#Wasn’t a true debate but attack make trump look bad to the world

[thoughtsbeewild]

I’m not going say he won nor say he lost the debate. A bit disappointing perhaps, he could of done better.. but it was a prepared aim for Kamala and her regime mainstream media army to make her look good, she knew the questions, memorize it like she a true woke celebrity actress like Ryan Reynolds’s, Blake lively doing a 90 minute scene from a movie..

[rumandtimes]

“Bossypants” by Tina Fey: A pre-view

Luigina Cecchina-Tarquina

Assoc. Lifestyle Contributor

When I picked up Tina Fey’s book, I knew little more of her reputation than as a female comedian. I expected a chuckle and some depiction of a woman’s take on the world of hollywood success — I would not have expected to come across a racist book that struggles to relay a single joke while recounting the life of a southern woman’s bygone teenage years, but then, what would one expect from a cast member of “saturday night live”.

For those who are even aware of Saturday Night: Live (SNL), it is common knowledge that Tina Fey, and saturday night live for that matter, are controversial figures in american media. It seems to be a split right down american society: people who find Tina Fey “L-O-L” funny, and people who find her humour unsufferable; people who tolerate the blatant racism of snl and 30rock as “satire,” and those who have had enough of the denigration, minstrels, slurs, and tropes for cheap comedic effect.

I know Tina Fey is a comedian — a clown — and sets out to prick peoples ears and widen people’s eyes. To quote another comedy critic, I do not seek to come off as someone wilfully misunderstanding humour and repeatedly not getting the joke.

Yet the illusion of that decision is for those who do not remember that Bill Murray had a sketch on snl, where he dreamed about “turning from ‘brown’ to ‘white’”, and the more recent habit of snl writers hiring minorities as comedians to attack themselves on the show with slurs, because it would look less objectionable than if the writers denigrated those actors or people themselves. In Tina Fey’s book, she states that “As a Greek,” she would “only date a ‘white’ man, such as a redneck” inexplicably fond of camouflage.

But to quote that same critic again, humour has a goal; It has an audience. When engineered to subvert expectations and play to the common denominator, jokes have a base which they are founded upon. If that baseline for the comedian or writer, like Fey, is a bedrock of deep-seated racism, which the comedian exploits rather than lampoons, it is no longer a humorous observation, but a cheap, racist ploy servicing an already receptive racist base.

Tina Fey saying she would only date in a certain imaginarily-defined group is racist. Full stop.

Fey going on to say she would date even the lowest, “redneck,” in that category, before anyone else in the world is not less racist — as Fey probably expected her statement to be received (by deprecating people of European-descent with ethnic slurs like “redneck” or “hillbilly” or “honche”, rather than solely praising their racist memes) — but it is more racist, as Fey is simultaneously using racism to make fun of her suitors, and again using racism to elevate even them above anyone and everyone else.

Not to “belabour the point,” as Fey would appreciate, or focus on one bad joke: but Fey’s joke is playing to long-festered notions of racism, colonialism, and rogue supremacism, which Fey buys into rather than challenges, where Fey herself puts (1) any “Aryans” above (2) rich Europeans, (3) Greeks above poor Europeans, and (4) poor Europeans above (5) the rest of the living world. It is inane — and stupid — but a strongly held delusion among groups (1) through (5), and probably strongest among groups (2) to (4).

Fey happily plays with this unholy flame of racism, undergirded by genocide in her native South, fuelled by the segregation in Fey’s own high school, and leaving embers of anti-marriage laws across the American East.

That is not to say racism, colonialism, genocide, holocaust, mob rule, political repression, et alia, are not to be joked about — they are the most popular comedic material in the United States (even if only in the United States). But these topics are deadly serious, and not as distant and abstract as we would like them to be.

There is a real possibility, given their frequency and recency, that anyone who read the first edition of Fey’s book, or attended same secondary school, committed a hate crime, using the exact same rhetoric Fey employs as a “joke.” Not only that, Fey never says it is a joke — there is no punchline.

The only reason I give Tina Fey the benefit-of-the-doubt and assume she was not serious about what she said is because the statements where so outrageous and absurd that someone would have to be insane to print them in sincerity, and equally as ungracious to print them even in jest.

Nonetheless, it was never expected to have to wrestle with these issues, which Fey has ill-managed, in a comedy memoir. Maybe if it had to do with Fey’s experiences or personal identity (as “German–Greek”?) it would have a more natural place. That is, if Fey had been the victim of racism, and condemned it, even through humour, that would be expected, cool, and fine. Fey calls herself “Greek,” but only tongue-in-cheek, and it’s apparent she doesn’t speak Greek. Fey calls herself “German,” but only in relation to being American, and it’s apparent she doesn’t speak German.

What we learn is not how Tina Fey suffered racism, but her experience in adopting racism itself. It offends the senses, and anchors the book.

While hardly intended to win over the intellectual crowd, some of Fey’s items over the years cannot be ignored. Conventional culture, and Fey herself, would seem to agree, after the firing of certain snl comedians and the pulling of certain 30rock episodes, that just went too damn far.

This puts Fey in the precarious position of defending her legacy of racist and baiting comedy, and that of her colleagues, as now she has been outed as admitting herself that she has crossed the line on several, several occasions. But does that mean that Fey is accommodated now that she has made a partial apology? Or is that the mere beginning of scrutiny now that critics have gotten their first concrete admission of her failure?

Fey, and many of her cultivation, say such racist things in order to just have meaningless fun, or in order to make fun of the racist. While Fey and the others may consider this to be in good fun, and an inclusive way to overcome racism, at the end of the day you have subtly racist comedians repeating the words of violently racist hate-mongers for the entertainment of an audience often apathetic to the realities of racism. That is to say, with such willingness to commonly, repeatedly, and recklessly embrace such a serious topic, they can miss the mark.

The impulse may be that racism is so at the heart of American culture and popular life that it is expected that a pop culture figure embrace it (similar to why comedians talk so much of ornery subjects such as politics), and that they should not be taken seriously as comedic plays on the feelings of the populace.

However, comedy is nothing if it does not play to the sentiments of the crowd, and the cover of the clown mask is a poor excuse for crude thinking. In Fey’s apology for racist comedy sketches on her show 30rock, she echoed a previous comedians apology, David Letterman, when she said that intent is less important than perception when that perception causes innocent people pain. In Letterman’s statement (on a different subject), Letterman also says it is not about intent but perception that forced his apology and goes so far to say that if you must explain a joke, it wasn’t that funny anyway, so there is no sense in defending it.

Elizabeth Xenakes Fey, or Tina, has been a supporter of progressive movements in the country, but it should not be overstated to what extent, nor should the virtue of this support be overstated. Fey’s famous endorsements of Barack Obama versus John McCain, and of Hilary Clinton versus Donald Trump, and moreover her critical statements of Sarah Palin’s alliance to both McCain and Trump, have been definitive to her identity as a good liberal and progressive person who supports women’s advancements.

Yet, so too did the majority or Americans. It is not a controversial stance to support the candidate that won the popular vote of a national election — and, sadly, many racist people, both aware and unwitting, also vote for so-called “progressive” candidates for different reasons, despite their problematic stances. That is to say, being a Democrat is not exculpatory of anything. It should also be noted that Fey endorsed Clinton over Obama in the primary, and refused to endorse Bernie Sanders (or Clinton) in the next primary, and Fey describes herself and her works as “neutral,” rather than progressive.

Fey’s most famous work in comedy, the impersonation of Sarah Palin wasn’t as scathing as one might expect of a true critic, but was in many cases humanising, and even flattering. Fey was not kind in undermining the Tea Party spokesperson, but Palin was made out to be an odd yet loveable figure, rather than a contemptible one: she was written off. As Fey’s alter ego said herself, ‘it would be egotistical for saturday night live (or anyone else) to believe that a couple of jokes swung the 2008 election.’

Tina Fey has many hard questions to answer for racist depictions in her sketches, television series, and book — and it is not so easy a dodge to say that she once ‘made fun of Sarah Palin.’ Another reviewer stated, “I don’t think Fey comes off as a bad person, I just don’t think she’s funny.” Tina Fey doesn’t come off as a good person, or a bad person, but just presents as an ordinary person, and whether you find Tina Fey (or mor importantly, any of her jokes) funny is a personal and indeterminable matter.

I watched a few of Fey’s “world-famous” skits for this review, and I admit I did mistake Sarah Palin for Fey in their cross-over cameo skit; And the moment I laughed the hardest (in fact the only moment I laughed through the skits) was during the VP Debate Sketch with her fellow southerner, Jason Sudeikis, where “Biden” repeatedly attacked Scranton, Pennsylvania as “the worst place on Earth” — so again, people react to comedy in an unpredictable way, as a basis of personal experience. I don’t think all of Fey’s jokes make it, yet no one can singularly define anything as “funny,” or not, but I do see her as a professional on screen. I don’t give a pass however on bad interest jokes, especially on the mere basis of not liking Donald Trump (who, remember, is also a television celebrity who has worked in comedy, and made jokes that were blatantly racist — and sexist).

Entering Fey’s book, “Bossypants”, with this pre-review (re-preview?) in mind, it introduces to me that this memoir may turn to places unexpected, and that just because it is a celebrity-text does not mean it will be a simple, casual, or homey, ride.

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

A Tale of Red States and Blue States

Once upon a time, there was a state.

It was a large state, with vast stretches of country between its world-class cities. It had communities rich in diversity and activism and ideas – and it had a lot of resentful white people who were just plain old rich.

The richest and most resentful white people created a terrible blight they called “modern conservatism.” They set their wicked curse on the state, and then unleashed it on the nation with two Republican presidents – one lamentable, the next even worse.

There were many along the way who sounded the alarm, but there were more who ignored the danger far too long. The spell had summoned a beast. The beast was hideous and stupid. It was no good at anything except being a hateful beast. But the dark spell had done so much damage that being a hateful beast was enough for the beast to win, at least for a time.

In one version of the story, the state is called “California.”

In another, it is called “Texas.”

It’s strange to think of now, with a decade of sneering about the “left coast” and “San Francisco liberals” and blah blah blah baked into political conventional wisdom, but it’s true. The reactionary modern conservatism which held the whip hand on the backlash to the great civil rights advances of the 1960s was born in California. California voted for Richard Nixon six times: once as their senator, twice as Eisenhower’s vice president, and then three times as the Republican presidential nominee. In between those elections, Nixon of course had to win primaries. In 1968, when he was the Republican front-runner, he faced an upstart challenger who wanted to make sure he’d be racist enough to keep conservative southerners in the tent. That person was not a southerner, but the then-governor of California, Ronald Reagan, who would go on to be the next Republican elected after Nixon.

So what the fuck happened? Well, a lot of things, and I don’t want to pretend to do justice to the generations of righteous activism that pushed back against this disastrous regime. Democrats did occasionally win state-wide – notably, California elected two Democratic women to the Senate in 1992 – even though Orange County was practically a metonym for American conservatism right up until the 2018 midterms. But the turning point that seems to have gotten your average voter to turn on the Republican party for good was in 1994. Governor Pete Wilson, a kind of hard-right proto-Trump, threw his weight behind a hateful anti-immigrant ballot initiative. It passed, even though it was so deranged that it never went into effect because a federal court ruled it unconstitutional within days of the vote, because the California electorate really was that conservative. The electorate changed, almost on a dime. Mexican-American voters organized. Their friends and neighbors and fellow citizens realized that sitting back wasn’t an option. And now the Republican Party of California is a fucking joke.

This isn’t, like, the eternal winds of history blowing microscopic chips off the statue of Ozymandias. If you remember the Clinton presidency, this happened in your lifetime. If you’re a little bit younger than that, it happened in your big cousins’ lifetimes.

Part of what makes it hard to see changes like this is that the dim bulbs in our political media see everything through a horse race lens, where who gets one particular W is the only piece of information worth retaining. You win and you’re clever; you lose and you’re a dumb sucker who tried. Who gets power is really important! But if you only care about that, then you miss the really important trends.

Take the Georgia 6th, the district once represented by Newt fucking Gingrich. Its representative joined Trump’s cabinet in early 2017, at least in part because it was such a supposedly safe Republican seat, so there was a special election for his replacement. Traumatized Democrats and Women’s Marchers threw themselves into the steeply uphill campaign of former John Lewis intern Jon Ossoff. When he came up a few points short, our blue-check media betters tried to turn Ossoff into a punch line stand-in for silly #Resistance liberal losers coping with Trump by losing some more, SUCK IT, MOM! but the other, correct, interpretation is that Ossoff only came up a few points short in a district that was supposed to protect the kookiest of right-wing cranks. His campaign had functioned as kind of an ad hoc boot camp for novice organizers, canvassers, and future school board candidates who had previously been too discouraged and disorganized to take this kind of swing, and it showed Democratic party donors that the district was winnable. So when gun safety advocate and Mother of the Movement Lucy McBath stepped up to the plate in the 2018 midterms, her campaign had the infrastructure it needed, and now she’s well-positioned to be reelected because she’s doing a great job. Meanwhile, Ossoff’s organizing chops and the enthusiastic work his supporters did for Rep. McBath are a big part of why he’s in a dead heat against incumbent Republican Senator David Purdue.

That’s why I’m keeping an eye on the South this year. The presidential campaign there is interesting, but the real story is in those network effects. There’s a rising tide that threatens to make the blue wave of 2018 look like a light spring shower if things break the right way. Just look at the Democratic senate candidates. They’re a diverse group: men and women, Black and white, preacher and fighter pilot. Most are relative newcomers to national audiences, but only some of them are young. Jon Ossoff is just 33; when he was in grade school, Mike Espy of Mississippi was Secretary of Agriculture. What they do seem to have in common is that they are having the time of their fucking lives.

Here’s Espy:

Moving and grooving in McComb. pic.twitter.com/RANCRGGpX7

— Mike Espy (@MikeEspyMS)

October 31, 2020

Ossoff:

The people of Georgia are tired of having a spineless, disgraced politician serve as their Senator. pic.twitter.com/OdaYwFKzmz

— Jon Ossoff (@ossoff)

October 30, 2020

Senator Doug Jones of Alabama:

I know you’ve heard us say it before, but when you see this clip, it bears reappearing: This guy really is clueless. https://t.co/w9YOUHegCW

— Doug Jones (@DougJones)

October 22, 2020

Jamie Harrison of South Carolina:

It's debate night and y'all know I'm going to walk it like I talk it. Let's see if @LindseyGrahamSC can do the same. pic.twitter.com/TNABxsaTEO

— Jaime Harrison (@harrisonjaime)

October 30, 2020

And the bad bitch with her eye on the big prize, MJ Hegar of Texas:

It's about time Texans had a senator as tough as we are. https://t.co/8MQ8Tykmyt pic.twitter.com/bgPr5vtgdh

— MJ Hegar (@mjhegar)

October 16, 2020

Clutch those pearls, John! https://t.co/iWej8MrhtV

— MJ Hegar (@mjhegar)

October 22, 2020

The spineless bootlicker Hegar is challenging, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, is currently resting his dainty patoot in the seat once held by none other than Lyndon Baines Johnson. As president, LBJ would aggressively push for some of the greatest human rights legislation in American history in pursuit of what he called the Great Society. That meant Medicare and Medicaid. It meant a revolution in environmental protections. It meant PBS. And it meant telling the one-party authoritarian regime in the Jim Crow south that America was done with their bullshit, they were going to have real democracy, they were going to do it now, and if they didn’t like it they could eat his ass.

Johnson was a complicated guy and left a complicated legacy. His project required an unusual leader of courage, conviction, and unmitigated savvy, cut with streaks of megalomania and dubious mental health. No architect but Lyndon Johnson would have built the Great Society, and no place but Texas could have built Lyndon Johnson.

Then again, Texas also gave us the Bushes in the late twentieth century. It gave us a terrorist attack on a Biden campaign bus just this weekend.

That darkness is real. So is the long, grinding slog to turn on the light. Like the GA-06 silliness, Democratic efforts in Texas get laughed at as some quixotic waste of resources by arrogant flops. In fact, the past few years of high-profile statewide elections in Texas have been on a pretty clear trajectory. In 2014, Wendy Davis, a state senator from Fort Worth who captured widespread progressive attention with her heroic filibuster of a 2013 state abortion ban, ran for governor. She lost by the ~20-point margin you’d expect in a year where Republicans everywhere did really well, but it was a vitamin B-12 shot to a perpetually overwhelmed state Democratic party. The 2016 Clinton campaign, when it was (correctly!) on the offensive before FBI Director Comey decided he would really prefer a Trump presidency, invested heavily in its Texas ground game. It was always a long shot, but even after the Comey letter and the Texas-specific sabotage by the Russian Internet Research Agency, Texas Democrats cut Trump’s margin there down to single digits. That is to say, they recruited the volunteers and taught the skills and raised the cash and registered the voters to carry the ball way down the field. And in the 2018 midterms, El Paso representative Beto O’Rourke built on all that energy to fight Senator Ted Cruz to a near draw. O’Rourke didn’t quite make it, but he did help a lot of downballot Democrats over the finish line and forced Republicans to light a few oil drums of cash on fire to save a seat that they had always assumed would be safe.

That growth has been possible because of a ton of hard work and persuasion, but it’s also been possible because there was so much untapped potential. As progressives have argued for years, Texas was less of a “red state” than a non-voting state. I’m not a person that usually has a lot of patience for people not bothering to vote, because the people who get to be loud about that are whiny, privileged assholes who can afford to be flip about the right to vote. But there are a lot of people who find it hard because they absolutely do know the weight and importance of voting, because they or their mothers or their grandfathers were beaten and terrorized to keep them away from the polls. They might make the same mouth-noises as the selfish dilettantes about how it doesn’t matter and they’re all corrupt and blah blah blah. But a vote is a tiny little leap of faith. It’s at least a skip of hope. And it hurts to know the weight and importance of that and to keep feeling that disappointment over and over again.

A key thing that Republicans in the South managed to do for a while, but California Republicans didn’t, was to let their misrule seem almost tolerable day to day. As outrageous as the overall trends were, as catastrophic the results were for a lot of people’s lives, it didn’t necessarily feel entirely irrational for lots of people to avoid the inconvenience and disappointment of trying to stop them. But if you’re just going to be a constant, unwavering shit show of incompetence and evil, infuriating people every waking minute of every fucking day for years on end, they’re not going to be deterred by inconvenience and disappointment. They're not going to be deterred by fucking tear gas. They’re going to understand that it’s worth trying to get rid of you, even if it’s a long shot. They’re going to line up to kick you in the shin just for the hell of it. And that’s exactly what millions of them have already done.

These dumbass motherfuckers radicalized Taylor goddamn Swift!

LOOK WHAT YOU MADE HER DO!

So yeah. People who had given up are fucking voting. Texas has already had hundreds of thousands more people vote than voted in all of 2016. BEFORE ELECTION DAY!

Vice President Biden likes to recite a poem by the great Irish bard Seamus Heaney. It’s about how you have to have faith that a better world is possible, even when you don’t have any rational reason to expect it any time soon, because it’s the only way you’ll be able to seize the most precious of opportunities, when “justice can rise up/ And hope and history rhyme.”

Sometimes hope and history walk into a bar to tell dirty jokes for a bachelorette party in downtown Austin. And they rhyme.

For a hundred and fifty years, unreconstructed revanchist terrorist sympathizers have threatened that “the South will rise again.” They mean the treasonous mobsters who called themselves the Confederacy.

Why do those losers get to define the South? Like, literally, they’re losers. They lost.

There’s another South. The terrorists cut it off at the knees, so it never quite rose the first time. But it’s always been there. The South the heroes of Reconstruction tried to build. The South of the Kennedy Space Station and the Center for Disease Control. The South of the French Quarter of New Orleans and the gay neighborhoods of Atlanta. The South of Barbara Jordan, Ann and Cecile Richards, Stacey Abrams, and the young women of the Virginia state legislature. The South of Maya Angelou, Molly Ivins, and Mark Twain. The South of the exiles of Miami and the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. The South of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Representative John Lewis. The South of James Earl Carter, William Jefferson Clinton, and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Once upon a time, there was a colossus. The richest and most resentful white people feared it, for it was both great and good. So they hunted it mercilessly. They tortured and killed its most vulnerable people. They bound it and silenced it and told the rest of the world it didn’t even exist. But they knew that wicked lie was the best they could do, for something so mighty could never be slain by the likes of them.

The giant grows stronger every day as it struggles against its chains, and those chains are turning to rust. One day soon  - maybe in this decade; maybe this week – it will break free. It will rise. And it will shake the earth. Just you watch.

[smokeybrand]

Mutiny

I’m not a fan of Joe Rogen. I find a lot of what he says to be problematic as f*ck but the way he says it, is FAR more damaging. Dude pushes some wild, dangerous, nonsense under the guise of “free speech”, disingenuous “debate”, and insidiously leading questions. Rogen is the Frat Boy version of Tucker Carlson in a lot of ways and that sh*t just doesn’t appeal to me. Beta males who think too highly of themselves listen to this due and take him seriously. These are people who are not self-actualized, who’s entire personality is based on their car or their sneakers or some other superficial bullsh*t they confuse for a personality, and that’s what Rogen’s entire show is; Superficial bullsh*t. So when he pushes dumb-f*ckery like “Don’t get the shot if you’re young and healthy”, these idiots who are either teenagers or have the mentality of teenagers, f*cking listen and we have a spike in cases. Because Joe Rogen said so.

The other day, this asshole bought into that whole “White Fear” sh*t, talking about how the Straight White Male is the most persecuted demo in America and i just groaned. This is the same exact sh*t Carlson does on his show, verbatim, just slightly less racist. It’s the current strategy of what is fast becoming the American Fascist Party, Republicans. It’s hypocritical f*cking nonsense and i hate it. How the f*ck would Joe Rogen, a Straight White Male with a whole ass podcast, be silenced or censored or persecuted/ He’s a multi-millionaire with one of the most popular platforms on f*cking Spotify. How the f*ck would any White person, especially Straight White Males, get silenced in the US? The bones of this country are built to uphold a very specific form of White Supremacy. Hell, cats talk about all these rights and liberties but, in the very beginning, those rights were only extended to White Male Landowners; basically Rich White Men, and guess who the f*ck Joe Rogen is? The constitution had to be amended to include every one else which means this country was designed to be a haven for objective White Supremacy. The fact that they replaced Straight with Rich is just a misnomer used to broaden that division and you have assholes with real audiences buying into that dangerous bullsh*t, disseminating that poison to their followers. And they just drink that persecution complex kool-aid, up. It’s f*cking absurd.

The irony in all of this is the fact that the country is getting younger and browner. Statistically, by the time Gen Z’s kids come of age, we’ll outnumber White people. The margin will be slight but they’ll be the overall minority in this country and that’s why we have all of this fear-mongering and treasonous tantrums. That system the Founding Fathers built to protect their power, is falling apart. It's all a matter of time. Why do you think they're fighting so hard to keep DC and Puerto Rico from becoming actual States? I can guarantee those cats who signed the Constitution never anticipated the influx of melanated people over the years, interbreeding with their lily White sensibilities, or the homogeneity desegregation would bring to society or the way Black culture ended up shaping the entire American zeitgeist or how the Internet just blew the doors off any illusion US citizens had about our true status in the world at large. I was born in 1984. Ten years before i existed, the South was still heavily segregated. My generation, the Millennials, were the very first to be completely free from the social consequences of the Civil Rights Movement. We were far enough removed from that to just see people, not race. I was exposed to so many more cultures, religions, and people, as a kid, than my ma had been when she was young. It wasn’t like, all of a sudden, we were singing kumbaya together, but it was definitely a start, one that has only gained more and more momentum as the Generations who came after mine, started coming of age in a world whose borders are just ceremonial at this point because of the Tech age.

I met my chick and made friends across the globe in a chatroom. One of my closest friends lives in New Zealand. Another stays in Finland. My birthday twin lives in England. She’s a year older than i am and has a beautiful family. My Puerto Rican sister met her dude around the same time i met my chick. He’s from Alabama. She moved from the island to be with him and they've settled down in Georgia where they share a beautiful daughter. My best friend became so close with an Asian girl from Australia, that he adopted her as his own sister. They spoke at least twice a week for the next fifteen years, all the way up until he passed away. The world is much smaller, much clearer, than it has ever  been before, and it turns out that it’s full of color. Color these Straight White Men are, apparently, terrified of. That’s got to be it. That’s got to be why they’re throwing these big ass tantrums and constantly fear-mongering about it. I don’t understand. When Brie Larson said what she said, it was the truth. There are THOUSANDS of films about White dudes you can watch. The entirety of film history is Straight White Males. What is so bad abut getting some chicks or People of Color or some LBGTQ representation in a few leads? Why can't we have strong Black performances in movies where we don't play the “magical Negro” or f*cking Slave? Why can't we have an all Asian cast when the principals aren't constantly fetishized? What is so terrible about giving a role to a Muslim that isn't linked to some ridiculous terrorist trope? Who’s really offended by this and why are they so goddamn fervent about it? Straight White Males, bud.

It’s because their grip on the reins is slipping. The power and the privilege they’ve had for so long, too long, is started to tip in the other direction. The playing field is, ever so slowly, evening out and these Straight White Males are losing their sh*t. They’ll talk about “being racist against white people” and “it's fine to interview everyone but hire cats who are qualified” with one breath but then absolutely savage voting rights directly focused on crippling the Black vote and desperately cling to the idea that 45 still deserves to be president, even though a steady stream of his criminal incompetence has been flowing out of the the White House since he’s left. The level cognitive dissonance is f*cking hilarious. It’s as bad as the GOP complaining about “cancel culture” while literally silencing Liz Cheney. Are you f*cking kidding me? I gotta sit here and listen to a very vocal minority complain about the direction of the MCU because they’ve decided to add a plethora of female and POC roles going forward into Phase Four. They keep asking “who's this for?” and it's obvious it's for everyone, not just Straight White Males. That, to them, means it's going to be bad. Just because the focus has shifted from three White dudes in leading roles, suddenly the MCU has lost it's way. It’s like, all of a sudden, just because the MCU wants to represent their audience as a whole, not just a narrow and shrinking part of it, we’re not supposed to trust in Feige anymore. Are you kidding me? The Green Knight is slated to be another massive hit for A24. The cat who wrote that film was bounced from studio to studio because he created that story specifically as a vehicle for Dev Patel and no major studio wanted to make it with him in the lead. Dev Patel is a f*cking Oscar winner and a brilliant actor but this movie, draped in surreal and beautiful imagery, driven by a visceral, bloody, focus, wasn’t going to get made because the lead this plot was specifically written for, happens to be brown. But Straight White Males are the ones being silenced? Okay, bud.

Joe Rogen is a symptom of a greater problem and it’s the problem of White Fragility. White Fragility fuels the worst of our society. It's the genesis of racism and bigotry. It drives Nationalism and is fertile ground for cults of personality which blossom into whole ass dictatorships. These motherf*ckers are in they’re feelings and will burn this country to the ground if it means they will stop getting their way. Brie Larson calls out the ridiculousness of the race bias in Hollywood? They attack. Arizona flips Blue because Indigenous people and Black folks come out to vote in droves? Voter fraud and four recounts, one months after the election has been called and Biden has already taken office. Jordan Peele says, out loud, to the entire country, that he’s not interested in telling stories with White people in the lead? Shadow banned from Hollywood. Dude was the toast of Hollywood after Get Out and Us. He said what he said and cat's been trapped behind the camera as a Producer ever since. It’s nuts because these people complaining about how hard it is to be and how unfair the current social climate is to Straight White Males, have called Twatter NPCs whiny, SJW, children, for years. Bro,you’re the same, just racist! You are the Trump to their Obama. You are the thermodynamic reaction to their Civil action. You assholes are arguing the same merit, just on the opposite ends of the spectrum so, if they’re whiny assholes, wouldn’t you have to be, too? The only difference is that the Twatter assholes have a zeal for inclusion while you Rogen Bros have a penchant for White Supremacy and, given the choice, I'd have to agree with the Blue Checkmarks in this regard.

Straight White Males have had the run of this country since before it was a country and look what they’ve done with it. Look where we are, right now, in the year of our lord, 2021. This is as far as we have come under their stewardship. It’s time for a new captain, i think. Sorry if that hard truth hurts your feelings. Now please steer us away from those very obvious rocks. I’d rather not violently crash into that reef and sink into a watery grave before we can get our hands on the wheel to right this ship, all because you assholes are in your feelings, thank you.

[rimalaw]

Why this Non-Trump Voter Thinks Trump Could Win 2020

I am a registered independent and both parties have ideals I agree with, and sadly those I don’t. Therefore, I am always left out and just looking for who will better support some of the more important values that I believe in. I did not vote for Trump, and because I need healthcare (among other things), I cannot support a man who wants to destroy the healthcare plan that I am on, without a real plan in place that will protect people with pre-existing conditions.  Trump says ObamaCare is a horrible program! But what the heck has he offered??? Nothing!  I can't take small talk to the doctor or hospital if and when you take away my health plan, and have to wait for small business enrollment in Florida (1x a year) to kick in and charge me tons of money to cover my pre-existing condition! 

When Bush was President, health insurance was costing me over $1,200/month, and now under the Affordable Care Act (a/k/a Obama Care which is really why Trump hates it... it doesn’t have his NAME!!), I am paying approximately $600.00 a month for a really good plan. Make no mistake, by now my plan would cost AT LEAST $1400.00-$1500.00, since I am 16-20 years older than when Bush was President.  Let me not forget how Obamacare saved the life of my best friend, who would otherwise NOT have gone to the doctor, and not have discovered a life threatening illness, which but for the Grace of God, she did. Because of her health plan, she received the best care and treatment, and thank God survived one of the worst diagnosis one could get.   She got the plan two (2) weeks before she went to the doctor!  This is what Trump wants to take away! Trump wants to take away lifesaving care without a REAL PLAN in place to help millions of Americans.

And make no mistake; sadly, I think people who are on that plan, who rely on this plan, who have family or friends who need that plan, etc. etc. will still NAIVELY and IGNORANTLY vote for Trump. 

Why do I think that enough people would vote for Trump and that he can win?  Well... Let’s think about it:

1-He is campaigning like a high energy Super Bowl Team in all the swing states, bringing with him his own type of electrifying energy, electrifying his base, and those who are still on the fence and can feel some of that electricity as the attendees and media blare their excitement of his visit.  Make no mistake, these visits matter.  When I ran for Judge 14 years ago, I was an unknown an the youngest in my race.  I didn’t have the type of ethnic or Anglo name needed to win in my County.  However, every area that I was able to heavily campaign in, make speeches, meet people, I WON. I didn’t win that election, but I won those areas.  So I realized that meeting people matters, and in this race, make no mistake, these super spreader events excite people.  They don’t care about COVID while they are there, and for the most part have learned to live with it.  They just care that the biggest Super Bowl team came to their town and made them feel GOOD!  I know Biden has toured, but I’m sorry it doesn’t come close. I know he was doing social distancing etc, but the car thing isn’t exciting nor generating the amount of crowds and energy that it needs. 

2-COVID- yes believe it or not, without COVID, Trump might have been up in the polls without issue.  Then COVID happened which threw him down in the polls, and then his apparent lack of handling it, threw him even further down.  Then he got COVID, and believe it or not, even though he didn’t seize the opportunity to come out more contrite, which would have assured him a win, he still earned a lot of points. How: A) because America saw him as human and actually felt scared for their President (even some of the ones that didn’t vote for him); B) America got to see that he BEAT IT!  Yes, he has the best doctors and treatment etc, but America saw that this 74 year old overweight man, who got sick enough to need treatment, still BEAT IT!  So now America sees COVID (foolishly or not) not to be so feared, which deep down everyone wants to believe. These two results of Trump getting COVID actually earned him voters as people felt scared for him and then happy at his beating COVID, signaling the Country and they could too could slay this dragon; and finally C) people are seeing the country economically recover and attributing this to his lack of fear of COVID, and the desire to keep the country out of lockdown which most Americans are fed up with.  

3-Fracking- For the love of God Joe, you don’t denounce fracking like that when you need the swing states in the way that you do.  Instead you CONFIDENTLY say, “don’t worry, our plan is to slowly bring in safe alternate sources of energy while we freely train current workers and so many more (as we will have so many jobs created) to transition into great and even BETTER paying safer jobs. NO ONE WILL LOSE ONE JOB, and I can guarantee even BETTER Jobs for you all.”  But instead, you have Trump in Pennsylvania, and other swing states scaring people that they will lose their jobs.

4-Law and Order-Make no mistake, I believe the police have systemic racism and needs serious training and overhauling.  But Biden and Democrats need to COMPLETELY distance themselves from the anarchist propaganda of defunding the police. That was NEVER a train to ride.  From the first use of those words, BIDEN should have never bitten, not even a nibble. Now with the visual of businesses boarding up, Trump is touting about these rioters and giving the illusion to those voters less capable to comprehend the difference, that this is what the Democrats, i.e. Joe are doing and allowing. From the get go, Dems and Joe should have aggressively, I mean hot tooting crazy like attacked and distances themselves from it. 

5-COVID AGAIN-I wear masks (2), I barely go out, etc, but like most Americans, we are tired of hearing about COVID.  When that is all that you hear, gloom and doom, and Biden talks about dark days, it just doesn’t sit so well.  Strangely enough, to people on the fence now, Trump seems like the guy that wants to give you freedom and a cheery positive outlook of life, while the Democrats, CNN, MSNBC, etc., are painting this bleak picture and more lockdowns, that no one wants to keep hearing about. 

6-The Darn Polls- So many polls tooting a Biden victory whether true or not, are only making on the fence people, the lazy, the unmotivated, the unenergized Democratic voters say, “they don’t need me, ... I’m not so excited.. or Biden will win anyway.” Meanwhile, the Trump supporters are freaking out and making sure they show up in massive droves to help their Super Bowl Team, I mean their guy. Plus, any poll should really discount a lot of points away from Biden, because really, there are a lot of paranoid secretive, conspiracy believing, or seemingly ashamed Trump voters who will not participate.  Remember, a bleeding hard liberal is more likely to be kind to a pollster and answer a poll; and a right winger will say, “I have nothing to say, leave me alone,” hang up, etc...

7-Socialism-Kill this socialism crap- The Dems should have killed this idea long ago, and Biden should have been VERY ASSERTIVE and vocal about how he is for middle of the road values (yes I know this might alienate the Bernie people, but that’s what Bernie is for. And if this party is so crazy to sit out and let Trump win because Biden isn’t left enough, well then the party has bigger issues which no amount of therapy can fix). 

8-The last Debate- Trump basically showed people he is not so crazy, he can have restraint, he wasn’t rude. People who were running away from him after the first debate or on the fence, came back after he showed America and the world that he isn’t so bad. 

9-Strength and POWER- Basically, aside from the fact that Trump often appears to be a bully, lately, more than anything he has shown stamina and strength.  People like that, and want to join the stronger looking team, and the man that never ever seems to stop, and confidently never takes NO for an answer. People, like to support the one that appears to never back down, never accept defeat, never look weak, and never quit!

10-Too many people believe his lies, those of the crazies on Facebook, and the alt right that disseminate the worst of the fake news. Sadly THE DEMS DON'T STRONGLY and DEFINITIVELY ATTACK THEM!! Every talking point should have been hit with a barrage of targeted commercials and aggressive stump speeches. People need to be told for example, “TRUMP brags about the economy, he hopes you have amnesia and forget that OBAMA left him with a booming economy, and only an untrained monkey could ruin it.  All Trump did was NOT destroy it YET, but his tax cuts to the MILLIONAIRES (not you AMERICA making under 400k) will cause us a depression if he is in office four more years because you can only pay so much to help the country without having income we used to rely on coming in.” 

Well, that’s all folks. I hope I am wrong, but if it doesn’t go as the untrustworthy polls show, these are some of the main reasons why. These points are for that small percentage that pick the winner in most Presidential elections, not for the firmly committed of either party. Also, if Biden doesn’t win, then those who protested this summer did not all come out to vote, and that’s shameful! 

[remazdo]

It’s about time I shared this...

On July 3rd I was minding my own business and looking though my Facebook feed, as I am prone to do in times of great boredom, when I stumbled across a news article titled “Trump dismisses need for climate change action: ‘we have the cleanest water we’ve ever had, we have the cleanest air’”. Now normally I do not engage in drama on the internet, I like my quite little corner where I can read and watch everything that is happening, but this time it was different. You see, when it comes to things that have to do with environment, I can feel rather passionate, so I shared and added my own little bit at the top that said

“Cleanest air and water compared to where? Venus? Titan? Flint, Michigan? O___o does anyone know where I can get a copy of these reports?”

I should have known better, I received a few funny comments, and then received the one that prompted the writing of this particular post you are reading now.

“Our Country is one of the cleanest I’ve ever been to. Yes he’s absolutely right if the rest of the world was as clean as America wouldn’t have that problem why don’t you go protest in China”

I was taken aback. It wasn’t that this person wasn’t known to say things like this, it was that I am not accustomed to being the start of or even being a part of such internet drama. I felt something inside myself, something my ancestors probably felt when the faced something they knew was wrong and that something had to be done. The feeling led me to do the one thing I never thought I would, I responded...

“This is very true, and I’m not disputing that fact. I’m actually very glad you brought that up. My point here is that the segregation of countries is causing us to miss other important things. I live in California, and the LA aqueduct drained lake Owens, the dust particles from the now dry lake bed are a carcinogen and particles of that lake have been found in lung cancer patients as far away as Russia.

The point I’m making here is that if one country has bad air, we all have bad air. It doesn’t matter the distance and toxins do not obey borders. Everything in this world is cause and effect, reactions even. If you strike a person in the solar plexus, he will double over. You can then strike him in the face or throat easier because you know where it will be moving. If we stand by as an attacker strikes at us and don’t react then aren’t we giving up? Chemicals, toxins, carcinogens. These are our attacker. By not trying to do something, even if it’s uncomfortable or hard to do, then we are going to be beaten. We need to as a species defend ourselves from the threat. And segregation will only make it harder to do. I’d rather be ready for a fight then pretend one won’t happen.

That being said, I do agree with you that America is one of the more clean countries. I just think it could be cleaner.

also, I want you to know that I’m not trying to upset, I just like a good debate and I love hearing everyone’s side of things. It’s the philosopher in me. I would actually love to talk about this topic further when I’m not heading to work if you are up for it.”

I felt the way I responded would have helped steer my point home, and hopefully prevent the online arguing I am so adverse to...unfortunately that is not how these things tend to go. His response was as follows.

“no debate. It’s liberal fools that destroyed California with open borders. You stated it your self segregation of countries. It’s what keeps out disease. Keeps people safe. You and your ideas are what is killing the American. Dream. Don’t protest here, move to China and do your whining. See how far it gets you.”

The feeling got stronger, I felt like fighting against injustice, standing shoulder to shoulder with my brothers and sisters to save the planet, I heard the ancestors screaming in my ears. I spent the next two days writing a response, but Facebook wouldn’t let me send the whole thing, it was to long. I shared it with two close friends, and they suggested I post it someplace where it may actually do some good, and that leads me to here. I hope you all enjoy the following.

“I really would like to keep this from becoming an argument and keep this strictly scholarly, but I would like to make a few points. The first being that I am not a Democrat, I am republican. But that doesn’t change the fact that I am also a tactician, a science major, and a martial artist. Being those things means a few things. The first of those is that I stand for what the definition of republican means.

Republican: adj.

having the supreme power lying in the body of citizens entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them or characteristic of such government.

I will be adding links below anything in quotations to my sources to allow for citation.

“The core beliefs of the Republican Party are centered on the idea that each person is responsible for their own place within society. The party believes that the government’s role is to enable the people to secure the benefits of society for themselves, their families, and for those who are unable to do so for themselves. Republicans believe in limiting the Government’s intervention in the work of the individual towards prosperity. The government should only intervene when society cannot function at the level of the individual. This also means that the party believes in keeping the government as close to the individual as possible, and should be focused mainly on the state and community level, not centered at a federal level.”

https://www.republicanviews.org/what-is-a-republican-republican-definition/

Now that I believe I have put my political stance in order, let’s move on.

From a tacticians point of view, the only thing we have to loose by repairing the environment is money and time. I would rather prepare for a possible problem and be proactive then pretend it is impossible that it could happen and be reactionary. Preparation is always better then procrastination. To quote Issui Sensei, “During a state of order you should consider and prepare for war and in a time of disorder you should think for the best way to bring about peace.” If you believe we are in a state of order, then you need to be ready for and open to anything that may happen that brings disorder. If you believe we are in a state of disorder, then you shouldn’t be arguing with everyone and should be open to new ideas and thoughts in a hopes to find a way to bring about order again. Anything less then that is ignorance and arrogance.

Next, from a scientific perspective. I am not one that just excepts things blindly, if the president says we have the cleanest air and water, I would like to see the report. That is all. If he said we had the dirtiest water and air, I would want to see the report. The fact is that I don’t just except climate change because. Scientist tells me its real, except it because I myself have done the experiments in my own home and have see the results. I am not excepting the word of someone else, I am excepting my own word on it. That being said, if you could provide me with tangible data that said we are not dooming our species, and it was from a trusted source or from multiple sources, then I would be willing to except it as truth. It really is that simple. If you want to change my mind, it is possible, but you need data, reports, and proof.

Now from a martial artist viewpoint. I think I covered that in my other post, but I will go over it again. If you get into a fight you do everything you can to survive, you punch and kick and bite. It’s my life or theirs. That is what we have here. Not between to people, but between all humans on earth and the threat of extinction. I will fight, and it doesn’t matter where I fight, because no matter how much better America is compared to someone else, it can always be better then its current state. No matter how good you are at fighting, there is always someone better out there, and you can always train harder and be better then yourself. So no matter how good America can be, it can always improve.

Okay, now let’s dissect the “killing the American Dream” statement you made.

The historian James Truslow Adams first defined the American dream in 1931 by saying "The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement." And it is protected in the Declaration of Independence where it says “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Here it clearly says all men, not just Americans. It is an ideal that is meant to be without borders and self evident in all people. If you call yourself American then you have to believe in this common ideal.

https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-the-american-dream-quotes-and-history-3306009

However, we are seeing this ideal being terribly twisted for personal gain and profit. People’s liberties are being taken, and their rights are being infringed upon. The follow pictures in the link below are examples of those rights being infringed upon. If you can look at these people and tell me that you would be able to do what they are and it wouldn’t be against your inalienable rights then my point is moot, because you will have proven to me that this is the normal way all humans should be treated. But if you wouldn’t willing live the way these people are being forced to live, then you will have to agree with me that it isn’t American to do so, and anyone doing this to another person is not only morally bankrupt, but also un-American. “All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” “Whatever is hurtful to you, do not do to any other person.” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” I think these words have lost their meaning today. And if you say my thoughts here are liberal brain washing, I would state that these ideals are in fact republican based off of the definition above.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BzOctt1ne_x/?igshid=1c05wg1vwiabz

It is true that people spread diseases, it is also true that animals spread disease as well, especially livestock. So if we are to shut our borders to the world, it would only make sense to provide better regulations to livestock as well. Yet that threat is also being over looked. It’s also important to note that my argument was not against border control, but for the well being of our environment. I know that climate change is real, and not because I saw it on the news, I in fact do not watch the news. All the news is propaganda. All news agencies are owned by the same companies. Instead I do my own research rather then just repeating something that some face on the television told me. If people could just get rid of their personal biases, try to work to helping other people, helping the planet, helping life, then we would have a great America again. But while America spends more money on the prison system then the school system, women’s bodies are seen as property of the state, the melanin content of a persons skin dictates your worth in society, or those in need at the steps of the temple are cast out to die in the streets America will never be as great as it could be, no where near. Nowhere in any of the documents for this country does it ever say that hate and segregation are the way to me things better, it only talks about unification and good will towards all men. And THESE are what it really means to be American, Republican, and human. We should be setting the example, not just ignoring it till it goes away and blaming others for not doing enough. America is supposed to be better then that.”

I would like thank anyone who was able to make it through this lengthy post, it was something I felt I needed to put out there into the world.

[douxreviews]

Jessica Jones - ‘A.K.A. Hero Pants’ Review

“No one’s ever who you need them to be.”

I’ve never been much of a gamer but this show continually brings the D&D alignments to mind. Jessica is the epitome of chaotic good. Good guys should be rewarded and the bad guys should be punished, laws be damned. Her only problem is determining good from bad.

Her attempts at lawful good failed miserably when she had to choose between punishing Sallinger or saving Trish. Now Jessica is reaping what she sowed. The police may not suspect her of evidence tampering but the murder of a police officer kinda trumps that, anyway. Solving Nussbaumer’s murder is now added to her already overflowing plate which includes stopping a serial killer while planning the funeral for her adoptive mother.

Jessica's first suspect is Erik who, if we’re being honest, is probably a true neutral. Or, at least he was. Erik is perfectly willing to follow the law, but not averse to bending it if it benefits him. However, thanks to his particular gifts, he’s not one to harm the innocent. Has he decided to try on his “hero pants” as Jessica put it and punish Nussbaumer? Considering that Nussbaumer died, wouldn’t that make Erik more villain than hero?

When Jessica confronts Erik about Nussbaumer’s death he claims innocence. He may have omitted certain facts but to my knowledge, he’s never lied to Jessica. Is it the lack of any other viable suspect that made her so loathe to believe him? Or just her general cynicism about human nature? More importantly, did she go over to his place and sleep with him just for the opportunity to search his apartment?

If we continue with the alignment theory, Hogarth would have to be lawful evil. She uses the law to protect herself and those she cares about as well as to attack anyone she considers a threat. Her willingness to “color outside the lines” may have been the intersection point in her Venn diagram with Jessica. However, even Jeri is having a hard time justifying representing a serial killer. Is her impending death giving her pause? Is she trying to make amends or just telling everyone what they want to hear?

Kith finally recognizes Jeri for what she is just as Jeri may be trying to change. And that is a heavily accented may. Yet Kith's need to protect herself and her son makes unleashing Jeri on her enemies a viable option. Does that make Kith neutral or push her into evil territory?

Malcolm has traded the lawful evil of Hogarth’s world for the chaotic good of Jessica’s. Neither is a particularly good fit. Malcolm still needs to figure out who he is and what he wants. On the plus side, he’s honest enough to own up to his actions. However, Zaya is not a bad person, and while she may have assumed he wanted the same things she did, she never forced him to do or be anything. Breaking up with her because of her association with Hogarth was not his finest hour.

Neither was his tumble with Brianna. I have no issues with them hooking up. But Malcolm’s desire seemed to have more to do with Brianna believing he was a “good guy” than because of any actual attraction.

Which leads us back to Trish. Once upon a time, she could have been considered lawful good in opposition to Jessica’s chaotic version. However, after watching the law fail Jessica in season one, she joined Jessica’s chaos in season two. Unfortunately, her worldview is far more simplistic than Jessica’s and her need to punish is far more direct. One might excuse Trish’s desire to kill Sallinger due to her mother’s murder. But killing Nussbaumer or Montero, as we’re being led to believe she did, definitely crosses the evil boundary.

Is Trish’s lack of impulse control a result of Malus’ experiment or the result of her addictive personality? Either way, it has surpassed a mere lack of faith in the authorities. Whether that’s because she no longer understands the distinction between good and evil (i.e. killing) or no longer cares is up for debate.

All of which is shown through the prism of Dorothy’s death. Jessica compares Dorothy’s last-ditch efforts to redeem herself with Jeri’s death’s door manipulations. And as much as Trish resented her mother, her speech on Dorothy’s hatred of wasting talent sounds like a justification of her own actions and a rebuke of Jessica’s approach. Finally, Malcolm’s tryst with Brianna at the expense of supporting Jessica and Trish at the funeral proves he’s not the “good guy” he wants to be.

This episode was an interesting character exploration. Thus my examination of the alignment theory. But no progress was made in the quest to stop the Big Bad and there was little forward momentum in the search for Nussbaumer’s killer until the final moments. It seems that Erik and Trish may both be trying on their hero pants and it doesn’t look like they fit.

3 out of 5 arrest warrants

Parting Thoughts:

Why would Trish’s wrists be bruised and not her hands? You don’t usually beat people to death with your wrists.

Does anyone else wonder what would happen to Erik’s head if he ever met Jeri?

New York’s Finest has not been so fine. This is not the first time they failed to watch all the entrances of the house of the person they are staking out. Then there’s the added bonus of Defford admitting she knew Nussbaumer was dirty and didn’t seem to care.

Sallinger was notably absent from this episode. I did not miss him.

Just for the record, I LOVE Gillian.

Quotes:

Jessica: “I would say ‘it wasn’t me,’ but it kind of loses impact after the 50th time.”

Defford: “Your hands have been murder weapons before.”

Jessica: “Don’t antagonize them. I’ve got that part covered.”

Kith: “What fresh hell has Peter’s crimes brought me today?”

Erik: “I’ve never wished my power on anybody, but if you had it right now, you’d be standing here headache-free.”

Malcolm: “I quit.” Jessica: “Got fired.” Malcolm: “Both.” Jessica: “Welcome back to humanity.”

Jessica: “Dorothy had no clue that she was about to die and even she wanted to do something good before she checked out. You know you're dying. What are you doing?”

Jessica: “What did you tell them.” Gillian: “That I’d never personally seen you murder anyone.” Jessica: “Thanks.”

Jessica: “There’s nothing I hate more than searching for something I don’t want to find.”

Malcolm: “What am I looking for?” Jessica: “Proof of life.”

---

Shari loves sci-fi, fantasy, supernatural, and anything with a cape.

[modernsocialist]

A Socialist Brexit...

Ok. I'll admit that not every Brexiter is Daily Mail Gammon. Not everyone who wants to leave is racist or xenophobic, thinking that Brexit is an opportunity for England to get its Empire back. Some of those outside the cosmopolitan areas simply feel overwhelmed by the huge social changes that have taken place thanks to mass immigration, added to rapid technological change and the linked erosion of workers’ rights. This on top of the austerity which has also contributed to damaging our social cohesion. This may explain why some Socialists see Brexit as an opportunity. I think this is mistaken even though the Socialist argument for being outside Europe has almost as long a history as the argument for a united Europe. So where does the idea of a Socialist Brexit originate? Well, it is mainly from the 1970s when it was formulated to serve the Soviet foreign policy of keeping Europe divided. The Kremlin didn't want Britain to join the then EEC, so invented the idea of it as a 'Capitalist Club'. The Soviets then used the CPGB, crypto-communists, fellow-travellers & others sympathetic to them to spread their propaganda. George Orwell, the anti-Soviet Socialist, recognised the need for a union of the Western European states for security against a belligerent Russian imperialism when he wrote ‘Towards European Unity’ in 1947. Orwell also pointed out the benefits of economic cooperation, which has been borne out by the success of Western Europe and its ability to give its citizens a decent minimum standard of living. But recent times have shown a new stridence by President Putin, just as the US under Trump has talked about cutting funding to NATO. This means we are entering into an age where Europe will need to look after itself militarily. Not a good prospect if one of the EU’s most powerful players is leaving to go it alone. As in the 1970s, the Kremlin has interfered in our democratic processes by using the Morning Star, Russia Today etc. to push its propaganda into the debate around the EU referendum. Only this time, the use of traditional media has been joined by attacks on social media using bots to spread fake news and fire up certain points of view in online debates. It is also extremely likely that they provided funds for the Leave campaign. This proves how important it is for Russia for the UK to be separated from the rest of Europe. Some Socialist Brexiters claim that we cannot achieve Socialism while within the EU. We are told it is a tool of corporations, which is partly true, but only because it was Britain that used its voice to push for pro-capital transformation. Attempts to make changes are condemned as futile. As a lone voice maybe. But if the British did push for more democratic change, though, our weight would convince other countries to join in. Also, the ‘red-tape’ that the free-market right hates consists of workers’ rights and consumer protections. We could successfully push for more, especially with the last referendum result in hand. Demands could be made, using the result as a mandate, claiming that if there wasn’t movement towards more democracy and improvements to the economic system we would leave as the electorate demanded. Still, Brexiter Socialists should bear in mind that the Thatcher revolution would've been far worse without the restraints of Brussels. If we leave the EU it will be no victory for Socialism. The Right will be emboldened by its victory and take the chance to burn all the 'red-tape' and completely free up the markets, leaving us under a form of Absolute Capitalism. There is more chance of achieving Socialism Europe-wide than there is only here at home, because we live in a globalised world and need foreign trade, and for Internationalists a wide as possible Socialism should always be preferable. We should also remember that the last person wanting Socialism in one country was Stalin. While we wouldn’t become a totalitarian state, our economy would most definitely be damaged by the reduced trading possibilities of being a lone actor, losing the benefits of partnership in a globally powerful bloc. To avoid a race to the bottom in taxes, workers’ rights and consumer protection we need to work with others. The EU is the powerful bloc that is required, and that we are lucky enough to members of, to achieve this. This is one of the positive reasons for the UK to remain a member of the EU. It should also be borne in mind that throughout the Brexit process business leaders have been consulted by the government but that the Trade Unions have not. While this is because the Tories have been in charge, even if Jeremy Corbyn came in, at this late stage there is not much he could do to change what has been set in place. Unless Article 50 was revoked and the negotiations started again from scratch, there is no chance of a ‘jobs first Brexit’, even if that were remotely possible anyway, considering the economic harm of any form of Brexit. So, it should be kept in mind that if Labour did take over the Brexit talks, they would do as badly as Theresa May has done. Jeremy Corbyn would be discredited by the inevitable bad deal & the Labour Left would be tainted by it for a generation. The EU has made it clear that no other deal is possible. All Socialists must now demand that Article 50 be revoked and if a second referendum is called, be ready to clearly and strongly campaign for Remain.

[beinglibertarian]

The Case for Censorship

Remember when Kanye West said “President Bush does not care about black people” while standing next to a distraught-looking Mike Meyers? That was a simpler time.

Remember the music that came out during that same era? So many artists denounced the Bush administration. Both Linkin Park and Nine Inch Nails created albums annoyingly political in nature. And yet, that was a simpler time.

Remember when you watched Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD before it became overtly political? The final straw for me was when an African-American character stated, “and I thought my mother was bad when she started watching Fox News.” No black man would say that about his mother. But alas, that was a simpler time.

Fast-forward to today, and we find ourselves living in a reality where Democrats have adopted Antifa’s tactics. I’ll never forget seeing Kavanaugh’s daughters rushed out of his hearing as paid protesters stood up and shouted their nonsensical statements during what should have been an otherwise benign affair. A good man was tarnished and attacked for no reason because these are trying times in which we live.

President Donald Trump is no Kavanaugh, though. He has skeletons in his closets. And thanks to the GOP losing the House, it can be safely assumed that the next two years will entail nonstop investigations. Once these baseless inquiries start issuing their subpoenas, men and women inside the Trump administration will undoubtedly disappear into a haze of legal bills. Combined with Robert Mueller’s trophy hunting, friends and colleagues of Trump will continue to fall by the wayside or morph into Democrat songbirds for the purpose of avoiding bankruptcy or jail time or both. General Flynn, for example, should have never been treated as poorly as he was.

The lack of civility shown in today’s politics borders on outright cruelty. You would think it would reach a saturation point, but it hasn’t. Progressive bannermen like Don Lemon will ensure the message of malevolence furthers onward toward newer and greater heights. And recently, I have noticed such an achievement.

Most outlets actively portray Trump and his supporters as unhinged white supremacist neo-Nazi xenophobic blah-blah-blah nationalists. For instance, one could infer Trump is the new Grand Wizard of the KKK with the way he is discussed in Ebony.

The views expressed in this article do not qualify under Being Libertarian’s editorial requirements, however, in the interests of open debate and in view of the author’s past contributions, it has been published. – The Editor

The level of vitriol writers and talking-heads have against this man makes me wish Trump would enact a new version of the Alien and Sedition Act if only for the sake of calming down the rhetoric. After all, it wasn’t that long ago a group of GOP representatives had 70 rounds of ammunition shot at them on a baseball field.

Furthermore, you don’t have to be a psychiatrist to conclude the constant drumbeat of negativity against the Trump administration and his allies will trigger another act of violence. Free speech is good so long as it is sincere and true. But that is not the case with today’s national dialogue. Today, we are living in the world of 1984. Everything is doublespeak and party-line platitudes. And our media is no longer in the business of telling the truth. All of this feels like the second act of a very macabre play. Therefore, in my ever so humble opinion, the beast we call free speech… needs tempering.

I don’t know what the answer is to cure or curb the nonstop word vomit that is our national dialogue. I know Big Tech is isolating the wrong crowd by banning the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos and Gavin McInnes, and our benevolent national broadcasters are canceling the wrong shows like Last Man Standing and Roseanne.

At this point, I wonder if China isn’t right to censor its people. For instance, their nation moves forward because no one can look back at the Tiananmen Square incident. How much better off would we be as a nation if similar black marks in our history could be forgotten? No more slavery… civil war… civil rights… Tuskegee Trials… everything and everyone could just… heal.

Prove me wrong; but how is constantly revisiting the worst parts of American History doing us any favors? The way I see it, we’re just supporting and nurturing future social justice warriors.

This article represents the views of the author exclusively, and not those of Being Libertarian LLC.

The post The Case for Censorship appeared first on Being Libertarian.

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[magicalmelonball]

The Unpopular Opinion: Nazis vs People Perceived as Nazis

Note: I've decided to continue my rant series, but the titles will be changed now. They will be called "The Unpopular Opinion" series. Just so you know.

READ BEFORE CONTINUING:

Please note that I do not condone the behavior of anyone that describes themselves as a nazi, white supremacist, etc. If you continue reading and think that I do so, then you're just an idiot that can't read, and I'm not at all sorry for saying that. You're just as bad as the Nazis you go after.

Congratulations, Liberals and Anti-Fa, you played yourself.

We already know what happened last weekend. A Nazi dumbass ran over people in an effort to harm them and ended up killing a woman in the process. I'm pretty sure we can all agree that this person is a pimple on the face of America that needs to be popped. He can rot in jail for all I care. I wouldn't shed a tear for this man if he got the death penalty either, to be honest.

However, because of this tragic event, people are using it as an excuse to go after anyone they disagree with.

"B-b-b-but Ginny, the people we disagree with are ACTUAL NAZIS! How can you say that?!"

Of course, the idiots at the protest (that was once peaceful until anti-fa did show up, btw) are Nazis, no doubt. But what about everyone else? 

Are they? 

Are they real, actual Nazis? 

Let's take a look over the past year, shall we?

We started off slandering anyone that wanted to vote for Trump as a "deplorable," thanks to Hillary Clinton. You know, the same woman that said that Robert Byrd was a hero of hers. 

https://twitter.com/StockMonsterUSA/status/896798087393427456 

Then news post after news post came out to slander what Trump said about illegal aliens, spinning it as if he said he was going to deport all Mexican, illegal or not. So it became okay, thanks to the media and ignorant folk, to call anyone that remotely agreed with Trump in any way as some sort of racist, white supremacists, and/or a Nazi.

If you DARED to share an opinion that doesn't fit the radical left (or the alt-left as I like to call them) then you were labeled. Slandered. They took anything a person said and twisted it in the worse way possible to make themselves look right. A good example I have is tweets sent to me on Twitter just yesterday:

https://twitter.com/mahoumelonball/status/897521956861423616

vs

https://twitter.com/jampackedballs/status/897523028464152576

Note what I actually fucking said and what this idiot tried to spin it as me saying. This is a VERY COMMON practice for Liberals. Either they twist your words, or they start attacking your character, your appearance, etc etc. (Or, fuck, both depending on the idiot you're talking to.) Noted director of Frozen and Tangled, Lino DiSalvo, retweeted the call by a radical group to identify anyone they thought was at the protest. Retweeted pictures to use to identify. I called him out like so:

https://twitter.com/mahoumelonball/status/897143630007349248

To which he decided to twist what I said:

https://twitter.com/LinoD/status/897218339482808321

I replied my argument, saying the using doxxing to go after people they don't like will not just hurt the person you're going after, but could hurt their family, friends, or loved ones that may not even be involved with that bullshit.

He still as yet to respond, especially after THIS came out today:

https://twitter.com/Independent/status/897538573326483457

Title: "Charlottesville: Arkansas man trolled on social media after being wrongly identified among white nationalists"

Someone that wasn't even there was falsely identified as being there. He had to flee his home. He's been attacked relentlessly and called horrible names.

HE WASN'T THERE.

As of this post, Lino has still not acknowledged the response or the news articled that proved me right. I've determined he's just another ignorant asshole that refuses to believe he was wrong. Just like anyone else that seems to think it's okay to attack people with violence as long as they THINK the people they're attacking is a Nazi.

ANYWAY...

Let's move on to everyone saying that this is Trump's fault.

I'm sorry, are you mentally challenged? (I would say retarded, but I'm pretty sure I'm already going to get hate for this alone. Don't need the overly sensitive coming over and crying about "THAT'S OFFENSIVE TO PEOPLE I'M SPEAKING FOR.")

Are you going off the article after article claiming that he's racist without ever actually showing proof that he is? Or are you going off that one illegal immigrant comment again that was twisted into the worse way it can be? Surely you can't be talking about the Democrats that got money from Klan members or the KKK secs that approved of them. And in no way are you referring to where he called David Duke a bigot and racist?

Or are you just blindingly following whatever MSM tells you to believe without taking in context or looking up things in the past yourself?

HMMMM.

If this is Trump's fault, then it's Obama's fault that the BLM member killed 5 cops in Texas during a BLM rally. It's then also Obama's fault that three black adults kidnapped a white kid and tortured him because of Trump. It's also Obama's fault that his administration pushed this divide between white and black people even harder in the early 2010s. (No, wait, that's not sarcasm. That's actually fucking true.)

Welcome to this new world order. Where people are so overly sensitive that someone they don't agree with speaks and they scream and cry for a safe space. Where people try to claim you can't be racist against white people because they never knew of oppression (because white people can't be poor and treated like shit either, amirite?). Where people tear down statues and burn paintings because they were either about white people or just a part of history they don't like instead of going down the sane route and having a community meeting about it and speaking and debating like ACTUAL FUCKING ADULTS!

Ahem... I digress...

What we're seeing now is Main Stream Media spinning things to not only try to start a war with Russia, but pushing for this potential fire keg of a new Civil War. We're seeing people that refuse to look up information or even bother to read the other side because "muh feelings." No one wants to admit they're wrong on both sides, to be honest, but what a world we live in when the media spins Anti-Fa as some sort of heroic group that attacked students at Berkely with broken bottles and U-Lock bike locks.

Because they were all racists?

Right?

Because the media said so.

....Right?

"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history." "In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." "Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." "Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it."

-George Orwell

[superdweebs]

Noticed someone citing that Kirby vs. Fascist Phone-Trollers anecdote on your other page, and I think they missed a crucial bit: Jack was not *initiating* violence. He wasn't trawling the block with a crowbar, intent on clubbing the next blue-eyed kid who sorta seemed to fit the bill. He was *responding* to a mealy-mouthed calling-out, and while I'm sure he would've thrown down if said shitheads had stuck around, that still isn't the Righteous Pre-emptive Aggro(C) being flogged by this pundit.

I generally try to avoid politics on this blog, but since this current situation is tied into comics as well as politics, I give to you a comic history lesson:

Back during World War II, the majority of the American public was in fact initially opposed to punching Nazis.

Seriously! The fighting over in Europe was viewed as “those silly Europeans are at it again the way they have been for the past several centuries really”. It was Somebody Else’s Problem Certainly Not America’s Problem.

Meanwhile, the Holocaust was at the time not something widely known outside of the populations being affected, and even those who did know often didn’t believe it was true or as bad/extensive as it was claimed to be. Plenty of countries, including America, were resistant to taking in Jewish or other Holocaust refugees.

It was not until Pearl Harbor got attacked that the Americans switched to approving of punching Nazis, because at that point it was a matter of literally self-defense. That is when punching Nazis became seen as OK: not because Nazis were horrible people, but because they punched us first.

So when the folks at Marvel created that iconic picture of Captain America punching Nazis? That was a radical statement back then. That was a very, very ballsy, controversial thing to do. That was Jewish creators saying before Pearl Harbor, “This should be America’s problem to address, dammit!” at a time when they were the only Americans being affected and so the majority of Americans didn’t care. It was not something taken as granted to cheer on, and if the Jewish folks had gone around back punching Nazis just for being jerks they would have been viewed unfavorably and arrested for assault and battery.

And as you say, even that iconic moment people talk about wasn’t Kirby going around punching Nazis just for saying rotten things, that was Kirby threatening to engage in self-defense towards someone who made a threat of violence against him first.

Plus ironically that threat was made in response to the statement of a Captain America punching Hitler, because, again, the majority of the American public didn’t see that as a thing we should be doing, though only a minority were as big jerks about their disapproval as that guy who threatened Kirby.

Because you see, the thing is: Superhero comics are a fantasy. They are a fantasy where generally the bad guys are obviously bad guys you have a moral license to punch and the good guys are the people with the moral license to do the punching. ***

But the real world doesn’t work that way, especially in this era. Social, political, and economic power often matter more than physical power. And too many the people with social, political, and economic power are morally terrible people. And those terrible people can and will wield that social, political, and economic power against you, successfully, if you ever punch them in a way that doesn’t look good to the general public that fuels their power.

Because, I mean, Nick Spencer is left-wing! Like, the guy has constantly showed left-wing sensibilities and politics. A large part of his Sam Wilson run has involved sticking it to the right and promoting leftist ideas, to the point where he even pissed off Fox News for a time, and Nick Spencer has frequently expressed left-wing sentiments on his own time. Making Cap a Nazi was even borne in part from the classic far-left belief that all patriotic white people must be white supremacists. So this sudden idea that Nick Spencer is right-wing is totally and utterly bizarre when compared to the facts of what Spencer has historically stated and promoted.

No, the fact that Nick Spencer is saying punching people for talking is bad should tell you “the majority of the American public will view you as morally bad for engaging in violence for reasons other than self-defense”, not “Spencer somehow got a magic brain transplant and did an instant 180 to become right-wing”. ****

People like to complain about respectability politics, but the cold hard truth and reality is that politics is in the end a PR game. It’s a PR game where the people who get the best PR among people who go out and actually vote are the people who get into office and become able to pass policies. And it’s a PR game where the politicians choose to pass or veto policies based in large part on what will curry favor with the people who get them into office.

So the cold hard truth and reality is that being morally and/or factually right does not always mean anything. No matter how morally and factually right it might be to punch Nazis, if it’s not seen as socially right (and therefore usually also politically and/or economically right), you will lose and be punished.

So you then have to ask yourself whether the consequences of your group losing and being punished are worth the satisfaction of “morally justified” violence. And since the consequences for this round of the left losing socially was putting into power Republicans who fully intend to do things that will badly harm lots of people, I feel the answer is no, losing socially is not a fair trade for being morally right.

Then add onto all of that the problem that the group of people calling for violence against terrible people are often the same group of people notoriously terrible at discerning who is and isn’t really a terrible person. This is a group of people which has a historical record of continually strawmanning and twisting things people say, of profiling people based solely on their headgear and clothing and facial hair, of doing things like hypocritically saying that your skin color or sex or orientation alone automatically makes you inherently bigoted or other negative assessments. So on top of going around punching people for reasons other than self-defense being generally not a good idea, these people who want to punch Nazis these people may not even necessarily correctly discern who should be punched.

So all in all, please don’t invoke the ghost of Kirby to go around saying you should punch people for speech alone, especially since one more point: That iconic Kirby moment people talk about is Kirby having to respond to someone wanting to punch him for speech alone.

No, the real, successful way to fight the Nazis and other scum right now is to build your own social, economic, and political power high enough to fight them on their own battlefield unless they degenerate things into physical violence. Because only then will you get to punch awful people and still come out of it on top in the ways that ultimately matter logistically.

I won’t respond to any replies on this account to this specific post, FYI, partly because I don’t want political discourse to take over this blog, and partly because quite frankly most of what I’ve said here is simply reporting fact and the rest I feel logically follows from that fact, so there’s very little of this I view as up for debate anyway.

And anyone who would want to make any response about my being right-wing, a Nazi, a Trump supporter, justifying violence, victim-blaming, or so on, would do nothing but prove my point above about a certain group of people being prone to strawmanning/twisting and generally being bad judges of character, since I would hope it would be obvious from how often I post about minority characters, have lamented about comic titles promoting diversity not doing well, and was despondent after Trump got voted in, that none of those things are the case.

*** To address the people using the specific argument: “Nick Spencer writes comics about people punching bad guys, how can he say we should use polite discourse instead of punching“: Well, you see, Nick Spencer is this thing we call “an adult of sound enough mind to tell the difference between reality and fantasy” which is a concept the people who are asking that question should really look into.

**** And yes I am aware of Spencer’s “SJW Brigade”, which should, again, tell you how even left-wing people view stereotypical SJW behavior, not, again, that Spencer somehow magically became right-wing out of nowhere. It should be an informational lesson about some of the negative ways average people perceive leftist causes, not as a reason to knee-jerk classify people who are on your side as “the enemy” just because they criticized you, even if you feel it was unfair criticism.

[raisingsupergirl]

I Voted for Trump, and It's Okay

My name is Andrew Winch, and I voted for Donald Trump. Yes, it's true. And I'm here to tell you, it's okay. At this, I know some of you will pump your fist and yell, "'Merica!" while others have likely already stopped reading. And that's okay, too. At least, it's starting to be okay.

Wait, wait, wait. Before your knee-jerk reaction takes control like it has for the past six months, why don't you sit back and actually consider what I'm saying before you prepare to tear apart my seemingly lukewarm stance on such an all-important topic. First, let me tell you why I voted for him in the first place.

Healthcare. It's what I do. I'm a physical therapist. I started PT school in 2004, graduated in 2009, and I've been practicing ever since. Needless to say, I've been on the front lines of the business, and I've seen some significant changes in insurance coverage. Now, this isn't a discussion on specific legislation (or politics at all, really, which is the whole point). Instead, I only assert that healthcare coverage overall has taken a very poor turn since the attempt to make it universal. And frankly, I needed a change. 

The funny thing is, I wanted to see what universal healthcare could do in this country. In fact (so I can be sure to offend ALL of my readers now), I helped vote in Obama on his first term for that sole reason. That's what happens when someone doesn't pick a side. He's free to make the wrong choice regardless of color (red or blue, people. Get your heads out of the gutter). 

So why am I saying all of this now? Well, it all started with a Facebook post about a week ago. It had to do with a Trump Tweet in which he promised that "we" would still build The Great Wall of 'Merica because of Mexico’s imminent threat to our safety, and how I was finally starting to doubt his political sanity. But regardless of my stance (I've already stated that it's infinitely flawed, and I am whatever the complete opposite of a politician is), what really interests me are the responses to my post. Oh, the glorious responses!

What was so amazing about them, you ask? It's simple. No one said anything offensive. None of my friends cussed out a complete stranger. No one got blocked or unfriended. A bunch of my friends just posted opposing ideas and thoughts, debated a little, then shook virtual hands and walked away. It was amazing. And it's something that never would have happened three months ago.

You all know what I'm talking about. The mass hysteria. The drawing of battle lines. The panic attacks, the violent protests, and the general breakdown of our country's unified patriotism. If a person wasn't taking a hard stance for or against, he was deemed lazy. If he refused to approach every conversation like a competition, he was written off. And as a result, we're all beginning to feel the beginning effects of national PTSD. 

It was all so exciting at first, wasn't it? The drama. The intrigue. The unpredictable future. And with social media breaking down those pesky social norms that assured basic mutual respect, we were free to fuel the fire without seeing the infuriated look on our friend's face. Until that awkward moment when we saw them in real life. Who would have thought? 

Humans as a species are a little slow on the uptake. We're so used to having control of our environment that we assume the natural progress of society, technology, etc. is a good thing (or at least a neutral thing), and it almost always takes seeing the ugly outcomes to realize what we're really doing. And thankfully, I think America, as a whole, is starting to see how crazy the whole thing was. Sure, I still have "click bait" friends that will always prod hot-button topics (either for exposure or amusement), and I did see a bumper sticker the other day saying, "Life's a B!$*#. Don't Elect One," with a picture of Hillary's face on it, but I'm hoping it was just too much trouble to scrape off. I'm hoping that the growing sense of sober-mindedness that I'm seeing in daily life and on the interwebs is the beginning of our country's reunification.

Okay, I get that I'm incredibly naïve. I understand that a bipartisan system will forever force people to take sides, that a president as controversial as Trump will ensure tension for as long as he's in office, and that having strong opinions isn't a bad thing. But no one can deny the harmful backlash that came from the public's hysteria, especially now that we're taking a collective breath and remembering what it's like to see the world through clear eyes. Again, I'm saying nothing of the plethora of political topics here, as important as they undoubtedly are. I'm just celebrating the glimmer of hope for the future of our country. That glimmer of hope that we celebrate every July 4th. We are one nation, for better or worse (lookin' at you, Illinois. Just kidding… kind of), and I'm happy to live in a country where I can be honest about my vote (for better or worse). So lets all grab our bottle rockets, burgers, bullets, and beer, and somehow try not to kill each other. Whatta ya say?

[stephenmccull]

Scalpels Out: Democrats Make Slashing Attacks On Health Care Plans

Top contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination torched one another’s proposals to reform the health care system Wednesday, as the contest to unify behind a single candidate to defeat President Donald Trump took a bitterly divisive turn.

Minutes after Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, warmed up the debate audience in Las Vegas by describing the party as a spirited but unified family, most of the candidates abruptly shifted into attack mode — and not just against Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire businessman and former New York City mayor making his first, belated appearance in the ninth debate.

Fighting to regain momentum after weak performances in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts dispatched with her opponents’ plans in brutally rapid succession.

Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor, has offered “not a plan” but “a PowerPoint” that she claimed would leave millions uninsured, she said. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has a proposal that is “like a Post-It note: Insert plan here,” she quipped. And Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whose “Medicare for All” plan she initially adopted as her own, “has a good start,” but his campaign cannot stop attacking those who question how it would work, she said.

“Health care is a crisis in this country,” Warren concluded. “My approach to this is, we need as much help for as many people as quickly as possible.”

It wasn’t the only tense moment.

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Sanders Angers The Culinary Workers Union

How Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal would affect unions in particular isn’t a new question. But despite strong support for the proposal from some national unions, it emerged as a flashpoint in the run-up to Nevada’s caucus on Saturday, turning the state’s prominent Culinary Workers Union against Sanders, the current frontrunner, in the 11th hour.

The union did not endorse a candidate but warned members that Sanders’ proposal could eliminate the health care coverage they have gained through years of collective bargaining, replacing it with a system that is untested and unknown.  The union then put out a statement last week saying its members had been “viciously attacked” by Sanders’ supporters over the organization’s opposition. Sanders responded by saying that, though there were some bad actors on social media, it was “not thinkable” that his supporters would attack union workers.

“Let me be very clear for my good friends in the Culinary Workers union, a great union: I will never sign a bill that will reduce the health care benefits they have,” Sanders said. “We will only expand it for them, for every union in America and for the working class.”

Klobuchar defended the “hard-working” culinary workers “who have health care plans that have been negotiated over time, sweat, and blood,” she said. “And that is the truth for so many Americans right now.”

Last summer Sanders tweaked his proposal to try to alleviate concerns from unions. Under a Medicare for All system, he said, the National Labor Relations Board would supervise unions in renegotiating contracts with employers, so that they could acquire “wrap-around services and other coverage not duplicative of the benefits established under Medicare-for-all.”

The idea, Sanders’ aides said then, was so that any savings a switch to single-payer achieved could still be passed on to workers, as increased benefits or wages.

But members of the Culinary Workers Union — and some other groups — still worry about losing the coverage they have, in exchange for something unknown.

Would that happen? Technically, yes, the health plan Nevada’s culinary workers get through their union would no longer exist. Under Medicare for All, private health plans could not sell coverage that duplicates what the government program offers.

But it’s worth noting that, in this world, culinary workers would still have generous health insurance. Sanders’ envisioned health plan is robust – he says it would cover virtually all practicing physicians and medically necessary services, with virtually no cost-sharing.

Of course, that would also depend on whether a President Sanders could muster support for his plan among skeptical members of Congress.

$100 Billion In Profits

Sanders brought up one favorite talking point twice Wednesday — his claim that the health care industry makes $100 billion a year in profits. We previously checked this claim and rated it True. The number comes from adding the net revenues in 2018 from 10 pharmaceutical companies and 10 health insurance companies. We recalculated the numbers, and they added up. Experts said it was even likely that the figure was an underestimate. 

Big Pharma Is Giving Money To Buttigieg And Others 

In another biting moment, Sanders charged that drug companies are donating to Buttigieg and other campaigns as the pharmaceutical industry profits off the current system.

We previously checked Sanders’ claim that Buttigieg was a “favorite of the health care industry” and rated it Half True. This is in part because it is actually Sanders who has received the most donations of any Democratic candidate from the entire health care sector, which includes pharmaceutical companies, health insurance industry, hospitals/nursing homes and health professionals.

But, while checking this claim we also found that Buttigieg has received donations from employees and executives of pharmaceutical and health insurance companies such as AbbVie, Aetna, Anthem, Eli Lilly and Co., Merck & Co. and Pfizer. We did not check into donations for other candidates from pharmaceutical executives. 

Do People ‘Love’ Their Insurance?

“You don’t start out by saying, I have 160 million people, I’m going to take away the insurance plan that they love,” Bloomberg said just minutes into the debate, pointing out the shortcomings of Sanders’ Medicare for All plan.

It is true that Sanders’ signature health proposal would eliminate private health insurance, replacing it with a single public plan that covers everybody. That would include the roughly 160 million Americans who get employer-sponsored insurance

But Bloomberg’s argument here — that those people “love” their plans — is complicated.

When we previously checked a similar claim — that 160 million people “like their health insurance” — we rated it Half-True. Cursory polling suggests people with that coverage are mostly satisfied. 

But most isn’t all. And, experts pointed out to us then, once Americans try to use that coverage, many find it lacking. In a Kaiser Family Foundation/ L.A. Times poll, for instance, 40% of people with employer-sponsored insurance still reported having trouble paying for medical bills, premiums or out-of-pocket costs. In that same poll, about half said they skipped or delayed health care because — even with coverage — they couldn’t afford it. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.)

More About Warren’s Comments On Klobuchar’s Health Plan

“Amy, I looked online at your (health care) plan. It’s two paragraphs,” Warren said.

This is highly misleading.

Warren’s campaign told PolitiFact that she was referring specifically to Klobuchar’s plan for “universal health care.” It pointed to the two paragraphs at the end of this Klobuchar campaign web page, which come under the heading “Propose legislation to get us to universal health care.” 

But that ignores most of Klobuchar’s health care plan, which she outlines in quite a bit of detail on four different web pages — a main health care policy page, a more detailed sub-page, a sub-page on prescription drugs and a sub-page on mental health.

We did a word count on the text from those four web pages, and it exceeded 6,000 words — and a lot more than two paragraphs.

PolitiFact’s Louis Jacobson contributed. 

Scalpels Out: Democrats Make Slashing Attacks On Health Care Plans published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

[gordonwilliamsweb]

Scalpels Out: Democrats Make Slashing Attacks On Health Care Plans

Top contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination torched one another’s proposals to reform the health care system Wednesday, as the contest to unify behind a single candidate to defeat President Donald Trump took a bitterly divisive turn.

Minutes after Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, warmed up the debate audience in Las Vegas by describing the party as a spirited but unified family, most of the candidates abruptly shifted into attack mode — and not just against Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire businessman and former New York City mayor making his first, belated appearance in the ninth debate.

Fighting to regain momentum after weak performances in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts dispatched with her opponents’ plans in brutally rapid succession.

Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor, has offered “not a plan” but “a PowerPoint” that she claimed would leave millions uninsured, she said. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has a proposal that is “like a Post-It note: Insert plan here,” she quipped. And Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whose “Medicare for All” plan she initially adopted as her own, “has a good start,” but his campaign cannot stop attacking those who question how it would work, she said.

“Health care is a crisis in this country,” Warren concluded. “My approach to this is, we need as much help for as many people as quickly as possible.”

It wasn’t the only tense moment.

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Sanders Angers The Culinary Workers Union

How Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal would affect unions in particular isn’t a new question. But despite strong support for the proposal from some national unions, it emerged as a flashpoint in the run-up to Nevada’s caucus on Saturday, turning the state’s prominent Culinary Workers Union against Sanders, the current frontrunner, in the 11th hour.

The union did not endorse a candidate but warned members that Sanders’ proposal could eliminate the health care coverage they have gained through years of collective bargaining, replacing it with a system that is untested and unknown.  The union then put out a statement last week saying its members had been “viciously attacked” by Sanders’ supporters over the organization’s opposition. Sanders responded by saying that, though there were some bad actors on social media, it was “not thinkable” that his supporters would attack union workers.

“Let me be very clear for my good friends in the Culinary Workers union, a great union: I will never sign a bill that will reduce the health care benefits they have,” Sanders said. “We will only expand it for them, for every union in America and for the working class.”

Klobuchar defended the “hard-working” culinary workers “who have health care plans that have been negotiated over time, sweat, and blood,” she said. “And that is the truth for so many Americans right now.”

Last summer Sanders tweaked his proposal to try to alleviate concerns from unions. Under a Medicare for All system, he said, the National Labor Relations Board would supervise unions in renegotiating contracts with employers, so that they could acquire “wrap-around services and other coverage not duplicative of the benefits established under Medicare-for-all.”

The idea, Sanders’ aides said then, was so that any savings a switch to single-payer achieved could still be passed on to workers, as increased benefits or wages.

But members of the Culinary Workers Union — and some other groups — still worry about losing the coverage they have, in exchange for something unknown.

Would that happen? Technically, yes, the health plan Nevada’s culinary workers get through their union would no longer exist. Under Medicare for All, private health plans could not sell coverage that duplicates what the government program offers.

But it’s worth noting that, in this world, culinary workers would still have generous health insurance. Sanders’ envisioned health plan is robust – he says it would cover virtually all practicing physicians and medically necessary services, with virtually no cost-sharing.

Of course, that would also depend on whether a President Sanders could muster support for his plan among skeptical members of Congress.

$100 Billion In Profits

Sanders brought up one favorite talking point twice Wednesday — his claim that the health care industry makes $100 billion a year in profits. We previously checked this claim and rated it True. The number comes from adding the net revenues in 2018 from 10 pharmaceutical companies and 10 health insurance companies. We recalculated the numbers, and they added up. Experts said it was even likely that the figure was an underestimate. 

Big Pharma Is Giving Money To Buttigieg And Others 

In another biting moment, Sanders charged that drug companies are donating to Buttigieg and other campaigns as the pharmaceutical industry profits off the current system.

We previously checked Sanders’ claim that Buttigieg was a “favorite of the health care industry” and rated it Half True. This is in part because it is actually Sanders who has received the most donations of any Democratic candidate from the entire health care sector, which includes pharmaceutical companies, health insurance industry, hospitals/nursing homes and health professionals.

But, while checking this claim we also found that Buttigieg has received donations from employees and executives of pharmaceutical and health insurance companies such as AbbVie, Aetna, Anthem, Eli Lilly and Co., Merck & Co. and Pfizer. We did not check into donations for other candidates from pharmaceutical executives. 

Do People ‘Love’ Their Insurance?

“You don’t start out by saying, I have 160 million people, I’m going to take away the insurance plan that they love,” Bloomberg said just minutes into the debate, pointing out the shortcomings of Sanders’ Medicare for All plan.

It is true that Sanders’ signature health proposal would eliminate private health insurance, replacing it with a single public plan that covers everybody. That would include the roughly 160 million Americans who get employer-sponsored insurance

But Bloomberg’s argument here — that those people “love” their plans — is complicated.

When we previously checked a similar claim — that 160 million people “like their health insurance” — we rated it Half-True. Cursory polling suggests people with that coverage are mostly satisfied. 

But most isn’t all. And, experts pointed out to us then, once Americans try to use that coverage, many find it lacking. In a Kaiser Family Foundation/ L.A. Times poll, for instance, 40% of people with employer-sponsored insurance still reported having trouble paying for medical bills, premiums or out-of-pocket costs. In that same poll, about half said they skipped or delayed health care because — even with coverage — they couldn’t afford it. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.)

More About Warren’s Comments On Klobuchar’s Health Plan

“Amy, I looked online at your (health care) plan. It’s two paragraphs,” Warren said.

This is highly misleading.

Warren’s campaign told PolitiFact that she was referring specifically to Klobuchar’s plan for “universal health care.” It pointed to the two paragraphs at the end of this Klobuchar campaign web page, which come under the heading “Propose legislation to get us to universal health care.” 

But that ignores most of Klobuchar’s health care plan, which she outlines in quite a bit of detail on four different web pages — a main health care policy page, a more detailed sub-page, a sub-page on prescription drugs and a sub-page on mental health.

We did a word count on the text from those four web pages, and it exceeded 6,000 words — and a lot more than two paragraphs.

PolitiFact’s Louis Jacobson contributed. 

Scalpels Out: Democrats Make Slashing Attacks On Health Care Plans published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

[dinafbrownil]

Scalpels Out: Democrats Make Slashing Attacks On Health Care Plans

Top contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination torched one another’s proposals to reform the health care system Wednesday, as the contest to unify behind a single candidate to defeat President Donald Trump took a bitterly divisive turn.

Minutes after Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, warmed up the debate audience in Las Vegas by describing the party as a spirited but unified family, most of the candidates abruptly shifted into attack mode — and not just against Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire businessman and former New York City mayor making his first, belated appearance in the ninth debate.

Fighting to regain momentum after weak performances in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts dispatched with her opponents’ plans in brutally rapid succession.

Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor, has offered “not a plan” but “a PowerPoint” that she claimed would leave millions uninsured, she said. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has a proposal that is “like a Post-It note: Insert plan here,” she quipped. And Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whose “Medicare for All” plan she initially adopted as her own, “has a good start,” but his campaign cannot stop attacking those who question how it would work, she said.

“Health care is a crisis in this country,” Warren concluded. “My approach to this is, we need as much help for as many people as quickly as possible.”

It wasn’t the only tense moment.

Email Sign-Up

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

Sign Up

Please confirm your email address below:

Sign Up

Sanders Angers The Culinary Workers Union

How Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal would affect unions in particular isn’t a new question. But despite strong support for the proposal from some national unions, it emerged as a flashpoint in the run-up to Nevada’s caucus on Saturday, turning the state’s prominent Culinary Workers Union against Sanders, the current frontrunner, in the 11th hour.

The union did not endorse a candidate but warned members that Sanders’ proposal could eliminate the health care coverage they have gained through years of collective bargaining, replacing it with a system that is untested and unknown.  The union then put out a statement last week saying its members had been “viciously attacked” by Sanders’ supporters over the organization’s opposition . Sanders responded by saying that, though there were some bad actors on social media, it was “not thinkable” that his supporters would attack union workers.

“Let me be very clear for my good friends in the Culinary Workers union, a great union: I will never sign a bill that will reduce the health care benefits they have,” Sanders said. “We will only expand it for them, for every union in America and for the working class.”

Klobuchar defended the “hard-working” culinary workers “who have health care plans that have been negotiated over time, sweat, and blood,” she said. “And that is the truth for so many Americans right now.���

Last summer Sanders tweaked his proposal to try to alleviate concerns from unions. Under a Medicare for All system, he said, the National Labor Relations Board would supervise unions in renegotiating contracts with employers, so that they could acquire “wrap-around services and other coverage not duplicative of the benefits established under Medicare-for-all.”

The idea, Sanders’ aides said then, was so that any savings a switch to single-payer achieved could still be passed on to workers, as increased benefits or wages.

But members of the Culinary Workers Union — and some other groups — still worry about losing the coverage they have, in exchange for something unknown.

Would that happen? Technically, yes, the health plan Nevada’s culinary workers get through their union would no longer exist. Under Medicare for All, private health plans could not sell coverage that duplicates what the government program offers.

But it’s worth noting that, in this world, culinary workers would still have generous health insurance. Sanders’ envisioned health plan is robust – he says it would cover virtually all practicing physicians and medically necessary services, with virtually no cost-sharing.

Of course, that would also depend on whether a President Sanders could muster support for his plan among skeptical members of Congress.

$100 Billion In Profits

Sanders brought up one favorite talking point twice Wednesday — his claim that the health care industry makes $100 billion a year in profits. We previously checked this claim and rated it True. The number comes from adding the net revenues in 2018 from 10 pharmaceutical companies and 10 health insurance companies. We recalculated the numbers, and they added up. Experts said it was even likely that the figure was an underestimate. 

Big Pharma Is Giving Money To Buttigieg And Others 

In another biting moment, Sanders charged that drug companies are donating to Buttigieg and other campaigns as the pharmaceutical industry profits off the current system.

We previously checked Sanders’ claim that Buttigieg was a “favorite of the health care industry” and rated it Half True. This is in part because it is actually Sanders who has received the most donations of any Democratic candidate from the entire health care sector, which includes pharmaceutical companies, health insurance industry, hospitals/nursing homes and health professionals.

But, while checking this claim we also found that Buttigieg has received donations from employees and executives of pharmaceutical and health insurance companies such as AbbVie, Aetna, Anthem, Eli Lilly and Co., Merck & Co. and Pfizer. We did not check into donations for other candidates from pharmaceutical executives. 

Do People ‘Love’ Their Insurance?

“You don’t start out by saying, I have 160 million people, I’m going to take away the insurance plan that they love,” Bloomberg said just minutes into the debate, pointing out the shortcomings of Sanders’ Medicare for All plan.

It is true that Sanders’ signature health proposal would eliminate private health insurance, replacing it with a single public plan that covers everybody. That would include the roughly 160 million Americans who get employer-sponsored insurance

But Bloomberg’s argument here — that those people “love” their plans — is complicated.

When we previously checked a similar claim — that 160 million people “like their health insurance” — we rated it Half-True. Cursory polling suggests people with that coverage are mostly satisfied. 

But most isn’t all. And, experts pointed out to us then, once Americans try to use that coverage, many find it lacking. In a Kaiser Family Foundation/ L.A. Times poll, for instance, 40% of people with employer-sponsored insurance still reported having trouble paying for medical bills, premiums or out-of-pocket costs. In that same poll, about half said they skipped or delayed health care because — even with coverage — they couldn’t afford it. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.)

And More About Warren’s Attach On  Klobuchar’s Health Plan

“Amy, I looked online at your (health care) plan. It’s two paragraphs.” Warren said.

This is highly misleading.

Warren’s campaign told PolitiFact that she was referring specifically to Klobuchar’s plan for “universal health care.” It pointed to the two paragraphs at the end of this Klobuchar campaign web page, which come under the heading “Propose legislation to get us to universal health care.” 

But that ignores most of Klobuchar’s health care plan, which she outlines in quite a bit of detail on four different web pages — a main health care policy page, a more detailed sub-page, a sub-page on prescription drugs and a sub-page on mental health.

We did a word count on the text from those four web pages, and it exceeded 6,000 words — and a lot more than two paragraphs.

PolitiFact’s Louis Jacobson contributed. 

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/scalpels-out-democrats-make-slashing-attacks-on-health-care-plans/

[biofunmy]

The Week in Tech: Navigating the Chinese Minefield

Each week, we review the week’s news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry.

Hello, Bits readers, I’m Erin Griffith, a tech reporter filling in from New York. Here’s what happened this past week in tech:

The Chinese government has increased pressure on foreign companies that don’t toe the party line on protests in Hong Kong. That has created a minefield for American companies, Amy Qin and Julie Creswell wrote. First, the National Basketball Association apologized to China after a team executive tweeted support for the Hong Kong protesters. Despite the apology, some Chinese sponsorships, broadcasts and preseason games were canceled.

Then Activision Blizzard, the gaming company, suspended a professional e-sports player for voicing his support for the protesters, saying it damaged the company’s image. The move prompted a vigorous backlash from fans and lawmakers. And a group of Blizzard employees staged a walkout to protest the company’s move.

Chinese media also attacked Apple for approving an app that lets Hong Kong protesters track police officers, leading to calls for a boycott of its products in China. On Wednesday night, Apple said it was withdrawing the app, HKmap.live, from its App Store just days after approving it because the authorities in Hong Kong said protesters were using it to attack the police.

That’s all in just one week. Nike, Tiffany, Riot Games, Marriott, Zara, Delta and many others have also complied with China’s requests.

I should note that one American group was defiant. The television show “South Park” issued a searing mock apology last Monday after it was banned from the country: “Like the N.B.A., we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom and democracy.” Ouch.

The escalation is set to the backdrop of an increasingly tense trade war. Writing for Opinion, Farhad Manjoo argued in a column that dealing with China wasn’t worth the moral cost.

Facebook’s political ad conundrum

Facebook’s decision to not ban ads that spread political lies set off a fiery debate about whether the social media giant is shirking its democratic responsibilities.

The company gave the O.K. to an ad from the Trump campaign that falsely claimed former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. offered Ukraine $1 billion in aid if the country pushed out the man investigating a company tied to Mr. Biden’s son.

Cecilia Kang wrote that Facebook’s decision, which was criticized in many circles, was further evidence that the company did not want to weigh in on political fights that would make it look like it was siding with one party.

Facebook isn’t the only company to agree to run the ad. Twitter and YouTube also said it did not violate their policies.

Some observers supported the move, arguing that making political ads available to public dissection was more democratic than censorship. But others said it was “empowering propaganda,” a craven play for ad dollars, bad for democracy and “toxic.” Some called for regulation, and others pointed out contradictions in Facebook’s policies. Chris Hughes, Facebook’s co-founder, said the policy was the equivalent of siding with President Trump.

People haven’t been willing to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt for years now. That doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon.

Start-up change of heart

In light of weak receptions for the initial public offerings of the highest-profile start-ups this year, a new gospel is spreading among Silicon Valley start-ups: Profits are cool!

In a novel shift, venture capitalists and start-ups are beginning to focus more on business fundamentals over cash-burning, top-line growth. It’s especially true for companies with untested business models, including gig economy start-ups or those disrupting old-line industries like real estate, orthodontics and exercise bikes.

If this feels a bit familiar, it’s because start-ups have undergone a “pivot to profit” moment every few years for more than a decade. In 2014, there were predictions of “dead unicorns” and markdowns from mutual fund investors. In 2016, venture investors warned start-ups to raise money before the market closed. And most famously, in 2008, Sequoia Capital presented a dire slide deck, titled “R.I.P. Good Times,” designed to scare founders into preparing for the recession.

But despite a few blips along the way, things have gotten only bigger and more bubbly in the enchanted forest of start-up unicorns. Even the recession of 2008 didn’t hit the tech industry that hard. Will this moment of austerity last? Investors are hopeful. But if recent history is a guide, I’m not holding my breath.

Some stories you shouldn’t miss

The Trump administration has been trying to protect tech platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter from regulations overseas by including protections for them in trade deals.

India’s internet and phone blockade in Kashmir means there’s no way to call the doctor, leading to preventable deaths.

A shooting in Germany was live-streamed on the social media platform Twitch, which is owned by Amazon.

Tesla’s self-driving Autopilot feature could save lives, but it has already been blamed for ending several. The ethical trade-offs create a conundrum for the company and society, Bloomberg wrote.

Kevin Roose profiled PewDiePie, the most influential YouTuber in the world. He has been name-checked in mass shootings and accused of being a white nationalist. Writing for The New York Times Magazine, Kevin asked what PewDiePie really believes.

Here’s an interesting rebuke of the tech industry’s assertion that tech innovation and evolution are inevitable. Writing for Vox, Rose Eveleth argued that it’s time for the tech industry to question what progress means.

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