US Politics
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We're truly in some bizarro world. A world that sees Erick Erickson talking actual sense on Bill Maher.
What The Hell Was This Rachel Maddow Segment About ?
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/rachel-maddow-niger-travel-ban_us_59ea060fe4b05b4f1c3ad52f
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/rachel-maddow-niger-travel-ban_us_59ea060fe4b05b4f1c3ad52f
Not often you get all the living ex-presidents in the same room
Thread:
Interesting. https://newrepublic.com/article/145504/conservatives-blame-poverty-poor
Why Conservatives Blame Poverty on the Poor
A new essay by National Review's Kevin Williamson exposes the ideological blind spots of responsibility politics.
By Sarah Jones
October 25, 2017
(Closing paragraph summed it up)
So close, yet so deliberately far. Black welfare recipients aren’t the problem; Mexicans aren’t the problem; immigration isn’t the problem. But low wages, a shrinking safety net, subprime mortgages, unattainable health care, impoverished local schools, among all the other locks that trap the poor in place, can and should be pinned to the very system conservatives want to defend. Williamson fixates on the willful stupidity of the poor because he must. If he didn’t, he’d have to indict his own ideology.
Why Conservatives Blame Poverty on the Poor
A new essay by National Review's Kevin Williamson exposes the ideological blind spots of responsibility politics.
By Sarah Jones
October 25, 2017
Scapegoat, prophet, moron, rogue—the poor white is a shapeshifter. He changes forms as the needs of his beholders change. When liberals need to blame a class for Donald Trump’s presidency, the poor white will do; never mind that two-thirds of all Trump supporters made $50,000 or more a year. When conservatives need to cast liberals as aloof elitists they appoint themselves the poor white’s defenders—until their ideology is threatened, and then it is time to take out the trash.
In a recent piece for National Review, Kevin Williamson chooses the latter, though he makes a few sound observations before settling on the poor-bashing. Central to Williamson’s argument is the existence of a phenomenon he calls “acting white,” a performative affect infecting the conservative class. This performance, he claims, assumes that authenticity “is not to be found in any of the great contemporary American business success stories, or in intellectual life, or in the great cultural institutions, but in the suburban-to-rural environs in which the white underclass largely makes its home.” It involves conservatives painting poor whites as this country’s principal victims and “valorizing” their “underclass dysfunction.”
There’s some validity to this observation. We can see it in the mutant campaign of Ed Gillespie, a moderate Republican who now panders to Trumpists so he can become Virginia’s governor. It is present in Roy Moore’s success in Alabama’s Republican primary for Senate, and it is embodied by Sarah Palin, who owes her lingering D-list celebrity status to a conservative movement once convinced of her blue collar bonafides. Beyond this, however, Williamson fears to tread. He will not indict the extreme free-market obsession rotting the conservative movement from the inside out, so the poor white must answer for his personal deficiencies.
“The more you know about that world, the less sympathetic you’ll be to it,” he asserts. “What the Trump-style would-be tribunes of the plebs most have in common with self-appointed progressive advocates for the poor is ignorance of the actual subject matter.” Once you know anything at all about that white underclass, he implies, you’ll be as harsh on them as he is.
Why the animosity? He gives up the game soon enough. “It weren’t the scheming Chinaman what stole ol’ Bubba’s job down Bovina, ‘cause ol’ Bubba didn’t really have him a job to steal,” he writes. “And it isn’t capitalism that made rural Appalachia or small-town Texas what it is.” But if the problem actually was capitalism, would Williamson be able to admit it?
When we speak of the American working class we speak mostly of people of color. There is a historical malice behind the idea that poverty is cultural, since it has been used as a tool to blame blacks and other minority groups for their own poverty. But that same malice is evident in cultural critiques of white poverty.
Williamson has earned praise for attacking the conservative fetishization of downscale white culture, but his underlying argument is not original. It’s a recitation of familiar conservative tropes. “People really do make decisions, and, whether they intend it or not, they contribute to the sometimes difficult conditions in which those decisions have to be made,” he argues.
As proof, he cites his mother and her poor life choices, which once kept him from his childhood home—a rhetorical sleight of hand that we could call the J.D. Vance maneuver, after the author of another book that castigates poor whites for being poor. Later, upon helping his mother and her fourth husband with their financials, Williamson found them in dire shape. “Of course they were almost dead broke—their bingo and cigarette outlays alone were crushing, and they’d bought a Cadillac and paid for it with a credit card,” he gripes.
Williamson glancingly acknowledges “external forces, economic and otherwise,” that might contribute to poverty, but asserts that it is not the case that the people he grew up with were “only leaves on the wind.” In downplaying those external forces, Williamson excludes a body of research on the relationship between poverty and poor decision-making skills. “In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep,” CityLab reported in 2013. “Being poor means, as the authors write, ‘coping with not just a shortfall of money, but also with a concurrent shortfall of cognitive resources.’” Poverty doesn’t make you stupid; in fact, surviving it requires a certain ingenuity. And that takes up space in the brain.
In an essay for Nautilus about his own impoverished upbringing, Christian Cooper cited emerging—and controversial—science about the epigenetics of poverty. The research is still in natal stages, but it has produced some early evidence that mothers can pass stress, including stress inflicted by poverty, to their children. “The uglier converse of the bootstrap hypothesis—that those who fail to transcend their circumstances deserve them—makes even less sense in the face of the grim biology of poverty,” he explained. “When the firing gun goes off, the poor are well behind the start line.”
Certain financial decisions, like the ones Williamson attributes to his mother, can certainly deepen poverty. But those decisions are rarely why a person enters poverty, and when the working poor can’t access a living wage or safe, affordable housing, credit cards look like an open door, not a trap.
The task of politics is to provide poor whites with the true reasons for their poverty, and with a means to address them. This is beyond the average conservative, as Williamson amply demonstrates. Conservatives like Williamson and J.D. Vance lean on cultural deficiencies because they’re convinced “it isn’t capitalism that made rural Appalachia or small-town Texas what it is.” At the heart of their arguments is a species of narcissism. I made it. I escaped poverty. Succeed by being like me. They are too personally invested in the myth of meritocracy to admit what the poor already know, which is that there’s no such thing.
“Feeding such people the lie that their problems are mainly external in origin—that they are the victims of scheming elites, immigrants, black welfare malingerers, superabundantly fecund Mexicans, capitalism with Chinese characteristics, Walmart, Wall Street, their neighbors—is the political equivalent of selling them heroin,” Williamson says. “The opposite message—that life is hard and unfair, that what is not necessarily your fault may yet be your problem, that you must act and bear responsibility for your actions—is what conservatism used to offer, before it became a white-minstrel show.”
In a recent piece for National Review, Kevin Williamson chooses the latter, though he makes a few sound observations before settling on the poor-bashing. Central to Williamson’s argument is the existence of a phenomenon he calls “acting white,” a performative affect infecting the conservative class. This performance, he claims, assumes that authenticity “is not to be found in any of the great contemporary American business success stories, or in intellectual life, or in the great cultural institutions, but in the suburban-to-rural environs in which the white underclass largely makes its home.” It involves conservatives painting poor whites as this country’s principal victims and “valorizing” their “underclass dysfunction.”
There’s some validity to this observation. We can see it in the mutant campaign of Ed Gillespie, a moderate Republican who now panders to Trumpists so he can become Virginia’s governor. It is present in Roy Moore’s success in Alabama’s Republican primary for Senate, and it is embodied by Sarah Palin, who owes her lingering D-list celebrity status to a conservative movement once convinced of her blue collar bonafides. Beyond this, however, Williamson fears to tread. He will not indict the extreme free-market obsession rotting the conservative movement from the inside out, so the poor white must answer for his personal deficiencies.
“The more you know about that world, the less sympathetic you’ll be to it,” he asserts. “What the Trump-style would-be tribunes of the plebs most have in common with self-appointed progressive advocates for the poor is ignorance of the actual subject matter.” Once you know anything at all about that white underclass, he implies, you’ll be as harsh on them as he is.
Why the animosity? He gives up the game soon enough. “It weren’t the scheming Chinaman what stole ol’ Bubba’s job down Bovina, ‘cause ol’ Bubba didn’t really have him a job to steal,” he writes. “And it isn’t capitalism that made rural Appalachia or small-town Texas what it is.” But if the problem actually was capitalism, would Williamson be able to admit it?
When we speak of the American working class we speak mostly of people of color. There is a historical malice behind the idea that poverty is cultural, since it has been used as a tool to blame blacks and other minority groups for their own poverty. But that same malice is evident in cultural critiques of white poverty.
Williamson has earned praise for attacking the conservative fetishization of downscale white culture, but his underlying argument is not original. It’s a recitation of familiar conservative tropes. “People really do make decisions, and, whether they intend it or not, they contribute to the sometimes difficult conditions in which those decisions have to be made,” he argues.
As proof, he cites his mother and her poor life choices, which once kept him from his childhood home—a rhetorical sleight of hand that we could call the J.D. Vance maneuver, after the author of another book that castigates poor whites for being poor. Later, upon helping his mother and her fourth husband with their financials, Williamson found them in dire shape. “Of course they were almost dead broke—their bingo and cigarette outlays alone were crushing, and they’d bought a Cadillac and paid for it with a credit card,” he gripes.
Williamson glancingly acknowledges “external forces, economic and otherwise,” that might contribute to poverty, but asserts that it is not the case that the people he grew up with were “only leaves on the wind.” In downplaying those external forces, Williamson excludes a body of research on the relationship between poverty and poor decision-making skills. “In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep,” CityLab reported in 2013. “Being poor means, as the authors write, ‘coping with not just a shortfall of money, but also with a concurrent shortfall of cognitive resources.’” Poverty doesn’t make you stupid; in fact, surviving it requires a certain ingenuity. And that takes up space in the brain.
In an essay for Nautilus about his own impoverished upbringing, Christian Cooper cited emerging—and controversial—science about the epigenetics of poverty. The research is still in natal stages, but it has produced some early evidence that mothers can pass stress, including stress inflicted by poverty, to their children. “The uglier converse of the bootstrap hypothesis—that those who fail to transcend their circumstances deserve them—makes even less sense in the face of the grim biology of poverty,” he explained. “When the firing gun goes off, the poor are well behind the start line.”
Certain financial decisions, like the ones Williamson attributes to his mother, can certainly deepen poverty. But those decisions are rarely why a person enters poverty, and when the working poor can’t access a living wage or safe, affordable housing, credit cards look like an open door, not a trap.
The task of politics is to provide poor whites with the true reasons for their poverty, and with a means to address them. This is beyond the average conservative, as Williamson amply demonstrates. Conservatives like Williamson and J.D. Vance lean on cultural deficiencies because they’re convinced “it isn’t capitalism that made rural Appalachia or small-town Texas what it is.” At the heart of their arguments is a species of narcissism. I made it. I escaped poverty. Succeed by being like me. They are too personally invested in the myth of meritocracy to admit what the poor already know, which is that there’s no such thing.
“Feeding such people the lie that their problems are mainly external in origin—that they are the victims of scheming elites, immigrants, black welfare malingerers, superabundantly fecund Mexicans, capitalism with Chinese characteristics, Walmart, Wall Street, their neighbors—is the political equivalent of selling them heroin,” Williamson says. “The opposite message—that life is hard and unfair, that what is not necessarily your fault may yet be your problem, that you must act and bear responsibility for your actions—is what conservatism used to offer, before it became a white-minstrel show.”
(Closing paragraph summed it up)
So close, yet so deliberately far. Black welfare recipients aren’t the problem; Mexicans aren’t the problem; immigration isn’t the problem. But low wages, a shrinking safety net, subprime mortgages, unattainable health care, impoverished local schools, among all the other locks that trap the poor in place, can and should be pinned to the very system conservatives want to defend. Williamson fixates on the willful stupidity of the poor because he must. If he didn’t, he’d have to indict his own ideology.
This is almost comically evil:
Annoyed at the way the DNC & Clinton campaign have ballsed up on this dossier stuff. Now reports are that Podesta and Wasserman Schultz testified to congress they had no idea who funded the dossier, which sounds hard to believe.
One person who has kept quiet in all this is Robby Mook who ran the Clinton campaign. There's just no way he never knew about the dossier and its funding. Clinton claims she never knew about the funding or that the memos even existed, so the question is why would Robby Mook refuse to inform his boss on any information relating to the Steele memos?
One person who has kept quiet in all this is Robby Mook who ran the Clinton campaign. There's just no way he never knew about the dossier and its funding. Clinton claims she never knew about the funding or that the memos even existed, so the question is why would Robby Mook refuse to inform his boss on any information relating to the Steele memos?
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Plausible deniability
Not sure if this is the right thread for it but this somehow made it to my suggestions on YouTube. .
Just finished watching this and there's something absolutely wrong with these nutters..
Just finished watching this and there's something absolutely wrong with these nutters..
This is such bullshit. If you see that NAMBLA/pedo-bashing image doing the rounds here's the truth behind it: it was a plant by counter protestors, likely from Cernovich's camp.
http://gothamist.com/2017/10/31/mike_cernovich_stole_my_photo_lied.php#photo-1
Mike Cernovich Stole My Photo, Lied About It On Twitter, And Sold Trump Jr. On Yet Another Fake Conspiracy
http://gothamist.com/2017/10/31/mike_cernovich_stole_my_photo_lied.php#photo-1
Mike Cernovich Stole My Photo, Lied About It On Twitter, And Sold Trump Jr. On Yet Another Fake Conspiracy
This fear-mongering ad should never have aired.
''Resistance'' hero McCain seems to side with Trump on the idea of sending criminals to Guantanamo and strip them of human rights.
DNAinfo and Gothamist Are Shut Down After Vote to Unionize
This is ridiculous, I don't know who Keith Olbermann is outside of his daily Trump rants I enjoy listening to. Is he an actual genius? I have a hard time believing this clip is from 7 years ago.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...rohibit-states-from-enforcing-net-neutrality/
Americas internet is well fecked lol
Americas internet is well fecked lol
America is well fecked.
That's messed up.
Not read anything about any burglary or unlawful entry charges, so it appears that the guy knew Rand and wasn't trespassing. Looks like its a personal dispute and not some random attack on a politician.
Not read anything about any burglary or unlawful entry charges, so it appears that the guy knew Rand and wasn't trespassing. Looks like its a personal dispute and not some random attack on a politician.
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Holy shitfeck, the us is pretty much on its way to be completely fecked - and the rest of the world get's caught up in the mess too.
It's seriously scary how much of the events that have happened and are happening this commentary explains/predicted.
I'm gonna go buy a kitten now, at least they are still awesome even if the world goes to up in flames
http://gothamistinexile.com/2017/11/05/gothamist-in-exile-who-we-are-and-what-were-doing/
Tagline: Seizing the Means of Production
Didn't want this to get lost in the tweets or Russia stuff. It's a documentary about the day of the elction, following various supporters of both candidates
https://www.netflix.com/watch/80214590
https://www.netflix.com/watch/80214590
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Not available in India catalogue
Not available in India catalogue
अमरीकी पढ़ाई का छुपा फायदा.
Rand Paul got beat up by his 59 year old neighbor in Kentucky. Like got his ass whopped. Rib fractures and lung contusions.
What's the name of doc?
As Wildfires Raged, Insurers Sent in Private Firefighters to Protect Homes of the Wealthy
Insurers see boost in enrollments ‘as people have seen us save homes’; consumer advocates say programs mean rich get better protections
Insurers see boost in enrollments ‘as people have seen us save homes’; consumer advocates say programs mean rich get better protections
Whoa!
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/gop-abortion-tax-bill_us_59fca946e4b0baea2631965f
Republicans Sneak Anti-Abortion Language Into Tax Bill
Democrats denounced the move as a back-door attack on Roe v. Wade.
--
Buried on page 93 of the 429-page tax proposal is a provision that would allow fetuses to be named as beneficiaries of college savings accounts known as 529 plans ― investment vehicles that come with a range of tax breaks.
Abortion rights advocates were quick to call out the language. “This is a back-door attempt to establish personhood from the moment of conception,” Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus, said in a statement. “The tax code is no place to define what constitutes an ‘unborn child.’ What’s next, giving a Social Security number to a zygote?”
Ostensibly, the idea is that parents can get a leg up on saving for their kid’s education before he or she is even born. However, it takes care to define the terms “unborn child” and “child in utero,” in what appears to be a naked attempt to establish so-called personhood for fetuses, a popular anti-abortion tactic.
--
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/gop-abortion-tax-bill_us_59fca946e4b0baea2631965f
Republicans Sneak Anti-Abortion Language Into Tax Bill
Democrats denounced the move as a back-door attack on Roe v. Wade.
--
Buried on page 93 of the 429-page tax proposal is a provision that would allow fetuses to be named as beneficiaries of college savings accounts known as 529 plans ― investment vehicles that come with a range of tax breaks.
Abortion rights advocates were quick to call out the language. “This is a back-door attempt to establish personhood from the moment of conception,” Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus, said in a statement. “The tax code is no place to define what constitutes an ‘unborn child.’ What’s next, giving a Social Security number to a zygote?”
Ostensibly, the idea is that parents can get a leg up on saving for their kid’s education before he or she is even born. However, it takes care to define the terms “unborn child” and “child in utero,” in what appears to be a naked attempt to establish so-called personhood for fetuses, a popular anti-abortion tactic.
--
Big test for the Democrats today with the state & local elections. Virginia's the one to watch as it looks a shoo-in that Dems will regain control of the governorship in New Jersey.
Dodgy activity being reported in Virginia.
Despicable assholes. So much stuff like this happens every election, and its almost treated like a game.
Meh, i'll have to repost this around... i hope no one gets duped, it's already a weirdly close race and Ed Gillespie cannot win this, terrible implications as a whole for the US as it'll be used as a political bat from Trumpster.
Positive signs for Northam. Good turnout in places like Fairfax, Charlotesville & Arlington.