Politics over Religion at MD&D

[_Meadowchik]

...just want to pop in with an everyday consequence of good trends going on...

[_Choyo Chagas]

I think you may have missed the point Johannes was trying to make. He is, it appears, British, perhaps even English. What he says refers to the sad fact that in some parts of the UK, the 2016 vote to leave the European Union was in part motivated by a dislike of the presence of white European workers, such as Poles, whose high qualifications and willingness to work were seen as displacing or reducing the wages of less qualified long-term UK residents.

Indeed. It's very revealing, really. For years, anti-immigration rhetoric denounced people who wear burqas, don't learn English, don't integrate with mainstream society, and so on. But Polish immigrants are white Christians who tend to speak good English and often have quite conservative views. As for the economic issue, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they don't work, they're welfare scroungers, and if they do, they're stealing our jobs - the Daily Mail will go after them either way.

got it

polish ones?
hungarians as well.

As for the economic issue, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't.
if and if in every case

they're stealing our jobs; what about pakistanies...
now only about gb...

[_Uncle Ed]

Also, how do you feel about the graduate student tax? Right now, a graduate student usually receives 1) tuition waiver and 2) a stipend in exchange for teaching course professors don't want to do. An average stipend is around $20k. This bill would include their waiver as taxable income, even though graduate students never see that money. In other words, someone making $20k would be taxed as if they were making about $50k. Do you know how much in real tax dollars that translates to? About $9k. So, the result will be that someone who right now generally is not taxed because they make so little will see nearly half their income gone with this bill.

https://www.npr.org/2017/12/15/571258698/chart-how-the-new-version-of-the-republican-tax-bill-would-affect-you?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=news
Seems like none of that got left "in". No changes. What is your point?

The rest of your verbiage is subjective, as is my world view. I disagree with giving the DEMs a pass and assigning all the blame for non cooperation to the Repubs. Liberals never want to share blame. See, how that sounds?

[_Uncle Ed]

...But for the love of Jebus, you do not choose Biff from Back to the Future ...

Leaped out at me, that bit did: I was saying this all by myself even before the summer of '16. Now here it is again: Trump is Biff Tannen to a "T".

But, according to any evidence garnered through the informative auspices of Medía, The Donald is not Biff. He acts like him, but his core is not Biff's. Outward appearances do mislead. I am going by acts, not the noise. And I have a reserved hope that he will perform "prodigies" (especially considering that he is, possibly, the most resisted President in history).

[_Uncle Ed]

There’s a great Vox article about the underlying reasons for Trump’s popularity that were discovered through careful surveys. Many of us will not be surprised to learn that support for Trump is highly correlated with xenophobia and sexism. When my parents gushed about those good old days, I always imagined malt shops and poodle skirts. The reality is that the unchallenged dominance of white men is usually the unspoken key to their nostalgia. What was so great about 1960?

Hmmm... gee, could it be segregation?

Nowadays people are a lot more honest about that being the case. How disappointed I was to find pretty frank white nationalism among my relatives. This is the key to Trump’s support. Richard Spencer once said he had no problem with socialism so long as it was benefiting the right people.

The smartest and most diabolically insidious thing the GOP ever did was to connect the idea of government support for anything to brown people. Before long government support started to become too expensive. If they have to let brown people in public universities, they make it difficult for the brown people to afford it. It is the wedge the Right uses to sucker poor white people into resenting their own benefits and voting against them.

Make America Great Again is really code for Make America White Again.

I am not saying that every Trump supporter consciously thinks this way, although quite a few of them clearly do. I am saying that they want the White World of the past back. This is what they feel a great America is, even if they don’t consciously put those things together.

This is despair producing crap. You really believe this.

Arguably, Mormonia is the most anti-Black demographic outside of Deep South enclaves. We have, still, very few Blacks (but far more than when I was growing up). My family called Brazil nuts Nigger Toes. My grandmother recited "When This Little Nigger Prays" from memory to put us to sleep, rather than sing, because her singing voice wasn't very delightful. There was a song that I now can't recall that focused on Niggers, quite funny and in its way, like the poem, pro Black, while bearing the violations of PC. As a little boy I grew up liking Blacks, but I had an antipathy toward Mexicans. I don't recall a single thing about my parents' or their generation toward or against Mexicans: it's a complete neutral blank. But I still battle with vestiges of my childhood xenophobia.

My son is married to a Peruvian. Not quite the same thing as if he were married to a Mexican, but close enough, as it appears that all Hispanics up here in the US hang out together. I love the woman as a father-in-law ought. Their little boy is delightful.

Brown skin was, to my childhood prejudices, the most beautiful color, combined with black hair and dark shining, almond shaped eyes. I didn't distinguish where any of them came from. Nancy Kwan was my first childhood crush. I fell in love with a girl in the fourth grade who resembled Nancy more than a little bit. She was my first and greatest RL crush, and she crushed me. You would expect such a combination to turn me into a bigot or worse. But I still see the greatest beauty in combined races tending toward the swarthy side. Interracial mixing is the best.

I am not in a minority. Most Americans are "color blind". Otherwise Obama would not have served even one term.

So your vaunted insight is way off. We should always be rethinking everything.

[_Symmachus]

Seems like none of that got left "in". No changes. What is your point?

Good to know some Republicans in the Senate have more sense than you. The point, which I think was blindingly obvious to anyone else, was that you let your mask slip: you are willing to admit that Trump is obviously a demagogue and possibly a tyrant (although you don't seem to grasp that the problem is not his personal behavior but that his personal behavior is affecting policy as he merges private interest with public), but as long as you get some money out of it, you're fine, no matter how it affects others or the larger body politic. You could wash the stench of hypocrisy off by putting your references to the constitution and American values on hold until you get your principles straight.

The rest of your verbiage is subjective, as is my world view.

The rest of my verbiage consisted of asking you to back up your claims about objective reality: which socialist judges did Obama appoint? Which freedoms have you lost since the 1960s? You can't name any because, as you admit here, it's more of a subjective feeling that informs what you say. It's sort of like Donald Trump's net worth.

I disagree with giving the DEMs a pass and assigning all the blame for non cooperation to the Repubs. Liberals never want to share blame. See, how that sounds?

Not sure what shadow you're responding to, but box away.

[_Uncle Ed]

@Symmachus:
Attack and deflect away.
My principles are well set and considered.
In the Real World, the vast bulk of voters do not study at university level any of the issues of the day or their historical antecedents. So Medía is the source of all "knowledge". That was clearly discerned well over a hundred years ago in this Nation when conspirators deduced that taking control of just "twenty-five" of the country's newspapers would suffice to propagandize that bulk of voters. From long before either of us were born this process of propagandizing American voters has been going on. So, how much, exactly, of what you "know" is even real?

I allow that what I "know" is tainted at best and total distortion/lies at worst.

So all I can do is go by what is unfolding right now. That caused me to resist Trump as no previous engagement in politics had ever accomplished. The man alarmed me and I too made the "Hitler" demagogue references, on Facebook, even. I pushed for Gary Johnson, joined the Libertarians (I am one hundred percent Libertarian, according to the world's smallest political quiz https://www.theadvocates.org/quiz/quiz.php ), donated, made bumper stickers https://www.dropbox.com/s/h1q6lkhnx0ul9al/cancer%20carcinogen.jpg?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/5go2ul916bsrxnt/DSC03422.JPG?dl=0 and then dumped him for Evan McMullin when it looked like he had a shot at denying "those two".

You might try to be a bit more persuadable. It is good for the soul.

[_Symmachus]

Attack and deflect away.
My principles are well set and considered.

You just can't explain them in a way that doesn't make you look like a self-interested hypocrite.

I'm persuadable on the basis of evidence-based (a term no longer allowed at Trump's CDC) analysis, but you can't even persuade me that your views are rooted, however tangentially, in real life. I'm just giving you the opportunity, as others on this thread have, to back up your assertions.

Fill in the blank:

One freedom that I have concretely lost since 1960 is:

One socialist judge appointed by Obama is:

So, how much, exactly, of what you "know" is even real?

That's a stunning hat you've got on; did it come with that tinfoil or is that an accessory? Now you are trafficking in epistemological conspiracy theories and claiming some kind of high ground: you know the enlightened truth that political narratives are constructed, whereas anyone who asks factual support for your baseless assertions in trapped in false understanding of reality. It's a ploy, so typical of Trump supporters, to disguise ignorance with knowledge. The truth will be apparent to anyone reading this: you just don't know what you're talking about, and so you assume no else possible can either.

I allow that what I "know" is tainted at best and total distortion/lies at worst.

The question is: how does one tell the difference, and can you tell the difference? Doesn't seem so.

[_Kishkumen]

This is despair producing crap. You really believe this.

I acknowledge the facts, whether they make me feel good or not. But I do note that you are telling us that your beliefs about reality are governed by your feelings. If you find the facts depressing, then you will choose not to believe them.

I am not in a minority. Most Americans are "color blind". Otherwise Obama would not have served even one term.

On the one hand you tell us that you wrestle with vestiges of your childhood xenophobia—refreshing honesty—and, on the other hand, you claim to be colorblind. Color blindness of this kind is a self-congratulatory fantasy. Obama’s presidency was a landmark historical moment, but in no way does it prove that a majority of Americans are colorblind. Clearly you don’t know, or don’t understand, how many people actually voted in the presidential elections or how many of them voted for Obama. His victory did not come from the majority of all Americans, although, thankfully, he did a helluva lot better than Trump, many of whose supporters are racists.

So your vaunted insight is way off. We should always be rethinking everything.

No, the problem is that you don’t understand my point. If your response is to say simply, “My brown friends and family prove I am not a racist,” then you don’t understand the issue at all.

[_moksha]

If people came in identical intensities of red and green, I would have a very hard time judging them.