The Republicans will claim that this is a nefarious Demorat (intended) plot, to cast shade on the wonderful Alaska sumit with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
A “Bukele style crack down on crime” actually involves secret deals with the gangs to be more discrete about the murders in exchange for releasing violent gang members. He then extrajudicially locked up a lot of other people.
Nods A handful sexually molested children, very important (of course they are, I’m not saying they are not); 10s of thousands of stolen children, (many of whom are exceptionally mistreated), less so.
The comments here are full of people who agree with him. It’s a bit disturbing how popular such archaic sentiments have become in the US. Because this is highly reactionary to say the least. This isn’t just men who are against female priests, which we also have in Europe obviously. This is far, far more archaic and reactionary than that https://x.com/RightWingWatch/status/1955327843824717876
I just want to bring my theology degree to bear on his viewpoint. Genesis chs. 1-2 reveal a fundamental equality between male and female. Both of them, together, are given a divine mandate to rule. Neither superiority on his part, or inferiority on hers, is in play.
After the curse of Genesis 3, one of the unfortunate outcomes was that he would desire to rule over her. Unfortunately we have seen that playing out down through history, as women have been suppressed and abused. It was not part of the original divine mandate.
Despite this we still have women exercising spiritual authority and changing the course of nations in the OT, and women exercising civic leadership, judicial leadership, military leadership and spiritual leadership.
Fast forward to the New Testament and women played a prominent role in the ministry of Jesus and in the early church.
It appalls me how Christians base their worldview on male/female roles in leadership and in the church without knowing the scriptures very well, and without knowing much about the life and ministry of Jesus, or indeed the early church. Women were prominent throughout.
I will stop writing as I could do a graduate paper on this, and it pisses me off to see it.
As far as gendered toilets are concerned, let’s everybody act like adults and make in the corner behind the smoking shed or on the nearest BMW, as Mother Nature intended.
Some of you have never taken a Llanelli girl out in Cardiff and it shows.
4. Suppression of Opposition and Dissent: Fascism relies on suppressing dissent and opposition through various means, including censorship, propaganda, and violence. Political opponents, minorities, and other perceived enemies are often targeted for persecution.
During the Obama era partisan Gerrymandering, drawing maps specifically to benefit the party in charge by concentrating the other party’s voters in as few districts as possible, started becoming a really salient issue. More than the unfairness, people started pointing to it as one the principal causes of our increasingly extreme politics - if you draw too many safe seats the only challenge the majority of politicians have is from their own party resulting in a race to the extreme within a party.
A group called common cause was fighting for independent districting commissions and put together a detailed set of guidance on how to draw fair maps. They argued against 2 specific gerryamndered maps and got their case to the SC in 2019, but lost. There had been incredible effort put into trying to identify the fairest non-partisan way of drawing maps, but that SC decision essentially set fire to it all.
This week Common Cause have come out in favour of California redrawing their maps in a partisan fashion in response to what Texas are doing. The internet has howled in disapproval at their hypocrisy…“not so non-partisan now are you?” WTF do you want them to do? The court defined the rules of the game and told them their preferred approach was irrelevant. If any state employed the CC approach it would be a unilateral disarming by the party in control of that state ceding power to a side that is going to use their power to achieve outcomes you don’t want.
Paulus is sadly put on a pedestal, and his view of women was the view of women in patriarchal judaism of his day and age. But for most Chistians, even protestants, Paulus is akin to a saint and only theologicans can question his wisdom. I don’t know how it in your church, but when I grew up, it was Paulus, Paulus, Paulus and his many letters. Augustin doesn’t help either. And he is also a massive authority. His view was one of theoretical equality in the mind, but in practice, women were so dangerous for the soul that he had to become a monk. And Thomas Aquinas is the worst.
Note: I am not that judgmental of historic figures of antiquity. A different time, a different world, but Thomas Aquinas was reactionary in his view of women already then. But I don’t judge them like I do comtemporary mysogynists.
But yes, when I grew up; you were not supposed to question these authorities (which is deeply ironic, given the Reformation, but hypocracy is eternal).
Today, most very conservative congretions justify their view of women with “according to Paulus”…
This is the type of approach I agree with. I think there is a tendency of the US democrats to play into Trump’s hand (no, I promise you that I will not become Toro) by denying severity of problems (such as illegal immigration, which is simply far too high in the US for it to not cause sociopolitical friction; but I often hear democrats scoff at that idea) https://x.com/asymmetricinfo/status/1955267841600438514
As for solutions, I would look at rehabilitation, but I understand this is not popular in the US, where criminals become some sort of sub human species best left locked away to suffer (only very, very slight exaggeration). I would also look as socioeconomics and seek to lower unemployment and housing costs, perhaps subsidies on public transport etc. In general, reduce social cleavages and seek to foster a kinder population (can’t do that effectively when top dogs spouts cruelty, so that is sort of out of the window). But I am a Social Democrat, so that would not fly in the US.
But even so, I agree with Megan that to just spin it and say that crime is going down without looking at exactly how high it is or how fast it is going down, is probably a propaganda victory to Trump. Another thing is, what is crime ? Crime is an extremely broad category. Murder and rape is rather more severe than petty theft and so on.
The thing is though when the other side just make up shit to get people angry about, there is a lot of value in actually being technically correct. I get the value of winning arguments, but when you’re only ever having those arguments on their terms then even when you win them you still reinforcing their incorrect view of the world in people’s minds.
When it comes to crime, both all sorts of violent crime, we saw a big spike during the covid era, one that preceded the Biden era of “defunding the police” (that never happened and was never supported) that has now dissipated and fallen back in the line with the overall downward trajectory of the last several decades that we were on before the pandemic. That means if there is no anomaly to respond to, and if one has concerns about crime incidence in absolute terms, there are plenty of other places to focus attention than in DC. But they arent because this isnt really about real crime.
Accepting their framing is why so many of our political and social arguments are had on RW terms. That is why despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary everyone just knows as a reflex that republicans are better for the economy and security even when they are losing a specific argument about either of those issues. Whatever issues Megan might have with Trump, she is a Republican and she is interested in sustaining the RW perception of these issues and that is instructive in how she frames her argument here. So what she is doing, as she has long been doing, is trying to pitch to Dems that actually being John McCain is the right response to Trump because that is where she wants this to all shake out when MAGA’s grip finally wanes.
It’s an interesting phenomenon, these more old school Republicans who’ve lost belief they can regain power of their own party and have switched to instead trying to get some control of the Dems.
There has always been an element of the Center Right establishment who live to tell Dems what they need to stand for to earn their vote (that they’d never cast because why vote for a Dem pretending to be a Republican when you can just vote for actual John McCain). But that was always about undercutting the Dem party. Today it feels like it is a genuine attempt to find a new home and make it more like the one they are familiar with.
Which is an interesting take, because I know a lot of these people have pretty cynical takes on immigrants changing the character of their adopted home with questions about whether we should really let that many in.
I respect that. But I do often think that liberals and leftists have a tendency to reinforce right wing tropes by minimising actual problems that the Right Wing exaggerates wildly, reinforcing the Right Wing’s propaganda narrative with “evidence” of how liberals ignore these issues or lies, etc.
Then because the issues become part of Nationalist trope, they become issues liberals and leftist won’t touch because they are “tainted” and one must discard everything Nationalists says automatically and so on. This again can and certainly in Europe have, lead to certain problems reinforcing themselves (an example is immigration, where in Sweden for instance, there has been a sport in scoring “kindness points”; leading to systemic problems with integration not being answered because it is touchy and can hurt someone’s tender sensibilities as well as validating minor points that the Nationalists raise as grievances).
After all, the most effective propaganda tends to the the one with a grain of truth but no nuances.
But here I am generalising. I don’t know enough about this case in question (regarding D.C crime) to have a very valid opinion.
This is an amazing illustration of the RW take on what the culture wars are that they winning - they are winning them only because they invent wars to fight that no one is on the other side of
This is shit sororities have been doing for as long as tik tok has been a thing. Up until 1 month ago the right responded to these things with disgust, referring to these women as whores just waiting to be passed around the football and basketball teams.
So why are they are now so giddy about this shit now? They convinced themselves what criticism of the Sweeney ad was because Libs dont like looking at fuckable women, or even acknowledging that its ok for women to present themselves as fuckable. You know he who shall not be named was drinking from the RW firehose because that is how he presented the argument several times. But what criticism of the ad there was on the left there was, with as muted and limited as it was, THAT was not the argument. But now the right takes every instance of women expressing themselves as autonomous sexual beings - although they are not good at reading that as often a woman just existing in a public space can be interpreted by the right as women making a point to present their fuckableness to (alpha) men - as a win over the libs.
Give it a month and they’ll remember they are supposed to think that women who want a college education are whores who will never find a their real calling of having a husband who takes care of them…because their arguments are an absolutely incoherent mess of guttural reactions.
Sort of, but I think the real attraction for men of the trad life is not having their meals cooked for them. But them being the provider in a way that gives them power over someone who is then dependent on them with a Betty Drapper sense of helplessness.
