[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.

Not for nothing, but I’d love it if this forum had a feature to unsubscribe from threads you had previously posted in. I use the thread hide userscript on my desktop, but there’s no equivalent on mobile.

DSGamer wrote:

Not for nothing, but I’d love it if this forum had a feature to unsubscribe from threads you had previously posted in. I use the thread hide userscript on my desktop, but there’s no equivalent on mobile.

That’s on the books, actually! We hit a few wrinkles but it’s on the way.

(Certishausered!)
In the meantime, you can use the favorite thread feature.

sometimesdee wrote:

I absolutely agree. I've been utilizing the favorite thread feature. Perhaps drop a line in the GWJ bugs/feature requests thread.

That’s my workaround on mobile as well, but today I clicked on recent activity instead got a... surprise...

Certis wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

Not for nothing, but I’d love it if this forum had a feature to unsubscribe from threads you had previously posted in. I use the thread hide userscript on my desktop, but there’s no equivalent on mobile.

That’s on the books, actually! We hit a few wrinkles but it’s on the way.

This is good news. Thanks.

Wisconsin judge blocks Republicans’ lame-duck power grab

Kudos to my neighbors to the east for plugging another hole in the rule-of-law dike. The modern GOP assault on democracy requires eternal vigilance.

JeffreyLSmith wrote:

Wisconsin judge blocks Republicans’ lame-duck power grab

Kudos to my neighbors to the east for plugging another hole in the rule-of-law dike. The modern GOP assault on democracy requires eternal vigilance.

These garbage (alleged) humans:

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos stated its purpose plainly: “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in,” he said.

You got voted out.... which “many of us” are you talking about? It looks like most believe something else...

It really looks like Rs will do everything to get and retain power, not be, you know, actual representatives.

JeffreyLSmith wrote:

Wisconsin judge blocks Republicans’ lame-duck power grab

Kudos to my neighbors to the east for plugging another hole in the rule-of-law dike. The modern GOP assault on democracy requires eternal vigilance.

I saw that news and then this popped up on my Twitter feed today.

Scott Walker's moved on to be the finance chair of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the "central Republican resource to coordinate and collaborate on a 50-state redistricting effort; focusing on the GOP’s redistricting-related legal and data needs."

Apparently the NRRT is needed because the left "will stop at nothing to gerrymander Democrats into permanent majorities" and that Democrats are using the courts to "pick the winners and losers in our elections" to ensure that the "ultra-liberal representatives they put into office will pass their radical left-wing agenda." Democrats are even "spread[ing] the influence of their core supporters out from the cities to silence the votes of suburban and rural voters."

All of which is essentially what Walker did for conservatives in Wisconsin.

Word from people inside Wisconsin is that they expect the state Supreme Court to overrule this decision. This is the same state Supreme Court that Walker and these same Republican state legislators packed with friendly justices.

OG_slinger wrote:

Scott Walker's moved on to be the finance chair of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the "central Republican resource to coordinate and collaborate on a 50-state redistricting effort; focusing on the GOP’s redistricting-related legal and data needs."

Apparently the NRRT is needed because the left "will stop at nothing to gerrymander Democrats into permanent majorities" and that Democrats are using the courts to "pick the winners and losers in our elections" to ensure that the "ultra-liberal representatives they put into office will pass their radical left-wing agenda." Democrats are even "spread[ing] the influence of their core supporters out from the cities to silence the votes of suburban and rural voters."

All of which is essentially what Walker did for conservatives in Wisconsin.

Every accusation, man.

Joe Rogan’s Galaxy Brain - How the former Fear Factor host’s podcast became an essential platform for “freethinkers” who hate the left

On Feb. 7, on the 1,241st episode of his podcast, comedian Joe Rogan kicked off a discussion of one of the signal injustices of our time: the deplatforming of jerks on the internet.

Rogan was against it, as was his guest, the author and podcaster Sam Harris, who urged Rogan’s listeners to consider the plight of all the witty provocateurs who have lately begun to suffer real-life consequences for their trollish online banter. Harris bemoaned a “world where people are having their reputations destroyed and their careers threatened for tweets they sent as teenagers,” though he didn’t specify whose reputations had been ruined by their teenage tweets, and Rogan didn’t ask him to clarify. But the implication was clear: Holding people accountable for what they say and what those words do is an offense far worse than saying cruel, racist, and divisive things in the first place. The reputational damage done to the utterer is the real social problem, not the more diffuse damage done by the utterance.

The proximate cause of Harris’ smarm was neither a teenager nor a Twitter troll but an actor who had made the rather old-fashioned mistake of saying something dumb to a journalist. In an interview promoting a movie, Liam Neeson had bizarrely volunteered that as a younger man, he had once roamed the streets hoping to be provoked into killing a black man—any black man—in retaliation for a friend’s rape. Harris, who has a practiced eye for these things, saw great liberal hypocrisy in the way that many people online had read racism into Neeson’s statement.

“The irony here for me is you have progressives and people on the far left who receive a disclosure like Liam Neeson’s—let’s take his—and they just want to see him burned alive, right?” These same people, he mused, “have as a genuine ethical norm the rehabilitation of murderers.” It was a flimsy argument but not as flimsy as the point Rogan made next: “Well, they’re constantly holding those two contradictions, right?” he said. “I mean, here’s another one: women’s rights and support of the hijab. I mean, what’s going on there? How do you do that? Don’t be Islamophobic but also support women’s rights and gay rights.”

I truly despise Joe Rogan. He's a festering wound in the flesh of social discourse. A person who exists to spread the "Both sides" mantra and give credence to shills, hucksters, and conmen.

MUELLLLLLLLLEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

I stopped paying attention to Harris a while back when it became clear that he has trouble seeing past his own ego and complete faith in his own correctness.

Lots and lots of breaking news about the SPLC. It's funny how we've know about what a scam this organization has been since the 90's, but many people, especially journalists, ignored it because it always told them what they wanted to believe.

The great Southern journalist John Egerton, writing for The Progressive, had painted a damning portrait of Dees, the center’s longtime mastermind, as a “super-salesman and master fundraiser” who viewed civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals.
Donald Trump’s Presidency opened up a gusher of donations; after raising fifty million dollars in 2016, the center took in a hundred and thirty-two million dollars in 2017...The new money pushed the center’s endowment past four hundred and fifty million dollars, which is more than the total assets of the American Civil Liberties Union
[In the 1980's] the center began to abandon poverty law—representing death-row defendants and others who lacked the means to hire proper representation—to focus on taking down the Ku Klux Klan. This was a seemingly odd mission, given that the Klan, which had millions of members in the nineteen-twenties, was mostly a spent force by the mid-eighties, with only an estimated ten thousand members scattered across the country.
Outside of work, we spent a lot of time drinking and dishing in Montgomery bars and restaurants about the oppressive security regime, the hyperbolic fund-raising appeals, and the fact that, though the center claimed to be effective in fighting extremism, “hate” always continued to be on the rise, more dangerous than ever, with each year’s report on hate groups. “The S.P.L.C.—making hate pay,” we’d say.
Were we complicit, by taking our paychecks and staying silent, in ripping off donors on behalf of an organization that never lived up to the values it espoused? Did we enable racial discrimination and sexual harassment by failing to speak out? “Of course we did,” a former colleague told me, as we parsed the news over the phone.

President Steps Down

Founder Fired

And all of that after the off-shore accounts were reported on last year.

The sad thing I've found is that most of its staunch defenders are the same people its been defrauding for decades. At lunch today some liberal co-workers and I discussed this and they just can't let it go and accept it's a scam. It's like when Obama's IRS went after the "conservative groups." I kept telling my conservative and Republican friends that it was a GOOD thing since those groups were scams and crooks and not conservative at all. They didn't believe me either, it was too easy to believe lies about Obama.

Now the Feds really need to look into this "non-profit", it can't be left alone to police itself.

The saddest thing about whatever problems the SPLC has had with its leadership recently is not that it had corrupt leaders, but that hate groups are going to use this as an excuse to claim that they were never hate groups. Nothing good can come of this.

Fox News is probably going to get this woman, a 29 year old adjunct professor with no full-time job, killed.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/...

Mixolyde wrote:

Fox News is probably going to get this woman, a 29 year old adjunct professor with no full-time job, killed.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/...

Trump and Fox seem to be working really, really hard to spread islmophobia as much as possible right now. It's f*cking disgusting.

That said, while at the dog park today there was a pavilion with a large group of Kurds celebrating with dance and music. I only know they were Kurds because they were flying their flag. It looked like a fantastic and happy event.

On the one hand, it made me really happy that they felt safe and comfortable enough to have this in our community. But I also worry, because I am seeing more and more blatant islamophobia being expressed in the local forums of the Post-Dispatch. It has transitioned from being scared of terrorists to pointing out how little you can trust anyone in hijab or any other sign they are Muslim, as though the religion itself is the danger.

But I was grateful that one of the women in the group my wife was hanging out with really made a point that she was happy to hear their music and such, and lamented the the folks that would be view them as some sort of encroachment. In the wake of Ferguson, the liberals in St. Louis started realizing just how many of their neighbors are bigots.

Jayhawker wrote:

But I also worry, because I am seeing more and more blatant islamophobia being expressed in the local forums of the Post-Dispatch. It has transitioned from being scared of terrorists to pointing out how little you can trust anyone in hijab or any other sign they are Muslim, as though the religion itself is the danger.

I don't know how you can stand to wade through that mess. It seems like the same dozen people viciously hurling insults at each other and trying to demonize and dehumanize each other. It's not a discussion forum, it's a bunch of 6-year-olds in a slap fight.

A tale of two tweets:

LOL.

Good, we need less scumbags, I don't care which side they pretend to be on.

I'm guessing Stormy Daniels is glad that she switched attorneys a while back.

I don't know, I'm so disappointed by so many things these days, I don't mind that he was a s-bag. There's a time when I would have, but not anymore. He played the role we needed him to play. Glad he's shuffling off the stage now that his part is over, though.

cheeze_pavilion wrote:

He played the role we needed him to play.

I mean, what did he even do though?

All I remember about the dude was thinking he was a TV lawyer from the moment I laid eyes on him. Which is to say, that he was a lawyer who was great at appearing on TV, but not necessarily one good at... being a lawyer. So this ultimate outcome isn't that shocking.

Prederick wrote:
cheeze_pavilion wrote:

He played the role we needed him to play.

I mean, what did he even do though?

All I remember about the dude was thinking he was a TV lawyer from the moment I laid eyes on him. Which is to say, that he was a lawyer who was great at appearing on TV, but not necessarily one good at... being a lawyer. So this ultimate outcome isn't that shocking.

Exactly--he was great at being on TV. He was finally someone Trump couldn't make go away in a PR battle. He was part of getting Stormy Daniels on 60 Minutes. I felt like they wounded Trump, made him look like he wasn't invincible when it came press coverage.

And then he did equal damage trying to grandstand around Kavanaugh. And his talk about running for president damaged the lawsuit. And has generally been a loose cannon. I wouldn't say that he's been on anyone's side, exactly, except maybe his own.

Perception is nine-tenths of politics and public opinion though, so who knows what his ultimate legacy is likely to be?

I'd disagree it was equal damage. He maybe have been a loose cannon on his own side, but I think he inflicted far more damage on Trump than on us.

cheeze_pavilion wrote:

I'd disagree it was equal damage. He maybe have been a loose cannon on his own side, but I think he inflicted far more damage on Trump than on us.

I feel like this might be similar logic to the conservatives who hold their noses and support Trump.

Nomad wrote:
cheeze_pavilion wrote:

I'd disagree it was equal damage. He maybe have been a loose cannon on his own side, but I think he inflicted far more damage on Trump than on us.

I feel like this might be similar logic to the conservatives who hold their noses and support Trump.

Logic is stupid. Throw rocks at it.

cheeze_pavilion wrote:

I'd disagree it was equal damage. He maybe have been a loose cannon on his own side, but I think he inflicted far more damage on Trump than on us.

I mean, it's impossible to measure and we can't see the counterfactual to tell if Kavanaugh's nomination would have sunk without Avenatti's grandstanding muddying the waters. And it depends on how much long-term damage you see from Kavanaugh. So we probably agree more than disagree.

I think I prefer the timeline without Avenatti's involvement. But if I can pick timelines, that's not exactly my biggest concern.


Conspiracy Theories Can’t Be Stopped - And some scientists think we wouldn’t want to even if we could

Shortly before killing 50 people at two New Zealand mosques, the man arrested for the Christchurch massacre posted an online manifesto that alluded to the “Great Replacement” — a racist demographic theory that stokes fears of white people becoming, effectively, extinct. Within hours of the shootings, this act of terrorism inspired by a conspiracy theory had already gone on to birth conspiracy theories about itself. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh speculated that the shooter was a secret leftist hoping to use the attack to smear the reputation of the political right.

That a single tragedy could be so tangled in conspiracy mongering should be no surprise at this point. We’ve all watched conspiracies grow from myriad soils: the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, the political passions of George Soros, vaccines, climate change, even the football secrets of the New England Patriots. Conspiracy theories appear to have become a major part of how we, as a society, process the news. It might be harder to think of an emotionally tinged event that didn’t provoke a conspiracy theory than it is to rattle off a list of the ones that did.

The ubiquity — and risks — of all these conspiracies has caught the attention of scientists. For years, the potentially dangerous consequences of conspiracy led many researchers to approach belief in conspiracies as a pathology in need of a cure. But that train of thought tended to awkwardly clash against some of the facts. The more we learn about conspiracy beliefs, the more normal they look — and the more some scientists worry that trying to prevent them could present its own dangers.

The experts I spoke with all said that the internet had changed the way conspiracies spread, but conspiracies, both dangerous and petty, have always been with us. Nobody knows, really, how popular conspiracy beliefs used to be, because it wasn’t a thing surveys regularly tracked until recently, said Jan-Willem van Prooijen, a psychologist at VU Amsterdam. But he and Michael Wood, professor of psychology at the UK’s University of Winchester, both pointed to a study that suggests conspiracies have consistently peered out of the pages of American newspapers for at least a century.

Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami, cataloged and coded more than 100,000 letters to the editor published in The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, and found the number of letters alleging and discussing conspiracy theories to have been pretty consistent over the last 120 years. This study isn’t perfect — the newspapers are still gatekeepers to what conspiracies were deemed fit to publish — but because it encompasses two different papers over a wide swath of time and many editorial leadership changes, Uscinski told me that it’s reasonable to assume we’re looking at something that reflects what interests readers, more so than what interests editors.

That research is significant to understanding conspiracy belief as a societal norm. “There was some crazy stuff that they were more than happy to publish,” Uscinski said. “The CIA is creating lesbianism. We found alien planets. … Jimmy Carter is a communist agent. Secret baby farms where they’re growing organs for people. It all wound up in there.”

And, it turns out, most of us believe in some strange goings-on behind the curtains. More than half of Americans think there was more than one person involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, for example. A 2014 study found that more than half of Americans believe in at least one medical conspiracy — a list that includes things like doctors giving children vaccines they know to be dangerous or the idea that the Food and Drug Administration intentionally suppresses natural cancer cures because of pressure from the pharmaceutical industry. The more specific conspiracies you ask about in polls, the higher the percentage of Americans that believe in at least one, Uscinski said. He thinks it’s likely everyone has a pet conspiracy to call their own.