MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
No bio...
User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7mo ago
It's more that the OG Bill of Rights was only enforceable against the Federal government, not the States.
It is more likely than not that the Reconstruction Congress intended the privileges and immunities clause of the 14th amendment to make the Bill of Rights enforceable against the States ("No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States") but the corrupt pro-South Supreme Court ruled otherwise in the Slaughterhouse Cases. Rather than doing the sensible thing and just overruling Slaughterhouse alongside Plessey as bad Jim Crow law, the Civil Rights era SCOTUS used substantive due process to enforce these rights - as late as 2010 SCOTUS rejected the argument that the 2nd amendment was directly enforceable against the states under the privileges and immunities clause. So there is a whole line of silly doctrine that takes the 14th seriously while claiming not to.
In my view, there is a good originalist argument against incorporating the 2nd amendment against the States. The corresponding argument against incorporating the Establishment clause of the 1st amendment has been endorsed by Clarence Thomas in some of his dissents and concurrences. Based on the text, the original purpose of the 2nd amendment was to protect the State militias against Federal interference. (This is perfectly compatible with the idea that the 2nd amendment created an individual right enforceable against the Federal government - State militias were not required to and often did not keep membership rolls at the time, so many militia members were "just private gun owners" on paper). Incorporating the amendment against the States takes away the States' right to regulate their own militias, so it changes the nature of the right protected, whereas incorporating a right like trial by jury only changes the scope of the remedy available. Similarly, the Establishment clause was intended to protect State-level established religions (like Massachusetts puritanism) from Federal interference, not ban them.
Obviously nobody is going to make that argument, because it gores both sides' oxen.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9mo ago
Protestant Irishmen and Catholic Irishmen get along just fine in the Republic, and have done ever since independence. They got along just fine in 1798, when the United Irishmen were cross-confessional.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
10mo ago
racially insensitive (including towards other Eastern Europeans, e.g. gypsies and Albanians)
That's nothing. In Europe, everyone hates gypsies (and pikeys, if they are British or Irish and educated enough to know the difference). Our so-called-liberal-elite just know to shut up about it in public. /r/historymemes is down, but there are some epic memes on this point.
Part of what makes a University a University and not something else is a degree of self-government. An institution that teaches a 13-16th grade curriculum determined by the politicians and/or bureaucrats in the sponsoring Education Ministry may be doing something valuable, but it isn't continuing the tradition that began with those communities of scholars in Paris, Bologna, Oxford and Cambridge in the High Middle Ages.
FWIW, I don't think that the legislature abolishing tenure (something that happened long ago in the UK without causing serious problems) or regulating non-classroom DEI initiatives gets close to the point where it turns a public University into a Even Higher School. But (for example) a law prohibiting the teaching of books by paedophiles would be pushing the boundary.
SB16 seems different, in that if it is enforced as written, it prevents the University teaching that correct social, political or religious beliefs are superior to incorrect ones. An organisation where the curriculum is subject to government sanitisation to remove controversial topics is not a University.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
???
Are you saying that sending classified information over unsecure e-mail is equivalent to putting it on the open Internet? I suppose it might be in terms of possible harm (although in the case of Hillary Clinton's e-mails this would be mitigated by the fact that they were probably never routed outside the US), but in terms of legal culpability it definitely isn't.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
The "Communist Party of Britain" isn't even the British communist party. That would be the "Communist Party of Great Britain" (which was Soviet-backed, and disbanded after the fall of the Soviet Union, with its leaders drifting seamlessly into senior positions in the left wing NGO-sphere). The "Communist Party of Britain" was a tankie splinter group that split off from the "Communist Party of Great Britain" in 1985 (de facto) or 1988 (de jure).
The bit in The Life of Brian about the rivalry between the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front was inspired by real events in British hard-left politics at the time Monty Python were making the film.
Of all British "communist" groups, the one you really need to watch out for are the "Revolutionary Communist Party", who appear to be libertarians (but are currently LARPing as anti-woke social conservatives).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
Even for adults with a driving licence, cars only provide freedom in an environment designed for it. That cars provide the illusion of freedom because of an extensive system of government roads is trite, and that the US does not collect enough in gas taxes to fund state highways is well-known. That private car use is associated with an extensive system of licensing and enforcement that is the main cause of negative interactions between government employees and non-career-criminal citizens is also well-known - the "cars are freedom" brigade claim that this enforcement is a tyrannical imposition on them by Blue Tribe car-haters, but when you relax it people start dying.
The bigger issue is parking. A car is a very good way of moving 1-4 people, with luggage, exactly when they want, with the people having full control over their in-journey environment; but only if the journey is from one parking space to another and only if the second parking space is vacant at the time the car gets to it. Driving in London simply doesn't create the sense of freedom that the open road does - partly because of the traffic, but mostly because you can't park anywhere you want to go. Driving in Long Island, on the other hand (I spent a summer working at Brookhaven), does feel freeing because even when the traffic sucks, you are still able to go where you want when you want in a non-shared space and expect convenient parking at your destination. But the price of that freedom is that anywhere you might want to go turns out to be (to Londoners' eyes) a shed on the edge of a giant parking lot.
Delivering enough parking that driving feels freeing requires YUUGE government intervention. Parking mandates are by far the most consequential piece of American land use regulation. Parking scarcity is the main stated reason for NIMBYs NIMBYing.
Even in rural areas, it isn't the people who ruin the popular beauty spots, it's the parked cars. The open road is fun, but when anywhere you might want to stop turns into a battle for a spot, it kills the experience. The only serious crash I have been in was while circling for parking at Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park - Yellowstone has already crossed the "visiting the popular bits is unpleasant because parking" threshold and they need to do what Zion or Disney have already done and put the parking lots at the gates and campgrounds and move people round the sites on park transit.
Above a certain population density (and most European and 1st-world Asian cities with metro area populations > 1 million get there), frequent, ubiquitous, clean public transport can provide the sense of freedom that private car ownership does for American suburbanites. It can also cover its operating costs at the farebox if people want it to (only London does this - in other countries local voters have more power, and trying to cover the operating costs of public transport with farebox revenue in dense cities is about as popular as trying to cover the cost of rural roads with gas taxes would be in Red Tribe America). Urban transport in large cities is a solved problem. (So is rural transport - buy a car!)
The interesting question is why the US is unable to adopt the solution outside New York. Clearly the issue is something to do with crime and anti-social behaviour - if American public transport is as unpleasant as motteposters say it is, then I wouldn't want to ride it. In the unlikely event that public transport in Houston suddenly became as clean and crime-free as public transport in Seoul or Taipei, I would happily bet on people being willing to use it, kicking off a virtuous circle of ridership, investment, and supportive land-use changes until 20-30 years later Houston was one of the world's great transit cities.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
The argument being made here doesn't require progressive Jews to take their own religion seriously. It requires progressive Jews to think that pro-Israel evangelical Christians take their religion seriously.
To the extent that they take their own religion seriously, pro-Israel evangelical Christians are aligned with the Third Temple fringe of the Israeli religious right. Secular jews (particularly in Israel, but also in the US) hate the Israeli religious right with the same intensity and for the same reasons that secular Yankees hate the SBC.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
I think the meaning of a genuine tough on crime policy is very different in Ecuador or El Salvador where the crime problem is organised crime where sane people have chosen to persue criminal careers because they are more attractive than legal careers, versus a place like the US where most of the crime we are worried about is committed by drunks, druggies and mentally ill people.
If the gangs are credibly threatening the State's monopoly on violence (and busting a gang leader out of jail counts), then fighting them is more like war than policing.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
Speaking as an atheist in a country where Christianity is the official state religion, I do not think that actually-existing American Christians would be willing to make the compromises that Anglicanism made in order to survive as a state religion in England, let alone the greater compromises needed in a country which is deeply committed to the idea that all Christian denominations are equally valid. Nor do I think that "mere Christianity" would work - the differences between Christian traditions matter. I wouldn't want to deal with the fallout when someone prays the Hail Mary over the tannoy before a Notre Dame vs BYU game.
The Bolsheviks were not Lizardman-tier popular. They got 23% of the vote in the Constituent Assembly elections which were the closest approximation to a free election in post-Tsarist Russia (they happened after the October revolution but before the Bolsheviks consolidated power outside Petrograd) including majorities among the voters they were targetting (the urban working class in Petrograd and Moscow, and the enlisted men in the armed forces), and had already demonstrated enough support in the military to defeat the Kornilov coup. It may not have mattered what Vasya Pupkin thought, but given how things played out it sure-as-hell mattered what Private Ivan Ivanovich thought.
e/acc and the Tech Right do not have the level of elite or popular support they need to take over through anything that looks like politics - at the point Hanania wrote the linked essay the people he was lauding as the future of right-wing politics were backing deSantis. In so far as Balaji Srinivasan had a political project it was based on crypto-enabled exit, and it has already failed - it is now very obvious that the world is a sufficiently dangerous place that you want to be under the protection of a US or Chinese client regime if you own anything worth stealing - particularly if you own anything the Feds or Chicoms would want to steal themselves. The Dominic Cummings project (given the people involved, probably supported in the background by Peter Thiel and Robert Mercer) to replace Trump with someone the Tech Right see as competent and biddable ended up not happening, and if it had happened it would need "orbital mind control lasers complete" persuasion tech in order to beat Trump in a Republican primary.
The only way an e/acc is becoming a technoking is if they build a superintelligent AI and use it to pwn their opponents. And then our technoking will be the man (or possibly transwoman, but definitely someone with a Y chromosome and penis) who is de facto goal-donor to the AI (who is probably a first-tier tech lead who can ignore the de jure top management of his organisation until the AI is turned on, and pwn them afterwards). The only gold-owners who are sufficiently close to top technical AI teams to be de facto goal-donors are Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis. If the AI-enabled technoking isn't one of those two then it is some wunderkind we haven't met yet.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
The Omicron variant of covid was intentionally developed (by serial passaging through lab mice) as a much more contagious, much less deadly variant that could quickly provide cross immunity against the more deadly variants.
I find "Omicron was a lab leak" to be >10%. But given that it emerged in South Africa, the idea that it was developed intentionally by people who knew what they were doing gives the South Africans credit for more competence than they possess.
Unelected leaders of some US agencies sometimes lie under oath to Congess.
I don't consider bears shitting in the woods to be a conspiracy theory.
A quick check of the right wing alt-media site you link to shows that even they are not claiming that there were 150,000 test ballots improperly included in the count. 150,000 was the total number of postal votes in Fulton County - we can reasonably assume that most of these were legitimate, particularly given that the overall percentage of postal votes in Fulton was close to the statewide average. Nor does the article say that the ballots were lost - it says that Fulton County explicitly says they are not lost, but that one specific right-wing citizen-journalist doesn't believe them.
The actual lawsuit filed by Favorito, a conservative activist and 9-11 conspiracy theorist (the lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign didn't run on this point) is based on an affidavit by Susan Voyles, who saw one batch of 107 "pristine" postal ballots in a box of 8 batches. If you assume that Voyles only looked at one box of ballots to find this batch and therefore that roughly 1/8 of the postal ballots were dodgy, then you get the "possibly 10-20,000 fraudulent votes" alleged by Favorito. And the specific box of votes identified by Voyles was reviewed, and there were no irregularities. So the premise of the Favorito lawsuit is that Voyles misremembered the box number, and that a bunch of randos should be able to go through 150,000 votes to find the needle in the haystack. FWIW, the reason why it has come up again is that the standing issue has finally been adjudicated in favour of Favorito after two trips up and down the appeals hierarchy.
But the important point here is how easy it is to create a Gish Gallop of hinkiness. We have one poll worker claiming (under oath, admittedly) to have seen 107 votes that looked a bit wrong (an argument so frivolous that Trump's lawyers wouldn't touch it), being blown up to 150,000 fraudulently counted test ballots alleged on this forum. And apart from Voyles, who (being under oath) was careful not to allege any specific irregularity, all the amplification was done by randos. There are hundreds of more or less frivolous complaints about the election being exaggerated in thousands of places, and because they get vaguer as well as bigger online, it can take hours to find out what the allegation even is, let alone to rebut it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
This isn't actually true anymore, and hasn't been for a while. The NSA's surveillance and profiling system most likely has a flag for whether or not someone's an illegal immigrant, and if it doesn't it would be able to add one in seconds.
Winston Smith was born in 1970 in a poor rural county which never digitised its birth records. He has never had a passport. The SSA has long-since lost any copies they kept of the documents he submitted when he first applied for an SSN in 1986.
Yossarian was brought to the US by his parents as a teenager in 1983. His shitlib high school guidance councillor helped him acquire an SSN in 1986 using the US birth certificate of a baby who died shortly after being born in 1970. (Back then birth and death certificates were not positively matched, so you could use a dead person's birth certificate). His parents' visas have long since expired, and they were out of status when they died in the 1990s.
How does the NSA know which one is a US citizen and which one is an illegal?
The problem with a mass roundup-and-deport is with corner cases like these, not people who entered the country on a 4-year visa 5 years ago.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
I have an interest in my neighborhood being a place I like to live, my city being a place I like to live, and my country a place I like to live. I absolutely have a right to express my preferences in these matters via the state. Keeping me expressing them via elections instead of simply forcing things to look the way I want them to is very literally the foundational role of government.
This viewpoint would be significantly less obnoxious if fewer of the people expressing it also talked about freedom, self-reliance, the value of hard work and other libertarian-adjacent ideas. "You can't have my house, you should get your own, and if you try to build one I will send men with guns to demolish it" is still antisocial, but "You can't have my house, it's my property because I worked hard for it, go get your own just like I had to, and if you try to build one I will act on my God-given freedom to send men with guns to demolish it" is despicable.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
A couple of generations ago, the median American sang frequently for fun or at least every Sunday in church. I’m guessing the anthem, sung by a crowd, didn’t used to be the big horrible embarrassed mumble it is today.
Most songs designed for mass singing have all the notes in the same octave. Looking at national anthems, God Save the King and Deutschland uber alles are all on one octave, La Marseillaise goes one note beyond the octave, and The Star-Spangled Banner goes four notes beyond a single octave. In addition, the top note of the tune is on "free", and "ee" is one of the harder vowels to sing at full volume.
To put the required vocal range into perspective, an operatic soloist is expected to to have a useful range of two octaves, and chorus singers can get by with slightly less.
A soloist singing The Star-Spangled Banner can choose the key to optimise for the middle of their vocal range (and the singer opening a sporting event will do just that - that is part of the reason the song is usually sung unaccompanied). Someone singing it in a choir can't - in order to be in tune they either have to sing at the same pitch as everyone else, or exactly one octave different.
This was never a song that was easy to sing.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
When I was active in student politics in the early noughties (As a Liberal Democrat, I was part of the "minority right-wing faction" within the students' union, according to the student newspaper) the SWSS (student group of the SWP) was by far the largest maggot extremist group on campus. They were also the most organised group on demos - as well as being the ones handing out the "Free Palestine" placards at demos against spending cuts. As far as I could see, every left group that actually did stuff was an SWP front organisation.
Although the SWP claimed to be Trotskyite, the main argument against them made by other maggot extremist groups in rooms where it was assumed that everyone was a leftie was that they were closet Stalinists. The main argument made against them by everyone else on the left was that they were entryists who took over any attempt to do organised left-of-Blair politics and turned it into something that only appealed to the usual suspects.
It was the rape allegations that did them in - all the most competent people left.
Apart from Life of Brian, the best material on the culture of sectarian maggot extremist groups in the UK is the work of John Sullivan, who was a Trot with a sense of humour. The details of individual groups are out of date (As Soon as This Pub Closes is a 1986 update of an earlier pamphlet), but the culture has not changed.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6mo ago
Even if people did trust the system, I don't think it would work. The Thatcher-era UK had a health service that enjoyed near-universal public confidence, police who enjoyed universal confidence among the subset of the public who were likely to be legal gun owners, and a gun culture that supported strong gun control. Even so, we couldn't keep guns out of the hands of mentally ill people who weren't supposed to have them. After two spree killings in 10 years (both using handguns, which was the norm for spree killers pre-Columbine), both by people who had gun licenses but should not have done, we banned private handgun ownership and banned private ownership of firearms other than shotguns designed for sporting or agricultural use.
I do not think you can have a system where any given type of gun is generally available to law-abiding citizens but does not end up in the hands of crazies.
Which is irrelevant, because no other US Presidents have committed the crimes Trump is being accused of.
If the facts set out in the Jan 6th committee report are correct, then
- The 2020 election was not, in fact, fraudulent
- Trump and his advisors at the very least knew that the specific allegations of fraud they were making (including the Dominion voting machines conspiracy theory) were false, and probably that there was no significant fraud at all.
- Donald Trump nevertheless conspired to remain in office
- As part of the conspiracy, the Trump campaign filed numerous lawsuits alleging facts they knew to be false, organised slates of fake electors some of whom sent fake electoral votes to Pence, intimidated State and local election officials, asked Mike Pence to violate his oath of office, and sent a riotous mob to the Capitol for the purposes of intimidating Mike Pence into doing what they wanted. (I am happy to admit that there is a legitimate factual dispute over whether or not Trump incited the mob to enter the Capitol).
- Some of this (the fake electors, the perjury, the hacking that Sidney Powell just pleaded to) is uncontroversially criminal. Much of the rest is caught by the vague laws against making false statements in official government proceedings that while a lot of people don't like it for good reasons, has stood up in Court just fine and is frequently prosecuted. There is also a lot of threatening behaviour which is clearly wrongdoing but might not be criminal because the 1st amendment is overprotective of threatening speech (sending goons to Ruby Freedman, Jan 6th itself).
- That Trump was sufficiently involved with the conspiracy to be vicariously liable for the crimes it committed under general principles of conspiracy law
- That Trump met with a retired general in the Oval Office to discuss the possibility of staying in power through an honest-to-God military coup. (Not prosecuted because the plans didn't go anywhere, but arguably the biggest outrage of the whole affair).
The last time anything remotely like this happened was the Hayes-Tilden election in 1876, and the fact that nobody was prosecuted for the malarkey then (which included a 3-figure number of murders) was part of a pattern of letting white southerners get away with shit that started with the culpable failure to hang Jefferson Davis and ended up with the north cucking to Jim Crow.
"Unsuccessful coup plotters go down" (whether they get the rope or just a long jail sentence depends on national tradition) is the historical default everywhere - there isn't a directly on-point precedent in the US because nobody in US history has tried to do the kind of things Donald Trump did between the election and Jan 6th.
You can argue that Donald Trump shouldn't be prosecuted because consensus reality is incorrect and he is factually innocent. You can argue that Donald Trump shouldn't be prosecuted because he is so disconnected from reality that he is incapable of forming the mens rea to commit a crime of dishonesty - based on the publicly-available information there is reasonable doubt on this point - although I am not sure you can do so with a straight face while suggesting that he be elected President of the United States. You can argue that he should be let off for the same reason Jefferson Davis was - that prosecuting someone for serious crimes of which they are obviously guilty is nevertheless dangerously divisive if a large percentage of the population still support the perp - but the precedent is that that was a mistake (at least if you reject Jim Crow and the Gone with the Wind/Birth of a Nation school of pop-history).
What you can't do and expect to be taken seriously is to argue that prosecuting a coup plotter is a shocking escalation, or that Trump is being prosecuted (at least as regards the election-related prosecutions) for something that a Democrat or pro-establishment Republican would have skated for, because neither Democrats nor pro-establishment Republicans would allow the kind man who would think of doing what Trump did near the presidency.
Not that it matters very much given that the politics of all this is driven by Jan 6th, but the story with the other prosecutions Trump is facing are similar,
- The Stormy Daniels payoff case in NY is bullshit - although even then the false accounting being charged is unambiguously criminal, and it isn't something that large numbers of people are let off for because it isn't a crime that large numbers of people commit.
- The documents case is clear-cut not bullshit. We can argue about whether Hilary's e-mails are comparable, but most big shots who deliberately mishandle classified information on that scale are prosecuted (Petraeus is the most recent one that comes to mind). The standard plea deal for big shots is a fine and probation, but Trump didn't co-operate so a few months in jail would be consistent with the precedents.
- The NY "civil" fraud case is strange because the punishment (effectively a corporate death penalty) is obviously disproportionate to the crime. But there is no doubt that the behaviour charged is large-scale fraud, of a type that isn't usually allowed to slide because large corporations don't normally commit it in the first place. And on the publicly-available information, the Trump Org sure looks guilty.
There is a lot of evidence, including from before Trump became a partisan political figure, that he is unusually dishonest by the standards of rich and powerful Americans. This means that you would expect him to have worse-than-usual post-presidency legal troubles.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7mo ago
Three AAQCs making basically the same heterodox point about modern attitudes to adultery in slightly different ways is interesting - was it the same small group of people nominating all three posts because they were complementary, or have we rooted out a silent consensus among Mottizens?
days before the firing.
Days before the December meeting at which Biden is supposed to have demanded the firing.
By the time Shokin is actually fired in March, essentially everyone has turned against him. There is timestamped publically-available information that the EU, the IMF, Victoria Nuland, Shokin's deputy Vitaly Kasko, Radio Free Europe (US government-owned), the Kyiv Post and various Ukrainian good-government groups all praised the firing when it happened.
The 2-3 month gap between Biden demanding Shokin be fired within 6 hours and the time Shokin was actually fired is inconvenient for both the pro- and anti-Biden theories of the case, as is the fact that the proximate cause of Shokin going was Kasko resigning on February 15th.
An even more bizzare complication is that Shokin applied for a freezing order against Zlochevsky's personal assets (the founder of Burisma, although he had sold most of his shares and was no longer an executive by the time Hunter Biden joined the board) on 4th February. As far as I can see, this was the first public move in the Zlochevsky/Burisma investigation since Shokin was appointed.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8mo ago
The other argument for going now is that Biden is just an incredibly weak candidate who will not inspire voter turnout, and the only person who can almost certainly lose to him, and can inspire Dems to turn out, is Trump.
and further down the thread
The Democrat base is, to my perception, exceptionally weak right now.
If the American right genuinely thinks this, they are high on their own supply and deserve to lose. I am not American and don't see the vibes that you guys are relying on, but I can see the election results. Biden won in 2020 on a record high turnout - if that is "a weak candidate who will not inspire voter turnout" then I want to see the kind of Dem landslide that would result if they find a merely mediocre candidate. Midterms and even more so special elections are all about base mobilisation (because of the generally low turnout) and the Democrats significantly overperformed in 2022, and are killing it in off-cycle elections so far this year.
I am guessing here (as I said, no access to the vibes) but it isn't hard to see two reasons why the D base should be unusually energised right now.
- January 6th, and more broadly Trump's attempt to remain in office despite losing the 2020 election. Even if Trump is not the nominee (and as far as I can see only a medical catastrophe or a SCOTUS decision that he is disqualified under Section 3 of the 14th amendment can stop him), the R primary electorate seem determined to double down on this. From the perspective of anyone who thinks that the 2020 election was not, in fact, rigged, and that the Trump campaign knew this, 2024 is a Flight 93 election because the Republicans are no longer committed to the idea that a Republican president should leave office after losing an election.
- Dobbs. I have posted before pointing out that the history of countries other than the USA is that abortion is a sufficiently important issue that in countries where abortion is "on the table" for democratic politics, the median voter ends up getting what they want. The Republicans are more out of step with the medial voter on this issue, at just the time where Dobbs makes it a matter of democracy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8mo ago
It's funny to see how it plays out now in that Rich men north of Richmond viral song, where there's a line criticizing fat people on welfare being paid to eat fudge. It's also funny to see in the live show video how enthusiastically a lot of the heavier people in the audience sing along even that part.
The word "welfare" and the height of the fat person (roughly the average female height) clearly point to the "welfare mother" stereotype. White rednecks who rort SSDI for a living don't see themselves as on welfare as such, so they know the line isn't directed at them. The same logic is why PMC white male New Yorkers and Californians aren't bothered when their political allies say that "white men" are responsible for everyone bad in the world.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9mo ago
Try not to do this.
To decide that you've had it up to here with the three or so well-funded idiots who make up Just Stop Oil and that you are going to hold your nose and sign up with the "I don't mind if the third world fries, it's hot out there I'm not surprised" crowd is a perfectly normal human response, and if at least some people do it it creates good incentives for activists not to be idiots. (Although I suspect that giving noisy idiots rent-free space in your head is bad for the soul). But that is a change in political tactics - changing your views on a factual question based on the noisy idiocy of a bunch of randos is irrational. If 550ppm CO2 is in fact as bad for humanity as the IPCC says it is, then this is the kind of fact that does not care about your feelings.
And Rommel was regarded as a true German gentleman. But if a statue of Rommel stood in a place of honour in central Stuttgart as part of the pantheon of military heroes of Baden-Wurttemberg, and it was melted down at the request of the local synagogue, we wouldn't be complaining about "teabagging the outgroup". In fact, part of the "Reconstruction" process in post-WW2 Germany was the removal of Nazi monuments.
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