Racism is alive and well, Thanks Trump and his supporters!

[psiberzerker]

my question is, why will anyone ever employ Erin Ashton  (or whatever her name is), the Mom of the young person selling without a permit, after seeing the behavior and language of this 'Mom'.

No wonder she finds herself unemployed, and is out screeching for folks to buy her daughter's cold water. The kid can be understood, less so for the mom.

You speaking as a prospective employer, or one of the millions of people looking for jobs under the "Your Fired" administration?

Or another judgemental conservative armchair behaviorologist moralizing for people they don't even know?

I don't think she really cared about her job prospects at the time.  My question is:  Why do you, now?

[Athos_131]

Because wypipo.

#Resist

[joan1984]

  Since you are a snide punk, generally, I will skip your question for me.

#chokeonit

[psiberzerker]

Since you are a snide punk, generally, I will skip your question for me.

More ad hominem in lieu of a contribution?  Yeah, that was rhetorical anyway.  That means I wasn't expecting a meaningful answer.

[joan1984]

Since you are a snide punk, generally, I will skip your question for me.

More ad hominem in lieu of a contribution?  Yeah, that was rhetorical anyway.  That means I wasn't expecting a meaningful answer.

Sorry, psiberzerker, I misspoke.

I thought Athos had asked the question, and responded accordingly.

As an answer, just seems her seeking attention with the social sites will call attention to her attitude, and such an attitude will not lure potential employers to be even curious about hiring her, or learning more about her... just a first impression, no biggie.

[psiberzerker]

LOL!  I got mistaken for Pathos?  I really need to change my signature.

You guys really need to start thinking before you start lashing out at random.

[Lois]

Please get a vocabulary.  Snowflake.

Oh, the irony here.  Seriously, you're telling someone, on a story board, to get a vocabulary, and all you can come up with is "Snowflake?"

"Snowflake" is a term that right-wingers often fling at liberals, so he was just throwing the term back.

I believe the term is meant to deride those that have a melt-down any time someone is faced with what they view as offensive.  Plenty of those on both sides.

[Jed_]

I think it would be nice if everyone stopped talking as if they’re two groups of bullies on an elementary school playground.  I’ve been guilty of the name calling too, but I’ve gotten sick of it.

[joan1984]

Agreed, and please accept my sincere apology. We agree sometimes, sometimes not, and never wanted to associate you with him in any way.

LOL!  I got mistaken for Pathos?  I really need to change my signature.

You guys really need to start thinking before you start lashing out at random.

[psiberzerker]

Agreed, and please accept my sincere apology. We agree sometimes, sometimes not, and never wanted to associate you with him in any way.

Well, okay, apology accepted.  I Dis/agree with just about everyone.  Nobody's 100% wrong 24/7, and Athos is a consistent prolific contributor to the discussion here.

Nobody's 100% right all the time either, and honestly trying to be is exhausting.  Again, thanks for being so understanding.

I mostly thought it was funny, because Athos goes out of his way to stand out.

#Respect.

[Athos_131]

SEE IT: Trump supporter berates landscapers because they're 'Mexican,' calls them 'rapists and animals'

#Resist

[Athos_131]

We Have a Crisis of Democracy, Not Manners

Last year, the white nationalist Richard Spencer was kicked out of his Virginia gym after another member confronted him and called him a Nazi. This incident did not generate a national round of hand-wringing about the death of tolerance, perhaps because most people tacitly agree that it’s O.K. to shun professional racists.

It’s a little more complicated when the professional racist is the president of the United States. The norms of our political life require a degree of bipartisan forbearance. But treating members of Donald Trump’s administration as ordinary public officials rather than pariahs does more to normalize bigotry than exercising alongside a white separatist.

Over the last week, several Trump administration officials and supporters have been publicly shamed. On Friday night, the Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a farm-to-table restaurant in Lexington, Va. That morning, protesters blasted a recording of sobbing migrant kids outside the home of Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s secretary of homeland security.

A few days before that, Nielsen left an upscale Mexican restaurant near the White House after protesters confronted her, chanting, “If kids don’t eat in peace, you don’t eat in peace!” The Trump adviser Stephen Miller was also yelled at in a Mexican restaurant — someone called him a fascist, though he may not regard that as an insult. The same night that Sanders was denied service, Pam Bondi, Florida’s Trump-supporting attorney general, was heckled outside a movie theater where she’d gone to see a documentary about Mister Rogers. Adding to the furor, Representative Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, urged people to keep jeering at members of Trump’s cabinet when they’re out and about, saying, “You tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”


Naturally, all this has led to lots of pained disapproval from self-appointed guardians of civility. A Washington Post editorial urged the protesters to think about the precedent they are setting. “How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?” it asked.

Of course, this is not hard to imagine at all, since abortion opponents have assassinated abortion providers in their homes and churches, firebombed their clinics and protested at their children’s schools. The Roman Catholic Church has shamed politicians who support abortion rights by denying them communion. The failure to acknowledge this history is a sign of the reflexive false balance that makes it hard for the mainstream media to grapple with the asymmetric extremism of the Republican Party.

I’m somewhat agnostic on the question of whether publicly rebuking Trump collaborators is tactically smart. It stokes their own sense of victimization, which they feed on. It may alienate some persuadable voters, though this is just a guess. (As we saw in the indignant media reaction to Michelle Wolf’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner routine, some pundits project their own concern with Beltway decorum onto swing voters, who generally pay less attention to the news than partisans.)

On the other hand, there’s a moral and psychic cost to participating in the fiction that people who work for Trump are in any sense public servants. I don’t blame staff members at the Virginia restaurant, the Red Hen, for not wanting to help Sanders unwind after a hard week of lying to the public about mass child abuse. Particularly when Sanders’s own administration is fighting to let private businesses discriminate against gay people, who, unlike mendacious press secretaries, are a protected class under many civil rights laws.

Whether or not you think public shaming should be happening, it’s important to understand why it’s happening. It’s less a result of a breakdown in civility than a breakdown of democracy. Though it’s tiresome to repeat it, Donald Trump eked out his minority victory with help from a hostile foreign power. He has ruled exclusively for his vengeful supporters, who love the way he terrifies, outrages and humiliates their fellow citizens. Trump installed the right-wing Neil Gorsuch in the Supreme Court seat that Republicans stole from Barack Obama. Gorsuch, in turn, has been the fifth vote in decisions on voter roll purges and, on Monday, racial gerrymandering that will further entrench minority rule.

All over the country, Republican members of Congress have consistently refused to so much as meet with many of the scared, furious citizens they ostensibly represent. A great many of these citizens are working tirelessly to take at least one house of Congress in the midterms — which will require substantially more than 50 percent of total votes, given structural Republican advantages — so that the country’s anti-Trump majority will have some voice in the federal government.

But unless and until that happens, millions and millions of Americans watch helplessly as the president cages children, dehumanizes immigrants, spurns other democracies, guts health care protections, uses his office to enrich himself and turns public life into a deranged phantasmagoria with his incontinent flood of lies. The civility police might point out that many conservatives hated Obama just as much, but that only demonstrates the limits of content-neutral analysis. The right’s revulsion against a black president targeted by birther conspiracy theories is not the same as the left’s revulsion against a racist president who spread birther conspiracy theories.

Faced with the unceasing cruelty and degradation of the Trump presidency, liberals have not taken to marching around in public with assault weapons and threatening civil war. I know of no left-wing publication that has followed the example of the right-wing Federalist and run quasi-pornographic fantasies about murdering political enemies. (“Close your eyes and imagine holding someone’s scalp in your hands,” began a recent Federalist article.) Unlike Trump, no Democratic politician I’m aware of has urged his or her followers to beat up opposing demonstrators.

Instead, some progressive celebrities have said some bad words, and some people have treated administration officials with the sort of public opprobrium due members of any other white nationalist organization. Liberals are using their cultural power against the right because it’s the only power they have left, and people have a desperate need to say, and to hear others say, that what is happening in this country is intolerable.

Sometimes, their strategies may be poorly conceived. But there’s an abusive sort of victim-blaming in demanding that progressives single-handedly uphold civility, lest the right become even more uncivil in response. As long as our rulers wage war on cosmopolitan culture, they shouldn’t feel entitled to its fruits. If they don’t want to hear from the angry citizens they’re supposed to serve, let them eat at Trump Grill.

#Resist

[Jed_]

We Have a Crisis of Democracy, Not Manners

We have both.  I read this article earlier today.

And, I agree the crisis to our democracy is exponentially far worse than the one of manners.  But, unless the manners aspect is curbed on the left, Trump wins and the crisis becomes even more worse.

[Athos_131]

These Are the 'White Moderates' MLK Warned Us About

The words of Martin Luther King Jr. are usually poorly used, so much so that even invoking his wisdom onto a given situation can become a limp cliche. But it’s hard to witness the collective hand wringing from Democratic leadership and their allies and and their call for civility without considering King’s word on the white moderate in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”:

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

The modus operandi of King’s white moderate is the playbook of Democratic Party and centrist, Democrat friendly media establishments: Play nice; invoke the importance of civility to those who have none; don’t make too much noise, and distance yourself from those who do.

Who is this for?

A cursory glance at Twitter and anecdotal discussions with friends don’t represent the full spectrum of Americans who are depending on the Democratic Party (reluctantly or otherwise) to right some of the Trump administration’s wrongs. But it feels safe to deduce that if these calls for “civility” were meant for the Democrats’ base, they seem to be falling on frustrated ears. “Be nice to administrative collaborators and and conspirators of a sickening child separation domestic policy” is a demoralizing hill for Democrats to die on.

Constituents aren’t calling for powerful Democrats to support some kind of campaign of bloodlust, but they are tired of Democrats being spineless and more concerned with maintaining decorum than seeking justice. As a (good) Washington Post op-ed by former Gizmodo Media Group Special Projects Desk Deputy Editor Tom Scocca published Tuesday made plain, “fretting about ‘civility’ is a luxury for pundits.” It’s also the luxury of elected officials who can easily suggest that frustrated constituents just calm down and vote when their careers and schmoozy relationships with Republican counterparts on the hill depend on it. These are the “white moderates” MLK warned us about.

There’s something absurdly out of touch about party leaders, 2020 hopefuls, and pundits taking the time to dampen the harmless catharsis of seeing those who are paid to defend Trumps most shameful policy decisions being shamed in non-violent acts of direct action. It’s tone policing a constituency that is sick of the atrocities this administration gets away with, wagging the finger at those who don’t feel morally compromised by tales of powerful administration officials being mildly inconvenienced at restaurants.

The condescension and ahistorical comparisons won’t galvanize voters to the polls this fall. And if the Democrats continue to encourage their base to quell the peaceful, righteous anger of their base, they deserve to lose.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Trump’s VA pick, once a defender of Confederate symbols, built his career serving polarizing figures

He started as a young aide to Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), the five-term Senate firebrand who denounced Martin Luther King Jr. and once called gay people “weak, morally sick wretches.” He served as a top aide to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who lost his leadership post after defending a fellow senator’s segregationist campaign for president decades earlier. And he joined the inner circle of former defense secretary and Iraq War architect Donald H. Rumsfeld before returning to the Pentagon last year to run military personnel policy for the Trump administration.

Throughout, Wilkie showed a willingness to fight on the front lines of his bosses’ culture wars. Earlier this year he led efforts to justify Trump’s near wholesale ban on transgender troops. In 1997, he rebutted a Democratic proposal to ensure equal pay for working women. And in 1993, he publicly defended a failed push by Helms to support an organization whose logo included the Confederate flag.

Wilkie grew up visiting U.S. battlefields with his father and developed a lifelong fascination with military history, including that of his ancestors, who fought for the Confederacy. He was, as recently as 2005, a fixture at the annual memorial ceremonies in Washington held by descendants of Confederate veterans around the birthday of Jefferson Davis. Wilkie also was a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group that defends public displays of the Confederate symbols.

#Resist

[psiberzerker]

Wilkie?  Ah, fuck.  As if the VA didn't have enough problems to begin with.  

{I grew up in NC during the Helms era.  My dealer in Angier had a photo of him with Jesse, smoking a joint.  Jesse wasn't smoking the joint, my dealer was, but he had the fucking Senator for Johnston County RIGHT THERE!  Not a fake.  Tobacco is the #1 Legal cash Crop.  Johnston County Sherrifs would pull you over, and smoke your weed, right in front of you, to teach you a lesson.

"Where'd you get this from, Boy?  This McClendon's?"

"Yeah, Earl.  This tastes like McClendon's new batch."

The same dealer got a call, from the same Sheriff's Department to tell them the DEA was in town.  So, he'd call us, and we'd go out to help him pull the camo nets over his field.  Then, we'd wave from the porch at the Helicopter flying over.  True story!}

[xXshepXx]

SEE IT: Trump supporter berates landscapers because they're 'Mexican,' calls them 'rapists and animals'

#Resist

This quote I found yesterday sums it up nicely

If you think that Mexico is only sending drug dealers and rapists,
but also worry that Mexicans are going to take your job...

What the fuck do you do for a living?

[Jed_]

I’d like to caution the comparisons to Nazis and Hitler.  It’s not that such comparisons don’t fit at all when applied in the various threads either to public figures or possibly even forum members, but we’ve all become tone death as soon as we hear them (even those of us that use these comparisons).  I know my eyes glaze over and I stop paying attention as soon as I hear or read a comparison to Nazis or Hitler.

I once read in Guns & Ammo magazine of all places such a caution.  It was applied to statements, posters and bumper stickers popular with gun rights advocates about how Hitler and the Nazis implemented gun registration in Germany prior to the war.  It seems the author of the article couldn’t find any evidence the statements were true.  He went on to say something I found to be profound:  You can tell who has lost an argument, as they are the first to bring up a comparison to Hitler or Nazis.

Besides, I always thought Trump was a lot more like Mussolini, or perhaps Ceaușescu.

[Katiebee]

The unfortunate thing is, Joan posts like Goebbels would. The comparison is very apt.

[Athos_131]

#Resist