#partisan blame shifting

[alwaysbewoke]

i have to remember not everyone in florida voted for these people in power because it's hard to feel sorry for them sometimes. really hard (watch til the end smfh)

and she's going to turn around the vote for him AGAIN smfh

[bugsbenefit]

hellfire in s5, and how it's Really not looking good for the members

the hellfire club is, in my opinion, one of the most obvious set ups for s5 and i never see enough people acknowledge how blatant the show actually is with it. because it's a directly addressed ongoing issue that slowly worsens over time and directly threatens three main characters (Dustin, Lucas, and Mike), at Least

there's a clear structured progression of the threat getting worse, with a major part of the s4 Hawkins plot being only Jason and his team chasing Eddie down, and by the last episodes of the show the rest of the town sides with them and joins the objective. however, we never get any consequence of the town agreeing with Jason, aside form the kids parents getting reaction shots looking insanely worried. the only thing even resembling partisan participation is a dogwalker (the same man that agreed with Jason first and then caused every other member in the town hall to also agree) informing Jason and co about there being someone in the Creel house. a single character ratting someone out is not pay off for a scene that rallies the entire town with anger and fear. especially because he was the First one to agree with Jason, arguably the next reaction, in parallel to the town house scene, will have everyone else also involve themselves

and everything Jason actually said in the town hall looks INFINITELY worse by the end of the season because he not only died the same day (how odd that must look), the town was also hit by a severe earthquake. (and hell-gates open in town but we don't know how people will react to that yet, or if it will even be immediately obvious to them)

like. it's a Terrible look. and with Eddie being dead now, the main target that represented the hellfire club in s4 and got the primary share of blame is now officially un-prosecutable

s4 also goes out of it's way to associate Lucas, Dustin and Mike explicitly with the hunt on Hellfire, ages before the whole town gets involved

Lucas is put on edge by the basketball's team hostility towards his friends constantly and has to actively lie his way out of the line of fire multiple times. the basketball team is also looking for Dustin to question him about Eddie's whereabouts, even going to his house where a confrontation only doesn't happen because he's not home. and they even manage to go out of their way to drag Mike into it despite him being out of town, when Jason starts a conversation with Nancy specifically to threaten her and then asks about Mike right after

which leads to the other thing; not only are all the kids already on Jason's radar, he's also getting more and more direct with the fact that he doesn't just want to have a nice chat with them (culminating in actually physically attacking Lucas by the last episode)

and if them setting all of the kid members of hellfire up for a bad time wasn't obvious enough, it's also fascinating to see the posters of hellfire we get over the season also show a clear shift in focus

when we see the hellfire club year book photo for the first time the focus is on Eddie. he's who Jason sees as the main culprit and when we get a close up of the burning poster we see Eddie

but when we see the hellfire club photo again 4 episodes later the focus isn't on Eddie anymore. not in dialogue and not visually

the shot is from the Wheeler's pov (Karen's specifically), and the only part of the picture that's in focus is the far right corner, with Mike and Lucas. (makes sense that's her son that's currently being implicated in satanic murders). Eddie never gets unblurred, he's not who the audience is supposed to look at in this shot. verbally Jason is also explicitly blaming the whole club now. it's not just Eddie who's "crazy" and killed Chrissy, it's the whole club who's responsible (it's also very notable that he's handing out yearbook photos of the whole club, not just Eddie. a really distinct prop choice. everyone in town now not only thinks hellfire is directly responsible for multiple ritualistic murders, they also know Exactly who's in the club)

and looking back at the season in hindsight, there's actually more than enough instances that would make the members of Hellfire look kind of guilty, or shady at best, even if someone were to do some research. there's multiple instances of hellfire members lying to the basketball team about hellfire member's whereabouts which definitely doesn't make them look more innocent in the team's eyes. not only do Eddie's band members try to brush them off, Nancy pretends to not even know about Hellfire when Jason asks about Mike, and Lucas goes out of his way to keep Dustin and Eddie's locations from them by deliberately lying and sending them to wrong locations

and that's on top of the entire montage of Dustin and Mike trying to find a substitute player for a single game on the same day a student with no previous affiliation to Eddie Munson dies at his trailer? that looks Horrible in hindsight. especially with them asking pretty much every other student, from almost every club, while both prominently wearing hellfire shirts. if anyone actually remembers them and thinks about the events post Chrissy's death they could definitely make some assumptions

it's just bad looks all around. and that's not even mentioning how they have the potential to look even worse in s5. if it got out Lucas was with Max when she somehow died and broke all her bones? would look horrible. or Dustin now associating with Eddie's dad? and we don't even know how he'll fulfill Eddie's wish to "look after the little sheep"

and even Mike, who didn't even have the chance to attract suspicion post e1 due to being out of town has a whole thing going on with his image paralleling Eddie, with being the other DM and having his s4 style be directly in reference to Eddie's looks

while there's building hostility towards the hellfire members, and the focus (both visually and vocally) switches more to the members Other than Eddie, by the end of the season there just hasn't been a chance for the townsfolk to respond to Jason's speech yet. they all agreed with him, but everything immediately went to shit the same night. however, even the last few minutes of the show, that always have the most direct foreshadowing for the next season, include a shot focusing on the rise of religion and the fearmongering that started with Jason's speech

which serves as a great reminder that the entire town hall just agreed with Hellfire being a satanist cult they need to stop

s4 ends with the hellfire set up being one of the most explicitly obvious plot threads that are about to be a problem for multiple main characters in s5. like the few other obvious established about-to-be struggles: the gates opening, Vecna still being alive, Max being "gone"; we've gotten a full set up there but no payoff yet

and then there's obviously the question of what the people would even DO in s5? they all agreed that Hellfire needed to be stopped, so... what now?

on one hand there's the interesting concept of the town refusing to help the protagonists but they could also be acting as a hostile force against them

say anyone tried to warn the town about the upside down or it's creatures, the chances of people listening to them talk about actual "demons" and reacting in any positive way is probably near 0. even if you saw a Demogorgon nibble on your neighbour an hour ealier, would you really listen to someone you think intentionally opened the Hellgate that let the creatures through in the first place?

but then there's of course the active antagonistic angle they could also take. Jason was calling for Hellfire to be actively opposed and stopped, not passively. and the show Does go out of it's way to show the overcrowded weapons store in multiple shots post Jason-speech

we're supposed to know these people are armed going forward. whether they're buying them to go hunting, or wanting to go shoot Eddie Munson, the weapons are there now... also ignore the 7 separate hellfire wanted posters in the opening shot of the store alone 💀(it's actually 9, i didn't circle the two that are cut off in the bottom corner. that whole board is just plastered with that one photo)

(the implication of what the guns are for couldn't be more obvious if they tried. again, also the scene where Jason tries to intimidate Nancy and directly asks about where Mike is. also the scene where Erica and co try to hide from the basketball team members in the store. the scene features, guns, hellfire posters everywhere, and characters specifically asking about the whereabouts of a member while other people are actively hiding)

and the weapons could play out in a positive way in s5 too, say the lady from next door gets hands on involved and takes shots at the Demobats in her front yard

but the reactionary, scared, and angry town that blames a specific small group of people for everything that's happening could also lead to MCs having to actively worry about getting shot by someone they've seen at the supermarket for 10+ years on top of the supernatural threat

TLDR: re Hellfire, none of these members will have a good time in s5

Edit (because i forgot to include these images and am silly)

Hellfire even makes it on the local news by the end of the season

and in line with the focus shifting from Eddie to the other hellfire members, the news anchor then goes to say that Eddie Munson is presumed dead after the earthquake but that that isn't enough for the town. the news even mentions the conspiracy theory that the hellfire murders CAUSED the earthquake. so anyone who hasn't heard Jason's speech, now they're getting it from a "reputable" source too. call that high quality journalism, let's throw the local highschoolers under the bus

we're supposed to remember the fear of the "satanic cult killing children" that Jason spread to the town. it's still there. and it's not just in the local town hall anymore, its being broadcast on live television. so just in case you didn't catch wind of who caused a "gate to hell" to open in your suburban neighbourhood the first time, the news anchor thankfully tells you who everybody Says is responsible, it's the 14-18 year old satanist serial killers duh

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Amanda Marcotte at Salon:

People are saying if you have a conservative family member, don't invite them to Thanksgiving or Christmas. Like, stay away from them," TikToker Brooker Tee Jones complained. "If that is happening, the devil is definitely winning."  After the November election, a rowdy debate erupted in online spaces over whether it's acceptable to cut off family and friends because of how they voted. Supporters of Kamala Harris expressed a range of views, from a reluctance to burn bridges to a "screw 'em all" mentality. "It's okay to shame someone for doing something shameful," feminist writer Jessica Valenti argued on Instagram. Shunning those who voted for Donald Trump, she added, was "a reasonable response by those of us who are disgusted, anxious, and afraid."

Some on the "Hysteria" podcast agreed with Valenti. But guest Megan Gailey said, "If you think you can bring them over, bring them over." Errin Haines agreed: "We cannot give up on our friends, our family. I think there was too much of that, frankly, after 2016." But that's a liberal podcast, so of course the panelists also offered reassurances that it's OK to disown family members if their Trump vote is "a symptom of larger issues." On the Trump-voter side of the debate, the sentiment has been nearly unanimous: It's an outrage if "woke" friends and family stop speaking to them. The only real disagreement among that cohort is whether this trend is literally the devil's work, or merely liberal "intolerance." One TikTok video that went viral featured a woman crying about being cut off and saying, "I'm completely heartbroken about my family taking it how they are. I never did this to them when Biden won." Conservatives have coined the phrase "vote-shaming," which seems to equate political and ideological conflict with personal choices regarding diet or sexuality. 

Estrangement has always been part of being human, but in recent months, we've seen a deluge of press coverage of the phenomenon. Most stories ignore the question of politics or mention it only in passing, instead blaming the seeming rise in family estrangement on social media, therapy culture and shifting cultural norms that prioritize individual happiness over familial duty. Yet an undercurrent of political tension rumbles right under the surface, a suspicion that this is tied to the increasing partisan polarization driven by the MAGA movement. Perhaps America's most famous estrangement story is the one involving Trump super-donor Elon Musk and his daughter Vivian Wilson, who has publicly denounced her father for refusing to accept her trans identity. Former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger, who served on the House Jan. 6 committee, has repeatedly spoken out about members of his family disowning him over his opposition to Trump, who has threatened to throw Kinzinger in prison.  "On the day after the election, I had several calls from clients that they need to have an appointment as soon as possible," Dr. Farnoosh Nouri, a clinical assistant therapist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, told Salon. She reports that colleagues across the state are reporting the same. "One colleague had 33 calls the day after the election, new clients who wanted to come in." Before 2016, Nouri said, she had not witnessed this kind of political stress on families. After Trump's first win, she saw a spike in college students "struggling with going back home for Thanksgiving holidays, for Christmas holidays." Now the fear and stress are ramping up again. Across social media, the stories are mounting, both from liberals who wonder whether it's time to go no-contact with MAGA parents and from Trump voters who complain about "childish" offspring who no longer speak to them. Nouri's experiences are backed by new statistics from the Public Religion Research Institute, which found that "Democratic voters (23%) are nearly five times as likely as Republican voters (5%) to say they will be spending less time with certain family members because of their political views."

Salon posted a request on Reddit to interview adult children who factored politics into their decision to go no-contact with parents. The response was overwhelming. Contrary to the stereotypes that adult children who make this decision are being callous, impulsive or foolish, the respondents — many of whom said they were in therapy — spoke eloquently about what was often described as a long and emotional decision-making process. 

"I literally thought being a Democrat was a sin"

“I don't know anybody who's gone no-contact with their family just because of politics.” In saying that, a woman Salon will call Ellie echoed a sentiment that came up in nearly every interview with children who have cut off right-wing parents: It's not fair to reduce the dispute to mere political differences. (All adult children and parents interviewed in this article are identified by pseudonyms to protect their privacy.) Ellie's parents, she said, were "extremely, extremely religious" and "very physically violent." This is not uncommon in fundamentalist Christian households, where the biblical proverb about "sparing the rod" is regularly wielded to justify corporal punishment.  The problem, Ellie said, is that in many cases it's not possible "to separate what people believe in politically with their values as a whole." She argued that "Donald Trump and his administration and all these Republicans have been justifying abuse forever," which she compared to the ways her family used religion to rationalize abuse. 

"Children who choose to estrange themselves aren't making a little decision on a whim," explained Joshua Stein, a researcher who tracks online trends, especially those that intersect with psychology and bioethics. Stein has been collecting data on the online discourse about estrangement and says that many children who were raised according to the fundamentalist teachings of James Dobson and Michael Pearl "are now adults and are estranged from their parents." For many such adult children, he says, "It's not the fact that the person is MAGA. It's the fact that you do not feel that it is safe to be around them." Maureen was also raised by parents she describes as devotees of Dobson, a famous proponent of spanking children. "I literally thought being a Democrat was a sin," she said, laughing. "I was very encouraged to get married young, to an older man," she said, but found herself becoming more liberal over the years and eventually left him. Trump's election further strained her relationship with her parents. "I was raised with all the shame, like having sex before marriage was bad," but "then my family was just completely willing to embrace Donald Trump." "All the things that they told me Christianity stood for? No longer matters," Maureen said. Like many of the adult children who spoke with Salon, she went full no-contact with her parents during the COVID pandemic. 

[...]

Blaming "woke ideology"

"I was not invited to my daughter's wedding," Darlene told Salon. "That's how sick these people are, because how do you do that to a mom?" Quite a few parents who have become estranged from their children expressed interest in speaking with Salon, but most declined after learning they would be asked questions about their political views. Darlene was the exception. Like the adult children interviewed, she also saw a connection between politics and her personal situation.  "There's a mindset, there's an entitlement" in younger people, she said, which she believes has led to the government being "out of money." She added, "I don't have beaucoup bucks to just throw it out so that somebody else can make the decision as to how it gets spent, when it's not on the same values that I have." Darlene's daughter is a practicing nurse and aspiring country singer. Darlene says she gave her daughter money to start her band and record an album, but believed that "I was to have no say in how we went about promoting" the music and managing the band. Things turned out differently, in her view: "I just was to give the money and she was at will to do whatever she wanted with it." Darlene also blamed her son-in-law, whose family is "more left" and "very controlling," she believes. (Her daughter did not respond to a request for comment.) She felt that her daughter's unwillingness to speak with her was indicative of a larger social problem: "What's happening to this country if you can't sit down and have a civil conversation?” She felt that Americans are not "discussing what's actually happening to this country" or "trying to find solutions," but "keep raising taxes" instead. Similarly, she said her daughter would not "sit down with me and discuss what was happening with the money," but implied that "I was just to be quiet" when it came to her daughter's music career. 

[...]

Authoritarianism starts at home

Most estranged children and their defenders use intuitive arguments to defend their belief that the personal and political are intertwined. Social science, however, backs them up. One of the best predictors of authoritarian political beliefs — and likely Trump support — is how a person answers questions about the most desirable traits in children:

independence vs. respect for their elders

curiosity vs. good manners

self-reliance vs. obedience

being considerate vs. being well-behaved

People who prefer obedience over curiosity, independence or consideration tend to have authoritarian personalities. As political scientist Matthew MacWilliams found, authoritarians are more likely to be strong Trump supporters. This linkage makes sense, MacWilliams told Salon, because authoritarianism is all about in-group versus out-group thinking. In that worldview, children are expected to "conform to in-group norms, be obedient, be orderly, be disciplined."  MacWilliams added that it's not surprising to see politics become intertwined with personality issues in family estrangement cases. He characterized authoritarianism as a "worldview, a predisposition" more than an ideology, adding that "values and worldview drive politics," not the other way around. Authoritarian values, he said, are the "poison root" from which far-right politics and regressive attitudes on child-rearing both flow.  In her new book "Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America," journalist Talia Lavin devotes the second half to exploring the widely-read marriage and parenting manuals of Christian nationalist subculture. These books or websites explicitly argue for hierarchical relationships, with women and children chastened to live their lives in unquestioning submission to patriarchal authority. As Lavin lays out in painful detail, this worldview is frequently enforced through violence, at least on children. The parenting manuals treat physical discipline not merely as an aspect of parenting, but as a parent's main tool. 

[...] Similar logic is echoed throughout anti-estrangement articles, such as the New York Times noting that "estranged children are likely to lose access to financial and emotional resources." No equivalence is drawn the parent side, even though it's also true that a parent who refuses to make peace with an adult child runs the emotional risk of losing that relationship permanently. Once again, the implicit assumption is that the lower-status person has a duty to maintain or restore harmony.  It is clearly true, as Coleman has argued, that the growth of individualistic values and greater economic freedom have created a context in which adult children can cut off contact with their parents, something that was often impossible for earlier generations. It doesn't follow, however, that such people have given up on "connectedness and interdependency and mutual reliance," as Coleman told NPR.

Most adult children who spoke with Salon did not seem lonely or disconnected from life. Most cited strong relationships with friends, other family members and romantic partners as giving them the strength to separate from parents they felt were harmful. Many spoke warmly of Reddit, which provided connections to other people in similar situations. On the estranged-parent forums, the term "found family" is sometimes uttered with evident contempt. Many of the adult children say they have simply found community. 

Could going no-contact with MAGA cultist parents be the right thing to protect your sanity?

See Also:

Everything Is Horrible: It May Not Be Safe to Remain Friends With MAGA

[samueldays]

in the spirit of xkcd's "did you know you can just buy labcoats?" , did you know you can just buy newspapers? some days it feels like any old shitposter can get a journalism job and spew high-velocity misinformation, like Aziah Siid at the Seattle Medium.

You're the ones doing the starving here, fuckwits.

Thanks to food deserts — or as some folks call it, “food apartheid”

Thanks to bad reporting - or as some folks call it, "Nazi-style propaganda"

that's halfway through the first sentence and Siid has very effectively set the tone for an article of race-baiting, blame-shifting, inflammatory, connotation-smuggling, condescendingly ignorant, hyperbolic, partisan hackery.

there are cities across the United States where Black families have to drive several miles to access fresh food at a supermarket.

link does not support claim, link is just tangentially related article using the word "food desert". link says this:

This gives me the impression that someone yelled "CITE SOURCES" at the journalist until the journalist did the malicious minimum of work to give the superficial appearance of a citation. The source "more than a quarter of a mile" does not support the article "drive several miles", and other problems.

Journalism delenda est.

That isn't even the topic yet, just a shitty lead-in. The topic:

But the lack of resources that disproportionately impacts Black communities isn’t limited to food or health care. Access to literature is also often limited in Black neighborhoods.

Interest in literature is also often limited in black neighborhoods. They have less desire for and less interest in books relative to whites.

Nearly half of American children live in a book desert — places that American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten defines as “neighborhoods that lack public libraries and stores that sell books, or in homes where books are an unaffordable or unfamiliar luxury.”

The linked article is by Randi Weingarten, but does not define "book desert" that way, as it does not use the word "desert" anywhere at all. Superficial appearance of citation again, journalism delenda est.

I'd call for Aziah Siid to be "fired" but there is nothing to fire her from. You can just buy newspapers. You can just write shitposts and have them published with fancy headings.

So I'm left reiterating: journalists lie, journalists spread disinformation, newspapers are full of shit, the profession attracts liars and incentivizes lying partly because it's loudly claimed to be fact-checkers, journalists can get away with contradicting someone and calling it a "fact check". It happens up and down the scale across the industry, from relative rando Aziah Siid, to upscale Keith Olbermann who has multiple awards for excellent journalism and he won't stop lying after repeated corrections.

If students don’t have books at home or in their neighborhood, they rely on what’s available in schools — in the classroom and campus library. But good luck finding banned and challenged books like “The Gift of Ramadan” by Rabiah York Lumbard and Laura K. Horton and “Sulwe” by Lupita Nyong’o and Vashti Harrison if students live in a place impacted by censorship.

"impacted" is such a wonderful weasel word that encourages the reader to imagine something maximally inflammatory with minimal commitment on the part of the journalist. There is no rebuttal that can be made here without Siid dodging that that's not what she meant by "impacted" - so I retort instead that it's content-free incitement and demagoguery. Journalism delenda est.

Similarly with "banned and challenged", where all the weighty connotation is being carried by the "banned" part, but all the truth of the sentence resides in the "challenged" part. I tried to find the specifics of the matter and as best I can tell, in one of the three thousand counties in the United States, The Gift of Ramadan was challenged for school review by partisan hacks and then got stuck in bureaucratic limbo in a poorly designed review process to determine whether it should be in schools in that county. Somewhere has to be the most fuckup county of 3000, and Duval County was it that year.

From the viewpoint of people who thought their book should be read by every student as a default, this cherry-picked one-county school-holdup felt like a "ban" despite the fact that the book remained available in bookstores.

What extraordinary entitlement.

The epicenter of these efforts? Florida and the attempts led by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to eliminate the teaching of accurate U.S. history and kill off access to diverse books.

Stripped of the bombast: Florida rejected one specific Advanced Placement course on African American Studies. DeSantis claimed this was because the course was a bunch of thrown-together left-wing talking points including queer theory and climate action along with the black blackety blackness.

The College Board released an edited version of the course, and claimed this was nothing to do with Florida because they get feedback from lots of people.

That’s why as part of a larger effort to make books more accessible, and directly combat these anti-history book bans, the national nonprofit Little Free Library and creative marketing agency Venables Bell + Partners have teamed up on the Unbanned Book Club.

Again with the use of "ban" for not using government resources to promote. Journalism delenda est, wordcels delenda est. The books are not banned, as shown by the fact that this project is legal. The vast majority of books in the world are not in any school, let alone every school; curricula change regularly; to call it "banned" that a book was removed from a school is a sort of linguistic robbery that steals the substance of word and leaves us with a confusion of tongues as of Babel.

[truthdogg]

I think our national media can’t see the forest for the trees here. And many democrats seem to be missing it as well.

This Republican-led process is supposed to be a sham. The point is to make impeachment proceedings, all impeachment proceedings, look like a partisan tool. This is a deliberate and necessary part of the 2024 presidential campaign for Republicans.

When independent voters are polled about Trump and his impeachments are mentioned, that distinctly and consistently lowers his support. His impeachments are a serious weakness with voters, and the GOP knows it. They can’t un-impeach him, of course, but what they can do is to pretend that the trials were partisan (they were not), over policy (they were not), and that this is always the case.

They are counting on Americans forgetting what a clown show Trump’s entire presidency was. And frankly, it might work. Few people want to remember what those four years were like; they were awful in a whole variety of ways and most of us have gladly blocked it out.

Many Republicans also truly do believe that impeachment is a sham process in general and to be used as a political tool. They’re not entirely wrong, since it’s a political process. But the main problem with their approach is that corruption or truth doesn’t matter to them, it’s only about putting points on the scoreboard.

In this case, impeaching the DHS secretary does get them bonus points, even if that is not the main goal. It adds to confusion regarding border policy, and it potentially makes the DHS less effective. These are important outcomes when they’re trying scuttle any sort of solution to problems there as long as Biden is in office. This circus also potentially shifts the blame from Congressional Republicans for not funding the bills they’ve passed onto Mayorkas for not doing them, and away from Abbott for blocking the DHS rom the Texas border.

It’s all about deflection. Never about solutions. When Democrats claim this impeachment is about policy differences, they’re giving Republicans way too much credit. Policy isn’t important to them; this is about power.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

More accurate ....

* * * *

TRUMP OPENS FIRE ON THE MEDIA

TCinLA

Dec 17, 2024

The point is not necessarily winning. The point is fear. Now that Disney has surrendered and paid their initiation fee, Trump is ready to commit more extortion, er, I mean start more lawsuits.

In his rambling fact-challenged press conference yesterday, Trump targeted Bob Woodward, CBS, and the Pulitzer Board for awarding its 2018 Prize to the New York Times and the Washington Post for their coverage of Trump’s campaign, the Steele Dossier, and the Mueller investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 election. Trump also described recent visits from Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and other tech barons. “In the first term, everyone was fighting me. In this term, everyone wants to be my friend.”

On Monday night, less than 48 hours after securing a $15 million settlement from ABC News, Trump filed a lawsuit in Iowa District Court accusing venerated pollster Ann Selzer and her polling company - and well as The Des Moines Register and its parent company, Gannett - of “brazen election interference” and “consumer fraud” over her November 2 poll showing Kamala Harris winning by 3 points in Iowa.

Whether Seltzer’s polling error constitutes an “election-interfering fiction,” as the suit alleges, is now the question before a Polk County court. Iowa lacks an anti-SLAPP law, a protection that gives judges the ability to swiftly toss out frivolous attacks on free speech. Trump’s newest legal adventure leans on an extremely aggressive reading of Iowa’s consumer fraud law intended to prevent businesses from making misrepresentations to deceive purchasers.

Selzer’s spent three decades in the polling business and boasts an A+ rating from Nate Silver, Her sterling reputation was the main reason why many in Washington and the media took her startling Iowa result at least somewhat seriously. Even among veteran political operators who wrote off the Harris +3 number as an outlier, the prospect that pollsters might be significantly undercounting Democratic votes fomented a temporary media narrative that Kamala’s campaign had crucial momentum heading into the final days of the race.

Two weeks after the election, Selzer announced she would be retiring from the polling business to explore “other ventures and opportunities,”a decision she said she made last year. “Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course,” she wrote in a guest essay for The Des Moines Register. “It’s ironic that it’s just the opposite.”

Trump was still fuming over the last-minute narrative shift that the poll generated. He now appears eager to run up the score.

Ahead of filing the lawsuit Monday evening, Trump previewed his plans in an afternoon press conference. “We have to straighten out our press,” he said. “Our press is very corrupt, almost as corrupt as our elections.”

Besides the ABC News suit, Trump is suing CBS News for $10 billion for the way it edited Bill Whitaker’s 60 Minutes interview with Harris - claiming the edited broadcast amounted to “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference.” He is now pursuing a case against the Pulitzer Prize board for awards to journalists from The New York Times and Washington Post who investigated his ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign.

Never before has a candidate sued a pollster for setting off a negative news cycle. Typically, if a pollster is wrong, their reputation suffers, but they are rarely blamed for damaging a campaign.

The Des Moines Register said they stand by their reporting and believe a lawsuit would be “without merit.” It will be interesting to see what Gannet does here - they are a major company in the news business without other corporate interests.

As with Trump’s other lawsuits against media organizations, the objective isn’t to win but to intimidate.

Litigation is expensive for all parties, especially in high-profile cases such as those involving a former and future president, even if the suit is ultimately found to be frivolous. There is also the burden of the discovery process, which is always invasive and frequently ugly. Already, nervousness is spreading, with media companies preparing for litigation targeting journalists, including charges like defamation or even violations of the Espionage Act. Axios recently told its staff to expect an increased number of lawsuits from the Trump administration.

The fact that Trump has filed litigation against Selzer, and 60 Minutes could undercut his argument he’s too busy as president-elect to shoulder the burdens of civil litigation.

The two dominant theories about ABC’s surrender are that either Trump has unearthed potentially damaging information or correspondence at ABC News that Disney doesn’t want revealed, or that this is CEO Bob Iger’s gesture to Trump to avoid his vengeance and the lightning-rod spectacle of a public trial against a sitting president. Iger, since he returned to Disney, has been willing to placate the right to keep the company out of its crosshairs He knows he can’t give $1 million to Trump’s inauguration without causing an internal firestorm, and he hasn’t made his own tail-between-legs pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago. But he knows this settlement is a way to buy some insurance for the next four years. The question is how much goodwill it actually buys. If Trump sees an opportunity to benefit from attacking Disney, he’ll do it, regardless of Disney’s surrender.

Michelle Goldberg wrote of these events, Collectively, all these elite decisions to bow to Trump make it feel like the air is going out of the old liberal order. In its place will be something more ruthless and Nietzschean.”

Anne Applebaum, an expert on descents into authoritarianism, said, “Many people assumed in the past that the news media in the United States was too big, too diverse, and too complex to be intimidated.”

So much for that cornerstone of democracy.

“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” - Edmund Burke

“You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.' - Winston Churchill

[TCinLA]

[mythserene]

My Beatles Biases

Since I want everyone else to state their biases up front, I will too.

I want to say something about the John/Paul dynamic. I came into the Beatles story very late, didn’t understand all this John/Paul “leader” internecine struggle, and by the time I did understand it, it was too late and I loved them both too deeply to be too partisan. But to place myself somewhere on that well-known scale, I really feel for Paul in the breakup and instinctively like him and want to defend him. Yet I can be almost knee-jerk protective of John. He screws up a lot, but I am very quick to make excuses for him. (And I think I’m right because he’s hurt.) I think the evidence shows that Paul was probably pretty full of himself near the end. I don’t blame him for “bossy” but I think he held breaking up over their heads more than we acknowledge, and there’s a fair deal of evidence for that that we dismiss too easily. I am also more sympathetic with John than I think most of the Paul team is. I do think the loss of his mom was more impactful than Paul’s mom was because he was more alone. But just as a rational human with eyes and a brain I think the whole “John was the leader” position is the most untenable I’ve ever seen. There is simply no way to make it believable. It goes against all the evidence. And last, I think the biggest problem right now is cutting George out too entirely. He’s the third leg of the table and he wasn’t always the bitter dude that he was after the breakup. I agree that the main artery of The Beatles was John and Paul, but George is always the tiebreaker. (Yoko realized and utilized that power he held well in the Allen Klein fight.) He was a factor in the shifts of power every step of the way, and basically the most important voter. (Plus, I have a soft spot for him.) Since I want everyone else to state their biases up front, I will too.

[anthonybialy]

Record-Setting Biden, In His Way

Recency bias leads those nursing welts thinking present pain must be the most agonizing.  Yet many equipped with memories remain aware of what happened five minutes earlier, which shocks liberals who are baffled every time their hideous nonsense harms humanity again.  Give it a few years, which will offer the context of realizing their world-healing garbage really was dreadful.  Historians who want to wrap up their shifts before lunch don’t have to wait to render a verdict on someone who has failed in every regard.  Joe Biden sucks.

Exhibit sophistication in a way a grabby dolt never illustrates by analyzing just how badly he’s performed on individual issues.  Biden’s status as contender for the worst president ever is not an outlandishly partisan suggestion or hyperbole exacerbated by experiencing present woe.  The agonizing task’s greatest challenge of narrowing an abundance of examples is precisely unlike a list of his accomplishments.  Coming up with things that have improved under Biden’s watch is like finding a valuable dollar.

Life is even more treacherous than usual either by design or putzing.  Political scientists can explain to unsophisticated voters why their suffering is occurring.  The difference may not register.  

Which of the two regrettable styles of Democrats is the incumbent?  The man who misses hiding in the vice president’s office isn’t really an Obama-style schemer dedicated to tearing down from the inside in order to control decline to his liking.  This term is more like fixing a flat tire with duct tape.  The inscrutable question is fitting for such a fascinatingly enigmatic president.  We may never learn Biden’s favorite cereal mascot.  The box featuring the Froot Loops bird is an unobtainable luxury.

Pondering how a prototypical nursing home resident got to be head of state out of millions of American options will only deepen depression.  That’s fine with this president, who’s a drug dealer getting customers hooked by making life miserable.  I suppose it’s good for business, although it’s not like he owns the government.  He certainly wasn’t going to invent his own enterprise.

Please enjoy some corruption to distract from ineptness.  There’s no other way to find peace presently, so enjoy what your caring president hands you.  Thinking every other rich person is the same is the most irritating assumption made by grifting politicians.  The only thing worse than unhinged cynicism is imposing it on everyone else.

Punishing the successful in a way they never do illegal immigrants or legal felons has provided exactly the incentives expected by everyone but White House staffers.  As with every other wretched notion joyless nitwits believe, the fact they must impose their ideas never tips them off to their inherent lousiness.  Public office-holding embodies such nobility that you shouldn’t ask them to empty their pockets.  Biden loves the self-checkout line.

Ruining everything by coercion is as noble as it gets.  We’re all to blame, thanks to those who roped in everyone else by law.  The type of politicians who dream of control want none of the credit, which sure is selfless of them.  Molesters of your rights really believe in collective action.  We are truly all in this together.

This nation is blessed to be equipped with a president who tells us how to live.  Velcro doesn’t fasten itself, which nobody knows better than Biden.  People couldn’t possibly provide child care or know what kind of cars will make it out of sight of the driveway without collective action.  Someone else gets to decide what action gets to be collective.

A snotty demand for selflessness based in taking what belongs to others could be deliberately ironic in the right hands, which means it’s not.  Your authorities never ponder just why so many people need help under their rule.  Commonplace poverty must be the fault of villainous conglomerates who spurred inflation to somehow profit off potential customers not being able to muster up funds.

Being this bad on purpose seems like it’s too tricky for the present temp staffer.  The paranoid notion makes sense if you realize who’s filling the chair.  A conniving plan to screw up with government in order to save us with more of it may have been engineered by nefarious underlings with IQs higher than room temperature.  The executive is out.

Life is surely going well if debate revolves around whether this woeful branch has been attempting to seize your choices as strategy or just does so in response to whatever they wrecked yesterday.  The net result is the same if anyone feared the only thing that could cause damage is a pernicious ideology.

Overusing power can only get worse if the stupidest jerk is in charge.  It’s not like this White House turned life into a trip to Disney World.  It only feels like a Magic Kingdom trip in the modern woke version where visitors spend 783 dollars on lunch in order to endure a lecture about sanctimonious tolerance.  Can we just wait in line for Space Mountain?

Democrats finally got the popular vote they wanted.  Circumventing states is not the only way they want to ruin the nation.  Contempt for being left alone motivates every decision by a White House that we wish couldn’t be bothered.

There can’t possibly be anyone enjoying this.  Scheduled monthly praising of pathetic job growth is a fake joy that’s fact-checked back into depression.  Russian soldiers and Iranian centrifuge technicians appreciate career opportunities, but they haven’t crossed the border yet.

Perspective makes agonies like this presidency worse.  A ceaseless irritation is not going to improve over time, which is fitting in its way.  Biden’s ironically shown himself to be an expert over time on not thinking ahead.  The lasting contribution will be unintentional, namely perfect example of why abused and overextended authority is limited.  Biden makes the case against Biden.

[sambinnie]

Due to illness and ageing and natural and unnatural river states, we’ve barely swum for the last six weeks, so between Christmas and New Year’s we take ourselves to a lake and dip in near-freezing water, crystal clear and smooth as the pond it is. I make it all the way to the first buoy and nearly back before I’m shivering in the water, which I’ve never experienced before, not even when we had to kick our way through the river-ice and dip in the truly freezing non-flow. But the lake is a drive away, so instead of running home in wet kit, we’re on heated seats in a heated car, eating leftover panettone and shortbread slices, which somewhat dilutes our connection to nature but does a great deal for plummeting core temperatures. I wouldn’t give up the river while I can, but a change is as good as a heated, cushioned rest. 

The year has kept me from nihilism, at least as I look immediately around and behind. Ahead, I’ve been feeling alarm, until I watched this (long, be warned, by Instagram standards) video from Martha Beck, an author who by any measure I should back away from with my fingers in my ears — she’s a life coach, she’s published a book involving the word ‘starlight’, she’s got her own podcast. But she also worded exactly the growing feeling I’ve had for the last five or ten years in such a neat and clear way: that our insistence on individualism and prioritising wealth as a marker of ‘success’, or indeed ‘goodness’, is damaging us beyond words, and that if we make the mental shift away from ego and towards collective thinking, we’ll thrive en masse. 

I feel too old to give any credence at all to anything remotely hippyish (unless you couch it as witch-based, then I, like any middle-aged woman who daily sees more than a handful of trees, am fully in), but the inverse makes our current position even clearer, like this Thread which says, ‘2024 isn’t “a weird time in history”, we’re living through the inevitable conclusion to doing everything wrong’ which, yes, is exactly the feeling I’ve had, that almost all of us are having day by day. 

So far, our attitude has been: Privatise everything, give more money than is possible to spend in a lifetime to a handful of people, ensure politics becomes a circle-jerk of super wealthy individuals protecting other wealthy individuals, or, at best, good-hearted individuals only able to make the most short-term of decisions because politics is cripplingly partisan and no one is able, practically, financially, politically, legally, narratively, to make any longterm plans that might pinch this week but will help us all a year or more down the road. Make our environment worse, make our poorest poorer, make our health services barely functional, make every news story about how This Group is to blame; normalise violent porn and telling children that the distress they feel about this weirdo world is because their bodies are sinful, or wrong, or broken; remove art and poetry and serendipity from people’s lives, tell them every hobby should be monetised as a side-hustle, or maybe just remove the chance for hobbies at all because they probably should be working multiple jobs to afford just to eat and pay rent; remove Third Spaces and tell people that connections should be on their phones, not in person; teach us all that women and men are enemies, all the time, and we should be afraid of each other, in different ways, and remind us that enemies have nothing in common; make tech addictive, and use it to terrify people so we’re too anxious to come off it but we’re also scared constantly at everything we’re shown on there; make wanting more things all the time so important that we pay beautiful randos online to tell us that we want this thing now, and aren’t they our friends so can’t we trust them? Make war the most profitable business in the world, and make young men and women kill each other, plus kill old men and women, plus children, because business is great, isn’t it, and it helps shore up our valuable economies, even though it destroys lives and countries and land and water and generations. (I mean, we know all this stuff, don’t we? This is not groundbreaking Human Existence content.) 

As someone said on twitter several years ago, ‘The modern condition is mostly trying to do things on your own that people have historically achieved with a large support network and wondering why you’re tired all the time.’ Quite. Or a more recent summary of AI: ‘No one has satisfactorily answered the fundamental question of why I should bother reading something you couldn’t be bothered to write’, or on the terrible, terrible existence of crypto, from a few years ago: ‘Cryptocurrency is literally like an eight-year-old’s concept of an evil businessman. He just plugs his pollution machine in and gets money for it. It doesn’t make anything, it just. Pollutes. And makes money. Like a fucking Captain Planet villain’. 

We don’t, as we’ve established, want to give art and culture over to AI so we can work more hours in a shitwork job enabling global enshittification; we want to work fewer hours and still be able to make art, or enjoy it, or share it, or laugh with our friends, or make a meal together, or dance in public without worrying that our gullible volunteer Stasi won’t film us and make us the Internet’s character of the day. (Do you know that’s real? That hordes of youth won’t go out to clubs/discos/parties because they’ve seen how people can be filmed anywhere, everywhere, by anyone, and turned into an online figure forever? If you read that in a book thirty years ago that would definitely have been a dystopian novel, wouldn’t it? But we’ve just let it become normal somehow, like live-tweeting strangers’ conversations as if we’re breaking the news on an International political scandal, rather than just chipping away at our collective humanity for the sake of a thumbs-up from an internet @-sign?) Also, did you know that Pokemon Go, that fun way to take our Covid walks, was actually a tool for geomapping the entire planet, especially paths that cars couldn’t get to or inside buildings, of which a cleverly placed Pokegym could lure players into getting full images? Tech is great! And not at all sinister in almost every Neo-capitalist manifestation! Tech is for the people, and in no way purely for increasingly the profits of the shareholders and normalising the collapse in personal privacy and security! You are a person with a spirit and a legacy, not just a data-heap with a face they’ve scanned for later use! We’ll send you a personal discount code to prove it! 

Which is all to say: I think we need a shift, and I see, thank god, that feeling everywhere. In Martha Beck’s video, in this jokey post from Cassie Wilson, with her “Outs” for 2024 including cancelling at the last minute, AI dating apps, celebrity gossip, “I asked ChatGPT to—”, binge watching, and her “Ins” for 2025 including craft nights, flirting, familial lore, dusting your room, and going outside before 3pm every day. We’re beginning to recognise, little by little but also more and more, that we all feel shit because this world isn’t built for our needs. We need challenge, and quietness; we need collective celebrations and collective action; we need to recognise our biological connection to Nature and what our psychological disconnection from humanity feels like, when we sit on screens all day, and we need to stop being trained to find violence and malicious error in evveerrrrythiiiing. Isn’t that called getting past your teens? We need movement and music — I went to a Taylor Swift gig this summer and my god, I finally get religion, I would join her cult in a heartbeat, and I know cults are by their nature bad and no person is perfect and should be worshipped and no one individual should have the pressure of being worshipped but at the same time thousands of people singing together, dancing together, in special clothes we’d chosen for this occasion, I get it, I get it, I kept weeping for weeks afterwards every time I remembered certain moments and I see how humans love this stuff when it’s the thing that clicks for you — and we need to do things we don’t want to do for the benefit of the greater good. 

I see this shift, these new questions, in the feed the terrible internet has curated for me. In an interesting episode of Search Engine on ayahuasca and the ego we’re currently not only driven by, but encouraged to foster until it’s big and strong like a spoiled toddler, and in Strong Message Here, where Armando Iannucci and Helen Lewis discuss how ‘everyone shouting in the Twitter town square means you end up with a wrestling heel as president’, and also how when words mean absolutely everything, when words can be ‘literal violence’, you end up losing sight of real reality, with sunlight and caring responsibilities and laundry and meals and how much money you get in your bank account for doing a full week’s work, and in The Rest is Entertainment, when Marina Hyde observes how the three biggest entertainment products at the moment are Traitors, Squid Game, and Beast Games, and how they’re essentially the same thing: a programme about betrayal, about being the worst person you can be in order to win against hundreds (or thousands) of others in a terrible, hopeless, anything-for-the-win society. No collective betterment, no improving of the many, no realist narrative, just disconnection in order to sell more product. It makes me think of that dull crushing modern mantra, ‘You’re born alone, you die alone.’ One may or may not technically die alone, but we 3,000,000% do not get born alone. Every single one of us is carried by a woman for nine months, who nourishes us and keeps us safe before giving birth to us in various methods ranging from a bit sore and achy to actually lethal, and if she’s made it through then she’ll continue to feed and care for us for months, years more, just like she was birthed by mothers before her, mother before mother before mother, all the way back to the start of the human race. In the same way that we don’t make it on our own further down the line either: we drive down roads others built wearing clothes others made, drinking water others have piped to our homes, taking medicine others have created, walking down streets others keep clean, using computers others have designed and manufactured, eating food others grew and packaged and delivered. There is not a single thing we do that is untouched by the hand of someone else, and to pretend otherwise is so egotistical it’s either wilful blindness or actual mental illness. 

As always, it comes back to Mad Men. Slight spoilers, but it’s been ten years and really you should have at least started by now: in the series finale, Don Draper, handsome, brilliant, wealthy, successful, realises that he is nothing. After taking himself off and experiencing essentially a breakdown/breakthrough, he telephones the people who mean the most to him: his ex-wife and mother of his children, his equally brilliant protégée, and his daughter, as wilful and sharp-minded as he’s ever been. He’s not calling them as service animals, to care for him as they perhaps had always seemed to do at distant points in his past; he’s calling for connection, to try and remind himself that they are the best thing about his life, that his money, career skill and looks count for nothing if he can’t connect again with the people who know him best. The episode is called, of course, Person to Person, and it ends with the clearest possible portrayal that it’s the most humble person to person connections we have to choose, ultimately, if we want to find happiness. 

I think of all the things I don’t like perhaps much more than I ought to do, and the things I do like maybe more than I ought as well — perhaps I should be creating more and appreciating/envying less — but I do know that for all the popular things I don’t like (Breaking Bad, E.T., Gladiator, most John Hughes films, Ghostbusters (except the Melissa McCarthy one), cosmetic surgery, putting your life on social media) my tastes are hardly art-house niche; I don’t spend my Saturday nights being the sole member of the audience at a drag interpretation of Brecht’s least-known play in a room above a pub, so my likes almost certainly overlap with yours somewhere. In fact, if you take the most die hard super-fan of Breaking Bad, Ridley Scott and botox, I bet there’s still more than a handful of things that we have in common, because generally people like loads of stuff, it’s just that the internet likes to make us feel otherwise. I like most food, for instance! I like to hear about the history of most sports, even thought I’ll never be a sports fan, so tell me about your team and the long-running rivalry they’ve got with whoever! Tell me about how you built something! Let’s talk about the best colours there are! Let me make you some soup, and we can debate the greatest soups we’ve each had! Describe your favourite Breaking Bad episode to me, because I’ll probably even like that! 

If you want to enjoy any of the things I’ve enjoyed this year that aren’t soup-chat or favourite colours, here you go: rewatching the whole of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was incredible. Despite Whedon’s best attempts to really fuck it up for all of us, it remains staggeringly good in the main, and even the worst bits (the boyfriends, fat-shaming) are valuable lessons for teen girls; The Body makes me in awe of the writers, in capturing not just grief, but the weirdness of death, so well. Rewatching Spaced, too; you never know how deeply something will embed in your consciousness, but I can still recite vast swathes along with it (and you can imagine how much my housemates love that). The Rehearsal was amazing, weird and unexpected; I had to beg my fellow watchers to stick with it but they were glad they did, and I still think about it regularly. 

Paul Mescal performed the triumvirate for me, between Aftersun (beautiful, quietly devastating), All of Us Strangers (beautiful, loudly devastating, will reshape your brain into a wondrous flower) and this musical number from SNL, the highlight of the year for the only one of my housemates to have watched both Wicked and Gladiator. The Fall Guy was great cinema, fun and funny and the mid-tier film they don’t make anymore (and probably won’t make anymore, goddammit), A Quiet Place: Day One was far better than it had any right to be, thanks to Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn; Heretic likewise, with Hugh Grant grinning and sighing ruefully and having the greatest time of his life in this slight, immensely fun horror film. 

In older films, I watched Laurence of Arabia for the first time and was silenced for several hours after by its beauty and power; Cabaret will, sadly, probably never not be relevant, as well as being painful and gorgeous and bleak; Fried Green Tomatoes may always be my favourite lesbian romance film/menopause power flick; Matt Reeves’ The Batman is the first Batman film I’ve liked since 1989, and Pattinson somehow captured the broken, dissociative nature of the figure for the first time, for me. I also rewatched The Prestige for the first time in at least a decade, and wondered both at how perfect a film it is, with the constant chronological leaping (around one timeline jump per minute of movie, according to IMDb) always crystal clear, and echoes between characters and plots and subplots forming the most perfect jewel-box, but also how Nolan has become such a meandering self-indulgent filmmaker in latter years (opinion: maybe Inception was his last good film, and I had to rewatch that at home because I couldn’t hear one single word in the cinema). 

Books-wise the only two that stand out are Love & Let Die, by John Higgs, a marvellous analysis of two great twentieth century shapes: James Bond and the Beatles, one standing for death and sex and the old ways, and the other for life, love and new possibilities. It’s funny and clever, and I listened to most of it on audiobook, read by the author, as I painted seemingly infinite walls an eye-achingly bland white this autumn, and didn’t mind at all. I’d loved British Summer Time Begins last summer, by Ysenda Maxtone Graham, so read her Terms & Conditions this summer, a wonderful history of girls’ boarding schools from 1939-79. It’s full of beauty and cruelty, friendship and injustice, larks, nature, freezing cold and terrible food, and it made me wish we could all just have a year without smartphones and see how all our children might turn out after those twelve months. 

Other things: I saw the Barbie exhibition at the Design Museum with the housemates, and seeing the Barbies I’d played with, hand-me-downs I now realise from the release dates, and a very similar house to the one I was given by my godfather, I wept and felt like a dip-dyed Marcel Proust. It was physical, this sense of time tunnelling between the Now, of forty-something women taking pictures with their iPhones, and my tall, amused housemates watching my reactions to these toys, and the Then, of holding these dolls, dressing them, their lives being my life, their clothes becoming the outfits I would generally gravitate towards even now (recent discussions with a school friend made me understand my dress-code thirty years on as half-Angela Chase, half-Rayanne Graff, but this exhibition made me realise it’s actually two thirds My So-Called Life, one third Crystal Barbie). I also went to Whitstable with friends to visit other friends, and the Whitstable friends took us to the sauna by the sea in October, and both sea and sauna were the best versions of those things I’ve ever experienced. Highly recommend, but I won’t link because maybe those host friends may not want more people in there and might refuse to take me there ever again. Finally, the podcast The 99% Invisible Breakdown: The Power Broker, hosted by two of my favourite podcast hosts, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan, who took twelve months and several hours each episode to go through the entire enormous book by Robert Caro about the man who built and shaped New York in the twentieth century. It’s funny and fascinating, and the way history repeats itself when it comes to power, those who want it, those who have it, and those who’ll do anything to stop others getting it, is worth reminding ourselves about even at the best of times, let alone at the tail end of centuries of mostly terrible political, cultural and social decisions. 

I hope our shared 2025 will be full of hard work that rewards us, of connections that might be tricky but make our lives better, of dancing if you like it, and not if you don’t. Let’s diminish our egos and eat more fruit and walk outside every day, and refuse to use AI and band together in a global movement that removes grotesque wealth from billionaires and enables everyone to feed themselves and their families, and to read books and build their community. Let’s prioritise long-term political thinking, making art and not being reactive online, reshaping global thinking and chatting less on our phones in public and making each other laugh more, and reteaching ourselves critical thinking and media and cultural literacy, and re-embracing collective action that we on the left seem to have abandoned in favour of self-care. I hope we can remember all the things we have in common, and stop letting people tell us all the things that we don’t. I hope we remember the things that make us behave better. I hope, I hope, I hope. 

[lighthousenewsnetwork]

WASHINGTON D.C. - A tremor ran through the political landscape this week as a bipartisan bill, the "National Stapler Replenishment and Redundant Acronym Elimination Act" (NSRAEAE), unexpectedly sailed through both houses of Congress. Lawmakers, still reeling from the shock, are scrambling to find someone to blame for this unprecedented act of unity. "It's like a unicorn stampeded through the Senate chamber," said bewildered Senator Bartholomew "Bart" Hacklesby (R-Deep Pockets). "One minute we're arguing about the strategic placement of flagpoles in Guam, the next we're allocating funds for a national stapler reserve. It's enough to make a seasoned politician question the very fabric of reality." The NSRAEAE, a bill so dense it could double as a doorstop, tackles the nation's most pressing yet overlooked issues: ensuring a consistent supply of standard-issue office staplers and eliminating redundant bureaucratic acronyms. While seemingly mundane, the bill represents a monumental shift in the political climate, where bipartisanship has become a relic of bygone eras. Theories about this legislative anomaly abound. Some, like Congressman Farley "Fast Eddie" Fingers (D-Shady Acres), suspect a daring communist plot to lull the nation into complacency with office supplies. "This bill is a Trojan horse," he boomed from the House floor, waving a slightly-used Swingline stapler aloft. "They'll lull us with staplers then hit us with, oh, I don't know, universal healthcare!" Others point to a rogue intern, a college sophomore disillusioned with partisan gridlock, who may have accidentally uploaded the wrong bill to the voting system. "He was probably fueled by lukewarm coffee and existential dread," mused political analyst Penelope "Penny" Pinpoint, "a potent combination that can lead to anything, from binge-watching reality TV to, apparently, bipartisan legislation." Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists have a field day. Popular internet personality "QTipAnon" claims the bill is a coded message from a secret cabal of moderate politicians, tired of the constant bickering. "Don't you see?" he rants in a pixelated YouTube video, "The staplers are a metaphor for unity, the redundant acronyms for the bloated bureaucracy! Wake up sheeple!" The public's response has been equally chaotic. Confused citizens are bombarding social media with questions. #"StaplerGate" is trending nationwide. Memes comparing politicians to malfunctioning staplers flood the internet. Some view the bill as a beacon of hope, a sign that even the most divided branches of government can find common ground over a good stapler. Others are terrified, convinced that this sudden bipartisanship is a harbinger of an alien invasion or the robot uprising they've been warned about in countless B-movies. In a shocking turn of events, during a tense press conference, Senator Hacklesby and Congressman Fingers, once sworn political enemies, emerged arm-in-arm. "We may not agree on everything," Hacklesby conceded, "but a nation cannot function without a reliable supply of staplers." Fingers nodded solemnly, adding, "And let's be honest, those acronyms were getting out of hand. FOMO? SMH? These kids today!" The revelation that the NSRAEAE was actually a collaborative effort between a Democrat and a Republican has plunged Washington D.C. into even deeper disarray. Accusations of betrayal fly, trust is shattered, and theories of a Manchurian Candidate situation are whispered in the halls of power. One thing's clear: the political landscape has been irrevocably changed. While the long-term consequences of this bipartisan anomaly remain unknown, one thing is certain: Americans can finally breathe a sigh of relief knowing they'll never run out of staplers again. However, as the nation grapples with the implications of this unexpected unity, a new question emerges: What will they argue about now? Call to Action: In the wake of this unprecedented event, we urge you to contact your representatives and

demand answers! Is this a sign of hope, or a slippery slope to a nightmarish world of bipartisan cooperation? Let your voice be heard! Also, maybe stock up on some extra staplers. You never know what the future holds.

[faith-in-democracy]

The rise in polarization and negative sentiments in the United States

This is a multifaceted issue influenced by various factors, including media dynamics, political rhetoric, social media proliferation, and foreign interference.

Media Dynamics:

Media outlets play a significant role in shaping public opinion. Some critics argue that certain networks, including Fox News, have adopted partisan perspectives that contribute to societal divisions. The emphasis on sensationalism and opinion-based programming over objective journalism can exacerbate misunderstandings and foster distrust among different groups.

Political Rhetoric:

Political leaders and commentators may use divisive language to mobilize support, sometimes prioritizing short-term gains over long-term unity. This approach can deepen societal rifts and promote an “us versus them” mentality, making constructive dialogue more challenging.

Social Media Influence:

Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and others have transformed how information is consumed and shared. Algorithms often amplify content that elicits strong emotional reactions, which can include anger or fear. This environment can accelerate the spread of misinformation and reinforce echo chambers, where individuals are exposed primarily to views that align with their own.

Misinformation and Disinformation:

The spread of false or misleading information contributes significantly to societal tensions. Disinformation campaigns can distort facts and create confusion about important issues. Being critical of information sources and verifying facts through reputable outlets is essential in combating this problem.

Foreign Interference:

There is evidence that foreign entities, including Russia, have engaged in disinformation efforts aimed at influencing U.S. public opinion and elections. According to investigations by U.S. intelligence agencies, these campaigns seek to exploit existing divisions and undermine trust in democratic institutions. While foreign interference can aggravate tensions, it operates within a landscape where domestic issues already exist.

Socioeconomic Factors:

Economic disparities, cultural shifts, and changing demographics can also contribute to feelings of uncertainty or resentment. When people face economic hardships or perceive threats to their way of life, they may be more susceptible to divisive messaging.

Conclusion:

Addressing the increase in negativity and division requires a comprehensive approach:

• Media Literacy: Educate the public on evaluating information critically and recognizing biases.

• Responsible Journalism: Encourage media outlets to prioritize accuracy and balanced reporting.

• Constructive Political Discourse: Promote dialogue that focuses on solutions rather than blame.

• Community Engagement: Foster local initiatives that build bridges between different groups.

• Addressing Root Causes: Tackle underlying socioeconomic issues that contribute to division.

By acknowledging the complexity of these challenges and working collaboratively, it is possible to reduce hostility and strengthen societal cohesion.

[darkmaga-returns]

Harris is distancing herself from her record, misrepresenting her past, and shifting blame for policy failures onto Donald Trump, creating a disconnect between her actions and campaign messaging.

By Victor Davis Hanson

October 14, 2024

Increasingly, little if anything remains real about the Harris campaign.

Take ideology and the issues.

It is now well known that Kamala Harris was rated as the most left-wing of all current senators, including Bernie Sanders—according to GovTrack, a non-partisan compiler of evaluators in Congress. The Voteview project found her voting record the most liberal of all senators of the 21st century, except for radical Elizabeth Warren.

Harris as vice president in a 50/50 Senate has proven the decisive passing vote on more deadlocked bills than any other vice president in history—all thirty-three of them proudly progressive legislation. She has done more to ensure left-wing government at the national level than any prior vice president.

Indeed, Harris, as both a California state official and its senator, and as vice president, has for some thirty years championed almost every issue dear to the left—Medicare for all, an end to private health care plans, banning fracking, mandatory EV requirements, unrestricted abortion, wealth taxes, income and inheritance tax hikes, defense cuts, price controls, open borders, ending the border patrol, stopping all deportations, opposition to a border wall, mass amnesties, free transition surgeries for illegal aliens, and mandatory buyback of semi-automatic firearms.

In most of these cases, Harris not only voiced support but did so proudly and emphatically in front of hard-left constituencies. She has declared that she is a radical and woke.

[qnewsau]

Call to uninvite PM from queer events after broken promises

New Post has been published on https://qnews.com.au/call-to-uninvite-pm-from-queer-events-after-broken-promises/

Call to uninvite PM from queer events after broken promises

Just.Equal Australia has declared Anthony Albanese should not be invited to LGBTIQA+ events or parades after broken promises to the community, including a shocking call on LGBTIQA+ inclusion in the next national Census.

Yesterday, it was confirmed the Albanese Government has vetoed counting LGBTIQA+ people in the 2026 Census, breaking a pre-election promise.

The decision came just weeks after the government dumped a key reform to protect LGBTIQA+ staff and students in religious schools from discrimination.

Just.Equal’s Rodney Croome declared, “Mr Albanese should not be invited to any LGBTIQA+ event or parade until he counts us in the Census and protects LGBTIQA+ teachers and students from discrimination.

“He may have marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge for WorldPride last year, but in the eyes of many LGBTIQA+ Australians he has now pulled up the draw bridge to equality.”

‘Deep betrayals of trust’

LGBTIQA+ organizations, who’d worked for years on counting us in the next Census, found out about the government’s decision in media reports on Sunday.

Assistant Minister Andrew Leigh confirmed that day there would be no change.

“While the Australian Bureau of Statistics tests changes from time to time, it’s the government’s decision that there will be no change to the topics in the next Census,” he said.

The Australian Labor Party’s 2023 national platform argued LGBTIQ+ Aussies should be counted in the census. The policy platform also committed to ensuring the 2026 count gathers that data.

“The decision not to include us in the Census shows that in this Government’s eyes, we don’t count,” Rodney Croome said.

“Last year the Federal Government funded the development of a national LGBTIQA+ health strategy. But now it’s hobbled its own initiative by vetoing its main data source.

“Exclusion from the Census, plus the failure to protect LGBTIQA+ people from discrimination in religious schools, are deep betrayals of the trust of the LGBTIQA+ community.”

Religious discrimination reform dumped

On religious discrimination reform, Labor shelved proposed draft bills after repeatedly promising change, including before the 2022 election. An Australian Law Reform Commission report also recommended the law change.

At that time, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese blamed the Coalition for the failure to reach an agreement.

“I don’t intend to engage in a partisan debate when it comes to religious discrimination,” he said earlier this month.

But Greens LGBTQIA+ spokesperson Stephen Bates argued Labor had refused to work with the Greens to pass the legislation.

Rodney Croome said a survey of LGBTIQA+ voters after the last election showed 21% shifted from Labor to the Greens, teals and independents because of Labor’s support for Scott Morrison’s anti-LGBTQIA+ Religious Discrimination Bill.

“Mr Albanese says he wants to promote social cohesion and prevent division. But by pushing LGBTIQA+ Australians back into the statistical closet he is doing exactly the opposite,” Rodney Croome said.

“The Government’s betrayal of our community will inevitably mean Federal Labor will lose yet more votes of LGBTIQA+ people at the next election.”

Read more:

Government blasted for ‘shameful’ LGBTIQ+ Census decision

‘Betrayal’: PM slammed for dumping key discrimination reform

ABS sorry to queer Australians hurt by exclusion from Census

‘In the dark’: Census slammed for snubbing LGBTIQ+ Australians

‘It’s gutless’: Gay former religious school student calls out PM

For the latest LGBTIQA+ Sister Girl and Brother Boy news, entertainment, community stories in Australia, visit qnews.com.au. Check out our latest magazines or find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

[janekim]

Jane Kim’s March 5, 2024 San Francisco Voter Guide

It’s hard to believe that I drafted my first voter guide in November 2004. Twenty years and countless endorsements later, here we go again! I am only providing additional insight for contested races.  If you’re looking for another great voter guide, check out my fave SF League of Pissed Off Voters.  I also appreciated the non-partisan analysis provided by San Francisco Public Press.  

US Senate: Barbara Lee

From becoming the first black cheerleader in her high school after fighting to desegregate her squad to casting the sole vote in Congress against authorizing the war in Afghanistan in 2001 (history has validated her), Barbara Lee has been fearless and principled.  A Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Lee is the only US Senate candidate who has called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. As the first state to send two women to the US Senate, I would be disappointed to forward two men.  We have two incredibly smart and courageous women candidates running– Congresswomen Barbara Lee and Katie Porter. This March, I’m voting Barbie for US Senate!

US Congress: Nancy Pelosi

State Assembly: Matt Haney, AD 17 and David Lee, AD 19

David has been an active voice and organizer in San Francisco’s Chinese American community since he started the Chinese American Voter Education Project 20 years ago registering thousands of API voters.  David is an earnest and sincere neighborhood advocate. While he may not be a nerdy wonk, I know he will fight for tenants, small businesses, and neighborhood safety issues.  He promises to be a champion to raise the statewide minimum wage and as a community college educator, fight to expand tuition-free community college tuition statewide.

Judges: Michael Begert and Patrick Thompson

Endorsed by all 48 SF Superior Court judges, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Democratic Party and the League of Pissed Off Voters (an unusual alliance indeed), this race has become a blatant political stunt. Unable to blame the District Attorney for all of San Francisco's woes, the right has shifted their attack to appointed judges vetted by an extensive and rigorous process led by the state. Appointed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Governor Gavin Newsom respectively, they are hardly radicals but demonstrably qualified.     

San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee: Labor and Working Families Slate and ME!

This super down ballot race used to attract an endless list of candidates and ZERO dollars.  This year, a few people are pouring $1.1M to defeat our slate which includes educators, a nurse, plumber, elevator mechanic, healthcare worker, youth activists, union organizers, and even an attorney/drag queen. 

My amazing slate mates are busting their quads, volunteering countless hours to walk hilly precincts, canvass farmers markets to win VOLUNTEER positions on the San Francisco Democratic Party.  Most of the year, committee members register voters and participate in phone banking efforts to flip red seats blue, not only in California but across the nation. We just want a corporate-free Democratic Party in our city. And we love San Francisco.

Don’t worry, you’ll always hear from people who have millions to spend to influence elections- do they need the Democratic Party too? 

Here is our slate in the order we are listed on the ballot!

Proposition A: $300M Affordable Housing Bond: YES, YES, YES

Endorsed by the Mayor, the entire Board of Supervisors and literally everyone else who endorses anything (minus the SF Republican Party), we need this revenue source to continue to build and preserve affordable and middle income housing in San Francisco.

Proposition B: Police Officer Staffing Levels Conditioned on Future Tax Funding: No

This is not a terrible measure– it raises minimum police staffing levels if the city raises new revenue. However, I believe the Mayor and Board of Supervisors should set police staffing numbers, not the voters. 

Proposition C: Real Estate Transfer Tax Break for Developers: No

Prop C provides tax breaks for downtown office developers who sell their building after converting it to market rate housing. I would have supported this largely symbolic gesture– symbolic because very few office buildings can convert to housing due to high costs and structural limitations. HOWEVER, this measure dangerously authorizes the Board of Supervisors to reverse prior victories in real estate transfer taxes that fund essential initiatives like FREE CITY COLLEGE and street tree maintenance (yes the very measure I authored in 2016) and affordable housing.

Side note–prior to 2016, San Francisco homeowners briefly had to shoulder the burden of street tree maintenance, which was both substantial and perplexing. This measure jeopardizes this revenue.

Proposition E: Blank Check on Police Surveillance and Car Chases: No, No, No

This one is all over the place and a perfect example of why I do not believe in legislating via the ballot box.  SF Chronicle calls it “a fistful of dubious public safety ideas at the wall in hope one sticks.” 

Proposition E is a package of policy changes that would allow the San Francisco Police Department to engage in more high-speed chases, install security cameras in public spaces (currently approved by a civilian oversight body) and test surveillance technology (ie. drones and facial recognition) on the public without oversight. It would also allow police to file fewer reports on use of force against members of the public.

There is one good idea— we should reduce how much time police officers spend on administrative paperwork so cops are on the streets instead of behind desks but there is no teeth to make this happen. And I am open to cops utilizing technological advances in their work- should cops have drones to follow active pursuits?  Maybe, but I don’t want voters to write this blank check.  This job belongs to the people we elect– the Mayor and Board of Supervisors who can study recommendations made by our SFPD Chief and the civilian oversight commission, evaluate studies and weigh public comment.

But there are some terrible ideas such as expanding police chases on congested San Francisco streets. I witnessed the devastating consequences when my best friend was struck by a fleeing vehicle two years ago. The perpetrator got away (but eventually arrested months later) but my friend continues to endure life-altering injuries. While no blame falls on the SFPD officer, the pursuit inflicted irreversible harm without achieving its intended outcome. 

It’s opposed by the ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, San Francisco Bar Association and League of Women Voters. 

Proposition F: Drug Screenings for Welfare Recipients: Just say NO

During the “War on Drugs” of the 80’s and 90’s, we targeted poor people for drug usage and guess what? The policy failed to decrease usage and only pushed our most vulnerable neighbors away from assistance.  Reverting to this Republican strategy, endorsed by the Trump administration and poorly implemented in red states like Alabama and Mississippi, is mind boggling. The estimated annual cost of this program ranges from $500,000 to $1.4 million, partially offset by discontinuing payments to our poorest residents who refuse testing.

Meanwhile, San Francisco has a waiting list of people who actually want treatment. 

Let’s look at states who have enacted this– very few applicants get tested and even less come back positive. The most expensive drug testing program was Missouri. Missouri spent a whopping $336,297 in public funds to test 108 individuals out of 32,774 applicants. 11 came back positive. 

Elected leaders want to appear like they are doing something about the devastating fentanyl crisis (precipitated by billionaire pharmaceutical conglomerates like Purdue/Sacker family), but THIS IS NOT IT.  Even the San Francisco Chronicle, hardly a bastion for progressive politics, says No on F.

Prop G: 8th Grade Algebra: YES

I fully support offering Algebra in the 8th grade. Frankly I support offering Algebra at any grade students wish to enroll. But this is yet again another symbolic resolution (do you see a pattern?) which is now moot as the Board of Education voted this month to re-offer 8th grade algebra. 

If you made it this far, thank you for reading and more importantly, thank you for voting. Agree or disagree, I appreciate you including my perspective in your decision making.  

Most importantly, if you are voting by mail, please vote by March 4.  Thousands of ballots go uncounted because people put them in the mailbox on March 5 without checking the final pick up time– these ballots are postmarked March 6 and are therefore invalid.

[sublimeobservationarcade]

Time To End The Two Party System?

Right now, is it time to end the two party system? The ideological polarisation between sides is so great now that the country is stuck most of the time in the middle of a fight. Party members and their supporting voters don’t believe anything that comes out of the mouth of those on the opposing side. Partisans take their news from those media organisations subjectively on their side. Truth has been sidelined by manipulative forces hellbent on muddying the waters wherever possible. The nation is in a mess and is bedevilled by party politics to such an extent that it is mired in lies and fake news. Photo by Sora Shimazaki on Pexels.com

When Two Tribes Go To War

The two party system was supposed to streamline the myriad different views and policy suggestions into workable ways of governing. Now, the adversarial nature of this two-headed political beast destroys more good ideas for the country than anything else. Red vs blue has so lost the bigger picture that the unity of the nation is under real threat once again. It is time to bust open this system and let some sunlight in to disinfect the polarisation. It is time to stop the lies and exaggerations so prevalent in political campaigns. Higher standards are required to weed out the toxic lies in politics. Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com Two Party Political System Failing The Nation Why are we where we are and how did we get there? The shift from concern with policies to playing politics has come about via the pushing of ideological values at the expense of shared experiences of identity. Any good marriage counsellor will tell you that relationships are built on compromise. I don’t see much compromise happening in the current climate. Political campaign managers have promoted divisiveness in a bid to get their candidates elected. They have identified social issues bothering certain demographics within their electorates and targeted these folks with negative messaging about the other side. Demonising ‘the other’ has become the accepted thing in today’s politics. Populism is based on these stratagems. - Tell your voter targets that things used to be better back then – employ nostalgia for some golden age. - Blame ‘the other’ as reason why things are bad now – socio-groups on the other side. - Demonise ‘the other’ as lazy, taking government money, & holding values at odds with the target audience. - Tell them your candidate is going to fix things & only your guy can do it! Two Party Democracy Reduces Voices Heard The two party system reduces the diversity of voices heard in government. This adversarial, head-butting, paradigm wastes most of the human energy expended in civic life. It signs up passionate individuals to agendas they often don’t believe in, but for which they are forced to toe the party line. The old argument is that without the two party system government will never get anything done. Well, they are not getting much done as it stands. It's Time For Another Way The biggest difference between the current political sides seems to be one of conservatives vs progressives. However, within that broad categorisation there are exceptions and many different ideas at play. If the politicians were freed from their opposing teams, perhaps, they could get on and achieve something together. The current set up is just not working. Being forced to fit in on a particular side, in one of those two main parties, has turned civic life into a contest. The contest had gotten out of hand. The players have lost sight of their shared national identity. It is a shit show! What Are We Teaching Our Children? Think of our children and what they are observing. What are they learning from our current political paradigm? That the country is split. That our nation is divided and wont listen to those it deems on the other side. How is that going to serve them in the future? How is it going to serve our country going forward?   People are so caught up in the fight they have lost their way. Civil wars cost a lot of lives. Is getting your own way worth destroying the whole? “Partisan polarization has long been a fact of political life in the United States. But increasingly, Republicans and Democrats view not just the opposing party but also the people in that party in a negative light. Growing shares in each party now describe those in the other party as more closed-minded, dishonest, immoral and unintelligent than other Americans.” - (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/08/09/as-partisan-hostility-grows-signs-of-frustration-with-the-two-party-system/) Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt, and Financial Freedom.   ©MidasWord Read the full article

[centrally-unplanned]

Completely agreed, and this is why the atrophy of elite consensus & media institutions alongside (and causally connected to) growing partisan divide has been so deadly. One side will absolutely get "blamed" for a government shutdown based on this or that, but it probably won't be by gigantic margins. A world where Trump just unilaterally declared he would ignore Congress is one where I would bet he still retains 35% approval as a floor, and it could be higher. People's faith in institutions beyond the abstract level is low and also strongly partisan-aligned. It is part of why more and more of the weight of preserving these institutions has fallen on state institutions themselves and empowered party actors.

(Though ofc weakened doesn't mean gone, these are relative shifts)

thanks for answering the courts question. ugh, shit sucks. you think if the right loses congress in the next election there could be at least a bit of a bulwark against all this shit (for all the insanity, im gonna assume those'll still be happening lmao). sorry again for the stupid qs.

Oh yeah, that would radically change things - the Trump Admin absolutely is doing what it is doing with the tacit approval of Congress. Congress could pretty easily block cabinet appointments, push funding, etc if it wanted to. Trump could ofc *try* to go "actually the president doesn't need to listen to Congress", and if he did I don't think Republicans would impeach him over it. But the justice system and all that would largely side with Congress because that is the consensus law, and they could stop a lot of damage. Wouldn't "fix everything" by any means, but would be way better.

Though I will note that I think controlling both houses would be key - a split congress can't pass laws and that gap is exactly what expanding executive authority fills. And Dems are incredibly unlikely to take back the Senate given the current electoral math. Split congress will definitely help, but it won't be nearly as effective (ofc just guessing, politics isn't mechanical)