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After all of that, then I missed what is probably the more disturbing story. I hate to do it, but I don't even want to grace these folks by calling them "pro-Palestinian" at this point If you're flying the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah, it's clear that your motivation has less to do with the Palestinians than it has to do with the eradication of Israel. Protesters decided it was a good, and not at all cruel and tacky, idea to demonstrate outside of a Manhattan tribute to the victims of Oct. 7 who were killed or kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival. This tribute included an exhibit of the people's names, stories and pictures and attended by family and loved ones. The protesters, in addition to flying the Hamas flag, chanted "Long live Oct. 7" and "Long live the intifada". By the way, "intifada", meaning a "shaking" or uprising, isn't really intended to be "long-lived"; but as co-opted by leftist supporters of perpetual revolution, it reveals that chaos, rather than eventual stability, is the endgame here. We've gone from the humanitarian imperative to protect innocent Palestinians to actively and sadistically celebrating the massacre of innocent Israelis. I don't see a path forward here without some pretty overwhelming condemnations of these participants.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has been accosted for not saying "genocide" enough, has managed to thread a fine needle by staying true to her humanitarian convictions regarding Palestinian life and sovereignty but refusing to edge over into what is emerging as a crusade against Israel. Notably, she has not called for the disestablishment of the state of Israel, but she has subtley warned that progressives are threatening to cross a line: "Antisemitism is an assault on our values as Americans, and especially as progressives. Antisemitism is also a threat to a community that is a vital partner in our struggles against injustice. So when the Jewish community is threatened, the progressive movement is undermined". She adds that "criticism of the Israeli government is not inherently antisemitic, and criticism of Zionism is not automatically antisemitism. That being true, does not mean that we should not recognize when criticism and when that criticism crosses a line into real harms against our Jewish community," This is a crucial reminder. Whether or not one adheres to Zionism (and I'm agnostoc on the matter), criticism of Zionism should not then justify the harassment, intimidation, ostracization or violence against Zionists, and although it is true that anti-Zionism is not synonymous with anti-Semitism, it shouldn't take a Rhodes Scholar to see the potential for overlap, or how someone could use one as a cover to smuggle in the other. I think, for example, that celebrating the dehumanization of Oct. 7th victims qualifies as antisemitism, and shouldn't be tolerated any more than those (not all) Zionists who celebrate the dehumanization of Palestinian victims.
Finally, since it seems too difficult for allegedly college-educated students to not feel compelled to defend Hamas, much less fly their flag in solidarity, maybe it's worth pointing out that Hamas is also celebrating the deaths of the 37,000 Palestinians. Hamas' central leader, Yahya Sinwar has been privately praising the fact, saying, "We have the Israelis right where we want them" and admitting that the overwhelming dead are "necessary sacrifices". How is this any different than the way Netanyahu dismisses these lives as "collateral damage"? For both (dare I call them) men, these innocent people are just pawns in their power game. Sinwar has shown zero interest in the establishment of a free Palestinian state, outside of the larger context of the eradication of Israel (seems to be the primary goal), and calls to "instead push for a permanent end to the war, adding that high civilian casualties would ramp up global pressure on Israel to halt the conflict". Yahya Sinwar is perfectly content, if not enthusiastic, to sacrifice as much Palestinian blood as Netanyahu is willing to spill, and that's a bad bluff to try to call. But Sinwar doesn't see a Palestinian state as the end game. No, just a "permanent" (which means what exactly in the 75 years of conflict?) "end of the war", presumably to allow him to reposition for his next terror attack, which also will be only to exacerbate tensions. These protesters have failed to understand Hamas' parasitic relationship with conflict. A Palestinian state would make them obsolete, it's the last thing they want. "Long live the intifada" indeed, rather than any long-lived peace settlement. Let's keep it hot! Burn this shit down! And this is exactly why Netanyahu has allowed them to exist and continue to be subsidized. Netanyahu is like Jack Palance in Shane, and Sinwar is the kid dumb enough to pick up the gun. Only it isn't so dumb when you know you won't get shot, only all of these innocent bystanders around you. It's a mutually blood-thirsty relationship.
Progressives need to better understand those people in their camp who are truly pro-peace and pro-ceasefire and those who just want an excuse to burn some shit down and start seriously calling out the latter until they understand that they have no home in the progressive cause.
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Is it possible for nearly everyone to make me throw up in my mouth?
Should I just be content that they at least don't all make me vomit out of my ears?
Just trying to adjust to the standards of the modern age. Forgive me.
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I'm glad that stalwarts like AOC and Bernie are still quite digestable.
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Jinnistan wrote:
I'm glad that stalwarts like AOC and Bernie are still quite digestable.
It's almost amazing what believing in anything does for your complexion.
I think AOC is pretty consistently great. Bernie too. I'm generally pretty jaded by all politicians, but both of them make me feel alright.
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I just watched a Lefty podcast, Some More News, based around why some people are cynically dismissing these pro-Palestinian protests.
Of course most of it is just strawmaning. I agree with about 90% of the particulars, but I can still recognize some dishonesty. Early on, the host says that we should go to the source and ask the organizing groups why they're protesting, and I fully agree. So when the host then quotes the Students for Justice in Palestine with talk of the "Zionist entity continuing to colonize Palestine." OK. "Zionist entity" is a phrase used instead of "Israel" as a way of conveying that they do not respect the legitimacy of the Israel state. This is, in fact, the crux of what is troubling in the discourse surrounding these protests. The podcast lasted 1 hour and 20 minutes, and for some reason, it never bothered to return to this central question of Israeli legitimacy, or whether Israel is presumed to have a right to exist or not. I mean, it should at least be debatable, but it's tellng that a leftist podcast defending these protests simply ignores the need to debate it at all.
Also, it's telling that the podcast decided to ignore the fact that this same group, Students for Justice in Palestine, immediately commented on Oct. 7th by calling it " a historic win for Palestinian resistence", called for "armed confrontation" with Zionists for its 'Day of Resistence', dedicated five days later on Oct. 12th while openly calling for the "complete liberation" of Israel (not just occupied territories). Indeed these are from the exact same groups that AOC condemned in the wake of Oct. 7th.
So I wonder why I had to sit through 1 hour and 20 minutes of lectures about respecting the youth and their right to protest - which I've never contested - while the actual troubling aspects within these protests, the central core tenet that some key organizations behind the protests say are inherent to faithfully supporting Palestinian liberation, went suspiciously omitted, unaddressed and unanswered for?
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Noted another banner from the Nova Exhibit protest, which read "Zionists are not Jews and not humans."
As Jonathon Glazer astutely, if thanklessly, pointed out, nothing good ever comes from dehumanization.
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This New York group organizing these latest, and most offensive, pro-Intifada protests is called Within Our Lifetimes, and they have helpfully been demarcating where the line begins where these protests veer into the unacceptable. Taunting the survivors of those killed on Oct. 7th, for example, or openly celebrating not just Hamas but al-Qassam, their militant brigade which committed those Oct. 7th atrocities. These protesters also vandalized some homes of officials at the Brooklyn Museum, painting red upside down triangles on their front doors - red upside down triangles being the symbol used by al-Qassam to indicate their miltary targets.
Today, Bernie Sanders, AOC and Jamaal Bowman held a rally in the Bronx which was also disrupted by these Within Our Lifetimes protesters, also helpfully illustrating how marginal they actually are by acting as if these three progressive stalwarts are somehow intolerable to their interests. It also helpfully illustrates how reasonable Sanders and AOC have been by refusing to abandon Joe Biden as the only viable option in the presidential election, and may only prove helpful for Bowman, who's been under attack from his Hillary Clinton-backed primary opponent for being too anti-Israel. Bowman here had an opportunity to counter and drown out the "intifada" chants with a preferable "ceasefire now" chant from his supporters.
Meanwhile, since the Young Turks have decided not to support Biden, they chose to waste hours this past week with extensive interviews with RFK Jr and Cornel West, because, again, "viable options". Basically they've decided they're just going to be jacking off over there.
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Jinnistan wrote:
There's a lot of talk about Julian Assaaaunge today, as what's called 'The Squad' is clamouring to have him released from custody.
To be clear, from my perspective, I would agree that Assaunge has likely served as much time as his crimes would warrant, and there's little reason why he should spend the rest of his life behind bars. I'm less sympathetic to the idea that he should not have been prosecuted at all, or that his persecution amounts to the criminalization of journalism itself. I wouldn't even quite go so far as to say it represents the criminalization of bad journalism, despite my less-than-flattering appreciation of his efforts. As bad a journalist as Assaunge was - as Edward Snowden noted of Assange and Wikileaks, "their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake" - there are still questions of reasonable legal consequences from this neglegence of information curation, ie. revelaed undercover assets who most likely were neutralized ("killed") by governments that happen to be slightly more draconian than the US. So I wouldn't exactly classify Assange as "innocent", nor would I suggest he deserves less than three times the persecution of, say, Reality Winner (who was a true hero), but, at this point, 12 years of detention in various embassies and, now, US custody seems like a sufficient time served to me. So I don't really have an objection to the demand released by the Squad to release the man.
The question that remains is either/or: were the worst effects of the various Wikileaks a result of unintended consequences of this negligent and irresponsible curation? Or were these effects, or possibly some of them, plausibly deniable side effects that more or less align with Assange's prefered geopolitical outcomes? Take for example, as part of the 2011 wikileaks of State Dept. diplomatic cables, those pertaining to the George Mitchell-led peace negotiations between Isreal and the Palestinian Authority. Assainge could say, "Ooops! Oh, well, collateral damage from releasing all of the other Middle East State Dept. cables supplied by Chelsea Manning". But was this just the negligence of a man, an alleged journalist, who couldn't be bothered to recognize that these Israel/Palestine communications were completely irrelevant to that stated purpose of revealing military abuses and diplomatic duplicity in the Iraq occupation specifically, but also the negligence of a man who apparently lacked the educated wisdom to realize that the release of such incidental and unrelated cables could and would have the necessary effect of sabotaging these peace talks and poisoning the well for any future attempted peace talks for a decade, maybe a generation? It's worth posing the question of whether Assange wanted to see the peace talks fail, either for the right-wing Zionist interests or, as the above article suggests, fomenting a violent Palestinian uprising in frustration of these revelations. (One of these options turned out to be more successful than the other.)
As a journalist, given all of the due presumptions of objective and critical analysis, it's worth asking why Assange was seemingly less interested in divulging the state secrets of, say, Vladimir Putin when he had the opportunity to do so? If and for which it were his honest and true mission to unveil the secret machinations of tyrannical global powers, rather than a desire to tip the scales for one power over another. Maybe this could be why Assange would actively defend Putin against the public release of secret evidence of government corruption by a journalistic competitor. And, in terms of journalistic ethics, it's worth asking why Assange would choose to launder stolen emails, exfiltrated by Russian military intelligence, disreputably claiming ignorance of the source, and, instead of his purported aesthetic of open and full data dumping, selective releasing of this material in full coordination with the favored and advantaged political party, the Trump campaign, through direct strategies and suggestions with Donald Trump Jr. and Roger Stone in order to maximally impact the election results.
So while I do have a deep skepticism concerning any possible abuses of something like the Espionage Act to silence and criminalize journalists, and overwhelmingly default against such charges against private citizens who report or reveal on government transparency, I'm not going to start getting moisty-eyed about the sufferings of a Julian Assange. I support his release. I agree that legally the so-called crimes do not justify his continued subjugation. But I have no illusions as to his cashed integrity as a journalist or any sentimental lamentation for him as a martyr of tyranny.
I wanted to bump this.
All of the above stands, both as my general apathy (let's call it "support") for Assaauunge's release and as a reminder not to take this albino-cat cunt too seriously in the weeks ahead as he will surely embark on his hero/martyr media tour and gets tongue-lavished for his perserverance.by some of the same people who possibly are also currently thinking that Hamas deserves similar praise. Although I do in fact think Assange and Hamas deserve somewhat of an equal reception, but, hey, at least Assange never ra....I mean, he never killed anybody, uh, that we're likely to hear about.
Interestingly, to me, is that much of the coverage on Assange and Wikileaks has involved the Chelsea Mannng leak of thousands of pages of State Department cables in 2010. This historic breach showed American military malfeasance in Iraq, but also involved a whole lot more banal (superficially at least) diplomatic information which, among other things, happened to derail the George Mitchell peace talks in Israel (see above quoted link).
But I stand by the opinion that Assange was not a journalist, and there's no real evidence of any actual journalism that he's ever produced. Perhaps you can call him a "publisher" of journalistic-interest information, but, as people like Edward Snowden have pointed out, Assange never really exercised any editorial judgment over these releases. Information dumps, without critical curation and commentary, is not journalism. And we've also seen (again, the above link) that Assange was apparently uninterested in such "government transparency" (involving, say, Putin's government) that didn't conform to his own political objectives. Therefore Assange, quite more accurately, should be considered first and foremost as a political operative, such as he was when he was advising the Trump campaign on disseminating and messaging stolen DNC emails or when he's been preoccupied running interference for Putin's own defensive propaganda after the Panama Papers release.
I'll let the matter rest with what I think is by far the most damaging of Assange and Wikileaks operations which was the 2017 "Vault 7" leak, which not only revealed some theoretically interesting activities by American intelligence agencies, but also, more irresponsibly, revealed the code of hacking software and a list of "zero day exploits" which were immediately repurposed by Russian and North Korean hackers into ransomeware such as EternalBlue, NotPetya and WannaCry which eventually caused all kinds of global havoc. In short, Assange did the very thing which Edward Snowden had been so careful to avoid, giving away the cyberkeys which could only accelerate hacking and surveillance by rogue authoritarian states. But Assange was clearly comfortable with the resulting ransomeware from his leak. And maybe he's even a little grateful that, despite the fact that the source of the Vault 7 leak is serving a 40 year sentence, Assange had already secured escape from prosecution back in 2019, long before this recent plea deal.
So I don't know if, during his imminent media tour, whether anyone will bring up the fact of his, at best, tremendously sloppy work as a journalist, or how he's aided and abetted Trump and Putin over the years and has been complicit in the spike of ransomeware starting in 2017. Hey, who knows. I just hope a dingo doesn't let the stink of cat piss keep him from eating his doughy fucking face off.
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Since there's a lot of incoming chatter about the prospects of a future President Gavin Newsom, I figured that it would be an opportune time to see if I can dig up a little promising conspiracy material before it all starts splashing out on Rumble or whatever. I mean, look at him. There's darkness somewhere in there.
And it didn't take long. First of all, he happens to be second cousins (twice removed) with Joanna Newsom, but the only crime there is his failure to mention it every chance he can get. (Maybe she asked him to stop, which I respect.)
More interesting is Daddy Gavin, also known as William Alfred Newsom III. He was a tax attorney to the Getty family and their Oil corporation. Gordon Getty would be the prime investor in Gavin's start-up winery at the beginning of his career. BAM! Oil, money and wine! As unctuous as Gavin's hair gel. Also, fun fact: in addition to naming this winery after Getty's "opera" about Falstaff, "PlumpJack was the first winery in Napa Valley to use screwcaps as a wine closure on fine wines." Ah, as classy as tit-shaped glasses.
Let's get a little more in the weeds with William Alfred Newsome III:
Newsom was also corporate counsel and a board member for Trans-International Computer Investment Corporation (TCI), which handled classified government contracts, for which Newsom was issued a National Security Clearance. TCI went bankrupt in 1971 after what the Sacramento District Attorney called "the biggest stock fraud in California history".
Mm! That's the stuff. Now there's nothing here that specifically implicates Newsom in the "stock fraud" itself, just the fact that he happened to be the top attorney at the firm that committed all of that stock fraud. Which is a minor oops when you're being entrusted with all of that classified access. And what kind of "computer investments" do you think we're talking about here? What kind of computers? The kind they don't want you to know about? The kinds that want to know about you? Still, must be a lot of pissed off spooks who apparently lost those investments. Maybe all of this stock fraud was the fault of the Getty family who were the actual top shareholders of this TCI corporation? After all, this bankruptcy was almost immediately followed by the Getty kidnapping. You can't always be responsible for the financial crimes of your primary tax client, right? There must be more to this story....
For most of 1969 and 1970, Newsom traveled across Europe alongside former SS Gestapo member Otto von Bolschwing who had been brought to the U.S. by the CIA under Operation Paperclip and appointed TCI's president by [J. Paul] Getty due to his former Nazi intelligence connections and their value in obtaining defense technology contracts. Newsom referred to von Bolschwing as "suave", "plausible", and "world weary".
(You can read more on this story here at this oddly obscured article that took three links deep to find from Wikipedia. Newsome also describes Bolschwing as having "his hair slicked back", which I'm just going to leave here suggestively.)
Okay. So what? So your dad's boss was a CIA Nazi who got hired by your dad's other boss and billionaire tax client to sell computer investments to classified government contractors which for some reason resulted in the largest stock fraud in California history. How is any of that going to help the fledging career of a young politician with a screwcap winery named after your dad's billionaire boss' brother's opera about an Orson Welles character?
(Gavin Newsom's winery also sells sportswear out of its Squaw Valley store.)
As a quick reminder, none of any of this means very much of direct relevance to Gavin Newsom except that his wine is overpriced bottle-caped swill and girls who drink too much of it lose all fashion sense whatsoever. But if the internet fails to make hay out of any of this, then perhaps it's true that society, like so many Getty children, may have lost all hope.
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Maybe the Biden administration, in light of the new Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, should claim that they believe all American voters who they believe might vote for Trump are a threat to democracy, and start rounding them up immediately, and detaining them until after the election.
He'd only be protecting democracy, after all. That sounds like it would fall under the umbrella of an official presidential act.
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crumbsroom wrote:
Maybe the Biden administration, in light of the new Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, should claim that they believe all American voters who they believe might vote for Trump are a threat to democracy, and start rounding them up immediately, and detaining them until after the election.
He'd only be protecting democracy, after all. That sounds like it would fall under the umbrella of an official presidential act.
That's constructive; I've been too consumed with being livid about this to envision anything so imaginative. Even as far right as this SCOTUS has taken things, I really didn't expect they would dare place the president above the law. AOC is threatening articles of impeachment, and more power to her.
I don't see this getting fixed without constitutional amendments, amendments that will:
remove the president's power to appoint judges,
impose term limits on Supreme Court justices,
provide for a course of action in case the chief justice recuses him/herself from a presidential impeachment,
and I dare say,
clarify the fact that the president is not immune from prosecution for crimes committed while president, and most certainly not political crimes, including using the powers of his office to domestic political ends or for personal gain... I mean, I feel ridiculous even having to say that, but here we are.
Does anybody still contend that a constitutional convention could result in a so–called runaway convention, or has that theory already been irretrievably debunked?
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I think I'd file this next to Kanye West's comment about "At least Hitler was a Christian".
(tl;dw = Candace Owens tries to explain about the larger "Christian Holocaust" which occurred in the Soviet Union under the Jewish Bolsheviks that "they" won't teach in schools in order to maintain the Jewish victimhood narrative. Among the many problems in Candace's tale: Candace's death tolls are fucked up, her time frame is all over the place, and the fact that not all Bolsheviks were Jewish and the Gulags weren't targeting Christians for religious reasons. But still, she refers to this as "my history" about "my people" because she's a "Christian First" and Jews apparently control the history books.)
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The Democratic Socialists of America have decided to cut ties with Alexandra Ocasia-Cortez, despite her standing against what she has explicitly described as genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Not good enough! She has, apparently, failed to properly oppose "criminalization of anti-Zionism" (although I'm not familiar with any proposed criminal penalties against anti-Zionism to oppose) and that she has failed to "publicly support efforts to end Israeli settler-colonialism". That latter is worth unpacking. Clearly, AOC is actively opposed to the occupation of the Palestinian territories, and she is sufficiently supportive of these territories being used for a future Palestinian state. So what this phrase actually means is that AOC has not stepped up to publicly call for the disestablishment of the state of Israel, which has been increasingly viewed on the left as an inherently genocidal settler-colony by the "Western project". Apparently "combatting anti-Semitism" is now viewed as a "deep betrayal", which maybe should say a lot. Instead, AOC committed the crime of saying that Israel has a right to exist. The Shanda. The Vergogna.
Likewise, the most prominent Democratic Socialist in American politics, Bernie Sanders, has also refused to call for the disestablishment of the state of Israel, leading to his office being briefly occupied, although again his support for Palestinian autonomy, and his antagonism against the Netanyahu regime, has hardly ever been in dispute. Will the DSA also publicly disavow Bernie in a similar fashion? Perhaps. And where will that leave them, I wonder? After alienating their most popular and prominent candidates?
The primary problem among the left-wing of this country has always been their inability to forge alliances, coalitions and their alienation of thier most useful resources, and the resulting lack of electoral victories should otherwise speak for itself. The question I ask is, why should I care until these bitches start to take this shit seriously? Ideals are only as useful as their practical paths to implementation, and, I'm sorry, "intifada" ain't gonna cut it.
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Move this over to the place for 'bad ideas':
Jinnistan wrote:
We'll undoubtedly see all of the stuff about how great and tough Trump is, some may even claim a certain divine fortune.
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Jinnistan wrote:
Move this over to the place for 'bad ideas':
Jinnistan wrote:
We'll undoubtedly see all of the stuff about how great and tough Trump is, some may even claim a certain divine fortune.
Mother Jones' Kiera Butler has been killing it this week following the thread of Christian Nationalism at the Republican Convention. If you perceived an uptick of religious jargon - some of it slightly more obscure, some quite overt - at this year's convention, it isn't your ears playing tricks on you.
Butler also covered Tucker Carlson speaking at a policy panel for the Heritage Foundation on the sides of the convention. Some of his remarks:
The assassination attempt against President Trump reminded a lot of people this weekend, a lot of people, there is a spiritual battle underway. There are forces within every society--because they reside in the human heart--that are against people. They are dedicated to the destruction of people and the civilizations that people build...forces of chaos and destruction which are fundamentally anti-human.
The group that makes them angry, I guess we would say now is Christians. Christian nationalists...What group do they dislike most? What group are they absolutely terrified of, and hoping to eliminate? Well, it’s Christians.
This echoes Samuel Alito's comments two years ago when, defending his Dobbs opinion, he declared that "secularists" are openly attacking "religious liberty", and that "More Christians are killed for their faith in our time than in the bloody days of the Roman Empire". Bill Barr had made similar charges in 2020 while still Trump's AG: "We must be vigilant to resist efforts by the forces of secularization to drive religious viewpoints from the public square and to impinge upon the free exercise of our faith. [We] will be at the forefront of this effort, ready to fight for the most cherished of our liberties: the freedom to live according to our faith". (If you were curious how someone like Barr, who so forcefully declared Trump to be a disaster to the country, could possibly consider Biden to be any greater threat, this provides your answer.)
Are either Alito or Barr under the impression that their "freedom to live according to their faith" as Christians in 2024 America is in any way being hindered? Are their expressions or communications, their right to assemble in churches, being infringed upon in any way by our secularist government? Only so far as that they cannot openly discriminate or otherwise publicly disparage homosexuals, or have to tolerate women they have no control over making their own reproductive decisions. It becomes clear that what they're really after is not freedom or liberty, but allegience, obedience, submission, subservience and fealty. Their faith is existentially threatened by its lack of coercive force. Perhaps they would prefer a Christian version of jizyah.
Going back to Tucker's comments, and his allusion to "spiritual warfare", which is a term which has been newly appropriated by Christian Nationalists, such as adherents of the New Apostolic Reformation and the Charismatic movements in both fundamentalist Protestant and Catholic churches. You could hear references to these movements on the floor and in the speeches throughout the Republican convention, to "spiritual warriors", and the literal demonization of Democrats, secularists, gender rights activists and generally anyone else who falls outside of their strict domestic paradigm.
Finally, there was an opportunity at the convention to test this commitment to "religious liberty", rather than as a subterfuge for Christian supremacy, and as expected the results were predictable. In a rare instance of multicultural inclusion, the convention featured a Sikh, Harmeet Dhillon, to lead the opening prayer, in native Punjabi, on Monday night. Dhillon is an RNC state official in California, so she is supposed to be "one of us"? Some of the reactions from convention attendees were less than kind:
"Last night you saw why Christian Nationalism must be exclusively and explicitly Christian. No tolerance for pagan false gods and the synagogue of Satan."
"Christians in the Republican party nodding silently along to a prayer to a demon god is shameful."
"How about you get deported instead, you pagan blasphemer."
"God saves our president and the RNC mocks him with this witchcraft."
"I’m not really sure what she was saying and she could have been doing some kind of incantation."
And then, as if the perfect summation of a party now completely subsumed in Christian Nationalism, the ultimate motto of the movement: "I think, you know, if you’re not a Christian, then this may not be the place to be."
The irony is that I don't think any of these people are particularly Christian.
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If no one is interested in keeping this in check (and clearly nearly no one is), the Republican party will become as much like Taliban as they are allowed.
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crumbsroom wrote:
If no one is interested in keeping this in check (and clearly nearly no one is), the Republican party will become as much like Taliban as they are allowed.
The Republican party isn't interested in keeping this in check. Hopefully the rest of the country is, or rather would be if they had a greater awareness of the context.
The news media largely doesn't seem interested in covering the story, although that WaPo piece I linked above (published just hours before Trump was shot) does a great job. I believe that the TV news is scared of touching it, fearing maybe that any talk of the religious aspect will alienate some viewers or risk criticisms of bigotry. And this is likely to remain the case in the media climate after the shooting.
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The protests against Netanyahu's appearnce before Congress were unfortunately marred by the same kinds of "Within Our Lifetimes" assholes who have been plaguing the pro-Palestinina protests lately, shifting from the moral imperative for peace, ending occupation and enabling humanitarian aid to the more onerous support for Hamas and al-Qassam and calls for violent escalation. Protesters point out that this faction is a small minority and that their presence and message shouldn't be allowed to define the larger movement. While I'm inclined to sympathize, as someone who wishes to preserve the larger movement, it would be nice if there was more energy spent on denouncing this minority element than spent on denouncing the media for noticing them. It's amusing to see people on the left utilizing the same mangled aphorism about "a few bad apples" used by the police to tacitly excuse their own corruption. And it's doubly amusing when these protests also involve calls which are completely irrelevent to the Gaza issue - burning American flags, the random hammer/sickle and "all cops are bastards" graffiti.
Both sides seem to misunderstand that the aphorism explains why such bad apples should not be tolerated in even the smallest amount. These WOL infiltrators are no less deplorable injecting their "Hamas is coming" and their red triangles than those protestors injecting "Jews will not replace us". There's simply no excuse. I appreciate the Council of American-Islam Relations for publicly denouncing these pro-Hamas elements a lot more than I appreciate some of the protest leaders who are claiming "betrayal" from the politicians, including Kamala Harris (who had boycotted Netanyahu's speech), who have also denounced the more violent elements of the protests.
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It's easy enough to ask "the fuck happened?" when discussing Robert Kennedy Jr. I don't know if he was ever really sane, but maybe seemed more reasonable when he was calling out mercury pollution before he decided that's what's responsible for autism rates. And there's the question of whatever neurological damage his own admitted mercury poisioning has had on more than his voice. Who knows, maybe someone slipped something in his heroin stash back in the day, maybe similar to whatever Liddy and Hunt smeared on Ted Kennedy's steering wheel. There's a lot of speculative questions to ask with this bunch. But then you get a story where you definitely have to wonder the proximity to whatever brain worms were involved.
Robert Kennedy Jr apparently dumped a dead bear in Central Park back in October 2014, and made it look like it was killed by a bicycle. He's admitted this on camera, sitting next to Roseanne Barr, perhaps to demonstrate the approximate type of bear cub for his viewers. There's a number of choice quotes that he gives for why exactly this came about: "I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea..." Of course! Clearly completely sober people tend to go along with "good ideas" from their drunken buddies all the time. And if he wasn't drinking, I think it's a fair question what else he may have been ingesting. To avoid confusion, let's not forget that it was Kennedy himself who came up with the idea: "I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear in the Central Park and we’ll make it look like it got hit by a bike'."
You might be wondering why Robert Kennedy Jr. just happened to have a dead bear on him in the first place. According to him, he was out and about in the Hudson Valley, "hawking" or "falconing" (lord knows what those are codes for), when all of a sudden, he says he witnessed a woman hit and kill a bear cub, presumably with a car while the bear cub was frolicking in traffic, as everyone knows bears like to do. Kennedy doesn't mention who this woman was, although the suspicion that she may have been among his drinking buddies has not been ruled out. Kennedy Jr, the self-professed nature lover, sprung boldly into action, "I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear. It was in very good condition, and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator." Such providence is the circle of life. Unfortunately for RFK Jr, he didn't have the time to drop off the swelling carcass at his Westchester home due to an emergency dinner at a Manhattan steak restaurant, which went a little long due to his total and utter sobriety. Naturally he thought it would be "amusing" to drop the dead bear off in the Park alongside an old bicycle (which for some reason he also happened to have on him). But despite such amusement, Kennedy also says that he and his friends were "shocked" when they discovered the story in the news the following day, and Kennedy became "worried" that his fingerprints would be found on the bicycle, which suggests that he may have had some inkling that maybe the stunt was less than completely legal.
Bobby Kay Jay also explained that the reason why he released this video confession was due to the fact that the New Yorker was set on releasing a story reveaing all of this, to which Kennedy smugly replied on Twitter, "Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one @NewYorker". Check and mate. I'll offer a guess....they're going to call you a god-damn psychopath with a skull full of worm shit.