What do you think Politically Correct was all about?Only these days?
We had the Satanic panic, the comics code authority, the haze code. Conservatives loved ruining everyone's fun looooooong before those dang SJWs came along.
Funny events in anti-woke world
- Thread starter Agema
- Start date
Some people on school boards have been SWATed and others have had child services called on them so they now have to get regular checks to make sure the children aren't being hurt by the parents
These must be really bad people, you might say. What crime did they do? 'Not do enough about removing CRT from the school curriculum'. Of course, CRT wasn't there in the first place, but that's besides the point.
So now some children have to take their clothes off in front of government officials due to other people complaining about made up stories. But they are just thinking of the children
OK, stop a minute, I'm not making it out to be "some big coup". It's an example. An example of a behaviour that's compelled under government contract, and which that company would not be doing if not for that contract.
If you genuinely don't believe that governments maintain supply chains for services that they themselves run, then I don't know what to say. It's one of the most basic recognised functions of government globally.
If rephrasing the same question is enough to convince someone to change their response, what does that tell you about that person's political awareness, really?
My point is that if every policy is put to referendum, including all detail and costing, you'll be going far beyond the kind of confirmatory referenda that have been mentioned thus far. And the onus on the voter to research is going to skyrocket. It won't be a case of asking whether people support introducing "M4A"; it'll be everything. Detail, costing, who runs what, the legalities, what happens to the existing companies, regulations on doctors etc. Hell, I would have no idea about how to approach that, because I'm not a professional. But I would trust an elected official with a strong track record in the area, such as Sanders, to have enough of a grasp of the topic to be able to approach those questions.
On some level, of course, yes. On some level every system of government is unrepresentative, including direct democracy. We unavoidably sacrifice some level of representativeness in order to have government at all.
They're more reliable than anything else. And they'll give you a damn good idea of someone's standing 9 times out of 10, if you're looking at their past conduct and voting as well as the specific topic at hand.
It's worse than that. Sometimes their big crime is just not letting a kid go on a field trip.
Okay and how does that address this issue? You say that like it's a tautology, but writing a contract to buy something is not maintaining a supply chain. It's being a buyer. How is the UK maintaining the insulin supply chain? Are they staffing the labs? Are they transporting it to the coast? Are they gathering raw materials?
Nothing, because when you lay out the policy before them and ask them their opinion, they usually support good policy. If you ask them isolated nonsense questions, you get isolated nonsense responses. Funnily enough just today I read an article on this very subject.
Journalists Misread Delayed Poll as Sticker Shock on Biden Bill
Many in the media misinterpreted a Gallup poll’s meaning, in part because they didn’t recognize a peculiar characteristic of public opinion.
fair.org
If you ask people if they support the reconciliation bill in congress, they support it. If you ask if the government should be doing more or less, they say less. If anything, giving broad policy outcomes independent of nitty gritty enforcement gives problems.
Of course that's all you want people thinking about.
And analysis can be provided, so I don't see how this helps your argument.
I'll take the more representative option then.
No it doesn't, not even close. Voting is possibly the second least important aspect of judging a politician, behind listening to how they talk about their voting. Creating support for their positions and putting those positions forward is the most reliable way of judging a politician.
Buying something is indeed part of maintaining a supply chain. As is arranging transportation, storage, and regulation for its use.
That article seems to be a prime example of what I'm talking about. Respondents will respond in diametrically opposed manners, to the same issue, depending on whether you state it as a question of broad principle of whether you cut it down into smaller questions. This is hardly a point of shining encouragement.
Analysis that we know, for a fact, people will not bother to access. Because they have access to quite a lot of it now, and they do not access it.
K.
That's so enormously vague. But from what I can tell, both of those will boil down to "how they talk".
But that's not maintaining, your insulin supply exists at the whim of a trio of private companies. And the UK doesn't arrange transportation itself outside of it's shores, likely paying a third (private) party if the insulin producers don't transport it themselves to the port. Once it's ship-bound it is also in the hands of a private enterprise.
Like, no praise or condemnation here, the supply chain itself is almost entirely managed privately, basically every supply chain is like this. Governments are just another customer.
It flies in the face of what you're saying actually. Here we have an example where people were told of a specific (but broad) policy and their position of support on it, and they support it. But if you ask them a platitudal philosophy question not attached to any policy, it can be used to fight a policy. It seems people respond to policy better than broad philosophical thinking.
They actually do, a lot more than you give credit for.
It's not, they are very different things. You can vote without giving any thought. It's almost a prerequisite to throw away your brain to talk about how you plan to vote on TV. It takes effort to argue your policy in debate, or to organize people to harass their politicians.
Manchin going on CNN to say he's not going to vote for the reconciliation bill takes nothing. Sanders going to West Virginia to sell why people should care about the reconciliation bill and pillory Manchin for opposing takes effort, it's why Sanders is real and Manchin isn't.
Or use the 642 story starter suggestion. Which do have some inappropriate suggestions... that are never used in the school setting because teachers aren't stupid.
But they gotta riot over that too
Yep. Hypocritical twats as always. The moment it's something they like, they don't want it canceled. The moment it's something they dislike or have prejudice against for little or petty reasons, then it's cancelable and acceptable. By their crap standards; if it can even be called that.
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-...ity-wisconsin-gop-proposes-banning-words-from
The party of "small government" and "school choice" having a totally normal one, trying to ban words that offend them from school curriculums.
The party of "small government" and "school choice" having a totally normal one, trying to ban words that offend them from school curriculums.
I think my favorite of these trigger words for Republicans are "equity", "equitable", "anti-racism", and "critical self-reflection." It truly highlights exactly how fucked up the GOP beliefs are that these words are so contrary to their agenda that they need to be literally banned from education. It's just like how the Texas GOP had a plank in their party platform about banning the teaching of critical thinking skills to students.
Where Facts Were No Match for Fear (Published 2021)
Civic boosters in central Montana hoped for some federal money to promote tourism. A disinformation campaign got in the way.
Civic boosters in central Montana hoped for some federal money to promote tourism. A disinformation campaign got in the way.
GREAT FALLS, Mont. — In the summer of 2020, as pandemic shutdowns closed businesses and racial justice protests erupted on American streets, Rae Grulkowski, a 56-year-old businesswoman who had never been involved in politics but was alarmed about what was happening to the country, found a way to make a difference.
The connection to the turbulence of national politics might not have been immediately clear.
Ms. Grulkowski had just heard about a years-in-the-making effort to designate her corner of central Montana a national heritage area, celebrating its role in the story of the American West. A small pot of federal matching money was there for the taking, to help draw more visitors and preserve underfunded local tourist attractions.
Ms. Grulkowski set about blowing up that effort with everything she had.
She collected addresses from a list of voters and spent $1,300 sending a packet denouncing the proposed heritage area to 1,498 farmers and ranchers. She told them the designation would forbid landowners to build sheds, drill wells or use fertilizers and pesticides. It would alter water rights, give tourists access to private property, create a new taxation district and prohibit new septic systems and burials on private land, she said.
None of this was true.
Yet it soon became accepted as truth by enough people to persuade Montana’s leading Republican figures and conservative organizations, including the farm bureau, Gov. Greg Gianforte and Senator Steve Daines, to oppose the proposal and enact a state law forbidding the federal government to create any heritage area in Montana. It is a ban that the state has no authority to enforce.
Which is how a humble bid for a small serving of Washington pork by a group of local civic boosters became yet another nasty skirmish in the bitter nationwide struggle between the forces of fact and fantasy.
From her point of view, the tale of Ms. Grulkowski’s one-woman crusade is a stirring reminder of the power of political activism. “I thought, ‘Here’s the world going crazy,’” she said, explaining her motivation.
From the vantage point of informed democratic decision making, it’s a haunting tale about how a sustained political campaign can succeed despite — or perhaps as a result of — being divorced from reality.
“Misinformation is the new playbook,” Bob Kelly, the mayor of Great Falls, said. “You don’t like something? Create alternative facts and figures as a way to undermine reality.”
The dispute has split communities, become a wedge issue in this fall’s political campaigns and left proponents of the heritage area flummoxed at their collective inability to refute falsehoods once they have become accepted wisdom.
“We’ve run into the uneducable,” Ellen Sievert, a retired historic preservation officer for Great Falls and surrounding Cascade County, said. “I don’t know how we get through that.”
Most of the heritage area’s key supporters are Democrats, and virtually all of its opponents are Republicans. But partisanship doesn’t explain everyone’s positions.
Steve Taylor, a former mayor of Neihart (pop. 43) whose family owns a car dealership in Great Falls, is a conservative who voted for Donald J. Trump twice, though he said he has regretted those votes since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Fellow Republicans, he said, have painted the heritage area as a liberal plot.
“They make it a political thing because if you have a Democrat involved, then they are all against it,” he said. “It’s so hard to build something and so easy to tear it down. It’s maddening. It’s so easy to destroy something with untruths.”
Giant Springs State Park near Great Falls is part of the proposed Big Sky Country National Heritage Area. Credit... Louise Johns for The New York Times
The Lewis and Clark Expedition first documented the Giant Springs in 1805. Credit... Louise Johns for The New York Times
Congress and President Ronald Reagan created National Heritage Areas in the 1980s as a partnership between the National Park Service and local boosters, who are required to match federal investment with funds raised locally. The 55 existing heritage areas, in 34 states, recognize, among other histories, metropolitan Detroit’s automotive background, Utah’s Mormon pioneers and Tennessee’s part in the Civil War. They collectively receive about $21 million annually — a pittance in the park service’s $3.5 billion budget — and have no impact on private property rights, a finding confirmed in a 2004 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office.
The proposal for the Big Sky Country National Heritage Area, encompassing most of two central Montana counties that are together roughly the size of Connecticut, was the brainchild of Jane Weber, a U.S. Forest Service retiree who spent a decade on the Cascade County Commission.
Beginning in 2013, Ms. Weber teamed up with local preservationists, formed a nonprofit, enlisted local businesses and raised $50,000 for a required feasibility study. In 2014, the Great Falls City Commission included the heritage area as part of its official growth policy.
The proposal would take in four National Historic Landmarks: Lewis and Clark’s portage route around Great Falls; Fort Benton, a pioneer town along the Missouri River that was the last stop for steamships heading west from St. Louis in the 1800s; the First Peoples Buffalo Jump, a steep cliff over which Blackfoot hunters herded buffalo to their deaths; and the home and studio of C.M. Russell, the turn-of-the-century “cowboy artist” whose paintings of the American West shaped the popular image of frontier life.
The park service requires demonstrations of public support, which Ms. Weber and her allies solicited. For six years, the process went on largely undisturbed. Ms. Weber hosted dozens of public meetings and was a regular on local radio stations. Opponents made scarcely a peep.
Then the 2020 political season arrived.
Rae Grulkowski and her husband, Ron Carpenter, falsely told farmers and ranchers that the heritage area would forbid landowners to build sheds, drill wells or use fertilizers and pesticides. Credit... Louise Johns for The New York Times
With the coronavirus ravaging the economy and protests lighting up her computer screen, Ms. Grulkowski said, she walked into a local Republican Party office one day and asked what she could do to help. Someone told her to attend a meeting. So she did.
There, she heard a presentation by Jeni Dodd, a former reporter for The Great Falls Tribune, who was running in a Republican primary for the Montana State Senate. Ms. Dodd had latched on to the heritage area as a waste of public money and a thicket of conflicts of interest for board members and elected officials. She wrote essays in local weeklies and started a Facebook group calling the proposal a “Big Sky Boondoggle.” It didn’t get much traction.
But Ms. Grulkowski’s interest was piqued.
At the time, she was becoming engrossed in the online world of far-right media. From her home on 34 acres in Stockett, a farming community of 157 people south of Great Falls, she watched videos from outlets like His Glory TV, where hosts refer to President Biden as “the so-called president.” She subscribed to the Telegram messaging channel of Seth Keshel, a prolific disinformation spreader.
And she came across a vein of conspiratorial accusations that national heritage areas were a kind of Trojan horse that could open the door to future federal land grabs.
When Ms. Grulkowski, who owns a septic cleaning company, tried using Ms. Dodd’s group to push the idea that Montanans’ property rights were at risk, Ms. Dodd kicked her out for promoting lies.
“I’m not happy with people saying it will seize your property, because that is disingenuous,” Ms. Dodd said. “I said to her, ‘I think you need to be careful about the message. It isn’t actually the way that it works, what you’re saying.’”
But Ms. Grulkowski plowed ahead.
Fort Benton, a pioneer town along the Missouri River, was the last stop for steamships heading west from St. Louis in the 1800s. Credit... Louise Johns for The New York Times
The Missouri River runs through Fort Benton, which is a National Historic Landmark. Credit... Louise Johns for The New York Times
One of her letters reached Ed Bandel, the local board member for the Montana Farm Bureau Federation, a powerful lobbying force. Mr. Bandel, who grows wheat and peas for energy bars on 3,000 acres, persuaded the farm bureau to oppose the heritage area and enlisted other agriculture groups to follow suit.
The bureau printed thousands of 4-by-6-inch cards saying “Just Say No!” and listing Ms. Grulkowski’s Facebook group and other opponents, including realtors, home builders, grain growers, stock growers and wool growers. Mr. Bandel, his son and Ms. Grulkowski left the cards on tables at supportive restaurants.
By May, their campaign had reached the state capital, where Mr. Gianforte signed the bill barring any national heritage area in Montana after it passed on a near-party-line vote. A heritage area, the bill’s text asserted, would “interfere with state and private property rights.”
In two hours of talking at his farm, Mr. Bandel could offer no evidence to back up that claim. He said he distrusted assurances that there were no such designs. “They say, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to do it right. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. I think Adolf Hitler said that, too, didn’t he?” Mr. Bandel said. “The fear of the unknown is a huge fear.”
Mr. Bandel said he trusted Ms. Grulkowski with the details.
Ed Bandel, right, and his son, Jess, grow wheat and peas for energy bars. They persuaded the Montana Farm Bureau Federation to oppose the heritage area. Credit... Louise Johns for The New York Times
But when pressed, Ms. Grulkowski, too, was unable to identify a single instance of a property owner’s being adversely affected by a heritage area. “It’s not that there are a lot of specific instances,” she said. “There’s a lot of very wide open things that could happen.”
That somewhat amorphous fear was more the point.
Outside of a poultry coop, as her chickens and ducks squawked, Ms. Grulkowski ticked through the falsehoods she had read online and accepted as truths in the past year: The Covid vaccine is more dangerous than the coronavirus. Global child-trafficking rings control the political system. Black Lives Matter was responsible for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The United Nations is plotting to control world population and seize private land. Mr. Trump was the rightful winner of last year’s election. Even in Cascade County, where Mr. Trump won 59 percent of the vote, Ms. Grulkowski argued that 3,000 illegal votes were cast.
“We didn’t believe in any of that stuff until last July,” Ms. Grulkowski said. “Then we stumbled on something on the internet, and we watched it, and it took us two days to get over that. And it had to do with the child trafficking that leads to everything. It just didn’t seem right, and that was just over the top. And then we started seeing things that are lining up with that everywhere.”
One thing Ms. Grulkowski does not do — because she refuses to pay — is read The Great Falls Tribune, the local daily. It’s not what it once was, with just eight journalists, down from 45 in 2000, said Richard Ecke, who spent 38 years at the paper before the owner, Gannett, laid him off as opinion editor in 2016. He is vice chairman of the proposed heritage area’s board.
The “Just Say No!” message is on billboards along Interstate 15 and on Highway 87 into Fort Benton, and on bus-stop benches in Great Falls. Credit... Louise Johns for The New York Times
In the paper’s place, information and misinformation about the heritage area spread on Facebook and in local outlets that parroted Ms. Grulkowski. Last winter, a glossy magazine distributed to Montana farmers put the subject on its cover, headlined “Intrusive Raid on Private Property Rights.”
Ms. Grulkowski badgered supporters of the heritage area to withdraw financial backing. She raised the money to plaster the “Just Say No!” message on billboards along Interstate 15 and on Highway 87 into Fort Benton, and on bus-stop benches in Great Falls.
Three of the heritage area’s board members quit in frustration. Ms. Weber herself resigned from the Cascade County Commission last December after her fellow commissioners voted to oppose the heritage area.
“It’s very easy to take fear and mistrust and make it work for you. It’s very hard to fight back against all of that,” Ms. Weber said. “It’s kind of like trying to convince someone to get vaccinated.”
The issue is now roiling November’s municipal elections in Great Falls.
“It’s a legitimate concern anytime you have anybody telling you a possibility of someone telling you: You can do this or you can do that with your own property,” Fred Burow, an auctioneer challenging Mr. Kelly for the mayoralty, said.
Jane Weber conceived of the idea for the Big Sky Country National Heritage Area. Credit... Louise Johns for The New York Times
Ms. Grulkowski now has ambitions beyond Montana. She wants to push Congress not to renew heritage areas that already exist.
Buoyed by the trust her neighbors have placed in her, she has begun campaigning for Ms. Weber’s old seat on the county commission, in part to avenge the way she feels: mistreated by those in power.
She doesn’t feel she’s been told the whole truth.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Well blame how the terms are getting abused.
Equitable isn't about equal treatment anymore but the treatment people are deemed to deserve due to their positions on "The progressive stack" thus being discriminatory or racist is fine if it's seen to in service of balancing some great cosmic scales but only as long as the target is deemed lower on the stack order.
With Anti-Racism it's become a term of "You're either racist or Anti-Racist there is no not racist" and to be Anti-racist you have to be actively doing it and actively fighting it so if you're not turning up to every even to fight off the ICE vans and actively using all your free time protesting or helping firebomb ICE facilities then you are racist according to activists.
As I said blame how the terms of getting abused
"You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons."
Yes, yes, you don't like actual equity or critical thinking, but you're aware enough to realize that saying that out loud makes you a "baddie", so you word salad around it to save face. You (and the GOP) are not fooling anyone, mate.
Also, I didn't realize you were against free speech. I mean this is literally the government censoring speech they disagree with here and you're defending it....
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I do.
I'm just explaining the logic of why people seem to want to ban the phrases. But also it's from use in schools and it's Colleges that are free speech places not so much schools teaching impressionable kids. You can argue for free speech there too if you want but understand that also mean the likes of Richard Spencer should be allowed to be giving talks to middle school and high school students and I don't think either of us would want that.
I've said for awhile that conservatives and everybody else are living in different realities. It's infuriating that it's hurting my hometown.Where Facts Were No Match for Fear (Published 2021)
Civic boosters in central Montana hoped for some federal money to promote tourism. A disinformation campaign got in the way.www.nytimes.com
No, I'm going to blame the people trying to ban words. Because they're trying to ban words.
That's not being pro-free speech. That's pro-Nazi. That you want scumbags like Spencer to have access to our children says absolutely nothing positive about you.