Funny events in anti-woke world

XsjadoBlayde

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Apr 29, 2020
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"The anti-CRT bill says you gotta both-sides the Holocaust"
Not mere happenstance, is part of the takeover and intimidation of school boards tactic, directly from Bannon and Flynn alongside a few others. Really not wise to sleep on this threat or wait for it to blow over.


In the Donald Trump era, GOP politics are mainly about trolling. So it's no surprise that Ohio Senate candidate Josh Mandel manifested this week as an in-flesh version of an egg avatar tweeting memes about DEMON-crats and the glories of horse paste. The unlucky recipients of Mandel's trolling were members of a school board in a suburb of Cincinnati, where Mandel showed up to grandstand despite not having children in the district. His complaints were incoherent — a muddled mix of whining about mask mandates, screeching that "children should not be forced to learn about to pick a gender," and something about the district's book-keeping practices — but of course, actually making sense was not the point. The point was to get attention by being a jerk.

So Mandel walked himself through the standard troll protocol: Escalate obnoxious behavior until the target is forced to block you, or in this case, kick you out. Then sanctimoniously declare yourself a victim to your own followers, martyred by the censorious liberals who can't handle the truth bombs you were supposedly dropping.

Mandel followed this script faithfully. He declared on Twitter — freely and without a hint of self-awareness — that his "free speech" was being suppressed. He was just there to "defend moms and dads," he sanctimoniously insisted, before accusing the school board of "using kids as pawns in a political game."

As with most accusations leveled by right-wingers, this was really a confession.

The Ohio school board — like every other school board affected by the coordinated assault by unhinged right-wingers screaming about mask mandates and "critical race theory" — is just trying to navigate the difficult problem of educating children during a pandemic. It's Republicans who are using kids as political pawns, staging these increasingly ridiculous confrontations at school boards. It's nothing more than political theater to motivate the GOP base for the 2022 midterms.

QAnon is, at its heart, a fascist movement dedicated to ending American democracy and, like many fascist movements, regards their leader, Donald Trump, as a god-like figure. But coming at people straight with that pitch is a tough sell. So, instead, the QAnon pitch is about "the children." They lure people in with lurid conspiracy theories about a worldwide pedophile cult, the sort of thing that, if it were true, really would be a cause to take action. Once in, the lies about "saving the children" serve as a justification, both to outsiders and to silence doubts in the followers. How can you call them fascists when all they want to do is "save the children?"

The beauty of using "the children" as a cover story is that it is blanket permission to be a monster. Any level of harassment or even violence can be justified, as long as protecting the innocence of children is invoked. (See: The attempted overthrow of American democracy by QAnon fanatics.) No wonder Republican operators have been inspired to take a page directly out of the QAnon playbook to manufacture this nationwide assault on school boards. Using imaginary threats to children as a recruitment-and-rationalization strategy works.

Republicans' cleaned up the conspiracy theory a little, as accusing Tom Hanks of pedophilia is a tough one to trick mainstream journalists into repeating. So the mainstream GOP version of the conspiracy theory is now "critical race theory" and something about how mask mandates are a sinister effort to wrest away parental authority, instead of a common sense health regulation. But the basic gist is the same: Pretend to believe that evil liberals want to hurt children, and use that as a permission slip to act on every antisocial impulse.

To be certain, Republican organizers have long understood that their base is composed of wannabe trolls just aching for an excuse to freak out in public. This understanding was harnessed in the early years of Barack Obama's presidency to protest his economic stimulus and in the GOP effort to prevent the Affordable Care Act from passing. The "Tea Party" started off as a total Astroturf affair, funded by the Koch brothers and organized by GOP operatives, built to look like a "grassroots" uprising of conservatives supposedly irate at social spending programs. But it tapped into a very real longing among everyday Republican voters to have racist temper tantrums in public. They just needed a cover story, and the Koch brothers gave it to them. Pop on a tricorner hat, drop the "without representation" part of the American revolutionary complaint about taxation, and now it's "patriotic" to scream barely coded racist vitriol at the local town hall meeting. The current assault on school boards follows the same formula.

"The sudden interest in school boards is not an organic grassroots movement of angry parents," but "an effort orchestrated by seasoned right-wing political operatives," Judd Legum at Popular Info writes, in a piece that identifies both the organizers, drawn heavily from the GOP consultant class and their GOP-linked funders. These people are then laundered into "concerned parents" — with no mention of their political affiliations — on Fox News. The organizing is deliberately constructed to look amateurish, as if this were just local parents having authentic reactions to local politics, instead of a well-financed national movement to construct a mass hysteria, aimed solely at the goal of electing Republicans.

The strategy works very well, because, as GOP operatives understand the scream-at-waiters-and-flight-attendant energy of America's Kens and Karens. Add to the mix the QAnon-esque fake concern for "the children," and that anti-social energy becomes explosive, as school board members across the country are finding out to their dismay.

No one should be fooled. Neither the organizers behind this Astroturf effort nor the ordinary Republican voters caught up in the excitement care one whit about American children. If they did, they sure wouldn't want them spreading COVID-19 in schools. In a broader sense, people who actually care about children want to fight climate change, want families to have access to affordable and quality child care, and want children born into homes where they are wanted and welcome — all values Democrats stand for (well, mostly) and Republicans universally oppose. Children are not harmed by learning racism is bad or by being protected from the novel coronavirus. But if these QAnon-style tactics work to elect Republicans in 2022, American children's futures are in very real peril indeed.
(Had to remove links to be able post again. *sigh*)


 
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Silvanus

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Certified "bruh" moment here. This is you ascribing far more pomp than is necessary for how many people vote. There's no need to change the tools for how representatives write laws, they all become available to the public. So unless you're saying that laws are written by cabals of engineers and polisci grads, and not just being asked by representatives about some topic that the representative will take to later write a law themself, it's a pointless line of argument for you.
Right, so all the tools and authority to draft laws and put them to vote are in the hands of everyone, then. Cue dozens of referenda a day, functioning essentially like petitions, none with any greater authority or reason to care than any other. So the one about insulin gets buried under the ones about mandating metric measurements and compulsory military service and standardised sizes for boxes. In short, standstill.


This is like what Cheetodust posted earlier where it's "Yes, but actually no, but kinda yes still". Delegated representatives, rather than elected (for what it's worth) for certain matters, while most day to day activities are handled through a more pure direct democracy.
Delegated by....? Does this just mean political power without any democratic mandate at all?


And the nations... are nations. Surprisingly enough. Get educated bruh.
Do you think a nation of 12,000, without national borders and existing within the wider economy/state of another, encounters the same practical considerations as a state of 60 million with its own economy and borders?


From what I can gather...



Which is rules of order, not any of the things you say are needed for effective governance.
OK, to get this straight, you believe MPs and Senators etc have access to no greater connections, information or resources than the guys on park benches?

It would remove any onus at all, except that you have to live in the society you create. So precisely the same onus in why people should care about elections and the laws representatives pass, but stronger since you can't pass the buck. And as soon as you've determined that the populace are the governing body, all the resources currently in the hands of representatives becomes available to the public, where issues can be explored and discussed. Just like in current assemblies, but bigger.
Can't pass the buck!? There's no greater recipe for zero accountability than a situation whereby everybody in the entire country is equally responsible.

And they have to live in the country they create. Yup, cue the self-interest. Only now its not even part of their job to act in anyone else's interest. Selfishness has full free reign.

And you know who else has to live in that country? Everyone who lost the vote.


In the sense that the government is made up of and legislates for a large group of people who can be subdivided into smaller governances. Y'know, exactly how it is now.
So these people wield broader political authority, then.

...the difference is that you're removing the requirement for them to actually be elected. So... unaccountable, appointed politicians, the people at large didn't choose.

My question is, where do you think current representatives get their information? Like Cheetodust pointed out, right now the news is an awful source of information in the for-profit market, but it hurts representative democracy to literally the same degree as it would direct democracy, so holding it as a flaw unique to direct democracy is a joke. And the fixes to news media that would better facilitate representative democracy would bolster direct democracy equally.

That's the whole point here, representatives don't have any special power, positions, or authority that makes them better governors than any given person. They just have a bigger voice in expressing their opinions.
They are supposed to be accessing a network of research bodies, scientific advisory councils, economic researchers and data compilers that the public in general doesn't have access to (well, unless they file a freedom of information request or something specific).

You want these open entirely to the public, then the bodies will spend most of their time fulfilling spurious requests, and would need to grow into enormous bureaucracies in order to function. Plus, any referenda that actually make use of the information would be indistinguishable and immediately buried by the 40 others filed on the same day.

Plus, with no figures holding the necessary political authority to appoint them (remember, abolishment of all political hierarchies was a specific aim of the person to whom I first responded), the bodies would themselves lose their standing and dissolve. There's also no way the public at large would vote to keep them in funding, because most people have no knowledge or understanding of what they do. It's not that this is hidden. It's that nobody cares to find out. So, funding gone, bodies gone.
 

XsjadoBlayde

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Holy shit we really are in the dumbest most cursed timeline.


What a stunning void of charisma. Hasn't stopped all the Q influencers pushing this hard though.

giphy-28.gif
 
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crimson5pheonix

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Right, so all the tools and authority to draft laws and put them to vote are in the hands of everyone, then. Cue dozens of referenda a day, functioning essentially like petitions, none with any greater authority or reason to care than any other. So the one about insulin gets buried under the ones about mandating metric measurements and compulsory military service and standardised sizes for boxes. In short, standstill.
So this has been bugging me for a while but I largely overlooked it for the sake of argument, is there a single country in the world that mandates how much insulin to buy? Last I checked the closest anyone approaches to that is letting their military buy drugs since they need to be able to run a field hospital everywhere in the world. Otherwise it's up to hospitals and pharmacies to buy drugs, and labs to produce them. So unless your vision of direct democracy requires nationalizing all drug production and distribution, then making every single decision a referendum with no delegation, it's stupid.

Beyond that, your argument hinges on there being no communication between people at all and that people won't know the issues happening in their country, which is the exact opposite of what we see now, misinformation of the causes aside.

Delegated by....? Does this just mean political power without any democratic mandate at all?
Well if they're delegated by a council comprised of everyone in the section of population they're apart of, by definition no.

Do you think a nation of 12,000, without national borders and existing within the wider economy/state of another, encounters the same practical considerations as a state of 60 million with its own economy and borders?
If you care about such things you should have specified. After all there are countries with economies and borders with fewer than 50,000 people in them.

OK, to get this straight, you believe MPs and Senators etc have access to no greater connections, information or resources than the guys on park benches?
And this is a response... how? You said these people were trained to be MPs, I pointed out they're not outside of understanding the rules of order. As to this distracting inane question, not inherently, no. I suppose there might be some national archive not available to public in at least some countries, but there's not going to be a book in there "How to govern effectively (the secret way)". Actually knowing how to be a politician and writing effective laws is not learned through the act of being elected.

Can't pass the buck!? There's no greater recipe for zero accountability than a situation whereby everybody in the entire country is equally responsible.

Funnily enough, there's a whole market built around angry Trumpers (I might remind you, number over 70 million people) selling them "Don't blame me, I voted for Trump" apparel unironically. I think your nightmare scenario is here.

And they have to live in the country they create. Yup, cue the self-interest. Only now its not even part of their job to act in anyone else's interest. Selfishness has full free reign.

And you know who else has to live in that country? Everyone who lost the vote.
I find it ironic you call me overly optimistic about the nature of society and then turn around and say politicians of all people act in anyone else's self interest. If people are inherently selfish assholes to the point of not being able to function in society, how does society work at all period? How do unions work?


So these people wield broader political authority, then.

...the difference is that you're removing the requirement for them to actually be elected. So... unaccountable, appointed politicians, the people at large didn't choose.
Literally the exact opposite of that.

They are supposed to be accessing a network of research bodies, scientific advisory councils, economic researchers and data compilers that the public in general doesn't have access to (well, unless they file a freedom of information request or something specific).
I thought this was about knowing what problems face the country day to day. Research bodies don't do that, they tell you how to fix those problems, and to my knowledge most experts for these committees exist outside of the government entirely. There are a few exceptions like the American CBO or NOAA (who do independent research without being told by anyone and present their findings publicly), but otherwise most of these programs amount to a group of politicians rounding up experts to ask them something. It's not that this isn't available to the public, it's that they're formed ad-hoc for some short term and specific goal.

You want these open entirely to the public, then the bodies will spend most of their time fulfilling spurious requests, and would need to grow into enormous bureaucracies in order to function. Plus, any referenda that actually make use of the information would be indistinguishable and immediately buried by the 40 others filed on the same day.
I mean, what's to stop a lone congressman from drowning these groups in spurious requests now, and why does that go away in direct democracy?

Plus, with no figures holding the necessary political authority to appoint them (remember, abolishment of all political hierarchies was a specific aim of the person to whom I first responded)
It's debatable if delegation is hierarchy, and even then you can still delegate and appoint in direct democracy.
 
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Gergar12

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Man, the Our Revolution Meetings are boring. I went to like two, and I left in 5 minutes. Even the guests they have on; who are elected congressional officials were boring. Then I remember the old Obama quote where he said a lot of progressive activism is eating cold pizza in church basements. If you are willing to stand that you deserve a medal.
 

TheMysteriousGX

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It's Joe Biden's fault that a store is in the middle of a remodel turning into Venezuela

Moderate conservative "comms strategist" casually maybe joking about child abuse

I wish I could be as shit at my job as a conservative pundit
 
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TheMysteriousGX

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Hey it was Boris Johnsons fault when it happened in the UK and totally must be due to Brexit lol

So it's Biden's fault now it's happening in he USA lol
It's Boris Johnson's fault that grocery stores occasionally empty some shelves during a remodel to fix their fucked up flooring?
 
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Dwarvenhobble

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It's Boris Johnson's fault that grocery stores occasionally empty some shelves during a remodel to fix their fucked up flooring?
That's what was being claimed by Remoaners in the UK a few months ago. The shortages on shelves (store literally about to restock or once that had been closed for refurbishment) was all food shortages due to Boris Johnson and Brexit according to them