New Developments III

[Sabin]

In the past twenty-four hours, I've thought about posting something about how I really might be wrong about the Roe effect on the American electorate.

Link: https://twitter.com/SimonWDC/status/155 ... m-IAA&s=19

Or giving credit about Biden and Schumer's recent reconciliation win (God, fingers crossed on Sinema): https://twitter.com/whcos/status/155313 ... xWtlAC9dGQ

Instead, I'll just wish President Biden a speedy recovery from COVID (again) and pray that he pulls a rabbit out of his hat this fall, so he can continue his agenda for (at least) two more years.

[OscarGuy]

He's definitely delusional. He lost because he's a one-issue figure. All he cares about is UBI and that's not happening in our lifetimes. If it's struggling to find footing in the more liberal areas of Europe, who is going to even try to get a foothold in the more center-right U.S....especially if the youth of American don't actually start voting like their livelihoods depend on it.

[Sonic Youth]

I don't know if Yang's party will fail or not. But I doubt it stays centrist for long. Fascists always show their true colors eventually.

[Sabin]

"Most Third Parties Have Failed. Here's Why Ours Won't."

Lindsay Funke: Did [an open marriage] ever work for these people?
Tobias Funke: No. It never does. I mean these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might... But it might work for us.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... ist-third/

I had second thoughts about posting this because the 2024 election is years away, so why start the doom and gloom now? But I've been tracking Andrew Yang a bit since the 2020 election and I mostly just felt like writing about him. So, fair warning.

I thought of all the candidates who ran in 2020, he was one of the few that set himself up for something in the future. Increasingly, every election we get a "Reddit" candidate, an independent-ish who runs against his own party with a messianic platform who builds fandom for not giving a shit. But unlike Paul and Sanders who at least seemed more interested in symbolic wins, I suspected that Yang had something different in mind, and now we're seeing it in his Forward Party.

I'll be honest. I truly don't know if he's a disingenuous bad actor or a delusional messianic. His economic policies make me think the former, but then why run for Mayor of NYC only to lose a winnable election in a wipeout? He speaks so much about the two-party dominance, I wonder if it's the latter. Or maybe he's just a simple opportunist. He confuses me. And all the while he comes across as such a nice guy. I've never seen anyone make doomerism so palatable. One might be forgiven for mistaking it for "straight talk."

And I almost can't blame him for his mission. I absolutely understand American voters feeling left out of a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024. On the other hand, the necessity of pushing back against the Republican Party has never been a more existential threat than right now, which is increasingly looking like the status quo for the rest of my life. So, I do blame him. This is not the time for his mission. I pray he implodes and he doesn't get on the fifty ballots. But I think he could easily clear the 5% needed for a meaningful third party challenge.

[Sabin]

Yikes reporting on Trump's plan for a second term.

https://www.axios.com/2022/07/22/trump- ... econd-term

[Sabin]

Big Magilla wrote
I watched Abbie Richards, the 25-year-old feminist comedienne who put this together, on YouTube in which she explains the anti-Semitic category consists of things that conspiracy theorists blame on one evil group or another - "they can be lizards or aliens but usually they're just Jewish" she sys. That's quite a leap.

Some of that stuff like "elders of Zion" and "George Soros" is obviously anti-Semitic, but some it like "flat earth" and "hollow earth" is science denial. Stuff like "Pizza Gate" and "Deep State" are the kind of things they used to put people away in the looney bin for. "Mars slave colony" and "reptilian overlords" are the stuff of science fiction. If you google WayFair you get Overstock.com - the CEO of Overstock.com was one of the loonies that met with Guiliani and the My Pillow guy to encourage Trump to seize voting machines.

"We're about to get hit by an out-of-control locomotive!"
"That's not a locomotive. It's a passenger. You can tell by the -- "

[OscarGuy]

The problem is the easily refuted conspiracy theories like science denialism and the like are lower in the pyramid. It's the stuff that can't be "disproven" so easily that gets into the higher category and hence the anti-Semitic branch up there.

[Big Magilla]

I watched Abbie Richards, the 25-year-old feminist comedienne who put this together, on YouTube in which she explains the anti-Semitic category consists of things that conspiracy theorists blame on one evil group or another - "they can be lizards or aliens but usually they're just Jewish" she sys. That's quite a leap.

Some of that stuff like "elders of Zion" and "George Soros" is obviously anti-Semitic, but some it like "flat earth" and "hollow earth" is science denial. Stuff like "Pizza Gate" and "Deep State" are the kind of things they used to put people away in the looney bin for. "Mars slave colony" and "reptilian overlords" are the stuff of science fiction. If you google WayFair you get Overstock.com - the CEO of Overstock.com was one of the loonies that met with Guiliani and the My Pillow guy to encourage Trump to seize voting machines.

Here's Abbie in her own words:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkCmolG-slE

[Sabin]

OscarGuy wrote

Big Magilla wrote
I don't know why the last marker is called the "Anti-Semitic" Point of No Return, there are plenty of nuts who fit in that category without being anti-Semitic.

I guess it would probably have to do with one of the older "conspiracies," that oft-used dog whistle "Globalism." Baked into conspiracies about Illuminati, new world order, etc, is a foundation of "Jews control the world," which is where the anti-Semitism angle comes in.

Yep. We should call it Anti-Semitism 2.0. It really is a remarkable relaunch. Most people don't even know that it's Anti-Semitism.

But clearly some people do.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... story.html
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/201 ... mitic.html
https://www.jta.org/2016/11/07/politics ... n-analysis

"The phenomenon of anti-Semitism absent of Jews is not novel."

[OscarGuy]

I guess it would probably have to do with one of the older "conspiracies," that oft-used dog whistle "Globalism." Baked into conspiracies about Illuminati, new world order, etc, is a foundation of "Jews control the world," which is where the anti-Semitism angle comes in.

[Big Magilla]

Biden has mild symptoms. He should be fine.

I don't know why the last marker is called the "Anti-Semitic" Point of No Return, there are plenty of nuts who fit in that category without being anti-Semitic.

[Sabin]

Thoughts and prayers to Joe Biden who just tested positive for COVID. Top trending on Twitter are now Joe Biden has COVID, President Harris, and Dementia. It's a good world.

I wanted to share something that went viral on Tik Tok a few months ago. I'm such a fan of it. It's an upside-down pyramid chart that breaks down the level of conspiracy theories. The farther "up" you go it, you pass the following markers: Speculation Line, Leaving Reality, Science Denial, and finally The Anti-Semitic Point of No Return.

https://i.redd.it/ma1m1mwdqib61.jpg

I might debate some of these. I don't know how many people still prattle on about the moon landing being fake but I don't think that one is past the Anti-Semitic Point of No Return. And some of them are very silly (Nazis on the Moon). But I remain very, very concerned about how prevalent some of these are both on a personal scale as well as a macro scale. Not just QAnon (I helped to rescue a friend) but shit like New World Order, Deep State, Illuminati, and Cultural Marxism is the one that scares me the most. I'm hearing that shit far more and more these days.

Anyway, I'm sharing this both as a novelty (it's an entertaining) but as part of a persisting worry of mine about how many people in this country are past The Anti-Semitic Point of No Return.

[Sabin]

My fascination with national politics continues to play out in Pennsylvania. Shapiro (the respectable party-line Dem) is only up by 4 against MAGA candidate Mastriano (a straight up coup guy) in the gubenetorial race while Fetterman is up by 9 over Oz, despite being largely off the campaign trail in the hospital. Fetterman is running excellent campaign ads against Oz for being a Hollywood carptetbagger and it seems to be really working. We're still months out and anything can happen but it really just goes to show how much politics is really about Do you trust this person and why? If these dynamics hold, then Fetterman is going to beat Oz because Pennsylvania voters just see Fetterman as one of them more than Oz.

It's really interesting stuff. We're months out. I'm really crossing my fingers for Fetterman's health as well as Shapiro's win or else we're going to end up with a/nother truly crazy MAGA guy in the Senate. I have a few more thoughts on the race that I won't bore you with but the biggest mistake I've made so far in my concerns about this race was in my concerns about Fetterman's candidacy. I still have my concerns about his relationship with the African-American community, but I framed him as a "Bernie" candidate because he was running anti-establishment greivance politics and ran as a "progressive". We saw how that worked for Bernie. But the difference is that Fetterman is running anti-establishment grievance politics in a statewide race, not national race, and that's a major difference. It's choice that won't work everywhere but it certainly seems to be working this year (especially in contrast to Conor Lamb). Also, Fetterman might be running as a progressive but he's not running on signature policies. He may support single-payer healthcare, but he's not running a single-payer healthcare campaign. He's basically running on his outsider identity, which can be a viable strategy and this year in Pennsylvania it seems to be. I'm no kind of expert on politics. I'm constantly wrong on my predictions. But the one assessment I've been most wrong about is the importance of policy in political campaigns.

[Sabin]

We live in dark times. I'll take what little ray of light I can find.

NEW: A woman in Dallas is arguing that she can’t be ticketed for driving alone in the HOV lane because she’s 34 weeks pregnant and the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade—and Texas law now says a fetus is a person. She says they can’t have it both ways.

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdo ... -a-ticket/

I don't know who this woman is. I don't know what she believes. But I like the moxie.

[Sabin]

I've been trying to understand why former Japanese PM Abe was assassinated and it seems like the shooter was a conspiracy theorist or something.