce baby names? Because if not, they are wasting some quality sweettalk on the wrong guy
ETA – Let’s be honest. Elon Musk wasn’t even the most interesting guy in any of his marriages.
Gin & Tonic
I know this was the topic of Adam’s thread last night, and I know David Frum has much to atone for, but when he’s right he’s right.
cain
@Kay:
Speculation is all they have it’s what brings the clicks.
tobie
@Tony Jay: The whole article is the most nauseating piece of sycophancy and purple prose I’ve ever read. I get it that every biographer has to plug his subject…but the subject of any book on Musk should be how a petulant, immature, impulsive, and rancid figure like Musk could hoodwink the public and public officials for so long.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
I took the twitter app off my phone and honestly might as well delete my account except…NYT Pitchbot. Is DougJ cross posting those to one of the twitter alternatives? If so, which one?
MisterDancer
America, as a country, has done horrific things, and continues to do so. Are you next going to ask Americans to leave en masse (pun intended), least they be tarred with the brush of those evils?
Or — perhaps, just perhaps — there is nuance in being an American? There’s people within the country willing and eager to use the levers of power they have within, to mitigate and fight against the worst we have done.
Frankensteinbeck
@p.a.:
I am reminded that of the… as I recall 5 references to gay sex in the King James Bible, only one of them actually says you shouldn’t do it, the Leviticus one. The word ‘sodomy’ in particular is completely made up in the two times it’s used. The original word in Greek has no precedent, is never used elsewhere but those two times in the Bible. It could mean anything. Hey, it’s a combination of ‘man’ and ‘love’, but my sandwich has no sand in it. The context of its use is condemning the use of prepubescent boys as Roman slave prostitutes.
More humorously, the fourth is a statement that God punishes people in orgies by making them gay.
I don’t remember the fifth, but it’s similarly not a ‘Do not be gay!’
UncleEbeneezer
@Kay: Correct. But you could have just written: Star Wars
They’ve been freaking out for years over the fact that Star Wars, Little Mermaid, The Wonder Years etc., are now featuring Black/Brown/Women actors, which just shows how much they fully understand the importance of representation and always have. They’ve been going to bat for White Male representation forever.
Tony Jay
@tobie:
That won’t happen until Musk pisses off the wrong people and/or loses so much money that word goes out on the grapevine he’s no longer teflon-coated.
Until then, slather-jobs like Isaacson’s are just the tribute ambitious courtiers pay to self-conscious princes.
Frankensteinbeck
@UncleEbeneezer:
Ironically, Andersen might have imagined her as dark-skinned. He thought Orientalism was hot and the story takes place in an Orientalist (IE Middle Eastern) coded kingdom.
ETA – Andersen was such a weirdo, and his stories are nothing like people imagine. The Little Mermaid is SO WEIRD and messed up.
Also may brain seems to be tangent-obsessed this morning.
MisterDancer
@Frankensteinbeck: Oh, in retrospect, being in the Society brought out the best and certainly the worst, in me. I got multiple awards in my time, learned how to do research and teach and dance and costume and and and…and also how to be an asshole in so many ways I will never overcome, too many people I hurt.
Stepping away was among the best things I’ve ever done for myself, and others. It’s great for some people, but for others…well.
Gin & Tonic
@MisterDancer: Nuance and eversor are orthogonal to each other.
eversor
@MisterDancer:
And yet the root of the evil in America is Christianity. So you have to deal with Christianity first. American sins can only be dealt with after.
Eolirin
@eversor: Bullshit. The root of all evil in the US is and always has been white supremacy. There has always been a struggle amongst Christian factions over it.
Which side the faction comes down on in that struggle is far more determinative of their politics than their Christianity. Which is why despite Church doctrine, half of Catholics are fine with birth control aren’t staunchly anti abortion and vote for Democrats.
UncleEbeneezer
@Matt McIrvin: The problem is that even while they are trying to do this (let Latinx people into the club of Whiteness) I don’t think they (Latinx voters) vote GOP at nearly enough of a rate for this to be a viable long-term solution. They’re losing old, white voters who vote heavily GOP and only gaining some Latinx ones who still lean Dem. And it’s really only a subset of Latinx voters who fall for it. Not young ones. Not college-educated etc.
Also, let’s be real: it’s much easier for racist, white people to make nice with Irish and Italian people than it ever will be for them to do so with Latinx people (who the GOP is constantly pointing to as a threat to America via immigration). For several reasons, I’m not sure we can really assume the absorption of Irish/Italians into Whiteness means the same thing is possible with Latinx People.
Steeplejack
@Suzanne:
🤞🙏 for Mom’s surgery!
Eolirin
@UncleEbeneezer: It’s entirely possible, if they make some changes.
Whether they can make those changes is something else. There’s a level of radicalism that feels different than during the period when those absorptions happened. But we’ve been here before and they moderated enough to allow it with those groups. So it could go that way again.
Where they have a real problem is with women. They’re making inroads mostly with minority men, outside of the Asian population. And their support from white women is slipping. That’s a real existential threat. If women can vote you can’t lose women by too much and win anything; if you lose white women by enough not even gerrymandering can save you.
And their worldview really requires women be subjugated by men. If women stop putting up with that it’ll be hard to hold things together. I think giving that up will be far harder than making the changes necessary to appeal to Latino populations that are willing to view themselves as white.
kalakal
@Suzanne: Hoping all goes well.
Art
Huuu-Waaa.
Hell-yes. Good ad. “President Biden” well played because all the GOP has are clown-car stuffing. Biden looks presidential. Good call.
Jeffro
@Geminid: that sounds like a fun trip!
I think it was Fort Pulaski that you’re talking about (near Savannah). I didn’t know the history but I’ll have to read more, it sounds fascinating. =)
I took a few hours that first day and went down to Brunswick, where my family lived for a few years when I was a kid. The exhibits at Fort Frederica out on Saint Simons Island were really outstanding. Those folks must have felt like they were at the end of the earth, that’s for sure.
MisterDancer
What @Eolirin said. Racism is NOT strictly a Christian problem, to take one example close to me. Eliminating Christianity will not make people suddenly see me as an equal.
And that’s aside from the fact you just slid past me mentioning there at least one entire damn Christian denomination that’s Pro Choice. That flies in the face of you tarring the entire religion with same brush.
As someone who’s spent much of my adult life studying cultures outside America, I assure you, these issues aren’t simply Christian.
Nor, for that matter, have you offered any way to “deal” with Christianity, much less what comes in that stops someone else from taking these powers. You keep saying we must, but this is not a math equation and these are not axioms.
Brachiator
@UncleEbeneezer:
It’s weird how some Americans keep asserting that Hispanic people are not white or may have problems with being absorbed into whiteness. Hispanic cultures are more complex than this and have their own issues with white supremacy and colorism.
There are numerous Hispanics who see themselves as superior to Anglos. Nor are they looking for validation from white America. They don’t need it.
MisterDancer
@Brachiator: Thank you for saying this!
Although being Black, it’s still hard for me to wrap my mind around all the diversity-within-diversity of the Hispanic cultural situation. And that bit about “validation” really matters, in this context.
NotMax
@MomSense
???
zhena gogolia
@Albatrossity: I was gonna say. It’s Abilene, Jake.
zhena gogolia
@NotMax: Heather Cox Richardson
Omnes Omnibus
@MisterDancer: There is a reason that my habitual response to that commenter is “A bigot says what?”
NotMax
@zhena gogolia
Okay. Name rings not the tinkliest of bells.
Citizen Alan
@Brit in Chicago: And don’t forget how they ran up the score in the red states with anti gay marriage constitutional amendments to get the Talibangelicals to the polls. I know people in Mississippi who would not have even bothered to vote in 2004 had they not been offered the opportunity to make an utterly gratuitous statement of hatred toward LGBTs.
sab
@Kay: Also too puppy mills.
MisterDancer
Ah, they tick me off too much to let it go. :(
Brachiator
@MisterDancer:
The recent Los Angeles city council scandal illuminated some of this. Hispanic city council members were being racist and openly disdainful not only towards black people, but also Jews, Armenians and other Anglo groups who are part of the city. One council member, basking in her Spanish blood, also mocked Hispanics with mainly indigenous heritage, including one of the other Hispanic council members who were caught in this open mike conversation.
There are Republicans who think that they can take care of this by controlling immigration and appealing to conservative Hispanics. They don’t have a clue.
Now, it is true that many Hispanic voters support Democrats, and despise Republicans. But this doesn’t mean that Hispanics are looking to Democrats for ethnic validation.
NotMax
@sab
Where else ya goin’ to get puppy flour from?
// :)
Eunicecycle
@Citizen Alan: the same in Ohio. I have voted in the same precinct for over 40 years and have never before or since seen the turnout there was in 2004 because of the marriage amendment. I saw people from my church that were practically in tears, worried it would fail. I didn’t tell them I voted against it.
Miss Bianca
@kalakal: Glad to hear the damage at least *seems* a little better than you feared.
Saving the penguin contest to savor over the next couple of days. :)
Eunicecycle
@sab: I saw a list recently of the worst puppy mills in Ohio and almost every one was in Amish country, with a name that implies they are Amish. For the most part I think the Amish are fine but like all people, they have their bad actors.
Matt McIrvin
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Trump’s supporters successfully smeared Hillary Clinton as a crony of Jeffrey Epstein even though Trump was far more closely associated with Jeffrey Epstein and even had associated rape accusations against him. These things don’t necessary follow logic.
NotMax
@kalakal
First prize a week’s vacation in Tuxedo?
;)
Alison Rose
Saw a tweet recently that said “‘Ronan Farrow is trending’ is the ‘Omar coming’ whistle for wealthy white men”.
Miss Bianca
@MomSense: HCR? B? No idea whom you are referring to, but glad the experience was a happy one!
Bupalos
It’s a well executed ad, and maybe it’s an angle we have to sink resources into. But we should also be clear-eyed that this is fundamentally defense. It might as well start out with “People say Biden is too old, but…” Which we’re going to have to do.
When the campaign ratchets up, I hope it’s tilted towards offense and talking up what the administration is doing that is changing this country for the better. They need to hammer as hard as possible the way workers are gaining power and talk about what that means for people’s lives.
Geminid
@Jeffro: Fort Pickens is another big pre-Civil War fort. It’s across the bay from the city of Pensacola, Florida. The Union held the fort throughout the war and it’s in much better shape than Fort Pulaski. Now Fort Pickens is part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore, and is a great place to visit or camp. Pensacola seems like a nice town too.
PAM Dirac
@NotMax: Pretty sure HCR is Heather Cox Richardson.
Kristine
@kalakal: I voted for Mo. I like his attitude.
Miss Bianca
@Kay:
I live around a bunch of Amish and, their celebrated barn-raising skills notwithstanding, they can do as much shitty building work as they do good stuff. When you want it fast and cheap, you go to the Amish around here – just be aware that “good” is not always guaranteed.
One of my friends had her Amish-built house burn down around her family earlier this year. Faulty electrical wiring. I would never trust them to build me anything but a pole barn or (non-electrified) shed, honestly.
Alison Rose
@Bupalos: Why the hell would we even want to acknowledge their dumbass argument? The whole point of an ad like the one above is to prove that claim wrong without dignifying it with direct reference.
Miss Bianca
@MisterDancer: Forget it, MD, it’s eversor(e). On this particular topic, he seems beyond the reach of reason.
Geminid
@Miss Bianca: There’s a group of Amish builders near me, from a community just east of the Blue Ridge. They’ve prospered with the Charlottesville area’s building boom. This particular outfit has a reputation for high-quality residential work. I got to watch them building a house next door to where I was doing a landscape project. They looked well organized and serious, like good carpenters.
UncleEbeneezer
@Brachiator: I’m well aware of everything you wrote. I live in Los Angeles. Surrounded by and work with and know people of all variation of the Hispanic/Latinx umbrella. I’ve worked on outreach in those communities on policing issues and have seen everything you speak of first hand.
My point is, Hispanic Women voted for Dems in 2022 by THIRTY POINTS! I don’t think GOP attempts to welcome Latinx/Hispanic voters into Whiteness are going to be able to lower that fast enough to offset all the young voters in that community. Certainly not when the MAGA base which the GOP can’t afford to lose and who are the active king-makers in the Primary will never stop bashing ALL Latinx/Hispanic people. Have you ever met MAGA voters? Do you seriously think they are going to attenuate their deeply-held contempt for anyone who is Latinx or Hispanic any time soon? I don’t. I think it’s way too deeply built-in to the psyche of US Conservatism even with non-Trumpers. They won’t be able to pick up older, Latinos as fast as they lose young Latinx voters (especially women). Even by using the carrots of anti-Blackness, misogyny, LGBTQphobia, that sadly do appeal to many in every community. I think the average GOP voter (and their politicians) can tolerate “The Good Ones” the same way they try to with Black People, but they won’t be good enough to net more voters than they continue to turn away. At least, not enough to offset Young and Women voters going to the Dem Party.
eversor
@UncleEbeneezer:
Yet saying Latinx is racist in and of itself and Latinos don’t like it. They aren’t your toy in the gender wars and being a Christian group by in large they do agree with patriarchy, hierarchy, and gender roles as Christ demanded. So just admit the GOP is racist but our values are counter to their religions and upscale whites should stop talking in terms like Latinx and admit nobody who believes in feminism can be a can be even remotely Christian. It’s faster to just fess up with it, rather than engage in more liberal lies about the situation.
eversor
@Eolirin:
Christianity and Christ himself demands women obey men. There is no way out of that with the religion. It’s a core Old Testament, New Testament, Jesus himself mandate. So unless Christianty is gone women are under men. And anybody who does not agree with this is not a Christian or even follower of Christ. Shit Ghandi admitted this one.
Bill Arnold
@MisterDancer:
Hate thy neighbor as thyself.
eversor
@MisterDancer:
We deal with Christians like we deal with Nazis that’s how it will be done. Mass social stigma. Not hiring them. Having former Christians rededucate them and speak in public about renouncing their beliefs.
This not only has to happen, it will happen.
UncleEbeneezer
@Brachiator: And what % of Latinx/Hispanic people do you think actually pass for White according to the GOP (and especially MAGA) voters? Of course those people exist, but I would argue that in the eyes of the GOP (and the MAGA base that controls it) it is very small number. They (GOP/MAGA) view the vast majority of Latinx/Hispanic people as Others and that is gonna put a pretty big ceiling on how many voters they can attract. They can have their Latino friends (just like they make nice with their Black Friends/co-workers) on an individual level, but I don’t think they (and the GOP Party) can welcome enough. I dunno. We’ll see.
Miss Bianca
@Geminid: #notallAmish
There are good and bad in every community. Some of the ones around here seem to be constantly testing what the ‘English’ law will let them get away with.
Matt McIrvin
@UncleEbeneezer: I think California is different from other parts of the US in this regard and that “Hispanic” may be too broad a designation to mean much of anything.
In Florida, the Republicans have a base of long-term support among Cuban-Americans and have done pretty well reaching out to other immigrants from left-wing authoritarian states, convincing them that Democrats are the kind of thing they ran from. That’s a similar play to the one Reagan used in the 1980s with immigrants from Southeast Asia. The Republicans eventually lost a lot of those voters by being racist and xenophobic, but it doesn’t seem to be a dealbreaker all the time.
Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog
@Brit in Chicago: Fwill condemns the extremists on both sides — The Republicans, who want to burn democracy to the ground and salt the earth, and the Democrats, who don’t.
sab
@PAM Dirac: That makes more sense, what with the Maine references.
Brachiator
@UncleEbeneezer:
The notion of Hispanic people “passing for white” is stunningly irrelevant to most Latinos. Many Hispanic people see themselves as white in their home countries if they are recent immigrants, or depending on their own family history. This perception is not dependent on the judgment of Anglos.
And again, many Hispanic people do not give a shit about MAGA voters or white people in general as gatekeepers of whiteness.
I mentioned once before a person I knew who was born in Mexico and whose wife observably had some indigenous ancestry. Still, he insisted that his children say that they were Spanish. And he voted Republican mainly because he hated black people and didn’t want to be associated with them politically.
But again he couldn’t give a shit about what Anglos thought about him.
I don’t know that the eyes of the MAGA base matter that much. Demographics are against them. White people are becoming a plurality of the voting population. They depend on the political apathy of young Hispanics. If this changes, the MAGA crowd are doomed.
The GOP play at restricting immigration and push a vile narrative that Hispanic people cannot be assimilated. But we have seen this before. The bottom line is that the Republican leadership can count. And they know that they will need Hispanic voters in the future.
Geminid
@Art: I sent that ad to four friends by text. I did not ask them their opinion, but three have texted back anyway to say they they thought it was a good one.
MomSense
@Baud:
Garden party!
Baud
@MomSense:
I want pictures for On The Road.
Geminid
@Miss Bianca: I think this set of Amish are able to prosper here because there is so much demand for good upper-middle class housing. A lot of people are building homes in western Albemare County, so most of their jobs are 20 miles or less from their homes (they live in the far northwest corner of the County). I imagine that Amish in less prosperous areas can be very grasping, but these folks don’t need to be.
Citizen Alan
@Tony Jay: As a Brit, I am curious if you saw and have any feelings about the Doctor Who episode from a few years back that focused on the Tesla-Edison feud. Like so much of the Chibnall era, I thought it suffered from horrendous missteps in writing. But I was particularly struck by the fact that the writers obviously wanted to write a story that was pro-Tesla, anti-Edison. But what they actually put on the screen depicted Tesla as a prickly antisocial jerk whose professional failures seemed due mainly to his character flaws, while Edison was allowed to give a fairly articulate and plausible defense of mercenary capitalism and, in the end, did more to save the day from the aliens than anyone else including the Doctor!
UncleEbeneezer
@Brachiator: Fair points. I knew a Colombian co-worker who sounds a lot like your Mexican friend. I suspect he wasn’t MAGA (more likely didn’t bother voting) but was very misogynist/racist and probably hated the
I guess I’m just not ready to hit the panic button on the notion of some mass exodus of Hispanic voters to the GOP. Even in the lowest turnout elections (most advantageous for GOP), like 2022, they have been voting for Dems by +28 (college educated) and +19 (no college education). And that was with Inflation and CRT concerns being on full blast by the Media, nonstop, in addition to exhaustion by many Dem GOTV canvassers I know who focus on Latinx outreach. I’d be surprised if the GOP could ever get that down to +10 points any time soon. And even only a 10 point advantage for Dems on the largest growing voting demographic is still extremely bad news for the GOP.
Citizen Alan
@AM in NC: All of the people I’ve known who have been truly kind and moral have been Christians. But for most of them, they seem to have been kind and moral despite the best efforts of mainstream Christianity to beat kindness out of them.
wjca
Sad to hear that the SCA has come to that (at least where you were). At least in its home in the San Francisco area, and in the 1970s and 80s, I wasn’t seeing that. In fact, if memory serves, in the 80s there was a Queen of the West who was East Asian. Nobody batted an eye.
Ruckus
@EarthWindFire:
A one word answer – conservatives.
Citizen Alan
@Kay: When I was a child, about 12 or so, I and all the other kids in my parents church were herded into the church basement to watch a Christian film called “Heavenly Deception.” It was anti-Moonie propaganda, and the title came from a scene near the end when the viewpoint character who had been brought into the Unification Church after being raised Baptist discovers that church leaders are doing something dishonest and they try to reassure him that it’s a “heavenly deception.” That’s enough to make him scurry back to the “honest” evangelical church.
Fast forward 20 years, and the SBC is happy to partner with the Unification Church against the godless hordes of liberalism.
wjca
@Eolirin:
It is probably too much to hope that eversor will ever explain how he reconciles the black Christian churches with his views. Doubtless easier for him to just ignore the contradictoon.
Brachiator
@UncleEbeneezer:
Totally agree with you on this. The worst of the MAGA crowd insist on doing everything they can to alienate Hispanic voters, even those who might agree with them on many issues.
It rarely comes up in these threads, but I know quite a few Hispanic people who followed all the rules and who vehemently oppose Democratic Party immigration policies.
On the other hand, I know Hispanic people who simply do not care about immigration law and come here because that is what they need to do to survive. The border is just an imaginary line. Some of these people have old ties here and have ancestors who crossed the border as needed, and always have had relatives on both sides.
ETA. Coming back to an earlier question, I know MAGA people who are married to Hispanic or Asian spouses. California is weird, dude.
Thinking about it a bit more, years ago I knew people who were part of the old WASP ruling class of Los Angeles. The unofficial rule among this crowd was that you could marry an Asian or Hispanic and still be part of the club. But not a black person. Also, being a gay male was okay, if you were quiet about it. But gay women were shunned.
Betty
I have remained on Twitter/X because I still find it useful. But now I am a little nervous because I got a notice that Elon just followed me. I can’t imagine why.
allium
@Frankensteinbeck:
You don’t say?
Ruckus
@Brit in Chicago:
Maybe when you work, even just vote to make the world more like the story says, better in food, better in freedom, better in standing in humanity, better in equality, better for all, maybe that can replace the concept of studying to be better by actually being better.
Geminid
@UncleEbeneezer: Ruben Gallego’s Senate race should shed some light on political trends among Hispanic voters in Arizona, both in participation and in affiliation.
My understanding is that Arizona Hispanics have lagged behind their Anglo counterparts in voter registration and turnout, but are beginning to catch up. The new Secretary of State, Adrian Fontes, provides that community with some visual representation in high office. That may help motivate Hispanic voters, as could Gallego’s candidacy.
Fun Gallego/Fontes facts: Ruben Gallego’s mother emigrated to the US from Mexico before he was born. Adrian Fontes’ familiy moved to what is now Arizona around 1740. Both men are Marine Corps vetterans
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
But gay women were shunned.
Gay women don’t as often create new citizens to collect taxes from.
A possibility. There are likely others.
Oh and BTW my gay sister had a child. Who has 2 children.
MomSense
@Baud:
I would get in big trouble!
gliese1288
Can anyone tell me who narrates the (excellent) Biden ad about his trip to Kiev? I’m sure I recognize the voice, for a second I thought it was maybe Mike Ehrmentraut from Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul? Probably not or there would be some publicity around it. Maybe that’s just the talent of a good voice actor, to make you feel like you know the person speaking.
eversor
@wjca:
Christianity was forced on other groups by rape, torture, and death, to accept what went on. That they turned it around to argue for their own rights is not a pro Christian right, but a slam against it.
Tony Jay
@Citizen Alan:
I do remember that episode. It’s funny, but I found Tesla quite sympathetic, a bit away with the fairies and paranoid about people stealing his inventions, but convincing in that he was a man who lived most of his life in his own very different head and really did have people out to get him. His delight at the Doctor’s ability to get his ideas was well expressed too. Edison, OTOH, came across as as the archetypal American proto-oligarch, damned clever in his own right – if nowhere near Tesla’s rarified level – but much more interested in controlling all of the money making inventions that were going to transform the world, by fair means or foul.
Have to say, though, I thought the Chibnall era was bolloxed by a lot of executive meddling. You got the impression that the BBC execs (operating under instructions from above to downscale the show in advance of hiving it off to another network) insisted on DW ‘proving its worth’ by taking on much more of an educational history-show vibe, which definitely annoyed the bejeebus out of a lot of fans. Far too much “Wow. It’s (insert historical figure) oh, you’re brilliant. I love you. When you did (insert historical event) that was brilliant!”
Roll on November. I can’t wait.
Bupalos
@Alison Rose: The whole tack is a tacit defensive acknowledgement, that’s my point. You and I might vibe more to the defender of freedom flavor here, because we’re more attuned to the nature of the Russo-Ukrainian war and it’s existential threat to a future based on democratic values. To the general public this is 90% just straight “OH YEAH?! Well look, he’s not too old to go to a war zone and be all war war like a young war guy!”
Which again, we’re going to have to do some of that kind of defense, because the age is a massive electoral issue, as maddening as that is in the current context. I just don’t want to get caught up in it. The administration is making miraculous progress against all odds, we need that story to be clear and that to be the focus.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
RE: But gay women were shunned.
No. I never entirely understood this stupidity, but some of it was that the men only were interested in women who were potentially wives or girlfriends. Also, some of the most disgusting bigotry came from straight women who feared or hated gay women.
Obviously being gay has nothing to do with being able to reproduce. A commuting buddy had tried to be a good girl when she was younger, got married to a macho man and had a daughter before she found the courage to live as an out and proud gay woman.
Ruckus
@Tony Jay:
It’s doubly ironic that Musk gets (approvingly) compared to Edison’s myth, when the real Edison was the man more or less responsible for destroying Tesla and all his actual genius.
Maybe that’s WHY he gets approvingly compared to Edison.
Tony Jay
@Ruckus:
It would make sense. Seeing something beautiful and stamping on it. How virile! The modern court infotainer tends to white-out with temporary blood relocation when in the presence of such dangerous men.
Manyakitty
@Kay: probably dead thread, but YES. This is the core, because that’s what he is. They feel vindicated by his public tantrums and love it when he sticks it to anyone.
tokyokie
I love the Biden ad, I just hope that when the GOP nominates its felonious standard-bearer, the ad is edited to point out that during the BLM protests near the White House, tfg cowered in terror in the safe bunker under the White House.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Having known a lot of gay people over the last 40-45 yrs, including a woman who used to live with my sister, who was a person I considered to be my best friend and who died from the care of a racist jackass of a doctor – from Sickle Cell, I believe you and I are on the same track here.
It doesn’t matter who you or I or anyone else lays down with (or any other position…) as long as it is completely consensual. No one is in charge of another adult’s relationship unless one (or more…) of them is a complete asshole. And then the other one should leave before the relationship starts or at the first sign of assholiness shows up. For most of us it really isn’t that difficult to be an actual human being. And yes, sometimes all of us have to work at it a bit. For some us that walk upright it is impossible for them to be anything but an actual complete asshole. I believe most of us, likely a lot more men (but not only men…) try to be absolutely in charge. That takes away all concept of equality, and is bullshit.
I don’t think it’s all that difficult to be a human the vast majority of the time, and yes there will be times when our limits are pushed too far and we fail at humanity 101. It’s what we do after that tells us who we really are.
rikyrah
@Alison Rose:
😂😂😂😂😂😂