Random Politics Thread

[The Cat]

I like to watch old, old episodes of the twilight zone, like the first season of it, and recently I read a book called This I Believe, which was essays, possibly from a radio show but I'm not sure and I think that people were a little more cerebral in the not too distant past, including in their politics.

I wonder if this kind of thing is just inevitable.

I think you'd enjoy this podcast:

 

[Jaguar]

A country that values its guns more than its children? What a statement. God help us all if it has even a modicum of accuracy.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

I'm now going to call anyone who plans on voting for Donald Trump in November libfa, for libertarian fascist.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

A country that values its guns more than its children? What a statement. God help us all if it has even a modicum of accuracy.

we do, sorry bro

 

[Jaguar]

we do, sorry bro

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

libfa need the guns and police to protect them from the scary people. if we have to sacrifice the first and fifth born to to yog sothoth to keep them, so be it.

 

[Maou]

Minneapolis allows violent riots calling them "Peaceful protests" the whole time, and refuses to crack down on them as they cause millions in damage, and then defunds the police... and has the audacity to ask the federal government for help lmao. Reap what you sow. Same with you New York. The Federal government shouldn't have to bail out your incompetence and bad policy. Get fucked.

 

[Jaguar]

.

 

[Jonny]

Imagine giving up your safe Senate seat to serve as the AG, only to have the President shit on you until you resign from office, and then torpedo your reelection campaign for your old Senate seat.

lol

 

[Coriolis]

Minneapolis allows violent riots calling them "Peaceful protests" the whole time, and refuses to crack down on them as they cause millions in damage, and then defunds the police... and has the audacity to ask the federal government for help lmao. Reap what you sow. Same with you New York. The Federal government shouldn't have to bail out your incompetence and bad policy. Get fucked.

There is so much oversimplification in this, I don't even know where to begin to sort it out, and honestly, I don't have the time right now to go look up all the facts and references to illustrate the reality of the situation. And that's how mis/disinformation propagates, because it takes much more time and effort to refute it than to spew it out into the common discourse to begin with. In my experience, the people making such statements generally either are wedded enough to that perspective to be unwilling to revise it, or are doing it just to bait/troll. I doubt you are in the second camp, and won't assume you are in the first. We picked apart some similar claims step by step on Discord in your first months here. I know you can do better.

Imagine giving up your safe Senate seat to serve as the AG, only to have the President shit on you until you resign from office, and then torpedo your reelection campaign for your old Senate seat.

Any Republican who expected otherwise was living with his/her head in the sand. Loyalty with Trump is a one-way street.

 

[Lark]

I wonder, with all the moves which look increasingly like England just wants to cut itself off from the rest of the world altogether if they'll begin to resemble something like the Amish only stuck in the seventies or eighties instead of days of the horse and trap.

 

[ceecee]

Kansas GOP Rep. Steve Watkins charged with voter fraud - Roll Call

The GOP has found the election/voter fraud. In the GOP.

New charges filed in 2018 North Carolina election fraud case | Raleigh News & Observer

 

[Maou]

AOC’s dishonest, callous answer to NYC’s surging street violence

 

[anticlimatic]

Resignation Letter — Bari Weiss

Dear A.G.,

It is with sadness that I write to tell you that I am resigning from The New York Times.

...

But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

...

Part of me wishes I could say that my experience was unique. But the truth is that intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times. Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm.

...

What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.

Pretty savage.

 

[ceecee]

This guy is running for president in Chile.

On the politics in the front and party in the back platform, obviously.

 

[Jaguar]

This guy is running for president in Chile.

On the politics in the front and party in the back platform, obviously.

I can't figure out which is worse - the hair or the suit.

 

[ceecee]

I can't figure out which is worse - the hair or the suit.

Or the dental veneers. Those are really white teeth.

 

[Jaguar]

Maryland's GOP governor publishes a scathing indictment of Trump's coronavirus response

In short - Gov. Hogan thinks Trump is an incompetent piece of shit.

 

[Stigmata]

This guy is running for president in Chile.

On the politics in the front and party in the back platform, obviously.

My initial impression is that he's about to try and sell me a used Chrysler which reeks of moth balls and may or may not have spent the last several years impounded as key evidence in an ongoing investigation.

 

[ceecee]

How Trump Is Helping Tycoons Exploit the Pandemic | The New Yorker

The prospect of food shortages understandably caused concern in the White House. Yet reports show that in April, as Tyson and other producers were warning that “millions of pounds of meat will disappear” from American stores if they had to shut down, exports of pork to China broke records—and Mountaire’s chicken exports were 3.4 per cent higher than they were a year earlier. The next month, the company’s exports were 10.9 per cent lower than in 2019, but its exports to China and Hong Kong grew by 23.1 per cent in April and by fourteen per cent in May, according to statistics provided by Christopher Rogers, an analyst with Panjiva, which tracks the food-supply chain. Tony Corbo, a lobbyist for Food and Water Watch, a progressive nonprofit advocacy group, said, “They were crying about shortages, and yet we’re still exporting meat. The shortage was phony: