Politics & Stuff

[cosmicway 1,333]

On 09/09/2021 at 13:05, Vesper said:

Daily Express front cover backfires spectacularly

Talk about a self own!

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/daily-express-front-cover-backfires-spectacularly-289551/

The Daily Express was caught in two minds this morning after publishing an anti-immigrant story next to news of a ‘history’ victory for British tennis player Emma Raducanu, who was born in Canada to a Romanian father and a Chinese mother.

Late last night news broke that Priti Patel has sanctioned new tactics to redirect migrant boats in the Channel back to France amid crunch talks over crossings – much to the delight of the right ring rag.

According to reports, the home secretary has ordered officials to rewrite maritime laws to allow Border Force to turn boats around, forcing them to be dealt with by French authorities.

It comes following a G7 interior minister’s meeting on Wednesday, during which Ms Patel told her French counterpart that the British public “expect to see results” from French efforts to prevent ongoing migrant crossings.

Several newspapers reported that members of Border Force are being given special training to handle migrant boats, but would only deploy the “pushback” tactics when deemed practical and safe to do so.

The story took pride of place on the front cover of the Daily Express, next to the jubilant Emma Raducanu, who made US Open history with stunning quarter-final victory last night.

 

How on earth are there migrants (boat people) in the channel ?
In the Med I understand, in the Aegean I understand, but in the channel ?
I just think the brexiteer press are just feeding their readers with grass on this one.

[Vesper 30,225]

THE SOCIOPATHIC STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/09/the-sociopathic-style-in-american-politics

The hysterical reaction on the right to Joe Biden’s eminently moderate vaccine mandates provides a kind of textbook example of what I will call the sociopathic style in American politics.

I’m alluding here to Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay on the paranoid style, and, following his usage, I don’t pretend to be making some sort of formal clinical diagnosis. In any event, sociopathy isn’t, strictly speaking, a formal concept in contemporary psychology; rather it is a variety of what psychologists call anti-social personality disorder.

And that is exactly what American right wing thought, and its avatar the contemporary Republican party, have both become: an elaborately rationalized form of anti-social personality disorder. Take for example this reaction from rising Republican star Dan Crenshaw:

People who haven’t given themselves over to the sociopathic style will find it difficult to understand what Crenshaw is even arguing for here. This is because, to people who haven’t fetishized individual liberty as being the one moral value that always trumps all other moral and practical considerations (important caveat: note that this commitment only holds when this value is being exercised by the right sorts of people), arguing against these sorts of mandates must seem inexplicable.

And it is inexplicable, from any reasonable — which in this context simply means non-sociopathic — point of view.

The position of the Republican party is that individual liberty is always and everywhere (again, note the caveat above) of such overwhelming importance that people should suffer no negative consequences whatsoever for refusing a free, safe, and highly effective vaccine, in the midst of a global pandemic that has killed millions around the world, and that by the end of this year will have, directly and indirectly, killed more than one million Americans.

This is merely a particularly vivid example of how contemporary right wing ideology in America consists of defending the indefensible, via arguments that no reasonable (again, non-sociopathic) person could possibly accept.

It’s also an example of, when you state a core right wing political belief in straightforward terms, it sounds like some sort parody. I mean surely they’re not arguing for that, are they? Surely some nuance, some complexity, is being omitted by the hostile polemicist here.

No: this is quite literally their position. People should be free to acquire and transmit to others a deadly and extremely communicable virus, that is causing a catastrophic pandemic, even though this catastrophe could be avoided completely if people chose to take a free and safe vaccine. Furthermore, it’s morally wrong for the government to engage in even the mildest coercion to nudge people toward getting vaccinated, because such coercion interferes with individual liberty, which is always the highest social value in every circumstance.

This is the sociopathic style in action. In contemporary conservative thought, anti-social personality disorder is, via the magic of ideology, transformed into an all-purpose political doctrine. In its cruder forms, as illustrated 24/7 by the workings of the nation’s massive right wing mass media propaganda complex, this ideology manifests itself as a kind of oppositional defiant disorder, as millions of chronological adults are encouraged to behave like cranky toddlers, whenever they are asked by the Liberal Conspiracy to perform the political equivalent of picking up their toys and going to bed on time.

In the tonier regions of the right wing ideological bubble, emotionally stunted sociopathy is tarted up constantly with ponderous (and highly selective) citations to Burke, Hayek, Orwell, Milton Friedman etc. But in both the Limbaughverse or the Buckleyverse the idea is the same: the invocation of the word “freedom” is supposed to cut off all higher cognitive function, just as surely as the word “God” is supposed to do in some adjacent ideological zip codes.

Thus the sacral status of Individual Liberty requires allowing countless individual choices to wreck the ecosphere via what economists refer to primly as the failure to take into account unpriced externalities, while elementary schools are shot up by semi-automatic weapons, and millions of Americans have no income other than food stamps, even as multi-billionaires rig the tax code ever-more in the favor, because that what Freedom means, according to the Constitution or the Bible or possibly both.

Of course the dictum You’re Not the Boss of Me is not a sustainable basis for even the most tenuous society. The concept of a sociopathic society is an oxymoron on its face, as the right wing is more than happy to acknowledge implicitly when it undertakes all sorts of vigorous steps to make sure that Individual Liberty means the Individual Liberty to live in an authoritarian ethno-state. Yet the apparent contradiction between the sociopathic style and the authoritarian personality is resolved easily enough when we remember that, to those who long to make America great again, freedom means freedom for me and not for you.

But perhaps the most crucial aspect of the sociopathic style is that it’s dedicated to not remembering that — which is easy enough to do when an ideology has no allegiance whatsoever to rational discourse, intellectual consistency, or any other form of honest argumentation. Expecting such things from the sociopathic style represents a fundamental failure to understand what that style is all about, which of course doesn’t stop plenty liberals, centrists, and delusional center-right conservatives to continue to expect them.

At this point in American history, sincere engagement with the nation’s right wing in general and the Republican party in particular is about as advisable as going on a blind date with Ted Bundy. And the otherwise inexplicably bizarre reaction of these people to even the mildest vaccine mandates makes perfect sense when we remember who we are actually dealing with.

Edited September 15, 2021 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,225]

https://www.democraticunderground.com/108821049

[Vesper 30,225]

Haitian roundup by horseback

Texas border

😢😡

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10004201/US-nears-plan-widescale-expulsions-Haitian-migrants.html

[Vesper 30,225]

 

Jumped the shark they have...

At yesterday’s anti-vax rally in London, people told us they wanted to see the Capitol insurrection happen in the UK.

 

This. In. London............

'There's a global fucking agenda right now'
'We know this is a scam, we know that Covid does not exist'
'The BBC has done a right proper job on you'
'So I will fight, fight, fight... whatever my ancestors had to do I will do to fight for freedom'
'We take to the streets, we take down the vaccine centres, and take down the town halls'

Edited September 20, 2021 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,225]

[Vesper 30,225]

assistant head of the yank FBI just said AOC is getting over one thousand verified death threats a week!

and this vermin white nationalist Republican House member Marjorie Taylor Greene is running adverts like this

wtf

 

 

[Vesper 30,225]

[cosmicway 1,333]

The white Americans -formerly British- were slaves to the Romans.

Edited October 12, 2021 by cosmicway

[Atomiswave 6,118]

Oh please, politicians are nothing but corrupt, evil, dirty, shady and anti you. You did not put them in office, they are not there to pander to your needs or the society for that matter. People's tolerence towards these actors is almost spent.

[Warning_Hazard 156]

This thread shows up some right orange man bad posters huh!!

Nothing about the absolute calamity that is biden then?

vax mandate could cause an absolute divide, 2000 flights already cancelled as pilots are legging it! pilots will be told theyre dumb next and racist even if youre a mexican!

Dont even get me started on afghan or the chinese!

[ZAPHOD2319 4,819]

Tbf Orange man, Hillary, Biden, all bad. Our nominating process is completely broken when these are who we end up with as choices to run the country. 

[Atomiswave 6,118]

33 minutes ago, Warning_Hazard said:

This thread shows up some right orange man bad posters huh!!

Nothing about the absolute calamity that is biden then?

vax mandate could cause an absolute divide, 2000 flights already cancelled as pilots are legging it! pilots will be told theyre dumb next and racist even if youre a mexican!

Dont even get me started on afghan or the chinese!

Ohh quote me on this soon, we will all witness chaos like never before shortly. Their reset will come right after the chaos.

27 minutes ago, ZAPHOD2319 said:

Tbf Orange man, Hillary, Biden, all bad. Our nominating process is completely broken when these are who we end up with as choices to run the country. 

Its your own fault, by being gullible.

[Warning_Hazard 156]

47 minutes ago, ZAPHOD2319 said:

Tbf Orange man, Hillary, Biden, all bad. Our nominating process is completely broken when these are who we end up with as choices to run the country. 

Same here really.

its all Poli tricks!

The french are giving it the biggun now in all!

[Warning_Hazard 156]

 

[ZAPHOD2319 4,819]

42 minutes ago, Atomiswave said:

Ohh quote me on this soon, we will all witness chaos like never before shortly. Their reset will come right after the chaos.

Its your own fault, by being gullible.

I voted for Gary Johnson when he ran, only 3% of my country agreed with me. Our biggest problem is being engrained in this two party system.

[Vesper 30,225]

9 minutes ago, ZAPHOD2319 said:

I voted for Gary Johnson when he ran, only 3% of my country agreed with me. Our biggest problem is being engrained in this two party system.

the US system is first past the post single member district plurality and/or majority wins with no proportional representation

3rd, 4th parties are doomed to failure from the start

the only role they can play is that of spoiler

[Atomiswave 6,118]

22 minutes ago, ZAPHOD2319 said:

I voted for Gary Johnson when he ran, only 3% of my country agreed with me. Our biggest problem is being engrained in this two party system.

He was never gonna win mate....

[ZAPHOD2319 4,819]

1 hour ago, Atomiswave said:

He was never gonna win mate....

I vote for who I think will be the most qualified, not for who I think can win. In this election there was a chance for Johnson to get 5% of the vote which would have qualified the Libertarian party for matching funds in the next Presidential election. That would have forced both parties to look for more centrist candidates. It was as much about the 5% for me.

[Warning_Hazard 156]

11 hours ago, ZAPHOD2319 said:

I vote for who I think will be the most qualified, not for who I think can win. In this election there was a chance for Johnson to get 5% of the vote which would have qualified the Libertarian party for matching funds in the next Presidential election. That would have forced both parties to look for more centrist candidates. It was as much about the 5% for me.

Think Rogan voted the same

I liked when he said he was politically homeless, Sums it all up well!