Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive biology, social behavior, morality and history.
Etiquette
DP Etiquette
First rule: Don't be a jackass. Most people are good.
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.
Research on the March primary in Texas is showing some evidence that new Republican anti-election laws are creating a race gap in rejected ballots. That is a high priority effect of GOP election subversion efforts. The New York Times writes:
A new Republican voting law led to the sharp rise in rejected ballots in the state’s recent primary election. An analysis shows that Black areas of Houston disproportionately had votes thrown out.
More than 18,000 voters in Texas’ most populous counties had their mail-in ballots rejected in the state’s primary election this month, according to a review of election data by The New York Times, a surge in thrown-out votes that disproportionately affected Black people in the state’s largest county and revealed the impact of new voting regulations passed by Republicans last year.
In Harris County, which includes Houston and is the state’s most populous county, areas with large Black populations were 44 percent more likely to have ballots rejected than heavily white areas, according to a review of census survey data and election results by the Harris County election administrator’s office.
The analysis also found that Black residents made up the largest racial group in six of the nine ZIP codes with the most ballot rejections in the county.
The rejection rate in the state’s most populous counties was roughly 15 percent. By comparison, during the 2020 general election, nearly one million absentee ballots were cast statewide and just under 9,000 were thrown out, a rejection rate of roughly 1 percent.
This is early evidence that Republican anti-election laws could be having the intended effect of suppressing more Democratic votes than Republican votes. The key question is how effective will these efforts be nationwide in the 2022 and 2024 elections.
If suppression of Democratic votes is insufficient to give results satisfactory to Republicans after the 2022 elections, it is likely (~98% chance IMO) that existing or new anti-election laws will be amended or written to improve targeting of Democratic votes with minimal impact on Republican votes. Those changes, if any, will be done in time to try to more effectively subvert the 2024 primary and general elections.
This is just an early glimpse of the effect GOP efforts to kill democracy and install some form of authoritarian Christian theocracy. One can only hope that more data will become available to the public.
Obviously, release of inconvenient data like this will be troubling to Republicans. They may fight back by making it illegal to release voting data for independent analysis. Maybe the secrecy would be justified in the name of national security. Regardless of their excuse, by hiding election data for independent analysis the GOP would be free to lie about what effects their election subversion project had. Republican propaganda claims would then be that their laws have no differential effect on Democratic votes vs. Republican votes. There would be no data available to confirm or dispute that, leaving the GOP free to lie without concern about inconvenient facts and truths.
Undoubtedly, the GOP will tell the public there is nothing to be worried about because “election integrity” will have been restored and all the massive voter fraud of 2020 will have been righteously eliminated by valiant Republican patriots in their defense of democracy and free and fair elections.[1]
Footnote: As argued here multiple times, blatant lies and hypocrisy do not even slightly faze Republican politicians and propagandists. They will effortlessly and shamelessly tell us they have cleansed American elections of all fraud while intentionally corrupting them for their own partisan gain.
This isn’t just about Putin avid supporter and the well-known professional liar, Tucker Carlson. It’s broader than just that Fox News freak show. It is about Republican Christian authoritarianism generally. Salon writes in an opinion piece:
Don’t be fooled: The GOP love affair with Putin is worse than it looks
Never mind the opinion polls and the Republican posturing. When the right sees Putin, they want what he's got.
That story of laughter and death and numbness [in Vietnam war architect Robert McNamara] applies to America's current situation as well. Former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham recently told “The View” that Donald Trump wanted the power to kill with impunity. In explaining why Trump both admired and feared Vladimir Putin she said:
“I think he was afraid of him. I think that the man intimidated him. Because Putin is a scary man, just frankly, I think he was afraid of him…. I also think he admired him greatly. I think he wanted to be able to kill whoever spoke out against him. So I think it was a lot of that. In my experience with him, he loved the dictators, he loved the people who could kill anyone, including the press.”
A healthy society would have been stunned, disgusted, terrified and moved to action by Grisham's confession. The evident fact that Trump is a sociopath would have been the subject of extensive news coverage. If America were a healthy society, we would have an ongoing “national conversation” about the peril the country experienced from Trump, his Republican-fascist allies and their movement — danger that has only grown stronger.
A healthy society would now ask: How can we prevent another Donald Trump, another fascistic, sadistic demagogue, from ever coming to power?
What does it say about American society that Donald Trump and his cabal of coup plotters and other enemies of democracy and freedom have not been punished? That they are plotting in public how overthrow American democracy and return Trump to power without fear of punishment or other negative consequences? And that Trump still has many tens of millions of followers — many of whom are potentially willing to engage in acts of violence, and perhaps even die, at his command? What does that say about a country and a people?
What was the response to Grisham's comments about Donald Trump’s desire to commit murder? Silence and indifference. Neither the media nor the American people seem to care. They have become desensitized to what not long ago would have been judged unconscionable.
America is a pathocracy. The masses take their cues from corrupted elites. Malignant normality is the new normal. Political deviance has been normalized. The Age of Trump constantly offers further proof that a sick and broken society can accept just about anything, no matter how surreal and grotesque.
Fascism thrives in such societies. But the poison could not have spread so quickly if the soil and foundations were not toxic to begin with.
The essential question must be this: Who are the specific objects of ideation and worship for Donald Trump, the other American neofascists and their followers?
The most prominent example, of course, is Vladimir Putin. The American people and the world should not be swayed and bamboozled by the Republican Party and its propagandists, who are now trying to claim that they are diehard Cold Warriors, forever united against Putin and his aggression.
Today's Republican voters and other Trumpists are part of a political cult. They follow, uncritically, whatever directives and various signals are sent to them by Donald Trump, Fox News, the white right-wing evangelical churches and the larger right-wing echo chamber.
Public opinion polls taken before the invasion of Ukraine show that Republicans view Vladimir Putin as a better leader than Joe Biden. That is no coincidence. It is publicly known that Putin and Russia's intelligence agencies have been engaged in a long-term influence campaign designed to manipulate (and manage) the Republican Party, its leaders, the right-wing news media and their public.
Putin is an authoritarian and a demagogue. He is anti-human, anti-freedom and anti-democracy. He stands against the future and human progress and pluralism. To many of his admirers in America and the West, he is a leader of “White Christianity.” Putin has persecuted and imperiled the LGBTQ community, and is hostile to women's rights and women's equality. He kills and imprisons journalists, and is doing his best to silence free speech.
Putin's Russia is a plutocracy and a kleptocracy controlled by an oligarchic elite of white men. He uses secret police and other enforcers to terrorize any person or group he deems to be the enemy. Republicans in the U.S., and many of their allies and followers, want to exercise that kind of power in America.
“Why would a group of ultra-nationalist Americans celebrate the invasion of a U.S. ally by someone both the left and right have largely understood to be an enemy of freedom?
In fact, though, the U.S. right wing has long cultivated ties with Russia. Some of these are self-evident quid-pro-quo affairs: The “sweeping and systematic” campaigns of election interference authorized by Putin in support of a Trump victory in 2016 and 2020; Trump's attempt to leverage Congressionally allocated aid to Ukraine for political dirt on the Biden family; the confessed Russian agent who infiltrated the National Rifle Association and the National Prayer Breakfast in a bid to develop informal channels of influence on the Republican Party.
More broadly, however, U.S. conservative evangelicals have developed strong symbolic and institutional ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. In recent years, these have dovetailed with white racist fantasies of Russia as an ethnically pure land of traditional religion and gender roles, symbolized by the bare-chested kleptocrat on horseback, Vladimir Putin….
At the much broader level of institutionalized ambitions to “dominion”[1], the Russian partnership has proved invigorating to the American right's overlapping agendas of white supremacy, masculine authority, and anti-democratic Christian authority. If Putin's cooperation with the Moscow Patriarchate is a model for emulation, American theocrats are telling us what they seek here at home. We would be foolish not to take them at their word.”
In total, the Republican fascists and the larger “conservative movement” have shown themselves to be Putin’s puppets. (emphasis added)
What a refreshing bit of reasoned clarity. It sounds like I wrote it! Salon is channeling Germaine. Will miracles never cease?
Question: Is Salon channeling Germaine or is it vice versa, or neither?
An example of dominionism in reformed theology is Christian reconstructionism, which originated with the teachings of R. J. Rushdoony in the 1960s and 1970s. Rushdoony's theology focuses on theonomy (the rule of the Law of God), a belief that all of society should be ordered according to the laws that governed the Israelites in the Old Testament.
Catholic integralism has been characterized as a form of dominionist theology. Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa have stated that Catholic integralists have entered into a non-traditional ecumenical alliance with Protestant reconstructionists who share “the same desire for religious influence in the political sphere.” Likewise, in the National Catholic Reporter, Joshua J. McElwee stated that Catholic integralists, along with their Protestant counterparts, wish to achieve the goal of establishing a “theocratic type of state.”
THESE PEOPLE WANT CHRISTIAN SHARIA,
NOT THE US CONSTITUTION!
Rushdoony propaganda: Christian dominion is not dictatorial,
instead: “We try to meet human needs in the Lord,
we try in every way to be faithful to God by fulfilling
his law word, love is the fulfilling of the law,
it is putting the love of God into force ....
the love of man is manifested by being faithful to God”
(How about that for crackpot reasoning?)
According to current Christian nationalist dogma, God’s law word
that Christian elites want backed by the force of real law enforced by
real police and real courts include:
Abortion is murder
God chose White males to dominate over all others
Homosexual sex is sin
Women are to obey men
The White race is has dominion over all other races
Anglo-European culture has domination over all other cultures
(e.g., put up a Christmas tree or else)
Open discrimination in commerce, employment and everything else
against non-Christians and the LGBQT community,
both of whom are profoundly sinful
Adulterers and sodomites are to be put to death by stoning
Church and state are the same
(e.g., give God, i.e., us, control of your tax dollars, all of ’em)
This 20 minute video describes the recent military history and strategy behind Putin's war on Ukraine. Flawed logistics strategy is part of Putin's mess. It offers an at least partial explanation for why the Russian military is having such a hard time in Ukraine.
According to dcleve, other factors in the Russian military's war troubles include:
Before the invasion, the Russian military believed Putin's propaganda and lies about Ukraine, e.g., there was no Ukrainian nationalism or unity, and it was just a bunch of Nazis in power there, and that led the military generals to seriously underestimate the resistance they would face
The Russian military limits individual initiative and creative thinking in its officers, a trait that goes back to Lenin and Stalin who feared intelligent, competent military officers and murdered most of them
Russian rank and file military morale is low and that reduces fighting effectiveness
Because Russia is a kleptocracy, nothing works well[1] because the people in charge are focused on personal profit, therefore it is possible that corrupt oligarchs looted Russian some or much of Russia's ammunition and military supply stockpiles
Footnote:
1. A personal anecdote: A colleague I worked with was invited by a fairly high-ranking, politically well-connected Russian scientist to give a talk at a science conference in St. Petersburg. In terms of things one normally associate with a professional conference, it was a disaster. Started late. No coffee or anything. The nearest place for food was a Starbucks a mile away, on foot. No Uber. The printed program was crap and had little to do with who wound up speaking or their topics or when they spoke -- it was all sort of ad hoc. In private conversations the Russian scientists spoke mostly about how to get the hell out of Russia and never come back. They hated it there.
A 2nd personal anecdote: Once upon a time, the company I worked for was considering entering into a business deal in Russia. Our contacts, the politically well-connected Russian scientist mentioned above and his colleague, an intelligent and foresighted Russian army general were the route the company needed to get to Putin. Putin needed to bless the deal, like all major business deals in Russia. Without Putin's blessing and agreement on how much bribe money had to be paid to him personally, any business deal assets, including bank accounts, would be looted by Russian oligarchs and thieves. The general was the guy to contact Putin because he was highest up in the Russian hierarchy. The contact never occurred. The Russian scientist told us he had been killed in an accident. A Russian army tank accidentally ran him over and killed him.
The bribery thing was the deal killer for the company. US law forbids US companies from bribing foreign officials and companies. It's unfair, but that's just the way it goes. The Chinese and other corrupt countries have a big advantage over the Americans in being able to bribe corrupt foreign officials and business executives.
For some partial corroboration of what goes in in the Russian military with competent officers, see dcleve's comments under point #3 here: https://dispol.blogspot.com/2022/03/zelenskys-speech-to-congress.html#comment-5795528410 . I never believed that the general was run over by a tank, but I did believe he was dead by unnatural causes. Over the years since then, the story about the general getting squashed by a tank seemed more and more plausible. The Russian scientists never lied to us as far as we knew. And, Putin really does murder people he dislikes for whatever reasons, e.g., by poisoning them, pushing people out of windows in tall buildings, etc. I now sort of believe the runaway tank story, or some close variant, e.g., squashed by a big military truck, is probably more true than not.
The lesson: Ya' gotta watch those Russkies. They're sneaky, especially the kleptocrats.
There's war going on not just in Ukraine. A huge one is going on in the US right now. The New York Times writes:
The Florida Legislature last week created a law enforcement agency — informally called the election police — to tackle what Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans have declared an urgent problem: the roughly 0.000677 percent of voters suspected of committing voter fraud.
In Georgia, Republicans in the House passed a law on Tuesday handing new powers to police personnel who investigate allegations of election-related crimes.
And in Texas, the Republican attorney general already has created an “election integrity unit” charged solely with investigating illegal voting.
Voter fraud is exceedingly rare — and often accidental. Still, ambitious Republicans across the country are making a show of cracking down on voter crime this election year. Legislators in several states have moved to reorganize and rebrand law enforcement agencies while stiffening penalties for voting-related crimes. Republican district attorneys and state attorneys general are promoting their aggressive prosecutions, in some cases making felony cases out of situations that in the past might have been classified as honest mistakes.
In Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton announced his new “election integrity unit” in October to investigate election crimes, The Houston Chronicle reported that the six-prosecutor unit had spent $2.2 million and had closed three cases.
“The underlying level of actual criminality, I don’t think that’s changed at all,” said Lorraine Minnite, a Rutgers University political science professor who has collected years of data on election fraud in America. “In an election of 130 million or 140 million people, it’s close to zero. The truth is not a priority; what is a priority is the political use of this issue.”
“It didn’t seem to me there was any attempt to defraud,” Mr. Gruenke said [about 25 voters who gave a PO box address instead of their actual residence address]. “It would be a felony charge, and I thought that would be too heavy for what amounted to a typo or clerical error.”(emphasis added)
In another recent article, the NYT commented on the current state of affairs in the GOP:
The proposals are the latest twist in a decades-long crusade by Republicans against election fraud that has grown rapidly since Mr. Trump’s election loss in 2020 and his false claim that victory was stolen from him. .... Sweeping election-law revisions enacted by Florida and Georgia legislators last spring sharply limit the use of popular drop boxes for submitting absentee ballots, require identification to obtain mail-in ballots, make it harder to conduct voter-registration drives, and restrict or ban interactions — such as handing out snacks or water — with voters waiting in line to cast ballots.
In other words, the Republican Party has been opposed to free and fair elections for a long time. The 2020 elections made the Republican fever intensify.
A Radical Republican elite rails against
free and fair elections in 1980
The Georgia law includes incentives for police to crack down hard on protesters, and a requirement for permits in advance of all protests. One good way to shut protesters up is to deny permits to protest. Another is to permit protesting only in obscure places that few people will notice. Georgia Republicans really want law and order inflicted hard on non-Republicans and by God, they're gonna get it. Clerical errors now rise to the level of felonies for average voters. The standards are far more relaxed for Republican elites -- their 'mistakes' are forgivable, even their knowing criminal acts.
In Memphis TN, a woman was sentenced to six years in prison in January after registering to vote because she had a felony conviction and registering to vote was illegal for felons. That will teach her a well-deserved lesson.
The Republican Party's authoritarian attacks on democracy and civil liberties remain focused on subverting elections, limiting open free speech opposition and some other key anti-democratic tactics. America's radical right war on democracy, inconvenient truth and civil liberties is not going to stop any time soon. Most who cannot see the urgency and danger by now are unlikely to ever see it.
