I am up to my eyeballs in rural and small town white people who, seemingly unmoored for the last 3-4 decades have drifted over to red in a once blue state.
I spend an hour driving in to work thru the countryside and give it some serious pondering.
MY life is hectic, the world has sped up so much and is heading in such a dire direction. I am scared and stressed. The evidence of overpopulation, migration, climate cataclysm has been prevalent for decades. You couldn’t watch a Nature program in those decades that didn’t ominously warn everyone watching. Including Rs. They are not the only people/culture that turned a blind eye towards the problem - ignored it all and hoped it would go away.
FEAR. Do the average R voters really want to take things back to 1859? I don’t think so. I think they cannot deal with the world and fear wants them to lop off everything that frightens them…to simplify everything. As long as it is “Christian” they will live under that subjugation. They will bow to a dictator (as long as it’s ‘their’ kind of a dictator), and (edited) think that system will establish a rule that might help get them through the looming cataclysm. I have to admit, at this late date - it is as plausible as the alternative: that the governments of the world will pull a rabbit out of their hat and solve it first.
John Roberts’ position on racial inequality is the contemporary equivalent of Nancy Reagan’s just say no to drugs campaign. ‘See, kids all you have do is refuse. Addiction is no big thing.’
What’s next for Roberts? Public service ads on not being racist?
I still shake my head at all the bland tubers that keep getting unearthed as the Chump Madness gets documented…and equally surprised at how quiet the 100s of people involved in the crimes kept themselves. With such extraordinary crimes against the life-blood of the country, basically nobody came forward. I never even heard of Brown or Roman until almost 3 years after the fact.
“Third, Giuliani and his lawyers surely feel the prosecutorial vise tightening on him,” Aftergut added. “Two of Nevada’s fake electors have testified before Smith’s grand jury. So has Trump campaign official Gary Michael Brown, who was reportedly connected to the fake-electors scheme, while his boss, Michael Roman, has now reportedly reached a cooperation agreement with Smith. Even Mark Meadows, Trump’s last White House chief of staff, who emailed about the need ‘to have someone coordinating the [fake] electors for states,’ is reported to have testified in Smith’s probe.”
Italy’s minister of culture has contacted Mark Zuckerberg about the possibility of staging a fight against Elon Musk in the Colosseum, according to TMZ. The tech billionaires appeared to publicly agreeearlier this month to some form of cage match, with Zuckerberg responding to Musk’s request on Instagram with the words: “Send Me Location.” TMZ now claims Zuckerberg’s team passed along the Colosseum offer to UFC President Dana White, who has previously said that both the Twitter owner and Meta boss are “dead serious” about having a brawl. The outlet also said Friday that Musk and Zuckerberg have been negotiating with White “multiple times each day for more than a week.” If a fight did go ahead and the Italian offer is real, it’s unclear if it would take place inside or outside the 2,000-year-old arena, as only a few hundred people could attend in temporary seating within the amphitheater.
What Trump did was vile, but can it be that the location of the Obamas’ home in DC is a secret?
However, it would be soooo nice if DOJ somehow used this as an example, unrelated to any ongoing DOJ case, of Trump doxxing people to get a judge to gag him on that kind of talk against anyone involved in his case(s)?
It seems to me that the US could use more universities. Too many students for too few choices compared to my day.
Also too, I’d laugh my ass off if Harvard dropped legacies. They won’t, but it would be funny and just.
He’s a corporatist POS. He serves corporate interests only.
When he votes in a sane way, it is only ever to serve the interests of corporate America. He tries to save Republicans from themselves but again, only to serve corporate purposes (keeping Republicans alive is a means to a low tax end)
That’s evil. Even if he’s convinced himself otherwise.
He and his benefactors need to hide the truth on racism for their own political survival, and to continue wealth consolidation
I know a number of people who hold the opinion that “You shouldn’t try to correct an injustice by simply reversing the needle of the injustice.” Conceptually, that seems like a principled argument but there is no other solution to the injustice presented, when you are talking a historic injustice perpetrated over centuries and institutionalized into a society doing nothing is not “colorblind.” It is a proactive step to allow the latent damage of that injustice to persist into the future.
The comments on “legacy” admissions are so accurate it should be embarrassing. Remind me again how many low income people where involved in that college admissions scam a while back. Like it or not race, and most usually black has been used as a signal of poverty in the US for decades.
Still, not criminal. Not by any stretch. That he was brought to trial seems, on its face, to be proprietorial misconduct.
100%. But, I wouldn’t limit it to cops. We should all, (and I’m looking right at@castor_troy), be advocating for gun control, and refusing to vote for anyone who gets anything higher than an “F–” rating from the NRA.
By the time the shooting has started, the situation is already tragic, out of control, and irredeemable. The solution is not “braver school guards”, the solution is fewer psychopaths with guns, which is most easily accomplished as: “fewer fscking guns.”
Amything else, everything else is just arguing about how many imaginary creatures can dance in the depression of a hollow-nosed bullet.
The majority de facto exempts West Point, Annapolis, and the other military academies from today’s affirmative action decision in a quaint little footnote.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a footnote in the majority opinion, “No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context.”
“This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”
And what are the potentially distinct interests of the military academies? “The Army, Navy and Air Force academies practice affirmative action— the policy of using race as a factor in admissions — to boost diversity.”
Roberts exempted the academies because they were not parties to the case. Neither were any public or private universities or colleges other than UNC and Harvard.
Somebody with a better memory for SCROTUS decisions that I have may be able to call up some examples of the 6 Nazgul denying an injunction to block a GOP-enacted law for this exact reason: that no injury had occurred yet. Perhaps one of the post-Dobbs abortion restrictions?
I think there is an evolutionary component to why fear drives some people to reject evidence based conclusions and also to continually categorize people as “other”, to be feared or rejected.
Humans are social organisms, and to be rejected, shunned or cast out of the group has dire consequences for survival in the circumstances our ancestors lived in- hunter gather societies that may have required cooperation to obtain and defend resources. So humans need to accept the rules/beliefs of a group to have access to resources, support, etc. Non-members are excluded and viewed as “others”. So members of the group will follow a leader who they believe protects them, and accept the group beliefs (or at least not defy them) in order to keep the benefits.
It’s easy to expand this beyond our ancestors- think of a person living in a small town in the Bible Belt who is quite vocal about being atheist. This could affect their social interactions and might even impact who will do business with him/her- thus still risking survival or finding a mate. So people stick with group thinking (at least outwardly) and those in power will continue to cast non-members as others to be feared or avoided.
One is forced to wonder; Is NOTHING being done about the Jewish Space Lasers? Did everyone just forget about those? We’re all just okay living with that threat?
We find out later today… today’s world. Don’t think there’s a way this changes the damage they are set to do today. Would be refreshing if it did, tho.
Agree on the impropriety of the criminal charge, but it puts the lie to the gun fetishist claim that armed security guards are the best way to protect the schools.
I used to be a regular commenter on the Washington Monthly blog until they changed their management policies, which resulted in the once great blog being demoted in importance and filled with trolls. However, when it was still going strong, the topic of ‘Whiteness’ came up. One rather eccentric poster* (who I believe was female) made a comment that has haunted me ever since. She said there were 2 groups of people in the U.S. who would never be allowed to become “White” (As the social construct): Blacks and Native Americans. At first I thought she was nuts, but later I realized she was exactly correct…
OT: This lovely obituary of a man most of us have never heard of. Sidenote: The Bitter Southerner is well worth knowing about.
When I sat down to write, I found myself dropping details into a template — son of, survived by . The obituary form puts a particular pressure on what matters, on what should be remembered and praised, but what does one say about a life that aimed to carry on in the background, that had no interest in a name in newsprint or an award on the mantel? Ray Harrell, son of Jim and Cora, was content to sit still and watch the breeze scatter the leaves? Ray Harrell, sergeant first class, arranged the bills in his wallet in descending order? Ray Harrell, survived by Grace, whistled the same invented tune year after year while searching for the right nail in the shed? I filled in the expected details and sent the obituary to the newspaper, but I knew it wasn’t right. It captured nothing of the life he lived. What I returned to in the days after he passed, as the ladies from church covered the table in casseroles and Grandma slept in a bed alone for the first time since she was 19, was the sheer audacity of a quiet life.
