Looking for reasons for hope

To people with minds that allow them to see, it's clear by now that our democracy, civil liberties, secularism and secular law, tolerant pluralism and respect for inconvenient truth are now all under a sustained deadly attack. The top two motivating destructive forces are rigid CN and BKC dogmas. Both are bitterly inimical to democracy and the rest of it. 

CN = theocratic Christian nationalism

BKC = brass knuckles (unregulated) capitalism

In the face of this decades-long onslaught, it can be hard to see reasons for hope. An opinion piece by Amanda Ripley that the WaPo published discusses this problem. Ripley asks the question, if raising reasons for hope is not a journalist's job, whose job is it? A broader question is whether hope is important or not. It turns out that having hope is important.

Last summer, I wrote a piece in this newspaper admitting that I have been selectively avoiding contact with the news, even though I’m a journalist myself. Traditional news coverage, I had slowly come to realize, was missing half the story, distorting my view of reality. It frequently overlooked and underplayed storylines and dimensions that humans need to thrive in the modern world — with the three most notable elements being hope, agency and dignity.

That column sparked an unexpected response. I heard from thousands of readers caught in the same struggle — wanting to be informed about the world but not bludgeoned into fatalism. Many of you reported that you had taken matters into your own hands. One man, after listening to devastating stories on the radio, does his own Google searches to find examples of people trying to solve the very same problems. Then he shares the links he has found with his friends and family on Facebook, basically doing a job reporters don’t want to do.

Others urged me to check out alternative sources they had found, including the Progress Network newsletter, which curates stories of human cooperation and ingenuity, and the 1440 daily briefing, which attempts to strip bias from the news. Still others said they have sought refuge in sports, hyperlocal news, Wordle and, for one reader, medieval history.

For more than 30 years, scientists have been researching hope and deconstructing its building blocks. And it’s surprisingly tangible. “It’s important to say what hope is not,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her book “Hope in the Dark.” “It is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine.”

So what is it? Hope is more like a muscle than an emotion. It’s a cognitive skill, one that helps people reject the status quo and visualize a better way. If it were an equation, it would look something like: hope = goals + road map + willpower. “Hope is the belief that your future can be brighter and better than your past and that you actually have a role to play in making it better,” according to Casey Gwinn and Chan Hellman in their book, “Hope Rising.”

Decades of research have now proved that hope, defined this way, can be reliably measured and taught. Using 12 questions, called the Hope Scale — a version of which you can take yourself here — more than 2,000 studies have demonstrated that people with stronger hope skills perform better in school, sports and work. They manage illness, pain and injury better and score higher on assessments of happiness, purpose and self-esteem. Among victims of domestic violence, child abuse and other forms of trauma, hope appears to be one of the most effective antidotes yet studied.

News bits: The indictment; Large scale book canceling; Etc.

Long list of bits today. I wonder if something is going on that I don't know about.

Bit 1: Trump was indicted for something or another. It's reasonable to think that (i) the radical right propaganda & dark free speech Leviathan, e.g., Faux News, will propel him to sacred, innocent, persecuted Christian martyr status, and (ii) he will be the GOP's nominee for president in 2024. 

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Bit 2: Missouri's radical legislature cut the budget for libraries to $0 in retaliation for suing the state over the radicals' recent book ban law. That will fix those nasty libraries for trying to protect those nasty books. This is yet more evidence of the Republican Party's hyper-radical authoritarianism (fascism IMHO). Too bad we can't defund the pro-tyranny, pro-corruption GOP.

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Bit 3: The radicalized, weaponized House plays more than hardball with its investigations, it plays a scorched Earth game. The WaPo writes:

Democratic lawmakers didn’t hold back their anger Thursday at a House hearing about social media and censorship when a pair of Republican witnesses delivered testimony and left without being questioned.

The shouting began after Sen. Eric Schmitt (R), the former attorney general of Missouri, and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry (R) testified before the House Judiciary select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government about what they claimed was the Biden administration’s effort to censor conservative voices online. After the two spoke, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the subcommittee chairman, dismissed them.

Believe it or not, that is what single party dictatorship looks like. It is just one small step from that to simply fabricating the evidence that Republican dictators and theocrats need to finally kill off democracy, secularism, pluralism and civil liberties.

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Bit 4: The Discovery Doctrine bites the dust: Pope falsely claims it never was a big deal anyway. The AP writes:

The Vatican on Thursday responded to Indigenous demands and formally repudiated the “Doctrine of Discovery,” the theories backed by 15th-century “papal bulls” that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of Native lands and form the basis of some property laws today.

A Vatican statement said the papal bulls, or decrees, “did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of Indigenous peoples” and have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith. .... The statement said the papal documents had been “manipulated” for political purposes by competing colonial powers “to justify immoral acts against Indigenous peoples that were carried out, at times, without opposition from ecclesial authorities.”

The papal bull did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of Indigenous peoples?  “Manipulated” for political purposes?  The bull justified immoral acts against Indigenous peoples without opposition from ecclesial authorities? There's a pack of insulting lies and brazen understatements of gigantic proportions. It would make even Trump blush. (nah, not really -- things like this don't faze him)

That bull(shit) sanctified and legitimized the mass slaughter, rape, oppression and ruin of Indigenous people and their cultures. It also sanctified and legitimized the theft of their traditional lands and their brutal, forcible expulsion from them. Church arrogance, mendacity, hypocrisy and sin on this is off the charts.

Last night was very odd

 Let me explain.

My sweetheart and I had just concluded our dinner and we thought we would turn to the TV just for a few minutes to see if there was any news. Bad choice. We turned on Fox first. And OMG - there was a hand-wringing, a bleating, a moaning and a groaning like never before. We turned it off. Later we sat down to watch a hockey game and during the intermission went online to see what is new, or to get some ideas for future threads. And OMG - there was more bleating, more moaning and groaning, and on different political debate forums (yup, I visit a few of them from time to time) there was a wave of anger worse than ever before, some serious mud-slinging, and near suicidal hysteria. All I could thing of was....

Did something happen to Trump last night??  😕

The radical right's ongoing love affair with Hungarian dictatorship

Radical right Republican activist Christopher Ruffo writes:

Budapest Diaries

Can Hungary’s state-driven cultural policy serve as a model for American conservatives?

In recent years, Hungary has become a hub for conservative intellectuals. The government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has established a constellation of right-leaning university programs, think tanks, research centers, and even a café franchise named after the British philosopher Roger Scruton. Orbán has proposed an alternative to the Brussels consensus, devoting significant resources to reforming the education system, revitalizing the country’s religious institutions, subsidizing healthy family formation, and reviving the classical architectural style.

This is not popular with everyone. The European Union has punished Hungary for bucking the trend of liberal technocratic governance, turning the small, landlocked nation into a scapegoat, much in the same way that America’s elite institutions have denigrated working-class conservative voters in the country’s heartland. Because of this, there is an immediate affection between Hungarian and American conservatives, both of whom feel besieged by the establishment and in need of a new strategy for managing the relationship between state and society.

That touches on a lot of what America's anti-democracy authoritarian radical right claims to see, feel and want. It claims to see and feel disrespectful liberal technocratic governance. It claims the democracy killing and dictatorship that Orban has established in Hungary as a role model for what authoritarian radical right Americans want to do to American democracy. That is clear.

It is also clear that elites like Ruffo know they are lying through their teeth. They know they are pro-dictatorship and anti-democracy.

So who is besieging whom here? Does real or imagined disrespect justify the overthrow of democracy and its replacement with a corrupt dictatorship-Christian theocracy-plutocracy? What about all that disrespect, lies and slandering the radical right routinely hurls at the left?[1] Does that justify the overthrow of democracy? (no, it doesn't)

Who is the more hypocritical group here, the radical right or the center and left, radical or not? 

Also note the standard propaganda technique that Ruffo relies on. He does not call Orban a dictator and he does not say that Orban destroyed democracy, which he in fact did. Ruffo does not call his radical right movement anti-democracy or pro-tyranny. Instead he blandly but falsely refers to his dictatorship movement as being merely "conservative" and "right leaning." Ruffo and his ilk are far merely conservative or right leaning. They are full-blown radical right authoritarians and Christian theocrats, fascists in my opinion.

Footnote: 

1. For example, Vox writes: The right’s moral panic over “grooming” invokes age-old homophobia -- “Groomer” accusations against liberals and the LGBTQ community are recycled Satanic Panic.

Bloomberg Law writes: Combative conspiracy theorist Alex Jones doubled down on his claim that defamation lawsuits filed by the families of 26 children and educators gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School are part of a liberal plot to destroy him. “I think this is a Deep State situation,” Jones told jurors Thursday during the second week of a civil trial in Connecticut. When asked if his credibility is the most important thing to him, the Infowars host replied: “No, crushing the globalists.”

The New York Magazine writes: Why Republicans Are Smearing Everyone As Pedophiles Now -- Conspiracy theories work on different levels.

News bits: GOP continues election rigging campaign; GOP sabotages the rule of law

One of the most obvious actions that proves the inherent anti-democracy authoritarianism that dominates the radical right GOP is its endless push to rig elections so that Republicans can vote, but Democrats can't.  It's hard to get it right, because some GOP votes get suppressed, which is not what the Republicans want to do. So, we get to witness the GOP's trial and error effort to subvert elections. The NYT writes about the ongoing subversion campaign:

Republicans Face Setbacks in Push to Tighten Voting Laws on College Campuses

Party officials across the country have sought to erect more barriers for young voters, who tilt heavily Democratic, after several cycles in which their turnout surged

Alarmed over young people increasingly proving to be a force for Democrats at the ballot box, Republican lawmakers in a number of states have been trying to enact new obstacles to voting for college students.

In Idaho, Republicans used their power monopoly this month to ban student ID cards as a form of voter identification.

Even in Texas, where 2019 legislation shuttered early voting sites on many college campuses, a new proposal that would eliminate all college polling places seems to have an uncertain future.

“When these ideas are first floated, people are aghast,” said Chad Dunn, the co-founder and legal director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project. But he cautioned that the lawmakers who sponsor such bills tend to bring them back over and over again.

A wild card in the 2024 presidential elections will be the effectiveness of Republican election subversion laws. This could be a necessary factor in who wins and loses in 2024. This adds to the mountain of evidence of radical right Republican Party animosity toward two-party rule, democracy and the free and fair elections needed to keep democracy meaningful. 

Students at the University of Texas at Austin lined up to cast their ballots 

on campus during the 2020 primary. A new proposal would eliminate 

all college polling places in the state.

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From the Corrupt Republican Politics Files: Daily KOS writes:

House Republicans demanding Bragg's evidence against 

Trump have been coordinating with Trump himself

CNN is now confirming what we've all suspected for a while now: House Republican caucus and committee leaders have been in regular communications with the coup-attempting Donald Trump, keeping him personally up to date on the status of committees and investigations launched to help cover up Trump’s suspected crimes.

"Not only are Trump, his aides and close allies regularly apprised of Republicans’ committee work, they also at times exert influence over it," reports CNN. And those communications have "emerged as a crucial method for Trump to shape Republicans’ priorities in their newly-won House majority."

CNN's report puts a new spin on it, however. It's not just that House Republicans have volunteered themselves as Trump's personal saboteurs. They've been coordinating with Trump himself, even two years after Trump left office following his attempted coup.  

So, yes. Jim Jordan and other Republicans have been in constant touch with Trump as they formulated their attacks on Bragg. And yes, it does appear that there's a direct pipeline in place that will feed whatever confidential information about Bragg's case to Trump's lawyers and Trump himself. It's not obstruction of justice if Jordan does it!

This adds to the existing mountain of evidence that the GOP is completely morally corrupt. Radical Republicans in congress constantly tell us they are just investigating crimes by the Bidens and merely vindicating the rule of law. Instead, they have nothing but open contempt for the rule of law as it applies to Republican elites. For GOP elites, both the Christian nationalists and the brass knuckles capitalists, the rule of law is just a political tool to attack enemies and reward allies and the elites themselves. The GOP is authoritarian, not pro-democracy. This is solid evidence of that truth.

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About the 2024 election: Newsweek writes:

A poll showing 61 percent of Americans don't want Donald Trump to be president again has been displayed on Fox Business.

The survey, conducted by Marist National Poll for National Public Radio and PBS NewsHour, found only 38 percent of U.S. voters want the New York business tycoon to have another term in the White House.

Despite that, it seems clear by now that as long as Trump is healthy enough to run for president again, The GOP will nominate him in 2024. His core base remains loyal. No other contender has yet made major inroads. Republicans who say they would prefer Trump not to be president again will nonetheless vote for him against any evil socialist Democrat deep state tyrant. It does not matter who the Democrats run, the Dem candidate will be relentlessly and viciously smeared and slandered into a terrifying vision Satan's incarnated evil on planet Earth in 2024. 

Really, who could vote for Satan?

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From the Brass Knuckles Capitalism (BKC) Files: Ars Technica writes about Google destroying inconvenient evidence in a lawsuit:

You can't do that! --

Judge finds Google destroyed evidence and repeatedly gave false info to court

Google in trouble for auto-deleting chats needed as evidence in Epic Games case

"After substantial briefing by both sides, and an evidentiary hearing that featured witness testimony and other evidence, the Court concludes that sanctions are warranted," US District Judge James Donato wrote. Later in the ruling, he wrote that evidence shows that "Google intended to subvert the discovery process, and that Chat evidence was 'lost with the intent to prevent its use in litigation' and 'with the intent to deprive another party of the information's use in the litigation.'"  

"The Court has since had to spend a substantial amount of resources to get to the truth of the matter, including several hearings, a two-day evidentiary proceeding, and countless hours reviewing voluminous briefs. All the while, Google has tried to downplay the problem and displayed a dismissive attitude ill tuned to the gravity of its conduct. Its initial defense was that it had no 'ability to change default settings for individual custodians with respect to the chat history setting,' but evidence at the hearing plainly established that this representation was not truthful."

Apparently, Google gambles that its is better to take lumps from a judge than lose its defense case in court. By intentionally destroying evidence, Google evinces an poor, condescending attitude toward the rule of law that far too many BKC elites hold and act on. No senior executive at Google is going to go to jail. That's the beauty of the liability shield that routinely protects elite corporate criminals. All bad acts here are by the legal person named Google. That's Mr. Google to you, you puny human citizen.  

What can the court do? No real humans are responsible. Send Google's official documents of incorporation to jail? That's who is responsible in the eyes of the law. The law blinded and neutered by BKC elites.

This is more evidence of how tenuous the rule of law can be and too often is. This is what the slow fall of the rule of law looks like in real time.

What an AR-15 bullet does to a person

A WaPo article provides images of what a .223 caliber bullet from an AR-15 does once it hits a person's body. The GOP wants to make the AR-15 the national gun. Here's why.

Warning, this is unpleasant.