Is there a politics thread? Guess I'm making one

[Grefter]

Postal survey for supporting gay marriage in Australia was a Yes.  Now the government can actually legalize it if they want to and not lie, but nothing holding them to it and they could have done it without wasting money on the Bureau of Statistics holding it.

[OblivionKnight]

Dear GOP: stop. Just... Please stop

[Pyro]

This tax bill they are throwing together like frankenstein's momster and pushing to pass now now now is bonkers.

[metroid composite]

Well, since alt-right videogame flare ups seem to be a predictor of electoral activity, I guess this belongs here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/GamerGhazi/comments/7dbv5x/frances_greatest_video_game_forum_and_dumpster/

Original French article:

http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2017/11/16/jeuxvideo-com-les-moderateurs-racontent-les-coulisses-du-forum-18-25_5215777_4408996.html

The French Website jeuxvideo, which...15 years ago I remember being pretty cool, had apparently descended into gamergatey 4chany /pol/esque racism and sexism, and was orchestrating harassment campaigns against feminists, and then against journalists who reported on the harassment campaigns.  Well, a bunch of advertisers pulled out, the owning company took notice, took down the forums for several days, hired 10 more admins, and then brought the forums back up again, which...so far seem to be calmed.

[dunie]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/11/20/the-senate-just-made-it-a-lot-easier-for-trump-to-appoint-federal-judges-over-democrats-objections/?utm_term=.7769a89f457a

[OblivionKnight]

Boy, I never thought I'd say this in my entire life, but I am so excited about current happenings in Alabama. 

Tomorrow should be interesting.

[OblivionKnight]

...

...

...

Did...

Did that just happen? 

[Shale]

I can confirm that that did, in fact, just happen. Fuck yeah.

[NotMiki]

That’ll do

[Captain K]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFYRkzznsc0

[dunie]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42374693
interesting development in a place other than Britain and the US

ps germany still does not have a functioning govt.

[Shale]

Going back into the last page for an election update....

My disteict was 12 votes for the R incumbent. Might decide Medicaid expansion for half a million people...

RECOUNT SAYS FUCK THAT.

One. Vote. Margin. Pyro, the entire state of Virginia thanks you for voting.

[SnowFire]

Looks like House of Delegates is back to a tie.  They might flip a coin to determine Pyro's seat.

Also I dunno about @notlarrysabato 's political savvy.  He seems incredibly hostile to having a downstate rep be Speaker (assuming the Dems even get that close) because...  I dunno.  Even if the sole goal is to have NoVa issues represented in the House, to do this, you're gonna need at least SOME support in the rest of the state...   

Anyway, if the Dems somehow get control of the House or even get to do some power-sharing agreement, I think I'd want to trade any and all political goals to change the Virginia redistricting process - well, assuming that the Republicans couldn't just change it again in 2019 at least.  Make it so that the districts are not so brutally gerrymandered that it requires an absolute wave election to maybe tie.

[Cmdr_King]

https://twitter.com/elizabethcatte/status/947107951436816384

Great followup to some stuff about coal country.  Eat the rich.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJW4-cOZt8A&t=897s

The degree to which I find myself represented in late 2017 Contrapoints is getting eerie.  PS eat the rich.

[Grefter]

Contra does have a way of building on her arguments as she goes (almost like her background is in formal logic and philosophy or something~) so hopefully future videos will revisit the ice cold motherfuckers thing.

FYI still Eat the Rich unironically tbqh.

[Luther Lansfeld]

“Rich as we are as West Virginians in our natural resources,” he said in his March 1913 inaugural address, “more than 80% of our fuel and raw material is utilized outside the state.”

I mentioned in the Books topic that I read the book Open Veins of Latin America. The degree to which this article reflects what was written in that book is quite eerie. Resource wealth ended up being a bad thing for the rank and file citizens of a place because outside interests came in and pillaged it for low prices.

[Grefter]

So remember a few pages back how I had a mad on for NYT and was dragging them for pushing conservative climate change denial editors?  And how it did the readers a disservice after marketting themselves as a point of sanity in the incoming Trump presidency?

So yeah fuck the New York Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/31/us/politics/trump-reinventing-presidency.html

That headline.  Section after section being “here is a bunch of bad stuff buuuuut look at how effective/impactful it all is!”.   This is pretty trash from top to bottom.

[SnowFire]

We've been back & forth on this before, but I absolutely do not get it, and totally disagree.  That isn't a puff piece by a mile, and it's worth knowing what parts of Trump's badness is being implemented, no??!  I...  I don't get it.  Is the only news article allowed "Trump didn't actually change anything and therefore everything is fine?!"  How is that accurate?  What's the problem here?

Under Mr. Trump, it has become a blunt instrument to advance personal, policy and political goals. He has revolutionized the way presidents deal with the world beyond 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, dispensing with the carefully modulated messaging of past chief executives in favor of no-holds-barred, crystal-breaking, us-against-them, damn-the-consequences blasts borne out of gut and grievance...  He has kept a business on the side; attacked the F.B.I., C.I.A. and other institutions he oversees; threatened to use his power against rivals; and waged war against members of his own party and even his own cabinet. He fired the man investigating his campaign and has not ruled out firing the one who took over. He has appealed to base instincts on race, religion and gender as no president has in generations. And he has rattled the nuclear saber more bombastically than it has been since the days of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[Cmdr_King]

Mr. Trump has cast aside the mythology of a magisterial presidency removed from the people in favor of a reality-show accessibility that strikes a chord in parts of the country alienated by the establishment. That indifference to the way things have always been done has energized Mr. Trump’s core supporters, who cheer his efforts to destroy political correctness, take on smug elites and smash a self-interested system that, in their view, has shafted everyday Americans.

Yeah no man.  Puff piece.  This is the language to use to talk about Facebook in 2005: "oh well this is kinda concerning and this one expert thinks it's a huge mistake, but it's really revolutionized the industry and is leaving a definite mark on the american psyche". Man's nazi followers have killed people in the streets, his brownshirts rip apart families left and right, god knows how many hundreds have died due to bigots emboldened by his election, but we're going to take the long-view "oh the presidency will be FINE, there's always some give and take in the ebbs of history" view because anything else would demand taking off the cloak of pretend-neutrality they covet over actual substantive news coverage.

Yeah no, fuck those guys.

[SnowFire]

But...  do you actually disagree with that statement?!  Are you saying that Trump's supporters deplore his efforts to destroy political correctness, endorse the measured judgment of elites, and liked the system before?  Am I reading a different article here or something?  Like, every other paragraph is absolutely flamebait for Trump-supporters but couched in somewhat neutral language.  I don't know how you can think the author has anything other than contempt for Trump.  If merely describing Trump & Trump's ideology is somehow endorsing it...   argh!

If you want to actually read Trump-supporting year-commentary stuff, I can find some easily enough.  Or for that matter scrupulously "neutral, both sides have good points" commentary (although this is kinda rare).  That article is not that. 

[Ranmilia]

If merely describing Trump & Trump's ideology is somehow endorsing it...   argh!

Yes, it is, when you do it in the NYT.  And it is argh, indeed.  That, uh, was the entire lesson of the election, the press insisting on giving  "fair" "equal" front page headline coverage to the most extreme views legitimized them as a platform and catapulted them into mainstream support.

[Grefter]

RE: is the only article “he didn’t do anything meaningful” the only article you can write.   Of course not, but you could actually fucking do or say anything in your piece.  This just states things that happen without doing things like damning the whole section “this is why he won” or pointing out how horrendously autocratic everything in that paragraph is.  There is no context on the horrible shit he actually fucking does with the power and authority he consolidates there.

All it is doing is describing Trump ignoring protocol and social norma, exactly what he said he would do going in, without saying a goddamned thing.  All it does is push Trump’s brand as being on point and what it said it was.  There is fuck all about the harm and lies that goes with this.  There is ONE reference to lies in the whole article, and that is “according to fact checkers”.  There is ZERO references to how efficient or inefficient the Whitehouse is actually run, just that it has less staff.  There is no stories from anyone there that is not a mouthpiece to people in charge there.

All this says is “look at all the change Trump makes and how everything is going to be in response to Trump”.

[SnowFire]

A brief side story first.  My father is a nice fellow, but he's a bit of a political neophyte at times.  He sent off what he thought was a nice, we can all join hands, happy NYTimes editorial out on Christmas, including to his conservative relatives.  He got an absolute flameblast email reply back, and both my mother & I could have told him beforehand.  What "appears" to be a nice balanced neutral piece in the liberal bubble is in fact incendiary trolling outside of it: it was really inviting conservatives to unilaterally disarm and support liberal policy proposals, because that would be nice and can't we all agree on that.  The conservative relatives picked up on this immediately, my father didn't.

Anyway, Grefter, don't trust me.  Find your local Trump-supporter (or Australian equivalent...  not that I think any exist...?  The Libs don't seem crazy enough), and ask them if this is a fair-and-balanced year-end recap; trust them.

--

Sir Alex: Well, I have bad news, but Trump is the president of the United States, horrible as that is, and I at least would be interested to bear about what he's doing and why.   Said extreme views are now very relevant.  I think that as far as legitimizing them, the article goes to pains to point out just what a break with traditional American standards they are, which is good to keep reminding people of.  I think that they absolutely have to be covered, and to the extent acknowledging their existence legitimizes them, this cost is outweighed by the knowledge in knowing what's going on.  "Trump is very bad, trust me" may be too vague to help.

--

EDIT: I should probably add for why I have a very strong response to this.  It's...  it's crazy.  The article, a somewhat boring year-end filler piece so the journos can go on vacation, outright calls him an authoritarian who's demolishing America's political traditions.  What do you want here?!  Look, I can get criticizing the NYT for being not left enough.  I think this would be ill-advised, but I get it.  Saying "fuck these guys" basically seems to be saying that the Times is secretly allied with Trump, or is enabling him, or something.  Which is crazypants and being unable to distinguish an ally from an enemy.  Ask Trump himself if the mainstream media is on his side.  (Now, if you want to rag on the media for over-coverage of the Mueller emails, fine, but that's not related to this particular article.)  Trying to delegitimize the media because...  I'm not even really sure what the complaint is, but because it didn't say FUCK TRUMP obviously enough or something...  is playing into Trump's hands.  The media's watchdog role is a good guardian for society, and a lot of the problem we have now is thanks to Trump ragging on them and claiming fake news every 5 seconds.  If the left agrees with this, that truth is relative and is solely about power, it will be the stupidest thing ever.  That article is doing the watchdog thing of firmly stating just all the terrible things Trump did.  That's a GOOD thing.

(now, if you want to rag on the Times for recent articles, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/us/ohio-hovater-white-nationalist.html is a better one to pick...  it's just a pretty insubstantial article.  People accused it of "normalizing" a Nazi, which was Kind Of The Point - a bit of a "they live among us" thing - but hey, it got the Nazi fired from his job, so it's not all bad.)

[Grefter]

But that is the problem!  It does NOT say he is an authoritarian.  It describes an authoritarian down to a capital A.   It doesn’t once call out and actually label what they are describing.  I am not saying call him Literally Hitler.   But when you describe an Authoritarian and a liar and you don’t call it plain in your text all you are doing is showing that you aren’t prepared to do just that.  If there is ever a time to speak truth to power it is when you are doing that with the leader of your country.


Edit - And if you think just presenting he facts and waving your hands like you did a magic trick is going to communicate to the broader public then you clearly missed the election where an autocrat with an autocratic campaign got elected and people calling him out on it were ignored and told they are being too extreme while the opposition won on a platform of telling it like it is.

[SnowFire]

Bob shot up the gas station, beat the clerk up, took his wallet, looted the register, then ran off.

Okay, I GUESS you can say that for people in favor of robbery, this might sound like an endorsement.  But it totally isn't.  This hypothetical passage is "descriptively" yet factually attacking Bob.  Nobody would say that such an article is obscuring Bob's nature or some such.  The article is filled with this -  "bristled at the restraints imposed on the presidency as few have, lashing out at judges, lawmakers, investigators and journalists who anger him",   "no other president would publicly assert such power in such a raw political fashion", talking about impeachment.  Like I said, I'm really not sure what you're looking for here.  Now, to be clear, if your default personal preference for reading is for more explicitly editorialish outfits, fine.  I certainly got lots of my news from The Daily Show back during the Bush years.  But attacking the NYT for writing facts you apparently agree with (that he's an authoritarian), in perhaps slightly more staid terms, is insanity!