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The motley items, political antics & moral posturings thread

#31
C C Offline
Trump blows up the Arizona GOP on his way out
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/16...ump-459772

INTRO: The Trump era did more damage to the Republican Party in Arizona than almost anywhere else. Over the past two years, Republicans lost both Senate seats. In November, the state flipped Democratic in a presidential race for the first time since 1996. The GOP state party chair is currently at war with the governor.

President Donald Trump’s fingerprints are on all of it, yet the state party will likely pass a resolution next week to officially “support & thank” the president. It’ll also vote on measures to censure three prominent Republicans who were deemed insufficiently beholden to Trump: Gov. Doug Ducey, former Sen. Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain, the wife of the late senator.

The adulation is an expression of GOP grassroots loyalty to Trump, but it’s also a portrait of a party that’s run aground in service to him. His defeat has triggered attempts to adopt an even harder pro-Trump line, raising questions about the party’s ability to compete in an increasingly diverse state that’s edging leftward.

“The craziness from the state Republican Party … it’s pretty embarrassing,” said Kirk Adams, a former Republican state House speaker and former chief of staff to Ducey. “We have been fed a steady diet of conspiracy theories and stolen election rhetoric and, really, QAnon theories from the state Republican Party since before the election, but certainly after.” (MORE)
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#32
Syne Offline
Well, Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain are pieces of shit. Those establishment RINOs that attack their own party to gain political leverage and media exposure. Don't know much about the AZ governor. And it's unclear whether the state actually flipped in the presidential race, making the Senate races suspect as well. If Republicans hold the state legislature, it's fishy for only national elections to go for Democrats.
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#33
C C Offline
Joe Biden's Hollywood inauguration
https://theweek.com/articles/961203/joe-...auguration

EXCERPTS: Celebrities this week are showing up in droves for their "buddy" Joe [...] "After four years of Trump," a recent Variety cover-story explained, "Hollywood wants to help Biden and Harris save America." But a bunch of entertainers ushering in Biden feels jarringly out-of-step and out-of-touch with the current moment — one of the darkest in our nation's 243-year history.

Not that there's nothing to celebrate. Biden's inauguration marks at least a temporary stay on President Trump's record [...] Tensions are boiling that won't be cooled down by a monologue from inauguration host Tom Hanks. At the same time, COVID-19 cases are breaking records daily [...] The American documentarian Ken Burns has dubbed this moment the nation's "fourth great crisis" — after only the Civil War, the Depression, and the Second World War.

Throughout the pandemic, celebrities have made cringey and misguided attempts to lift Americans' spirits, unaware, perhaps, of how their messages of hope and resilience sound when broadcast from their mansions, as millions of Americans are out of work, facing eviction, and struggling to feed their families.

Likewise, Biden's star-studded, five-day-long inaugural festivities come across a little like a party on the deck of a sinking Titanic. The inauguration, which is either naively, ignorantly, or idiotically themed "America United," has a lineup more appropriate for Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin Eve circa 2006, and belongs to an entirely different universe than the one most of us are living in.

The performers are also pulled from the mid-aughts [...] The message seems to be that Biden will be a kind of third-term Obama, which again, feels simply ignorant. Anyone who's been paying attention knows that while we can hope for a more boring and steady leader, there is no going back to what came before... (MORE - details)
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#34
C C Offline
Trump provoked deadly Capitol riot, Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell says
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/19/trump-pr...-says.html

SUMMARY POINTS: President Trump helped provoke the swarms of his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor. "The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people," McConnell said. McConnell's remarks came as he and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer hash out details on Trump's impending impeachment trial. (MORE - details)

- - - - - -

Question is, in contrast to a sitting president being impeached, could they really, legally prevent an ex-President from holding future office even if there were enough RINOs and rogue elephants to jump on board?
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#35
Syne Offline
Now that a man with a spine is leaving office, all those career, establishment RINOs, like McConnell and Lindsey Graham, are right back to their sniveling ways.
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#36
C C Offline
Biden quickly moving on climate change, reversing Trump rollbacks
https://www.npr.org/sections/inauguratio...-rollbacks

INTRO: President Biden is moving quickly on climate change on his first day in office, saying he plans to sign a sweeping executive order to undo many of the Trump administration's environmental rollbacks. Biden's pledge to rejoin the international Paris climate accord tops his list of immediate steps. Former President Donald Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from the landmark agreement in 2017, which was completed in November. The Trump administration also weakened or undid other, lesser-known climate and environmental policies that Biden has vowed to restore.

Biden will instruct federal agencies to review more than 100 policies, many crucial to curbing heat-trapping emissions, including fuel economy standards for cars and pollution limits on the oil and gas industry. "A cry for survival comes from the planet itself, a cry that can't be any more desperate or any more clear," Biden said in his inaugural address Wednesday... (MORE)
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#37
Syne Offline
Bye, bye jobs.
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#38
Zinjanthropos Offline
(Jan 21, 2021 02:02 AM)Syne Wrote: Bye, bye jobs.

Biden already screwed thousands of Americans out of a job with the Keystone halt. Alberta not happy also, same thing. Aboriginals also miss out of $765m negotiated in good faith over last 10 years. I always thought build the damn thing first then see where technology is and if you can actually use it.
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#39
C C Offline
Eviction cases in California projected to double
https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing...e-covid-19

INTRO: California courts are bracing for eviction cases to double over the next year as pandemic-related financial woes deepen for thousands of renters across the state. Landlords are expected to file 240,000 new eviction cases — twice what occurs in a typical year, according to estimates by state court officials. The projection takes into account the looming expiration of state eviction protections, which end in late January.

While Gov. Gavin Newsom hopes to extend the renter safeguards, he’s also asked the Legislature to increase the judicial system’s funding so that courts can prepare for an eventual surge in evictions. “If cases in fact do not double, and we certainly hope they won’t, these funds will be returned,” Newsom spokesman Jesse Melgar said.

The pandemic has battered low-income tenants across the state who had already needed to dedicate significant portions of their income to cover California’s high housing costs... (https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing...e-covid-19)
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#40
C C Offline
Cynical Sindee: Exemplifies how the literary and socio-political establishment, for decades already sympathetic to and borrowing from the hegemonic conspiracy mindset of Marxism for wider purposes, has ironically itself become so intimidated by these "race-fixated opportunists" that it just reflexively heaps praise and awards on any pile of anecdotes and feelings work they output, elevating it to the status of fact/science.

Why I'm no longer talking to white people about race -- by Reni Eddo Lodge
https://areomagazine.com/2021/01/12/why-...ddo-lodge/

EXCERPTS: Reni Eddo Lodge’s 2018 "Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race" has scooped six literary awards and received near-universal praise and Lodge has recently been voted one of the Sunday Times’ Women of the Year 2020. The book offers an uncompromising attack on whiteness and fits into an emerging canon of third-wave anti-racist literature spearheaded by US thinkers like Ibram X Kendi and Robin Di Angelo, with notable British contributions from writers including Akala and Afua Hirsh. The book covers black British history, systemic racism, white privilege, white fears, the relationship between race and class and the pitfalls of white feminism, all interwoven with Lodge’s negative personal experiences with whites who are in a state of racial denial.

While the book is probably accessible and appealing to those who share the author’s totalising vision of race, it lacks sociological depth. Its factual assertions are tightly wrapped up in events experienced, words said and emotions felt. This means that any criticism levelled at the book risks eliciting a charge of insensitivity. Worse still, as with Robin DiAngelo’s concept of white fragility, it also, as Jonathan Church has pointed out, sets a Kafka trap for those who question its claims. Just as, for Di Angelo, rejecting the notion of white fragility is itself a tell-tale sign of white fragility, Lodge implies that those who question her assertions are demonstrating “white denial.” It is important to withstand this kind of gaslighting, since the author’s ideas—like any other ideas—are open to a range of objections.

[...] Anecdotes are a dime a dozen. They can be used in the service of many different conclusions. For example, Lodge attests to the difficulty in finding material on black British history when she was younger: “I was hungry for more information. I wanted to know about black people in Britain, post-slavery. However, this information was not easily accessible. This was history only available to people who truly cared, only knowable through a hefty amount of self-directed study.”

However, given its dizzying breadth, most history is only truly knowable through a hefty amount of self-directed study. Also, what is asserted by anecdote can be rejected by anecdote: Lodge is six years younger than me and grew up in London. I grew up in Avon, in an area that was not even remotely multiracial. When I developed an interest in racial politics and history in my teens, I did not have a particularly hard time finding the relevant books.

Lodge argues that one should not have to seek out such information, that it should be readily visible within the broader culture. But her suggestion that the education system and our media institutions are keeping us ignorant on these topics, while perhaps a fair comment in the 1990s, has increasingly come to lack both relevance and plausibility.

Hollywood movies (which we Brits consume avidly) have been exploring racism for decades (see list) and, even within British broadcasting, there is a wealth of programming addressing societal racism and black British history. [...] As for education, even Black History Month—a unique corrective within the education system—is barely recognised as progress. Reflecting on her conversation with Black History Month’s UK founder, Lodge writes, “it felt like she was sceptical of the values of current-day Black History Month activities. It wasn’t about hair … it was history month, not culture month.” This gives the impression that all is not well in the classroom and that across the country, during the month of October, trained educators with a passion for history are talking about how great cornrows, box braids and Bantu knots are. They aren’t.

Lodge at times expresses hostility towards evidence... (MORE - details)

--- new idiom entries ---

wracism (dervied from [w]hite + racism): Hatred of whites or promoting hegemonic conspiracies revolving around whites.

wraycist (derived from the archaic verb "wray", meaning to denounce a person or group): Individual who exploits and profits from obsession with race victimhood (fabricated or legit). Using one or multiple population groups as a scapegoat ladder to gain, acclaim, or success. Distinguished from a traditional racist via the latter's classification as the aggressor by either justified or contingent/fickle perceptions of the institutional mainstream, even though the propaganda of traditional racists may also similarly portray themselves as victims, or future ones.
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