2020 Political Chatter

[guido]

Countdown Clock

71 days and counting (not including days spent in counting mail-in ballets, recountings and challenges etc.)

Keep it clean, non-personal and friendly...

[Too Tall]

Voter suppression. Why are we only today doing anything about it? Past actions amount to practically nothing. If this is part and parcel of the system we've elected, what's the fuss?

Not to diminish the electoral college "issue" but man this is no longer a fair process to evenly represent states with fewer votes...among other factors.

[guido]

Getting the voting rights act through congress and implemented took years even in the good old days of relatively less partisan acrimony. But the current conservative supreme court has been unwinding it and as the orders for review of all voting regs have been removed, certain states have wasted little time to slam on new discriminatory practices. An increasingly unrepresentative minority has digging in hard to retain power as demographics change...

[zachateseverything]

I had the realization sometime during Joe Biden's DNC speech that this election is shaping up to be Dusty Rhodes (all american hero/son of a plumber) vs Rick Flair (rich jerk).

[Colinmclelland]

I do enjoy these. Colourful language warning though...

[Mark Kelly]

You have to love

"Or fuck it, just go to a rich neighbourhood and mail it there: it'll arrive on time"

[guido]

The Manic Denialism of the Republican National Convention | The New Yorker

"The problems in your life aren’t real; the real problems are the ones that nobody, except for everybody on this stage, has the courage to talk about. The media wants to brainwash you; the Marxists are massing outside your idyllic suburban lawn; if the enemy gets its way, small businesses will be decimated, Thomas Jefferson will be cancelled, and 911 will go straight to voice mail. The speakers at the Republican National Convention keep ringing the same notes: fabricated panic followed by hoarse, manic Panglossianism. Jobs were lost under past Democrats, and they would be lost under future Democrats, but with President Trump there is only milk and honey. Joe Biden is a stultifying agent of the status quo, too boring to mention by name; he is also an unprecedented break with tradition, a threat to all that we hold dear. Climate change, of course, is waved away as mass hysteria; even the coronavirus pandemic is mentioned rarely and almost always in the past tense, as if the decision to deliver speeches in a cavernous, empty auditorium were merely the whim of a quirky location scout. Anyone watching from quarantine, during a once-in-a-century unemployment crisis, would not need a fact check to know that this is all a stretch, to say the least. Still, who doesn’t like a bit of flattering escapism now and then? A disaster movie is supposed to have a clean arc: hero nukes asteroid before it can collide with Earth. Who wants a muddled plotline about a real and intractable disaster—a hurricane supercharged by global warming, or the long struggle against police brutality, or a President who may or may not be on the verge of stealing an election and triggering a constitutional crisis? Sounds depressing. Besides, movie theatres are closed right now, for reasons it would be too much of a bummer to mention.

“America is not a racist country,” Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, said on Monday night, twenty seconds before referring to the “discrimination and hardship” she and her Indian-American family had faced. On Tuesday night, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, demonstrators chanted the name of Jacob Blake, an African-American father of six who had been shot in the back, on video, by a white police officer. Melania Trump, in her keynote address from the White House Rose Garden, said, “While debate rages on about issues of race, let’s focus on the strides we have made and work together for a better tomorrow for everyone.” Mistakes were made in the past; fewer mistakes should be made in the future; in the meantime, it would be unseemly to focus on anything so mundane as the present. The point was to stay positive. Beyond that, no one seemed too hung up on the details. Rand Paul, the libertarian senator from Kentucky, praised Trump for winding down foreign wars; Eric Trump, perhaps the dimmest star in the Trumpian firmament, praised his father for dropping “the mighty MOAB,” which stands for Mother of All Bombs. “Hello, folks,” President Trump’s top economic adviser said, employing the faux-familiar tone of a neighbor who can never quite remember your name. “You know me from TV and radio. I’m Larry Kudlow.” He declared the Trump Administration’s economic policies “a roaring success”—hopefulness repackaged as blithe, obstinate blindness—and asked, “Do you want economic health, prosperity, opportunity, and optimism, or do you want to turn back to the dark days of stagnation, recession, and pessimism?” A desire for both opportunity and reality—say, a nod toward the obvious fact that we’re currently in a recession, which would seem like a prerequisite for finding a way out—was not on offer. “Our enemies fear us because Americans fight for good,” Dan Crenshaw, a representative from Texas, said on Wednesday night. “The defeat of ISIS was the result of America believing in our heroes.” Then, before Vice-President Mike Pence’s acceptance speech, came a five-minute trailer, an orgy of white picket fences, amber waves of grain, and sun-drenched American flags billowing in slow motion."

[guido]

The most shocking line in Vice President Pence’s 2020 RNC speech | Vox

"Across all three nights of the Republican National Convention so far, speakers returned to a single theme: In American cities, at least according to these speakers, protesters hostile to the police are rioting and crime is skyrocketing — and if Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is elected, this will be the future.

As Vice President Mike Pence put it during his keynote speech on Wednesday, “in the midst of this global pandemic ... we’ve seen violence and chaos in the streets of our major cities.”

Pence’s speech highlighted a single law enforcement officer, strongly implying that this officer was the victim of left-wing radicals opposed to police officers and to President Trump: “Dave Patrick Underwood was an officer of the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service, who was shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, California,” said Pence, before acknowledging Underwood’s sister, who was in the audience.

Underwood’s death is tragic, but it has nothing to do with left-wing radicals.

Underwood was killed just blocks away from anti-police violence protests in Oakland, but federal authorities say he was killed by Steven Carrillo, an Air Force staff sergeant and a follower of the “boogaloo boys,” a right-wing extremist movement that, according to the Washington Post’s Katie Shepherd, “has sought to use peaceful protests against police brutality to spread fringe views and ignite a race war.”

Carrillo was taken into federal custody, and he faces murder charges.

The “boogaloo” movement, which emerged on the website 4chan, is a bizarre mix of in-jokes, conservative gun culture, and Civil War nostalgia. It derives its name from the 1984 breakdancing film Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, a film that is sometimes used as a sarcastic shorthand for an unnecessary sequel. The idea is that the Boogaloo movement hopes to bring about a sequel to the Civil War."

[htwoopup]

Voter suppression. Why are we only today doing anything about it? Past actions amount to practically nothing. If this is part and parcel of the system we've elected, what's the fuss?

Not to diminish the electoral college "issue" but man this is no longer a fair process to evenly represent states with fewer votes...among other factors.

Ummm, this is pretty distressing....not doing something about it but making it worse.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...f7_story.html?

[monadnocky]

"Welfare recipients are people who don't work, don't pay taxes, and don't support themselves. Of course there are exceptions, but as a group -- let's face it -- they are among the least educated, least productive, least responsible adults in America. They're also among the least likely to be interested in elections or to follow public debates. If in addition they don't bother to vote, we ought to be grateful....

...Why would anyone want to coax them into registering? No one is disenfranchised in this country. Unlike days of old, there are no poll taxes, literary tests, gender barriers, or property requirements to come between any citizen and the voting booth. If US elections are marked by chronically low turnout, it is not because voters are kept away. It is because they stay away. Some are apathetic, some are ignorant, some are simply self-centered. Why badger such people to register? What would they bring to an election?"

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/7817/makin...o-easy-to-vote

Emphasis mine.

This was written by run-of-the mill, solidly centrist Republican editorialist to the Boston Globe in 1996. 1996! As if voting can be "too easy!" The notion of discouraging large swaths of the US electorate from voting is not new. It's been stock-and-trade policy of the Republican party for decades, since at least the Southern Strategy.

It's not confined to the right wing. It's mainstream thinking of an entire political party, even the center Right. And yet we stand slack-jawed at the apparent novelty of it.

[vertical_doug]

This goes back to the last census in 2010. 2020 stakes are higher which explains why Trump is so trying to scuttle this.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2...ode-845-redmap

It ties into Gerrymandering and everything else. Worth a 21 minute listen.

[cash]

The mainstreaming of the right wing fringe, ignore at our peril:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...UisLZ7KSu3B6B0

And, given President Trump's authoritarian tendencies and apparent adulation of V. Putin, how long til this is a tactic in the playbook:

https://www.npr.org/2020/08/20/90438...cted-poisoning

[Colinmclelland]

So in Australia we've got two key parties. The meanspirited and ineffectual ones and the genuinely ineffective ones.


I've seen a few snippets of the GOP "convention" thingy. Why is it that in the US there is "us" and "them" and the "them" will bring down hellfire and damnation. I don't really get it. I don't think either of our two main political parties could organize armageddon. And I don't think the public would believe you if they said they would.

Ooh, and guns. We were thinking about having a rational discussion with a possum. Looked into air rifles. For which I would have to get a gun license in Australia. WTAF is going on with that pink shirted barefoot dude with the assault rifle and his wife with a pistol. Even ignoring the bairfooted pink shirted thing, it's just weird.

[Mark Kelly]

We were thinking about having a rational discussion with a possum. Looked into air rifles.

Just so you know, even if you did obtain the air rifle and the licence, you still wouldn't be able to shoot the possum. All native marsupials are protected species, you have to have a special permit to shoot them and there's no way you would be given that permit in surburban Sydney. Yes I know it seems odd that possums are protected here when there are bloody millions of them but maybe that's because they are protected.

[ides1056]

On my ride yesterday I came across an official sign, given the production values, that read: Biden touches children. I took a photo. Way out in the woods on a gravel road. I thought better of removing it.

If anyone wants to watch the Trump show, I suggest Stephen Colbert's nightly synopsis. My gag reflex won't permit seeing it firsthand, but leavened by comedy I can tolerate the dissonance.

[Too Tall]

The United States is about to relearn what the Founders designed.

[monadnocky]

The United States is about to relearn what the Founders designed.

As well as what they inadvertently overlooked and (most) could not reasonably foresee: The dominance and subsequent moral bankruptcy of the two-party system.

[Scott G.]

As well as what they inadvertently overlooked and (most) could not reasonably foresee: The dominance and subsequent moral bankruptcy of the two-party system.

Pages 56-57 of the American Talmud, on faction.

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole,
who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest,
adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:..._1863.djvu/200

[Colinmclelland]

Just so you know, even if you did obtain the air rifle and the licence, you still wouldn't be able to shoot the possum. All native marsupials are protected species, you have to have a special permit to shoot them and there's no way you would be given that permit in surburban Sydney. Yes I know it seems odd that possums are protected here when there are bloody millions of them but maybe that's because they are protected.

We’d never shoot at one! We were just going to chat. Even more absurd, if you trap a possum you have to release it within such a small distance it kind of defeats the point of trapping it in the first place. I always used to wonder why NZ made such a fuss about them as pests. But OMG, they must eat their bodyweight in new growth everyday. They are such destructive critters if you are actually trying to grow something. We we just going to discuss that. That was all.

[zachateseverything]

So in Australia we've got two key parties. The meanspirited and ineffectual ones and the genuinely ineffective ones.


I've seen a few snippets of the GOP "convention" thingy. Why is it that in the US there is "us" and "them" and the "them" will bring down hellfire and damnation. I don't really get it. I don't think either of our two main political parties could organize armageddon. And I don't think the public would believe you if they said they would.

Ooh, and guns. We were thinking about having a rational discussion with a possum. Looked into air rifles. For which I would have to get a gun license in Australia. WTAF is going on with that pink shirted barefoot dude with the assault rifle and his wife with a pistol. Even ignoring the bairfooted pink shirted thing, it's just weird.

There are a lot of systemic issues with America and what you're seeing are the symptoms. We probably have some of the same stuff going on as the rest of the western world regarding the spread of misinformation on social media, the addiction to 24 hour news coverage, etc but there are some distinctly American phenomenon that likely doesn't exist in much of the rest of the world. This is a non-inclusive list.

- like some other countries we use a first past the post system of choosing the winner of an election. this guarantees a two party system for any election larger than a town council position. in theory this forces the political parties to be "big tent" operations but the reality turns out to be a bit different because...

- gerrymandering. This also exists in other countries but it's very pronounced here. In the short term one political party divvying up the voting districts to their own benefit does help them stay in power. in the long term the issue it creates is that non-competitive districts feature a party primary as the defacto general election. You know who wins a party primary with no concern about winning a general election? Cranks capable of passing a purity test but not compromising with others and governing effectively.

- 100 years of military, economic, and political dominance has really rooted in this idea that America is the greatest country in history and shouldn't change at all. The founders of this country have been deemed infallible despite their horrible records regarding slavery, women's suffrage, civil rights, genocide, etc. The people with strong America fetishes really by into this idea that taxation is theft, they aren't free if they can't do whatever they want when they want regardless of the consequences to others, and that they need a gun to protect themselves and their property from a police state (but somehow police gunning down unarmed civilians doesn't qualify as such).

- money in politics. There are effectively no caps on the ability for special interests to poor money into elections and key issues. We've seen stuff like gun rights advocacy go completely off the rails.

- a good chunk of the early settlers from Europe were religious kooks who got chased over here. Early in the history of America that's a net positive. The constitution was written with the idea that Government should be separated from all forms of religion. However, those kooks still lived here and had children here. Low and behold a lot of the ancestors of those people seem to display high degrees of cognitive dissonance.