I’m looking forward to your taking on someone really interesting, smart and controversial. Flex your considerable intellectual muscle. This turd is not in your league Steve.
Yeah, honestly, and I’m not trying to toot my own horn here, I wish it were easier to find challenging and/or meaningful debate online.😅
I have an advantage in these conversations, in that I’ll have done some considerable research before writing an article, so I know what I’m talking about, but all too often the opposing argument isn’t even about the facts. It’s just some variation of “the points you’ve laid out here don’t validate my feelings so you’re stupid/evil/racist/transphobic/etc.“
The internet makes it very easy to have an opinion without ever really needing to defend it.
I hope I’m not getting out of my lane here but I enjoy your writing and ideas so much that I can’t resist asking if you would share your take on theme of navigating the post colonial world generally. How do we deal with the colonial past? How do we teach it? What do we do with its monuments and institutions? Is cultural appropriation bad or good? How do we separate the colonial contributions (eg modern political systems) from the bad and who decides? How do indigenous and the descendants of colonialists coexist? These questions are relevant to almost every country on earth. Your experience abroad and unique family background give you a good vantage point from which to think about these questions. I’ve lived in India and other countries like Mexico and all are still litigating the post colonial world.
""How do we deal with the colonial past? How do we teach it? What do we do with its monuments and institutions? Is cultural appropriation bad or good?"
😁 A lot to cover here, but very broadly speaking, I think the way to deal with the post colonial world is to stop pretending that past and present are equivalent. And to focus on real issues instead of distractions. This would be helped enormously by teaching history accurately, tying it to the present effectively, and abandoning the idea that we automatically share the sins or oppression of our ancestors. We can do this without denying our culpability in the present.
For example, let's consider a few different types of cultural appropriation.
I saw recently that some Aboriginal spears stolen by James Cook in 1770 will be returned to the original clan. I think that's great if that's what the clan wants (I'd love to see the same thing happen with the British Crown Jewels, but I won't hold my breath 😄).
There's no denying that colonialism stole a lot of material and cultural wealth from around the world and if the descendants of the original owners want it back, I think that's what should happen. That wrong, at least, can be undone relatively easily.
Then there's appropriation in the form of capitalism, which is a lot more complicated. To take Africa as an example, vast amounts of wealth and resources have been (and still are being) effectively stolen from the continent.
Right now, China is buying up vast swathes of land and infrastructure that will keep Africa indebted for centuries. This is colonialism too. Aided and abetted in the case by extreme poverty and corrupt governments (both African and Western). It's one of the greatest injustices of history and hardly anybody is talking about it because we're all, and I mean *everybody* in the west, complicit. To undo *that* colonialism we'd all need to sacrifice. To be fair, the reluctance to sacrifice for the greater good is why colonialism throughout history has gone unopposed by people of good conscience.
And this is why it's so infuriating to see people going about "cultural appropriation" in the form of dreadlocks and beads and surfing. This is what always happens. There's a legitimate problem somewhere in the world, the problem is complex or the solutions are unpalatable, and so a sect of noisy "activists" finds some idiotic low-hanging fruit that nobody really cares about and they act as if that's the key issue.
Some people *pretend* to care because it's trendy and they get social media points, and the people most affected, the people starving and dying in poverty and unsafe working conditions, never even cross their minds. But hey, at least we yelled at Kim Kardashian for wearing cornrows or for calling her shape wear line "Kimono."
Anyway, rant over.😅 I hope I mostly answered your question.
That was a take on the symbolic “cultural appropriation” as “idiotic low hanging fruit that nobody really cares about” in the context of the massive material appropriation that nobody talks about is original and really perceptive. I had never linked them that way.
When I raised the issue of the challenges of post colonialism I was not expecting your substantive answer. I was hoping it could be a topic of future articles. You have a lot to add I am sure.
There is actually one anti-appropriation law that I know of. It is on behalf of native Americans. I have a Navajo flute (crafted and sold by Navajo people) and a native American style flute (not made by native Americans). Notice the inclusion of the word style. It's the law. Selling crafts native to native Americans is a common source of income and falsely selling imitations is truly a ripoff.
That is quite different from me playing clawhammer banjo or blues which are considered to be Americana. The African roots are acknowledged but the extraordinary richness of American music is a cultural blend.
As for things like hair styles. I am a champion of women doing whatever they please to accentuate their beauty. No tribe has a monopoly.
I'm not trying to answer for Steve with this, but part of the difficulty in my opinion is that people want to maintain their tribal status. I posted this link on my Facebook page with the words, "Historical song with a hidden meaning. More of the old music is like this than I knew." The only person to put a 'like' on it was my 90-year-old conservative uncle.
Do people not want to know about such things, or do they fear being thought of a woke if they publicly like it? I didn't put it there to signal virtue or wokeness, I found it to be interesting a few days late for Black History Month.
I'm fairness I understand that my interest in history found in song is not exactly common.
I'm the book "Banjo Roots and Branches" it must have been painful for slave owners to give the detailed descriptions of their runaway slaves, but they wanted them back. "He is a skilled blacksmith and carpenter who speaks and reads English and French. He is also a fiddler who plays at dances for white people." That from people who justified being slave owners with the idea that black people were inferior, but passed laws making it unlawful to teach a black person to read with no apparent sense of irony. Something I learned because of my interest in the banjo.
I am currently working with Greg "Sule" Wilson's "Funky Banjo" instruction. Volume Two has a good bit about the history and meaning of the songs. Some black musicians refuse to play "Turkey in the Straw." He teaches the uncensored names of versions that we could not be comfortable singing. When you hear that ice cream truck coming down the street you don't think about that being "N****r Love a Watermelon Ha! HA! HA!" during the Coon Era and points out that watermelon were a taste from home.
He teaches "Run N****r; Run or the M.P. 'll Catch You" (without the asterix) with the explanation. "Yes, we get it. Most folks are NOT going to sing this song in public; to use the word "n****r" is still pretty volatile. Yet we include it. Why? A couple of reasons. One: ALL our history is not to be shut out least we not learn from our mistakes. Two: This folk expression of bravery and humanity, a testament to heart and perseverance, was taken and used against us. Let's all grow up, re-contextualize and heal."
My few years on Medium proves your point. Sometimes I get the sense that the smart and reasonable people on there avoid politics, culture, race and gender. They talk about math or gardening or programming etc. Anything but those subjects.
You do realize that they, often with justification, say the same about progressives. You even begrudgingly admit that they are sometimes right.
Thor should strike progressives with lightning for calling themselves liberals. We live in a world where tribal hostility is so extreme that hyperbole and straw man arguments are the norm from all sides when things become heated.
It would be comforting if it were so one-sided that I could chose a tribe to mindlessly agree with, but I don't seek that kind of comfort or see it as one-sided as the partisans. Neither do you, though it doesn't always show. You are not about show and speak Frankly.
You know that I completely repudiate a lot of what people are calling “left” now. But I don’t see the symmetry you mention. Sure there are a few progressive trolls but on the right that’s all there are.
Woke is MAGA in a mirror. Just as rigid, just as orthodox.
I'm going to sleep now too, but I can't help but say that the idea that the majority of conservatives are racists, MAGAs and such is from the same set of molds as the idea that black people are all criminal thugs, liberals are all idiots, etc. We can of course find plenty of examples to confirm our beliefs, but we can also find examples that don't.
As an aside, we all have bias, but it does not mean we are speaking falsehood. Effective propaganda is a mixture of truth and lies. People focus on the part that supports their views. I have never claimed there is no truth coming from any "side."
As I tell my MAGA stop the steal friend, Trump won is a fool's errand. If Jesus Christ came down from the heavens to declare that the election was a crooked as a dog's hind leg the fact checkers would declare it false, the courts would say Jesus has no standing because he is not a US citizen and throw it out. The Democrats would declare that the courts found no evidence, though they didn't actually look. American must believe that fraud and corruption only happens in other countries but not America because we are special. A cellophane cat could run thru hell and not get scorched before the election would be overturned and Trump be reinstated into the office of POTUS. They just look idiotic dreaming that that could happen.
Was there voter fraud? According to the courts, yes, but was it enough tip the election? Who knows? I don't have a dog in that fight. https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud/search
Election fraud claims are not in the interest of the liberal side until it is. Is it delusion to claim there is no evidence of election fraud in America when there are convictions for it?
This bothsides stuff is beneath you, Dave. Fraudulent votes are in single digits and they're all Republicans.
Heritage? Seriously? Self-respect won't let me click that. "Who knows?" You do. Biden got seven million more votes. Half the country would have to be in on the conspiracy and nobody breaking silence. Please tell me you don't believe this.
Yes we all have bias, so what, that's orthogonal to dishonesty, of which the right has oceans to the left's thimbles. Even those lunatics at Fox knew Trump lost but they went before the cameras and lied anyway, and they're still lying.
Nobody is saying the liberal side is angelic in its veracity but "both sides" is unforgivably sloppy. The Fox audience gets enraged when they *aren't* being lied to.
My point was that they have chosen the wrong hill to die on. If they were correct that Trump won it wouldn't matter, nothing will happen. Don't confuse that thought with me thinking Trump won. I do look at things that I don't agree with (ht Sun Tzu) and your apparent broad-brush dismissal of sources to your political right scares me a bit. The link to small fries being prosecuted for election fraud was not an attempt to claim that the election was stolen (I sure hope that you know that), but rather some insight into how people can make leaps in their opinions = election fraud exists, therefore the election was stolen.
A bit of background. I was trained in riot control while on active duty. Unforgettable words from the training, "They are your fellow Americans. Use the minimum force necessary, 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗲𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗿𝘆." I was in Vietnam when the 1969 Moratorium took place but one of the Marines in the training who was stateside was in Washington DC for that event for the "all that is necessary." Thank Zeus it wasn't. How 6 Jan 21 was handled was shocking to me.
Jan 6 was just like in the training all those years ago. Mostly protestors, but some agitators there to turn a protest into a riot. In this case, I suspect that they knew who they were while they were planning. The National Guard was not utilized. Where were the Marines?
Shortly after the event, people sent links to me that showed government people unlocking doors and apparently directing people to the chambers. They were quickly scrubbed from the internet. Now, two years later they are reappearing on Fox. I don't know who directed them to give them easy entry. Could have been Trump or trump loyalists for all we know. It should give anyone pause who knows the standard protocols for defending Federal offices.
Did the investigation attempt to determine who the Feds were that let them in and led them? They sure as hell should have. If I was running the investigation, it would have been at the top of my list. Now that it's too late to scrub them again, will we get answers about that question?
None of what I just wrote gives any credibility to the notion that the election was stolen. It does shine a light on how extraordinarily strange the response was, and why the hell the answer to who they were is not a part of the revealed findings. It does make it odd that Fox would show it since it is potentially damning about Trump. We don't know, or has it been revealed what was found out about that? It should damn someone(s).
Did Fox say it was a tourist excursion or it looked like one? I haven't watched their commentary on the videos, but hyperbole is the norm.
The newsertainment shows know their audience and know that their sponsors know the audience. And that is certainly left and right since commercial newsertainment is about money. That's not giving Fox, or anyone else a pass, just an acknowledgement of how things work. "Trump won" is the most egregious but disingenuous/half-truth coverage has no monopoly source.
"your apparent broad-brush dismissal of sources to your political right"
It's not as simple as that. I don't have time to read everything and I do have some respect for my own time and Heritage Foundation is simply below the salt. Fer chrissake, they believe in "market forces." They're nuts.
Let me draw a parallel. I don't know it this is still observed but back in the HIV epidemic I went to donate blood and was turned down because I was gay. OK, nobody ever said that all gay men were HIV+ and not all HIV+ men were gay but the correlation was robust enough that it was simply prudent to not take blood donations from 5% of potential male blood donors.
Not everything on heritage.org is going to be batshit right-wing economics (one of the very lowest bars there is) but the same prudence applies there. Heritage promotes apologia for some of the most unhinged conservative ideas there are. And frankly I am going through soe serious emotional challenges right now and don't need to be aroused to murderous anger by reading this stuff. So I deliberately make myself a little less open-minded for my own mental health as well as out of respect for my increasingly limited time.
You know me well enough to know that I'm not too tribal in my liberalism. I'm a gay liberal who would gleefully throw the Woke "unterm Rad," I hold beliefs about personal responsibility that don't dovetail with the infinite tolerance and—ugh—inclusivity so in vogue.
And it's simply part of my outlook that I draw lines perhaps a little too comfortably. There are ideas like creationism, the morality of abortion, the history of the singular they, Lafferism, that I am unwilling to ever discuss again.
I don't wish to add to your stress or divert the conversation further. Someday we'll have to discuss economics since that is where the "left" seems to be the most in denial of reality to me. Your disdain for "market forces" always gives me pause. Another time, stay mellow now.
I was talking about conservatives active online. To a close approximation they’re all trolls. I’ve been doing this since the early 90s and it’s always been that way.
The civil ones just repeat the lies with less confrontational words. Instead of “Trump won” they say “doubts about election integrity.”
The coming Republican dog fight will be interesting. DeSantis may be more effective in pushing Trump aside than any Democrat. The MAGA Trumpsters are more vocal on-line, but he may have less appeal than people think. Trump's greatest strength is progressives. If the more liberal Democrats can push the progressives aside it will be hard to elect a Republican. I didn't even vote in the midterms. I would have just written in no acceptable candidate on all of them.
I agree that the woke shit is a real danger. Nominally liberal parents will vote Republican to protect their kids from the surgeons and even aside from the malignant "trans" shit, there is the politically potent Annoying Factor. I get equality and fairness, I don't see any point in this inclusion and gender-neutrality nonsense.
What will kill DeSantis is the camera. He is a deeply unlikeable guy and he's just too extreme in his intolerance and desire for control.
Trump has gone batshit crazy, first losing the election and then all the legal troubles. When someone finally gets around to slapping the cuffs on him he's going to literally go nuts.
I’m looking forward to your taking on someone really interesting, smart and controversial. Flex your considerable intellectual muscle.
This turd is not in your league Steve.
Yeah, honestly, and I’m not trying to toot my own horn here, I wish it were easier to find challenging and/or meaningful debate online.😅
I have an advantage in these conversations, in that I’ll have done some considerable research before writing an article, so I know what I’m talking about, but all too often the opposing argument isn’t even about the facts. It’s just some variation of “the points you’ve laid out here don’t validate my feelings so you’re stupid/evil/racist/transphobic/etc.“
The internet makes it very easy to have an opinion without ever really needing to defend it.
I hope I’m not getting out of my lane here but I enjoy your writing and ideas so much that I can’t resist asking if you would share your take on theme of navigating the post colonial world generally. How do we deal with the colonial past? How do we teach it? What do we do with its monuments and institutions? Is cultural appropriation bad or good? How do we separate the colonial contributions (eg modern political systems) from the bad and who decides? How do indigenous and the descendants of colonialists coexist? These questions are relevant to almost every country on earth. Your experience abroad and unique family background give you a good vantage point from which to think about these questions. I’ve lived in India and other countries like Mexico and all are still litigating the post colonial world.
Interested?
""How do we deal with the colonial past? How do we teach it? What do we do with its monuments and institutions? Is cultural appropriation bad or good?"
😁 A lot to cover here, but very broadly speaking, I think the way to deal with the post colonial world is to stop pretending that past and present are equivalent. And to focus on real issues instead of distractions. This would be helped enormously by teaching history accurately, tying it to the present effectively, and abandoning the idea that we automatically share the sins or oppression of our ancestors. We can do this without denying our culpability in the present.
For example, let's consider a few different types of cultural appropriation.
I saw recently that some Aboriginal spears stolen by James Cook in 1770 will be returned to the original clan. I think that's great if that's what the clan wants (I'd love to see the same thing happen with the British Crown Jewels, but I won't hold my breath 😄).
There's no denying that colonialism stole a lot of material and cultural wealth from around the world and if the descendants of the original owners want it back, I think that's what should happen. That wrong, at least, can be undone relatively easily.
Then there's appropriation in the form of capitalism, which is a lot more complicated. To take Africa as an example, vast amounts of wealth and resources have been (and still are being) effectively stolen from the continent.
Right now, China is buying up vast swathes of land and infrastructure that will keep Africa indebted for centuries. This is colonialism too. Aided and abetted in the case by extreme poverty and corrupt governments (both African and Western). It's one of the greatest injustices of history and hardly anybody is talking about it because we're all, and I mean *everybody* in the west, complicit. To undo *that* colonialism we'd all need to sacrifice. To be fair, the reluctance to sacrifice for the greater good is why colonialism throughout history has gone unopposed by people of good conscience.
And this is why it's so infuriating to see people going about "cultural appropriation" in the form of dreadlocks and beads and surfing. This is what always happens. There's a legitimate problem somewhere in the world, the problem is complex or the solutions are unpalatable, and so a sect of noisy "activists" finds some idiotic low-hanging fruit that nobody really cares about and they act as if that's the key issue.
Some people *pretend* to care because it's trendy and they get social media points, and the people most affected, the people starving and dying in poverty and unsafe working conditions, never even cross their minds. But hey, at least we yelled at Kim Kardashian for wearing cornrows or for calling her shape wear line "Kimono."
Anyway, rant over.😅 I hope I mostly answered your question.
Well said Steve. Very well said.
That was a take on the symbolic “cultural appropriation” as “idiotic low hanging fruit that nobody really cares about” in the context of the massive material appropriation that nobody talks about is original and really perceptive. I had never linked them that way.
When I raised the issue of the challenges of post colonialism I was not expecting your substantive answer. I was hoping it could be a topic of future articles. You have a lot to add I am sure.
There is actually one anti-appropriation law that I know of. It is on behalf of native Americans. I have a Navajo flute (crafted and sold by Navajo people) and a native American style flute (not made by native Americans). Notice the inclusion of the word style. It's the law. Selling crafts native to native Americans is a common source of income and falsely selling imitations is truly a ripoff.
That is quite different from me playing clawhammer banjo or blues which are considered to be Americana. The African roots are acknowledged but the extraordinary richness of American music is a cultural blend.
As for things like hair styles. I am a champion of women doing whatever they please to accentuate their beauty. No tribe has a monopoly.
I'm not trying to answer for Steve with this, but part of the difficulty in my opinion is that people want to maintain their tribal status. I posted this link on my Facebook page with the words, "Historical song with a hidden meaning. More of the old music is like this than I knew." The only person to put a 'like' on it was my 90-year-old conservative uncle.
https://youtu.be/UYJafpW1siE
Do people not want to know about such things, or do they fear being thought of a woke if they publicly like it? I didn't put it there to signal virtue or wokeness, I found it to be interesting a few days late for Black History Month.
That video was history, not wokeness or postmodernism. Thanks for it!
I'm fairness I understand that my interest in history found in song is not exactly common.
I'm the book "Banjo Roots and Branches" it must have been painful for slave owners to give the detailed descriptions of their runaway slaves, but they wanted them back. "He is a skilled blacksmith and carpenter who speaks and reads English and French. He is also a fiddler who plays at dances for white people." That from people who justified being slave owners with the idea that black people were inferior, but passed laws making it unlawful to teach a black person to read with no apparent sense of irony. Something I learned because of my interest in the banjo.
I am currently working with Greg "Sule" Wilson's "Funky Banjo" instruction. Volume Two has a good bit about the history and meaning of the songs. Some black musicians refuse to play "Turkey in the Straw." He teaches the uncensored names of versions that we could not be comfortable singing. When you hear that ice cream truck coming down the street you don't think about that being "N****r Love a Watermelon Ha! HA! HA!" during the Coon Era and points out that watermelon were a taste from home.
He teaches "Run N****r; Run or the M.P. 'll Catch You" (without the asterix) with the explanation. "Yes, we get it. Most folks are NOT going to sing this song in public; to use the word "n****r" is still pretty volatile. Yet we include it. Why? A couple of reasons. One: ALL our history is not to be shut out least we not learn from our mistakes. Two: This folk expression of bravery and humanity, a testament to heart and perseverance, was taken and used against us. Let's all grow up, re-contextualize and heal."
Should this history not be taught? Why?
My few years on Medium proves your point. Sometimes I get the sense that the smart and reasonable people on there avoid politics, culture, race and gender. They talk about math or gardening or programming etc. Anything but those subjects.
The programming articles are garbage now.
So are most of the “trans” trash and all of the Trump trash.
Every forum I’ve ever been on has yearned for some debaters from the other side who weren’t liars or stupid.
I concluded they don’t exist.
You do realize that they, often with justification, say the same about progressives. You even begrudgingly admit that they are sometimes right.
Thor should strike progressives with lightning for calling themselves liberals. We live in a world where tribal hostility is so extreme that hyperbole and straw man arguments are the norm from all sides when things become heated.
It would be comforting if it were so one-sided that I could chose a tribe to mindlessly agree with, but I don't seek that kind of comfort or see it as one-sided as the partisans. Neither do you, though it doesn't always show. You are not about show and speak Frankly.
You know that I completely repudiate a lot of what people are calling “left” now. But I don’t see the symmetry you mention. Sure there are a few progressive trolls but on the right that’s all there are.
Woke is MAGA in a mirror. Just as rigid, just as orthodox.
More later I’m going back to sleep.
I'm going to sleep now too, but I can't help but say that the idea that the majority of conservatives are racists, MAGAs and such is from the same set of molds as the idea that black people are all criminal thugs, liberals are all idiots, etc. We can of course find plenty of examples to confirm our beliefs, but we can also find examples that don't.
Instead of me posting something you will call biased, suppose you go out and look up how many Republicans believe that Trump actually won in 2020.
And find the equivalent delusion on the liberal side.
As an aside, we all have bias, but it does not mean we are speaking falsehood. Effective propaganda is a mixture of truth and lies. People focus on the part that supports their views. I have never claimed there is no truth coming from any "side."
As I tell my MAGA stop the steal friend, Trump won is a fool's errand. If Jesus Christ came down from the heavens to declare that the election was a crooked as a dog's hind leg the fact checkers would declare it false, the courts would say Jesus has no standing because he is not a US citizen and throw it out. The Democrats would declare that the courts found no evidence, though they didn't actually look. American must believe that fraud and corruption only happens in other countries but not America because we are special. A cellophane cat could run thru hell and not get scorched before the election would be overturned and Trump be reinstated into the office of POTUS. They just look idiotic dreaming that that could happen.
Was there voter fraud? According to the courts, yes, but was it enough tip the election? Who knows? I don't have a dog in that fight. https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud/search
Election fraud claims are not in the interest of the liberal side until it is. Is it delusion to claim there is no evidence of election fraud in America when there are convictions for it?
This bothsides stuff is beneath you, Dave. Fraudulent votes are in single digits and they're all Republicans.
Heritage? Seriously? Self-respect won't let me click that. "Who knows?" You do. Biden got seven million more votes. Half the country would have to be in on the conspiracy and nobody breaking silence. Please tell me you don't believe this.
Yes we all have bias, so what, that's orthogonal to dishonesty, of which the right has oceans to the left's thimbles. Even those lunatics at Fox knew Trump lost but they went before the cameras and lied anyway, and they're still lying.
Nobody is saying the liberal side is angelic in its veracity but "both sides" is unforgivably sloppy. The Fox audience gets enraged when they *aren't* being lied to.
Was 1/6/2021 a tourist excursion?
You're scaring me, Dave.
My point was that they have chosen the wrong hill to die on. If they were correct that Trump won it wouldn't matter, nothing will happen. Don't confuse that thought with me thinking Trump won. I do look at things that I don't agree with (ht Sun Tzu) and your apparent broad-brush dismissal of sources to your political right scares me a bit. The link to small fries being prosecuted for election fraud was not an attempt to claim that the election was stolen (I sure hope that you know that), but rather some insight into how people can make leaps in their opinions = election fraud exists, therefore the election was stolen.
A bit of background. I was trained in riot control while on active duty. Unforgettable words from the training, "They are your fellow Americans. Use the minimum force necessary, 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗲𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗿𝘆." I was in Vietnam when the 1969 Moratorium took place but one of the Marines in the training who was stateside was in Washington DC for that event for the "all that is necessary." Thank Zeus it wasn't. How 6 Jan 21 was handled was shocking to me.
Jan 6 was just like in the training all those years ago. Mostly protestors, but some agitators there to turn a protest into a riot. In this case, I suspect that they knew who they were while they were planning. The National Guard was not utilized. Where were the Marines?
Shortly after the event, people sent links to me that showed government people unlocking doors and apparently directing people to the chambers. They were quickly scrubbed from the internet. Now, two years later they are reappearing on Fox. I don't know who directed them to give them easy entry. Could have been Trump or trump loyalists for all we know. It should give anyone pause who knows the standard protocols for defending Federal offices.
Did the investigation attempt to determine who the Feds were that let them in and led them? They sure as hell should have. If I was running the investigation, it would have been at the top of my list. Now that it's too late to scrub them again, will we get answers about that question?
None of what I just wrote gives any credibility to the notion that the election was stolen. It does shine a light on how extraordinarily strange the response was, and why the hell the answer to who they were is not a part of the revealed findings. It does make it odd that Fox would show it since it is potentially damning about Trump. We don't know, or has it been revealed what was found out about that? It should damn someone(s).
Did Fox say it was a tourist excursion or it looked like one? I haven't watched their commentary on the videos, but hyperbole is the norm.
The newsertainment shows know their audience and know that their sponsors know the audience. And that is certainly left and right since commercial newsertainment is about money. That's not giving Fox, or anyone else a pass, just an acknowledgement of how things work. "Trump won" is the most egregious but disingenuous/half-truth coverage has no monopoly source.
"your apparent broad-brush dismissal of sources to your political right"
It's not as simple as that. I don't have time to read everything and I do have some respect for my own time and Heritage Foundation is simply below the salt. Fer chrissake, they believe in "market forces." They're nuts.
Let me draw a parallel. I don't know it this is still observed but back in the HIV epidemic I went to donate blood and was turned down because I was gay. OK, nobody ever said that all gay men were HIV+ and not all HIV+ men were gay but the correlation was robust enough that it was simply prudent to not take blood donations from 5% of potential male blood donors.
Not everything on heritage.org is going to be batshit right-wing economics (one of the very lowest bars there is) but the same prudence applies there. Heritage promotes apologia for some of the most unhinged conservative ideas there are. And frankly I am going through soe serious emotional challenges right now and don't need to be aroused to murderous anger by reading this stuff. So I deliberately make myself a little less open-minded for my own mental health as well as out of respect for my increasingly limited time.
You know me well enough to know that I'm not too tribal in my liberalism. I'm a gay liberal who would gleefully throw the Woke "unterm Rad," I hold beliefs about personal responsibility that don't dovetail with the infinite tolerance and—ugh—inclusivity so in vogue.
And it's simply part of my outlook that I draw lines perhaps a little too comfortably. There are ideas like creationism, the morality of abortion, the history of the singular they, Lafferism, that I am unwilling to ever discuss again.
I don't wish to add to your stress or divert the conversation further. Someday we'll have to discuss economics since that is where the "left" seems to be the most in denial of reality to me. Your disdain for "market forces" always gives me pause. Another time, stay mellow now.
I was talking about conservatives active online. To a close approximation they’re all trolls. I’ve been doing this since the early 90s and it’s always been that way.
The civil ones just repeat the lies with less confrontational words. Instead of “Trump won” they say “doubts about election integrity.”
The coming Republican dog fight will be interesting. DeSantis may be more effective in pushing Trump aside than any Democrat. The MAGA Trumpsters are more vocal on-line, but he may have less appeal than people think. Trump's greatest strength is progressives. If the more liberal Democrats can push the progressives aside it will be hard to elect a Republican. I didn't even vote in the midterms. I would have just written in no acceptable candidate on all of them.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/desantis-vs-trump-pits-accomplishments-against-narrative-conservative-election-2024-republican-woke-populist-candidate-florida-tallahassee-e8b473dc?st=olxrxjklq4kyrh0&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
I agree that the woke shit is a real danger. Nominally liberal parents will vote Republican to protect their kids from the surgeons and even aside from the malignant "trans" shit, there is the politically potent Annoying Factor. I get equality and fairness, I don't see any point in this inclusion and gender-neutrality nonsense.
What will kill DeSantis is the camera. He is a deeply unlikeable guy and he's just too extreme in his intolerance and desire for control.
Trump has gone batshit crazy, first losing the election and then all the legal troubles. When someone finally gets around to slapping the cuffs on him he's going to literally go nuts.
“Where are they?” Enrico Fermi. Thanks for this Chris. The elusive intelligent life forms
Yeah but now we know the answer.