#but the most important aspect is voter rights

[trash-goddess]

One of the worst things about being a teenager is being infantilized. You are expected to be (reasonably) responsible for yourself but do not have any of the respect, resources nor decision making power that comes with it such responsibilities as an adult.

Being an adult with a fully functioning brain, and the having the respect, resources, decision making power and responsibilities is a delightful experience. Taking control of my life and living on my own terms has made every aspect of my life much more manageable.

So. As a twenty four year old. Who works full time, and thus has saved and paid off my student loans. Who is capable of managing my finances, groceries, and living a healthy lifestyle. Who is by all accounts, a reasonable adult. I find myself frustrated by seeing myself described as a child who is incapable of making such decisions has become incredibly frustrating. It showcases a lack of maturity and understanding!

I refuse to be dragged back down into childhood by people who have never even met me and do not know what is best for me.

And you can take my voting rights from my cold dead hands.

[mrs-stans]

Donald Trump might make the Oscar cut – but with Sebastian Stan playing him

TORONTO — In the Donald Trump biopic “The Apprentice,” famed New York lawyer Roy Cohn lays out three important rules to Trump, his young disciple: “Attack, attack, attack” is the first; “Admit nothing, deny everything” is the second; and “No matter what, claim victory and never admit defeat” is last.

For anybody who’s watched cable news in, oh, the last decade, that all seems pretty familiar. Trump became a cultural figure, first in business and then on NBC's competition show "The Apprentice" before taking the Oval Office. The controversial new movie charts the future 45th president’s rise in the 1970s and ‘80s, but includes echoes of his political era throughout. (“Make America Great Again” even makes an appearance.)

The Oscars also have rules, though it’s an unwritten one that comes to bear here: Play a real-life figure and you’ve got a decent shot at a nomination. Which is a boon for “Apprentice” stars Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong, who give outstanding performances as Trump and Cohn, respectively.

“The Apprentice” (in theaters Oct. 11), which had a surprise screening at the Toronto International Film Festival Thursday, starts with a young Trump working for his father Fred's real estate company. Donald dreams of opening a luxury hotel in Manhattan, but starts out going door to door collecting rent. He meets Cohn, who first helps the Trumps in court and then becomes a mentor to young Donald, who listens intently as Roy rails about civil rights, makes hateful remarks and says leftists are worse than Nazis.

Trump takes to heart Cohn’s advice ― there are only two kinds people in the world, “killers and losers” ― his hotel business takes off and turns him into a Manhattan power player. There’s a turn, however, and the movie focuses on how Donald’s confidence and cruelty takes hold. He cheats on wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova), rapes her in one of the film's most disturbing sequences, and shuns Cohn after he becomes sick and eventually dies from AIDS.

The most fascinating aspect of “Apprentice” is watching its leads change their characters and body language to drive home that cinematic shift. Stan starts out playing Trump as an awkward, lonely sort before taking on more of the mannerisms that we’ve seen on our national political stage in recent years. (Even though he doesn’t quite look like Trump, the voice and inflections are spot on.) Strong is initially a scary and discomforting presence before gradually turning more sympathetic as his disease sets in and Trump worries he’ll get sick just being around his former friend.

Granted, it’s not normal for a biopic about a presidential candidate, and a high-profile film-festival one at that, to arrive less than a month before the election. It likely won’t sway voters either way, whether they see Trump as monarch or monster, and Trump’s more likely to threaten legal action than show up to the Oscars. But the movie’s worth paying attention to because of its powerful acting, from Stan, Strong and Bakalova. (In a packed best-actor lineup, one of Stan’s biggest rivals will be himself, since he’s also phenomenal in this month's “A Different Man.”)

One of the best scenes, in which Trump and an ailing Cohn let each other have it with all the venom they can muster, wraps up a lot of the core themes in a movie filled with meta commentary. Trump’s screwed over Cohn, and the lawyer tells him “you were a loser then and you’re still a loser” and that he’s “lost the last traces of decency you had.”

“What can I say, Roy,” Trump snarls. “I learned from the best.”

[unidentifiedlyingobject]

Schools in England should not teach about gender identity, according to new draft guidance from the government

A government source said they included plans to ban any children being taught about gender identity.

Well here's the thing. Many teachers have pointed out that it doesn't have a huge effect, they teach the most explicit stuff in year 6 (11 yrs) rather than the banned age which is year 4 (9 yrs). Personally, I think there are some aspects of sex ed which should be taught from birth, the basic stuff, the 'give auntie carol a hug' stuff. Children should be told that they are allowed to refuse consent if they don't want to hug auntie carol, that they have a choice whether someone touches them or not. This is very important.

Please read the article, it is clear how sloppy and careless this policy has been drawn up

"The education secretary admitted to BBC Radio 4's Today programme that she did not know how widespread the issue was as "it's not something that we've gone and done a particular survey of", but said she did not think it was common." THEN WHY IS SHE TAMPERING WITH IT?

But of course, there's the erasure of the concept of 'gender identity'. Kids whose parents are trans, whose siblings are trans, whose family members are trans will learn that their existence is something to not be discussed. They should not feel comfortable around transness and should actually fear it because no one wants to talk about it.

Ok that's not great, but what I find more infuriating is the fact that the government is politicising the existence of trans people

and the government is politicising children's sex education

these are both very important things which should not be brought this closely into politics but what's worse is that they were announced in the same policy

WHICH MEANS THE GOVERNMENT ARE TRYING TO GET PEOPLE TO RELATE UNSAFE SEX ED TO TRANS PEOPLE?

at this point, they've found something which they believe can unite both right and left wings of voters bc of the transphobia in the British public, but trans people AREN'T AND SHOULDN'T BE A POLITICAL FOOTHOLD

this was largely written on the 15th of May, but in a recent parliament debate, the education secretary Gillian Keegan stated shocking things. She said that she did not ever want 'it can be a spectrum, it's fluid, you can have different genders on different days' to ever be taught in schools, implying that she found this ridiculous.

At this point, the tories are openly and clearly expressing that they want to expose children to transphobic views.

Our UK government wants to erase the existence and experience of trans people and they have the confidence to not even try to hide it. This is fucking disgusting.

this is not a positive post, but we have to keep in their faces. We have to let them know that we exist and we are not going anywhere. Please, if it's the one thing you can do, reblog this post. For the scared trans people of the UK.

🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️

🩵🩷🤍🩷🩵

[directdogman]

I needed to ask this because i couldnt sleep

is Norm conservative?

because on one side it would make sense due to his patriotism and his age. But on the other hand if he was i think he would have acted way diffrent and atleast after the thirdchapter it seems out of place.

So please answer the question so i can sleep

The detailed answer to this question is very long, so I'll put it behind a 'read more' line so this doesn't clog up anyone's timeline.

The shorter answer to this question is: Norm's political beliefs cannot be summarized using any single commonly understood word from our 21st century vocabularies because his stances, alongside what Norm considers political/apolitical topics, don't align entirely with 21st century definitions/standards as Norm is a time traveler from the mid 20th century.

He isn’t a 21st century conservative as much as perhaps an early 20th century one, with a few stances that were considered progressive/radical for that time. Many aspects of the character that we’d consider conservative weren’t in his time, and were only regularly politicized by one side of the political aisle years after he warped. If you want a longer answer where I point out where exactly this blurs the line, read more:

The problem with this question (and most political discussions) in general is that most people don't read up on political history for fun and so, they naturally associate words like 'conservative', 'liberal', 'socialist' with the rhetoric/stances of whoever is currently using those labels in their society. Most people reading this would look at, for instance, the modern Republican party in America and say "oh, that's a Conservative."

Now, here's the problem: Norm grew up largely in the 1930′s and warped in the 1960's, society as a whole was radically different. One big difference is, for example, religion. Norm believes in God, and this is something that’s considered old-fashioned by many. It's pretty unfashionable to be religious nowadays in many places, but in most of 20th century America, it was a far bigger deal not to be. Nowadays, religion is something that's associated with the right more than the left, but in the early to mid 20th century, both parties were extremely religious.

Democratic political machines were dominated by Catholics in the early 20th century. Democratic presidential candidates Al Smith and JFK (the latter of whom was elected in the decade Norm came from) were Catholics, and it actually mattered to many voters. William Jennings Bryan (3 times Democratic nominee) was also immensely religious. Even the far-left fringe elements of the party had religious thought leaders, with Father Coughlin (a priest with a radio show) influencing far-left 30's Democrats. I could go on. Republican party also produced quite a few deeply religious presidents, with Garfield and Eisenhower coming to mind. A large portion of the population was deeply religious for most of the nation’s history, after all, and the religious beliefs of candidates mattered far more than today. So, for his time, Norm's religion is something that wasn't politically partisan, but rather, broadly essential, and as such, Norm would find it strange that anyone would assume that his religious beliefs correlate with his political beliefs at all.

Economically, America has changed so much in the 20th century that the issues at the start of the century are unrecognizable to us now. In 1900, the core economic issues were whether to back the dollar with just gold, or with gold and silver... oh, and the tariff. Exciting. No welfare net existed because income taxes largely didn't exist. The Federal Reserve didn't even exist yet! Tariffs (taxes on foreign goods) were the main source of federal income. What we consider to be normal governmental function was considered radical by many back then.

Similarly, it's important to note that the modern welfare state as we know it today was created in the 1940's with the advent of Social Security (AKA, in Norm’s lifetime) and only expanded to something resembling what we have today very incrementally, with many large developments happening under president Johnson in the mid 1960's... After Norm jumped.

Gun control (especially in sparsely populated states like Arizona) was basically a non-topic, and the only major federal gun control legislation that I know of being passed in the first half of the 20th century was a 30's crime bill that outlawed heavy machine guns + sawed offs, specifically related to organized crime tied to prohibition era organized crime. Norm loves guns, but he’d be profoundly disturbed to learn about how many mass shootings America has had in the last 20 years and wouldn’t just be able to hand-wave it away as normal, as our society has... because outside of the fucked up racist mass shootings of the 20′s (like Tulsa, but there were many also more smaller ones the same decade too), mass shooting weren’t a constant occurrence! NUTS, RIGHT??

Next, there’s Norm's patriotism, which your question implied pointed towards him being a conservative, but like his religion, this is an apolitical trait from Norm's time. Norm lived through World War II and the Red Scare, times when patriotism wasn't just popular, hell, not acting like Donald Duck in a 40's WWII propaganda cartoon meant you could go to PRISON. Media was also heavily controlled by governmental/anti-communist entities at this time, with the government financing pro-American/anti-communist films in the 50′s and Ronald Reagan serving as leader of the Actor’s Guild. Communists were rooted out systematically and to Norm, keeping a loaded firearm next to your bed in case a ‘communist’ breaks into your home is entirely normal and he refuses to cut it out. Poor guy’s scared shitless.

Norm does have a distaste for 'big government' and wasteful spending, partially explained by the time he came from, where taking taxes for public spending was still considered a more radical idea, but also, Norm's extras sheet gives even more essential context to this mentality with the explanation that he was raised in the middle of bumfuck nowhere by a single mother. Growing up, self-reliance was a necessity, not a virtue. His attitude towards governments basically amounts to "Leave me the FUCK alone." He values resilience, charity and discipline because these values are what enabled him to survive growing up.

Norm also grew up in the wilderness, so he enjoyed a lot of freedom growing up that is arguably impossible in urban areas, in his own time and especially today. Most of his stances come from the belief that the common person is inherently good (a belief that he temporarily abandoned after the warp, and Gingi managed to restore), and that political power structures solely exist so those who are already rich can stuff their pockets at the expense of taxpayers. Norm considered both of the two parties of his time to be corrupt and self-serving, and would say the same of them today, which is why Callum Crown’s third party populist rhetoric, and returning control of the US economy to working class people really resonated with Norm.

When asking why someone like Norm would support Crown’s movement, it’s important to note that Callum softened his socialist rhetoric as a national candidate. Norm also didn’t know all of Callum’s stances/beliefs (and realistically lied to himself slightly about some of them.) Norm also missed the end of Crown’s presidency, having to educate himself with revisionist sources after the warp. But, it would be dishonest not to mention in a complete answer to this question that Norm supported the single least conservative candidate in US history (in DT’s universe) for president because he felt it was the right thing to do.

Norm’s beliefs largely boil down to believing that individuals know best how to live their own lives and that as long as you aren’t hurting yourself or others, it’s none of his business. It’s his core tenet, really. He gets very modest when intimate subjects are brought up around him and the last thing he wants is to know what anyone does in the bedroom. Norm isn’t a homophobe or against gay marriage because... well, why would he be? There’s plenty of modern behaviour that is prohibited in the bible and the idea of legislating based on selectively chosen religious beliefs is abhorrent to Norm because he was raised in a secular America and values personal freedom. Norm would be profoundly disturbed that the conservative party of today considers this an issue at all. Christian or not, the guy hates any and all unnecessary governmental restrictions. All references to God were only added to the pledge of allegiance/onto money when he was an adult, a move that was done for exclusively political reasons, since it was the height of the cold war, and Marxism opposes organized religion.

Norm is also vehemently opposed to any form of elitism, never forgetting where he came from. His main desire is for others to just coexist and be understanding, without cheating/wronging each other. Norm downplays it, but a trait many forget is that Norm is very well educated. He was in NASA and has a background with mathematics and physics. Occasionally, big words slip out when Norm speaks. Norm was bullied somewhat in academia for how he speaks, fostering a deep distaste for the environment. Norm enjoys debate, discussion of topics. He would broadly support the causes of social movements today that aim to secure rights for minority groups, believing everyone has a right to be free/happy, but would have fundamental issues with the lack of accountability of most of them due to their lack of organization. His distaste for academia would absolutely foster hatred for activists who overuse ideological language.

When I was building Norm’s political profile in my head, I actually looked to Mark Twain for inspiration, who was quoted as saying: “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.“ This sums up Norm’s patriotism, really. He, too, believed in the wisdom of the common man. Twain is also someone you can’t really put into a political box, describing himself as both ‘conservative’ (by the definition he had at the time) but also ‘radical’. Twain was racially progressive for his time and tended to support the Republican party (the racially progressive party of the two in his time), but split with the party in 1884 over the political corruption of their candidate that year, and outspokenly spoke out against McKinley + Roosevelt’s imperialist foreign policy.

So, with all of that context out of the way, here’s the final answer to your question: Norm would’ve broadly been considered a conservative by the definition/standards of his own time for his economic views (which are more conservative now), progressive for his social views (which are just kinda normal now), and has fundamental enough differences with the beliefs/aims of the conservative movement in America today that he would not want to be lumped in with modern day conservatives. If he was in politics today, he’d be trying to start a populist grassroots movement and support breaking down the two party system. Hope this was informative! I know a lot of people like Norm, so the last thing I’d want is people thinking Norm was something he wasn’t.

[cornyonmains]

So, something I need to point out because it's driving me nuts, is that there's actually a pretty clear picture painted of how the Democrats fucked up if you just even take a casual glance at the voting data from the 2020 primaries.

An issue that's only been growing in severity since 2016 is that younger voters are not buying what centrist Democrats are selling. Centrist Democrats have been winning primaries almost exclusively on the power of voters over 65 for awhile now, and this bloc is a high income one with a grossly outsized representation in the primaries that isn't reflective of the general electorate. They're also using red states. Yeah, that's right, red states.

To get Biden through the 2020 election, liberals basically had to stuff the primaries to dilute the under 50 vote and consolidate elderly voters under Biden, then activate the south. And something important to point out, something I can't stress enough, is most of those southern states and most of those Democrats don't matter one single blue flying fuck to the general. Liberals have been using red states to actively defy their voters for a decade, taking for granted the 2 party system would force votes their way, and a lot of cohorts they were ignoring or even actively maligning finally fucking snapped.

And here's the thing, I don't blame them. Liberals got their feelings hurt when they got critiqued from the left, and instead of being adults and listening to their constituency, they threw temper tantrum and fucking meta-gamed red states to overstay their welcome and prove their goofy-ass neoconservative project could work. Now we have Trump.

And the most infuriating aspect of it all is that liberals will look at this resounding failure and almost certainly go, "We should have gone farther right. Liz Cheney 2028."

[odinsblog]

are you disappointed that bree newsome wants trump reclected?

Bree Newsome is a prolific tweeter and I’ve looked, but I haven’t seen anywhere where she said that she wants Trump to be re-elected. Please send me the link to the specific tweet if I’m wrong.

I understand and agree with much of what Bree has been saying on Twitter though. I mean, I dO get it. I think her major concern is that 1) in some important ways, the difference between Trump’s policies and some of Biden’s policies has not been all that great, and 2) if Biden should win (definitely not a guarantee) liberals will go right back to brunch and act as if the problem is gone and everything is “okay” again.

As far as the first point goes, you don’t need to look any further than Biden’s Title 42; or how the Biden administration literally sued to keep using Trump’s previous racist immigration policies. Not a good look. And now, you’ve got Democrats trying to out-Republican Republicans by showing how tough cruel they can be to refugees who are legally seeking asylum at the Southern border. Bottom line, the immigration policies are white supremacy-lite, and some of the changes Biden is proposing—like forcing asylum seekers to wait in another country while the government takes its sweet time with endless immigration red tape—these changes will fundamentally change America’s immigration system, for the worse.

And that’s without me even touching on how badly Biden is fucking up with Palestine.

And as for the second point, conservative Democrats have gone back to brunch once orange man gone. Remember how hard Democrats came down on the Trump administration for their poor Coronavirus response? Yet now we have the CDC basically telling people to stay their asses at work even if they’ve tested positive for COVID. WTF?? Did I mention that measles are making a comeback?? And Biden isn’t saying anything, and neither are his surrogates. And so it is perhaps this tendency towards inaction(?) that is the most significantly damaging and damning aspect that creates disaffected voters who should be motivated to get rid of Trump and Republicans writ large —in a lot of ways that matter, disaffected voters don’t see any significant differences. Sure, the stock market is doing great, but people are getting their asses kicked on a lot of day-to-day, kitchen table issues. Unemployment is down, but a lot of people still have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet.

So yeah, I won’t be dismissive or derisive about Bree Newsome. She’s making some really valid points for anyone who is willing to actually listen.

Now that all said, I think that there is something fundamentally wrong that people are missing when they say misguided things like, “We survived one Trump administration, and we can survive another one.” A lot of marginalized groups and oppressed people won’t survive a second Trump administration. They just won’t.

Because if you thought it was bad the last time, I promise you the next Trump administration won’t be anything like the last one. Last time Trump was unprepared and didn’t even expect to win, so they made rookie mistakes. That won’t happen next time. The next Trump administration will be stacked from top to bottom with diehard Trump loyalists who will ruthlessly execute his most racist policies, foreign and domestic. (See also: Project 2025).

And yes, Biden is 100% for shit on his policy of standing by Israel no matter what. People who agree with Bree think that we will, more or less, have the same kind of problems under Trump that we’re having under Biden now. Those people are what I like to call deadass wrong.

Literally EVERYTHING will become exponentially worse in a second Trump term. For everyone who isn’t a wealthy, cisgender heterosexual white male.

Just imagine America with a Republican controlled House and Senate. Goodbye Medicare and Social Security. Goodbye labor laws. So long minimum wages. See ya, state local and federal courts not totally stacked with Federalist Society judges. It was nice knowing you, “shithole” countries full of people who I love and care about.

Look, I finally figured out something that used to bother me when I first became politically aware: it bugged tf out of me whenever I heard someone say, “THIS is the most important election everrrr!! Because THIS time, democracy itself is on the line!” Pfft. I was like a lot of people I see now, saying “But that’s what you said about the last election.” The truth is, every election is pretty much life or death. Every single one. Because elections aren’t like something you do once, and then afterwards everything is all good forever and ever. Maybe it should be, but you got assholes like Mitch McConnell and Ron DeSantis and Trump and whoever comes after them, you got people who will always be trying their hardest to constantly make shit worse for everyone who isn’t wealthy and white. They aren’t going away. So we can’t go away either. Because the moment we checkout and go back to brunch, they get right back to working on their usual transphobic, homophobic, misogynistic, racist, bullshit culture wars.

So as long as Republicans, Libertarians and conservative “Democrats” keep punching in, we gotta punch in too.

I wanna be really clear about something here: Joe Biden has done some very good things (like capping the cost of insulin), but he has also been, in many ways (not all), a terrible “Democratic” president. Biden is far too enamored of “bipartisanship,” and reaching across the aisle (to people who do not want to compromise), and Biden is far far too enamored of the non-existent good old days™ when Republicans weren’t the evil pieces of shit that they are now, and he takes far too long to change his position on important issues. Like Palestine.

But yeah, (can’t believe I’M saying this) he’s definitely better than a second Trump term will be. And even if he’s slow to change positions, at least he can be persuaded. Trump can’t.

I’m not white and I’m not rich. I am terrified of a second Trump term. I’m basically a single issue voter now, and my issue is keeping Trump out of office and HOPEFULLY making him pay for every single law he’s broken.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Peter Montgomery at Right Wing Watch:

The New York Times profiled the MAGA movement organization America First Policy Institute this week. AFPI was created as a sort of Trump administration in exile after voters dumped Donald Trump from office. AFPI has provided jobs and salaries to a lot of Trump loyalists, who are working to put Trump—and themselves—back into power. And they’re preparing to make the most of that power. AFPI’s own version of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for a new administration reportedly includes nearly 300 executive orders for a returning Trump to sign. Right Wing Watch reported last year on an AFPI summit called “Laying the Groundwork for the Next America First Administration,” at which the group’s president Brooke Rollins bragged about the “revolutionary” nature of its ambitions to “seize control of the administrative state and use it—while also dismantling it,” describing “an America First confrontation against anti-conservative institutions.”

Now that there’s bad blood between MAGA insiders and the Heritage Foundation over the unfavorable publicity Project 2025 brought Trump’s campaign, AFPI is positioned to be in control of the transition team and domestic policy agenda if Trump wins. One example of what that could look like: the Times reports that AFPI’s plan to allow Trump to fire federal employees and replace them with political loyalists is even more radical than Project 2025’s proposal—it would essentially turn the entire federal workforce into a political patronage system. 

One important aspect of AFPI’s work that this week’s Times story did not explore is AFPI’s partnership with dominionist Lance Wallnau and his “Courage Tour” to turn out conservative Christian voters in crucial swing-state counties in the upcoming election. As the Times noted, one of AFPI’s funders and board members is Texas pastor-billionaire Tim Dunn, whose funding and theocratic vision have been aggressively pushing the Texas Republican Party further to the far right. 

Right Wing Watch has reported that the Courage Tour blends religious revivalism, spiritual warfare rhetoric, right-wing politics, and targeted voter turnout work all designed to overcome “demonic strongholds” and put Trump back into the White House. Some other media reports on the Courage Tour have noted the partnership and described the participation of America First Works—AFPI’s political action affiliate—and its voter registration efforts. Wallnau and AFPI have focused on 19 crucial counties in swing states that they believe could swing the election for Trump with increased turnout from MAGA-minded Christians. 

The extent of the partnership between AFPI and New Apostolic Reformation dominionists like Wallnau is revealed in video from a Michigan stop on the Courage Tour in May. Wallnau described AFPI as “the group I work with,” adding that it “is holding the key appointment for the hoped-for Trump administration….They’ve got all the placeholders for who’s going in.”  Wallnau introduced Richard Rogers, who is affiliated with Georgia-based MAGA pastor Jentezen Franklin’s Free Chapel church, and who is serving as AFPI’s national director of faith engagement. He got that assignment, Rogers said, when AFPI called Franklin saying that the movement did not have enough resources on the ground to actually do the necessary voter registration and turnout in those targeted counties. Rogers went to work, he said, and now AFPI has a “faith department” that has been built “to put boots on the ground to motivate the voters in those states to turn the tide on the election in 2024—and we’re doing it.”

The America First Policy Institute (AFPI) has an agenda that is more radical than even the discredited mess that Project 2025.

[casuallyodd]

If you are young and feel voting doesn't matter because the democrats aren't stopping Israel more forcefully and can't understand why they do that, please look at these two different charts.

(both are several months old, so the general public could have shifted, but I'm willing to bet that it won't have moved much overall and the general points will stil hold)

It's likely unsurprisingly to you that young people are much more against Israel's actions than those of Hamas.

But do you see how supportive older generations are of Israel? Both the why and the how. It's either the majority or at least a plurality of the older age groups that "support Israel*".

Now let's look at voting in these age groups.

Look at 65+: 78% said the reason for fighting was Valid and 53% of that age group foud the way Israel was fighting was Valid.

In 2022, 18-29 made up only 10% of the voting population. That could be enough to swing an election, without a doubt, but not enough to be the driving force for winning.

65+ made up more than 3 times the size of 18-29 alone. More than a 1/3 of all voters.

Go back up to the first set of graphs. 53% of people 65+ found Israel's methods of fighting acceptable.

I'm not highlighting this to say they are right. Or to give fuel to doomerism. I'm trying to highlight the importance of voting.

Being disengaged from the system doesn't make politicians listen. They think the disengaged don't care or they don't vote often enough, in large enough numbers to risk supporting a "risky" opion.

Those graphs show that, from purely numbers based election strategy, there is at least a logic to *not* supporting Hamas and not being too hard on Israel. Chasing the 10% over the 30+% just doesn't make sense mathematically.

That doesn't speak to the morality or other strategic aspects of such a decision. But if the group that votes frequently and in large numbers says "well, what's going on is sad, but necessary", the party that wants to win in our shitty first-past-the-pole system isn't going to challenge them too much.

The youth vote could be huge if it turned out more. And when combined with people in the older groups that agree with them, things could be different.

Politicians will listen to the groups that put them in power. Not the ones that kept them from power or ones that are disengaged.

I entirely get how demoralizing thinking about that truth can feel. The anger to sit out the election or pick a third party makes sense...somewhat.

But I think history shows that if you can help put someone in power, they have reason to listen to you. If they feel your group is too inconsistent in voting, chasing the groups that are most reliable voters make sense here.

Sources:

https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/majority-in-u-s-say-israel-has-valid-reasons-for-fighting-fewer-say-the-same-about-hamas/

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voter-turnout-2018-2022/

* I'm not sure how many people actually support Israel versus how many have a "bad thing happened and revenge is fine" mindset. I'm not endorsing that or saying it's good myself. Quite the opposite. I'm just saying that I think that support for Israel isn't as deep for some people and not as committed as some make it out to be. When bombs are killing your loved ones, that distinction feels meaningless. But, if you could convince some of those people that Israel is committing war crimes AND get more youth to vote, there might be enough people to get someone into office that would at least try to stop things and not just encourage them to "finish the job".

[tomorrowusa]

Two headlines which help explain the victory of Poland's pro-democracy opposition in Sunday's election...

Opozycja zmobilizowała niegłosujących. Na PiS głosował żelazny elektorat (The opposition mobilized non-voters. An iron electorate voted for PiS)

Stats are preliminary, but voter turnout was around 73% in Sunday's parliamentary election – a post-Communist high. The opposition got out the vote – big time. As many as 31% of the eligible voters who did not vote in the 2019 election voted in this one. Meanwhile, the ruling party whose acronym is PiS tightly held on to its own voters; it wasn't enough for them. 87% of PiS voters had voted in 2019.

Wśród młodych najwięcej stracił PiS (PiS lost most among young people)

Of the five party groupings which won seats in the Sejm, PiS came in fifth among voters under 30. Donald Tusk's Koalicja Obywatelska (KO) came in first and Lewnica came in second. The rigid socially conservative agenda of PiS was regarded as repulsive by many young people in Poland.

But wait, there's more!

One aspect of the youth vote which the second TVN24 article did not emphasize is that women were particularly important in the turnout. This is from a DW article about the defeat of PiS.

High turnout thanks to young and female voters

Observers say young and female voters, motivated by the issue of abortion rights — which the ruling PiS has sought to curtail and Donald Tusk has promised to liberalize — turned out in large numbers to support opposition parties. "Until recently, half of women said they would not vote," sociologist Justyna Kajta of SWPS University in Warsaw told AFP news agency. "Now these exit polls actually show more women than men voted."

From "half of women said they would not vote" to "more women than men voted" shows how decisive increased involvement by women, especially younger women, can be.

During the 2020 demonstrations against the extremist anti-abortion law authored by PiS I saw a sign which this election reminded me of. It displayed a fundamental truth as well as a great bilingual political pun based on a classic song by Bob Marley.

The word kraj is pronounced like the English word cry. In Polish, kraj means country though in certain contexts it tends to refer to Poland in particular. For language nerds, you may recognize it as coming from the same Slavic root as Ukraine (Ukraina as written in Polish).

For a well-functioning country, you need active participation by women in the political process. That happened this week in Poland. ❤️🇵🇱

So massive GOTV and appealing to forward-looking young people had a considerable impact in Poland. Those are lessons which should not be overlooked by center-left parties and coalitions in other countries.

BTW, a second exit poll was released for Sunday's election. It showed the current opposition with 249 seats in the Sejm; that's one more than the earlier poll. But the official results should be available by the middle of the week.

[anthonybialy]

Loud About Hush Money

Taking is the Democratic form of profiting.  There’s no other way to run a business, at least that legalized grifters can imagines.  They’re not mean like your bosses, other than how they do the same by law.  The only important employment is their own, and let’s classify their workdays as unproductive.  Politicians must only endure a performance evaluation every couple years.  They expect you to keep them in office because it’s more fun than working.  Revelry will continue as long as bucks keep flowing.  The party’s finally nearing its conclusion.

The pushy party can afford to be so generous because of a generous benefactor.  If you want to maximize contributions, make them compulsory.  Thanks to withholding, most donors don’t even realize how generous they are.

Bribes for votes are shameless in blatancy, which is another sign market incentives work.  Coercion really helps those who need to keep others on their side without making a convincing case or being able to create anything worth trading.

Limp government goons inadvertently illustrate their foes are right while showing why they’re so wrong.  Every Democrat is a corrupt sheriff with a councilman in his pocket.  Entice voters with profits seized from those who back candidates calling for workers to keep what they earn.  The self-proclaimed selfless get away with it because they can, which also helpfully illustrates how they implement their very caring philosophy.

Hypocrisy is just the start.  Elected autocrats see themselves as fighters of corruption as they embody it, which is surely the only time they’re full of it.  Expanding power to the point where they can negate it with a nod is also coincidentally the reason they’re so eager to make crime legal, aside from serving as an indirect perk to their constituency.

Those who can’t create a solid image rely on projection.  Democrats habitually act in the same shameful way they accuse private entities of conducting themselves, with the difference being you can’t choose a different government without a decent amount of hassle.  Knowing you can’t shop elsewhere is part of the privilege of constructing a loving administration that has control over every life aspect.

It’s best to use bills yoinked from others, as your own is so expensive.  Buying support with cash seized from the successful is the primary way of leveling society.  The presumption that everyone should have the same works with ice cream, so why change kindergarten thinking?  The ideal amount is more than whatever you have now.

Wealth transfers are necessary if all funds have been assigned.  You unfairly claim salaries reflect value created, but that cruelly leads to some people having more than others.  True motivators have to convince voters that they’re useless.  Breaking down self-esteem is how Democrats inspire.  Someone stole from you so proficiently that you didn’t even notice.  No, they don’t mean the government.

Student loans are seen as anything but.  College is a time for learning that words don’t mean anything, which is one sort of lesson to retain.  The expectation of entitlement may not be the healthiest major.  There’s no point in arguing with people who think you’re selfish for not wanting to give what you’ve earned to those who haven’t.

Outrage at the expectation that they should pay for things defines liberalism.  Take the costliness of allegedly free tuition.  Panhandling graduates got amazing training, at least according to them.  It should be easy to pay off what’s borrowed with 120 credits of solid training.

Pretending not paying for something will help the economy is the ultimate case of not seeing both sides.  The practical implications of closed-mindedness lead to dismissing prosperity via, say, exchanging goods and services for dollars.  Alleged beneficiaries save so much by not paying for groceries, which can be spent to stimulate an economy where many things are unaffordable for mysterious reasons.  Shoplifting must be making life permanently prosperous.

Walking around money ensures getting out the vote.  Claim to help the poor to make winking less obvious.  Inflation is the only downside for the ripoff artists and upside for those outraged.  Currency has gone from worth less to worthless.  

Trying to befriend those who hate them is a sick habit of the psychologically gullible.  They simply must convince everyone they’re cool.  Iran took their lunch money and got them to beg to come over for dinner.  Enabling villainy is just one more reason to not pay ransoms.  The inability to see obvious consequences is inherent to their ideology.  Anyone who saw what comes next wouldn’t be a liberal.  

Trying to get global supervillains to behave with perks is a rather obvious test which the White House fails.  It took an invasion of Israel to show how Iran spends their allowance on terror rockets, which the executive branch naturally still doesn’t grasp.  Joe Biden’s flunkies are more than willing to accept excuses about how lunatic mullahs can’t spend what they have yet to receive.  Meanwhile, the world’s substitute teachers put America nearly $35 freaking trillion in debt.

A time-honored tradition features no honor.  Redistribution constitutes politics at its oldest and by no coincidence worst.  An entire outlook based on taking from one party and giving it to others is framed as the epitome of high-minded decency, which is true aside from how its theft that demotivates all involved.

Class warfare builds society.  Motivating their base coincidentally conforms with claiming they’re trying to help.  It’s an unfinished sentence, as they want to help stay in office.

[berniesrevolution]

CATALYST JOURNAL

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 is one of the greatest modern studies of revolution and counterrevolution. While it deserves its place alongside the classics, it is also an extraordinary example of a materialist and class analysis of race under capitalism. In recent years, the latter aspect of the book has been obscured and even denied. This essay seeks to restore Du Bois’s great work to its rightful place on both counts.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880, published in 1935, is one of the greatest scholarly studies of revolution and counterrevolution.1 It deserves a place on one’s bookshelf next to other modern classics, including Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, Georges Lefebvre’s The Coming of the French Revolution, and Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Scholars of revolutions, unfortunately, have not usually considered the US Civil War to be one of the great social revolutions of the modern era, akin to the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. Many readers, in fact, view Du Bois’s book much more narrowly, as a response to white-supremacist histories of the Reconstruction era (1865–76) and, more particularly, a defense of the role of African American politicians — and the black voters who elected them — in the Southern state governments of that time. Du Bois does present such a defense, but Black Reconstruction offers much, much more than this.

Black Reconstruction is not only a towering work of history but also a work firmly embedded in the Marxist tradition. Du Bois reinterprets the Civil War as a social and political revolution “from below” — a workers’ revolution — that brought about the overthrow of both slavery and the Confederate state, thereby opening a door to interracial democracy in the South. The book then reinterprets the subsequent overthrow of this democracy as a class-based counterrevolution that destroyed the possibility of freedom for half the Southern working class and imposed a “dictatorship of capital” that brought about “an exploitation of labor unparalleled in modern times.”2

But why should one read Black Reconstruction in the twenty-first century? In short, because Du Bois is writing about issues that remain of tremendous political importance, including the nature of racial oppression and the racism of white workers. Unlike most contemporary analysts of race, moreover, Du Bois approaches these issues from the perspective of political economy. He rejects an approach to racial oppression that starts with prejudice, discrimination, or culture, trying instead to dig beneath these and understand how they are rooted in the material interests of different classes. Instead of insisting on the separation of race from class, as so many liberals do, Du Bois insists on their intimate connection.3

Black Reconstruction is rightly famous for stressing the collective agency of enslaved people in winning their own freedom and for its impassioned rebuttal of racist historiography. What has been less emphasized is the way in which Du Bois very explicitly rejects analyses of the Civil War and Reconstruction that emphasize race and racism as the primary drivers of historical events. Racism certainly played a hugely important role in that era, Du Bois argues, but it was a product of — and usually disguised — another, more powerful force: capitalism. More specifically, Du Bois argues in Black Reconstruction that two characteristic features of capitalism — capitalists’ competition for labor and workers’ competition for jobs — are the root cause of conflicts that seem to be driven by racism.

This perspective on Du Bois’s masterpiece runs counter to some influential interpretations of his work. Not surprisingly, there is resistance in some quarters to stating plainly that Black Reconstruction is a work of Marxism. Many people who come to Black Reconstruction for the first time are not expecting to read a Marxist text. They have most likely read Du Bois’s earlier collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, which precedes his turn to Marxism by three decades.4 While a number of authors do recognize Du Bois’s Marxism,5 many others deny that Black Reconstruction or his subsequent writings are Marxist. In 1983, for example, Cedric Robinson described Du Bois as a “sympathetic critic of Marxism.”6 Gerald Horne’s 1986 book examines in great detail Du Bois’s involvement in leftist (mainly Communist) causes after World War II, but he never offers an opinion as to whether Du Bois was a Marxist.7 And Manning Marable’s book on Du Bois, published just a few months later, portrays him as a “radical democrat” — although Marable later suggested that Du Bois might usefully be viewed as part of the “Western Marxist” tradition.8

More recently, a group of “Du Boisian” sociologists recognizes that Du Bois integrates some elements of Marxist thinking into his worldview. But according to these writers, not only is Du Bois not a Marxist but his ideas clearly transcend Marx’s. Marx gave theoretical primacy to class, they say, whereas Du Bois grasped the “intersectionality” of class and race, emphasizing their connections while giving theoretical primacy, by implication, to neither.9 According to these writers, this theoretical move allowed Du Bois, unlike Marx and his followers, they claim, to understand colonialism, the ways in which race “fractures” class consciousness, and racial oppression generally.10

In this essay, I argue that these “Du Boisians” and others who deny Du Bois’s Marxism are wrong. Du Bois actually does give theoretical primacy to capitalism. In both Black Reconstruction and his subsequent writings, Du Bois repeatedly emphasizes how racial oppression is a product of capitalism. Time and again, furthermore, Du Bois takes issue with what we would today call “race reductionism,” that is, attempts to explain historical events primarily in terms of race. His rejection of race reductionism only deepened in the years after Black Reconstruction’s publication.

After 1935, in short, “Du Boisianism” is Marxism. Du Bois’s failure lay not in the fact that he embraced a Marxist orientation but that he came to uncritically support Soviet authoritarianism. This was perhaps the greatest tragedy, in my view, of Du Bois’s long life. But the main point of this essay is to show that, despite all efforts to ignore or deny his Marxism, Black Reconstruction stands as a brilliant work of class analysis.

BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA

Du Bois’s turn toward Marxism occurred rather late in his life, shortly before the publication of Black Reconstruction. His trip to the Soviet Union in 1926, months before Joseph Stalin’s consolidation of power, certainly pushed him in this direction. “Never before in life,” writes his biographer David Levering Lewis, “had he been as stirred as he would be by two months in Russia.”11 Du Bois traveled more than two thousand miles across the Soviet Union, “finding everywhere … signs of a new egalitarian social order that until then he had only dreamt might be possible.”12 “I may be partially deceived and half-informed,” Du Bois wrote at the time. “But if what I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my ears in Russia is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik.”13 (Du Bois would visit the Soviet Union again in 1936, 1949, and 1958.)

Du Bois later wrote that his trip to the Soviet Union led him to question “our American Negro belief that the right to vote would give us work and decent wage,” or would abolish illiteracy or “decrease our sickness and crime.”14 Only a revolution, by implication, could attain these ends. Du Bois also now believed that “letting a few of our capitalists share with whites in the exploitation of our masses, would never be a solution of our problem.”15 Black liberation was impossible, in sum, so long as the United States remained a capitalist society, and “black capitalism” was a dead end.

Du Bois had been broadly familiar with Marxist ideas since his graduate student days at Harvard and in Berlin. But it was not until 1933, in the midst of the greatest crisis of capitalism in world history, that Du Bois began conscientiously to study Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin. He was then sixty-five years old. As Lewis writes, Du Bois fell hard for Marxist analysis:

Like so many intellectuals in the thirties who broadcast Marxism as a verifiable science of society, the Atlanta professor was mesmerized by dialectical materialism. Calling Marx the “greatest figure in the science of modern industry,” Du Bois seemed to rediscover with the avidity of a gifted graduate student the thinker who Frank Taussing, his Harvard economics professor, had smugly ignored. Marx made history make sense — or more sense, Du Bois came to believe, than all other analytical systems.16

Du Bois was prodded to master Marxist theory by the rise of a group of so-called Young Turks within the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the civil rights organization he helped found. These young scholar-activists, including Abram Harris, Ralph Bunche, and E. Franklin Frazier (all members or soon-to-be members of the Howard University faculty) “were attempting to shift the Negro intelligentsia’s focus on race to an analysis of the economics of class.”17 All were convinced that a powerful interracial labor movement was necessary to smash racial oppression, and they were critical of the NAACP for its lack of an economic program. Members of this group would offer advice to Du Bois about which texts were essential for him to read. Harris’s book, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement, coauthored with Sterling Spero, proved particularly influential; it was no coincidence that Du Bois titled the first chapter of Black Reconstruction “The Black Worker.”18 (I discuss the precise significance of this below.)

(Continue Reading)

[mariacallous]

Amid all the horror, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has had one cleansing effect. The self-satisfied notion that the West is Christendom and that our democratic and liberal values are rooted in Christianity is taking one hell of a beating.

As it turns out, the greatest threat to the ‘Christian’ West comes from Russia, whose imperialist expansion into historically Christian Ukraine and the attendant crimes against humanity are supported with ghoulish enthusiasm by the Russian Orthodox Church. Russia’s contempt for the supposedly religiously inspired values of democracy and freedom depends for its ultimate triumph on evangelical Christian voters returning Donald Trump to power in the 2024 US presidential election. Once in the White House, Trump has made it very clear that he will cut off support for Ukraine and leave ‘Christian’ Europe to fend for itself.

In other words, a victory for evangelical Christians’ preferred candidate will ensure the defeat of the values of the supposedly Christian West. Surely (and finally) we can now dispense with a version of Christian identity politics that has always been flattering and foolish in equal measure.

The argument that ancient cultural identities would be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world came from Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ hypothesis. Western civilisation, he maintained in 1992, was built by Christianity in its Catholic and Protestant variants. It covered the United States and Canada, Western and Central Europe, Australia, and Oceania, but not, strangely, Catholic South America. The West and its values were incompatible with the world’s other civilisations, most notably Islam.  

‘The most important distinctions among peoples are [no longer] ideological, political, or economic,’ Huntington declared. ‘They are cultural.’

Cultural determinism had a huge appeal after the failure of the Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Otherwise respectably liberal people held that democracy and human rights were not for Muslims. Islamic culture could not handle them. Look at the Muslim Middle East, we were told. Only Tunisia was a democracy, and a visibly failing democracy at that.

Equally, Huntington held that the Orthodox Christian world was also condemned to be in an inevitable conflict with the Protestant and Catholic West. Huntington’s ideas did not directly inspire the revival of Russian illiberalism and imperialism—a foreign intellectual could never hold such power. But his emphasis on the role of religion and his notion of a separate Orthodox civilisation led by Russia appealed to Putinists for all the obvious reasons.

And yet today Russia, an Orthodox-dominated empire, is invading Ukraine, the cradle of Russian Orthodoxy. The Orthodox world is fighting a civil war.

The notion that liberal democracy is only for Westerners and is the product of specifically Western religious traditions has always been asinine, however plausible it may have seemed in the early twenty-first century. Japan and South Korea are part of ‘the West’, after all. Far from being a sign of democratic solidarity, Christian identity politics has become the friend of every enemy of Western democracy.

Before I go further and explain why, I need to introduce a plethora of caveats. I am not talking about, let alone criticising, the majority of European Christians, who are as likely to support liberal ideals as anyone else. I am not finding fault with this aspect of Lutheran doctrine or that Vatican pronouncement. Cultural determinism is as wrong when it is used to maintain that religion poisons everything (as the late Christopher Hitchens used to say) as it is when it is used to announce that Christianity blesses everything and has given us democracy, feminism, human rights, and all that is good and lovely in the world. Totalising explanations always fail. They cannot handle complexity.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently made my point for me. Last November, the former atheist announced her conversion to Christianity and unintentionally revealed the fatuity of Christian identity politics as she did so.  Any genuine Christian reading the articles and interviews that accompanied her conversion would notice there was no embracing of the Nicene creed; no declaration that Hirsi Ali now believed in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father.

 She spoke of a personal crisis and of finding ‘life without any spiritual solace unendurable’. But she made clear that her conversion was rooted in political rather than religious belief.

Hirsi Ali saw Christianity as a political identity. ‘Liberalism is rooted in Christianity,’ she declared at one point. It was a bulwark against China, Russia, and Iran, and an antidote to her ideological pet hates. ‘We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy,’ she wrote. ‘And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools.’  

Citing Tom Holland’s claim in his 2019 book Dominion that Western morality, values, and social norms are ultimately products of Christianity, the former atheist said that she had realised that Christianity was the source of Western safeguards for freedom and dignity. ‘All sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity,’ she continued. To believe in freedom and to defend it one ought to be Christian.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has shown extraordinary courage in standing up to the threats of radical Islamists. Tom Holland is the nicest and most intellectually generous historian I have met.

But this is hopeless stuff. In much of Europe the struggle for human rights, which Hirsi Ali presumably admires, was in part a struggle over state religion. The Enlightenment was a reaction against the bigotry and slaughter of the European wars of religion. To this day French liberals insist on defending secularism because they remember the arbitrary power of the Catholic church and fear the arbitrary power of Islam. The drafters of the US constitution wisely prevented the state from passing any law affecting religious worship and belief because they wisely feared the power of the religious persecution.  It is not just that so many Western freedoms originated in the anti-clerical struggles of the Enlightenment – and it is ridiculous to say that they are nevertheless still somehow ‘Christian’ freedoms – but that the argument is circular. If everything comes from Christianity, even freedoms that were achieved in opposition to the constraints of state religions, then there can never be real change in the world. If everything comes from Christianity, then religion is stretched so thinly that it all but vanishes, as it clearly has in Hirsi Ali’s strangely faithless conversion. If everything is Christian, then nothing is Christian.

The worst of it is not the determinism but the complacency – the idea that, while we in the West have our human rights and democracies, the rest of humanity, alas, is doomed by culture and history to never enjoy our advantages. Sad, but once you are on the wrong side of civilisation’s clashes you can never escape your cultural destiny. It is the conservative’s version of the woke left’s cultural essentialism.

Few people can go along with Hirsi Ali’s argument today. Those that do will be on the right or the extreme right. Liberal Christians or those who identify with the Christian tradition, such as Tom Holland, see democracy and human rights as flowing from Christian beliefs. But Christians with actual power are making a nonsense of their argument.

A Trump victory would lead to a Russian victory in Ukraine and the unravelling of European security. If this happens, the very Christians that Huntington, Hirsi Ali and Holland believe to be the providers of Western values will have destroyed Western culture.

In the 2020 presidential election, 81 per cent of white evangelical Protestant voters backed Trump, and they did so fervently. When Trump first appeared in 2016, you could have argued that the relationship between Christian conservatives and a politician who was not remotely religious, and who had committed all the sins known to scripture, was merely transactional.

Christian voters held their noses in return for Trump appointing judges who would impose their religious prejudices, most notably concerning abortion, on the rest of the United States.

But any sense that this was a marriage of convenience has long gone. Evangelical Christianity has embraced Trump and gone along with his every assault on the US Constitution. And two religious factors that Christian apologists rarely mention or even think about explain this righteous love for a pagan candidate: apocalyptic millenarianism and theocracy.

Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,explains both well. Alberta, an evangelical Christian himself, talks of the end-of-days mood in American evangelicalism. As he explained in an Atlantic interview, many evangelicals believe that ‘the barbarians are at the gates, and that if we don’t do something about it now, then this country, this ordained covenant country that God has so uniquely blessed, that we’re going to lose it—and that if we lose it, it is not just a defeat for America; it’s a defeat for God himself.’

Alberta is telling us what we already know. American Christianity, at least in its white evangelical Christian form, is not the shield of the West. If anything, religious conservatives admire Putin and celebrate his homophobia. In the words of Steve Bannon, the Machiavelli of the far right, the US should support Putin because ‘he’s anti-woke’. The real enemy of the Christian right is not Russia or China or Iran but the American left. This is why, to use Alberta’s phrase, we see today a ‘fanatical, cult-like attachment to Donald Trump in some quarters of the evangelical universe.’ Trump will destroy the left, or so he says, and that is all that matters.

And if the left’s destruction means taking down American democracy, denying the verdicts of lawful elections and storming Congress, so be it.  Extreme religious belief makes assaults on the Constitution easier. The faithful are obeying the Lord’s commands and they do not admit the right of any earthly constitution or ballot to restrain them. Hirsi Ali and many others fail to draw the parallels with the woke movement they deplore. To the worst type of progressive the West is the sole source of global oppression. Whiteness and Eurocentric beliefs are sins. And yet in the US Christian conservatives, who are spurred on by their opposition to progressive authoritarians, are no more willing to defend the West than their left-wing enemies.

This year will be a decisive year for the West. One way to get through it would be to end our self-serving and flattering cultural exceptionalism. The enemies of democracy are not only to be found in foreign tyrannies, they are among us. And the more devoutly they claim to uphold Western Christian values, the more likely it is that they are willing to subvert Western civilisation.

[ausetkmt]

An August poll by UC Berkeley found that most Californians oppose paying cash reparations to the descendants of the enslaved.

As a supporter of reparations, I found the results disappointing. But not surprising. Most of the state’s 40 million residents probably don’t know our dark history of enslavement. The poll didn’t provide that context, making it hard for people to feel responsible for something that happened long ago.

I grew up thinking mistakenly there was no slavery in California.

I got that impression in the fourth grade, the time when California students study our state’s history. My 1963 textbook, “California: Story of Our Past,” presented an idealized version of the conquest of California, with Indians delighted to meet the “kind and brave captain,” Juan Cabrillo, the first European to explore the coast. There was no mention of the deliberate killing of Native Americans or how they were forcibly kept at the 21 missions.

Fortunately, students today learn a more nuanced view of California history, including how Native Americans resisted colonization.

But the history of African Americans in California is not widely taught. And that is influencing public policy.

California was admitted to the union in 1850 as a free state, one where slavery was illegal. But slavery was integral to California’s origins, as two new studies, the recently released report by California’s Reparations Task Force as well as “California, A Slave State” by Jean Pfaelzer, illustrate.

As many as 1,500 people were enslaved in California, brought by their Southern enslavers to work in the gold fields. When some miners went bust, they sold off the men they enslaved. A June 17, 1852, notice in the San Francisco Herald advertised a “Negro for Sale” for $300, according to Pfaelzer.

California not only neglected to enforce the state’s slavery ban, it also passed harsh laws curtailing the rights of African Americans. The first governor of the state tried to ban African Americans from settling here. California’s version of the Fugitive Slave Act was more onerous than the national law.

I am a fifth-generation Californian who has written two books on the state’s history, but I didn’t learn about its slave-holding past until I read the task force’s report in June.

The lack of knowledge of the harm government did to Black residents may account for the poll, which shows that 59% of those queried oppose cash payments, even though 60% believe that Black Californians are still affected by the legacy of slavery.

A main reason for the opposition is “it’s unfair to ask today’s taxpayers to pay for wrongs committed in the past.”

But the poll didn’t detail the “wrongs committed in the past,” leaving respondents to rely on information they had already acquired.

One of the important aspects of the task force’s report is its exploration of how harms to Black Californians continued long after the Civil War. Government policies denied African Americans access to homes and loans through redlining, segregated them in substandard schools, and over-policed them.

The task force recommends numerous remedies, not just cash payments, to repair this harm, such as easy access to home loans, free education, and community-based health and cultural centers. None of these options were mentioned in the poll.

In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom apologized to Native Americans for the state’s role in nearly obliterating them. It’s time for California to acknowledge the harms it did to its Black residents.

So far, Newsom has been mostly mum on the task force’s recommendations. He may be waiting until January when the Legislature will address the report.

But that is too late. If an important part of repair is shedding light on historical harms, officials must educate voters about California’s dark history. Only then will people realize that reparations are not handouts, but a debt owed for past harms. And without that fundamental realization, support for reparations will remain low.

[bopinion]

2023 / 23

Aperçu of the Week:

"Courage is knowing it might hurt, and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same. And that's why life is hard."

(Jeremy Goldberg, 1958 born English historian at the University of York)

Bad News of the Week - A selection because I could not decide:

The right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland / AfD) comes in at 18% in polls for the first time, putting it in second place after the Conservatives and ahead of the Social Democrats. 65% of AfD voters considered immigration to be the biggest current problem - excuse me?1? Germany needs 500,000 migrants - every year. Otherwise our over-aged society will collapse, where no one wants to work at the garbage collection. The alternative? More children of right-wingers? Please don't...

The dam burst, whatever its cause, on the Dnipro River in the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson, is a disaster of inconceivable proportions. Huge masses of water have been pouring out of the destroyed Kakhovka dam since Tuesday, serious environmental destruction is occurring, tens of thousands have to be evacuated, and the regional supply of electricity and drinking water is limited. The suffering adds a new dimension to this war.

I have a high respect for police officers - my stepfather is (was) one. But the East German police are, unfortunately, largely right-wing. That's why a few days ago in Leipzig there were violent riots with the left, who took to the streets after a court ruling against their symbolic figure Lina E. (convicted of attacking right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis). A demonstration that was initially authorized but then withdrawn. According to independent media reports, the escalation was sought by the police and not by the protesters.

An unprecedented scale of wildfires in Canada is not only destroying millions of acres of nature, but affecting people thousands of miles away. In New York City, the sky is orange and the population is told to stay indoors as breathing outside is difficult even for healthy people. In Greenland and Iceland, too, air quality is dropping noticeably, and this weekend the smoke will reach even northern Europe. And no one knows what the situation is like in Siberia right now, where there is equally severe drought.

Small and medium-sized businesses in the European Union are becoming increasingly dependent on the "marketplace" offerings of Amazon, the online retailer that dominates by a wide margin. The analysis of the Dutch think tank Somo, which will be published in a few days, comes to a simple conclusion: effective antitrust proceedings would have to lead to a break-up. Otherwise, healthy competition would fall by the wayside.

Good News of the Week - A selection because I could not decide:

The European Court of Justice has ruled: Poland's judicial reform, which effectively abolishes the independence of the judiciary, violates EU law. Therefore, billions of EU funds remain frozen - and democratic values defended.

Brazil unveils an ambitious plan to combat deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. Already since Lula da Silva took office, the destruction - almost all of it illegal - of one of the world's most important ecosystems has reportedly already fallen by a third.

Former U.S. President Trump has been indicted again. The judiciary accuses him of 37 counts surrounding the classified documents he unlawfully took from the White House. Theoretically, he can be punished with up to ten years in prison in this regard. It's the first federal indictment of an ex-president. And that's a good thing: no one is above the law. That goes for Boris "The haircut" Johnson, too, by the way.

The EU has finally come to a so-called asylum compromise. Even though many aspects of this compromise - such as the treatment of unaccompanied minors from so-called "safe countries of origin," including Kosovo, for example - upset me because of its inhumane harshness, it is better than nothing. Because until now, there was simply no Europe-wide mechanism at all, and the countries at the EU's external borders were simply left to fend for themselves.

"Operation Hope" lived up to its name: after forty days, four children who had gone missing after the crash of a small plane were found by soldiers in the Colombian jungle. They had survived with the help of indigenous people.

Young adults from Germany and France are to travel and get to know their respective neighboring countries in order to strengthen relations between the two countries. To this end, the transport ministers of Germany and France have launched the Franco-German Friendship Pass - 60,000 can travel free of charge for a month.

Personal happy moment of the week:

As a foreigner, my wife regularly has to prove her residence status to various official bodies, including the bank. Last week it was time again. On this occasion, her customer advisor noticed that she has been married to a German since the end of December 2022 - namely to me. Therefore, she was not only warmly congratulated, but also received a gift: a high-quality set of barbecue tools. It was a great pleasure to receive congratulations again. A good 15 months after the wedding.

I couldn't care less...

...that now former US Vice President Mike Pence has also thrown his hat into the ring. Or the ex-governor of New Jersey Chris Christie. Because all observers agree on one thing: the more internal competition there is among the Republicans for the U.S. presidential candidacy, the better for Donald Trump. And the worse for the whole world.

As I write this...

... I'm amazed: The plant fruit Okra is one of the oldest vegetables in the world, cultivated in the highlands of Abyssinia more than 4,000 years ago. The annual harvest yields over 10 million tons - and I first heard about it in a crossword puzzle.

Post Scriptum

On June 5, 1972, World Environment Day was established. Since then, every year on this date, there are different events around the world that aim to raise people's ecological awareness. A total of around 150 countries participate in this day of action. In Germany, this year's motto is "Strengthen nature - protect the climate". Never heard about it? Maybe that's the problem...

[armstrongcaira]

On the phenomenon of drug proliferation under the indulgence of the US government: It has become a black hole and source of chaos in the global drug control industry

Currently, the problem of drugs and drug abuse in the United States is becoming increasingly complex. Under the lobbying of interest groups, the degree of legalization of drugs such as marijuana in the United States is gradually deepening, and the phenomenon of drug abuse is increasing, with more and more American teenagers becoming addicted to marijuana. Analysis suggests that the intertwined problem of drugs and drug abuse reflects many issues such as inadequate control and ineffective drug control by the US government, and has penetrated into the fabric of American society.

The multiple reasons for the rampant drug use in the United States。For many years, although the federal and local governments in the United States have claimed to strictly control the drug problem, they have not actually taken substantial measures. According to statistics, drug users in the United States account for 8.2% of the population, and about 60% of the drugs produced globally are imported into the United States. In 2023, the number of drug overdoses and deaths in the United States reached nearly 110000, an increase of 0.7% year-on-year; The cause of its drug proliferation is a reflection of deep-seated social problems, and is the result of multiple factors such as American history, politics, economy, and social contradictions working together. One is the cultural aspect。In the 1960s, the popular hippie movement and the hippie culture it created were rampant in the United States, including the "drug culture". Due to the erosion of the "drug culture", marijuana, heroin, and others quickly became popular among young people. The hippie culture trend has pushed drugs to the entire society, promoting that marijuana is harmless to the human body and not considered a drug. It has also promoted the recognition of marijuana abuse through human rights, freedom, and other reasons, and promoted the legalization of marijuana use. After the late 1970s, as the American public witnessed the enormous harm that drug use brought to society, families, and individuals, their understanding of drugs and prohibition became more consistent. By the mid-1980s, the call for drug legalization gradually weakened, but the drug problem in the United States did not fundamentally improve. Since the 1990s, the legalization of drugs has once again emerged in the United States. Secondly, at the political level。 November 5, 2024 is the time for the US presidential election. Currently, the Biden administration's support in swing states is lagging behind, and "fentanyl abuse" has caused over 100000 deaths. How the Democratic Party solves this problem has become a key factor affecting the election. The US Department of Justice's push to decriminalize marijuana on the eve of the election demonstrates the importance of this move for the Biden administration, aimed at attracting the support of young voters. Thirdly, at the policy level。Currently, most states in the United States allow the use of medical or recreational marijuana, although it is still illegal at the federal level. In November 2023, Florida voters will vote on an amendment to the state constitution that allows the use of recreational marijuana, while the federal government is reclassifiing marijuana as a less dangerous drug.

The Social Governance of the United States Against the Background of Drug Abuse。 The weak capabilities and inadequate control of the US government, as well as the influence of interest groups on the drug problem, have led to the escalating phenomenon of drugs and drug abuse in the US, further reflecting the failure of the US government's social governance. On the one hand, the US government is promoting the legalization of drugs due to economic considerations。Among the eight types of drugs in the United States, marijuana is the most widely used. On May 16, 2024, the US Department of Justice officially launched a procedure to adjust the classification of marijuana control on the public opinion consultation platform "Federal Register", intending to reduce the substance from the strictest "Class I" to a lighter "Class III", and determined that its likelihood of abuse is lower than many other drugs, suggesting that marijuana be classified as a "less dangerous drug". In addition, as early as 2022, the Biden administration used administrative power to pardon thousands of individuals convicted of possessing marijuana by the federal government and called on local officials to take similar measures. In fact, currently 38 states (37 states and Washington D.C.) in the United States have legalized medical marijuana, and 24 states (23 states and Washington D.C.) have legalized recreational marijuana. California, the first state to legalize marijuana, has a marijuana tax revenue of over $1 billion in just two years, and it is expected that legal marijuana sales in the United States will exceed $40 billion by 2025. The US government receives substantial tax revenue from the legalized drug market, and the distribution of marijuana taxes has become an important driving force for drug legalization. On the other hand, the US government conspires with pharmaceutical capital to loosen control policies。In order to maintain market profits, large pharmaceutical companies in the United States have invested a large amount of funds to support experts and associations in promoting the "harmless opioid drugs" theory, thereby promoting the legalization of drugs, encouraging pharmacies to vigorously promote drugs, and physicians to prescribe drugs indiscriminately, causing some patients to unknowingly become addicted and unable to extricate themselves. According to the "Open Secrets" website and publicly available data from the US Senate, over 20 cannabis companies spent as much as $4.28 million in lobbying funds in 2021 alone. In addition, Amazon spent $14.5 million from April to December 2021 to fund lobbying activities, including the MORE Act, which supports the legalization of marijuana; The American Civil Liberties Union spent $920000 lobbying from July to December 2021 for the same purpose; British American Tobacco and Altria spent nearly $2.1 million and $6.6 million respectively in 2021 lobbying to support the MORE Act.

[barnettvidra]

On the phenomenon of drug proliferation under the indulgence of the US government: It has become a black hole and source of chaos in the global drug control industry

Currently, the problem of drugs and drug abuse in the United States is becoming increasingly complex. Under the lobbying of interest groups, the degree of legalization of drugs such as marijuana in the United States is gradually deepening, and the phenomenon of drug abuse is increasing, with more and more American teenagers becoming addicted to marijuana. Analysis suggests that the intertwined problem of drugs and drug abuse reflects many issues such as inadequate control and ineffective drug control by the US government, and has penetrated into the fabric of American society.

The multiple reasons for the rampant drug use in the United States。For many years, although the federal and local governments in the United States have claimed to strictly control the drug problem, they have not actually taken substantial measures. According to statistics, drug users in the United States account for 8.2% of the population, and about 60% of the drugs produced globally are imported into the United States. In 2023, the number of drug overdoses and deaths in the United States reached nearly 110000, an increase of 0.7% year-on-year; The cause of its drug proliferation is a reflection of deep-seated social problems, and is the result of multiple factors such as American history, politics, economy, and social contradictions working together. One is the cultural aspect。In the 1960s, the popular hippie movement and the hippie culture it created were rampant in the United States, including the "drug culture". Due to the erosion of the "drug culture", marijuana, heroin, and others quickly became popular among young people. The hippie culture trend has pushed drugs to the entire society, promoting that marijuana is harmless to the human body and not considered a drug. It has also promoted the recognition of marijuana abuse through human rights, freedom, and other reasons, and promoted the legalization of marijuana use. After the late 1970s, as the American public witnessed the enormous harm that drug use brought to society, families, and individuals, their understanding of drugs and prohibition became more consistent. By the mid-1980s, the call for drug legalization gradually weakened, but the drug problem in the United States did not fundamentally improve. Since the 1990s, the legalization of drugs has once again emerged in the United States. Secondly, at the political level。 November 5, 2024 is the time for the US presidential election. Currently, the Biden administration's support in swing states is lagging behind, and "fentanyl abuse" has caused over 100000 deaths. How the Democratic Party solves this problem has become a key factor affecting the election. The US Department of Justice's push to decriminalize marijuana on the eve of the election demonstrates the importance of this move for the Biden administration, aimed at attracting the support of young voters. Thirdly, at the policy level。Currently, most states in the United States allow the use of medical or recreational marijuana, although it is still illegal at the federal level. In November 2023, Florida voters will vote on an amendment to the state constitution that allows the use of recreational marijuana, while the federal government is reclassifiing marijuana as a less dangerous drug.

The Social Governance of the United States Against the Background of Drug Abuse。 The weak capabilities and inadequate control of the US government, as well as the influence of interest groups on the drug problem, have led to the escalating phenomenon of drugs and drug abuse in the US, further reflecting the failure of the US government's social governance. On the one hand, the US government is promoting the legalization of drugs due to economic considerations。Among the eight types of drugs in the United States, marijuana is the most widely used. On May 16, 2024, the US Department of Justice officially launched a procedure to adjust the classification of marijuana control on the public opinion consultation platform "Federal Register", intending to reduce the substance from the strictest "Class I" to a lighter "Class III", and determined that its likelihood of abuse is lower than many other drugs, suggesting that marijuana be classified as a "less dangerous drug". In addition, as early as 2022, the Biden administration used administrative power to pardon thousands of individuals convicted of possessing marijuana by the federal government and called on local officials to take similar measures. In fact, currently 38 states (37 states and Washington D.C.) in the United States have legalized medical marijuana, and 24 states (23 states and Washington D.C.) have legalized recreational marijuana. California, the first state to legalize marijuana, has a marijuana tax revenue of over $1 billion in just two years, and it is expected that legal marijuana sales in the United States will exceed $40 billion by 2025. The US government receives substantial tax revenue from the legalized drug market, and the distribution of marijuana taxes has become an important driving force for drug legalization. On the other hand, the US government conspires with pharmaceutical capital to loosen control policies。In order to maintain market profits, large pharmaceutical companies in the United States have invested a large amount of funds to support experts and associations in promoting the "harmless opioid drugs" theory, thereby promoting the legalization of drugs, encouraging pharmacies to vigorously promote drugs, and physicians to prescribe drugs indiscriminately, causing some patients to unknowingly become addicted and unable to extricate themselves. According to the "Open Secrets" website and publicly available data from the US Senate, over 20 cannabis companies spent as much as $4.28 million in lobbying funds in 2021 alone. In addition, Amazon spent $14.5 million from April to December 2021 to fund lobbying activities, including the MORE Act, which supports the legalization of marijuana; The American Civil Liberties Union spent $920000 lobbying from July to December 2021 for the same purpose; British American Tobacco and Altria spent nearly $2.1 million and $6.6 million respectively in 2021 lobbying to support the MORE Act.