[News] Post a Political News Story

Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day. This thread is for 'smaller' stories that don't call for their own thread. If a story blows up, please start a new thread for it.

karmajay wrote:
MrDeVil909 wrote:
karmajay wrote:

I knew that first ep of Black Mirror was going to come true!

Don't see how this relates to the pig?

I was talking about the one where everyone rates every interaction on an app. Possibly it is the 1st ep of a different season?

That would be Nosedive from the third season.

Netflix did something weird where now when you try to watch Black Mirror for the first time, episode 1 of season 3 is the first to play.

Tkyl wrote:

Netflix did something weird where now when you try to watch Black Mirror for the first time, episode 1 of season 3 is the first to play.

The split the season as a separate thing instead of having all the episodes and seasons under the same title. This confused me for a bit when the season was over and it didn't give me a option to go to the next season.

We only started watching it recently, and it's "always" been like that. Makes it awkward to binge. Watched all of Season 1, then ended up with S04E01, then manually chose S02E01.

We've finished 'White Bear', I think. We needed a bit of a break after that one.

Wink_and_the_Gun wrote:

We only started watching it recently, and it's "always" been like that. Makes it awkward to binge. Watched all of Season 1, then ended up with S04E01, then manually chose S02E01.

We've finished 'White Bear', I think. We needed a bit of a break after that one.

In the case of Black Mirror, I think it might accidentally be better to not auto-play everything...

I think the Black Mirror weirdness is due to the fact that Season 3 is when it became a Netflix exclusive.

Yeah I had to manually select season one last month when I started it. Then friends told me I shouldn't have watched them in order, which makes sense because damn, that first episode.

Nine Days After Women’s March Co-President Shared the Love With Louis Farrakhan, the Group Got Around to Gently Rebuking His Anti-Semitism and Homophobia

A+ work there.

It’s no secret that Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan is virulently homophobic and anti-Semitic, but it seemed to be news to leaders of the Women’s March.

Last Sunday, February 25, Tamika Mallory — the March’s co-president — attended the Nation of Islam’s annual Saviours' Day event, where Farrakhan proclaimed that “the powerful Jews are my enemy,” and that “the Jews were responsible for all of this filth and degenerate behavior that Hollywood is putting out turning men into women and women into men.”

In that same speech, Farrakhan commended the Women’s March and personally acknowledged Mallory (who’d previously shared a photo of herself with Farrakahn on Instagram with the caption “Thank god this man is alive and doing well. He is definitely GOAT”).

While the speech, and Mallory’s presence there, were immediately criticized, the group remained formally silent for over a week, reviving questions about who is, and is not, welcome with the intersectional movement.

Dragonman, the Man Who Sells “People-Hunting Guns”

They come to Dragonland in droves, often after a mass shooting. The phone begins ringing, and Melissa, the daughter, answers politely. Hello, Dragonman's… Rings again. This is Dragonman's… Ring, ring, like an emergency. Can we help you? She has preternaturally blue eyes, sitting before walls festooned with AK-47s and AR-15s—icons of American top-selling weaponry. Meanwhile, her father, Dragonman, is banging around out back in the metal shop, fusing metal joints, milling and lathing. Bolt, screw, rivet. He wears jeans, a baseball cap, and a tight tee, a bunch of faded tattoos punched on his Popeye forearms, over a hundred in all on his body. His hands are beefy: They're what built Dragonland in the first place.

Though Dragonman has been in Colorado for almost 40 years, he still talks in a busted-up Brooklyn street brogue. When the subject is guns, it's almost a rat-a-tat-tat. "We got da Kel-Tec KSG over here"—which looks similar to a weapon from Grand Theft Auto—"and dis Kalashnikov over here. Last week, I sold an AR-15 for $17,000…" And so on. As a Class-3 gun dealer, Dragonman buys and sells so many weapons each year he's become one of the largest independent purveyors of firearms in western America. On his Facebook page, where he has more than 60,000 followers, he claims that he specializes in "military style rifles…handguns, shotguns, silencers, and full-auto machine guns," or as he tells me, "people-hunting guns." He includes announcements for the annual Halloween pumpkin shoot and the 9/11 memorial machine-gun shoot and a bunch of goofy staged videos, featuring Dragonman ramming cars—belonging to gangbangers, stoners—with his front-loader. His property is a dead-car graveyard.

Dragonman is all about the show—hence, the name (his real one is Mel Bernstein). Owner of 200 machine guns, he calls himself "the most armed man in America," a free-market Hong Kong of weaponry, a sideways P.T. Barnum, a steroidal symbol of this trigger-happy American moment. And each time a customer comes through the door, he—or Melissa, or whoever is stationed at the front desk—stands between us and another potential mass shooter. That is, Dragonman and his employees act as a kind of judge and jury, weighing whether you're in your right mind and whether he, Dragonman, is going to sell you one of the guns off his wall, or bump stocks or flamethrowers.

Unlike Dick's Sporting Goods and Walmart—both American corporations that no longer sell AR-15s and semiautomatic weapons, nor to customers under 21 years of age, in the aftermath of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting—the independent gun dealer decides as he or she sees fit, according to his or her own conscience. There's a lot of gray here. Dragonman's oft-stated argument boils down to this: He doesn't control what people do with the weapons once they leave Dragonland any more than the soda company controls how much soda you drink, or the cigarette company controls the cigarettes you smoke.

"Well, if you get cancer, it's not their fault," he says. And laws are laws, no matter how lax. "As long as you pass the background check and pay for the gun and take two steps out of that door, I'm not responsible."
But can he sleep at night, wondering who lurks out there with one of his weapons, wondering if their name might join others like Eric Harris, Dylann Roof, and Nikolas Cruz in the mass-killer Hall of Fame? In announcing his company's new measures last week, Edward Stack, chief executive of Dick's, told The New York Times, "When we saw what happened in Parkland, we were so disturbed and upset. We love these kids and their rallying cry, 'Enough is enough.' It got to us…. We don't want to be a part of a mass shooting."

"Yeah, I sleep good," says Dragonman.

Ring goes the phone again. Everything is lit up and alive in Dragonland the day after a mass shooting. Business hums. The TEC DC-9, an AK-47 or Uzi... Yes, we sell it, barks Dragonman. Everything here is for sale!

The Collapse of Racial Liberalism

By racial liberalism, I mean the basic consensus that existed across the mainstream of both political parties since the 1970s, to the effect that, first, bigotry of any overt sort would not be tolerated, but second, that what was intolerable was only overt bigotry—in other words, white people’s definition of racism. Institutional or “structural” racism—that is, race-based exclusions that result from deep social habits such as where people live, who they know socially, what private organizations they belong to, and so on—were not to be addressed.2 The core ethic of the racial liberal consensus was colorblind individualism.

The racial liberal consensus emerged from the post-1960s struggle over racial integration, in particular through the debates over school busing and affirmative action. One of the Civil Rights movement’s most undisputed successes was in establishing the norm that overt expressions of racial animus were no longer politically or even socially acceptable in the United States. Despite grumbles about political correctness, new forms of racial etiquette and sensitivity training proliferated across the American educational and corporate landscape. At the same time, however, resistance to school busing and the eventual roll-back of affirmative action programs resulted in clear limits on redressing system-level structural exclusions based on what was typically referred to as “the legacy” of racism and slavery.

Emblematic of this post-Civil Rights Movement racial liberal consensus was the late Reverend Billy Graham, as David Hollinger recently explained in the New York Times. To his credit, Graham made a show of integrating his religious revivals and rallies at a time when such a move was considered “provocative” in much of the South. On the other hand, he offered only weak challenges to ongoing prejudices and injustices, choosing “to represent anti-black racism as a sin of the individual human heart rather than a civic evil to be corrected by collective political authority.” In this estimation, intentions rather than outcomes were the proper basis for measuring racial progress.

While there were always dissenters from the racial liberal consensus in the post-Civil Rights era, mainstream politicians from both sides of the political divide respected its norms, if only in the breach.3 While racial animus persisted beneath the surface of U.S. civil society, the consensus was not only that overt expressions of bigotry against people of color and celebrations of white supremacy were no longer acceptable, but also that attempts to name and dismantle the institutional bases of white privilege were a political bridge too far. Mainstream politicians were expected to police defectors from their respective “extreme” flanks.

A notorious moment of such policing took place during Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign for the presidency: his “Sister Souljah moment,” when the Democratic candidate publicly condemned the remarks of Sister Souljah, an African-American activist and rapper with the group Public Enemy, who had declared in the wake of the Rodney King riots that spring that, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Clinton, appearing before Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, declared, “If you took the words, ‘white’ and ‘black’ and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.” Characteristic of the clever triangulator, Clinton was clearly marking out the limits of acceptable centrist racial discourse, equating over-the-top rhetoric by a black entertainer with a former Republican State Representative from Louisiana infamous for refusing to accept the civic and political equality of African-Americans.

On the other side of the aisle, the policing of the racial liberal consensus took aim at expressions of white supremacy coming from the Right. Not only were overt racists like Duke personae non gratae within the Republican Party establishment, but even coded expressions of doubt about the results of the Civil Rights era were beyond the pale.

Consider what happened in 2002 when Mississippi Senator and Majority Leader Trent Lott declared at fellow GOP Senator Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party that, concerning Thurmond’s 1948 run for the presidency: “We voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either.”

Of course, Thurmond hadn’t run as a Republican, but rather as the head of the “Dixiecrat” ticket whose central plank was an overt rejection of African-American civil rights and the defense of de jure segregation in the South. While the GOP tried to ignore the story, bloggers kept it alive, and within a week Lott found himself compelled to appear on Black Entertainment Television (BET) to repudiate Thurmond’s former views. But in 2002, the strength of the racial liberal consensus meant that even overt self-abasement was not enough to make nostalgia for white supremacy forgivable: A week later Lott was forced to step down from his leadership position (though he remained in the Senate for five more years).

Guardians of the racial liberal consensus took events like this as a sign of progress: proof that the arc of the moral universe, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, bent toward justice. The original racial sin of the nation was slowly but surely being overcome. Heck, some dared to whisper: Maybe one could even imagine a black President!

An interesting article, although I think the author forgets that David Duke ran for national office in Louisiana twice and came close to winning despite being "personae non gratae" in the Republican establishment.

Old enough to "choose" marriage. But not old enough to have an opinion on politics.

Demosthenes wrote:

Old enough to "choose" marriage. But not old enough to have an opinion on politics.

Given the reams of conservatives who went out of their way while I was growing up to tell me how important it was for children to be aware of politics and celebrated teen activism when it was for conservative causes I'm going to say that they're giant hypocrites right now.

I'd feel betrayed, but it's just one more straw and I've run out of camels.

Gremlin wrote:
Demosthenes wrote:

Old enough to "choose" marriage. But not old enough to have an opinion on politics.

Given the reams of conservatives who went out of their way while I was growing up to tell me how important it was for children to be aware of politics and celebrated teen activism when it was for conservative causes I'm going to say that they're giant hypocrites right now.

I'd feel betrayed, but it's just one more straw and I've run out of camels.

I'm not following the logic of this statement:

If Tennessee were to ban child marriages by modifying state marriage law, lawmakers would be acknowledging the existence of same-sex marriage, according to Fowler’s legal theory.

I'm pretty sure there is no logic, but I could be missing something.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

I'm not following the logic of this statement:

If Tennessee were to ban child marriages by modifying state marriage law, lawmakers would be acknowledging the existence of same-sex marriage, according to Fowler’s legal theory.

I'm pretty sure there is no logic, but I could be missing something.

Fowler's argument is that Obergefell v. Hodges invalidated the Tennessee laws about marriage.

If the state legislature passed the child marriage law then that would mean the state was admitting that Obergefell v. Hodges didn't actually invalidate those marriage laws because why would anyone change a law that was supposedly not in effect anymore. Basically passing the law would cause the foundation of Fowler's argument to disappear in a puff of smoke.

From a 2016 article when Fowler first filed his lawsuit:

Times Free Press wrote:

Fowler, a former Signal Mountain GOP lawmaker and attorney who now heads the Tennessee Family Action Council, said the lawsuit poses legal issues Tennessee courts need to resolve in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's June 26 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges. The ruling invalidated Tennessee's 1995 law limiting marriage to unions between a man and a woman.

"The bottom line is to say to the state courts of Tennessee, you have to decide what the Supreme Court of the United States really did," Fowler told reporters at a state Capitol news conference.

He said in the high court's 5-4 decision, the majority "purported to do two things that are mutually exclusive: rule a law invalid and then rule that everyone has a right to get married under an invalid law. That inconsistency must be pointed out, raised and resolved. And this lawsuit seeks to do that."

Fowler argued the Supreme Court's ruling in effect invalidated Tennessee's entire marriage license statute as a result of a legal doctrine called "elision."

Fowler, who was a senator when the law passed, said that's because Tennessee lawmakers never intended the license statute to apply to same-sex couples.

And so the issue now, he said, is "how does anyone, regardless of the sexes of the party, get a valid marriage license pursuant to an invalid law?"

...

"In particular," the suit says, "all Plaintiffs seek a declaration that those provisions of the Tennessee law relative to the licensing of marriages are no longer valid and enforceable since the Obergefell decision and that the continued issuance of marriage licenses under those circumstances violates their aforesaid rights under the Tennessee Constitution."

Suicides, Drug Addiction and High School Football

MADISON, Ind. — An hour’s drive from Louisville, perched along the Ohio River, sits the prettiest little town.

Madison, population 12,000, has won awards for its beauty. Best Main Street. One of the top 20 romantic towns in Indiana. One of 12 distinctive destinations in the United States, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The river walk, down from the main street, is a hot spot for joggers and dog walkers and couples canoodling on benches. In the distance, a soaring bridge that connects Indiana and Kentucky often disappears behind a morning fog.

It’s all a lovely distraction from an open secret. On a reporting trip in July, I learned this in the unlikeliest of places: at Horst’s Little Bakery Haus, a doughnut shop with just a few tables, not far from the river.

A waitress had overheard me interviewing someone at the bakery earlier, and asked if I was a journalist.

She checked over her shoulder to see if anyone was listening. There was an urgency in her whisper as she said: “I lost my son last month. He hung himself from a tree in our yard and shot himself in the head. I cut him down myself, with my own hands. So many suicides.”

She wiped away tears.

“We need your help,” she said.

NRA: You really need legislation to change things. This is all perfectly legal. It's a state decision.

NRA sues Florida to reverse freshly-passed gun laws.

f*ck the NRA. Such a load of bullsh*t.

That’s old, just to be clear.

I wonder if they really aren't "fun" for him or if he simply can't afford to pay for them anymore.

He bounced a check at Florida State University when they required him to pick up about ten grand for the venue and a bit of the security costs. He's suing the University of Cincinnati because they also wanted him to help pay $11,000 for the venue and security for a speech that was supposed to happen this month. And he's suing a couple of other universities for either not letting him speak or for asking him to pick up a (tiny) part of the event's security costs.

MSU's requirement that Spencer have liability insurance is also probably really f*cking with him. I can't imagine that any insurance company is eager to give a guy whose followers are violent and have a tendency to pull out guns and shoot at protesters a policy. At least not one that's remotely affordable.

Spencer said the left-wing coalition known as Antifa has made attending his speeches too dangerous and not “fun” by intimidating his supporters and shouting down his lectures.

Sounds to me like there really is more than one way to fight fascism.

The Mountain West Is Experiencing A Second Gold Rush. This Time They’re Mining Bitcoin.

On a cold, damp, February evening, roughly 70 residents of Bonner, Montana, population 1,633, filed into the cafeteria of the local elementary school to talk about their new neighbors. Specifically, they were there to complain about “the roar.”

For two hours under the fluorescent lights, community members trudged up to the podium in their snow boots to voice concerns about the sound coming from the town’s old lumber mill. Some claimed the wildlife — particularly the hummingbirds and the deer — were nowhere to be found since the roar began around six months ago. Perhaps, one attendee suggested, “avian PTSD” was to blame for their disappearance. Residents took turns complaining of trouble sleeping, of newfound anxiety and depression, falling property values, and a growing feeling of desperation that the roar may never end. One concerned citizen wrote in to the council that she and her dog were itching all over and losing their hair; she blamed the roar. At one point, halfway through the meeting, when frustration seemed at risk of simmering over, council member Burt Caldwell issued a friendly warning: “Remember,” he told the group, “we’re not here to beat up on the bitcoin guys.”

The locals didn’t look mollified. Over decades, they’ve grown used to the sounds coming from the building when it was a lumber mill. But the new occupants were industrialists of a different sort, and the roar was the sound of rows of servers and fans feverishly whirring in an effort to solve complex cryptographic puzzles that could unearth digital money.

In recent months, with bitcoin’s value and cultural prominence rising spectacularly, dozens of cryptocurrency mines have popped up in the rural West, following in the geographic footsteps of a previous gold rush. Lured by cheap rent and wide-open space, they’re bent on bringing “mining” back to a region that was largely defined by pulling precious materials from the earth — only this time, the gold is digital.

In January, an unknown company working in the blockchain space purchased 67,000 acres at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center in Nevada, right next to Tesla’s Gigafactory. At the end of February, a Utah-based company called Power Block Coin LLC announced a plan to invest $251 million over the next three years in Butte, Montana, to build a campus of mining data centers.

And here in Bonner, a town of less than 2 square miles nestled along the winding banks of Western Montana’s Blackfoot River, one of North America’s largest bitcoin mines has set up shop. The locals have questions — about how it all works, about how cryptocurrency mining might revitalize the area’s sluggish economy, and most important, about whether it can be trusted to stay in the region for the long-term. Could a cryptocurrency boom could be the region’s best chance to revitalize old industry towns? Or it will these companies elbow their way in, only to disappear if and when the bubble bursts?

The Financial Whisperer to Trump’s America - Dave Ramsey has spent 25 years helping radio listeners climb out of debt. What does he see behind their economic anxiety?

BRENTWOOD, Tenn.—On a Tuesday afternoon in January, an audibly anxious young man—Chris from Midland, Texas—finds himself live on the air explaining his economic struggles to a perfect stranger. Chris, 28, is a truck driver and the family breadwinner; his wife is a stay-at-home mom. They have accumulated $14,600 in credit card debt and borrowed twice that much from their retirement account. They owe $59,000 on an SUV that is worth $46,000. His annual salary of $60,000 can’t buy a shovel big enough to dig out of the hole. Feeling strangled by the financial stress, Chris is turning to someone for help: Dave Ramsey, whose radio show a friend has recommended.

“The car is gone. It’s insanity. It’s absolutely nuts. It owns you,” Ramsey says in his cigar-smoky southern drawl. With millions of people listening, he orders Chris to sell the SUV and the couple’s other vehicle—a paid-off pickup truck with a value of $15,000. Then he instructs Chris to take out a $5,000 loan for a clunker to drive while paying down other debts. “You guys are in such bad shape that I’m scared for ya,” Ramsey says. But, he adds encouragingly, all is not lost. “When I was your age, I was going broke and going bankrupt. And I had to start completely over, with little babies, and my marriage was hanging on by a thread. And I was so scared, I couldn’t breathe,” Ramsey says. “You can clean this up, dude. And I can show you how, if you’ll do what I teach you to do.”

Ramsey might not be a household name in Washington or New York, cities where the chattering classes worry about their blue-chip stocks and wonder whether “economic anxiety” in the heartland really propelled Donald Trump to the presidency. But for the past 25 years—and especially in the decade since the recession—this Tennessee realtor-turned-talk-radio-host has spent his time considering nothing but economic anxiety, walking tens of thousands of callers through a nightmarish gauntlet of debts and defaults, job layoffs and pay cuts, underwater mortgages and punishing student loans.

Beloved for his down-home manner and direct, time-to-take-your-medicine approach, Ramsey is the pro bono financial adviser to millions of Americans who otherwise could never afford one. Privately owned and self-syndicated, “The Dave Ramsey Show” is carried by more than 600 stations and heard by more than 13 million listeners each week. Despite that scale, the relationships he forges with listeners can be intensely personal; people travel from every corner of the country, and occasionally from around the globe, to visit Ramsey in person and thank him for changing their lives. He makes himself readily accessible, hosting three hours of his eponymous call-in program every weekday from a glass-encased studio on the first floor of the Ramsey Solutions headquarters here in suburban Nashville.

When Ramsey listens to America talking, what does he hear? Two hours before he goes on air that Tuesday afternoon, I ask Ramsey about that term, “economic anxiety.” He hesitates. “If you define economic anxiety as, ‘Do I think I can get out of my mess?’ … there is probably more of that out there now than when I started doing this 25 years ago,” Ramsey says. “And it’s kind of disturbing.”

Sitting in his wood-paneled studio, flanked by copies of his best-selling books and a Tennessee Volunteers football helmet autographed by Peyton Manning, Ramsey laments about something more fundamental: the loss of a certain kind of can-do thinking among the people who need it most. He is a conservative, fiscally and culturally, and sounds cautiously bullish about the economy under President Donald Trump. But he worries that more and more Americans of all political persuasions have become economically paralyzed, and are mistakenly looking to the government to help them solve their problems.

I'm of two minds about Ramsey. On the one hand, getting people out of debt is generally a positive thing, on the other treating it like a personal sin is one of the cracks in our society's foundation. Becoming debt free requires a safety net and predicable, livable income: things that we've uprooted. Still, for a certain part of the middle and upper-middle class, there's some sensible advice.

(For the actual upper class, debt is part of a leveraging strategy to control more capital. Money becomes something more than cash.)

Yonder wrote:
Spencer said the left-wing coalition known as Antifa has made attending his speeches too dangerous and not “fun” by intimidating his supporters and shouting down his lectures.

Sounds to me like there really is more than one way to fight fascism.

I watched the full 24 minute video on which all these news articles are based. He blames (credits) the willingness to do violence on the part of antifa(scists) as the sole reason he is “course correcting” away from college campuses. It’s a huge win for America and an absolute vindication that punching Nazis has demonstrable, positive effects.

Seth wrote:
Yonder wrote:
Spencer said the left-wing coalition known as Antifa has made attending his speeches too dangerous and not “fun” by intimidating his supporters and shouting down his lectures.

Sounds to me like there really is more than one way to fight fascism.

I watched the full 24 minute video on which all these news articles are based. He blames (credits) the willingness to do violence on the part of antifa(scists) as the sole reason he is “course correcting” away from college campuses. It’s a huge win for America and an absolute vindication that punching Nazis has demonstrable, positive effects.

As Gandhi said, "an eye for an eye leaves the whole world without Nazis."

Gremlin wrote:

I'm of two minds about Ramsey. On the one hand, getting people out of debt is generally a positive thing, on the other treating it like a personal sin is one of the cracks in our society's foundation. Becoming debt free requires a safety net and predicable, livable income: things that we've uprooted. Still, for a certain part of the middle and upper-middle class, there's some sensible advice.

(For the actual upper class, debt is part of a leveraging strategy to control more capital. Money becomes something more than cash.)

Agreed. There are also studies that suggest that the "debt is dumb" mantra that he lives by contributes to the belief by those who are financially secure that anyone who has debt does so because of stupidity, all of which can be fixed by willpower alone. That's a dangerous mindset that leads to a lot of issues. I like Dave Ramsey (sold him a television once, he was ridiculously nice), but I have a few issues with parts of his message.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

As Gandhi said, "an eye for an eye leaves the whole world without Nazis."

Not to break the fourth wall of political talk, but yoink!