Open Mic for the week of 6/26/2023
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
Patriot Front showed up at a place and, this time, The Proud Boys unmasked a couple of them.
The Patriot Front guys freaked out at being unmasked and now social media is doing what they can to ask “who are these guys?”
Adam Kinzinger points out that there may be felonies involved:
Report
I’m out of date on my daemonology. What is the Patriot Front?
Also judging by this video it looks like there are fewer than 20 and maybe fewer than 15 people involved in whatever this shoving match was.Report
Patriot Front is one of several ultra-right-wing groups that shows up and has members that wave A VERY PARTICULAR FLAG YOU KNOW THE ONE and they tend to always be fully masked. Like, “Who are these guys?” masked.
Well, what makes this particular interaction notable is that two were actually unmasked this time around.Report
Got it. So potential for some job openings.Report
Starting the week off with some good news:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/26/economy/us-rents-may/index.htmlReport
I have difficulty thinking of a better trend than this for alleviating the crisis of unhoused people.Report
Private housing completions have been steadily rising since 2010, but we still have a huge hole to fill:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPUTSA
Note that this is annualized monthly rate, so there were about 125k homes completed in May, not 1.5 million. And two-thirds of those units are single-family homes, so we need to be building much more multi-family housing.Report
Also, housing starts took a dive in mid 2022, so that doesn’t suggest good things to come:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
The decline was only in single-family starts, though. Multi-family housing starts kept rising, possibly because of the longer process to get started, or possibly because the barriers to building are so high that it’s profitable to build even at high interest rates.
By the way, for the last five years, in the entire United States, there have been about 350k housing units in multi-family buildings completed per year. Prior to that it was even lower, though it was much higher in the 70s and 80s. Yet for years I’ve been hearing about how we’re building tons and tons of luxury apartments and condos that just sit empty.Report
This just showed up on the timeline:
What happens to housing prices if, oh, 20% of Air B&B properties are put up for sale?
40%?Report
People have been saying since November 2020 that there’s gonna be an AirBnB Crash.
Not to say it’s not gonna happen, but it’s not like it’s a new hot idea that’s taking the world by storm.Report
Okay. Last week’s commercial was interpreted as making fun of the consumers by making them look like a bunch of bumbling oafs.
Could have happened to anybody, really.
So let’s turn things around FOR REALSIES.
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Heads up for SCOTUS this week. Still undecided as we head into the last decision days of June are:
Groff v. DeJoy (standards for on-the-job religious accommodations);
Counterman v. Colorado (what constitutes a “true threat” to remove a statement from First Amendment protection);
Abitron Austria GmbH v. Hetronic Int’l (can overseas trademark violations count for domestic trademark confusion);
Biden v. Nebraska and Department of Education v. Brown (who has standing to challenge Biden student-debt relief plan and if it’s either individual student loan payors or states, the merits of those challenges); and biggest of all,
Moore v. Harper (do state legislatures have plenary, unchecked power to regulate elections including drawing legislative maps).
(Comment edited to convert listing of cases into an actual list.)Report
Given the rulings so far on state legislature drawn maps in Alabama and Louisiana I have to wonder how Moore V. Harper comes down.Report
United States v. Texas is also a sign that SCOTUS is not going to defer to states just because they’re states.Report
Moore v. Harper (do state legislatures have plenary, unchecked power to regulate elections including drawing legislative maps).
I believe it was the penultimate paragraph in the Arizona v. Arizona opinion that said the responsibility for making that interpretation fell to Congress, the time for Congress to do it was 120 years ago, and to decide otherwise now was to open the door for hundreds of cases about election laws that shouldn’t be on the books. I suspect that despite how they might feel about the first two of those, there will be at least five votes to avoid that increase in the case load.Report
But you’re not considering the partisan angle. If a state legislature AND ONLY A STATE LEGISLATURE can draw maps, then there is nothing to stop California from throwing out the then-unconstitutional independent commission map and gerrymandering to something like a 49-5 split which all the political mapheads assure us is quite possible. Republicans would never get control of the House of Representatives again.
The only thing that would stop that from happening if the MAGAs win in NC would be California Democrats’ lack of ruthlessness. (And to be fair, that’s a reasonable gamble on their part.)Report
It isn’t so much as a lack of ruthlessness but a big part of the Democratic Party being goo-goos and insisting on adhering to principles as the Republicans use every trick they can. The New York Democratic Party attempted ruthlessness and got told to shove it.Report
Arguable, the time to make that interpretation fell to fell to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, or someone right after that, because the OG US Constitution throws quite a lot of things to state legislatures, and there has never been any suggestion that state constitutions or even existing legislature cannot modify how that functions.
Indeed, there’s not a constitutional process as to how this is supposed to function…when the constitution throws things to state legislatures, it doesn’t bother to explain _how_ the state legislature is supposed to decide things. Like here:
“New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.”
And how does the legislature ‘consent’ to this? A simple majority vote of all of them voting together? Each house voting separately and it has to pass both? Hell, why are we defaulting to voting, that’s not even specified, maybe the elected leader of the bodies just must agree! Where is this process of ‘consent’ laid out?! How do we know what the means?
Without a process being given in the US constitution, the only logical place to look for a process of how the ‘legislature’ consents to things is within the state constitution (You know, the thing that actually made the bodies we’re talking about) and state law…which, yes, will involve other things besides the legislature.Report
The Moore v. Harper decision is out. Roberts writes:
Report
And oh my, egg on my face. I completely forgot about the affirmative action cases.Report
That’s where things will get interesting. McMegan had a mini-essay talking about how AA makes sense in a country with the demographics of the 1970s and it doesn’t make sense in a country with the demographics of the 2020s. When you add to that how “educated whites who send kids to selective schools are rapidly becoming the most influential Dem constituency”, there’s something that is going to have to break.
It’s not particularly “fair” (whatever that means) to make the AAPI community take it in the shorts.Report
mcmegan: “AA made sense for the country that existed when it was written, but not now”
also mcmegan: “Section 230 is vital to the functioning of the internet and we can’t ever change it, the original context is irrelevant”Report
Still waiting to hear what the 9th does with Gonzalez v. Google.Report
FedSoc legal conservatives used to say that it was not the role of the courts to measure what makes sense for the country at a given point in time, that’s a legislative function. The unchanging Constitution merely sets boundaries on what is permissible for a legislature to do, and it is up to legislatures to do them, or not, responsive to the popular will. Hell, Antonin Scalia preached that doctrine until his dying day.
The majority bloc of SCOTUS today still talks that talk at their fancy banquets (that have recently been put under a wee bit of public scrutiny to their great discomfort), but they do not walk the walk when they actually write their opinions.Report
Groff winds up unanimously ruling for the petitioner. The de minimis standard is gone, let us move boldly forward into the new era of “substantial cost.” (Context: measuring when a religious accommodation becomes an “undue burden” on an employer.)
Unanimity on that case took me by surprise until I saw that no one — not the respo dent, not the government– was arguing to keep the old standard.
AA got the axe, as was widely predicted. A tiny sliver of it remains, but not enough to matter.
Still up: student loans and gay wedding websites. On that last case, I favor an expansive reading of the standing requirement of Article III. But I have to disapprove of “someone just making shit up and filing a constitutional challenge based on that.” https://newrepublic.com/article/173987/mysterious-case-fake-gay-marriage-website-real-straight-man-supreme-courtReport
Am I interpreting the article correctly? That all of the courts, from District to Circuit to Supreme, with all of the lawyers involved, never attempted to verify the claim about the same-sex web site request? Just took it at face value?
What’s the statute of limitations on perjury? What punishment is typically dealt out to attorneys who submit fabricated evidence?Report
Dude should say “I used ChatGPT!”Report
You interpreted it how I would. Lots of egg on lots of faces.
And if you were seeking to discredit the judiciary, this would end up being a great way to do so.Report
It’s not clear who made this thing up. It seems pretty clear that an actual web designer would a) not be very likely to hire someone else to design his own wedding website; b) would probably not be planning his wedding to a man while still married to a woman; and c) the inquiry came at a strange time with respect to the filing of the lawsuit, specifically, the day AFTER it was filed, despite d) the plaintiff never having done a wedding website before and not advertising to attra ct that sort of business.
If you’re looking at all that and saying “Yeah, that COULD be a weird coincidence but come on, this was totally fabricated,” I agree with you.
Jaybird’s reference to the ChatGPT thing is on point. That was a Rule 11(b) violation and there’s a lot of discretion in how that sanction comes down. The idea is to punish as a deterrent to others.
This could also be a referral to a state bar disciplinary panel. I like to say that lawyers really only get in serious disbarment trouble for three things: having sex with their clients, stealing from their clients, and lying to the court. This would be “lying to the court.”
(ETA: There are dozens of perjury prosecutions nationwide every year. Please note I said “dozens,” not “hundreds.”)Report
The actual logical problem with most of these ‘I should not have to do things for teh gays’ cases is that the work is ‘artistic’, which seems to make sense when only looking from one direction. There’s a good argument of ‘art is a creative endeavor that touches on not only religion, but other first amendment issues, and the government cannot compel me to create speech I disagree with’. This position seems much more likely to get through the courts than ‘The government cannot compel me to sell them gas’.
The problem is, when conservatives actually try to test that in court, it runs into the very obvious problem that queer people do not…uh…want homophobes designing art for them. In fact, queer people mostly prefer not to do business with homophobes at all, but they especially do not want a person who dislikes them to produce art for them, especially art that in some way is supposed to honor a queer relationship or something. Aka, the exact situation that conservatives want to take to court.
This is sorta why I wouldn’t actually have a problem with a ‘right’ not to create art if that right was _actually intended_ to be restricted to artistic things, but it’s clear that conservatives are trying to get a foot in the door with court decisions introducing ‘religious liberty’ to discriminate, and expand that right outward to just deny services in general to LGBTQ people. But…they run into a serious problem getting their foot in the door because, duh, the sort of court case that could hypothetically get past the court isn’t likely to even arise.
And thus we get this. An entirely made-up case, based entirely in hypotheticals.Report
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/us/roe-v-wade-abortion-views.html
Abortion attitudes are shifting strongly in a pro-choice direction which doesn’t surprise me in the least. The Pre-Roe world always had a HUGE contingent of people who were perfectly content to be verbally pro-life or non-committal so long as they were confident it wouldn’t effect them in any way. The pre-Roe high water mark for pro-restriction attitude was clearly their highest water mark.Report
If anyone actually cared about federalism or voter autonomy (as opposed to result), then this might be a fine result, and one that proves my thesis that law and culture have a reciprocating catalytic relationship rather than one of effect-and-cause.
But no one cares about federalism or voter autonomy, and abortion is the tentpole issue that proves this is true: however much they may protest about process, people only actually care about the result.Report
“people only actually care about the result.” It’s a republic, if you can keep it…Report
…which is why process matters.Report
+1000Report
It takes a pretty cerebral person (or a person to whom the given issue has little to no impact) to focus on the process of any given policy rather than the outcome.Report
well that would be OT, now wouldn’t it?Report
Depends on the policy. Speaking personally I am a gay man; I have a black husband; I have many trans friends; I have a sister. So I have skin in the game on many hot button policies.Report
I do too – but OT is full of cerebral persons focused almost entirely on policy process and not outcome.Report
+1Report
I hear what you’re saying but you’re basically endorsing Donald Trump’s worldview.Report
no, I’m characterizing OT, vs normies. Most of whom, frankly, don’t care about how until it impacts them, and then its the what they rant about not the how.Report
Did we discuss Jason Brennan’s taxonomy from Against Democracy here before?
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“It takes a pretty cerebral person…to focus on the process of any given policy rather than the outcome.”
Everything creates precedent. If we do something outside the process just this one time because it’s really important, now we need to explain why, tomorrow, we won’t go outside the process another time, and particularly we need to explain why we went outside the process to help a white straight woman but not a black gay man.
This doesn’t mean “don’t do things”. It means that you have to follow the rules.
Oh, the rules are a pain in the ass and we shouldn’t follow them if they stop us doing what
we want to doreally needs to be done? Welcome to the Libertarian Party, your complimentary gun is on the table to the left.ReportThat entire premise falls apart when one political party is willing to do literally anything to accomplish their goals, including breaking precedents like ‘not trying to overthrow the government’, and ‘having Supreme Court decisions based in actual facts’.
The argument isn’t the Democrats should break the rules because the rules are in the way, the argument is that Democrats should break the rules because the rules literally don’t matter anymore to Republicans and they will break whatever rules get in their way anyway, so Democrats might as well do it first.Report
The Republican Party didn’t try to overthrow the government; a few idiots did (or whatever it was they were trying to do). The Democratic Party’s SCOTUS choices have never let a law get in the way of their sense of duty. Democrats talk about padding the Court, minting $1 trillion coins, and every other “ends justify the means” scheme that’s been endorsed by our fellow commenters.Report
Remember, when anyone says ‘Democrats talk about doing random things outside the normal political process’, they are saying it that way because Democrats _haven’t actually done, or even tried to do, these things_.
Meanwhile, something that the actual elected Republican President backed and asked people do for him, and they actually did, is just ‘a few idiots’.
I guess it was just ‘a few idiots’ on the Supreme Court who just decided a totally bogus case, too.
The problem isn’t that some people here ‘focus on the process of any given policy rather than the outcome’, the problem here is that some people here literally cannot distinguish between things a political party is actively doing via laws and court cases and holds policy positions about, vs a thing that a couple of dozen leftist talking heads and _maybe_ Bernie Sanders and AOC calls for but the political party is nowhere near even seriously discussing, much less making a policy position, and actually attempting it is almost incomprehensible.Report
Democrats promoted unsupported accusations against SCOTUS nominees. Democrats challenged the fair election in 2000. Democrats took over Chrysler. Democrats targeted conservative groups with the IRS. Democrats put kids in cages. Democrats overthrew the Senate filibuster rule. Democrats defended an impeached president. Democrats put covid sufferers into nursing homes then undercounted the deaths. Democrats defended race riots throughout 2020. Democrats illegally imposed vaccine mandates. Is 10 enough?Report
So, another problem here is that people have absolutely no reading comprehension or can’t stay on track, and think ‘A list of problems they have with Democrats is Democrats doing things outsides the political process or norm’.
Let’s look at this list:
1. Democrats promoted unsupported accusations against SCOTUS nominees.
…aka, Democrats looked into allegations being made before putting someone on the Supreme Court, a thing that is literally their job.
2. Democrats challenged the fair election in 2000.
I can’t even imagine what you think this means.
3. Democrats took over Chrysler.
You’re going to call a bill that was voted for by 41% of Republicans in the House something horrifically outside norms that the Democrats did, eh?
4. Democrats targeted conservative groups with the IRS.
We factually know this is incorrect, and have discussed that here several times. The IRS’s slapdash ‘Is this an actual charity or is it a political lobbying group’ stuff impacted Democratic groups just as much.
5. Democrats put kids in cages.
…in a way that violated the law? You do remember we’re talking about ‘Things happening outside political norm’, not ‘things people have decided are bad’
As far as I can tell we have been locking up kids who crossed the border illegal forever, which you can argue makes certain Democrats hypocrites (Although Trump is majorly increase that.), but it certainly doesn’t make it outside political norms.
6. Democrats overthrew the Senate filibuster rule.
…after Republicans broke norms by filibustering judicial nominees for years.
7. Democrats defended an impeached president.
WTF does this even mean?
…and somehow the breaking of the norms by _continually investigating the President until he lied under oath about a personal matter, and impeaching him for that_, is somehow not breaking norms, but defending him is.
Republicans started the ‘continually investigate elected officials despite there being no actual crimes’, not Democrats. In fact, Democrats have not even started doing this…although it’s hard to notice because they _have_ been investigating Trump, who, uh, does actually have plenty of legit reasons to be investigated.
8. Democrats put covid sufferers into nursing homes then undercounted the deaths.
As opposed to Republicans, who clearly did other things that you can list now:
Oh, wait, no, they didn’t, did they?
9. Democrats defended race riots throughout 2020.
LOL.
10. Democrats illegally imposed vaccine mandates.
There has never been a vaccine mandate for COVID in the US.Report
All perfectly true and perfectly useless to point out.Report
The funny thing is, in his response to my ‘People keep pretending things that some Democrats talking things about are comparable to actual policy decisions and incitements to riot by Republicans’, he went ahead and listed three or four things that are just some amount of Democrats talking: ‘promoted unsupported accusations against SCOTUS nominees’, ‘defended an impeached president’, ‘defended race riots throughout 2020’, and possibly ‘challenged the fair election in 2000’, depending on what he means by that.
And two others on the list are response to crisis, one which it is possible to argue was not ideal, and the other certainly wasn’t ideal, but both were pretty frickin centrist behaviors at the time:
The obviously non-ideal one was mismanaging COVID, which pretty much every state managed to do. And regardless of how anyone feels about that, even if the Democrats did it worse in general, it’s bad governance, not norm breaking behavior. Feel free to bring it up in mistakes Democrats have made! But being bad at the government (In a pretty novel situation that no one really got correct) isn’t the same as trying to overthrow it or failing to allow judges to be nominated or investigating literally all Democratic administration for complete nonsense in Congressional PR show-trials, or whatever norm-breaking behaviors that Republicans invent next.
And the other centrist thing was the 1979 Chrysler bailout, which conservatives _barely_ were not in favor of, we’re talking about a 40/60 split…and also isn’t some weird norm-busting behavior anyway! It gets a lot of focus and claims that it was ‘first’ from conservative groups , but that’s not even vaguely true, the Federal government had bailed out Lockheed in 1971! ‘Passing laws that a moderate majority of conservatives disagree with’ is not norm-breaking behavior.Report
I’ve been saying for years that abortion is good but Roe v Wade was a total hack job. The Constitution and rule of law matter more than any one decision.
I think about 1% of people in the US, tops, will acknowledge a distinction between a Constitutionally correct decision and their own personal policy preferences.Report
This used to be a fairly common position. People would say that they agreed that abortion should be legal in the first trimester or whatever and that people should have the option of medical privacy blah blah blah and then they would yell “BUT” and talk about emanations and penumbras and chuckle.Report
You need to hang out with pro-choice Republicans more.Report
They seem to have retreated from the political scene, and since they still tend to vote for GOP candidates who are – collectively – clamping down post-Dobbs, I doubt hanging out with them would garner any change in current status, nor would it have impacted the GOP’s approach.Report
A pro-choice Republican, these days, is a Republican politician whose daughter gets pregnant.Report
Except people need to vote based on their alleged policy preferences!! If people voted based on policy preferences and polling, the GOP would be a rump party. In our world, we have people constantly voting for liberal initiatives generally and then getting stymied because they vote for Republican supermajorities in their state legislatures at the same time.Report
Agreed.Report
I mean, that is their policy preference – they want all the center-left economic policies without having to be on the same side as The Other, whether the other is a pro-abortion feminist, a BLM protestor, illegal immigrant, et al.
That’s how you get people who will vote for a $15 minimum wage, Medicaid expansion, etc. in referendums, then vote for every Republican on the ballot.
Like, millions of well-off Democrat’s vote “against their interests” because they have moral views that would make it impossible for them to ever vote for the GOP. There are millions of Republican voters with the same, opposite view.Report
That explains some of it but very few people put that much thought into their politics. This is true for both factions you described. It is very hard for political types to understand this but most people don’t really think that much about politics at all. They vote the way they do because that is what their background informs them to do. Many people are even unable to name politicians by name including up to the President.Report
The view that people should form abstract principles then work them out to policy positions is attractive to educated people who learned this way of thinking as a general problem-solving process.
But its weakness is that policy governing human behavior is going to require as much complexity and contradiction as human behavior itself.
The way almost everyone (including the educated) forms policy preference is to begin with some intuited notions of justice and the ideal society, then work backward to craft some abstract principles which they imagine will produce that result.
But invariably the abstract principle has glaring omissions which render it incapable of reliably producing the desired result.
In some ways the low information voter is just being honest in sidestepping that entire process by selecting policies buffet style.
It drives us types mad, but real, actual political principles are riddled with so many caveats and exceptions and provisos as to make them almost indistinguishable from a buffet selection anyway.Report
“The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter” as Winston Churchill reportedly said.Report
I don’t know if this is related but it reminds me of something else I find frustrating about the Broad Left side of the political aisle despite being on it. That is the inability to come out and say what we mean at times or do go into vague platitudes that pretend that deep down everybody is a Secret Disney Liberal despite that not obviously being the case.
An example of this is multiculturalism. One criticism against a lot of multicultural arguments is that it is really about food, fabric, and festivals, that is the easy sharable material aspects of culture, rather than deeper stuff like how people should behave in public or what social arrangements should look like. And this criticism is entirely correct. When most people talk about multiculturalism, they really do mean the easy shareable stuff with a basically Western bien pensant upper middle class morality. There is nothing wrong in admitting this but lots of liberals just can’t seem to bring themselves to come out and say it.Report
Well, perhaps that’s because we don’t actually have a problem with broadening standards of behavior to account for those cultures.Report
Different cultures have wildly different attitudes towards violence, women’s rights, abortion, gay rights (much less gay marriage), and the role of religion in society.
Which of those are you willing to “broaden the standards of behavior” to accept those cultures?Report
I think this is true that liberals are squeamish about Order, even as they love to talk about Liberty.
its why I keep saying that we aren’t witnessing a battle between public order versus freedom, but between two competing sets of public order.
It isn’t “should speech be restricted?”, but “What types of speech should be restricted?”Report
Many liberals see talk about Order as a code for reactionary policy preferences or “the nails that sticks out will be hammered down” type social pressure that exists in certain places. This fear isn’t without reason but trying to get the type of society liberals want without some sort of public decorum and order is kind of an impossibility.
There is also the fact that nobody really likes talking about trade offs. Many American liberals were impressed about how the citizens of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan followed COVID protocols without any sort of MAGAT style open up protests. What they don’t want to admit is that the type of society where you get this sort of compliance without much protest is going to have social elements they can’t stand like stricter norms regarding gender, etc. Rather than ask hard questions about good and bad things that might be really entangled, many prefer to imagine that they can have their cake and eat it to.Report
Are you ok with calling your political opponents vermin?Report
Which is what leads to people trying to redefine Order in ways that camouflage the enforcing hand, sort of like parent trying to slyly manipulate children without any obvious force.
But honestly most of this sort of thing, from my experience, happens in the extremely online community or the radicalized conservative factions.
Most people wore masks without complaint, most people respect other people’s choices and have no problem being reminded of social norms.Report
There were a handful of people who didn’t wear masks.
I expected more people to complain about the people not wearing masks but I was, instead, surprised by the number of shrugs it elicited. “Hey, you know that you’re supposed to wear one, right? That’s the important thing.”Report
This is a very human thing. Someone was reporting about what the typical Russian wants… and it came down “a democracy where everyone supports the empire”.
More locally, “strict anti-abortion laws that aren’t intrusive because everyone willingly follows them”.Report
I mean, I’m not saying they’re making some rational, well-thought decision.
When they see a vote for a $15 minimum wage, they vote for it, because it’ll help either them or people they know.
OTOH, if a Democrat who supports a $15 minimum wage is up for election, they also want to kill babies/let all the illegals in/force them to get the jab/etc, so they won’t vote for them, and they might not even know about the min. wage part, but it wouldn’t effect their vote, even if they did.Report
True – our GOP Governor, who is less popular right now then Biden, will likely cruise to reelection because his opponent old white guy is a Democrat.Report
I think this assumes facts not in evidence. There are cultures that are much more touchy-feely than American liberals would like or who believe in a lot stricter levels of public decorum and hierarchical social arrangements than Americans feel comfortable with. My read of the situation is that people really do want the sort of upper middle class college educated decorum as the way people are supposed to conduct themselves. Certain groups might get an allowance for wilder behavior depending though.Report
I think you mis-threaded this.Report
I did misthread it.Report
Or people trust politics to balance out.Report
“If people voted based on policy preferences and polling, the GOP would be a rump party.”
lol
Florida voted for Donald Trump and for a minimum-wage increase
please stop assuming that people vote for platforms in totoReport
“Abortion attitudes are shifting strongly in a pro-choice direction which doesn’t surprise me in the least. ”
Compares pretty well to Kelo, I think, where a lot of people realized the difference between a Supreme Court decision and a law.Report
I’m so old that I remember when Reagan won Republican hearts for promising to tear down walls and could be rather sympathetic to non-citizens who came to the United States to work even if they didn’t obey the letter of immigration law. Now RonDeSantis wants to be the Walter Ulbricht of the American Right and build walls and go all SED on the United States.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article276758641.htmlReport
Its nationalism, plus socialism!
Now all he needs is a very particular flag.Report
He and Bernie Sanders can go halfsies.Report
And there you go. Whoever runs for the GOP will be branded a Na.zi. I called this long before we knew who was running.Report
The question isn’t whether he gets called that.
The question is whether the charge sticks.Report
It’s a religious concept now. It merely means “bad guy”.
It’s a term that was used for Trump, Romney, McCain, Bush, Dole, Bush, Reagan, Ford, and Nixon. Every single Republican presidential candidate since Eisenhower has been called one and, when you think about it, doesn’t “Eisenhower” sound kind of German when you say it out loud?Report
um no. in most cases we question why they are called conservatives when the only thing they seek to conserve is white male power. Beyond that – if the policies being advocated for are fascist and seem to mirror those actually implemented by the National Socialist Party back in the day, then we point out the similarity. I would not ever use that term for Anyone prior to Trump, though I can draw a straight line from Reagan to Trump in terms of policy evolution. Nixon was a criminal and Ford largely a coward. Nine of then from Eisenhower up to Reagan would actually get nominated these days by the GOP.Report
So, wait, is the argument that they weren’t called that term?
Or that you wouldn’t have called them that and therefore we should use your definition?Report
My argument is that the few people calling them that were not paying attention to what they were proposing at the time, and that none of their policy proposals as candidates would have merited that label. I am sure there were folks online who crossed that line, but I don’t think its an accurate label for anyone but Trump. I am also sure that folks on the right accused the left of using that term too liberally as a defense mechanism to avoid discussions of the actual policies proposed and the actual impacts of those policies.Report
Okay, good. Because my argument is that every single one has been called that.
If the counter-argument is “That wasn’t accurate then! This time, it’s accurate”, I just have to nod along.
I am also sure that folks on the right accused the left of using that term too liberally as a defense mechanism to avoid discussions of the actual policies proposed and the actual impacts of those policies.
I admit: I’d kinda prefer to talk about the actual policies proposed and the actual impacts of those policies than splitting hairs over whether this use of religious language applies (unlike the last 60 years where we agree that it didn’t apply for the first 50 of those).Report
If you think its a “religious” marker for “bad person” as opposed to a pointer to how current policies align with former policies, then what’s your criteria for using the term in politics going forward?Report
I will stick with the old faithful “Literally Voldemort”.Report
And you see none of the politicians thus accused – based on their stated policy positions and laws they support/enact as rising to the level of “literally Voldemort?”Report
Why are you defending them?
Are you a secret Death Eater?Report
I’m just asking questions Jaybird. If you choose to see that defense I can’t help you.
To be clear I believe Trump enacted policies that were the same as or nearly so those enacted in Germany by the National Socialist Party. I see Ron DeSantis’ policy proposals – and a number of the laws he has signed while Governor in the same way.
I’m trying to get clear on how *you* see them, and why you don’t believe they meet your “Literally Voldemort” test.Report
You know who else was just asking questions?
Draco in the HP:MOR fanfic.Report
I don’t have time to read fan fiction of any sort. And even if I did, I wouldn’t be using to deflect from direct questions asked directly about my policy analyses and candidate assessments.
Troll on Jaybird.Report
Well, then. I’ll let you get back to the serious business of calling DeSantis a Nazi.Report
I believe Ron DeSantis is a supporter of fascist policies, especially in regards to women, and the LGBTQ+ community. Some of those policies appear to mirror policies used by the National Socialiast Party to suppress and then attempt to exterminate similar people in Germany before and during WW2. You will note however that I don’t call his a National Socialist nor any of its derivatives, and Fascist encompasses his politics very nicely.
Now once again – I’m trying to get clear on how *you* see them, and why you don’t believe they meet your “Literally Voldemort” test.Report
I see his policies as accurately representing what appears to be a majority of his constituents.
Democracy In Action.Report
No, they don’t. DeSantis has massively dropped in approval unpopular since he decided on his…insane fascist jaunt.
https://theamericanonews.com/floricua/2023/05/19/most-floridians-disapprove-of-states-direction-desantis-approval-rating-drops-by-19-points-in-new-poll/
He was moderately well liked at the start of the year, but went on a legislative tear as soon as the session opened in February, and has, at this point, pretty much ruined his chances of election.Report
If anyone wants to see the cratering trajectory of Ron DeSantis themselves, here you go:
https://t.co/B0kzgA07WS
It’s fun to experiment with the options…DeSantis doesn’t even manage to break 80% approval of _white Republican men_.Report
Oh, the poll put out by Progress Florida shows dissatisfaction with DeSantis? Tell me more!Report
So I figured I’d go to 538 and see what it had to say.
Looks like Ron is scoring Net Unfavorable in national polls and flipped back in late March.
The articles I’m reading seem to indicate that some percentage of this is coming from Trump supporters, though. (Note: This is for national polls.)
So we’re dealing with the entire issue of the meta-question that the polled folks are “really” answering by answering the way they did.Report
It looks like he, Trump, Harris, and Biden are all around the same level. Then again, Yuengling is probably the only institution in this country polling net positive.Report
If the people answering the question are really answering an election question about Trump versus DeSantis, why did they start changing their mind about that way back in March, when he didn’t announce he was running until the end of May?
And as for who put out that first poll, unless they’ve changed their methodology, it shows a pretty serious drop, regardless of whether you want to believe the absolute values or not.Report
Did you suspect that he was running for president back in March despite not announcing yet?
I did, for the record.
(And I’m not saying that “the people” are doing that. There are tons of people who are *NOT* doing that. They are legit expressing that they do not support the guy. I’m saying that some percentage of this is coming from Trump supporters who are making different calculations than the ones made in January.)Report
We didn’t _start_ suspecting that in early March. Pretty sure he’s been obviously been trying to run for president since literally being elected governor the first time.
Something changed in early March or so, and continued to change. Coincidentally, that is exact time that Florida’s legislative session opened, and a bunch of bills were put out that DeSantis said he supported. (And, as we all know, the executive tends to get blamed for things that pass whether or not they support them.)
And the bills were put out almost immediately, too. The barring kids and adults from trans healthcare bill was put out March 3, the antiabortion one was March 8. This isn’t some thing where the legislature dawdles over bills…they only had 60 days total. They threw out the stuff that was _supposed_ to be red meat immediately…and the base said ‘Not great’, and everyone else said ‘What the hell?!’
Actually, wait a minute, there’s an easy way to check if this is Trump via voting patterns…yup, I was right. Go to https://t.co/B0kzgA07WS again, turn on the Republican filter, and then look at men. Then women. And then switch to Independents and do the same. (It’s not worth looking at Democrats, functionally none of them support him.)
It’s Republican and Independent _women_ who have massively dropped, not men. I mean, men dropped a lot too, but half as much. It seems rather doubtful it’s women trying to signal an intent to vote for Trump.
And guess what happened back in March that might have made women run away from DeSantis? Could it be that abortion ban? Yes. Do I also hope it’s the anti-trans thing…well, yes, I do, but I have no real evidence of that, the anti-abortion thing is a much stronger contender.Report
Oh, the abortion thing. Yeah, that makes sense.Report
Apparently, DeSantis was waiting until _now_ to piss off whatever queer Republicans existed:
https://twitter.com/themaxburns/status/1675204510367588354Report
The Log Cabin Republicans are a force with which to be considered.
But lower taxes for DINKS only gets you so far.
(They’re probably calculating based on the Bud Light thing. Conflating the Gay Thing with the Trans Thing is probably a mistake, given the number of people out there who consider themselves good, but reasonable, allies.)Report
The “Gays Against Groomers”, an astroturf pro-gay anti-trans group that heavily supported DeSantis, and in fact had one of the founders on DeSantis payroll, has now torn itself apart.
I know this probably isn’t making any news outside the queer community, but it is a funny-as-hell story about a group and a bunch of people that everyone hated. Just…here’s a web search about it:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Gay+Against+Groomers+desantisReport
If memory serves, we had people on this site claiming Trump was going to go full death camp with illegal immigrants.
But even though he has the same policies, Biden gets a pass. Just like Obama before him.Report
And we were right:
The top Trump adviser Stephen Miller advocated blowing up boats of migrants with drones, according to a new book by a former homeland security official previously revealed to be the “anonymous” author behind a famous warning about Trump White House extremes.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/27/trump-stephen-miller-migrants-boats-drone-attacks-book
The fact that some fragile guardrails held, only validates our predictions.
Without pushback from liberals and institutionalists, a Trumpian America would be murdering immigrants on a mass scale.Report
The first problem is you describe Trump, DeSantis, Romney, Reagan, and so on as though they’re all the same.
The second is you supposedly want a high trust system.Report
Look, I can’t help it if a guy suggests murdering a boatload of immigrants and Republicans all nod and shrug.
You guys did this, all by yourselves.Report
Look at what you’re doing there.
That suggestion was…
1) Perhaps more brainstorming than serious.
2) Made in the context of a “this is what we’d actually need to do”.
3) Certainly was not public.
You’re taking that and expanding it to “every member of the GOP supports mass murder”.
So you’re showcasing not only that we don’t have a high trust society but also that we can’t because you won’t allow it.Report
You’re not refuting, but exemplifying my point.
You refuse to believe that the Trump administration would say such a thing seriously, and so therefore it must have been just idle speculation.
Of course, most normal people would be appalled at even idle speculation about murdering a boat full of women and children, but not Republicans and not you.
So yeah.
EVERY Republican, without exception, is nodding and shrugging. No one has yet found a bridge too far, an atrocity too awful for the average Republican to balk.Report
We nod and we shrug because you’re constantly claiming that dead bodies will be created, especially around election time, but there are never any dead bodies.
Your claims are not serious. You’ve screamed wolf dozens of times before, what’s different this time?Report
There is nothing that’s uniquely fascist, historically. So naturally the word isn’t requried.Report
Remember when Philip said he would have supported Romney’s first run, then when I quoted some of the things Romney said in his first run, Philip declared that I’d finally revealed how despicable I am? This has nothing to do with the history of policies or terminology. It’s always about now – right now I see something that I don’t like, so I have to call it the worst word I can think of.Report
There’s a reason why this is a meme.Report
How dare you remember things?!?
It is the current year!Report
There’s one thing I’d forgotten, because I don’t think about Trump, but we just passed the 8 year anniversary of the escalator moment.Report
No. Not that you as a digital troll care much. BLM denounced the violence committed in their name. The former GOP president called the people doing it in his name good people.
Troll on . . . .Report
If every single politician gets called that, then why take exception when we apply it to DeSantis?
Unless a lot of people decide that it seems to fit his actions.Report
I don’t take exception to it.
I’m the guy who said: It’s a religious concept now. It merely means “bad guy”.
Oh, you think DeSantis is a bad guy? Wow.Report
If you’re wondering why we can’t have a high trust society, it’s because it does happen every single time.Report
If they are proposing policies that seem to align with the policies instituted by the National Socialist Party in Germany, what else would you have us call them? We certainly can’t call them communists.Report
I’ve said before that the most common comparisons tossed about – to Hitler, Stalin, Mao- aren’t actually that fitting.
Because in the vast sweep of human history, those three were really standouts, and very few other instances can compare to them.
What is a more fitting comparison to contemporary Republicans are the lesser known, second and third tier authoritarian regimes.
Like the various Eastern Bloc countries like Albania and Romania, or the African kleptocrats, or the endless procession of Latin American caudillos and generalissimos.
None of these regimes had a Holocaust or gulags or mass slaughters on a Maoist or Cambodian scale.
But what they had was a Florida style Trumpian regime where the national telephone exchange would be sold to the presidente’s brother, or the port authority taxes would be funneled into a Swiss account controlled by the strongman, and any pestering business that criticised the regime would be nationalized and its assets given to the strongman’s cronies.
And everyone would shrug in helpless resignation, and accept that the cops were always corrupt and brutal, and that you could freely engage in any vice or decadent pleasure, so long as you were of the right social class and the righteous bishop would always look away if you gave him a donation.
This is the sort of comparison that fits perfectly with the Republicans today.Report
I happen to consider your analogies apt but I also have a personal connection to the modern history of tin pot South American dictators that nearly all Americans lack.
And to be frank, I don’t think alluding to those dictators is appropriate. Yes, like the modern GOP they wanted to obtain and retain power for its own sake. But that’s where the analogy ends. The GOP – at least at the state level – is taking pains to try to outlaw certain groups, and suppress certain other groups in a manner far more consistent with European fascists of the early and mid-20th century. That being so, using the appropriate historical references for assessment and discussion is something I feel quite comfortable with.Report
Fair point.
There really is no reason to think that the horrors of ethnic cleansing couldn’t happen here since, they actually have.Report
Obviously, a wall to keep people in is different than a wall to keep people out. No one’s anti-wall.Report
So if Mexico were to build a wall to keep its people in, American conservatives would demand they tear it down.
A show of hands- Who believes this?Report
They might when it impacts their profit margins . . .Report
Halfway to Baltimore:
Now, the comments are all jumping all over distance learning and the other pandemic stuff but this is a trajectory we’ve been on for a while.
Seems like they’re re-incorporating phonics instead of leaning into the whole word stuff.
Let’s hope it works.Report
Baltimore as a whole isn’t at zero. Baltimore has 22(?) schools with zero percent proficient in math. New York already has at least one.
https://1039thebreezealbany.com/one-capital-region-school-district-scored-0-math-proficiency-in-2022/Report
Well, this was about reading more than math. For what it’s worth, I see the switch away from Phonics back a couple of decades ago as one of the main reasons that we started wandering away from proficiency (and the pandemic moved us from a “wander” to a “jog”).
This is something that I see as a step in the right direction.
Like San Francisco saying “let’s maybe try policing again?”, this is an indicator that even those people who were invested in Not Having Been Wrong have seen things have gotten so very bad that they’re willing to change.
This is a *GOOD* thing.Report
When I talk about Fascist approaches to repressing trans Americans, this is what i mean:
https://www.kcur.org/2023-06-26/kobach-says-trans-kansans-ids-will-be-changed-back-to-their-sex-assigned-at-birthReport
This is a good example of how conservatives really, really, like the idea of the state enforcing a spiritual matter for which there is no empirical basis.
There isn’t really any practical need for this, and the status quo harms no one.
But it offends the sensibilities of conservatives, so the state must do some vice signalling so as to enforce its version of morality.Report
… calling ‘very deliberate harm to a minority of people designed to make them unable to function in society’ ‘virtue signaling’ is extremely silly.Report
Vice signaling, actually, but you’re right, this goes way beyond signaling and yes, its designed to make it impossible for trans people to function in society.
For example, a male-to-female trans person who has a beard and penis will be forced to shower with the women at the gym.
Is this what the conservatives want? Ha ha, no, what they want is for trans people to be unable to use the gym entirely.Report
I think you meant:
Report
Yes thanks for the catch.Report
And just in case it’s not clear, this absolutely will result in trans people being unable to vote in the future, or do anything that requires ID. Because they went to the trouble of legally changing their name, which will not be changed back.
So now someone with the name Elizabeth, who looks like a woman, will have a driver’s license with the name Elizabeth on it but a gender marker of M.
Their identity will be challenged very often, and they can’t be sure of being able to participate in any part of society that requires a license check.
The decision when to legally change name and gender ID is already a pretty fraught decision with a lot of complicated factors for trans people, but changing one of those back and leaving the other intact is basically going to always be wrong.Report
hehReport
The problem with labeling this “fascist” the entire world is struggles with the issue of trans rights. If we were a European country we’d be pretty middle of the pack. If we expand that to the entire world then we’re very progressive.
https://tgeu.org/trans-rights-map-2022/Report
And we hold ourselves out – at least rhetorically – as a beacon of personal liberty and freedom. But modern history tells us that when repression of groups like this takes hold in a country, it doesn’t stop here. Trans Americans won’t be the last folks whom legislators try to make disappear by force of law. Not bay a long shot.
That aside, its immoral oppression. Period. Full stop. The last most recent regimes who undertook oppression of this nature against this community were in fact fascist. And also European. If you have a better political/historical term I’ll entertain it.Report
It’s immoral, you don’t like it, ergo it is comparable to the most evil acts humanity has done and will lead to genocide.
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that before but as a prediction it hasn’t worked well.Report
Trans persons and gay people were sent to the gas chambers alongside the Jews. In considerable numbers. Germany was intent on exterminating them. And it all started with laws making them essentially illegal. That’s the predictive force of this.Report
No one in the US is making laws that make gay people illegal. We had laws that were far more restrictive on gay people back when we were fighting fascism, and no one saw a contradiction.
“Trans persons” is a tricky term to define in 1940’s terminology, but there were no people who had been physically equipped as one sex and altered to the other. People who would have identified as the opposite sex would likely have been considered gay. We aren’t making laws in the US that criminalize trans identification or transition surgery. We’re making laws that prevent the surgery for children, and one law that prevents a person from changing the sex on his driver’s license, which also would have been illegal under fascism and any other system until recently.Report
Florida has passed a law that prevents trans adults from continuing treatment unless they get certification to do so from state authorities appointed by the governor who opposes the existence of trans persons. Its the definite start of a slippery slope:
Which is such a rare occurrence as to be unfindable outside a single transwoman on TLC . . . .
If you are referring to Kansas, the new law actually changes back drivers licenses and birth certificates that were previously legally changed. Meaning we are legally forcing transpeople back to their prior gender with no legal protection or recourse.
There are also multiple states that have banned drag shows, but in such as way as to potentially criminalize transwomen (in articular) dressing as women.
But sure, no one can be arrested, prosecuted and convicted of being transgendered. Yet.Report
No, it’s actually much worse than that. Not only have they created a series of hoops and set up the system in such a way that it is incredibly difficult to navigate most of it, but they actually require doctors to fill out a government form to authorize trans healthcare, a form which literally does not exist because it has not been created yet by that committee, who seem in no hurry to do that.
It is, right now, LITERALLY impossible to get trans healthcare in Florida, not just very very difficult.Report
Fair. I’m going off the text of the media summaries, and trying to point out – as you do – that being transgendered is no longer effectively possible in Florida.
Of course Pinky wants to make sure we know it’s not criminally impossible, so its all ok with him.Report
Oh, I wasn’t trying to argue with you, I was just pointing out that the Florida situation is worse than it sounds, with a bunch of interlocking laws that deliberately make it basically impossible.
For example, supposedly you can continue _existing_ trans prescriptions without getting this form, except that they also invalidated all prescriptions written by nurse practitioners (aka, where 80% of trans people get prescriptions) and require MDs now… But that’s a new prescription so you can’t start it. And if you do happen to be a lucky 20% who are already getting it from an MD, you can’t alter it in any way, and considering the fines are so high, plenty of them have backed off of doing it under this somewhat ambiguous law.
They also ban any sort of telehealth, just to make things harder.
It’s basically the anti-abortion trap laws except for trans healthcare, and the people making the laws don’t have the same sort of court decisions about that that restrict them in any way.Report
You mean it’s impossible for the 15% of trans people who WANT this to get healthcare. MOST trans people are fine the way they are, thanks, k bai.
27,000 trans adults surveyed, and more than 80% of them do not want this. PLEASE go ahead and tell me that “trans health care” is imperiled.Report
Radio this morning (maybe Florida NPR) was talking about the workaround which deals with this and lets trans to continue to get “gender affirming care”.
I wasn’t paying much attention so I don’t recall who did what.Report
I’m pretty certain that I’m on the right Twitter feeds that if there was some very clever legal workaround, I’d know about it.
Are you sure it wasn’t just DIY, AKA ordering the hormones and blockers from overseas pharmacies? Because that is technically illegal under us law, despite it being something that trans people have done for decades because of the gatekeeping by the medical establishment until fairly recently.Report
Both parts of that sentence are factually incorrect.
There are actually several laws that prohibit children from identifying as trans, or at least anyone from acknowledging that, both schools under the threat of large fines and parents under the threat of losing custody of their children. From merely acknowledging identification, not any sort of medical treatment.
Additionally, Florida has banned both surgery and medication of all adults with regard to gender transition.Report
I’m against thought crimes of any stripe. Can we get rid of “hate crimes” too? I’m not sure what “acknowledging identification” actually means in terms of concrete action. Is this a dress code thing? Boy can’t wear dress to school?
(I’m against dress codes too. My clothing is part of my speech.)Report
And can I point out how weird and silly this claim is?
Plenty of people actually have a problem with the fact that we didn’t free some people from the concentration camps, instead we took them from the concentration camps and put them in German prisons for the crime of being gay
This is actually a pretty common point made by the queer community.
Another thing we didn’t have any problem with doing in the 1940s, for reference: Denying black people the right to vote.
… Hey, quick question, where and when do you think the words transsexual and transgender come from? Just, maybe you should quickly Google that. Maybe also Google the first person to receive gender reassignment surgery, and who murdered them under what circumstances.
It really is amazing to watch people with no knowledge of queer history just kind of blindly stumble into things that they don’t know much about.Report
“We used to do this immoral thing so why can’t we keep doing it” is not the flex you think it is.Report
My position was, as you might put it, we used to do this thing and no one thought of it as fascist.Report
So?
We used to intern Japanese Americans in camps because we assumed they were going to be disloyal in war.
We used to deny Black men the vote – AFTEER the 14th Amendment was passed.
We used to deny Women the vote.
And yes, at the time those were considered fine and dandy things by the white men who held power.
They were still moral wrongs, and we as a nation have spent a good many decades correcting them.
And then after WW 2 we learned how the German’s treated all sort of people, including gay and transgender people. As we could clearly see that regimes that did that – gassed them to death – were both immoral and fascist.
We learned from history. We grew as a nation. We became more inclusive and more moral in how we treated our fellow citizens.
And now some of our fellow citizens want to undo that moral gain through the use of legal tactics that mirror what prior fascist regimes did in Europe. Because we have learned that lesson and seen what that actually is, we can not go back without backsliding into fascism.
And let’s be clear – Fascism is morally wrong. Ethically bankrupt. And defeated in the last World War rather decisively. by the OG Antifa.Report
The subject was whether the term “fascist” was correct, not whether the things listed were wrong. You’re trying to change the subject.Report
Fascist is correct in as much as learning from history has shown us what was done and is being done is fascist.
Which is still immoral.Report
You’re still doing what Dark Matter and Jaybird called you out on. Your definition of fascism is things you object to.Report
Nope.
I am quite certain that laws criminalizing abortion, preventing dispensing of transgender supporting medication, and curbing discussions of a diverse society (to say nothing of court rulings prioritizing Christian religious speech) fall quite squarely in the “Severe societal regimentation” arena.
And again, active oppression of gay, lesbian, non-binary and transgendered individuals HAS BEEN PRACTICED by fascist regimes in modern history.Report
I don’t know if “Akabanga” is our local troll, so for preservation purposes I’m going to repost the first few lines of his comment:
“Eugene Oregon called, circa 1980. They would like to respectfully disagree.”Report
My definition of specific fascism (as opposed to authoritarianism in general) is:
A leadership, often a single leader, that demagogues against enemies, both external and within, usually minorities that cannot defend themselves. There are enemies _everywhere_, attacking The State and Moral Decency and all the Good People, who used to live under some ideal form of The Nation before all that.
That’s sorta the philosophical difference between fascism and other forms of authoritarianism.
In addition to laws against those ‘enemy’ minorities, this demagoguery also often results in what are essentially militias that are willing to use force against said minorities, or even attempt to use force to overthrow the government if they are currently out of power.
It generally leaves industry intact, preferring instead to take it over (Or vis versa) than to formally nationalize it. Or to put it another way, it makes sure to keep businesses owned by and profitable for their owners, instead of taking the businesses away from their owners like authoritarian communism. I’m not really sure this one is a requirement as opposed to a tendency, though.
That’s the main difference between fascism and other forms of authoritarianism I can think of offhand, and all the rest of it is just sorta the definition of authoritarianism: It tolerates no dissent, and when in power, ruthlessly suppresses political opposition, it centralized everything under its control, it attempts to control most industrial and economic activities, etc, etc.
Incidentally, comment in moderation.Report
It’s a pretty well known historic fact that the Nazis actually looked to our treatment of Black people when building their policies, and their policies and politics were actually very strongly supported by the exact same conservative people who made those policies here.
They were merely the country that tipped over into fascism instead of us, and the fact they tipped over probably stopped us from tipping over back then is pretty obvious. The US tipping the other way and entering the war on the other side is not implausible with a different political leadership at the time.
Pretending that things that the US has done in the past cannot be the start of fascism because the US did them is nonsense. Things that the US did in the past are, literally, part of the origin of fascism as practiced by N.azis!Report
The predictive force is the many dozens of times on this forum that this sort of logic, analogy, and prediction has been made, it hasn’t worked. In fact it’s never worked.
Thus my prediction that these sorts of predictions would be made was a safe bet.
Predictions of genocide is somewhere between an indication that “the predictor doesn’t like it and views it as immoral” and a slogan which means “vote Blue”.Report
Pretty much all predictions talking about a run-up of over a decade, just like Na.zi takeovers, so I’m a little confused as to why you think it has been disproven.
If anything, the fact that individual events that can be mapped to what happened in Germany keep happening, by the same people, is evidence that we’re actually on track.
Plenty of people were predicting, when Trump went after immigrants and Muslims, that other groups would be next, and what do you know, other groups have been next! That’s not a failed prediction, that’s a successful prediction.Report
Oh, and another pretty successful prediction: Trump would not quietly leave office, and would a) use the courts to do a bunch of bogus stuff, and b) if that failed would try to use his army of people to try to stop it.
Like, that prediction was made a lot here, and dismissed by a lot of people, including, I believe, you.Report
Not to mention Frum’s prediction which encapsulates all the others, that when faced with democratic rejection of their policies, conservatives will reject democracy rather than change their policies.
This has been proven correct time and again.Report
Trump hardly went after immigrants – arguably less than the law would require him to – and didn’t go after Muslims. Those who think he did also think that other groups have been targeted, and that’s false too.Report
Nope. No “going after Muslims” at all.Report
Right. Not going after Muslims at all. I’m glad we can agree.
Are the only Muslims in the world from those seven countries? Was there no geopolitical similarity among them that could make a recipient country nervous? Were there no Muslims already in the US? Did Trump issue any restrictions on them or their religious practice?Report
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/26/trumps-muslim-ban-really-was-muslim-ban-thats-what-data-suggest/
What a weird claim. Please explain what geopolitical similarity you think there is between Iran and Somalia that is not majority Islam!
Iran is a highly competent regional power that dislikes us (Which, incidentally, is not a good reason to bar travel from there, considering we don’t even bar travel from _global_ powers that dislike us.) but has never attacked us or even come close to attacking us, and Somalia is a country that, in 2017, had managed to be semi-functional for about five years. They are not really the same thing.
And the only one of those countries that belong on a list with North Korea and Venezuela (Who were also on the list) is Eritrea, a country that slipped into authoritarianism while no one watched…and honestly barring them all from traveling to the US is a stupid political decision, but it at least can make some logical sense.
That list is utter nonsense unless it was supposed to be ‘Muslim countries that we are not allies with’. In fact, I don’t even know what our problem with Libya was supposed to be at that point! We were working with them against ISIS!
Yes, actually. Trump tried to bar permanent residents that were in the US from reentering the US if they happened to be outside when he did his executive order. Which also would stop them from leaving if they wanted to come back. That is, literally, a restriction on Muslims in the US.Report
Jeffrey Epstein again. Not surprising to anyone familiar with general prison conditions:
https://www.aol.com/news/prison-staffs-serious-failures-enabled-142100155.htmlReport
There were multiple, multiple irregularities.
BUT THEY WERE ALL ABOVE BOARD!!!
(Still weirded out by the hyoid bone.)Report
The climate crisis is worsening, and urban building patterns ( and their associated tax bases) are not helping:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/27/weather/texas-heat-wave-nighttime-temperatures-climate/index.htmlReport
Came across this article about “deep canvassing” on transgender rights — instead of bombarding with arguments and literature, it involves longer conversations with people, listening without judgment, sharing experiences and nudging towards the goal. Sounds great, but expensive — ROI may not be adequate.Report
It’s the way gay rights were advanced in the first place, where just meeting and getting to know a gay person often changed someone’s opinion.
It’s why pride events are so important, to demonstrate that queer people are all around us- our relatives, our coworkers, our friends.Report
“It’s the way gay rights were advanced”
Well, an important factor anyway, among others. For organizers in any particular locale, it’s a question of efficiency. From the article:
Report
I was wondering when/if this would happen. I apologize for linking to The Daily Caller, but they seem to be the only ones covering this angle of the story (they claim it’s an exclusive):
Top Anheuser-Busch Marketing Executives Responsible For Boycott Are No Longer Employed
Alissa Heinerscheid is the one I was most curious about (especially given some of the apparent subtext of their first summer commercial back) but I’m not surprised to hear that Daniel Blake is gone too.
Now I am curious about some of the stuff hinted at… does saying “fired” open Bud up to lawsuits? I mean, I know that pro wrestling uses the boilerplate “we wish them the best in their future endeavors” instead of “they failed a pee test”.
Does just saying “they’ve been fired” open up to lawsuits?Report
Jaybird, I was jesting about that first ad having an “everyone makes mistakes” theme. That would have required a willingness to admit they’d made a mistake.Report
I saw it as insightful. It’s one of those things that I could see Bud Light doing as a “everybody makes mistakes” extension of an olive branch.
As it is, it was interpreted as “our customer base is dumbasses. Loveable dumbasses, but dumbasses.”
I mean, maybe they were going for the latter? But it makes sense to go for the former. It does not make sense to go for the latter.Report
The ad wasn’t going for either, because both of those would be addressing the people who took one side or the other. This ad is the small talk at Thanksgiving dinner after a barn-burner political argument.Report
I have not seen the goofy ad on tv but I have seen one where people are at some kind of music festival where it starts raining. That seems like the better one, i.e. pretend nothing happened and don’t do anything that could be remotely construed as remembering something happened.Report
” Back again, “New and Improved”,
we return to our irregularly programmed schedule
hidden cleverly between heavy breasted
beer and car commercials…”Report
Cyberbullying statutes run into the First Amendment of the Constitution. The Supreme Court in a 7-2 decision written by Justice Kagan holds that stalking victims must show that the perpetrator has some awareness of the impact of their behavior along with a legitimate reason they feel threatened.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jun/27/supreme-court-stalking-ruling-alarms-advocates-and-victims
This is a very tricky area of the law especially for civil libertarian types. I think that one of the divides that is growing in the broad left in the United States is between people with a more European view of free speech and the side that still holds to the American definition of it.Report
Um, Ok. So one has consequences and one doesn’t? Help us out here counselor . . . .Report
On the other blog a poster once remarked that America is filled with Whigs who think they are radical Marxists because of the compressed political landscape. Vox writing about anti-capitalism definitely reeks of this at times since Vox is filled with college educated professional managerial class Whigs.
https://www.vox.com/culture/23775754/frog-and-toad-queer-cottagecore-pride-lobel
This article also shows that the primary audience for Marxism in the United States is people who think it will liberate them from boring day jobs.Report
…and having to pay rent, I’ll speculate.Report
Affirmative Action for Universities gets a minor setback:
Apparently, predictions say that this will drastically change the mix of students at all but the most prestigious universities (which have already dropped tests like the SAT in favor of a more “holistic” view of the individual student).Report
Correct me if I’m wrong but aren’t most universities outside the top tier pretty much open admittance and are desperate for (any) students? Except for the selective admittance universities I don’t see how this has much impact.
I just can’t find it in my heart to get very upset by the axing of affirmative action.Report
The grumpy take that I saw on this that made me laugh was that AA is unpopular pretty much with everybody across demographics and it only wins a plurality (not a majority) of support with a particular demographic and this demographic is, arguably, not up for grabs in the voting anyway.
So this is a gift to “the left” in that it takes a particular unpopular issue off of the table.
Now we can talk about student loans again.Report
That sounds more right than not.Report
HARVARD HAS RELEASED A STATEMENT!!!
You know that the next word cannot be “but”.
And it’s not. HOWEVER! It may as well be.
The rest of the letter is about how they’re going to keep on keeping on.Report
…and meanwhile they will continue to accept legacy students at 33% and everyone else at 6%, resulting in legacies making up about 15% of the student population just because family members went to Harvard.
A huge chunk of people, apparently permanently grandfathered into Harvard. Often a string of people attending all the way back to when admissions were openly biased against against minorities or even did not allow minority attendance.Report
So pass a law making legacies illegal! I have no doubt that you will find that it polls at 60+%!!!Report
…why do you think we can pass laws for things that poll at 60% or higher?Report
Maybe not *NATIONALLY* but you should be able to pull it off in New York, California, Massachusetts, and other states that have the good colleges.Report
See, this is the difference between me and you, Jaybird.
I am entirely aware that even liberal states have been entirely captured by very wealthy white people who think they have been given control because they are amazing instead of just sort owning everything.
They just have some level of noblesse oblige and are willing to make sure that people don’t starve to death in front of them. To maybe let one or two Black people into their schools, sure, but how DARE you suggest they can’t get their kids into those schools.
Remember that bribery scandal a while back, and where it happened? Yeah, that.Report
It’s like the whole “higher taxes” thing. It’s not that I think that I shouldn’t give the government more money. Of course I think that!
I just don’t want to do that unless you have to do it too!
I don’t *WANT* Harvard to allow legacies.
But if the U of M still allows them due to a wishy-washy legislature, why is that fair?Report
Former Chief of Staff John Kelly states that Trump would openly imagine having sex with his daughter Ivanka to staffers. Many Republicans seem to be defending this as “all fathers imagine having sex with their daughters.”
https://jezebel.com/donald-trump-openly-imagined-sex-with-ivanka-his-forme-1850587005Report
something something All Democrats are pedophile groomers something something.Report
The Venn diagram of the people screaming about trans people, and the people defending Trump and the Duggars and the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist convention, is pretty close to a circle.
It isn’t actually hypocrisy though. Its an example of what I was talking about earlier where people take their intuitive sense of order then try to craft a neutral-sounding principle, which fails.
In this case, their stated neutral principle is that parents shouldn’t molest their kids.
But the actual principle is patria potestas, the idea that the father, and by extension, the leader of the community is the lord and master of the house and everyone in it is his to do with as he wishes.
This explains how Trump and DeSantis see the government as their personal fiefdoms, where all the civil servants are their minions, all the classified papers are theirs personally, and the power of the state is vested in them personally.Report
Which is HUGELY, BIGLY ironic considering their full throated support for laws that take away parental rights and parental controls when parents make decisions they disagree with.Report
A world in which gender roles and the social hierarchy itself is not fixed and unquestioned terrifies and enrages them.
Its the common thread that weaves all the seemingly disparate parts of the right together- the adulation of Strong Men like Putin and Orban, the men’s rights and pick up artists, the self described Trads, the Thin Blue Line and Three Percenters and religious conservatives.
All of their professed principles shatter upon first contact with reality. Like how they are isolationist with regard to Ukraine, but want to invade Mexico, adherents of free markets who want to give bonuses to families for making babies, champions of limited governments who want to appoint genital inspectors at every bathroom.
A lot of liberals see these as betrayals of principle, but actually they all have the exact same principle.Report
“California governor Gavin Newsom has decided to double the presence of state police to deal with San Francisco’s crime and fentanyl crises, as he admitted that his own businesses have been burglarized.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12247239/California-Gov-Gavin-Newsom-doubles-number-state-police-crack-crime-San-Francisco.html
So it wasn’t a problem before, but now is?Report
The San Francisco Standard is not helping. They have an article talking about the “Grim State of Downtown” without asking a single whatabout.
Whatabout West Virginia?
Whatabout Nashville?
Whatabout Georgia?
How come the San Francisco Standard isn’t talking about Florida?Report
Scot Peterson found not guilty.
Police have no legal obligation to protect you. It isn’t illegal for them to stay outside while children are being shot.Report
Ah, Alan Arkin has passed.
He was the best part of The Rocketeer, Catch-22, and The Jerky Boys Movie. (Also *AMAZING* in The Last Unicorn.)
Sigh.Report
In a functional democracy, and Administration is capable and willing to criticize its own actions in public. To wit:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/politics/state-deparment-afghanistan-withdrawal-report/index.htmlReport
Is Cashapp anonymous? Like, I know that Bitcoin is anonymous (in theory, anyway).
Is Cashapp?
Report
As no one has answered this: No, CashApp is not anonymous at all. It hooks into a bank account, like Paypal. It pulls money from there, and it puts money into there when you tell it too.
Perhaps you could get around that, not hook one up? I don’t actually remember if that was an option, I set my bank account up as part of signing up.
But then the only way to get money out of it would be to transfer the money to someone else…which I suspect would logically start raising questions about who _that_ person was.
Although I will point out that, legally, it would be hard to prove any sort of crime here. The letter does not contain even slightest hint of threat. It’s easy to think ‘If this person does not make enough money this way they will go back to breaking into cars’, but a) that’s not actually stated or even hinted at, and b) that’s not actually a threat against _you_ specifically, which would be required to be extortion. ‘Pay me money or I shall go back to my life of crime’ isn’t extortion, even pretending that was what was being said, which it isn’t.
And the fact it is easy to track down a Cashapp works against the case, because the person can easily argue ‘I was certainly not intending to do something illegal that I tied to my real bank account. I was simply asking for money.’.Report
Oh, I wasn’t asking for reasons related to Law Enforcement.
But thank you!Report
Well Roberts’ Court took their shot for religious liberty. With an imaginary business woman and an imaginary scary gay person trying to get an imaginary wedding website service. Best they could do is say that religious people are allowed to discriminate against people they don’t like so long as they only do so in expressive service provision. Weak tea if you ask me, that’s not much of a window for the fundies to try and wriggle through though, perhaps, the intention is to try and wiggle it wider over time?Report
I’m old enough to remember when conservative judges paid attention to things like standing, case or controversy requirements, and procedural regularity, and excoriated “judicial activists” for substituting their judgment for the judgment of the other branches of government or the people through them.Report
Yeah, fancy that eh?Report
A reminder: Subway calls the people putting your sandwich together ‘sandwich artists’.
The thing is, I agree that people shouldn’t be forced to create speech that they disagree with. Although I would really like to see religion have absolutely no impact on that, you can get there just using free speech.
But I trust the current Supreme Court to limit that decision as far as I can throw them, and I also trust far right Christians to make the distinction…zero. I trust them literally zero.
This court decision is going to result in all sorts of idiots thinking they can bar LGBT people from their hardware store just because they want to. It’s also going to result in the next screw tightening by the Federalist society coming up with another imaginary case that extends the actual Court decision just slightly farther.
If I had any sort of political power, I would argue that the solution here is for the left to pass a bill defining the boundaries of this right. Saying expressly what artistic expression is, and setting up rules about how the creation of it has to be denied by people who don’t want to make that speech.Report
I would, at minimum, require businesses who are required to provide service by law to someone, but reject the speech being asked of them, to give them a formal rejection letter stating that fact and the actual message requested by the customer.
Unless you set up a process for this, it’s going to give any bigot license to discriminate and no one clearly sure what anyone’s rights are, and people just making up things after the fact.
If a bakery is going to reject reject the cake of a queer person, we need to actually find out what message was intended to be put on that cake, because under this decision, they don’t have the right to reject one with no message, for example. And if they reject one that says happy birthday, we need them to say that formally so we have a record that they’re opposed to birthday cakes.
(And, of course, if it turns out later on that they have made other cakes with exactly that message for straight customers, well it really looks like their problem wasn’t the message, and thus they are not protected under this decision.)Report
I don’t disagree. Personally if a business wished to use their religious beliefs to refuse services to people I would want it only to be usable in court if they disclosed those restrictions on their signage and marketing material. Let the markets decide then.Report
“Oh, this person doesn’t want to cater to a certain group of people? Man, I ain’t gonna purchase stuff from them!” is one of those sentiments that you’d think that we’d be more in favor of.Report
*blinks innocently*
What are you talking about, Jaybird? This court decision doesn’t give people license to discriminate against protected classes of people _at all_.
It only gives them license to refuse to produce _speech_ even if the laws seem to say otherwise.
Surely you’re not implying that the court just gave license to bigotry and violating anti-discrimination laws in general! They were very careful to explain otherwise!Report
I was agreeing with letting the market decide!
“I am not going to purchase a product and/or service from this company!”
I am 100% down with customers doing that sort of thing!Report
I wonder how far “speech” stretches.
I used to have a friend who wrote embedded software for gadgets and/or little systems people were building. He turned down jobs when he deemed the gadget to be a weapon or otherwise too dangerous. He once remarked that it was a decision that had to be made after a potential customer described the device/system. “You would be amazed,” he would say, “how many stupidly dangerous things people want to build.”Report
If only we had some sort of court that existed that could lay out boundaries for weighing rights against laws and other rights with specific multi-pronged tests that other courts could use.
Instead we get this, the Supreme Court, who *checks notes* writes ‘You can do that no-gay website thingy cause of some speech thingy we don’t have to time to explain’ in crayon on a napkin.Report
No, that doesn’t work, I just addressed that below.
I have never explicitly stated that I would not produce a website making the case that ‘Ludolf von Alvensleben is the greatest human being that ever lived’, that thought literally never entered my mind before this comment, and yet I wouldn’t do that after quickly googling him!
In fact, making people list what they will not do is itself compelled speech, so congrats, you just gave the court somewhere to strike that down.
What you need to do demand that a very clear record is kept of exactly what messages are rejected. That everyone involved agrees, formally, what the literal text of the requested message was, and the business states, for the record, it will not produce that speech.
This not only pins it pretty specifically _to_ only instances of speech, but allowed a court record that shows the business will, _in fact_, produce identical speech for straight people. You want to claim that making a sandwich is ‘art’ and hence speech, fine, maybe it is, but you’re making that exact ‘speech’ for straight people, we have a record of that and we’ll see you in court.Report
There are a lot of clever people out there saying that business should have to publish what speech they will reject in advance, but that that creates two problems: That is itself compelled speech, and also that’s nonsense, no one can imagine all speech they wouldn’t be comfortable saying.
So I’m trying to fit this into the absolute worse case scenario by a court intent on striking it down. In fact, considering the nonsensical Little Sisters of the Poor court case, maybe even having them provide a formal letter is too far. What we need to do is have the _customer_ fill out a formal request, using a template provided by the law, with the message they are asking for clearly stated, and the business has to sign to indicate they are rejecting providing that message under their first amendment rights.
Well, they don’t have to sign, but if the customer is a member of a protected class, that then leaves the assumption open that the businesses’ problem with providing services is _what class_ the person is (Which is illegal) instead of the message they are being asked to provide (Which is legal).
And, honestly, that might actually stop the bigoted hardware store owners, if they try to throw a gay person out cause it’s their ‘right’, and the gay person pulls out a form and says ‘We need to fill out this form, what message exactly was I just asking you to produce?’Report
For cakes I already have to fill out a form. Not like they’re going to put it on a cake right then and there, and no one expects them to remember the message hours later.Report
Yeah any actual ‘artist’, even for something like cake decoration, is going to write down what the request is.
Although, thanks to me trying to Supreme-Court proof this, I have the _customer_ doing it here, because of that dumbass Little Sisters of the Poor case. Otherwise, the court would simply decide that the business somehow has a first amendment right to not fill out a damn form. So I have the customer write it, and the business merely has to say ‘Yup, that’s the request I’m declining due to speech’. Maybe not even sign it, maybe just have it presented and witness that it was presented. “I have formally written down your refusal of my content.”.
And in actuality, this form isn’t most for future court cases, because…you don’t actually need a court case to do this! What Lorie Smith was ‘trying to do’ (Or, rather, making up a hypothetical about.) was actually already legal. It is perfectly legal for anyone to turn down making a website because of the content. Everyone already knew that.
What isn’t legal is to turn it down because of who is asking for it. And right now, there are a people misconstruing this outcome, because the case _itself_ kept being presented as giving her the right to turn down _gay couples_ as customers, which was illegal and still is under Colorado law, instead of _turning down making content she didn’t want_. (Which just happened to be about a gay wedding, she imagined, but could be literally any content.)
This lawsuit is a deliberate attempt to blur the ‘You have a right to not be hired to create content you disagree with’, an actual right people have, with the ‘You can refuse to follow anti-discrimination laws due to religious reasons’ nonsense that the far right has aimed at ever since the Civil Rights Act.
And, let’s be clear, this decision _will_ be used by people to outright discriminate against gay people, or Black people, or whoever, because they heard the court just said that was legal as long as the bigots said ‘religious reasons’. That’s half the point of this, to make people think those laws don’t apply anymore. (And the media is playing along.)
So I’m saying the legislature should say ‘The rejected customer can present a form that says what content they are trying to get, and you have to agree that is the content you will not create’, not really for any future court cases, but to make it _extremely_ clear that what can be rejected is content and content only. Due to freedom of speech, _not_ freedom of religion.Report
Hell, _I_ just got pulled into the misleading framing there.
You do not have a right to not create ‘content you disagree with’. That sort of argument is how freedom of _religion_ works, you can sometimes refuse things that you find morally objectionable.
Under the first amendment, you have a first amendment right not to be compelled to create speech. Period. That is where the sentence ends. You have a right to not be compelled to create speech _even if it is something you completely agree with_.
You may notice how the majority’s decision in this case seemed to think Smith’s _moral objections_ were relevant, when in fact they are not. This is because the far right has been trying to blur these two different rights.Report
Honolulu’s rapid transi line is finally open and it looks like American transit planners still don’t get it according to this video. The line took over a decade to build and is mainly focused on the less densely parts of Honolulu with one station being in a literal field. The plans to develop these stations do not seem to be that great. The line won’t be expanded into the denser parts of Honolulu until 2025/2031. With transit friends like this, who needs enemies. So many policy issues seem to be people knowing what needs to be done and saying “I don’t want to.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERBbFqALDdMReport
A very interesting comparison:
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Higher education allows you to make more money and insulate yourself from crime. It also makes it easier to recover financially from theft, vandalism, and even injury.
The effect of being a Democrat is probably just mediated through ideology.Report
In general, educated people are better at learning the party line. This results in a curious phenomenon where, on many issues, Republicans and Democrats diverge at higher education levels, rather than converging as one might naively expect.
Even among people with college degrees, only a small minority understand any given issue well enough to form an educated opinion. Most are really only capable of memorizing a few key talking points, and on this basis conclude that they know everything they need to know and that everyone who disagrees is just ignorant.Report
Remember a few weeks back when we were debating the effect of Mississippi’s gains in fourth grade reading scores? Turns out that – like a great many things here – it’s a statistical lie enabled by bad educational policy.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-07-03/how-mississippi-gamed-national-reading-test-to-produce-miracle-gainsReport
Sigh. Thank you very much for this post+link.Report
Doing a deep dive on this and I’m not sure the link is correct.
Are the 4th graders who had to repeat the 3rd tested or not?
If they’re not tested at all, then the critique makes sense and so does “adding them back into the pool”.
However I held one of my kids back (2nd grade, not 3rd, but I’ll pretend it’s 3rd here) and it had a massive positive effect the next year because she was repeating the grade, but that effect was permanent.
She took the normal 4th grade tests in 4th grade. Putting in what she would have gotten if she hadn’t been held back makes no sense at all.Report
From the same article:
Report
I have mixed feelings on this. 4th grade reading scores is measuring whether or not they can read. That’s a big deal. The big shift from learning to read to reading to learn is 3rd grade or so.
So that test is measuring whether they’ve made the transition.
8th grade is probably measuring whether or not they want an education? That’s a different problem.
None of which changes that if this is a statistical illusion, then it’s an illusion. We really need to know whether the kids held back in the 3rd grade are tested in the 4th.Report
That’s an interesting opinion piece.
The comments to the Kevin Drum blogpost contain some good criticisms of what Drum did including:
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Indeed that would be an interesting analysis. Let’s hope he does it.Report