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DBDr  2yr ago (text post)   529 thread views

META topic discussion: Tennessee politics not found.

A bit of a metta question: To what extent does anyone on this forum have any opinions on what is going on in the Tennessee legislature VIS: should people be talking about it on this forum?

Does nobody know or does nobody care or does nobody think that anyone here would have something interesting to say about it?

I ask because nobody has mentioned it so far on the forum, and it seems like it would be right in line with the Culture War Roundup's usual suspects.

(I know this is short for a top level post but I would like to know for future reference)

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I try not to make top level posts unless I have something unique to say. Rarely is my analysis in and of itself interesting, but I read a fairly eclectic collection of stuff so maybe it's a connection I think others aren't seeing between A and B, that maybe leads to interesting analysis C. I try to avoid just posting A, and look how AMAZING or HORRIFYING A is! There's a million websites for that. When I subject y'all to my thoughts, I want to at least try to make it interesting.

I also have a general rule that I ignore controversies that happen in state capitals that aren't mine when they make national news. Whether that's "Can you believe that State Rep Johny-John Johnson III, Republican from North Sheepdick Arkansas, introduced a bill requiring that women wear below-the-knee skirts at all times?" or "BRAVE BIPOC WOMEN STALL ENTIRE OKLAHOMA GOVERNMENT UNTIL THE STATE AGREES TO RECOGNIZE DRAG QUEEN STORY HOUR AS A SACRAMENT!!!" They're just uniformly stupid articles, made stupider by national lens being trained on them, rendered even dumber by bringing in an international wrecking crew of bleacher creatures to boo and cheer and roll call appropriately on the internet. If we translated local Estonian or Uruguayan or Russian regional politics and posted them the same way, they'd probably be just as dumb. La plus ca change.

Most state Reps are not that bright, they're locally connected or basically good looking and charismatic guys who managed to get a connected friend group of a few thousand to vote for them in the primary and then cruised through a party fixed general. A handful are ambitious, or at least ambitiously corrupt, and they do make important decisions about laws that affect the populace. But the intricacies of Albany or Hartford or Des Moines politics, and the kind of moron that decides to make a spectacle of themselves in those places and achieve nothing, are rarely that interesting at the end of the day.

Well, some legislators broke the rules and got expelled, then reinstated. The White House showed more interest in those legislators than in the families of the victims of the shooting, probably because the legislators are black. At least one of those legislators seems like a grifter, complete with a fake preacher accent.

I can't help but think "god damn that's some bullshit" when we get reports like this one, though:

But at this point, Rausch indicated it does not appear the shooter wrote of any particular agenda regarding politics or to target a specific person or religion. So, for now, a clear motive remains a mystery.

You so much as sneeze in the general direction of a synagogue, and someone is going to have the ADL up on speed dial--but a transsexual murders a bunch of children at a Christian school and "oh, wow, weird, I wonder what that could possibly be about?" I roll to disbelieve.

But there doesn't seem to be much of substance to discuss on these things. Transsexuals hate Christians, big surprise. Blacks hate Republicans, big surprise. Everyone in Tennessee seems to just be playing the culture war game on rails at this point.

Not every culture war event gets covered here. We're few in number, and many inflammatory happenings don't have an interesting discussion angle. I recall that the shop teacher with prosthetic breasts didn't get any commentary here, despite being all the rage in conservative social media circles. What is there to say besides "Can you imagine what the outgroup is doing this time? Boo outgroup!"

I'm sure if you posted it in the CW thread you'd get people to talk about it. Posting a meta thread is fine too, though it might have been better if you actually started out with a summary of the things going on in Tennessee that you want to talk about

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