I said this in another thread and I will keep repeating it because I think it’s important: if you know anyone who is a veteran or has a loved one who is a veteran, make sure they know that veteran’s benefits will be severely cut if Project 2025 is implemented.
As someone currently serving, it fucking boggles my mind that anyone who has ever served could be in favor of the Republican party. Even without Project 2025 threatening veteran benefits.
So many of us have been to actual locations where the Church has a stranglehold on the government/is the government. My husband has stories from Afghanistan. I went to Qatar, which, is a “progressive” middle eastern country. I could wear tshirts and knee length shorts, but I was also not allowed to ride in an elevator with the opposite sex, and I was heavily questioned when I tried to buy cigarettes until a male coworker intervened and assured that I could. Not to mention the FUCKING INSANE wealth disparity. Palaces gilded in gold for the government/rich/churches and literal shacks made out of whatever material could be cobbled together in the rural areas outside of Doha.
Why the fuck would anyone who has seen that first hand want to support anything that could even remotely resemble a world like that?
Then they’ll get out and pay attention to how much the GOP hates funding the VA and veteran programs in general.
Republicans as a party are generally “Support the troops but fuck the veterans!” just like always. It blows my mind that there are veterans that are also working class that are MAGA because they are getting fucked over twice as much from the very party that they support.
Ultimate power sounds kinda nefarious. Seems to me like she’s doing a hell of a job, currently. I don’t have any particular love or hate of her, but her job has got to be like herding cats, and she clearly does it will.
Deservedly so. She didn’t get where she is by NOT currying favor with and doing the bidding of the ultra-rich and their corporations.
her job has got to be like herding cats, and she clearly does it will.
Nah, her job is to receive and carry out the wishes of the owner donors. That’s why she originally supported Biden staying in: the wealthy patrons were still on his side. It was only when THEY started pulling their support that she used her power to oust him.
No. Only the most corrupt politics, of which Pelosi is a chief proponent.
Corruption is unacceptable, especially on the scale of the likes of Pelosi and most if not all Republicans.
Politics are NOT as corrupt in every system and even if it was, that would be something to fight to change, not “make peace with” like a good little slave.
What are you going to do about it? Money and power dominate every system. Monarchy. Feudalism. Communism. Democracy. Even anarchy is rolled by the person with the biggest guns.
There is no organization of people, from a marriage to a nation, that can’t be unbalanced. Someone always has influence (wealth, power, knowledge) that can be used corruptly or violently to take from another.
Dammit, that’s actually a good point lol. She’s mostly a vessel through which even richer, even more powerful, and even more corrupt people exert their will on the public.
She’s damn effective and brutal about it, though, making her chief amongst corrupt middle managers.
They do. As do Republican, third party, and politically neutral elites.
In a system specifically designed to reward greed, ruthlessness, and authoritarian tendencies, you don’t get to be one of the elites without being an awful person.
Only if your greed and lust for power are stronger than your higher principles.
You can fight the system, even from the inside, without selling out, but they won’t let you pull the levers behind the scenes unless you’re much more rich and/or powerful than it’s possible to become without selling out.
For an easy and obvious example, see Bernie Sanders. He’s stood behind his principles from the day he was born and never sold out to anyone. He’s a beloved figure across the whole country and a huge percentage of Americans supported his run for president.
He has next to zero power, outside of using his established position to shame other politicians. If you’re immune to shame, he can do nothing.
Israel is not at all the same as the Jewish Religion no matter what the ethno-Fascists Zionists and the child-mass-murder-loving politicians in the Anglo-Saxon World and Germany say.
More Jews live outside of Israel than live Inside. And while Jews do have the right to claim Israeli citizenship if they can prove their heritage, it’s become very uncommon as even the children of Holocaust survivors are dying out. Their kids don’t feel unsafe in other countries like the previous generations were given reason to.
Shit man, there are even Jews who are against the very existence of Israel for religious reasons.
I mean, only a fucking ignorant racist idiot would believe the bollocks about Israel and the Jewish Religion being the same thing and I apply that to both the the morons passing laws that make demonstrating against the Israeli Genocide be treated as anti-semitism and to the morons attacking Jews because of the actions of Israel.
Mind you, in many places Neoliberalism so normalized “benevolent” racism (the kind that says “people from this ethnic group are good” or that “this nation represents this ethnicity”) that it made it easy for many to flip from that into “malevolent” racism (i.e. “people of this ethnicity are bad”) when the “representatives” of the ethnicity do evil shit.
This is not to justify the racism morons: I’m just pointing out that when you constantly plow and fertilize the moral ideas field with Prejudice (“people should be judged by their ethnicity”), don’t be surprised when it’s just as fertile to grow “people of this ethnicity are good and deserve special treatment” ideas as “people of this ethnicity are evil and deserve ‘special’ treatment” ones.
(Sorry for the blow up: I really detest the slimy manipulative racism of Neoliberalist Modern Politics that adjusted the tribalism, prejudice and racism of the old days into a “fashionable” format to keep using it to manipulate the masses, rather than genuinelly be “liberal” - i.e. all people are the same and should be judged by their own beliefs and actions - in the moral sense)
I don’t disagree with you at all that Israel has definitely fanned the flames of antisemitism, but having been on the receiving end from people who even like Israel (many evangelicals Christians want people like me forcibly exiled to Israel so Jesus can come back), it’s not just Israel.
People hate Jews for all sorts of reasons. A lot of evangelicals hate me because my ancestors apparently killed Jesus, even though it was the Romans, and that’s my fault. People like Elon Musk and his ilk hate me because I apparently control the banks and Hollywood. People like Nick Fuentes hate me because Hitler hated people like me and he loves Hitler. I’m sure some people hate me just because I’m slightly different from them.
And I don’t mean to restrict this to just Jews. What I saw happen to my Muslim brothers and sisters after 9/11 was disgusting, and even these days you have people essentially claiming all Muslims are terrorists. And both Jews and Muslims in America are essentially considered foreigners in our own country. I’m from Indiana, but that doesn’t matter even though I guarantee you that I have more in common with a Palestinian American born in Montana than either of us have with a Jew in Israel or a Muslim in Palestine.
It’s not surprising and kinda dovetails with the point I was making: prejudice kept being cultivated throught the XX and XXI century in a different form, making the field just as fertile for traditional racism as it was making it for the (supposedly) “benevolent” racism fashionable in this era.
Whenever somebody says “ethnicity are victims” and “we should do this special thing for them we do not do for other people”, what’s being passed right besides the supposedly benevolent message is another, far less nice, message: “people of ethnicity are different from other people and should be treated differently from people of other ethnicities”.
It didn’t help that (not just in terms of ethnicity) many with the “right” “ism” went far beyond the (rightful and totally just) fight for Equality Of Treatment and took advantage of the “benevolent” prejudice for Personal Gain whilst hiding behind the group, which indirectly caused discomfort in others who saw it as unfair.
So both the supposedly anti-Racists and the Racists kept the Architecture Of Prejudice going not just in speech but even in action, and it seems to me that Jews are suffering the most from it now because the traditional anti-semites kept being assholes, and now, because of the actions of Israel, many of the people who previously believed the “positive” kind of message about Jews I listed above (which can only be believed by believing the Principles of Prejudice underlying it) flipped from a “positive” predesposition towards the ethnicity to a “negative” predesposition, whilst continuing to believe the foundation of Prejudice - i.e. they turned from being what we were told by poiticians was anti-Racism into traditional Racists.
Not only is there, as you say, so much hate in this World, but the sleazy slimy disgusting manipulation in this domain of the masses for personal gain by politicians and just greedy people hiding behind “the group” that pushed “positive” discrimination, made it immenselly easy to turn favourable opinions of group held by simpletions into unfavourable opinions of group, turning them into people unfairly hating an entire group of people for the hateful actions of a few people in that group, i.e. into traditional racists.
The real opposite of Racism is the thinking that people should only be judged on their actual actions and character and that thinking that a person’s ethnicity (gender, sexual orientation or so on) makes them be in a special group and dictates their character is as moronic as thinking that the color of their eyes or the size of their feet makes them be in a special group and dictates their character.
(This is actually the kind of thinking I’ve had since long before all that’s happenning now and going back to learning from the Dutch their posture when it comes to things like homosexuallity which is pretty much “it’s all normal so I’m not going to judge people for it” - as much as possible I try to apply that to any form of prejudice on things people were born with)
I’m just saying this is not mass migration we’re talking about in terms of the population as a whole. I think we will continue to see population parity between the entire Jewish population in Israel and New York City for quite some time. In fact, New York City’s Jewish population is slightly higher. 7.5 million vs. 7.2 million for all of Israel.
I only meant to draw your attention to the fact that antisemitism is driving a growing portion of Jewish migration (largely to Israel). France, for example, has seen 7% of the Jews leave in the past decade alone (over 15% since 1990 - from 530k-446k).
This is not a trend seen in other groups in France - just Jews.
The safety net has people-sized holes in it. I nearly became homeless in June, and it wasn’t the state that came through for me, it was a relative. Even though I’m stll sleeping on a porch, I count myself lucky.
The programs that are supposed to help people stay housed are failing: not enough funds for housing vouchers, restrictions too high for enrollment, and waiting lists too long for practicality.
And Gavin is a wannabe autocrat. If it weren’t for him and his vetomania, we would have legalized natural psychedelics in CA by now. But no, instead we have people out there getting sick from sketchy products. And it seems like it’s the same with everything: do the exact opposite of helping while making it look like you care.
A large number of the homeless people in L.A. have jobs. It’s just ridiculously expensive to live there, so they end up living in their cars or a tent.
That’s what I’ve heard as well. Passing them on the street you’d probably think they weren’t even homeless at all. Not everyone finds it possible to get their life together that much, though :/
a 2021 study from the University of Chicago estimates that 53% of people living in homeless shelters and 40% of unsheltered people were employed, either full or part-time, in the year that people were observed homeless between 2011 – 2018.
This is definitely true. It’s something I’ve heard Trump supporters argue about firsthand. But it’s not just only racism or the threat of being a minority, but the fear of losing freedom to do what they want according to their own skewed morals. So while a decent chunk of why they think the way they do is sheer racism and fear around that (especially since the start of the BLM movement), it’s not the core of the problem.
I believe that this started as the resurgence of toxic masculinity in that Trump showing people it was okay to be misogynistic, racist, and homophobic in opposition to race, gender, and identity politics rising in the 2010s. Women’s rights and LGBT people are in their sights as well and, despite their narrative fitting well with fundamentalist religious morals, this seems more like resentment that those movements didn’t address their needs or issues. COVID restrictions that they disagreed with fanned the growing fire into the fulblown fascist conservative movement we see today.
So I don’t think it’s the fact that cis het white people are in lower relative numbers but it’s the event of rising social progressivism and more rights for minorities and women that spurred the antagonism of them.
Tldr: Bigots are upset that they didn’t get anything out of women’s, LGBT, and minorities rights.
I’ll agree with you except for the timeline. It started after 9/11, bigotry was far less openly acceptable during the 90s. It just blew up after Obama was elected and social media took off. People were all exposed to the same type of media at the time, and big media companies weren’t spreading extremely racist content, other than a few fringe things like Rush Limbaugh. Fox news really took off after 9/11 too.
I’ll agree with you except for the timeline. It started after 9/11, bigotry was far less openly acceptable during the 90s.
I want to disagree with this because bigotry was huge in the 90’s, but so was attacking it. Our cartoon’s were chock-full of anti-bigotry messaging, but then movies would be the opposite.
I think I, personally, would typify the 90’s with saying that one out-group is ok, but only if we all make fun of another one or you’re the butt of jokes. IE. You can have Will and Grace, but we’re using ‘gay’ as a word to literally just mean ‘bad.’
I think after 9/11 they were still the same old tactic they used in and after the cold war; security theater and fear mongering. But you’re right, news and political representatives definitely weren’t the completely open bigots that they are today though and I think you might be right about that time period being the start of today’s Fox news.
Social media definitely had a profound impact on politics, people’s rights, and open bigotry. This definitely gave them the means to have more of a voice with younger demographics but I’ll still argue that it wasn’t until Trump entered the picture that they were able to really push their narrative and decouple “truth” from official news sources in the minds of many. I don’t think I’ve seen so many people just repeat distorted views of reality at once until then.
(2) How is checks notes healthcare for inmates something we have to debate about? If you are incarcerated your well-being is the responsibility of the state. The government has to take care of you because you don’t get a choice in being there.
John Brown didn’t get to kill enough slavers, that’s why we’re all here. We gave the racists a little rope, and now they’re trying to hang us with it. Been that way ever since Reconstruction ended.
Opposition to racism must be enduring. It must be absolute. It can brook no compromise, because compromise is tacit agreement to the validity (however small or marginal) of the opposition’s point, and racism is based on an absurdity. And when a society starts validating absurdities… well, look at Trump.
and the fact the confederacy was allowed to “live in on” in memory as heritage, and allowed statues honouring traitors to the United States
If you allow confederate statues to honour enemies of the country, why are there no statues honouring the british red coats from the war of independence? Where are the statues honouring soviet spies executed for espionage?
Constructed largely after the cowards were all dead, in the civil rights era. And yet some people still insist that it’s ‘history’ to leave them standing instead of a blatant attempt to cement the United States as a ‘White Man’s’ polity.
Fuck them.
If you allow confederate statues to honour enemies of the country, why are there no statues honouring the british red coats from the war of independence? Where are the statues honouring soviet spies executed for espionage?
Let’s make some 9/11 memorials to commemorate those brave hijackers too.
It’s fucking absurd, and while I know HOW it got started, I don’t know how it got started. You know what I mean? Like, I understand the conditions that led to the rise of Lost Causer nonsense, but I just can’t wrap my fucking head around the idea that everyone just fucking normalized it. Like, even if you are a racist (as most 19th century Americans were to at least some degree), what the fuck kind of lunatic country commemorates the ‘heroism’ of literal traitors and secessionists who killed hundreds of thousands of our countrymen?
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