Finding a Santos Successor Is Proving No Simple Task for Republicans (Published 2023)
Party leaders have vowed not to repeat the vetting mistakes they made with the expelled congressman. But getting to yes is proving messy.
Funny events in anti-woke world
- Thread starter Agema
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Fascists really love to virtue-signal their fetishised worship of state force against civilians.Like all grifters he's like a weather vane and turns whichever way the wind blows
Did you just really hope none of us actually read it?
Or did you parrot your lines from someone else, without reading it yourself?
Cause like, wow
This is like RFK Jr claiming that Larry Fink was buying up all the houses, driving up prices
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink accuses DeSantis, Ramaswamy of deliberately false attacks
BlackRock's CEO Larry Fink fought back against Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy after they took aim at the asset manager during the Republican debate.www.cnbc.com
Republican candidates
-Blackrock/Larry Fink believes in climate change, and acts accordingly
Larry Fink
-'Nuh Uh I love fossil fuels.'
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RFK Jr meant BlackStone, not BlackRock and all investment firms have bought up a whopping .3% of single family houses
Total misunderstanding of the situation
This is not new. There has been THOUSANDS of babies who die in thr mothers arms in the last year in Texas alone. And it's increased mother's dying. Most of this didn't happen before Roe was overturned
Well, you see, when the police murder a black man for selling loose cigarettes, they're "the thin blue line". When they give me a ticket for doing 80 in a school zone, they're "jack-booted thugs".
You're ignoring half the words in the letter:
"potential long term implications" has the word potential, which implicitly leaves open the possibility that they can perform the abortion without those implication.
"the TRO will not insulate you from" does not mean the repercussions are inherent in performing the abortion, only that the TRO is irrelevant if they don't follow the law.
"The TRO is deficient because it fails to identify a life-threatening condition" does not dispute that she may have a threat to her life, it only states that the court order does not contain that information.
The end of the letter is exceptionally clear:
"Judge Guerra Gamble is not medically qualified to make this determination and it should not be relied upon. A TRO is no substitute for medical judgment".
Democrats gave this woman a restraining order against the state of Texas specifically to bypass the requirement for judgment by medical professionals. Paxton wrote to tell them to just do it by the book. The pro-abortion side wants this to be a case to nullify exception-based bans in the state, Paxton wants them to just do the paperwork to make their case moot, nobody is on the side of "make the woman die from sepsis with a dead fetus in here".
How does it feel to make a jab so petty only Brawlman likes it?
To be fair, it's not clear most of you can read most of those words.
:watermark(cdn.texastribune.org/media/watermarks/2023.png,-0,30,0)/static.texastribune.org/media/files/482181562326f58b71adb9eff7fbe44d/Texas%20Supreme%20Court%20MG%20TT%2015.jpg)
Texas Supreme Court temporarily halts ruling allowing Dallas woman to get an abortion
After a Travis County district judge cleared the way for Kate Cox, 31, to terminate her pregnancy, Ken Paxton petitioned the state’s highest court to halt the ruling.
www.texastribune.org
For the deaf in the back, it is not about bureaucracy, but Paxton's own political grandstanding and his willingness to kill other humans for political clout.
Absolutely nowhere here does the letter indicate that they could proceed with the procedure if they followed the existing rules. It is solely concerned with warning then away from the approach they're taking. It says zilch about how things would go outside of that approach.
He categorically did not say "do it by the book". Any honest reader will come away with the message Paxton obviously intended: don't do it.
Hmm. Thing is, a jab like this only shows that you give a shit about how many likes a post gets, which is far and away the pettiest thing here. Worse for the fact you didn't get any.
"Nothing in the TRO compels you to waive your hospital's long-standing policies for determining whether a patient, including Ms. Cox, qualifies for the medical exception to Texas abortion laws."
That sentence means "Follow your hospital's policies for determining whether she qualifies".
I don't think you understand how likes here work most of the time. There are people like us who use the button as a message of genuine approval for a thoughtful response. Then there's the peanut gallery that use it as a circlejerk button. If you write out a long, thoughtful post, people who know how to read may like it sometimes. If you say "conservatives have small penises" and get fewer than 3 likes, it means the peanut gallery doesn't like you.
I'm getting it from black people themselves, who by your own logic should STFU and be happy they're getting any representation at all, apparently.
At least, until one of these pop culture media outlets link and publish the tweets, with headlines like "real fans push back against bigoted trolls attacking tentpole media franchise!". While simultaneously posting tweets that rightfully ought to be just as easily ignored, from the minority of actual bigots whilst claiming they're representative of all forthcoming criticism. Then, it's pretty fuckin' hard to ignore.
Especially when real criticism of these works gets conveniently marginalized.
lmao, I'ma stop you right there. We "anti-woke" folks have been telling you for literal years Somerton was completely full of shit, especially since the grooming allegations came out. Hell, here's a thread on this very forum in which I said as much,
Oh hey, MovieBob got fired (Or let go)
Looks like they're both open again, but I can't help but notice that both his professional and non-professional accounts are pretty much talking politics which is kind of interesting. Like. Why bother having two then. I can understand wanting to talk about politics and making a space for...
forums.escapistmagazine.com
Now you should ask yourself who around here has been defending him and his ilk for years, up to and including claims of grooming or sexual predation are prototypical right-wing smears.Me! said:
Funny how we have an established track record of being right more often than not, but we're apparently the ones lacking credibility.
The irony is someone does that, but it ain't us. What happens nowadays if you admit to liking Harry Potter nowadays, or patronize Harry Potter content?
"It's okay to like problematic things!"
You know, so long as you don't speak about it. And if and only if that "problematic" content is by authors not yet unpersoned. Or, if that work sufficiently meets predetermined and ever-shifting nebulous qualitative standards that its "problematic" elements can be overlooked.
Nah, just follow your own advice and stop patronizing shit.
See also, the Manson family and their use of psychedelic drugs to recruit and indoctrinate. You know, because Faith is an expy of Charles Manson, taking us right back to the whole "cult supergroup" thing.
"Sometimes" in about the same way the US "sometimes" liberates oil-rich countries.
You know damn well the iron cross derives from the heraldic cross being it was the symbol of the Teutonic Order, which is precisely why the Nazi party and contemporary white supremacists continue to use the symbol to this day. That reason being, it's evocative of the Crusades.
At this point you're trying to Chewbacca defense, hoping I don't actually know what I'm talking about.
Yes as a matter of fact it does, which is noteworthy given Scientology's distinct trend for white supremacism.
We'll get there shortly.
You mean like for example, kidnapping and indoctrinating people, killing dissidents, stealing and taking land by force, planning large-scale terrorist attacks up to and including the use of stolen nuclear weapons (i.e. the plot of Turner Diaries)?
You know, all those things about which you said,
Odd position to say, "they only do bad things without context", but when that context is explained to you, now it's "where's the bad things they do?".
Well if we're comparing dick sizes now, my degrees (note the plural) are in history and political science, and my minor was in religious studies. Approximately 40% of the credit-hours towards my political science major were spent in a series of 500/600-level interdisciplinary courses which I took for 400-level credit on the media and propaganda, the history of terror in the modern era, the methodology and strategic logic of terrorism, and right-wing extremism in the United States in the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. I'm acknowledged as a contributor in three (last I checked) published scholarly articles by friends and colleagues and two more by my professors on the topic, and that doesn't include the two master's theses and one doctoral dissertation in which I'm also acknowledged as a contributor.
"Counter-cult" my ass. Don't mince words, and speak the truth of the matter: those are cults. They just happen to be cults with vastly bigger budgets and readier media access than whackadoodles living in great plains states, who (correctly) perceived the events of the early '90s as symbolic of a federal crackdown on cults, and made the strategic decision to seize control of the anti-cult narrative.
Only if you're looking exclusively at religious cults, and not political, irreligious doomsday, or personality cults. That's the rub; those other forms all exist, and in the '90s were all interconnected to varying degrees.
The Branch Davidians didn't have to support right-wing extremists directly. Right-wing extremists saw what happened to the Branch-Davidians, and with Ruby Ridge as a preceding incident, realized they were likely to be next. And, to be frank, they were right.
And again, you're discounting that evangelical Christianity is, itself, a disparate collection of (doomsday and political) cults. That Christianity shows up as a running theme in so many of them should be a bit of a giveaway.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying people misunderstood the references; I'm saying they're so ignorant of the source material, they failed to recognize there were references at all. Because they're people who have absolutely no idea what they were talking about, wouldn't have understood there were references unless Peggies were walking around with tiki torches or some shit, and just wanted "orange man bad" repeated back to them to confirm biases.
We're talking about people so fundamentally unaware of what right-wing extremism actually is and looks like, they were too busy internet slap-fighting and clout-whoring over the main antagonists being black, to notice the entire mission series where you literally burn crosses.
And as expected, the supreme court is going to try and kill her.
I think in cases like these its mostly about the right wanting to give a message about how they truly think about people that question them.
I think they stuck with Kavanaugh partially because they felt woman had gotten far too uppity during Me2 and that this was a nice change to stick it to them. And in this case I think its Christian fundamentalists being beyond fed up that their draconian policies get questioned even after stacking the supreme court into backing them. As such they sought a case to make an example out of and ensured they'd be as cruel as possible about it.
While that could be very well be a part of the reason behind kavanaugh push after a certain point, the hard-line conservative court stacking is basically all down to the federalist society engineering this takeover for years already now.
‘Plain historical falsehoods’: How amicus briefs bolstered Supreme Court conservatives
A POLITICO review indicates most conservative briefs in high-profile cases have links to a small cadre of activists aligned with Leonard Leo.
www.politico.com
Is quite a long article so i understand people's aversion to it, but it thoroughly goes over what and how the federalist society has been enacting this, and perhaps how hopeless the current available options are for the left to even hold them officially accountable, let alone stop or stem their anti-democratic takeover.
Follow up article;
D.C. Attorney General is probing Leonard Leo’s network
The Federalist Society co-chair and ex-Trump judicial adviser has utilized nonprofit groups to collect more than $1 billion for conservative causes.
www.politico.com
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It would be really cool if the opened up the dictionary and looked up the word Freedom. Because they are usually doing the opposite
That's not what I said at all.
The point is, you don't get to decide how angry other people should be. You can point out that media depictions of black people are rooted in minstrel show stereotypes, but you're not the one being stereotyped so your opinion doesn't really matter. It's possible to appreciate or enjoy characters rooted in those stereotypes, it's possible to be the type of person being stereotyped and still find the depiction enjoyable, comforting or flattering. It's possible to enjoy weak or tokenistic representation because it has personal meaning to you, while also being aware of what it is. It's kind of up to the individual how angry they want to be about it.
Just stay in your lane. It isn't too hard.
Try it.
Honestly, it's not as hard as you think. The problem is that often the "real criticisms" are just kind of shit, obvious attempts to conceal bad faith criticism or demands that other people (people who are actually affected) should get angry, which we all know is bullshit because it's very obvious that we're only allowed to get angry when something makes you angry.
Generally, it's more effective if the post you link to actually evidences the thing you're saying.
But let's deal with the big issue here. You seem to be struggling with the concept of individuality. People do not typically share a single set of thoughts, ideas or opinions based on the imaginary social categories you feel they belong to. Black people do not have some single, monolithic hive consciousness regarding media stereotyping. Some people will react differently because they have individual experiences which inform their individual perspective. People who disagree with you do not all have the same opinions, consume the same media and we certainly don't have any kind of shared responsibility. I forgot who James Somerton was until a few days ago. I'm using him as an example because his content is shit, and yet he still does the thing you claim noone does.
Incidentally, credibility requires the assumption of good faith.
Nothing.
Nothing will happen to you. Noone will kick down your door or attack you in the street. You will not be sent to a reeducation camp. People might be angry with you, because you're financially supporting someone who is materially harming them, but again, you don't get to decide how angry other people should be. You aren't actually affected in any way.
Plenty of people have talked about their complex feelings towards Harry Potter, about how important it has been to them personally even as they feel alienated from its creator. We've gone through this process before with people like Orson Scott Card. There's plenty of cultural space in which to have those discussions. What people have a problem with is the insistence that liking Harry Potter is fine and trans people are just getting upset over nothing. Again, because this may as well be the golden rule, you don't get to decide how angry someone else is about something which doesn't affect you.
Psychedelics have been used for religious purposes since before human history.
It's very difficult to use psychedelics as a tool of control because they're extremely unpredictable and also non-addictive. Aum Shinrikyo were the only cult I can think of that deliberately tried to use psychadelics in this way, mostly as a way to enhance torture or get people to have religious experiences. The Manson family used psychadelics because they were hippies.
Faith being based on Charles Manson would be pretty tasteless and frankly a bit disgusting. If anything she is a representation of Manson's followers, who were mostly vulnerable women whom he recruited at an extremely young age. Manson's philosophy was openly misogynistic and viewed women as possessions. However, her backstory as a recovered drug addict is also reminiscent of another cult, specifically the one everyone conveniently forgets.
Synanon is probably the most important and influential cult in US history. It's incredibly influential on the thought and philosophy of the political right when it comes to treating things like addiction and mental health problems, and yet most people probably don't even recognize the name.. it's almost like it's embarassing for people who believe you can just bully people out of being drug addicts to be reminded that that kind of coercive control can also convince people to hurt others.
The iron cross is a national emblem of Germany. Again, it is still used by the German military today. Previously, it was a common national emblem of Prussia, because the state of Prussia was a direct evolution of the Teutonic state and retained much of its symbolism. The Nazis didn't adopt it because it was reminiscent of the crusades, it was the existing emblem of the German military. It also is or was common in other subcultures which Nazis tend to recruit from or be represented in, such as heavy metal and biker culture, where it's often just used as a cool design without any implied meaning.
Again though. None of this is terribly important because the flower cross isn't particularly evocative of an iron cross.
Firstly, the stolen nuclear weapon stuff is fan theory. The basic on paper reading of the ending is that the collapse actually happened, and this is never explicitly contradicted.
Secondly, a multi-racial militia doing bad things to random people does not characterize them as white supremacists.
All you are doing here, I hope you realize, is inflating the expectations you are currently failing to meet.
The point was to draw a distinction between two things that should be very obviously separate. The first is the reality of what actually goes on inside religious movements, and the second is the public moral panic around "cults". Far Cry 5 is based on the latter. It's not really saying anything insightful about real movements or groups because it only ever engages in surface-level references to the popular imagination of these things. It can't even have them be racist, because that might upset people.
The term "cult" has no clear definition. It was popularized by the counter-cult movement specifically as a way to demonize the groups they targeted and distance them from "real" or "legitimate" religion. Deciding what is and isn't a cult is, frankly, a useless exercise. I'm only using the term because NRM is clunky.
Okay. But evangelical Christianity represents a quarter of the US population, so why the fuck is it so important to pretend that the Branch Davidians or the Manson Family are some crucial piece of the far-right puzzle? They just aren't. People are fascinated by the mythology that has built up around these groups. People love the aesthetic of the new age movement, the idea of the supernaturally charismatic cult leader, the fear that "brainwashing" can turn ordinary people into mindless zombies. It's a cool story, but it's just a story. The reality is extremely mundane. Coercive control is an ordinary part of our lives, and it appears in religious and political institutions as much as anywhere else.
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A uniquely British hue of radicalisation from one of the old guard members of Dragon's Den telly show.