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, October 27, 2022

More news bits

The hellscape will get worse
Elon Musk has to close the deal to buy Twitter by Friday, i.e., tomorrow. That's pretty soon. He publicly stated he would lay lots of Twitter employees off, get rid of content moderation, re-open Trump's account and more or less, let free speech run free, wild and butt naked. Axios writes:
Elon Musk: Twitter won't become a "free-for-all hellscape"

Elon Musk said in a note Thursday that Twitter must be "warm and welcoming to all" and not a "free-for-all hellscape" in order for it to reach its full potential.

Why it matters: In an overture to advertisers, Musk seemed to walk back the idea of total free speech on Twitter and promoted it as a digital town square with some limitations.

What he's saying: Musk wrote in a tweeted note to advertisers that Twitter should be "a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence."

"Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!"
Here comes the a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences. Public discourse and civility are going to get even uglier than they are now. The chart below shows how to prepare for the barbaric hell that Musk is going to unleash on all of us. If you don't already have a scimitar, Wall Mart has them on sale in anticipation of the worsening hellscape to come soon.




The Republican plan for the economy
Various sources are reporting that once the GOP takes control of congress after the upcoming elections, they will push hard for (i) geting rid of as much of the federal government as they can, e.g., the IRS, EPA and Dept. of Education, (ii) tax cuts for the wealthy and businesses, gutting domestic spending for social security, Medicare and etc., and (iii) total attacks on all future elections, especially ones that republicans do not win. Republicans have already filed dozens of lawsuits attacking all aspects of the upcoming election in various states. This is just the beginning of an endless radical right Republican Christofascist and capitalist war against elections.  

In essence, the autocrat-theocrat GOP is once again pushing hard for horse and sparrow economics, with wealth gushing up to the elites (the horses) and the masses (the sparrows) desperately looking for scraps ejected from the elites.





Election update
‘A madness has taken hold’ ahead of US midterms: 
local election officials fear for safety

In two rural California counties, voters are showing increasing hostility and aggression toward election workers

In California, officials in small, rural and underresourced counties such as Shasta say they are encountering hostility and aggressive bullying from residents who believe there is widespread voter fraud – many are inundating local elections offices with public records requests as part of a relentless quest to try to prove their claims.  
Residents in Shasta county have tried to intimidate election workers while acting as observers, crowding around Allen during a tense election night confrontation in June, and visiting voters’ homes while claiming to be a part of an “official taskforce”. In north-eastern California’s Nevada county, the registrar-elect had to take out a restraining order against residents who harassed her and pushed their way into her office, assaulting a staffer, she said.

Our democracy is slipping quietly under relentless waves of autocratic Republican Party demagoguery, dark free speech, rage, hate and lies. The American experiment is probably going to end in a corrupt autocratic-Christian theocratic failure.

Fetterman's debate performance has Democrats on edge in crucial Pennsylvania Senate race

HARRISBURG, Pa. — After getting their first long look at John Fetterman in Tuesday night’s Pennsylvania Senate debate, fellow Democrats are second-guessing his decision to appear on stage five months after a stroke — and some question whether he should have remained on the ballot at all.

(Snowy's opinion: I wish Democrats would shut the f..k up. This is their candidate, back him! Questioning and 2nd guessing only feeds the other side)

But by Wednesday morning, many Democrats were in a panic over his performance. And there were fresh questions about how transparent Fetterman has been through a months-long recovery that continues to present communication challenges less than two weeks before Election Day.

(Snowy's opinion: Just what the Dems need in the home stretch, panic 😕)

He has little room for error: The FiveThirtyEight's review of recent polls suggests he holds a 2.3 percentage point lead over Republican Mehmet Oz, a margin that has narrowed appreciably since Labor Day.

(YES it has narrowed, but even despite a poor performance, Fetterman is still leading, time to put a MORE positive spin on this instead of hand wringing)

Fetterman 47.2%Oz 44.9%

Similarly, some Democrats maintained optimism. 

Snowy was listening to a call in show yesterday, day after the debate, and it featured a lot of Pennsylvania voters, and the vast majority who called in - and this was NOT on a partisan leftwing show either - had the same message:

"Fetterman is one of us, no way we are going to fall for a fake from out of state."

Whatchallthink? Time for the Democrat panic button pushers to stop eating their own??

After all, the Repubs are backing Hershel Walker ALL THE WAY. 

Wednesday, October 26, 2022

An opinion from across the pond about the UK and conservative politics

Oh, Britain: the chasm between myth and reality keeps on growing

So it’s tempting to see the fall of the hapless Liz Truss and the rise of the guileless Rishi Sunak as a contrasting tale of character and plot.

One was plainly incompetent and spontaneously combusted in an inferno of their own lies and trickledown economics. So is the other.

But British politics are not quite so simple – not since the country ripped off its reputation for common sense and streaked on to the global stage claiming it was too sexy for its own continent.

There has long been a yawning chasm between what British people admire in the mirror and what the rest of the world observes.

But over the last six years, that gap between myth and reality has become unbridgeable.

Sunak, for all his earnest schoolboy affect, is heading for the same fate as all four of his predecessors, because you can only fool all of the people some of the time.

Of course, some of the people can be fooled all of the time. We call those people Conservative party members who are – like their American Republican counterparts – no longer conservative at all.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the monster raving loony right has glugged down a radical cocktail of conspiracy theories, free-market fever dreams, and a corrosive taste for cultural victimhood.

Six years into Brexit, it’s obvious that the world is not in fact hankering after glorious new trade deals that will make Britain ludicrous amounts of loot. It’s also obvious that erecting trade barriers to the largest economy on your doorstep did not in fact punish the foreigners on the other side.

As the former governor of the Bank of England points out, before Brexit the British economy was 90% the size of Germany’s. Today it is less than 70%. Well done, chaps.
The new prime minister is faced with the same dire choices as his predecessor – and proudly proposes the same dire policies.

He cannot increase trade with Europe, without admitting that Brexit was batshit. He cannot raise taxes to spend more on public services, without admitting that his version of Thatcherism was reckless nonsense.

So all he can do is to cut public spending at a time when interest rates are rising sharply. The next two years, before the next general election, will be miserable for everyone.

To be fair, other countries will also need to hack back after years of cheap money as the world’s central banks crack down on inflation.

But Britain has indulged in something worse, and there are clear lessons for other countries that are tempted to go down the same mirage-filled road.

Today’s rightwingnuts idolize the notion of a long-lost greatness that somehow proves their own exceptionalism.
In Britain’s case, that is clearly rooted in memories of empire that have never been revisited with any seriousness. British children can pass through an entire schooling without an honest discussion about the white supremacist enterprise that built their own country.

In a country that likes to look down on racial politics in the United States, there is little to feel smug about. Around one third of Brits think the empire is something to be proud of. That’s not much different from the number of Americans who think the US government has no responsibility to address the historic effects of slavery today.

If we can’t be honest about our past, it’s easy to lie about our future.  
British prime ministers used to come and go like vintage wines. Every few years there might be a classic. Now they come and go like utility bills: painful and entirely forgettable.

Gosh, that sounds a lot like British right wing politics is about like radical right deceive and divide politics in the US. There's lots of illusions of grandeur, false beliefs, lies and crackpottery, with plenty of slanders to go all around. 

At least the toxic reality of Brexit is dawning on some of the Brits. One question is whether a significant awakening will make any difference. Probably not.

News bits

Russia demands desatanization of Ukraine
Russian propagandists are learning fast from American Christian nationalist propaganda techniques and creative QAnon style crackpottery. Ukrainska Pravda writes:
Russia's Security Council claims there are "hundreds of sects" in Ukraine
and demands "desatanisation"

Aleksey Pavlov, assistant secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, has said that Ukraine should be "desatanised".

Details: Pavlov claims that Ukraine has turned into a "totalitarian hypersect" where citizens have abandoned Orthodox values, and therefore "desatanisation" is becoming an urgent issue. Pavlov admits that the exact number of sects in Ukraine is unknown, but "the number is in the hundreds."

Quote: "Using internet-based manipulations and psychotechnology, the new government [formed after 2014 - ed.] has turned Ukraine from a state into a totalitarian hypersect. Moreover, the authorities in Kyiv were the first to turn into militant fanatics whose views are directly opposite to those of normal people.
Not disclosed, is what "internet-based manipulations" and "psychotechnology" are. One European observer of this Russian intelligence mused out loud in the comments section of a reposted version of this article, I wonder what desatanized means from a metrics viewpoint? One commenter hypothesized, from what I have seen from the Russians, it means you invade a country with a Jewish president and bomb the holocaust memorial. . . . . They appear to be going full Ghandi on this.

Dissident Politics will be keeping a close eye on how Russia's desatanization pogrom is going and make discreet inquiries into what internet-based manipulations, psychotechnology and a totalitarian hypersect might be.

Disclaimer: I think the quoted reporting is not sarcasm or humor. The site it comes from is credible and has a good fact accuracy rating.


From the well duh files: Pledged climate change efforts are failing
Countries around the world are failing to live up to their commitments to fight climate change, pointing Earth toward a future marked by more intense flooding, wildfires, drought, heat waves and species extinction, according to a report issued Wednesday by the United Nations.

Just 26 of 193 countries that agreed last year to step up their climate actions have followed through with more ambitious plans. The world’s top two polluters, China and the United States, have taken some action but have not pledged more this year, and climate negotiations between the two have been frozen for months.

Without drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the report said, the planet is on track to warm by an average of 2.1 to 2.9 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels, by 2100.
All indicators remain the same: Party hardy (formerly party hearty) while the lights are still on.



From the advances in dirty tricks files
Two right-wing political operatives have pleaded guilty in Ohio to a telecommunications fraud charge for arranging thousands of robocalls that falsely claimed that the information voters included with mail ballots could be used by law enforcement and debt collectors, prosecutors said.

The operatives, Jacob Wohl, 24, of Los Angeles, and Jack Burkman, 56, of Arlington, Va., entered their pleas on Monday in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court in Cleveland, prosecutors said.

The men were indicted in 2020 after they were accused of using the robocalls to intimidate residents in minority neighborhoods to refrain from voting by mail at a time when many voters were reluctant to cast ballots in person because of the coronavirus pandemic. The calls also claimed that the government could use mail-in voting information to track people for mandatory vaccination programs, prosecutors said.  
They face up to a year in prison and a fine of $2,500 when they are sentenced on Nov. 29, he said.
Up to a year and up to a $2,500 fine? Pffft! They will probably get probation for a couple of months and a $50 fine for being just playful, but naughty boys. 

Accumulating evidence continues to point to voter fraud efforts being committed by Republicans, not Democrats. Republican claims of serious vote fraud are just projections of what they desperately want to do themselves, i.e., cheat and steal elections. Just more shameless hypocrisy.


Racketeering Catholic church style 
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo has agreed to submit to sweeping government oversight of its operations in a legal settlement reached on Tuesday with the New York attorney general, Letitia James, resolving a lawsuit that accused the church and its officials of a yearslong cover-up of sexual abuse.

Those monitors will be overseen by Kathleen McChesney, a former high-ranking F.B.I. official who also led the child protection office at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. As part of the settlement, two former Buffalo bishops, Richard Malone and Edward Grosz, will also be banned for life from holding any fiduciary role in a charity registered in New York.

According to the suit, the two former bishops shielded more than two dozen accused priests from investigation by the Vatican, and allowed them to either retire or go on medical leave.  
Instead of following church policy and referring the accused priests to a Vatican investigation that might result in their expulsion from the priesthood, the bishops classified the men as “unassignable,” a category that allowed them to retire with benefits or go on medical leave.

That kept the priests on the diocesan balance sheet, which prosecutors said constituted a misuse of charitable funds and an abrogation of fiduciary duty.
Us dumb taxpayers. We are forced by law to support the criminal Catholic church organization with massive tax breaks. And this is how the arrogant, criminal Catholic church shows its gratitude for what it is generously given. As the ex-president might say, while praising Catholic racketeering operations and for its stand against, and abuse of, the rule of law, taxpayers are suckers and losers. He would be right about that.






Monday, October 24, 2022

The Red State crime problem



In this election, as usual, Republicans are demagoguing the crime issue by fear mongering it. All the propaganda is that Democrats are weak on crime, especially murder, and crime is raging out of control. Much (most?) of the public is, as usual, is buying this false narrative. For most people, the raging out of control is somewhere else. The Third Way writes:
Takeaways
  • The rate of murders in the US has gone up at an alarming rate. But, despite a media narrative to the contrary, this is a problem that afflicts Republican-run cities and states as much or more than the Democratic bastions.
  • In 2020, per capita murder rates were 40% higher in states won by Donald Trump than those won by Joe Biden.
  • 8 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2020 voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century.
Every news outlet from FOX to CNN to The New York Times to local newspapers has a story with attention-grabbing headlines like “US cities hit all-time murder records.” Fox News and Republicans have jumped on this and framed it as a “Democrat” problem. They blame it on Democrat’s “soft-on-crime” approach and have even referred to a New York District Attorney’s approach as “hug-a-thug.” Many news stories outside of Fox have also purported that police reform is responsible for this rise in murder and have pointed to cities like New York and Los Angeles.

There is a measure of truth to these stories. The US saw an alarming 30% increase in murder in 2020. While 2021 data is not yet complete, murder was on the rise again this past year. Some “blue” cities, like Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, have seen real and persistent increases in homicides. These cities—along with others like Los Angeles, New York, and Minneapolis—are also in places with wall-to-wall media coverage and national media interest.

But there is a large piece of the homicide story that is missing and calls into question the veracity of the right-wing obsession over homicides in Democratic cities: murder rates are far higher in Trump-voting red states than Biden-voting blue states. And sometimes, murder rates are highest in cities with Republican mayors.

For example, Jacksonville, a city with a Republican mayor, had 128 more murders in 2020 than San Francisco, a city with a Democrat mayor, despite their comparable populations. In fact, the homicide rate in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco was half that of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Bakersfield, a city with a Republican mayor that overwhelmingly voted for Trump. Yet there is barely a whisper, let alone an outcry, over the stunning levels of murders in these and other places.
These [Republican] attacks assume that the changes in criminal-justice policies that some states and many cities have pursued over the past few years are undermining public safety and fueling higher crime rates.

But an exhaustive new study released today by the Center for American Progress refutes that allegation. Conducted by a team of seven academic researchers, the study compares cities that have elected so-called progressive prosecutors with places whose district attorneys continue to pursue more traditional approaches.

Countering conventional wisdom, the study found that homicides over recent years increased less rapidly in cities with progressive prosecutors than in those with more traditional district attorneys. It also found no meaningful differences between cities with progressive or traditional DAs in the trends for larceny and robbery. “I think it’s really important to emphasize the extent to which we looked for a relationship and found none” between a prosecutors’ commitment to reform and crime rates, Todd Foglesong, a fellow in residence at the University of Toronto and one of the co-authors, told me.



It is good to counter false narratives with inconvenient truth. Too bad that inconvenient truth is often (usually?) not as persuasive as comforting false narratives. Bummer.


A glimpse at America’s threatening, mendacious radical right tyranny

John Daniel Davidson, enraged 
Christofascist tyrant


This is from an article by John Daniel Davidson, a senior editor at The Federalist. The Federalist is the mouthpiece of the Federalist Society. The Federalist Society is the hyper-radical authoritarian outfit that picks ideologically pure, radical right judges for Republican presidents to put on the federal bench. The ideologically pure, radical right Republican Party judges are transforming America from a liberal democracy into a deeply corrupt, radical Christian-theocratic fascist kleptocracy. 

Davidson represents how radical right elites think. He writes : 
The conservative project has failed, and conservatives need to forge a new political identity that reflects our revolutionary moment.

Given the state of America in 2022, conservatives should stop calling themselves conservatives.

Why? Because the conservative project has largely failed, and it is time for a new approach. Conservatives have long defined their politics in terms of what they wish to conserve or preserve — individual rights, family values, religious freedom, and so on. Conservatives, we are told, want to preserve the rich traditions and civilizational achievements of the past, pass them on to the next generation, and defend them from the left. In America, conservatives and classical liberals alike rightly believe an ascendent left wants to dismantle our constitutional system and transform America into a woke dystopia. The task of conservatives, going back many decades now, has been to stop them.

In an earlier era, this made sense. There was much to conserve. But any honest appraisal of our situation today renders such a definition absurd. After all, what have conservatives succeeded in conserving? In just my lifetime, they have lost much: marriage as it has been understood for thousands of years, the First Amendment, any semblance of control over our borders, a fundamental distinction between men and women, and, especially of late, the basic rule of law.

Calling oneself a conservative in today’s political climate would be like saying one is a conservative because one wants to preserve the medieval European traditions of arranged marriage and trial by combat. Whatever the merits of those practices, you cannot preserve or defend something that is dead. Perhaps you can retain a memory of it or knowledge of it. But that is not what conservatism was purportedly about. It was about maintaining traditions and preserving Western civilization as a living and vibrant thing.

Well, too late. Western civilization is dying. The traditions and practices that conservatives champion are, at best, being preserved only in an ever-shrinking private sphere. At worst, they are being trampled to dust. They certainly do not form the basis of our common culture or civic life, as they did for most of our nation’s history.

To talk now of “family values” is to assume that there are enough Americans able and willing to marry and raise children together for something like “family values” to matter in the public discourse, much less in the halls of power. To talk of defending “religious freedom” is to misapprehend that the real risk today is widespread irreligion, which will leave so few religious Americans in the coming generations that the government and large corporations will inevitably — and easily — persecute them.

So what kind of politics should conservatives today, as inheritors of a failed movement, adopt? For starters, they should stop thinking of themselves as conservatives (much less as Republicans) and start thinking of themselves as radicals, restorationists, and counterrevolutionaries. Indeed, that is what they are, whether they embrace those labels or not.

They might, looking to American history for inspiration, conjure up the image of the Pilgrims — those iron-willed and audacious Christians who refused to accept the terms set by the mainstream of their time and set out to build something entirely new, to hew it out of the wilderness of the New World, even at great personal cost.

Or they might claim the mantle of revolutionaries, invoking the Founding Fathers ideologically pure, radical right judges view (or, at least, Thomas Jefferson’s) that periodic revolution to preserve liberty and civil society has always been and always will be necessary.

Whatever the term or image, the imperative that conservatives must break from the past and forge a new political identity cannot be overstated. It is time now for something new, for a new way of thinking and speaking about what conservative politics should be. The fusionism of past decades, in which conservatives made common cause with market-obsessed libertarians and foreign policy neocons, is finished. So too is Conservatism Inc. and the establishment GOP it enabled, whose first priority was always tax cuts for big business at the expense of everything else. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 heralded a populist wave and the end of Republican politics as we knew it, and now we are in uncharted waters.

To be sure, there has been plenty of talk on the right lately about what should be done differently now. Some, such as Sohrab Ahmari, Gladden Pappin, and Adrian Vermeule (along with a larger cohort of conservative Catholic thinkers), advocate a conservatism that is comfortable with big government and in fact sees it as necessary not only for the common good but to tame what Ahmari recently called the “private tyranny” of woke corporations empowered by unrestrained market forces. Conservative Catholics, he argues, should today claim ownership of a pro-worker, even pro-union political agenda that once belonged to the left, and which produced generations of Democrat-voting Catholic workers.

Indeed, a willingness to embrace government power has been a topic of fruitful debate on the “New Right” in recent years, as it should be. However uncomfortable traditional “small-government” conservatives might be with Ahmari’s argument, it is more or less true.

Put bluntly, if conservatives want to save the country they are going to have to rebuild and in a sense re-found it, and that means getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it. Why? Because accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible. One need only consider the speed with which the discourse shifted on gay marriage, from assuring conservatives ahead of the 2015 Obergefell decision that gay Americans were only asking for toleration, to the never-ending persecution of Jack Phillips.

The left will only stop when conservatives stop them, which means conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about “small government.” The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life — and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.

To stop Big Tech, for example, will require using antitrust powers to break up the largest Silicon Valley firms. To stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require state legislatures to starve them of public funds. To stop the disintegration of the family might require reversing the travesty of no-fault divorce, combined with generous subsidies for families with small children. Conservatives need not shy away from making these arguments because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free markets and small government. It is time to clear our minds of cant.

In other contexts, wielding government power will mean a dramatic expansion of the criminal code. It will not be enough, for example, to reach an accommodation with the abortion regime, to agree on “reasonable limits” on when unborn human life can be snuffed out with impunity. As Abraham Lincoln once said of slavery, we must become all one thing or all the other. The Dobbs decision was in a sense the end of the beginning of the pro-life cause. Now comes the real fight, in state houses across the country, to outlaw completely the barbaric practice of killing the unborn.

Conservatives had better be ready for it, and Republican politicians, if they want to stay in office, had better have an answer ready when they are asked what reasonable limits to abortion restrictions they would support. The answer is: none, for the same reason they would not support reasonable limits to restrictions on premeditated murder.

If all that sounds radical, fine. It need not, at this late hour, dissuade conservatives in the least. Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.


To those who worry that power corrupts, and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point. If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus? It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after we have won the war.

For now, there are only two paths open to conservatives. Either they awake from decades of slumber to reclaim and re-found what has been lost, or they will watch our civilization die. There is no third road.

Once again, the corrupt anti-democratic, Christian theocratic rage and hate that drives Republican Party and hyper-conservative elites is on public display. These people hate democracy, they hate non-heterosexuals and they hate immigrants. Also, they shamelessly lie through their teeth about all of what they are all about. Davidson openly calls for a bloody American civil war if political opposition does not surrender and go away to be subjugated and oppressed.

What are radical right, wealthy White male elites all about? Getting more even power and wealth for themselves. That power includes the pleasure of watching their morally rotten capitalist tyranny and Dark Ages Christofascism crushing political and social opposition by force. 

These crackpot extremists are not playing around here. They will kill people in opposition once they sink their poison claws into enough power. They already control the US Supreme Court. That is a hell of a lot of power, maybe enough to kill off democracy, the rule of law and the civil liberties they openly hate.