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.

Saturday, March 4, 2023

Fun with guns . . . . . and rationality

Salon writes about a discussion on gun rights, gun deaths and a few other mostly gun-related things. The participants were radical right Republican state Sen. Nathan Dahm of Oklahoma and comedian Jon Stewart. 


Salon transcribed some of the 8:27 discussion:
"You don't want anything that could help law enforcement or society determine whether or not a person is a good guy with a gun or a bad guy with a gun," Stewart said.

"The registry would allow you to have much more effective background checks," Stewart continued. "I don't understand why you won't just admit that you are making it harder for police to manage the streets by allowing all of these guns to go out without permits, without checks, and without background stuff? Why can't you just stand by that?"

"Because that's not what I'm doing," Dahm responded. "I'm defending the individual's right to keep and bear arms."

Stewart countered by noting that Americans have to register in order to have voting rights.

"So you have to register for a right. Is that an infringement?" Stewart asked the lawmaker.

"Does the right to vote say 'shall not be infringed?'" Dahm responded.

"Oh, so this is just a semantic argument?" Stewart retorted, to which Dahm quickly said "no, it's not."

"What is the leading cause of death among children in this country?" Stewart asked Dahm during the discussion.

"And I'm going to give you a hint," he said, "it's not drag show readings to children."

"Correct, yes," Dahm responded.

"So what is it?" Stewart asked again.

"I'm presuming you're going to say it's firearms," Dahm said.

"No, I'm not going to say it like it's an opinion," Stewart said with indignation. "That's what it is. It's firearms. More than cancer, more than car accidents, and what you're telling me is you don't mind infringing free speech to protect children from this amorphous thing that you think of, but when it comes to children that have died, you don't give a flying f**k to stop that because that shall not be infringed."

"That is hypocrisy at its highest order," Stewart concluded.

So, is Dahm a hypocrite as Stewart alleges? Does it matter that guns kill more children than cancer or drag show readings? Which of the two sound more reality-based and rational, Dahm or Stewart? Which is more pro-democracy, e.g., it's OK to infringe voting rights via registration but not gun rights?

About Ron DeSantis’ political ambitions

CONTEXT
Recently, I’ve posted several items about what the radical right dictator wannabe Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida. It is the centerpiece of his campaign for president in 2024. From what I can tell, he is emulating the tactics that Viktor Orban used to kill democracy in Hungary. This post is a copy of the superb analysis that PD laid out on Snowflake’s Forum about the cruel, authoritarian things that DeSantis wants to do to American democracy. For context, this 5:28 interview is about how Orban killed democracy in Hungary. He did that within just two years after his election in 2010. That track record of anti-democracy accomplishment is why radical right Republican authoritarian elites love Orban and want to replicate here what he did there.




DeSantis analyzed
  PD wrote
DeSantis is the only candidate (once he actually announces) with a chance of defeating Trump, who is still the #1 Republican candidate in the polls I’ve seen. But DeSantis knows that he’ll never beat Trump on Trump’s own terms-- basically cult of personality with that famous charisma I just don’t feel, but which seems to catalyze voters even after all his blunders. So what can DeSantis do? Trump savages him verbally, and-- true to Trump’s nickname for him, DeSanctimonious-- he can do no more than say, “I don’t insult other Republicans, I criticize Biden and not others in my party.” Actually he does both, but dreads a battle of personalities, since his own is dull as dishwater. 
Here’s what I think is going on in Fla. with the constant ratcheting up of authoritarianism: he’s putting together a resume for the radical Trump-loving base which will not require him (he hopes) to square off with Trump and thus lose. Instead, his sales pitch is going to be, I think, “Look at what I did to Florida in a few short years. Give me your vote, and the US will look just like Fla.” Okay, so what does that look like according to DeSantis? As he puts it in this 50 second clip, after bragging about his authoritarian policies, “The political character of Florida has changed. We’ve been really able to rewrite the map here, and the Democratic Party in this state is basically a dead, rotten carcass on the side of the road.”



He is betting that if he can do what Trumpists want Trump to do more quickly and effectively (or at least make the claim on the basis of Florida as “exhibit A”) then most of Trump’s followers will vote for this audacious “Trump sans baggage.” While Trump continues to relitigate the 2020 election at his rallies, DeSantis is working hard to model Florida’s colleges on Hillsdale College ( where Scalia and Clarence Thomas have given commencement speeches, and where "anti-woke" curriculum and Christian nationalism-laced American History courses are designed and exported to Red States). DeSantis placed Christopher Ruffo on the board of New College in order to make of this famous liberal arts college that once had Arnold Toynbee in its history dept., a Christian Nationalist (CN), anti-woke, book banning dystopia to show just how much he can fuck with US institutions and get away with it. 

Ruffo is the GOP’s premier culture warrior, the guy who almost single-handedly made the letters CRT a household word in this country and manufactured a virtual panic over them. He and other CNs from Hillsdale and Claremont (the most regressive institutions going) are taking over the administration of this college which will also (DeSantis hopes) serve as “exhibit A” on the education/ religious indoctrination front. See, it’s not just K-12 anymore. As the bumper stickers say nowadays, “Florida is where woke goes to die.” That has to include not just K-12, but state colleges, corporations (like Disney) and anything else in the way of the DeSantis juggernaut. Here’s Ruffo bragging about how swift and thorough the wreckage will be. Notice the line that says, “We’ll recruit new students who are mission-aligned.”


So, there should be no surprise that if he can get away with it, DeSantis will censor blogs just like he has done with libraries, just as he is doing with Advance Placement courses in HS and now higher education too. Who knows what he really believes. As Katherine Stewart (author of The Power Worshippers) wrote in a recent New Republic piece, DeSantis knows that the road to the White House must include A) frequent public acts of cruelty (y’know like when Trump attacked an American Judge as "having a conflict of interest because he’s Mexican" or when he taunted a Goldstar Family whose Muslim son had died fighting in Afghanistan while Bone Spurs used insulting ethnic stereotypes to savage the parents). That’s why DeSantis pulled that stunt with the asylum seekers he sent to Martha’s Vineyard late last year. Performative cruelty. 
The second requirement to win is to get the support of a significant portion of the Republican super-donors, which DeSantis has done. BUT, often overlooked by MSM is the fact that, as DeSantis has learned from Trump, the road to the White House now requires that “you get an endorsement from God” according to the influential CN’s and white evangelicals. That’s why Hillsdale College (a CN bastion) serves as the template for the educational makeovers he’s trying to orchestrate. I recommend Katherine Stewart’s article in The New Republic.

All of these things are timed to coincide with his new book, The Courage to be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, obviously his extended argument for running against Trump. This Newsweek article includes a 30 minute podcast interview with DeSantis in case anyone wants to hear what he sounds like as he makes the case for being a--perhaps less charismatic but more “effective”-- proponent of just about all of the things “the base” wants from Trump.  
I still say Trump is likely to be the candidate mainly because when I try to picture DeSantis forced to respond to Trump in real-time on TV I think he’ll come across as lame and stiff as Trump repeatedly insults and humiliates him as he did effectively with more likeable-- to Repubs that is-- candidates in 2016. But as Stewart and others point out, DeSantis is a man with a plan, and though he’s in the news, unlike Trump, he is not explicitly called out as a dangerous would-be dictator. And yet that is exactly what he wants to prove he is by making sure that by the time the debates start he can say with even greater credibility that in Florida, he has left the Democratic Party like “a dead, rotten carcass on the side of the road.” 

It’s scandalous that our cowardly media outlets give him a pass as if he were just another candidate-- albeit with anti-woke tendencies. Anti-woke is only the tip of the iceberg, the bait to attract a broad swath of Republicans and Right Leaning Independents. Come for the anti-woke--stay for the thought control regime.


Qs: Is this analysis wrong, hyperbole or otherwise not persuasive? If so, why, e.g., are evil democrats indoctrinating children with socialism, and evil awareness of inconvenient truth and gender fluidity? Does the alleged evil the Democrats do justify doing to American democracy what Orban did to democracy in Hungary? Is DeSantis just another candidate or does the MSM deserve a grade of F for failing to treat DeSantis as the dictator wannabe I firmly believe he is?

An 8-year-old learned his Waffle House waiter was living in a motel.

 

 He's raised over $66K for him

“He has a very huge heart, and I’m thankful he came into my life,” Devonte Gardner says about Kayzen Hunter.


Eight-year-old Kayzen Hunter has a regular ritual: breakfast at his local Waffle House in Little Rock, Arkansas with his family, sometimes with his grandpa, but often with his parents and siblings. With these trips comes his meal served by his favorite waiter, Devonte Gardner.

“It was about a year ago when they met. My dad started going and Kayzen would go with him. When he came home, he talked about Devonte and how much he liked him,” Kayzen’s mom Vittoria Hunter tells TODAY.com, adding that the family go for breakfast just about every weekend.

For Gardner, the feeling is mutual.

“Every time he comes in, I always give him a high five because that’s what he expects,” Gardner tells TODAY.com. Gardner has memorized Kayzen’s usual order — scrambled eggs with cheese, no toast, hash browns covered with cheese and an Arnold Palmer. 

“He’s a wonderful kid. He tells me jokes every time he comes in, like, ‘Hey, Devonte, I got a joke for you,’ and the next thing you know, we’re laughing,” he adds.

Hunter says the family got to know Gardner better over time, learning about his wife, Aissa, and daughters 3-year-old Jade and 2-year-old Amoura.

“As we started to go more and more and we met Devonte, we realized he’s just really a light in the world,” Hunter says.

“It got to the point where we always would sit in his section,” she adds. “Every time we go in, he’s so smiley, he’s always like, 'Hey, Kayzen, how are you?’”

One day, Kayzen learned that Gardner was in a dire living situation because his family’s former apartment was riddled with issues, and he didn't have a car to drive to work.

“We wanted to find something affordable, so we moved into a low-income area,” Gardner says. “We just got tired of infestations with rats and roaches and all this black mold. My daughters were getting sick. No heat and things like that. When it was cold outside, we had to bundle up with like four or five blankets in order to stay warm.”

“It was just horrible,” Gardner says, adding that he and his family have been living in a motel for the past eight months.

After learning this, Kayzen decided he wanted to help his friend.

“He came home and told me that, ‘Hey, Mom, Devonte walks or gets a ride to work and I’m gonna start a GoFundMe,’” Hunter says, adding that Kayzen had begged her for a while to do a GoFundMe before she agreed to take the plunge. “I was like, ‘Well, OK, that’s really sweet. It’s a great idea.”

The initial idea was to raise enough money to get the Waffle House worker a car. Gardner mentioned to the family he was looking for one, but the plans were put on hold due to his living situation. “It really set him back because the motel was so expensive,” Hunter explains.

With his mom’s help, Kayzen aimed to raise a modest amount of $500 for Gardner. They posted the GoFundMe titled “Help Devonte get a family car” on Feb. 18.

“Hi, my name is Kayzen, I am 8 years old,” reads the GoFundMe description. “Devonte is a hard-working dad with two little girls and a wife. He is a dedicated worker and has to walk or get a ride to get to work every day.”

Kayzen then explains that Gardner was looking for a decently priced car, and that the Hunter family wants to get Gardner's family into a clean rental property.

“Devonte is one of the most joyous and positive people you’ve ever met!! He always greets us with the biggest smile,” Kayzen wrote. “I hope your heart is as BIG as mine and you will help me spread kindness in the world. Any amount helps!!”

Though the Hunters say the GoFundMe started out slow, as more attention comes to it, the amount — and the goal — has skyrocketed to over $66,000 as of publication.

“It’s exciting,” Kayzen tells TODAY.com. His mom jumped in to add that all the attention has been slightly overwhelming for the little one.

“I mean, he’s still eight, you know?” Hunter says. “The other morning, he said, 'I was just trying to maybe make $5,000 and get him a car.' Now, it’s turned into a crowd. We had no clue that this was going to happen.”

“That’s the crazy part to us,” Korey Hunter, Kayzen’s dad, tells TODAY.com. “I get it, but the goal was $5,000 and people do not care what the goal was; they keep giving and giving.”

Gardner, who spoke to TODAY.com while on break during his morning shift at Waffle House, says that he just signed a lease on a two-bedroom apartment thanks to the efforts of his little friend. 

“I will be moving into my apartment very soon. We’re able to have something more stable,” Gardner says, adding that he’s looking to get a family sedan or minivan but will save the rest of the money for his kids.

“I’m gonna save the rest because I want to put my daughters in a good school, I want them to be in a good environment,” Gardner explains. “Everything I’m getting is going mostly towards my daughters to make sure they have a great, great life. Make sure we won’t have to struggle anymore.”

Gardner and the Hunters also mention that they just saw each other recently, after the GoFundMe at the Waffle House, where Vittoria Hunter snapped a picture of Gardner still at work.

“He’s a positive young kid. He has a very huge heart, and I’m thankful he came into my life,” Gardner says.

“I think so many people spend a lot of energy complaining about what they don’t like,” Vittoria Hunter says. “But if you just be positive, then you know eventually love and positivity is gonna prevail. It always does.”

"'Be the change you wish to see in the world,' right? We know who we are as people and we know the potential of what our children can be,” Korey Hunter adds. “Kayzen’s middle name is actually Love.”

When asked if they think Kayzen is living up to his name, both of his parents reply, emphatically, “Exactly.”

https://www.today.com/food/people/boy-raises-money-for-waffle-house-waiter-rcna73309

Snowy's observation: when it seems like the whole world is going to shit, stories like this one remind me there is still kindness in the world and gives me optimism. 



Friday, March 3, 2023

A question about how society should deal with anti-abortionists

An odd article in The Guardian raised the issue of the role of leaders who publicly advocate for bans on abortions. TG writes about the context:
Louisiana anti-abortion group calls on doctors to stop denying care exempted by ban

Group speaks out after hospitals refused to offer treatment for a woman who had a near deadly miscarriage citing ambiguous law

An influential group in Louisiana that has long opposed abortion access is calling out medical providers and their legal advisers who – for an apparent fear of liability – have cited the state’s ban on most abortions to deny treatments that remain legal.

Even though Louisiana has some of the tightest restrictions against abortion in the US, Joshua was legally entitled to the care she sought under an exception to the ban which involves miscarriages, Sarah Zagorski of Louisiana Right for Life said.

Zagorski, whose organization has been involved in anti-abortion legislation since 1970, said it is clear under Louisiana’s abortion ban that it is legal to provide and receive miscarriage treatments, even if they closely resemble some abortions.

“It was just a gross misunderstanding of the law from the practitioners handling the case, unfortunately,” Zagorski said.
The comments by Zagorski triggered some thinking and questions. Who is Zagorski to interpret Louisiana law? Multiple news stories have been written about ambiguity in anti-abortion laws and bad consequences for the women involved. Who bears responsibility for women whose lives are damaged or ruined by being forced to have a baby they do not want, cannot afford and/or otherwise face years of who knows what hardships? And how should Americans who support abortion rights react, if at all? Should people like Zagorski just be given a pass even though they identify themselves in public?

I searched and found things like this:






Since Zagorsky gives her email and speaks publicly, is it impolite or wrong to write and respectfully but clearly convey a few thoughts. Thoughts such as: 
  • You are not a lawyer, so how do you know what the scope of Louisiana forced birth law is? Laws can be enforced aggressively, not at all or in between. Prosecutors usually have a lot of discretion.
  • Forced birth advocates like have a shared responsibility for all the harm that anti-abortion laws cause.   
  • Your shared responsibility includes the injuries, ruined lives, broken relationships and deaths to women that comes from ambiguity in forced birth laws, or in caution by people and businesses who shy away from laws they do not feel they know the exact limits of.
  • Shared responsibility also includes the injuries, ruined lives, broken relationships and deaths to women that comes from their desperate attempts to obtain abortions that forced birth laws have made illegal, including women who were raped.
  • Yes, forced birth advocates might deny any responsibility for what they have fomented, e.g., because God allegedly demands it. However, that does not change the fact that anti-abortion laws literally force some women to have a baby. That is unlike legal abortion under Roe, which never forced even one woman to bear a child against her will.

So what makes sense. Say nothing because criticisms of forced birth laws will be ignored or rejected? Or say something, e.g., because it sends a message that a majority of Americans disagree with extremist forced birth laws?