***Official Political Discussion Thread***

[balldontlie206]

Trump physically running so unbelievable no AI generated image in the world could fool me.

 

[reconic supreme]

 

[AEA18]

I hope that's fake

 

[kdawg]

The AI has obviously been reading his medical reports and not what he actually weighs.

 

[IATT]

 

[Comparison Ford]

Republicans are wild, man. Their boy might get arrested so the play is to say "No no no, the guy who would indict him should be arrested!" Their logic, tactics and gaslighting are insane. You couldn't even get away with this **** in grade school

His anesthesiologist neighbor needs to come out of retirement and put ol’ boy to sleep.

For good.

 

[Methodical Management]

Well i'll be damned, Webster's actually has a decent definition of the word as it was before the people perpetuating said racial and social injustices decided to use it as propane.

ˈwōk. chiefly US slang. : aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues especially of racial and social injustice.

'Woke' Is Just Another Word for Liberal

What many conservative critics of wokeness actually oppose is the pursuit of equality.

www.theatlantic.com

Mandel herself later offered this definition of woke on Twitter: “A radical belief system suggesting that our institutions are built around discrimination, and claiming that all disparity is a result of that discrimination. It seeks a radical redefinition of society in which equality of group result is the endpoint, enforced by an angry mob.” The right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro offered a similar description.

I like Mandel’s definition because it makes the concept seem so reasonable that it requires a few modifiers and a straw man about mob enforcement to evoke the proper amount of dread in the reader. If you describe the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, you don’t need to add that it was “radical” to get most people to understand that it was bad. But the claim that “American institutions are built around discrimination” is just a straightforward account of history. And if few of the people who are caricatured as woke would argue that all disparities result from discrimination, most of them would agree that many key disparities along the axes of class, race, and gender do. But either the history, policy, and structure of the American economy matter or they don’t.

To claim the reverse, that people who are rich or white or male are just better than everyone else—to object to “equality of group result” as a goal, as if it’s absurd to believe that people from across the boundaries of the biological fiction of race could be equal—reveals a prejudice so overt that it practically affirms the “woke” side of the argument. The “radical redefinition of society” that many of the so-called woke seek is simply that it lives up to its stated commitments. And one really could, I suppose, describe that as radical—the abolition of slavery, the ratification of women’s suffrage, and the end of Jim Crow were all once genuinely radical positions whose adoption redefined American society.

Those transitions were only possible because, as Mandel’s definition inadvertently concedes, the ideology she opposes is grounded in fact. The United States could not have been created without displacing the people who were already living here. Its Constitution preserved slavery, which remained an engine of the national economy well into the 19th century. Among the first pieces of federal legislation was a bill limiting naturalization to free white people. Yet not even all white men could vote at the nation’s founding—property requirements shut out many until around 1840—and universal white male suffrage (sometimes including noncitizens!) was paired with the explicit disenfranchisement of Black men, even in some northern states. The nation was nearly rent in two because the slave economy and the social hierarchy it created were precious enough, even to men who did not own slaves, that they took up arms to defend the institution of human bondage with their life. After the Civil War, the former Confederates reimposed white supremacy and subjected the emancipated to an apartheid regime in which they had few real rights, a regime my mother was born into and my grandparents fled. For most of the history of the United States, Black people could not vote and women could not vote; American immigration policy in the early 20th century was based on eugenics and an explicit desire to keep out those deemed nonwhite; the mid-century American prosperity unleashed by the New Deal that conservatives recall with such nostalgia was stratified by race.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. These things are real; they happened. To believe that the disadvantages of race, class, and gender imposed lawfully over centuries never occurred or entirely disappeared in just a few decades is genuinely “radical” in a negative way; to believe that creating those disadvantages was wrong and that they should be rectified is not. The idea that no one ever succeeds based on advantages unrelated to their personal abilities is likewise radical, and also ludicrous. But you can, perhaps, understand why one of the richest men in the world would consider the opposing idea—that where many people end up in life is the result of unearned advantages—to be a “woke mind virus” that should be eradicated. That kind of thinking leads to higher marginal tax rates for people with private planes.

You know you're down bad when you have to make a mortal enemy of both empathy and history.

my point is people shouldn't pretend like your enemies are drooling buffoons and lie about their history to make the narrative stick.

I swear progressives brains turn to total mush when this topic is brought up.

I survived on socialist public assistance… by myself?

Of the many fallacies marshalled against reparations, one of the most offensive has to be this assumption that only White people pay taxes.

Even if you want to entertain this Republican fantasy of equal opportunity chattel slavery, and I don't recommend it, the general premise here is that "White people aren't the only ones who owned slaves, so why should we have to pay reparations for slavery?"

The reparations in question would be paid by the government, as a means of redress for government complicity in racial discrimination. It's impossible to argue against government complicity in slavery, though overwhelming factual evidence and shame have done little to discourage the attempt, but even if we pretend, as conservatives are wont, that slavery is "ancient history," this alone does not exculpate federal and local governments from their role in creating and maintaining systemic racial inequality.

Shawn Rochester recently placed a rather conservative estimate on the financial cost of anti-Black racism in the United States, amounting to $70 trillion.

As California considers establishing a Freedom Affairs Agency, in the shadow of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, it's worth remembering the government's refusal to make whole the 67,000 depositors of the Freedman's Bank after its fifty White trustees frittered away their savings through a series of corrupt investments and bad gambles.

More locally, California's state and municipal governments were abundantly intertwined with discriminatory housing policies. Richard Rothstein's popular The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America includes, within its first chapter, an account of such policies in the San Francisco Bay Area. The city of Milpitas, for example, passed an emergency ordinance in 1953 prohibiting the construction of rental apartments in favor of single family homes to keep Black families from moving in to work in Ford's recently relocated manufacturing facility. To maintain eligibility for government-backed FHA and VA mortgages, developers had to conform to racist underwriting policies that explicitly forbade sales to Black borrowers. This, coupled with the Federal Highway Act - funded at ten times the rate of public transit - relegated Black factory workers to low quality rental dwellings in distant outcroppings, prohibiting even skilled workers from keeping their own jobs unless they had access to a car (or carpool) and a tolerance for extended commutes. The average home value in Milpitas, according to Zillow, is now $1,283,519.

Similar examples abound.

Leaving soon from a library near youth:

This is not some unfortunate accident of ancient history, but a willful, concerted, sustained practice facilitated by all levels of government.

 

[IATT]

 

[whywesteppin]

Has anybody been arrested yet?

Yawn.

 

[IATT]

 

[IATT]

 

[IATT]

 

[wavycrocket]

This has been widely known for 40 years. It’s very interesting to see the “oh ****” response .



I was reading the comments in a related video, and this made me chuckle

When the same **** comes out about trump, both bushes etc in 20 years, the same people will say the same ****

They all LEGIT cheated in elections. Plus Real scandals that have long lasting effects from today. War on drugs (Nixon/Reagan), Reaganomics, Iran Contra (Bush, Barr, Reagan), 2000 election Iraq War, Russia etc etc





Edit, Roger Stone & Manafort we’re involved in Reagan’s treason and “October surprise” as well

 

[IATT]

 

[IATT]

dwalk31

 

[rexanglorum]

The least unhinged Skip Bayless fan...

 

[Belgium]

Oof

 

[had pants]

 

[Belgium]

Oof

The judge set a very unusually rapid timetable for this crime-fraud exception dispute. Latest update in this Twitter thread (2h ago) is at the bottom. Btw for legal news, this is a great reporter to follow on Twitter

 

[IATT]

 

[IATT]

 

[IATT]

‘Under His Wings’: Leaked Emails Reveal an Anti-Trans ‘Holy War’

Leaked emails from anti-trans lobbyists and state lawmakers read, at times, like scripts from “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

www.vice.com

 

[IATT]

This guy

 

[Based Jesus]

From now on I refuse to do my taxes any other way

 

[Nike Jordan]

This guy

I see Scam Jones is still on his ********. He knows that Trump isn't President anymore, right?