US Politics November 2017

i could conceive of one, General

maybe cuz Nixon was president when i was eight

Conyers quits leadership post

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-annoyed-ivanka-over-her-213413193.html

I endorsed Luther Strange in the Alabama Primary. He shot way up in the polls but it wasn’t enough. Can’t let Schumer/Pelosi win this race. Liberal Jones would be BAD!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 26, 2017

a stirring and nuanced examination of the roy moore race. "Liberal Jones" not really up to his usual nickname standards though.

when i was home on thanksgiving break i listened to a christian radio station that seamlessly morphed into a conservative politics show. in that show, the host made the case that although moore's actions were potentially regrettable - but not proven, let's keep that in mind, only alleged at this point - it would be an absolute catastrophe for a democrat to win the seat. bad for the tax bill, bad for obamacare repeal, bad for abortion, you name it.

so far, pretty standard arguments for a trump supporter. but then it was funny because a key part of his argument was that whoever wins - moore or jones - they'll only be holding the seat until the 2018 elections anyway. so, he said, even if you had "moral objections" to moore - and remember, alleged! nothing proven! i thought this country still believed in innocent until proven guilty, alleged! - he was only going to hold the seat for a little less than a year, anyway, and then the 2018 election would give alabama voters a chance to start with a clean slate. so why not vote for moore so that he can be present in the senate for these key votes in the next few months?

of course, that's wrong. the special election is to seat someone through to the 2020 election, not the 2018 election. but whatever, he went on like that for an entire segment. i kept listening to the rest of the show to see if anyone would correct him but it didn't happen. the weirdest part was the transition from a sermon (by Charles Swindoll, from a 16-part series on Paul, apparently) to this political show, which imbued the show with a sense of religious guidance and sponsorship, even though they barely mentioned anything spiritual. instead, it was just talking points in the form of misleading fragments of facts and outright lies, spoonfed to the listener in repetitive steady doses. if you ever wonder how evangelicals end up being the biggest supporters of someone like Moore, at least part of the answer is in the absolute garbage they apparently listen to

i got a lib-er-al jonnnnnes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlhWPVJNAOo

if you ever wonder how evangelicals end up being the biggest supporters of someone like Moore, at least part of the answer is in the absolute garbage they apparently listen to

That and being stupid.

the collective cognitive albedo of the southern evangelical / prosperity gospel hive mind exceeds matte black and edges into stealth bomber territory. No reflection is possible without specialized, highly calibrated instruments.

I've read numerous interviews with seemingly reasonable people who vote exclusively for anti-abortion candidates, even when those candidates are otherwise terrible people. With such a low bar, calling him Liberal Jones is probably effective enough.

/ if you ever wonder how evangelicals end up being the biggest supporters of someone like Moore, at least part of the answer is in the absolute garbage they apparently listen to/

That and being stupid.

the collective cognitive albedo of the southern evangelical / prosperity gospel hive mind exceeds matte black and edges into stealth bomber territory. No reflection is possible without specialized, highly calibrated instruments.

I’m confused. I admit I was being obtuse with my phrasing but what did you think I meant?

i just keep hearing it to the tune of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDRaKC53DGA

1/ The NYTimes is densely defending their article by claiming it was intended to shed light on the normalcy of racism in American society.

I agree this is a worthy topic of discussion.

So, let’s talk about all the things the Times could have *actually* achieved this. . . . pic.twitter.com/9ZsHMxsz8p

— Mangy Jay (@magi_jay) November 26, 2017

^^ thread

Dunno if this shit NYT piece was covered or not. But boy, was it a shit piece.

That worthless, reprehensible article is just begging for it.

"Nazis: they're just like us!"

"Yeah, I know they have an abhorrent racist ideology, but what are they like ... as people?"

"He might be a Nazi, but he mows the lawn like anybody else. And that lawn is impeccable."

Otm. Might me my twitter bubble, but NYT deserves all the scorn and tbf to be hanged for this next level type of normalisation imo.

'Nazi's wipe their asses, too. Who knew all that time that nazi's... are just like you and me.'

Libs will always give a pass to the NYT. I doubt they lost any subscriptions/money/clicks over this piece, which was basically trolling their readership.

I actually thought about that and then figured we didn't delve into it here because discussing the useless mendacity of the NYT in covering basically anything at this point is kind of deserving of its own thread, like the ILE edition of the track-by-track Billy Joel thread, except way harder on the participants

have you heard "Storm Front"

oh hey xpost! Fuck you, we unsubscribed from the NYT in 2009. Who's getting a pass from who?

writer in the nyt
normalizing nazis

Are those Paul Simon lyrics?

Tombot, it would probably be more like the equivalent of the 'Is the Guardian worse than it used to be' thread?

Idk over 'ere NYT is still revered and looked at/up to by all the "srs press". Not saying that changed all of a sudden, but boy was this a terrible normalising piece.

people get really worked up about one article huh

that was my other thing, this one about the Hovaters is kind of a drop in the bucket given how fucking horrid that birdcage liner has been since feels like forever, as this quartz piece cheekily suggests in the opening paragraph: https://qz.com/1138080/the-problem-with-the-new-york-times-normalizing-profile-of-nazi-sympathizer-tony-hovater/

when you're getting pwned on the regular by vox and atlantic media staff bloggers, maybe it's time to wonder if maybe jumping on the "color photography" bandwagon in 1997 was the right move!

well they did link to the online store page where you could buy the guy's swastika armband.

but there's also the thrush (RIP for sex pesting) & haberman stenography, this week's new freidman column about how saudi arabia is good, the fact they got rid of the public editor, this thing which doesn't mention that the subject of the article is a known fraud who works with cambridge analytica, etc. also iraq. when the stakes are high it's mostly an extremely bad newspaper.

this is really the quiddity of the NYT:

The NYT's constant stream of lowkey sympathetic portraits of racists and sexists is what happens when you believe, institutionally, that your real audience already possesses all the correct beliefs

— Erin Kissane (@kissane) November 26, 2017

Eh. The editorial page is a cloaca like most newspapers. Dunno what you expect! I still read the news with pleasure every day, always with caution.

I don't think they believe their beliefs are correct. I think they think liberalism is wrong, and the ludicrous puffery about the ruling class that we have a thread dedicated to is of a piece with the fawning profiles of angry scum from flyover exurbs. The entire editorial posture is self-flagellation and kowtowing to the truly right and powerful, mostly scions of resource-extraction economies and those they patronize.

i was not impressed with that Hovater profile, but he still came across as a hateful moron, no?

There might have been too much emphasis on how “normal” and “polite” he seemed, I guess, but they say that about serial killers too.

I don’t think anyone became a racist after reading that.

people get really worked up about one article huh

This is not the first time they've done this.

Or became softer on racism. Who knows, but the idea of “normalization” might need unpacking. Trump was never normalized — the Times treated him as a freak the whole election — and he still won.

i mean the fact is that the NYT produces the world's best reporting and also a bunch of shitty stuff. it sucks but boycotting the paper is probably not the best strategy

People are boycotting it over this????

the Times treated him as a freak the whole election 

And yet they treated many of his most outrageous lies and obfuscations as worthy of serious consideration

I am not boycotting the Times over this fyi, i gave up on them after judith miller

There have been scores of reasons to give up on them over the last few years tbh, anyone here who is surprised hasn't been paying attention

otoh their Magazine a week ago ran an outstanding expose of how our goddamn Military Death Machine in Iraq lies about killing civilians, maybe read that for balance.

yes that was good

The anecdote I bring up a lot is Errol Morris' "Mr. Death." The first cut of the film had no editorializing, no experts to refute his Holocaust denial. Morris figured, hey, give 'em enough rope. But infamously. when Morris screened the film at Harvard there were enough people at least giving credence to his crazy beliefs that he reconsidered and recut with experts making clear that his subject's beliefs were not just offensive but wrong.

same thing when he showed The Unknown Known; he said people kept telling him he was humanizing Rumsfeld when it was clear to me he straight up loathed the motherfucker but he seems to have given up pleasing the crowd

Something a friend of mine posted (publicly) on Facebook:

Donald Trump’s election to the presidency was the culmination of a six-year period during which he launched himself in politics by promoting a baseless, openly racist conspiracy theory challenging Barack Obama’s citizenship. Since Trump won the election, and even before it, pundits and reporters have struggled to find ways to insist that, because so many people could select him as their president, he must be more complicated than he appears. He isn’t. He is, as Steve Bannon has said admiringly, Archie Bunker. He’s a man who could, without shame or hesitation, promote a racist conspiracy theory, and who has never apologized for it, though towards the end of his campaign, he did claim that it was actually Hillary Clinton who had started it and that he had “finished it” by bullying Obama into finding and releasing his birth certificate, which Trump has also said is a fake. He may be other (bad) things, but he’s never any better than the man who did that.

No outlet had worked harder than the New York Times to publish articles explaining that there are a great many good, decent people who voted for Trump. This is a lie, but you can see why they do it. Trump’s whole existence testifies to the fact that telling lies is fun. And there are deeper reasons for it: nobody wants to seem close-minded or judgmental towards those who are culturally different from you or with whom you have political differences.

One constant of the pieces analyzing Trump’s appeal that appeared immediately after the election is that there are reasons besides racism for voting for Donald Trump. And while it’s true that all the people who voted for Trump aren’t personally repulsed by racism—a group that, so far as I know, consists entirely of racists—there ARE reasons besides racism for voting for Donald Trump. There’s xenophobia. There’s misogyny. There’s homophobia. There’s a belief that a TV character is smarter than all the politicians put together. There’s a belief that consumer protections and environmental regulations are breaking the backs of the little guy. There’s the conviction that basic civility and any degree of intelligence are stifling our society and we need a bigoted, stupid daddy figure to yell abuse at women and nonwhite people all the time. There’s the inexplicable belief that there’s some truth to as much as two percent of the things said on Fox News by people not named Shepard Smith.

There’s the assumption that Donald Trump, an heir to wealth, a marketable name, and valuable contacts who has made such a mess of his business affairs that he had to peddle his ass to Russian oligarchs because American banks would no longer have anything to do with him is some kind of tactical genius. Theres the thought that democracy has gotten out of hand and we need to be more like Russia under someone like Putin, a tough guy who seems to keep his country pretty white and keeps his bitches and queers in their place. There’s the belief that Trump is an acceptable candidate compared to Hillary Clinton on the theory that Hillary Clinton is Satan, or a concern for the protection of fetuses so all-consuming that you are willing to forfeit any protections for the lives and rights of those who have already been born. There are a great many reasons to vote for Donald Trump; there just isn’t a single defensible reason for voting for Donald Trump, one that doesn’t mark the voter as an objectivity terrible person and unpatriotic American. And these aren’t judgements about people’s politics but Morality 101. Donald Trump has the distinction of being probably the only person ever elected president of the United States solely based on the support of garbage people.

The New York Times’s profile of a Trump supporter and self-defined Nazi has gotten a lot of criticism for “normalizing” Nazism, because the reporter respectfully details the trivial details of the subject’s life and dishes it all together with things like his belief that Jews control the media and his wife’s sympathy for George Zimmerman. But all the pieces that have appeared profiling Trump supporters do this. Even though every single person who voted for Donald Trump is a piece of dirt, reporters have insisted on their decency and urged readers to consider their “legitimate concerns”—Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization, or Obama was trying to create a landscape of desolation and poverty because he was homesick for Kenya, stuff like that.

If the Heartland Nazi piece existed in a vacuum, it would be fine, but in the context that the Times and other papers have created, it makes sense that readers would assume the point of it was to make them relate to the Nazi. Are we really supposed to pretend that there are any people who voted for Trump who are on even a slightly higher moral plane than his Nazi supporters? Whatever they think is in their hearts, they all knowingly voted for white supremacy as an electoral choice and a map for America’s future. I’ve been listening to those malignant fuckheads for some time now, and I know how they sound: they don’t want to discriminate against anybody, they don’t hate anyone, they don’t want to hurt anyone, they just want things to feel NORMAL again, the way they did when nobody thought a black man or a woman could get anywhere near the presidential podium.

(And I can tell you that while they might not hate anyone, they can get pretty testy with a white guy who disagrees with them, and that when pushed to the limit they will say things like “What about all the time you’ve said ‘nigger’?” or “Oh, like you’ve never tried to do something with a woman when she was too drunk to know where she was.” One thing I’ve learned pretty recently, now that Trump has made garbage people feel sufficiently empowered to let their freak flags fly, is that garbage people literally believe there are no good people or even any people trying to be good, just garbage people happily wallowing in their own shit like them, and hypocrites who don’t want to own up to what they are. And woe to the white Southerner who can think of any reason to be proud of his “heritage” that doesn’t require the veneration of pro-slavery traitorous pieces of shit who murdered actual loyal Americans, my fellow countrymen, in a “civil” war. But I digress.)

I sometimes see things written by white Southerners who aren’t racist themselves, lord knows, but maybe they had some family who were at the riot that accompanied the integration of Ole Miss or on the jury that turned Byron de la Beckwith loose, and who seem to be demanding absolution for the people they feel connected to who somehow hadn’t received word, a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, that racism is evil and stupid. And I grew up in Mississippi and went to a segregated school that my sometime-Klansman daddy found me to go to and I know from my own experience that we all know that racism is evil and stupid, it’s pretty goddamn obvious, you’d need to have a heart of coal and a head like a compost pit to not figure that out, and some people decide to run with it anyway, because they choose to be garbage. The Times’s profiles of Trump supporters seem to be written from a viewpoint that it’s possible to not know—not if you’re a coastal elitist, of course, but white working class Southerners like me are born stupid and just get dumber as they go along, so you can’t judge them, mustn’t shame them or shun them if they vote the nation into crisis, because the poor rubes can’t possibly know better, and are only to be pitied.

Between the original heartland-Nazi profile and the piece linked to here, the Times ran an acknowledgment of sorts that the profile is unsatisfying, because the reporter failed to get the “Rosebud” moment that would explain why a man would turn Nazi. Has to be one, right? I could never get a job profiling a Nazi, or big-fucking-difference a Trump supporter, or even my father or any of the other racists I’ve known who had some charm and were also fundamentally worthless, because after thinking long and hard about a whole bunch of individual cases that have come my way, I really do think that people come to embrace garbage thinking not because of legitimate concerns or some lightning bolt of the mind but just because they’ve made a conscious decision to be garbage people.

The link mentioned was of course to the Times' editorial response to its pissed-off readers.

explaining that there are a great many good, decent people who voted for Trump. This is a lie

lol

a fan!

In my view, the attacks on this story are positively nuts. Soft on Nazis? It is a superbly reported, superbly rendered story of a homegrown Nazi — the Nazi next door — absolutely chilling in its impact. You don’t always get convenient horns and tails! https://t.co/WxOrYAhJaY

— Jay Nordlinger (@jaynordlinger) November 27, 2017

8% of black voters and 29% of hispanic voters went for Trump. I don’t think these people were all morallt equivalent to Nazis, whatever else you might say about them.

Xp the part of unperson’s post that crut quoted

Trump is a horrifying excuse for a human being whose canpaign was indeed explicitly racists but his voters represent this huge bloc of people who had all kinds of different reasons for voting as they did.

Sorry for the typos

garbage typing