Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
There's a very obvious way in which these weren't similar protests; they didn't happen literally during the confirmation of the electoral vote (and thus the Biden presidency) in the literal location where that confirmation was taking place. The first link (I had to VPN it - not available outside of US) took place after the inauguration; it was literally a protest in the sense that nothing they could do at this point could make Trump a not-President and they were just expressing their frustration.
It's the specific context (location, timeline etc.) of Jan 6 that makes it a (farcical) coup attempt, not just there being protests against a presidency in general during some generic time around the election-inauguration period.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
As always, this just resolves to ’I want to think of myself as anti-cancel-culture but I also want to cancel people’.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
This is what mystifies me about how large the supposedly beyond the pale attacks on Romney during the 2012 campaign are such a huge theme on this forum, popping up time after time after time.
My understanding of American presidential elections is that they have always pretty much been a no-holds-barred cage match, behind the scenes, with both parties (not their ticket headers but lower figures) continuously accusing the other party's candidate of everything under the sun and negative campaign galore being the theme of the day.
However, there's now a suggestion that in this particular election, with this particular candidate, the Dems should have refrained from all this and, in effect, fought with one hand behind the back, that there was something particularly ungentlemanly about going after Romney in the typical way. And the people claiming this don't even really like Romney all that much!
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
Or, you know, young women might just vote for left-wing parties because they feel that right-wing parties are too full of people who view them misogynistically. One might indeed get an impression that such views might exist by reading a thread on this forum full of speculation about how this ineffable mystery can best be explainable by the fact that young women are vapid idiots who don't know their own good, or are fantasizing about being conquered by exotic brown-skinned immigrants, or so on.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
The only thing this chatter proves is that Hillary Derangement Syndrome is still going strong. A number of Republicans just can't let go of a long-time enemy, to the point of fantasizing about facing her yet again and again.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
My guess is that there's still going to be great amounts of older children's books available representing in the great majority heterosexual families of your country's majority ethnicity (or animals obviously intended to represent that ethnicity like Berenstain Bears in US etc.), no? At least when I go out in bookstores to check what they have, they usually have reprints of old classics front and center.
My guess is that a lot of modern children's books authors specifically think about the great majorities of existing children's books not showcasing groups other than heterosexual families of a country's majority ethnicity, and thus go above and beyond the call of duty to increase the general representativeness.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
And yet, after getting run over, they acquiesced and acclimated to the situation very fast, and Trump ended up governing pretty much like a standard Republican, and now there's not a particular visible difference between the "Trump movement" and the Republican party in itself.
My point was more that when you're talking about the national politics at this level, there's no firm line separating a wholly grassroots movement from a wholly artificial one. All notable movements have at least some organic popular support, all movements also involve someone planning things from the above and conducting at least campaigns of at least some level of artificiality.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Israel is conducting an operation that by all accounts seems very bloody and, to say the least, not one where they are deliberately trying to avoid civilian casualties. Taking this into account, these polling results would appear to show American support for Israel to be notably strong, among both parties.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
I cannot really comment on the fairness of American family courts (I've heard comparatively few complaints from local friends who have undergone divorce), but if one believes that women and men have deep, inbuilt biological differences making them more suitable for different walks of life (as many conservatives tend to do), wouldn't it tend to be only too natural to find that in such situations custody should indeed, as a matter of course and unless there are considerable complicating the factors, go to the woman (as the sex stereotypically more suited to raising young children personally), and that the man's role would likewise be to contribute financially (as the sex that traditionally has done the yeoman's share of paid work)? I mean, you can just say "well, they shouldn't divorce in the first place", but there have always been cases of family separation, for one reason or another.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
There's a lot of people going "look at all these people proven wrong by not holding off conclusions" who aren't... holding off conclusions, such as the conclusion that this non-binary identification shuts out the possibility that the shooter might be anti-gay far-righter. One might quickly imagine why such a shooter might announce they-them profiles to be written in official documents: to own the libs. ("Lol! They have to call me by this shit now!") Of course, I don't know if that's the case - that's what holding off conclusions indicates.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
17d ago
The oceans stopped rising?
...one of your examples of a cult of personality around Obama is a misphrased version of his own speech?
Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless.
This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.
This was the moment when we ended a war, and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.
He's exhorting the troops ('if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it'), and he's not even saying that the oceans stopped rising but that the rise begins to slow.
Meanwhile, a considerable share of American Protestants believe(d) that Trump is anointed by God to be the President, and the share is not insignificant even if there's a comparison question regarding whether all Presidents are anointed by God.
The God-Emperor stuff was both funny and a satire by someone not a fan of Trump, it was taken up ironically because hell, yeah it was funny and cool at the same time.
I'm not sure what the satire part is in reference to. Probably the first memes I saw about Trump (his campaign didn't instantly take off in the online crowd so it ook a bit of time for them to start accumulating in places where I'd spot them) were God-Emperor memes, presented in a ha-ha-only-serious tone.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6mo ago
To me, it just seems like, for the last 3 years, many of the Covid skeptics and Covid conspiracists have been doing constant victory laps on evidence that is insufficient, to say the least. Yes, some of the contrarian things were correct, but there was a large number of wild claims about vaccine killing half or third of people taking in space of years, sterilizing people to the degree of "unvaccinated sperm becoming more valuable than gold", being filled with gunk that basically makes your veins look like huge black worms etc. that obviously didn't come true. Sure, not every Covid skeptic said this stuff, or even most of them, but the more moderate skeptics still seemed, at least to me, generally unwilling to start debunking the wilder variants. At least insofar as my personal experience goes, I do not know anyone who seems to have suffered a major vaccine injury (nor do I know anyone who has died of Covid, though one guy I know apparently came pretty close), which makes me question those who claimed to encounter vaccine injuries left and right.
There's Rogan saying that all the conspiracy theorists were correct on the basis of a report saying that "Operation Warp Speed Was a Great Success and Helped Save Millions of Lives", which obviously would be the complete opposite of reality if the mRNA drugs manufactured and distributed as a part of OWS were deadly poison. Indeed, a great number of Covid skeptics ended up fulsomely praising - not just supporting as the last bad option but actively campaigning for - Trump, who has never stopped bragging about his great vaccine and successful Warp Speed operation and, when pressed on the incongruity, usually resulting to "well, he didn't support a mandate!", as if it was still OK to use tremendous amounts of tax money in order to support a lie and actively push a deadly poison on people, which is what he would have been doing if the mRNA vaccine claims were correct.
As said, the mainstream Covid response was flawed in many ways, opened a room for a lot of corruption and included a push for mandates and vaccine passports in a way that almost certainly has caused more harm than good in eroding public trust to public health authorities and experts - but the "counter-experts" don't seem particularly willing to utilize the same standard of evaluation on themselves, or their own community.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
It would seem obvious to me that there are, in fact, a lot of Americans who like what the Democratic Party has on offer - obviously! A party can't survive for ages if no-one likes what it has on offer! - and are happy to have it represented by what has always seemed to me a basically (though not expectionally) competent politician (competent at politics, that is) who happened to have an off-season in 2020 and doesn't have an off-season now. Thus, there is not anything particularly special to what is happening now.
What I wonder about is how hard it seems to be for American conservatives to believe that there exists a non-astroturf sentiment (and what does astroturf even mean these days, anyway? Both major parties have well-honed political machines to make basically literally any movement existing within their purview at least partly astroturf if you choose to look at it that way) supporting American liberalism organically. Why wouldn't there be? The last four years have seemed to be quite good for a fair few Americans, materially, especially compared to what is the most natural comparison to me - Europe's continuing malaise and doldrums.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
The most important figure of the American right spent a large portion of his winning 2016 presidential campaign demanding that his center-left opponent be locked up.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
17d ago
Imagine thinking a President was practically the Second Coming
The QAnon stuff goes here.
and deifying him in art
...and the "God-Emperor" memes, among others, go here.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Dreher's anecdotes about the wisdom of Communist East Europeans always reminds me of another group of Eastern Europeans moving to the US from the sphere of a totalitarian regime and suddenly finding themselves fearful about the signs of the same totalitarianism developing in the United States.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1yr ago
Caused the greatest inflation from excessive spending since Jimmy Carter.
...wouldn't a large part of that be Trump-era Covid spending, though?
Invited naked Trans people to the White House lawn.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
You'd get a huge amount of red-tribe examples simply by amassing all the times the Antichrist's regime in Book of Revelation is portrayed as a liberals/socialists/Satanists hunting down conservative Christians to execute them.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
I'm not sure why that question should be summed up as "trying to come up with a gotcha". It's a genuine question.
The whole "my rules applied consistently..." thing, which I have indeed seen many times before, always seems to start with the presumption that it's obvious who the "me" and the "you" are. One might as well see the conservatives who are the "you" who want to apply their rules inconsistently; inbuilt biological gender roles when it benefits them, equal treatment of the sexes when that is what benefits them.
It's what I've called the "rule of equal but opposite hypocrisies", it seems almost every time one makes what is basically a hypocrisy argument between two positions they themselves could be seen as being equally hypocritical, just the other way around.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2yr ago
Historically both left-wing and right-wing parties were full of men who would, at least by today's standards, be considered misogynistic.
The approximate reason for women voting more conservative historically was probably their greater religiousness, with the left being associated with secularism and the right-wing parties being more explicitly religious. Nowadays, the whole society has secularised, which has had many effects, one of which has been the replacement of more polite and civil traditional religious conservatism with crude and boorish chest-tumping macho nationalism as one of the mainstays of right-wing politics. The former did have appeal to many women, the latter... not very much so.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9mo ago
We're now in a situation where both the public defenders and prosecutors are bought by the same leftist billionaire, and the entire justice system is a circus of sociopathic procedural manipulation to achieve political outcomes.
...the actual achieved outcome was that they executed the guy, no?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
10mo ago
The idea that you were, at one point, bound to lose (particularly immediately after the assassination attempt) and, all of a sudden, you're now bound to win is pretty exciting in itself, no?
One could argue that the Dems had a say in picking their candidate - in 2020, when they accepted Harris as the person who would take the reins if the President became killed or incapacitated. Now the President is sort of incapacitated - yes, it's a very odd sort of incapacitation that apparently means you can no longer run for Presidency but can still function as a President, technically - so Harris takes the reins for that one particular thing.
Personally, I'm not too sure whether the tension inherent in Biden being smoked out by the media and party elites has been quite resolved yet and might still come up and bite Harris on the butt after the convention fever is out, and it is certainly not confirmed that Harris's current lead will continue, but I guess it'll take until November to see what will happen.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
11mo ago
I have never seen any evidence that Harris has the intelligence or insight required to lead a nation.
Does Trump?
I don't think this switch will be good for the Dems (Biden staying would also not have been good for them, it's a no-win situation), but at least they can now make the instant switcheroo to "It's Trump who is old and demented, HE should drop out now".
No, because it was a literal attempt at overturning a democratic election result, ie. a coup attempt. No matter how farcical or amateurish, that's what it was. The people invading the Capitol obviously thought in some way that their actions would lead to Trump being declared the president, despite that, according to the law, this wasn't supposed to happen, and indeed didn't happen. That's a coup attempt by whatever definition of the words you are using; it is absolutely not surprising at all that a coup attempt would be treated more harshly than an "ordinary" riot.
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