171–180 of 284 posts
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The is true and is just more proof of the oligarchy we live in brainwashing us to believe the "other side" is the enemy while the rich and powerful robs us blind.
more proof of the oligarchy we live in brainwashing us to believe the "other side" is the enemy while the rich and powerful robs us blind Whose fault is that though?
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I don’t understand “red/blue” shit. For me, it’s “improving quality of life for wage earners and affirming civil liberties / vs not doing the aforementioned” shit. A cousin in my family has a very valid grievance against business owner uncles that support politicians who don’t want to provide meal breaks or bathroom breaks. This cousin has to work 12 to 14 hour shifts, and eat standing up while working and sneak in b…
This viewpoint (where the unstated understanding is 'the group that is good is Democrats, and the group that is evil is Republicans') is part of the problem. The world is more complicated than that.
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>leaned heavily towards socialism and economic justice... Not to be too on the nose, but another equally valid phrase here is “leaned heavily towards being a christian minister”, which he was. The religious motivations of the civil rights movement are ones we seem blind to, and the only reason i can think of for it is that when i, an american, hear “christian”, i have been taught think “republican suburban or rural w…
There were just as many religious motivations behind slavery and segregation as there was for it - actually more, in reality. In truth, evangelical Christianity has been one of the primary tools used to advance and justify segregation and slavery throughout western history, with some going so far as to equate rejection of slavery as no different than rejecting Christ. The predominant denomination of the south, Southe…
I don’t agree at all that that statement or population is somehow emblematic of “the real religion”, because the unspoken priors there are precisely the sort of white- and christian- centric circular definitions that, for example, white american evangelicals believe and promulgate. It’s giving up the game before you even get started.
Tangentially, the sanctification of Dr. King as an american saint is part of an extremely long tradition of blunting the impact of prophets. If you put someone up on a pedestal you add them to a history that is done and somehow over and safe now. We remember “i have a dream” and tacitly conclude that the dream is realized now; we forget that King died largely hated and in the process of screaming against the war and organizing for (mostly white) trash collectors. And we forget that the work never stops.
To conclude more hopefully, though, I’d also say that people do keep the flame alive — and, i suspect and pray, we’ll look back at this year as a time when the embers were fanned back up into a flame to get some more work done at a great cost.
I agree with the central thesis -- we should be shaking hands with our neighbors and looking to take back power and wealth from the rich. But how do you get neighbors to shake hands when one believes that gay marriage is truly evil and another is gay? Both sides in America constantly fight bitterly over identity politics and it seems like many of those identities are irreconcilable with one another. I'm non binary an…
It's why I find it so interesting (and concerning) how people respond to, say, college, or urban areas, coming from rural and more homogeneous ones. Some people find themselves realizing that those who are different than them...aren't so different, and learn to accept and respect others despite those differences. Others resist, seeking out others like themselves, building a bubble to operate in, avoiding the 'other', and become even less tolerant than they were before (while also demonizing the 'liberal brainwashing' happening in colleges and big cities and the like, that they saw happening around them).
Social media has made it wildly easy and incredibly cheap to propagate any misinformation. Head over 4chan and you'll see a factory line of ideas being thrown at the wall to see what sticks - which is then further spread across social media. If you were a foreign power and wanted to sow discord in a rival country, you had to buy off dozens of journalists and funnel money to media houses and hope that they'd at least…
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This viewpoint (where the unstated understanding is 'the group that is good is Democrats, and the group that is evil is Republicans') is part of the problem. The world is more complicated than that.
The viewpoint that both groups are just as bad or just as good for wage earners is a problem. It’s easily verifiable that Democratic states have better laws for wage earners, and have pushed for policies that benefit wage earners. They’re nowhere near perfect, but there’s no reason to pretend Dems and Repubs are the same.
However, if we go by cumulative per capita COVID deaths, then the result would have been 228 Trump, 310 Biden.
Why the big swing? I think it is because the big early outbreaks that swept through retirement and nursing homes before we got better at treating it were in big urban areas. By the time it got big in rural areas, we'd gotten a lot better at dealing with it.
It would be interesting to do a similar calculation, but using say the rates over say the last three months instead of cumulative from the start. If someone wants to do that one, a good place to get the COVID data is here [1]. They have links to download the data for all the graphs as CSV files.
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>The craziest part of this american culture war, to me, is that it seems to spill over to the rest of the world. It does not seem so crazy to me, after decades of cultural imperialism from America, that we are mirroring the same patterns of behaviour and fighting the same battles. (Just to be clear, I'm not against imperialism) If American politics are straining your relationship with your sister and you are not even…
As a Canadian, I'm shocked at the attention the minutia of US politics gets in Canada. I was visiting family and watching the 6pm news and I'd say US politics dominates Canadian national news. It's not unusual for the first 20 min of a 30 min program to be nothing but US politics. Plenty of people say "well, what happens in the US is important to Canada", but what's covered is just stupid political bickering. And it'…
Frankly it doesn't deserve coverage here in America, either. If he hadn't been gifted billions of dollars in free advertising from all of these networks that hate watch his Twitter feed I don't think we would even have Trump as POTUS. And now he's never going to go away. And they're going to be hate watching his every step to keep "reporting the news." For the life of me I do not understand why people watch the news in this era.
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Talk is cheap. For whatever reason, the increased pay and benefits for blue collar workers exists, by far, in Democrat areas, and is implemented by Democrat politicians.
Talk is cheap, but lies win elections, especially when supported by a massive media machine designed to mislead voters. The output of Fox is bad enough, but the QAnon nonsense isn't some weird aberration that appeared out of nothing. It's the logical conclusion of a huge social experiment to see how much political benefit you can wring from an industrial lie machine. And it's working far better than anyone on the lef…
I would argue that, for the individuals in question, the long-term consequences literally have no meaning, do not matter, and absolutely are not part of the calculus.
If I get power during my life, and secure my legacy as an important, and very wealthy person, my children can buy away any problem that may pop up for them.
Therefore, my actions of destruction today do not matter, as long as I am the one in power.
This is why I believe it is only going to keep getting worse; if the incentive is to stay in power, at all costs, we're in for a wild ride.
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One of the GOPs greatest triumphs is co-opting and becoming the party of religion/Christianity.
I feel that their greatest triumph is getting everyone to refer to them by that cutesy nickname “GOP” no matter how they are behaving.
"GOP" is as much an epithet to those inclined to dislike the party, as it is a proud accolade for those inclined to like the party.
Sort of like "liberal", though admittedly many who use that as an epithet make their meaning clear by changing it to 'libtard' or a similarly puerile play on words.
The craziest part of this american culture war, to me, is that it seems to spill over to the rest of the world. My sister and I, living in Germany, have a very loving relationship, but we absolutely disagree on almost everything political and basically are stuck in our seperate bubbles. This gave us an interesting observation: 5 years ago it took us about two to three months, to have a fight over something that start…
One thing I've noticed is the whole sale importation of the BLM movement to the UK. I'm not overly aware of the issue facing ethnic minorities in the UK (I live in Scotland where it's almost entirely white with some small asian communities, which isn't to say there isn't racism just few people to discuss it with personally) but from reading around racism in the UK is very different to the US. Despite this we've adopt…