Etiquette



DP Etiquette

First rule: Don't be a jackass.

Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.

Thursday, June 19, 2025

Ghastly MAGA updates: djt denies lethal reality; Bigoted MAGA USSC screws the LGBQT community, again

A NYT analysis piece (not paywalled) makes clear what we already knew, namely that when facts or truths are inconvenient, djt denies them: "Trump, Iran and the Specter of Iraq: ‘We Bought All the Happy Talk’ -- Today, Trump allies argue that coming to the aid of Israel by dropping 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on Fordo, Iran’s most fortified nuclear site, could be a one-off event that would transform the Middle East. There is a dispute over intelligence between Tulsi Gabbard, Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, who said in March that Iran was not actively building a nuclear weapon, and Mr. Trump, who retorted on Tuesday that “I don’t care what she said.” Iran, he added, was in fact close to a nuclear weapon."

There it is, djt does not care what reality is. He cares only about what he wants to believe, true, false, idiotic or lethal. The reality is that Iran was not close to a nuclear bomb. djt simply does not care about inconvenient US intelligence analyses. I think the day is close at hand when djt will fully neuter US intelligence capacities and simply dictate what he personally wants to believe the threat situations is.

And, just like the idiot US neocons who thought that the 2003 Iraq war would be fast, easy, low cost and decisive, they now believe that blowing major Iranian nuclear facilities to smithereens will be fast, easy, low cost and decisive. The NYT analysis points out that some of the same prominent neocon ideologues who wanted war in Iraq now want war with Iran, e.g., Bill Kristol. 

Q: Is djt a dangerous lunatic?
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The Raw Story reports about a recent anti-LGBQT USSC decision that seriously undermines the equal protection civil liberty. In this lawsuit, the authoritarian,, Christian nationalist MAGA judges, all haters of the evil LGBQT community, held that a clearly discriminatory and unconstitutional law was constitutional and not discriminatory. To arrive at that crackpot decision, the MAGA judges blew off precedent and did an end run around equal protection law using dirty tricks. 

Case summary: All six MAGA Republicans on the USSC upheld Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, including puberty blockers and hormone treatments. Legal experts sharply criticized as clearly discriminatory. Amy Coney Barrett's pro-discrimination concurrence flat out denied heightened constitutional protections for transgender individuals, saying it is not a matter of sex discrimination. Why legally discriminatory? Because the same drugs used to treat non-transgender minors for other clinical situations can still get the same treatments as before. Only treatments of transgender minors are affected. Sotomayor argued in her dissent that the law explicitly conditions medical treatment on whether it enables a minor to "identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor's sex." That is a sex-based distinction.

Dirty tricks: Roberts wrote for the radical Republican majority, arguing that Tennessee's law classifies based on "age" and "medical use" rather than sex or transgender status, thereby avoiding the "intermediate scrutiny" analysis typically applied to sex-based classifications. Instead of analyzing the TN law using normal intermediate scrutiny for cases like this, Roberts applied the "rational basis" analysis for determining whether the TN was was constitutional and discriminatory. Rational basis "analysis" amounts to the court or any party in the lawsuit being able to dream up and argue any "rational basis" for a law to exist. That only requires someone to articulate any reasonably conceivable state of facts that sounds like a rational basis for the law to even exist. In practice, rational basis analysis often upholds even frivolous government laws.

Consequences: Immediately after the USSC published its decision, djt issued broad executive orders targeting transgender people, including orders that (1) recognize only two sexes, male and female, that are "fixed at birth", (2) withdraw federal protections for transgender people in education, housing, and immigration, (3) withhold federal funding from programs that promote "gender ideology", and (4) banning transgender people from serving in the US military.

State legislative anti-LGBQT laws are coming. MAGA's and Christian nationalism's bigoted anti-transgender hate campaign extends beyond federal action. Twenty-six states have enacted laws similar to TN's. This coordinated effort is part of the overall MAGA agenda in Project 2025, which the ACLU says seeks to "dismantle civil rights protections" and "dehumanize transgender people."[1]


Footnote:
1. Project 2025 includes the following explicit attacks on, slanders of, explicit discrimination against, and insane lies and crackpottery about the LGBQT community and the parents of LGBQT children:
  • .... children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.
  • Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women.
  • Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military.
  • Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics. The President should direct agencies to rescind regulations interpreting sex discrimination provisions as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc.*
  • CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) should repromulgate its 2016 decision that CMS could not issue a National Coverage Determination regarding “gender reassignment surgery” for Medicare beneficiaries. In doing so, CMS should acknowledge the growing body of evidence that such interventions are dangerous and acknowledge that there is insufficient scientific evidence to support such coverage in state plans.**
* That is explicit advocacy of discrimination against the LGBQT community. Period.

** Russ Vought and other Project 2025 authors lied when they wrote that there is a growing body of evidence that transgender medical treatments are dangerous. As of 2019, clinical evidence was that outcomes were (1) generally positive, and (2) not dangerous. Later research on hormone therapies shows generally good mental health outcomes and apparently manageable side effectsA 2024 analysis of 3,134 patients found that gender-affirming surgery was associated with significant improvements in mental health outcomes. Hormone therapy shows consistent benefits for mental health and quality of life with fairly low side effects.