President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

LOL. Of course it has. Bill went whining to someone he knows on the board, no doubt. What a fucking piece of shit that guy is.

 

Just plane stupid

 

Really like ya, man, but I have to disagree with you on this talking point. Hunter S. Thompson once wrote or possibly quoted someone else when he wrote, "Kill the head and the body will die." Elite universities are the de facto head of our educational system. The right is already attacking ed on a grassroots level by packing school boards as a way to get control of what is happening in the classrooms and to give nascent hard right people a toe-hold in politics. That they are now working from the top down should be another dead canary when it comes to the crumbling away at our ability to nurture intellectual growth, critical thinking, and free thought.

Schools can go from being places for fostering creativity and encouraging an embrace of personal agency and responsibility to a mill for creating compliant bodies to fill roles in a bigger plan to roll our social/economic mores back to the late Nineteenth, early Twentieth Century.

That's not to say we shouldn't talk about the election. Frankly, the fact that so many people are blindly following the MAGA movement scares me. We can and should have meaningful conversations about both issues. Even though I am not a parent, I am someone who does what I can to encourage young people to find their intellectual true north. To see children forced into lockstep to feed a social machine is tragic. We should be alarmed by this.

 

Must have been lazy ghetto thugs installing those jet windows. Affirmative action hires.

 

On MAGA...
I can understand conservatives feeling confident in the leadership abilities of every GOP candidate up to Donald Trump. He just does not compute and I have tried to see what they see where he is concerned. My default idea was that this cult-like movement has its roots in fear and anger. As Freidman at Esquire (or was it The Atlantic?) wrote a few years ago, the cruelty is the point.

I bring this up because last week I was in rural Kentucky at a variety store (what some people might think of as a general store) where there were some youngish English men shooting the breeze with the older Amish gentleman at the counter. They were talking about the Colorado ballot and how that shouldn't happen in America.

"Nobody is hated the way people hate Trump."

Their discourse about Donald Trump was weirdly personal. At first blush it was like listening to people talk about a relative or friend. In retrospect, it was clearer to me that they saw him as a peer, someone who might not be acceptable to the people they perceive as elite, educated types. Another local English man came in, he was older and he obviously knew the two hanging out there. He glared at them as they continued to get themselves worked up over what they saw as America's mistreatment of Donald Trump. He made eye contact with one of them and, well, if looks could kill... They simmered down and left.

He spoke to the man behind the counter in German. Language cloaking is nothing new, and while I respect it, this conversation needs to be noted. (Rough translation from memory follows.)

English: You don't have to put up with that.

Amish: They're young and stupid. They'll learn.

English: His grandfather and great-grandfather went to fight Nazis. He should respect that. I told him there were all kinds of people, including Anabaptists, who died in the camps. He needs to think and pray about that. I am sorry.

Amish: You have no need to apologize. There is a reason you are here and I am here, my friend.

Those young men felt angry and alienated. MAGA speaks to the way we are hard-wired to respond to tribal calls. They were just two guys in a pickup truck in Kentucky, but multiply that and think about how they have been underestimated in the recent past.

 

Yassss, as always, when ya got nuthin', blamed it on the brown peoples ...

 

Paging Mr. Lee. Mr. Bill Lee, you have a call on the white courtesy phone.

 

Florida is rapidly becoming a cesspool.

Local officials will no longer be able to investigate police misconduct under proposal

 

The same Fox that tried to blame Biden when the hurricane hit Southern California last year, right?