Why is this even a problem? If you need more citizens, take in more immigrants or refugees. It’s not like America has a shortage of either wanting to come in. If you can’t make your own citizens, imported is fine.
How Millenials are killing the baby industry
“If you can’t make your own citizens, imported is fine.”
this is why white supremacists want to make abortion illegal again, by the way. the whole “white genocide” fantasy is rooted heavily in outrage that white women aren’t producing enough white children
^^^
Which is also one of the reasons immigration isn’t a proper “solution” to most Republican voters. And why Donald and his crew want to kick out non-white credentialed immigrants as much as they want to kick out informal ones. It all comes back to white supremacy.
when people say shit like “if you’re at an antifacist event, don’t talk to reporters” they mean you. you aren’t an exception to that. you can be the smartest, most articulate person on the planet and right wing news stations can still edit shit to make you look like a dipshit.
when people say to not take selfies or leave your face uncovered at antifacist events they mean you. when people say not to get into public debates with nazis (because it just gives them a platform and a persecution complex) they mean you. the way to actually, effectively combat fascism is by organizing en masse – you can’t be a hero or get famous as a black bloc activist and you shouldn’t be trying to.
your fifteen minutes of fame on local news isnt worth potentially giving your political opponents soundbites of “crazy sjws” to pass around on reddit and recruit more scumbags with. it’s not worth risking the safety of other people to take photos at events that might get other, more vulnerable people identified. it’s not worth it to get into pointless arguements with fascists in atmospheres where you’re just giving them an excuse to spout their bullshit and a soapbox to do it on. if you think feeling like a hero is more important than the actual, physical safety of the people you’re supposedly trying to protect, you’re just a narcissist who happens to have left wing politics.
this goes x10000 if you’re white. instigating police violence at protests or riling up violent fascist shitheads isn’t noble in the slightest when you aren’t the one who’s going to get stabbed in the ribs.
Charlie Kirk: alright guys we need a new idea on how to protest all this liberal nonsense like “caring” and “feelings”
guy with a diaper fetish: glad you asked!
What bothers me about all this nonsense, is that it is entirely part of the patriarchal attempts to erase or glorify certain aspects of history. Let me explain.
In the past, it was exceedingly common, indeed expected for men to have safe spaces. They were sometimes even called this. A man had a study at home, or an office. Even in the poorer houses, during the growth of the middle class, circa 1700′s, men had a library, or a study, or a dressing room. They had social clubs that did not allow women. They were allowed multiple locations that were entirely theirs to do with as they pleased, including abandoning their wives to whatever it was they were doing, ignoring the world, shooting billiards, drinking, smoking and so forth. Even before the creation of the middle class after the plague, there were male-only groups, meeting halls, schools, and pubs. Men had plenty of safe spaces reserved for themselves that were unrelated to work and entirely focused on leisure. At universities, which were male only for the longest time, there were also common rooms, study rooms, rooms for leisure activities, pubs, mess halls and so forth.
Men have always had their male-only spaces. They have kept women from them, they have used them to escape from “the strictures of family life” specifically. They used them to avoid the things that men found overtly objectionable. They have used them to write letters, or converse with other women who were not their wives, or experience companionship with other men. They have even made rules about what could and could not be discussed.
Great historical partnerships, arrangements, bargains, treaties and on and on were founded in these male-only safe spaces. Lloyd’s of London, one of the largest financial institutions of the world? Founded in Lloyd’s coffee shop – a typically male-oriented space full of cronies sitting around chatting about their insurances on ships and trade. Publishing? Founded in pubs and churchyards. Property? governed through public houses and in male clubs. Law? An entire group existed at Temple Bar and the Inns of court to allow male lawyers to have freedom from the regulations of the city, to the point that they often fought with the crown. These men had an entire culture entirely to themselves, with additional safe spaces within that were the foundations of many of the longer standing legal and trade organizations. The British East India trading company? You guessed it. Put together by blokes sitting at a pub on the North Bank.
Safe spaces for men have always existed, while women were either kept from them or eventually had safe female spaces delegated for them by men, usually a solarium or parlor, or drawing room specifically. They were allowed to take the air or promenade in the park, but that was all.
And that says nothing about racial organizations that provided safe spaces from the poor, the immigrant, the slave, from which, all of these groups were banned or forced to act as servants or slaves within these safe spaces, seeing the white males go about their safe leisure, with no regard that it is being facilitated by the oppressed.
To now see grown men in children’s clothes, acting as if the entire foundation of everything they hold dear and propagate as the heights of achievement wasn’t built in male safe spaces, by men escaping their families, or their jobs, or their obligations, or the people they didn’t see as “fit”, for a moment, is both appalling to me and uniquely ignorant. The history of male leisure and its critical impact on how the world works is being overwritten. This new history is a palimpsest that obliterates the intrinsic hierarchies at play in western culture.
These men are stupid bastards, and someone ought to give them a good walloping.
i just think it’s hilarious that they’re dressing up as babies in order to act like children
“waaaah it’s not fair that i get in trouble for being an asshole in public”
huh, usually you guys do this on the internet in your undies, but ok
yeah what these kinds of men are really freaking out about is other people trying to be safe from THEM. bullies will always scream about the injustice of their victims figuring out how to escape.
We don’t know yet if Mueller has the goods — documentary or testimonial proof of explicit collusion — or if he can get them, so we have no idea how this is ultimately going to play out.
But we are disturbingly close to the following scenario:
Say Mueller reveals hard proof that the Trump campaign knowingly colluded with Russia, strategically using leaked emails to hurt Clinton’s campaign. Say the president — backed by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Fox News, Breitbart, most of the US Cabinet, half the panelists on CNN, most of the radio talk show hosts in the country, and an enormous network of Russian-paid hackers and volunteer shitposters working through social media — rejects the evidence.
They might say Mueller is compromised. It’s a Hillary/Deep State plot. There’s nothing wrong with colluding with Russia in this particular way. Dems did it first. All of the above. Whatever.
Say the entire right-wing media machine kicks to life and dismisses the whole thing as a scam — and conservatives believe them. The conservative base remains committed to Trump, politicians remain scared to cross the base, and US politics remains stuck in partisan paralysis, unable to act on what Mueller discovers.
In short, what if Mueller proves the case and it’s not enough? What if there is no longer any evidentiary standard that could overcome the influence of right-wing media?…
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy having to do with how we know things and what it means for something to be true or false, accurate or inaccurate. (Episteme, or ἐπιστήμη, is ancient Greek for knowledge/science/understanding.)
The US is experiencing a deep epistemic breach, a split not just in what we value or want, but in who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening.
The primary source of this breach, to make a long story short, is the US conservative movement’s rejection of the mainstream institutions devoted to gathering and disseminating knowledge (journalism, science, the academy) — the ones society has appointed as referees in matters of factual dispute.
In their place, the right has created its own parallel set of institutions, most notably its own media ecosystem.
But the right’s institutions are not of the same kind as the ones they seek to displace. Mainstream scientists and journalists see themselves as beholden to values and standards that transcend party or faction. They try to separate truth from tribal interests and have developed various guild rules and procedures to help do that. They see themselves as neutral arbiters, even if they do not always uphold that ideal in practice.
The pretense for the conservative revolution was that mainstream institutions had failed in their role as neutral arbiters — that they had been taken over by the left, become agents of the left in referee’s clothing, as it were.
But the right did not want better neutral arbiters. The institutions it built scarcely made any pretense of transcending faction; they are of and for the right. There is nominal separation of conservative media from conservative politicians, think tanks, and lobbyists, but in practice, they are all part of the conservative movement. They are prosecuting its interests; that is the ur-goal.
Indeed, the far right rejects the very idea of neutral, binding arbiters; there is only Us and Them, only a zero-sum contest for resources. That mindset leads to what I call “tribal epistemology” — the systematic conflation of what is true with what is good for the tribe.
There’s always been a conspiratorial and xenophobic fringe on the right, but it was (fitfully) held in place by gatekeepers through the early decades of America’s post-war prosperity. The explosion of right-wing media in the 1990s and 2000s swept those gatekeepers away, giving the loudest voice, the most exposure, and the most power to the most extreme elements on the right. The right-wing media ecosystem became a bubble from which fewer and fewer inhabitants ever ventured.
As the massive post-election study of online media from Harvard (which got far too little attention) showed, media is not symmetrical any more than broader polarization is. “Prominent media on the left are well distributed across the center, center-left, and left,” the researchers found. “On the right, prominent media are highly partisan.”
When mapping out sources of online news, researchers found that the two basic poles were the center-left and the far-right.
The center of gravity of the overall landscape is the center-left. Partisan media sources on the left are integrated into this landscape and are of lesser importance than the major media outlets of the center-left. The center of attention and influence for conservative media is on the far right. The center-right is of minor importance and is the least represented portion of the media spectrum.
In short, they conclude, “conservative media is more partisan and more insular than the left.”
That insular partisan far-right media is also full of nonsense like Pizzagate that leaves the base continuously pumped up — outraged, infuriated, terrified, and misled. At this point, as the stories above show, the conservative base will believe anything. And they are pissed about all of it.
As Brian Beutler wrote in a scathing piece recently, the mainstream media has never learned to deal with the right-wing bubble — it has not learned how not to take bad-faith lies seriously. And now we will all reap the consequences…
Say he pardons everyone. People will argue on cable TV about whether he should have. One side will say up, the other will say down. Trump may have done this, but what about when Obama did that? What about Hillary’s emails? Whatabout this, whatabout that, whatabout whatabout whatabout?
There is no longer any settling such arguments. The only way to settle any argument is for both sides to be committed, at least to some degree, to shared standards of evidence and accuracy, and to place a measure of shared trust in institutions meant to vouchsafe evidence and accuracy. Without that basic agreement, without common arbiters, there can be no end to dispute.
If one side rejects the epistemic authority of society’s core institutions and practices, there’s just nothing left to be done. Truth cannot speak for itself, like the voice of God from above. It can only speak through human institutions and practices.
The subject of climate change offers a crystalline example here. If climate science does its thing, checks and rechecks its work, and then the Republican Party simply refuses to accept it … what then?
That’s what US elites are truly afraid to confront: What if facts and persuasion just don’t matter anymore?
…I think we all know already that it’s going to go this way.
Once this tax-cut plan goes down in flames, which it looks like it will
currently(remember, they wanted to get this passed the first week of
Sept or some crazy thing like that, so it’s already been massively delayed and the opposition to it is huge), then it’s possible the Rs will
decide Donny’s a liability and cut him loose.
I find this less likely
than some do, though, given how committed the Rs have been to the Infallibility of Republican Presidents since Nixon.
It’s not just the chorus of “Nixon did nothing Wrong” they’ve been warbling, faux-emotional, since his resignation, either; the Republican party basically responded to an RPres being forced out of office for committing serious crimes that threatened our very democracy itself by… doubling down on presidential criminality. Every Republican president since Nixon, with the possible exception of Bush1(haven’t looked him up in awhile so I’m shakier on his term), has committed impeachable crimes. None of them faced any punishment at all for them; hardly anyone in their administrations did. There was never even any serious attempt by Congress or through the Courts to punish them. The Republicans really are the party of “Faction Before Country” and have been for decades now, so the possibility of them choosing to ignore further evidence of Donald’s criminality(there’s already plenty out there unrelated to Russia, campaign finance fraud, and providing aid and comfort to an enemy of the Union that they’re choosing to do nothing about) is very real.
– the personal is political / your existence is revolutionary, when used prescriptively or as a given
– if you’re not outraged you’re not paying attention / if you’re silent or neutral you must be on the side of the oppressor
– if you don’t care about these issues (for a narrow definition of caring, in a visible and strident way), you must not be affected by them
individuals whose lives are politicized against their will can reserve the right to be apolitical. to not accept that. people who are silent or neutral may be uninformed, scared, confused, necessarily focused on their own survival. opting out is not invariably a sign of privilege. opting out does not indicate a lack of empathy. instead of saying that our breathing is revolutionary or makes us activists, we need to say that it is ok for people not to be activists.
nothing makes my blood boil like posts that scathingly indict anyone who doesn’t visibly engage with ‘the issues’, accusing them of complacency and saying ‘it must be nice to have this shit not affect you’. withdrawing is frequently a reasonable response to this stuff affecting you. have you no perspective.
This is something I’ve been meaning to talk about, and I may do a full blog post at some point, but here’s a capsule version:
The Benign Violation Theory of humor, which is probably the best one out there, suggests that something is perceived as funny when it is simultaneously perceived as violating how the world “should” work and as benign. Something like the “gun” meme, for example, is funny because it violates our sense of how a joke should progress, and at the same time it’s harmless.
Racist/sexist/etc shock humor violates our sense of how the world work–in either a “that’s not true!” or “you’re not allowed to say that!” way–and therefore whether you find it funny is based on whether you find it benign, which is to say either you think it’s harmless or you don’t care about the people it harms. (This is the root of the punch up/kick down distinction–jokes that punch up are funnier than jokes that kick down because the people they target are less vulnerable and therefore less likely to experience harm.)
So yes, science agrees that if you think racist jokes are funny, the reason is that you don’t care about the feelings of the people the joke is about. There’s a word for that.
just moving along like everyone else 