I can find no shortage of essays, columns, and what not from alleged allies of Israel telling Israel that the time for the amount of time left for the two-state solution is ending, that a deal has to be reached now or its the end of Israel.
And yet you've actually apparently never read one of those. The time for two-state solution is near ending for _Israel_, and Israel only, because at we're getting close to the point the Palestinians say 'We hereby officially give up on Palestine, and are now all part of Israel. You officially win, congratulations, take all of Palestine....and now give us the fucking vote, and, oh, look, Arabs outnumber the Jews. Let's see _exactly_ how long Israel remains a Jewish state.'
Here are the _only_ possible outcomes:
1) A two state solution in the next decade or two.
2) Israel attempts to keep things as they are forever, trying to keep 'Palestine' existing in a quasi-country even as _Palestinians_ want to join Israel.
3) Dissolving Palestine, making it part of Israel....
a) ...and being essentially voted out of their own country. (Probably with a country rename, just for fun.)
b) ...and operating some sort of apartheid forever where Muslims can't vote.
c) ...after some sort of ethnic cleaning to kill most Palestines.
The two-state solution is the only solution where _Israel_ wins, and _Israel_ is rapidly running out of time to actually make it happen.
Is that accurate, DTC? I’ve only recently been exposed to the idea of heteronormativity and have not studied it in any real depth. My assumption was that include the first few phrase there, but does not necessarily assume that “the man does the money earning and the woman does the cleaning.” Is this latter part generally included in the definition?
Yes, and no.
I have a confession to make. You see, _I_ was thinking the exact same thing as you, that heteronormative was essentially just the assumption that LGBT people didn't exist. I was even going to point out that heteronomative was being misused.
..and then I look at it on Wikipedia.
What I was thinking at first was the _original_ definition, but it apparently has expanded to include gender roles in general. I find this very confusing and annoying. There are reasons we have _different_ words for _different_ things. 'Heteronormative' is already the assumption that human beings are composed of straight couples, we don't need to overload it with 'gender roles' assmptions, which, duh, already has the term 'sexism'. But I'm not in charge of language.
That said, CK was still misusing it. It doesn't mean 'The fact that two biological sexes exist', nor has anyone, at any time, proposed changing that fact in general. Specific people may end up outside those two sexes, either by choice or otherwise, but no one's proposed that as any sort of policy or even stated it was an ideal or even _good_ outcome for people in general. (I rather suspect most feminists, like most other people, enjoy being the biological sex they currently are, even if they dislike the discrimination society applies based on that.)
Homosexuality is not the only alternative to heterosexuality or heteronormativity. I was thinking as much or more about the latter when I used the word “heterosexuality,”
I think you're using the hetronormative to mean 'gender normative'. While it does include that, I suspect it is confusing people who think it just refers to _relationship_ roles.
Moreover, you're not using that right. The entire premise of hetronormative is that there are _assumptions_ built into the world, about gender roles and relationship roles. The hetronormative assumption is: Everyone is either a cis male or a cis female, attracted to the opposite gender, and they will enter a relationship with exactly one person of the opposite gender where the man does the money earning and the woman does the cleaning.
Not a _single_ word of that is alterable with technology, baring some sort of mind control. Because they are not 'facts', but are assumptions. Hetronormative refers to society's assumptions about people, or, to put it less nicely, society's prejudices about people. You can't fix prejudices with technology.
You seem to think that hetronormative includes the biological fact that people are born (generally) with a specific biological gender. That fact is not something that anyone has a problem with. People may wish to correct their own biological gender, but no one wants to alter _other people's_. (At least, no one opposing hetronormativity. It's the people with written-in-stone gender roles that freaked out about intersex and trans people and try to 'correct' them to whatever they decide that person 'really' is.)
@Patrick The State, as an aggregate, can’t be credited with the same sort of evaluation capabilities as atomic persons. Like any organizational structure, there’s agency loss and there’s all sorts of perfectly logical and somewhat predictable outcomes for organizational behavior that we would never, ever tolerate in an individual without criminal sanction. And that applies both to governments and all sorts of other organizations, too.
I've always thought this was a fundamental different between the left and the right: The left also thinks _individuals_ and private entities can also be assholes.
While a debt incurred to a private entity might be better, you're probably looking at this through the lens of hidden privilege, because you're one of the people who _can_ get help from private individuals, and you generally assume everyone can.
The government operates off a series of blind rules and regulations, and that can often lead to nonsense. But human beings, OTOH, operate off a series of prejudices about who 'deserves' what, and if you're some old ugly gay black guy you can just rot in a ditch while they 'charitably' feed a bunch of cute children who don't really need it.
In practice, I find myself far more often disagreeing with debt obligations beyond the most abstract.
Indeed. Debt obligations on people we help is just a sneaky way of enforcing privilege, a way of creating rules for the poor but not for the rich.
I don't want to live in a society where only people don't have subsided health insurance (aka, the rich) can smoke. (I don't particularly want _anyone_ to smoke, and think an argument can be made to just slowly banning it over a few decades and not allowing current non-smokers to start, but I don't want to bar all _but_ the rich.)
I don't want to live in a society where only people who get financial aid to college will be unable to go to college if convicted of a drug offense, whereas people who can afford college (aka, the rich) can go there just fine if they have that on their record.
I don't want to live in a society where we drug test people who are getting welfare, but not people who are getting a tax deduction.
If we want laws, _we want laws_. If we want to stop people from smoking, we stop them from smoking. If we want to punish people with drug convictions by keeping them from college, let's ban them from college. If we want to drug test people, we better damn well just start drug testing people.
Hell, it's already fucked up enough that we functionally have a system where all sorts of minor offenses like speeding and parking violations are just fines...meaning the rich can commit them with impunity and the poor can't. But at some point, we're going to try to assert that people on welfare are using 'our gas' and we can subject them to even _worse_ fines.
Government aid should have no obligations attached at all. Requirements, sure...we give people food stamps instead of cash, or whatever. But we don't run around threatening people with _new_ rules, rules others don't have to follow, when we give them help.
That is technically true, but it’s easier to think of it the other way around, because that’s usually how it’s set up…the law legally applies to everyone, but somehow the ‘privileged’ people don’t actually suffer from it.
And it's worth pointing out that the most overreaching privileged laws, the one everyone _does_ see a problem, usually fail at this 'fairness'.
For the obvious example, the law that, if you were convicted of a drug offense, you couldn't get financial aid and to go to college.
Even people who don't normally examine any of their privilege at all said 'Hey, wait a second...why are we deliberately setting up laws where rich drug offenders can go to college but middle class drug offenders can't?'.
Or maybe the problem there was just that the privilege excluded white middle class people. Actually, nevermind this post, that seems much more likely.
The thing is, it was 25% then, and it's 95% now. Or whatever the percentages actually were.
And part of the problem is now that the sense of entitlement has filtered down even lower, to the upper-middle class.
A while back, on some board, in a discussion about a manager at KFC who fired a woman because she was homeless, I actually explained the actual _job_ of a manager (Aka, _make sure that their workers can do their job_.), and people responded with 'preach it brother' and talking about no managers appears to actually know this, which somewhat amazed me. Even goddamn managers thinks their job is to sit around doing nothing while money just magically appears out of fucking nowhere.
No one actually thinks they have to do an honest day's work anymore _except_ the working class...and they can't find any damn jobs, because instead of actually operating companies that _make and sell things_, the superrich have decided to fuck around with credit default swaps and screwing around with buying and selling stocks every nanosecond, while dismantling companies for tax write-offs or who the fuck even knows where money comes from anymore. (It's sure not from actually _making stuff_.)
Our current economy is imaginary bullshit built on top of other imaginary bullshit on top of the mortgage of some guy in New Jersey who works at the only plant in America that actually produces anything anymore. And with our luck, it's DVD players, and is about to fold when the owner refuses to start making Blue-rays.
A privilege is what one person has and others don’t.
More specifically, a privilege is an _exception_ to a general rule, law, or restriction that one person (or set of people) have and another does not. (The fact I own a specific thing and no one else does is not 'privilege', assuming that laws about property ownership apply equally. I suspect that's not what you meant, but it could be read that way.)
Privilege is not really when laws are aimed at specific people. That is technically true, but it's easier to think of it the other way around, because that's usually how it's set up...the law legally applies to everyone, but somehow the 'privileged' people don't actually suffer from it. _Everyone_ technically has to show papers...but only Hispanic people will be _asked_.
Privilege is when society decides that rules are not for specific people. It is when rules somehow deflect around people like Sue Storm deflects light around her. There are good people, and we'll waive the rules for them, and there are...those other people. You know the ones. We need to make sure they stay in line.
An interesting fact from that lawsuit is the accuser's allegation that Seagal kept two young _Russian_ girls on staff essentially as sex workers, and she was hired to replace one of them. (Instead of the personal assistant position she thought she was hired for.)
You get 50+N % of the folk in town to agree that we’re all going to call “this thing” community property and put our collective taxes towards maintaining it… and then say that in spite of me paying taxes, I don’t get to use “this thing” without giving up smoking or drinking or skiing or swimming or riding a motorcycle or doing my own woodwork with a skil saw, I’m about ready to spit in your eye. You cover the cost, or you don’t provide the service.
Exactly. If something is bad enough we don't want it, _outlaw it_. We are a nation of laws, after all. If we want to drug test people, _drug test people_. Don't run around trying to outlaw drugs _for the poor_, which is functionally what people keep trying to do. (Anyone remember that 'We will remove financial aid if you test positive for drugs.' trick. Aka, poor drug users can't go to college but rich ones can?)
It's a very clever plan...create an economic system that is completely broken, and people need our help. So when they _ask_ for our help, we choose what specific rules to put on them, the poor, that the non-poor are not subject to.
I call bullshit on the entire concept. The _entire system_ is suspect, and appears to create incentive to _keep people dependent on the government_, so we can then control what they do.
And holy fuck, I just ended up agreeing with the libertarians. Of course, my solution is to _stop telling the poor what to do_ while continuing to help them, whereas the libertarian conclusion is somewhat different.
Oh, and the next thing to talk about is the fact that a _huge_ percentage of black men in this country are under the control of the prison system. Not actually in prison, mind you, but under the control of it via probation and parole. So now we have a way to subject black people, I mean criminals, I mean people who couldn't afford a lawyer, to rules that no one else has to follow.
At some point we just have to agree this entire damn system is nonsense. That we seem to enjoy creating situations where certain types of people need to come crawling to the government for help, and various bigotted asshats can then put rules on those 'certain types' of people, rules which no one else has to follow.
No. 'Privilege' literally means _private law_. It is a combination 'privus', which is where we get 'private', and 'leg', where we get 'legal'. Private-law.
A privilege is an 'right', or an 'immunity', you have _that other people do not_. It can be one specified under the law, or it can be one that society has given you. It is when you can do something that others cannot.
'Unearned' doesn't really come into this. None of the privilege anyone is talking about is 'earned'. We don't generally let people earn 'privileges' in modern society. That would be something like that in the movie Armageddon, where the astronauts demand to never pay taxes again. That would be a 'privilege' under the law, a specific legal exemption for them.
There is a long list we could compose of obvious moral truths that justified the destruction of settled but obviously inferior and wrong ways of life, but I’d rather cut to the chase.
Note: Stating you are going to cut to the chase is the opposite of cutting to the chase.
Or would it be better to achieve actually authentic freedom and equity a tad more gradually, say, just long enough for Kazzy and his wife to live out their dreams in American middle class comfort and merely relatively confident freedom and equity?
Ah, yes, if only women had started demanding equal rights a hundred years ago.
SLOWER, DAMMIT! SLOWER! WE'RE STILL MOVING FORWARD!
It’s the cruel certitude of the superior liberal – the bureaucrat of tomorrow, a familiar type from certain historical episodes we sometimes consider noteworthy – who never seems to think for a moment that he or she or some or many just like him or her may be put in the very same position by someone with an even truer truth about really real “freedom and equity”
...truer truth? Huh?
You mean someone could someday point out that _I_ am privileged and need to stop acting like an asshat?
Yeah, which is why I have a general policy of, you know, _not doing that_, and stopping when people point it out. Instead of attempting to out-asshat people.
You do realize there are, in fact, _men_ in this discussion, right? We're not a bunch of women going 'Fuck yeah, men need to suffer!'.
How about the privilege or right not to have some world-improver with apparently minimal experience of life or curiosity about it beyond his own presumptions impose on me or anyone else his latest guaranteed relatively well thought out version of justice.
Jesus H. Christ. He has the _right_ to keep women from having equal rights.
It's the same argument against SSM, the 'right' to oppose people. Except he forgot to put religious clothes on it!
It's just hanging out there naked, like there is some actual identifiable _right_ to oppress people and a _right_ to keep that from changing. He thinks we're agree with this.
that the full effects of irreversibly eradicating complex and living social structures, cultural-economic ecosystems developed and elaborated over thousands of years, are fully or well enough known and anyway negligible, as long as they seem to be borne by someone else;
Yeah! How dare men be asked to bear some costs when changing a thousand years of oppression of women!
..and by 'costs' we mean 'Still making more than women'. So, whatever the opposite of 'costs' is.
and, perhaps most of all, that the denial of empathy, the lack of effort even to understand, sooner or later won’t come around after having first gone around.
Even if you don’t care about the suffering of your fellow citizens and other human beings, since they have not earned or have lost the privilege of having their suffering counted as meaningful in your view, or if you happen to find the suffering quite tolerable, since it is not yours,
Damn it, that was a brand new irony detector. Shouldn't these things have fuses on them or something?
and since you think it merely derives from abstract notions that you don’t share
It's naked prejudice again! He literally has an abstract notion that he should _not lose his privilege_.
The rest of it he's cloaking in 'go slower' and 'unexpected consequences', but here it's just flopping around where everyone can see, without any pretend justification except that he does not want less privilege.
and anyway you deem quite unattractive on an idealized marriage market you imagine is the real subject, it would be in your interest, or the interest of your class, to take both, the people and their suffering, seriously anyway.
Side note: You write like I used to, making mile long sentences with dozens of commas. This is not actually a good way to write. And I at least used paragraphs.
There’s got to be some kind of moral choice underpinning the whole thing.
The thing is, there actually _is_ a rather serious moral problem in the US right now, due to moral failings of certain types of people, who _used_ to behave in a specific way and have now changed their behavior, nearly destroying society. Those people used to believe everyone was in it together, and they weren't greedy bastards looking from handouts from the government when things didn't go their way. They didn't assert the government had to pay them money or else.
The people I'm describing, of course, are the _rich_.
The moral failings of society don't trace back to the 60s. They trace back to the 80s.
In the US, an adult with a full-time job and no dependents cannot fall below the poverty line. A 40-hour, minimum-wage job will put you at 130% of the poverty line for a one-person household. As long as you have a full-time job and don’t have any children, you can’t be poor.
Of course an adult with a full-time job and no dependents 'cannot fall below the poverty line. 'If they're making 130% of the poverty line, they are not under the poverty line'. No shit, Sherlock. Nice logic skills there. And way to ignore the people who can't get a full-time job by defining them out of existence. (Along with people who have children, but others have pointed that out. I'm just pointing out _additional_ stupidities.)
However 'As long as you have a full-time job and don’t have any children, you can’t be poor.' is a complete and utter lie. Those people sure as fuck can 'be poor'. The poverty line defines how much an _average_ person needs in minimum expenses each year.
Start off someone with a lot of debt, or have a disaster like a house fire or a heath issue, and yes, a single person who has a full time job can be 'poor'. All they have to do is _have more expenses each year than 130% of the poverty line_, you twit.
Which is actually...trivially easy. The 30% of 130% of poverty level gives you $3351 'above' the _average_ bare minimum 'poverty level' to live. That's $3351, _before taxes_ at 15%. So only $2848 a year. Wait, we forgot to take half of FICA. $2630 a year.
That's $219 a month above the bare minimum considered _possible_ by the government to live on.
The disparity in _rent_ across the country can more than account for expenses being that much higher than average, to say nothing of food, and that completely ignores _actual emergencies_.
If this were true, then nobody would have been in the streets, and nobody would be watching Fox News.
Uh, what are you talking about? Why would nobody be in the streets _because_ Fox News urged people to take the streets?
And why would Fox News covering people in the streets protesting Obama result in people _not_ watching Fox News?
That you don’t even have a timetable in your explanation suggests that this comment is more parroted than the result of personal research.
While I did not lay things out as a 'timetable', if you can't figure out _when_ I'm talking about you need reading comprehension skills, and perhaps the ability to use Wikipedia.
I first said 'the Republicans in 2008 were not yet astronomically stupid', which rather implies I'm talking about 2008.
Then I talk about the creation of the Tea Party, which I didn't mention a time, but happened right at the start of 2009. I am unsure as to why I should required to provide the specific time. We're currently talking about the creation of the Tea Party, so perhaps you should spend ten seconds on Wikipedia and read up on that.
Then I said, right after Fox made their street theatre, that it was _immediately_ hijacked by the Kochs. Admittedly, 'immediately' is rather vague, and I mean 'Over the next year or so', but, again, I don't understand why this wasn't fairly obvious from the text and the _slightest_ bit of knowledge about the Tea Party.
Hell, the real people in Tea Party _itself_ complain about the Tea Party Express. And it's fairly clear that FreedomWorks is also running the Tea Party Patriots, although feel free to dispute that if you want. But complaining that I didn't provide a 'timeline' for when well-documented events happened is utterly inane.
Of course, the 'original' Tea Party that Fox created still exists in some sense, mostly in those asshats over at Tea Party Nation.
The teaparty is only the first attempt to harness the overseer class.
Not really. There have been plenty of attempts at that. The most obvious being unions. A question presents itself: How do the people in the Tea Party feel about unions?
It's sorta sad we already know the answer to that question without any research, and that it's not good.
The Tea Party actual problem is that the people _in_ the Tea Party are mostly the Republican base, a group that has been lied to for so long they have literally no idea of the actual truth in a dozen different contexts. I mean, the entire _premise_ of the Tea Party is that people were being 'tax more than they can stand' at the trail end of the _Bush_ years! (Although they only started protesting under Obama, for some completely mysterious reason.) The entire founding is just a blatant lie about various tax rates.
It's almost certain that any organization you create from those those people, and those lies, is going to be functionally insane, without any rational goals. I mean, the _stated_ goal is 'deficit reduction', but I've yet to hear _any_ Tea Party group praise Obama for the massive deficit reduction he's pulled off.
And if you do, by chance, happen to get a Tea Party group that isn't insane(1)...it almost certainly will realize that 'Tea Party' is a damn stupid association and rename itself.
1) Please note I am not calling the people in the group insane. They are not. I am saying the groups behaves in a completely random manner, without any discernible goals or any idea of what they are doing. (Also, I'm talking about the 'grassroots' Tea Parties, not the pretend Tea Parties operated by the Kochs.)
The best place to start is the current 'scandals'.
Like I said, there is absolutely no evidence that the Republicans cut security to embassies because they wanted an terrorist attack before the election. No evidence at all.
There's also no evidence that the reason the Justice Department was tapping AP reporter's phones is that Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee leaked information to them, or that the reason the Republicans have stayed mostly silent on this one is that some of them are cooperating with Justice to bring others down. And Michelle Bachmann's resignation had _nothing_ to do with this.
And there's very little evidence that tiny real grassroot Tea Party groups were investigated at the request of anyone, and there's no evidence that, if they were, it was at the request of FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity in an attempt to destroy the competition.
I believe all of these rumors are entirely fabricated, and both me and people on the right should want to see those people fully cleared of all wrongdoing.
The real funny thing is that the sex drive actually _is_ 'natural'. There are very little mammals that do not operate as if it is very important, and it's so important to regulate that female animals actually produce hormones to influence it in various ways, including, and this is interesting, _periods of time in which they are not fertile_.
Whereas the idea that males being in charge is 'natural' is sheer nonsense. There are plenty of animal species where females are in charge, and plenty of species were males are weaker.
And that's not even attempting to figure out in what male animals 'having jobs' and female animals 'staying home and watch the kids' is even _supposed to mean_. Animals do not have jobs.
Even if you want to call 'collecting food' a job, firstly, plenty of female animals do that, and secondly, plenty of animals do not 'go out and do that'. The food is right there, and everyone sorta wanders around and eats it. (Seriously, it's like these people have never heard of cows and horses or any sort of herbivores.)
Granted, making sure the children get fed is usually the mother's job...but that's not because the father is out eating, it's because many animals don't even bother with 'fathers' in the sense of raising children. The father is not out providing subsistence, the father is just over there doing his own thing because actually attempting to raise children is not that common for fathers in the animal kingdom.
We've actually reached the point where conservatives are creating false stereotypes about _animals_. That is actually happening.
(Hey, here's a fun idea. The next time conservatives start yammering about 'natural' behaviors of men vs. women, point out that in the animal kingdom, no one knows who their father actually is, and usually don't care. So why on earth do human children get their _father's_ last name?)
If these GOP-ers are serious, there’s plenty to be afraid of: we have their track record.
There is actually a very important way politics now differs from politics, pre-cold war: The internet. And video phones. And the ability to present cold, hard facts.
So I'm not entirely sure the Democrats need to start 'lying' at all. You are right, the actual _record_ of Republicans exists.
Here's a fun idea for a 527: An organization that presents GOP lies. That all it does. When someone in the GOP lies, it runs ads in their district showing their lie and explaining why it is a lie. And by 'lie' I mean to include 'misleading statements', and by 'someone in the GOP', I mean _anyone_. Even in entirely GOP states.
It does not attempt to tell people how to vote, it does not attempt make this Democratic vs. Republican. It just said 'This person who represented you just lied to you and everyone else.'.
I'm not saying it should be non-partisan, I'm saying it shouldn't be overtly partisan. And t should be overtly un-opinionated. It should even avoid calling people out on what they _claim_ to want. (OTOH, calling them out on what they say others want it is fine.)
While the major purpose of this would be TV, they'd also have a little section dedicated to commenting on graphics passed around on Facebook. With some sort of magic Facebook search (I'm pretty certain that it's possible to give access to that information) or browser addon that, the _second_ such a graphic pops up in your feed, you can click somewhere that explains _exactly_ why that graph is incorrect. So you can cut the goddamn things off at their knees with an immediate post about how it is crap.
What said, I'd be fine with any actual pushback at all. How about promoting a damn conspiracy about how the _right_ is pretending to investigate Benghazi because _they_ left security unfunded for the consulate. And _absolutely no one_ is saying they did that on purpose, or were colluding with the attackers in attempt to sway the 2012 election by damaging Obama with a terrorist attack. No one is saying that _at all_. We just want to get to the bottom of what _really_ happened.
They’re going to have to not talk about culture war stuff, though.
The Tea Party: Ruined ten seconds in.
More seriously: More people would have had respect for the Tea Party if it hadn't magically appeared one month after Obama was elected, complaining about stuff that Bush did but somehow were Democrats fault. Oh, and if it hadn't completely failed to notice that deficits have been reduced at the faster rate ever. And if it hadn't branched out into all sort of social stuff. And if it wasn't plagued with racism. And if a good 80% of 'Tea Party' groups the media covers weren't just fronts for Americans for Prosperity.
I'd have a lot more respect for the Tea Party, in fact, if they were entirely different people, with different views and different goals, and actually were just complaining about the bank bailouts. And protested the actual wrongdoers, the _banks_ that demand that they continue to be allowed to be 'too big to fail', not a government that probably did the best it could.
Although they should put some focus on how the government fails to do anything about the economy. And they should deliberate steered away from both social issues _and_ allowing a political party _or_ rich donors to hijack them.
Someone should start a group like that. Since it's more about jobs than taxes, and since 'job party' sounds like cross between a key party and a circle jerk, we could call it the Occupational Party or Occu-Party or something.
No, the Tea Party was created by Fox News. Apparently because the Republicans weren't being proactive enough about yelling at 'Obama bank bailout', probably because, duh, it was bipartisan and the Republicans in 2008 were not yet astronomically stupid.
Fox wanted people screaming in the streets about the administration and taxes and the deficit (Which was now Obama's fault) and abortions for some and tiny American flags for others. Fox wanted street theater to report on, so they made some up.
The Tea Party was then _immediately_ hijacked by the Kochs.
Or it's possible this went the other way around, and various corporate interests (There's some interesting fact out there about links to the cigarette lobby and the Tea Party) planned to do this, and Fox leapt on top it of it. I.e., a fake grassroots movement accidentally got populated by grassloons.
But pretty much none of the players have the best interests of the Republican party as a goal.
Of course the Kochs, at least, need to _have Republicans elected_ to get their agenda done, which puts them a step above Fox News and their trained loons. Fox is actually happier when Republicans _aren't_ in office. (Which means it's pretty fucking stupid for the GOP to team up with them)
But while the Kochs have the _short-term_ interests of the Republican party at heart, in the long-term, they are pretty destructive to the GOP. (Although, at least, are _paying_ the GOP to self-destruct. The loons aren't offering _anything_.)
This is sorta why the Tea Parties ended up in a weird battle with themselves, fighting between stupid short-term goals (The loons, controlled by Fox) and stupid long-term goals (The so-called 'establishment', controlled by Koch.).
I keep hoping for the Republicans to collapse and for us to all realign in the aftermath.
It keeps not happening.
The thing is, the Republican party is driven by the base, and the base is driven by idiotic media blowhards. The Republican party can't right itself until it realizes that _media personalities do not have the best interest of the Party at heart_. In fact, they do better the _worse_ the party does.
All too often, when idiotic behaviors present themselves, people forget to ask themselves 'Who has an advantage because of this behavior?'. The answer, here, is clearly 'right wing media' and it's pretty easy to trace their control of the GOP. The GOP willingly gave over control of their party in 1996 or so to the media, in an attempt to remove the president, and have been unable to take it back from them, while it is _deliberately_ being driven into a ditch by uninformed bigoted gibberish by a media that profits from that.
There's really no way for the GOP to fix this without telling Fox News to FOAD. Which it needed to do a decade ago, or at the least when the right-wing media created the fucking Tea Party, which was just blatantly 'treasonous' behavior towards the GOP and rather demonstrated whose interests they served. Seriously, at that point the GOP should have said 'If you want your own political party, feel free to have that one, we're taking our toys and going home'...yeah, they would have done worse in 2010, but might have actually had a chance in 2012 without the bone-stupid 'base' weighing them down.
What is going to happen next is, even with the redistricting the Republicans did, at some point they are going to managed to reduce themselves to a minority in all branches, and at that point they become a rump party made up entirely of loons. At some point, the right wing media will have functionally converted a portion of the population to Alex Jones listeners and made their own audience, which will then continue to exist as long as the right-wing media makes a profit from it.
I say all this as a progressive, but one that would actually like a honorable opposition party instead of whatever the hell the GOP is.
The segment finally ends with Erickson noting – without even the slightest trace of irony – that conservatives need to be careful when they tell people this so they don’t come off as sounding anti-women.
I love the idea of saying idiotically horrible things live on television, then going 'But we're going to have to be careful when we explain this to women'. Because women don't watch Fox News, apparently. (I wonder how many advertisers know that.)
It's always hilarious when a politician explains what they _really_ think in a private meeting, and someone is recording it and makes it public. But this...they do understand the _concept_ of television, right?
I've pretty much stopped talking to George at this point, who readers may notice only took issue with my pointing out that a Roland Emmerich movie was, in fact, a movie, and The Day After Tomorrow is no more a real prediction than Godzilla was. He apparently had no rebuttal to both my explanation of drought plus increased rainfall _or_ my pointing out that no one is predicting sealevel change to go backwards, accepting both those to instead dispute the idea that crappy science fiction is a real prediction.
So I will address the prediction of shutting down thermohaline circulation. While there _is_ a theory that that could shut down, nothing that happens in that movie is even vaguely predicted by it. (As was pointed out by the very article that was linked to by George!)
While the shutdown itself could be near instant (Or not, we don't know), it wouldn't cause instant temperature changes, nor would those temperature changes be anywhere near as fast as shown, or as large, or even happen in the same place!
Shutting that down simply means that the temperature of a few places become more in line with their latitude...Scotland eventually turns into Sweden, for example. And Iceland into Greenland. And France into Canada. And, at the other end, Georgia into Tunesia, or, if you prefer, Texas.
All that, of course, is an exaggeration (It's not _just_ latitude and thermohaline circulation that effect the temperature), but the point is that the thermohaline circulation moves warmth up the New England coast, takes it across the ocean, and slams it smack into Europe, making _both_ those places more livable than their latitude would otherwise imply. (And stirring up the ocean while it does it, which makes it more liveable too.)
If you've been paying attention, you will also notice that the thermohaline circulation does not actually effect the temperate of New York very much, (New York is at the same approximate latitude as Spain and Italy and Japan, the temperature is fine there anyway.) which means trying to assert that The Day After Tomorrow has anything to do with that exceptionally stupid.
In fact, The Day After Tomorrow is not quite as stupid as that, and the freezing of New York is due to some 'super storm', not the collapse of the thermohaline circulation. George Turner: Making less sense than Roland Emmerich.
The general purpose of having kids move quietly down a hallway is to avoid disrupting other classes and/or offices.
See, I agree entirely with that, but the simple fact is, that at schools, almost _all_ rules are justified with 'It would disturb other students'. This is because the courts have said that students actually have some rights, but schools can restrict them if such rights would 'disturb' education.
So you end up with nonsense like dress codes in high school being justified to keep from 'disturbing' classes. (Which had some interesting slut-shaming going on, considering that the most enforced dress code was skirt length.)
So while 'Care for self, care for others, care for the environment.' actually does make sense, the problem is that often the fascista who get placed in charge of schools just nonsensically justify things using essentially that.
I wish I could find my old high school handbook, to quote some of these rules. And note these were _pre-Columbine_ rules...the year after I left high school, Columbine happened, the fascista really ramped things up, and my brothers had to go to school with transparent bookbags. (Because no one can hide a weapon on themselves, or just pull one out in the parking lot.)
You know what annoys me? When I was a teenager, I was assured that all this would make sense when I was older, that teenagers think they know everything but don't. I am now 34, and looking back, I have learned...I was entirely right about everything, and a lot of adults really are just fascist assholes towards teenagers. That's not to say a lot of teenagers aren't stupid, but their stupidity doesn't justify the idiotic system that teenagers have to live in. (In fact, I have to suggest that a lot of teenager's stupidity is _due to_ rebelling against such a system.)
Sometimes they use it to predict global cooling, citing changes in the oceans’ thermo-haline circulation patterns, most famously in the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” where temperatures seemed to be hundreds of degrees below absolute zero.
I want to print this out and frame it as 'Most nonsensical climate change denialism'. You just cited a Roland Emmerich movie as if it was an actual prediction of the future.
That actually happened. In the actual world. You just did that.
We also don’t know that higher temperatures will produce more drought. Many models show that there would be increased rainfall along with fewer extremes (those don’t get much coverage because they’re useless for scaring people). In general we know it should get wetter as it gets warmer.
'Increased rainfall' and 'drought' are not mutually exclusive thing. In fact, you can't _have_ drought under climate change without having increased rainfall. This is because the increased rainfall is due to increased evaporation. Which, duh, results in less water on the ground.
Granted, some of that water is making it back down. And, indeed, near oceans, there will probably be less drought, as more ocean water ends up on land. (Assuming that's the way the wind moves, of course.)
In areas _it already doesn't rain_, aka, deserts, having higher evaporation makes the desert larger and drier, while not actually putting enough water in the air for it to rain. (Changing the humidity from 2% to 4% is not going to make it rain.)
Heat removes water from the ground, and puts it in the air. That is what causes rain, so we will have more rain.
Heat removes water from the ground, and puts it in the air. The lack of water on the ground is the _definition_ of drought, so we will have more of that also.
The fact we're cycling water _faster_ doesn't change the fact that less of it will stick around to make it into plants and animals, and more of it will be floating uselessly in the air. (Unless the plan is to operate giant dehumidifiers to water our food.)
Warmer temperatures have also been modeled to produce sea-level decreases (considered unlikely by the IPCC, but not out of the ballpark) due to an increase in snow piling up on Antarctica, and thus a net gain in polar ice mass.
Except no, that's not what anyone has modeled.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “How the Tea Party Movement Is Often About Things Uglier Than Fiscal Restraint, and a Challenge to Public Conservatives Who Claim Otherwise”
I can find no shortage of essays, columns, and what not from alleged allies of Israel telling Israel that the time for the amount of time left for the two-state solution is ending, that a deal has to be reached now or its the end of Israel.
And yet you've actually apparently never read one of those. The time for two-state solution is near ending for _Israel_, and Israel only, because at we're getting close to the point the Palestinians say 'We hereby officially give up on Palestine, and are now all part of Israel. You officially win, congratulations, take all of Palestine....and now give us the fucking vote, and, oh, look, Arabs outnumber the Jews. Let's see _exactly_ how long Israel remains a Jewish state.'
Here are the _only_ possible outcomes:
1) A two state solution in the next decade or two.
2) Israel attempts to keep things as they are forever, trying to keep 'Palestine' existing in a quasi-country even as _Palestinians_ want to join Israel.
3) Dissolving Palestine, making it part of Israel....
a) ...and being essentially voted out of their own country. (Probably with a country rename, just for fun.)
b) ...and operating some sort of apartheid forever where Muslims can't vote.
c) ...after some sort of ethnic cleaning to kill most Palestines.
The two-state solution is the only solution where _Israel_ wins, and _Israel_ is rapidly running out of time to actually make it happen.
On “Some mansplaining on women’s access to the workplace”
Is that accurate, DTC? I’ve only recently been exposed to the idea of heteronormativity and have not studied it in any real depth. My assumption was that include the first few phrase there, but does not necessarily assume that “the man does the money earning and the woman does the cleaning.” Is this latter part generally included in the definition?
Yes, and no.
I have a confession to make. You see, _I_ was thinking the exact same thing as you, that heteronormative was essentially just the assumption that LGBT people didn't exist. I was even going to point out that heteronomative was being misused.
..and then I look at it on Wikipedia.
What I was thinking at first was the _original_ definition, but it apparently has expanded to include gender roles in general. I find this very confusing and annoying. There are reasons we have _different_ words for _different_ things. 'Heteronormative' is already the assumption that human beings are composed of straight couples, we don't need to overload it with 'gender roles' assmptions, which, duh, already has the term 'sexism'. But I'm not in charge of language.
That said, CK was still misusing it. It doesn't mean 'The fact that two biological sexes exist', nor has anyone, at any time, proposed changing that fact in general. Specific people may end up outside those two sexes, either by choice or otherwise, but no one's proposed that as any sort of policy or even stated it was an ideal or even _good_ outcome for people in general. (I rather suspect most feminists, like most other people, enjoy being the biological sex they currently are, even if they dislike the discrimination society applies based on that.)
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Homosexuality is not the only alternative to heterosexuality or heteronormativity. I was thinking as much or more about the latter when I used the word “heterosexuality,”
I think you're using the hetronormative to mean 'gender normative'. While it does include that, I suspect it is confusing people who think it just refers to _relationship_ roles.
Moreover, you're not using that right. The entire premise of hetronormative is that there are _assumptions_ built into the world, about gender roles and relationship roles. The hetronormative assumption is: Everyone is either a cis male or a cis female, attracted to the opposite gender, and they will enter a relationship with exactly one person of the opposite gender where the man does the money earning and the woman does the cleaning.
Not a _single_ word of that is alterable with technology, baring some sort of mind control. Because they are not 'facts', but are assumptions. Hetronormative refers to society's assumptions about people, or, to put it less nicely, society's prejudices about people. You can't fix prejudices with technology.
You seem to think that hetronormative includes the biological fact that people are born (generally) with a specific biological gender. That fact is not something that anyone has a problem with. People may wish to correct their own biological gender, but no one wants to alter _other people's_. (At least, no one opposing hetronormativity. It's the people with written-in-stone gender roles that freaked out about intersex and trans people and try to 'correct' them to whatever they decide that person 'really' is.)
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@Patrick
The State, as an aggregate, can’t be credited with the same sort of evaluation capabilities as atomic persons. Like any organizational structure, there’s agency loss and there’s all sorts of perfectly logical and somewhat predictable outcomes for organizational behavior that we would never, ever tolerate in an individual without criminal sanction. And that applies both to governments and all sorts of other organizations, too.
I've always thought this was a fundamental different between the left and the right: The left also thinks _individuals_ and private entities can also be assholes.
While a debt incurred to a private entity might be better, you're probably looking at this through the lens of hidden privilege, because you're one of the people who _can_ get help from private individuals, and you generally assume everyone can.
The government operates off a series of blind rules and regulations, and that can often lead to nonsense. But human beings, OTOH, operate off a series of prejudices about who 'deserves' what, and if you're some old ugly gay black guy you can just rot in a ditch while they 'charitably' feed a bunch of cute children who don't really need it.
In practice, I find myself far more often disagreeing with debt obligations beyond the most abstract.
Indeed. Debt obligations on people we help is just a sneaky way of enforcing privilege, a way of creating rules for the poor but not for the rich.
I don't want to live in a society where only people don't have subsided health insurance (aka, the rich) can smoke. (I don't particularly want _anyone_ to smoke, and think an argument can be made to just slowly banning it over a few decades and not allowing current non-smokers to start, but I don't want to bar all _but_ the rich.)
I don't want to live in a society where only people who get financial aid to college will be unable to go to college if convicted of a drug offense, whereas people who can afford college (aka, the rich) can go there just fine if they have that on their record.
I don't want to live in a society where we drug test people who are getting welfare, but not people who are getting a tax deduction.
If we want laws, _we want laws_. If we want to stop people from smoking, we stop them from smoking. If we want to punish people with drug convictions by keeping them from college, let's ban them from college. If we want to drug test people, we better damn well just start drug testing people.
Hell, it's already fucked up enough that we functionally have a system where all sorts of minor offenses like speeding and parking violations are just fines...meaning the rich can commit them with impunity and the poor can't. But at some point, we're going to try to assert that people on welfare are using 'our gas' and we can subject them to even _worse_ fines.
Government aid should have no obligations attached at all. Requirements, sure...we give people food stamps instead of cash, or whatever. But we don't run around threatening people with _new_ rules, rules others don't have to follow, when we give them help.
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That is technically true, but it’s easier to think of it the other way around, because that’s usually how it’s set up…the law legally applies to everyone, but somehow the ‘privileged’ people don’t actually suffer from it.
And it's worth pointing out that the most overreaching privileged laws, the one everyone _does_ see a problem, usually fail at this 'fairness'.
For the obvious example, the law that, if you were convicted of a drug offense, you couldn't get financial aid and to go to college.
Even people who don't normally examine any of their privilege at all said 'Hey, wait a second...why are we deliberately setting up laws where rich drug offenders can go to college but middle class drug offenders can't?'.
Or maybe the problem there was just that the privilege excluded white middle class people. Actually, nevermind this post, that seems much more likely.
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_Many_ were short-sighted, true.
The thing is, it was 25% then, and it's 95% now. Or whatever the percentages actually were.
And part of the problem is now that the sense of entitlement has filtered down even lower, to the upper-middle class.
A while back, on some board, in a discussion about a manager at KFC who fired a woman because she was homeless, I actually explained the actual _job_ of a manager (Aka, _make sure that their workers can do their job_.), and people responded with 'preach it brother' and talking about no managers appears to actually know this, which somewhat amazed me. Even goddamn managers thinks their job is to sit around doing nothing while money just magically appears out of fucking nowhere.
No one actually thinks they have to do an honest day's work anymore _except_ the working class...and they can't find any damn jobs, because instead of actually operating companies that _make and sell things_, the superrich have decided to fuck around with credit default swaps and screwing around with buying and selling stocks every nanosecond, while dismantling companies for tax write-offs or who the fuck even knows where money comes from anymore. (It's sure not from actually _making stuff_.)
Our current economy is imaginary bullshit built on top of other imaginary bullshit on top of the mortgage of some guy in New Jersey who works at the only plant in America that actually produces anything anymore. And with our luck, it's DVD players, and is about to fold when the owner refuses to start making Blue-rays.
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A privilege is what one person has and others don’t.
More specifically, a privilege is an _exception_ to a general rule, law, or restriction that one person (or set of people) have and another does not. (The fact I own a specific thing and no one else does is not 'privilege', assuming that laws about property ownership apply equally. I suspect that's not what you meant, but it could be read that way.)
Privilege is not really when laws are aimed at specific people. That is technically true, but it's easier to think of it the other way around, because that's usually how it's set up...the law legally applies to everyone, but somehow the 'privileged' people don't actually suffer from it. _Everyone_ technically has to show papers...but only Hispanic people will be _asked_.
Privilege is when society decides that rules are not for specific people. It is when rules somehow deflect around people like Sue Storm deflects light around her. There are good people, and we'll waive the rules for them, and there are...those other people. You know the ones. We need to make sure they stay in line.
On “The Very Weird Tales of Steven Seagal”
An interesting fact from that lawsuit is the accuser's allegation that Seagal kept two young _Russian_ girls on staff essentially as sex workers, and she was hired to replace one of them. (Instead of the personal assistant position she thought she was hired for.)
On “Some mansplaining on women’s access to the workplace”
You get 50+N % of the folk in town to agree that we’re all going to call “this thing” community property and put our collective taxes towards maintaining it… and then say that in spite of me paying taxes, I don’t get to use “this thing” without giving up smoking or drinking or skiing or swimming or riding a motorcycle or doing my own woodwork with a skil saw, I’m about ready to spit in your eye. You cover the cost, or you don’t provide the service.
Exactly. If something is bad enough we don't want it, _outlaw it_. We are a nation of laws, after all. If we want to drug test people, _drug test people_. Don't run around trying to outlaw drugs _for the poor_, which is functionally what people keep trying to do. (Anyone remember that 'We will remove financial aid if you test positive for drugs.' trick. Aka, poor drug users can't go to college but rich ones can?)
It's a very clever plan...create an economic system that is completely broken, and people need our help. So when they _ask_ for our help, we choose what specific rules to put on them, the poor, that the non-poor are not subject to.
I call bullshit on the entire concept. The _entire system_ is suspect, and appears to create incentive to _keep people dependent on the government_, so we can then control what they do.
And holy fuck, I just ended up agreeing with the libertarians. Of course, my solution is to _stop telling the poor what to do_ while continuing to help them, whereas the libertarian conclusion is somewhat different.
Oh, and the next thing to talk about is the fact that a _huge_ percentage of black men in this country are under the control of the prison system. Not actually in prison, mind you, but under the control of it via probation and parole. So now we have a way to subject black people, I mean criminals, I mean people who couldn't afford a lawyer, to rules that no one else has to follow.
At some point we just have to agree this entire damn system is nonsense. That we seem to enjoy creating situations where certain types of people need to come crawling to the government for help, and various bigotted asshats can then put rules on those 'certain types' of people, rules which no one else has to follow.
On “Fox News Woman takes Fox News Frat Boys to the Woodshed – and it is AWESOME!!!”
Is a “right” not an “unearned privilege”?
No. 'Privilege' literally means _private law_. It is a combination 'privus', which is where we get 'private', and 'leg', where we get 'legal'. Private-law.
A privilege is an 'right', or an 'immunity', you have _that other people do not_. It can be one specified under the law, or it can be one that society has given you. It is when you can do something that others cannot.
'Unearned' doesn't really come into this. None of the privilege anyone is talking about is 'earned'. We don't generally let people earn 'privileges' in modern society. That would be something like that in the movie Armageddon, where the astronauts demand to never pay taxes again. That would be a 'privilege' under the law, a specific legal exemption for them.
There is a long list we could compose of obvious moral truths that justified the destruction of settled but obviously inferior and wrong ways of life, but I’d rather cut to the chase.
Note: Stating you are going to cut to the chase is the opposite of cutting to the chase.
Or would it be better to achieve actually authentic freedom and equity a tad more gradually, say, just long enough for Kazzy and his wife to live out their dreams in American middle class comfort and merely relatively confident freedom and equity?
Ah, yes, if only women had started demanding equal rights a hundred years ago.
SLOWER, DAMMIT! SLOWER! WE'RE STILL MOVING FORWARD!
It’s the cruel certitude of the superior liberal – the bureaucrat of tomorrow, a familiar type from certain historical episodes we sometimes consider noteworthy – who never seems to think for a moment that he or she or some or many just like him or her may be put in the very same position by someone with an even truer truth about really real “freedom and equity”
...truer truth? Huh?
You mean someone could someday point out that _I_ am privileged and need to stop acting like an asshat?
Yeah, which is why I have a general policy of, you know, _not doing that_, and stopping when people point it out. Instead of attempting to out-asshat people.
You do realize there are, in fact, _men_ in this discussion, right? We're not a bunch of women going 'Fuck yeah, men need to suffer!'.
How about the privilege or right not to have some world-improver with apparently minimal experience of life or curiosity about it beyond his own presumptions impose on me or anyone else his latest guaranteed relatively well thought out version of justice.
Jesus H. Christ. He has the _right_ to keep women from having equal rights.
It's the same argument against SSM, the 'right' to oppose people. Except he forgot to put religious clothes on it!
It's just hanging out there naked, like there is some actual identifiable _right_ to oppress people and a _right_ to keep that from changing. He thinks we're agree with this.
that the full effects of irreversibly eradicating complex and living social structures, cultural-economic ecosystems developed and elaborated over thousands of years, are fully or well enough known and anyway negligible, as long as they seem to be borne by someone else;
Yeah! How dare men be asked to bear some costs when changing a thousand years of oppression of women!
..and by 'costs' we mean 'Still making more than women'. So, whatever the opposite of 'costs' is.
and, perhaps most of all, that the denial of empathy, the lack of effort even to understand, sooner or later won’t come around after having first gone around.
Even if you don’t care about the suffering of your fellow citizens and other human beings, since they have not earned or have lost the privilege of having their suffering counted as meaningful in your view, or if you happen to find the suffering quite tolerable, since it is not yours,
Damn it, that was a brand new irony detector. Shouldn't these things have fuses on them or something?
and since you think it merely derives from abstract notions that you don’t share
It's naked prejudice again! He literally has an abstract notion that he should _not lose his privilege_.
The rest of it he's cloaking in 'go slower' and 'unexpected consequences', but here it's just flopping around where everyone can see, without any pretend justification except that he does not want less privilege.
and anyway you deem quite unattractive on an idealized marriage market you imagine is the real subject, it would be in your interest, or the interest of your class, to take both, the people and their suffering, seriously anyway.
Side note: You write like I used to, making mile long sentences with dozens of commas. This is not actually a good way to write. And I at least used paragraphs.
On “Some mansplaining on women’s access to the workplace”
There’s got to be some kind of moral choice underpinning the whole thing.
The thing is, there actually _is_ a rather serious moral problem in the US right now, due to moral failings of certain types of people, who _used_ to behave in a specific way and have now changed their behavior, nearly destroying society. Those people used to believe everyone was in it together, and they weren't greedy bastards looking from handouts from the government when things didn't go their way. They didn't assert the government had to pay them money or else.
The people I'm describing, of course, are the _rich_.
The moral failings of society don't trace back to the 60s. They trace back to the 80s.
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In the US, an adult with a full-time job and no dependents cannot fall below the poverty line. A 40-hour, minimum-wage job will put you at 130% of the poverty line for a one-person household. As long as you have a full-time job and don’t have any children, you can’t be poor.
Of course an adult with a full-time job and no dependents 'cannot fall below the poverty line. 'If they're making 130% of the poverty line, they are not under the poverty line'. No shit, Sherlock. Nice logic skills there. And way to ignore the people who can't get a full-time job by defining them out of existence. (Along with people who have children, but others have pointed that out. I'm just pointing out _additional_ stupidities.)
However 'As long as you have a full-time job and don’t have any children, you can’t be poor.' is a complete and utter lie. Those people sure as fuck can 'be poor'. The poverty line defines how much an _average_ person needs in minimum expenses each year.
Start off someone with a lot of debt, or have a disaster like a house fire or a heath issue, and yes, a single person who has a full time job can be 'poor'. All they have to do is _have more expenses each year than 130% of the poverty line_, you twit.
Which is actually...trivially easy. The 30% of 130% of poverty level gives you $3351 'above' the _average_ bare minimum 'poverty level' to live. That's $3351, _before taxes_ at 15%. So only $2848 a year. Wait, we forgot to take half of FICA. $2630 a year.
That's $219 a month above the bare minimum considered _possible_ by the government to live on.
The disparity in _rent_ across the country can more than account for expenses being that much higher than average, to say nothing of food, and that completely ignores _actual emergencies_.
On “Why Conservatives Can’t Win the Non-Male Vote, “I’m Fishing Speechless” Edition”
If this were true, then nobody would have been in the streets, and nobody would be watching Fox News.
Uh, what are you talking about? Why would nobody be in the streets _because_ Fox News urged people to take the streets?
And why would Fox News covering people in the streets protesting Obama result in people _not_ watching Fox News?
That you don’t even have a timetable in your explanation suggests that this comment is more parroted than the result of personal research.
While I did not lay things out as a 'timetable', if you can't figure out _when_ I'm talking about you need reading comprehension skills, and perhaps the ability to use Wikipedia.
I first said 'the Republicans in 2008 were not yet astronomically stupid', which rather implies I'm talking about 2008.
Then I talk about the creation of the Tea Party, which I didn't mention a time, but happened right at the start of 2009. I am unsure as to why I should required to provide the specific time. We're currently talking about the creation of the Tea Party, so perhaps you should spend ten seconds on Wikipedia and read up on that.
Then I said, right after Fox made their street theatre, that it was _immediately_ hijacked by the Kochs. Admittedly, 'immediately' is rather vague, and I mean 'Over the next year or so', but, again, I don't understand why this wasn't fairly obvious from the text and the _slightest_ bit of knowledge about the Tea Party.
Hell, the real people in Tea Party _itself_ complain about the Tea Party Express. And it's fairly clear that FreedomWorks is also running the Tea Party Patriots, although feel free to dispute that if you want. But complaining that I didn't provide a 'timeline' for when well-documented events happened is utterly inane.
Of course, the 'original' Tea Party that Fox created still exists in some sense, mostly in those asshats over at Tea Party Nation.
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The teaparty is only the first attempt to harness the overseer class.
Not really. There have been plenty of attempts at that. The most obvious being unions. A question presents itself: How do the people in the Tea Party feel about unions?
It's sorta sad we already know the answer to that question without any research, and that it's not good.
The Tea Party actual problem is that the people _in_ the Tea Party are mostly the Republican base, a group that has been lied to for so long they have literally no idea of the actual truth in a dozen different contexts. I mean, the entire _premise_ of the Tea Party is that people were being 'tax more than they can stand' at the trail end of the _Bush_ years! (Although they only started protesting under Obama, for some completely mysterious reason.) The entire founding is just a blatant lie about various tax rates.
It's almost certain that any organization you create from those those people, and those lies, is going to be functionally insane, without any rational goals. I mean, the _stated_ goal is 'deficit reduction', but I've yet to hear _any_ Tea Party group praise Obama for the massive deficit reduction he's pulled off.
And if you do, by chance, happen to get a Tea Party group that isn't insane(1)...it almost certainly will realize that 'Tea Party' is a damn stupid association and rename itself.
1) Please note I am not calling the people in the group insane. They are not. I am saying the groups behaves in a completely random manner, without any discernible goals or any idea of what they are doing. (Also, I'm talking about the 'grassroots' Tea Parties, not the pretend Tea Parties operated by the Kochs.)
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The best place to start is the current 'scandals'.
Like I said, there is absolutely no evidence that the Republicans cut security to embassies because they wanted an terrorist attack before the election. No evidence at all.
There's also no evidence that the reason the Justice Department was tapping AP reporter's phones is that Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee leaked information to them, or that the reason the Republicans have stayed mostly silent on this one is that some of them are cooperating with Justice to bring others down. And Michelle Bachmann's resignation had _nothing_ to do with this.
And there's very little evidence that tiny real grassroot Tea Party groups were investigated at the request of anyone, and there's no evidence that, if they were, it was at the request of FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity in an attempt to destroy the competition.
I believe all of these rumors are entirely fabricated, and both me and people on the right should want to see those people fully cleared of all wrongdoing.
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The real funny thing is that the sex drive actually _is_ 'natural'. There are very little mammals that do not operate as if it is very important, and it's so important to regulate that female animals actually produce hormones to influence it in various ways, including, and this is interesting, _periods of time in which they are not fertile_.
Whereas the idea that males being in charge is 'natural' is sheer nonsense. There are plenty of animal species where females are in charge, and plenty of species were males are weaker.
And that's not even attempting to figure out in what male animals 'having jobs' and female animals 'staying home and watch the kids' is even _supposed to mean_. Animals do not have jobs.
Even if you want to call 'collecting food' a job, firstly, plenty of female animals do that, and secondly, plenty of animals do not 'go out and do that'. The food is right there, and everyone sorta wanders around and eats it. (Seriously, it's like these people have never heard of cows and horses or any sort of herbivores.)
Granted, making sure the children get fed is usually the mother's job...but that's not because the father is out eating, it's because many animals don't even bother with 'fathers' in the sense of raising children. The father is not out providing subsistence, the father is just over there doing his own thing because actually attempting to raise children is not that common for fathers in the animal kingdom.
We've actually reached the point where conservatives are creating false stereotypes about _animals_. That is actually happening.
(Hey, here's a fun idea. The next time conservatives start yammering about 'natural' behaviors of men vs. women, point out that in the animal kingdom, no one knows who their father actually is, and usually don't care. So why on earth do human children get their _father's_ last name?)
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If these GOP-ers are serious, there’s plenty to be afraid of: we have their track record.
There is actually a very important way politics now differs from politics, pre-cold war: The internet. And video phones. And the ability to present cold, hard facts.
So I'm not entirely sure the Democrats need to start 'lying' at all. You are right, the actual _record_ of Republicans exists.
Here's a fun idea for a 527: An organization that presents GOP lies. That all it does. When someone in the GOP lies, it runs ads in their district showing their lie and explaining why it is a lie. And by 'lie' I mean to include 'misleading statements', and by 'someone in the GOP', I mean _anyone_. Even in entirely GOP states.
It does not attempt to tell people how to vote, it does not attempt make this Democratic vs. Republican. It just said 'This person who represented you just lied to you and everyone else.'.
I'm not saying it should be non-partisan, I'm saying it shouldn't be overtly partisan. And t should be overtly un-opinionated. It should even avoid calling people out on what they _claim_ to want. (OTOH, calling them out on what they say others want it is fine.)
While the major purpose of this would be TV, they'd also have a little section dedicated to commenting on graphics passed around on Facebook. With some sort of magic Facebook search (I'm pretty certain that it's possible to give access to that information) or browser addon that, the _second_ such a graphic pops up in your feed, you can click somewhere that explains _exactly_ why that graph is incorrect. So you can cut the goddamn things off at their knees with an immediate post about how it is crap.
What said, I'd be fine with any actual pushback at all. How about promoting a damn conspiracy about how the _right_ is pretending to investigate Benghazi because _they_ left security unfunded for the consulate. And _absolutely no one_ is saying they did that on purpose, or were colluding with the attackers in attempt to sway the 2012 election by damaging Obama with a terrorist attack. No one is saying that _at all_. We just want to get to the bottom of what _really_ happened.
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They’re going to have to not talk about culture war stuff, though.
The Tea Party: Ruined ten seconds in.
More seriously: More people would have had respect for the Tea Party if it hadn't magically appeared one month after Obama was elected, complaining about stuff that Bush did but somehow were Democrats fault. Oh, and if it hadn't completely failed to notice that deficits have been reduced at the faster rate ever. And if it hadn't branched out into all sort of social stuff. And if it wasn't plagued with racism. And if a good 80% of 'Tea Party' groups the media covers weren't just fronts for Americans for Prosperity.
I'd have a lot more respect for the Tea Party, in fact, if they were entirely different people, with different views and different goals, and actually were just complaining about the bank bailouts. And protested the actual wrongdoers, the _banks_ that demand that they continue to be allowed to be 'too big to fail', not a government that probably did the best it could.
Although they should put some focus on how the government fails to do anything about the economy. And they should deliberate steered away from both social issues _and_ allowing a political party _or_ rich donors to hijack them.
Someone should start a group like that. Since it's more about jobs than taxes, and since 'job party' sounds like cross between a key party and a circle jerk, we could call it the Occupational Party or Occu-Party or something.
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No, the Tea Party was created by Fox News. Apparently because the Republicans weren't being proactive enough about yelling at 'Obama bank bailout', probably because, duh, it was bipartisan and the Republicans in 2008 were not yet astronomically stupid.
Fox wanted people screaming in the streets about the administration and taxes and the deficit (Which was now Obama's fault) and abortions for some and tiny American flags for others. Fox wanted street theater to report on, so they made some up.
The Tea Party was then _immediately_ hijacked by the Kochs.
Or it's possible this went the other way around, and various corporate interests (There's some interesting fact out there about links to the cigarette lobby and the Tea Party) planned to do this, and Fox leapt on top it of it. I.e., a fake grassroots movement accidentally got populated by grassloons.
But pretty much none of the players have the best interests of the Republican party as a goal.
Of course the Kochs, at least, need to _have Republicans elected_ to get their agenda done, which puts them a step above Fox News and their trained loons. Fox is actually happier when Republicans _aren't_ in office. (Which means it's pretty fucking stupid for the GOP to team up with them)
But while the Kochs have the _short-term_ interests of the Republican party at heart, in the long-term, they are pretty destructive to the GOP. (Although, at least, are _paying_ the GOP to self-destruct. The loons aren't offering _anything_.)
This is sorta why the Tea Parties ended up in a weird battle with themselves, fighting between stupid short-term goals (The loons, controlled by Fox) and stupid long-term goals (The so-called 'establishment', controlled by Koch.).
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I keep hoping for the Republicans to collapse and for us to all realign in the aftermath.
It keeps not happening.
The thing is, the Republican party is driven by the base, and the base is driven by idiotic media blowhards. The Republican party can't right itself until it realizes that _media personalities do not have the best interest of the Party at heart_. In fact, they do better the _worse_ the party does.
All too often, when idiotic behaviors present themselves, people forget to ask themselves 'Who has an advantage because of this behavior?'. The answer, here, is clearly 'right wing media' and it's pretty easy to trace their control of the GOP. The GOP willingly gave over control of their party in 1996 or so to the media, in an attempt to remove the president, and have been unable to take it back from them, while it is _deliberately_ being driven into a ditch by uninformed bigoted gibberish by a media that profits from that.
There's really no way for the GOP to fix this without telling Fox News to FOAD. Which it needed to do a decade ago, or at the least when the right-wing media created the fucking Tea Party, which was just blatantly 'treasonous' behavior towards the GOP and rather demonstrated whose interests they served. Seriously, at that point the GOP should have said 'If you want your own political party, feel free to have that one, we're taking our toys and going home'...yeah, they would have done worse in 2010, but might have actually had a chance in 2012 without the bone-stupid 'base' weighing them down.
What is going to happen next is, even with the redistricting the Republicans did, at some point they are going to managed to reduce themselves to a minority in all branches, and at that point they become a rump party made up entirely of loons. At some point, the right wing media will have functionally converted a portion of the population to Alex Jones listeners and made their own audience, which will then continue to exist as long as the right-wing media makes a profit from it.
I say all this as a progressive, but one that would actually like a honorable opposition party instead of whatever the hell the GOP is.
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The segment finally ends with Erickson noting – without even the slightest trace of irony – that conservatives need to be careful when they tell people this so they don’t come off as sounding anti-women.
I love the idea of saying idiotically horrible things live on television, then going 'But we're going to have to be careful when we explain this to women'. Because women don't watch Fox News, apparently. (I wonder how many advertisers know that.)
It's always hilarious when a politician explains what they _really_ think in a private meeting, and someone is recording it and makes it public. But this...they do understand the _concept_ of television, right?
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Problem is, I don’t see a lot of prominent conservatives talking about this kind of stuff in an intelligent manner.
...as opposed to all the other stuff that prominent conservatives talk about in an intelligent matter? ;)
On “This Is Why the GOP Can’t Have Nice Things”
I've pretty much stopped talking to George at this point, who readers may notice only took issue with my pointing out that a Roland Emmerich movie was, in fact, a movie, and The Day After Tomorrow is no more a real prediction than Godzilla was. He apparently had no rebuttal to both my explanation of drought plus increased rainfall _or_ my pointing out that no one is predicting sealevel change to go backwards, accepting both those to instead dispute the idea that crappy science fiction is a real prediction.
So I will address the prediction of shutting down thermohaline circulation. While there _is_ a theory that that could shut down, nothing that happens in that movie is even vaguely predicted by it. (As was pointed out by the very article that was linked to by George!)
While the shutdown itself could be near instant (Or not, we don't know), it wouldn't cause instant temperature changes, nor would those temperature changes be anywhere near as fast as shown, or as large, or even happen in the same place!
Shutting that down simply means that the temperature of a few places become more in line with their latitude...Scotland eventually turns into Sweden, for example. And Iceland into Greenland. And France into Canada. And, at the other end, Georgia into Tunesia, or, if you prefer, Texas.
All that, of course, is an exaggeration (It's not _just_ latitude and thermohaline circulation that effect the temperature), but the point is that the thermohaline circulation moves warmth up the New England coast, takes it across the ocean, and slams it smack into Europe, making _both_ those places more livable than their latitude would otherwise imply. (And stirring up the ocean while it does it, which makes it more liveable too.)
If you've been paying attention, you will also notice that the thermohaline circulation does not actually effect the temperate of New York very much, (New York is at the same approximate latitude as Spain and Italy and Japan, the temperature is fine there anyway.) which means trying to assert that The Day After Tomorrow has anything to do with that exceptionally stupid.
In fact, The Day After Tomorrow is not quite as stupid as that, and the freezing of New York is due to some 'super storm', not the collapse of the thermohaline circulation. George Turner: Making less sense than Roland Emmerich.
On “Is This Wrong?”
The general purpose of having kids move quietly down a hallway is to avoid disrupting other classes and/or offices.
See, I agree entirely with that, but the simple fact is, that at schools, almost _all_ rules are justified with 'It would disturb other students'. This is because the courts have said that students actually have some rights, but schools can restrict them if such rights would 'disturb' education.
So you end up with nonsense like dress codes in high school being justified to keep from 'disturbing' classes. (Which had some interesting slut-shaming going on, considering that the most enforced dress code was skirt length.)
So while 'Care for self, care for others, care for the environment.' actually does make sense, the problem is that often the fascista who get placed in charge of schools just nonsensically justify things using essentially that.
I wish I could find my old high school handbook, to quote some of these rules. And note these were _pre-Columbine_ rules...the year after I left high school, Columbine happened, the fascista really ramped things up, and my brothers had to go to school with transparent bookbags. (Because no one can hide a weapon on themselves, or just pull one out in the parking lot.)
You know what annoys me? When I was a teenager, I was assured that all this would make sense when I was older, that teenagers think they know everything but don't. I am now 34, and looking back, I have learned...I was entirely right about everything, and a lot of adults really are just fascist assholes towards teenagers. That's not to say a lot of teenagers aren't stupid, but their stupidity doesn't justify the idiotic system that teenagers have to live in. (In fact, I have to suggest that a lot of teenager's stupidity is _due to_ rebelling against such a system.)
On “This Is Why the GOP Can’t Have Nice Things”
Sometimes they use it to predict global cooling, citing changes in the oceans’ thermo-haline circulation patterns, most famously in the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” where temperatures seemed to be hundreds of degrees below absolute zero.
I want to print this out and frame it as 'Most nonsensical climate change denialism'. You just cited a Roland Emmerich movie as if it was an actual prediction of the future.
That actually happened. In the actual world. You just did that.
We also don’t know that higher temperatures will produce more drought. Many models show that there would be increased rainfall along with fewer extremes (those don’t get much coverage because they’re useless for scaring people). In general we know it should get wetter as it gets warmer.
'Increased rainfall' and 'drought' are not mutually exclusive thing. In fact, you can't _have_ drought under climate change without having increased rainfall. This is because the increased rainfall is due to increased evaporation. Which, duh, results in less water on the ground.
Granted, some of that water is making it back down. And, indeed, near oceans, there will probably be less drought, as more ocean water ends up on land. (Assuming that's the way the wind moves, of course.)
In areas _it already doesn't rain_, aka, deserts, having higher evaporation makes the desert larger and drier, while not actually putting enough water in the air for it to rain. (Changing the humidity from 2% to 4% is not going to make it rain.)
Heat removes water from the ground, and puts it in the air. That is what causes rain, so we will have more rain.
Heat removes water from the ground, and puts it in the air. The lack of water on the ground is the _definition_ of drought, so we will have more of that also.
The fact we're cycling water _faster_ doesn't change the fact that less of it will stick around to make it into plants and animals, and more of it will be floating uselessly in the air. (Unless the plan is to operate giant dehumidifiers to water our food.)
Warmer temperatures have also been modeled to produce sea-level decreases (considered unlikely by the IPCC, but not out of the ballpark) due to an increase in snow piling up on Antarctica, and thus a net gain in polar ice mass.
Except no, that's not what anyone has modeled.
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