Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[Winstonm]

+1 for fetidity.

[Winstonm]

It occurred to me that the impact shelf life for trolls is fairly short, and the trolling president is finding fewer and fewer who are persuaded by his name-calling schtick: complaining that the LameStream Media was unfair to his totally incompetent selection to head the Intelligence services starts to sound contrived and pretty boring after awhile - except to weak minds.

[kenberg]

re: Mayor Pete's structural reform to-do list:

 

Here's one that my congressman proposed a couple years ago and reintroduced last month along with kenberg's congressman:

 

 

 

 

I voted for Jamie Raskin, maybe I'll drop him a congratulatory note on this.

 

 

 

He represents a seriously gerrymandered district (mine):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland%27s_8th_congressional_district

 

Working now against gerrymandering is not at all hypocritical. He ran in the district as the lines are now drawn, if he favors re-drawing lines in a more satisfactory manner, good for him, I hope that it succeeds.

 

 

 

 

[jjbrr]

So after reading about this El Paso deal and hearing that (once again) reporters are at the scene trying to interview people who were literally shot at moments before or perhaps who had just lost a loved one a la Sandy Hook, I'm curious what the breakdown is among BBFers between the news you receive via written media versus televised media.

 

I suspect there is a strong correlation between the percentage of televised media consumed and general political lean, though BBF is almost certainly not a good representation of most Americans.

[kenberg]

So after reading about this El Paso deal and hearing that (once again) reporters are at the scene trying to interview people who were literally shot at moments before or perhaps who had just lost a loved one a la Sandy Hook, I'm curious what the breakdown is among BBFers between the news you receive via written media versus televised media.

 

I suspect there is a strong correlation between the percentage of televised media consumed and general political lean, though BBF is almost certainly not a good representation of most Americans.

 

I read WaPo most every day, I listen to the PBS Newshour more often than not. I lsten to Joshua Johnson some on 1A, most lf I am driving somewhere. I sometimes follow-up on articles posted here, with various reasons and results. For example, when the subject turned to immigrants and CEOs, and Fortune 500, I browsed around. I'm from Minnesota (but I have been in Maryland for 50+years) and was a bit surprised (and pleased) to see that were 18 or maybe 19 Fortune 500 companies in Minnesota. (The St. Paul Pioneer Press said 19, but that article was a year old). Anyone who reads my posts knows I find Paul Krugman's style to be pretty obnoxious but I appreciate having my attention drawn to his articles from time to time.

 

I cannot tell you who the anchors or main reporters are on CNN or ABC or CBS etc. Mostly I find their news shows unbearable. Somewhere along the way the news got turned over to the entertainment people, and it doesn't fit my interests.

 

I try to read conservative writers despite my choices of PBS and NPR. I very much appreciate hearing from those with a conservative view, and on some matters we can agree. Not really rare, as a matter of fact. Many conservatives find Trump appalling, but there are other areas of agreement as well.

 

I don't know if any of this is the sort of thing you were asking about.

[jjbrr]

Ken, do you watch local, daily news?

 

I have never in my life chosen to seek out a local news segment, except in high school when they announced snow closings. I'm curious if you think local news provides value in your life.

[kenberg]

Ken, do you watch local, daily news?

 

I have never in my life chosen to seek out a local news segment, except in high school when they announced snow closings. I'm curious if you think local news provides value in your life.

 

Well, some. I mentioned above that I voted for Jamie Raskin. I went to a debate where there were several candidates for the Democratic nomination and I read various opinion pieces. I follow things involving education. And I suppose it's a question of how local is local. I live maybe 40 minutes from downtown Baltimore. The mayor there resigned a while back. She had written a children's book, self-published, and I gather that she sold copied by the truckload to some organizations that were doing business with the city. Something like that. I followed it sort of, but not closely enough that I can give exact details. Growing up in St. Paul and then living in Minneapolis I followed local news more closely. It was more interesting. And back then I followed sports. Now I have no idea how the Ravens are doing.

 

On occasion I listen to something on MPT, Maryland Public Television, that talks about the Chesapeake Bay or other matters. But I definitely do not regularly tune in to either a tv channel or a radio station for local news.

 

I'm guessing few find these facts as just what they needed to know before getting a good night's sleep.

 

 

[johnu]

‘Gun Rights’ Fan Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Turns Focus To Mental Health After El Paso Attack

 

Ardent “gun rights” supporter Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott tried desperately Saturday to focus on shooters’ “mental health” issues instead of issues such as easy access to assault rifles at a press conference following the mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart that left at least 20 people dead.

Abbott once boasted he was “embarrassed” that Texas was second to California in gun sales.

He insisted Saturday that the state legislature passed “bill after bill after bill” to protect students from school shootings after eight teenagers and two teachers were fatally shot last year at Santa Fe High School in Texas. One of the bills Abbott signed into law involved arming more teachers. None of the bills involved increased gun control.

Abbott acknowledged that “we did not, as far as I know, evaluate for and plan for an incident like this,” referring to the Walmart shooting.

He later angrily snapped at reporters that it was too soon to focus on the “politics” of gun control while “there are bodies” still to be recovered. “I think we need to focus more on memorials before we start the politics,” he added.

On that last point, by the time all the memorials have been done for the last mass shooting, there will be another mass shooting that will delay any focus on the previous mass shootings.

 

Abbott is a favorite of the National Rifle Association, which recently hailed ten pro-gun laws the governor has signed this year. “Governor Greg Abbott has now signed all of the NRA-supported legislation which the Texas Legislature sent him during the 2019 session,” an NRA web site boasted.

 

In June Abbott vetoed a bill by his legislature making it a state crime to bring guns into secure areas of airports.

Oh my! :o

[kenberg]

Abbott speaks of mental health. I see the psychological component this way. By allowing for the manufacture and widespread sale of weapons that kill many people in a short time we are , intentionally or not, conveying a view that as a society we are ok with killing a large number of people quickly. We can say oh no, of course we don't actually want you to use this weapon to shoot up a mall or a church or a softball game etc, but it is absolutely inevitable that some people, and not just the total loonies that would be seen as total loonies, will see the legality of the sale as acceptance of the use. And they will choose the manner of use.

 

I think that this is important. People intuitively understand this point, it shows up in other contexts. For example, it is often argued that if the high school nurse provides condoms to students, that nurse is implicitly accepting sexual relations among high school students. The wisdom of having the nurse handing out condoms ca be debated, but no doubt it will be taken, at least by some, as society saying that it's ok for sixteen year olds to have sex. . Allowing people to buy weapons that will quickly kill many people will be taken by some as society's acceptance of their use of that weapon. They shouldn't interpret it that way but some will interpret it that way. This is certain.

 

People can understand this argument. That's my point. Most people do not read the Federalist Papers or have long discussions about the Constitution. But they can quickly understand that allowing such weapons to be sold is acceptance that such weapons will be used. And that understanding is a start on addressing the problem.

[Winstonm]

That the gun stance of the Republican party is complicit in these shooting deaths is unequivocal; after all, the symbiotic relationship of the NRA and the Republican party gives rise to a lack of an honest exchange of ideas about dealing with guns and gun violence.

 

The question to me is how did we go from a the staunch conservative's legal view sounding like this:

"A fraud on the American public." That’s how former Chief Justice Warren Burger described the idea that the Second Amendment gives an unfettered individual right to a gun. When he spoke these words to PBS in 1990, the rock-ribbed conservative appointed by Richard Nixon was expressing the longtime consensus of historians and judges across the political spectrum.

to the Heller decision written by Antonin Scalia that stated gun ownership was an unfettered right?

[y66]

The question to me is how did we go from a the staunch conservative's legal view sounding like this:

 

"A fraud on the American public." That’s how former Chief Justice Warren Burger described the idea that the Second Amendment gives an unfettered individual right to a gun.

to the Heller decision written by Antonin Scalia that stated gun ownership was an unfettered right?

We followed the $$$?

[Winstonm]

Abbott speaks of mental health. I see the psychological component this way. By allowing for the manufacture and widespread sale of weapons that kill many people in a short time we are , intentionally or not, conveying a view that as a society we are ok with killing a large number of people quickly. We can say oh no, of course we don't actually want you to use this weapon to shoot up a mall or a church or a softball game etc, but it is absolutely inevitable that some people, and not just the total loonies that would be seen as total loonies, will see the legality of the sale as acceptance of the use. And they will choose the manner of use.

 

I think that this is important. People intuitively understand this point, it shows up in other contexts. For example, it is often argued that if the high school nurse provides condoms to students, that nurse is implicitly accepting sexual relations among high school students. The wisdom of having the nurse handing out condoms ca be debated, but no doubt it will be taken, at least by some, as society saying that it's ok for sixteen year olds to have sex. . Allowing people to buy weapons that will quickly kill many people will be taken by some as society's acceptance of their use of that weapon. They shouldn't interpret it that way but some will interpret it that way. This is certain.

 

People can understand this argument. That's my point. Most people do not read the Federalist Papers or have long discussions about the Constitution. But they can quickly understand that allowing such weapons to be sold is acceptance that such weapons will be used. And that understanding is a start on addressing the problem.

 

Ken, it's not that I disagree with you but I think it's also critical to understand who is on what side of the question and just who it is that needs to alter their views.

 

A holy-scripture-like adherence to a document and a reading of that document to fit beliefs is not the provenance of the middle ground, right-leaning, left-leaning, or left. That is something firmly grounded in the strong-right.

 

Until the strong right - especially the right-media-complex - no longer controls the entire Republican party, we will have nowhere to go and nothing will be done.

 

There is middle ground; unfortunately, we have been deemed unworthy to find it.

[Winstonm]

We followed the $$$?

 

No, I think we were led by the $$$.

 

The oddity is that if you accept that polls are at least accurate in a general sense, then the U.S. favors some type of limitation of gun rights and gun owenership. This means that a minority makes the decisions in that regard.

 

I don't think a democratic-republic can be defined as a country where a wealthy minority overrides the will of the majority.

[Winstonm]

Here is a curiosity. I cannot vouch for the accuracy:

 

Will Bunch noted on twitter that counties where Trump holds a rally witness a 226% increase in hate crimes.

 

Trump held a large rally in El Paso last February, he held one three days ago 45-minutes south of Dayton.

 

From WaPo:

 

Using the Anti-Defamation League’s Hate, Extremism, Anti-Semitism, Terrorism map data (HEAT map), we examined whether there was a correlation between the counties that hosted one of Trump’s 275 presidential campaign rallies in 2016 and increased incidents of hate crimes in subsequent months.

 

To test this, we aggregated hate-crime incident data and Trump rally data to the county level and then used statistical tools to estimate a rally’s impact. We included controls for factors such as the county’s crime rates, its number of active hate groups, its minority populations, its percentage with college educations, its location in the country and the month when the rallies occurred.

 

We found that counties that had hosted a 2016 Trump campaign rally saw a 226 percent increase in reported hate crimes over comparable counties that did not host such a rally.

 

my emphasis

[johnu]

He (Texas GOP Gov Gregg Abbot)later angrily snapped at reporters that it was too soon to focus on the “politics” of gun control while “there are bodies” still to be recovered. “I think we need to focus more on memorials before we start the politics,” he added.

On that last point, by the time all the memorials have been done for the last mass shooting, there will be another mass shooting that will delay any focus on the previous mass shootings.

 

Mass Shooting In Dayton, Ohio, Leaves At Least 9 Dead, 27 Injured

 

The memorials for the El Paso victims haven't even started to be planned and there's yet another gun massacre to take the focus off El Paso and reset the clock to begin talking about the politics of gun control.

[Zelandakh]

It occurred to me that the impact shelf life for trolls is fairly short

Is it? Tell us, how long has AI_U_C been posting here? Dodgy Donald only has to keep the con going for another 15 months. Hoping everything will collapse from itself within that timeframe is not a recipe for success.

[Winstonm]

Is it? Tell us, how long has AI_U_C been posting here? Dodgy Donald only has to keep the con going for another 15 months. Hoping everything will collapse from itself within that timeframe is not a recipe for success.

 

When I say shelflife I mean the amount of time when the troll is impactful. After a time, the troll messages are pretty much ignored.

 

....a Quartz analysis of his[Trump's] personal Twitter account data shows. Engagement with his tweets has plummeted since the beginning of this year:

https://qz.com/1665059/data-show-trump-is-right-fewer-people-like-his-tweets-now/

[Winstonm]

Amazing that it takes a young man in a wheelchair to turn us in the right direction and face down the far right.

 

8chan Is a Megaphone for Gunmen. ‘Shut the Site Down,’ Says Its Creator.

 

By Kevin Roose

Aug. 4, 2019

 

Fredrick Brennan was getting ready for church at his home in the Philippines when the news of a mass shooting in El Paso arrived. His response was immediate and instinctive.

 

“Whenever I hear about a mass shooting, I say, ‘All right, we have to research if there’s an 8chan connection,’” he said.

 

Mr. Brennan started the online message board 8chan in 2013, as a spinoff of 4chan, the better-known message board. In its early years, the site was known as an unmoderated free-for-all site populated by anonymous posters, where shocking and offensive humor reigned.

 

Now, 8chan is known as something else: a megaphone for mass shooters, and a recruiting platform for violent white nationalists. And Mr. Brennan, who stopped working with the site’s current owner last year, is calling for it to be taken offline before it leads to further violence.

 

“Shut the site down,” Mr. Brennan said in an interview on Sunday. “It’s not doing the world any good. It’s a complete negative to everybody except the users that are there. And you know what? It’s a negative to them, too. They just don’t realize it.”

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/04/technology/8chan-shooting-manifesto.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

[johnu]

Mass Shooting In Dayton, Ohio, Leaves At Least 9 Dead, 27 Injured

 

The memorials for the El Paso victims haven't even started to be planned and there's yet another gun massacre to take the focus off El Paso and reset the clock to begin talking about the politics of gun control.

 

Followup story in the news

 

Ohio gunman taken down within 30 seconds of first shots -police

 

A gunman who attacked revelers outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio, early on Sunday, killing nine people and wounding 27 others, was taken down by officers within 30 seconds of firing his first shots, the city's police chief said.

The headline of the article speaks for itself. Less than 30 seconds to fire all those shots. I blame the NRA and politicians who are paid by the NRA for this unnecessary death and carnage.

[Zelandakh]

https://qz.com/1665059/data-show-trump-is-right-fewer-people-like-his-tweets-now/

Your hopes are based around his tweets being liked and retweeted at approximately the same rate as in Mar-Apr 2017?

[y66]

From John Delaney via Matt Yglesias:

 

There are many things we need to do on gun safety, including requiring liability insurance to own/purchase a firearm (like we do to own a car). It would probably cost an average hunter $5 a year, but if you have a history of hate crimes it would be cost prohibitive. Commonsense.

[y66]

From Will Wilkinson at NYT via Chris Hayes:

 

The Republican Party under Donald Trump has devolved into a populist cult of personality. But Mr. Trump won’t be president forever. Can the cult persist without its personality? Does Trumpist nationalism contain a kernel of coherent ideology that can outlast the Trump presidency?

 

At a recent conference in Washington, a group of conservatives did their level best to promote Trumpism without Trump (rebranded as “national conservatism”) as a cure for all that ails our frayed and faltering republic. But the exclusive Foggy Bottom confab served only to clarify that “national conservatism” is an abortive monstrosity, neither conservative nor national. Its animating principle is contempt for the actually existing United States of America, and the nation it proposes is not ours.

 

Bitter cultural and political division inevitably leads to calls for healing reconciliation under the banner of shared citizenship and national identity. After all, we’re all Americans, and our fortunes are bound together, like it or not.

 

Yet the question of who “we” are as “a people” is the central question on which we’re polarized. High-minded calls to reunite under the flag therefore tend to take a side and amount to little more than a demand for the other side’s unconditional surrender. “Agree with me, and then we won’t disagree” is more a threat than an argument.

 

The way the nationalist sees it, liberals always throw the first punch by “changing things.” When members of the “Great American Middle” (to use the artfully coded phrase of Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri to refer to nonurban whites) lash out in response to the provocations of progressive social change, they see themselves as patriots defending their America from internal attack.

 

The attackers — the nature-denying feminists, ungrateful blacks, babbling immigrants, ostentatiously wedded gays — bear full responsibility for any damage wrought by populist backlash, because they incited it by demanding and claiming a measure of equal freedom. But they aren’t entitled to it, because the conservative denizens of the fruited plain are entitled first to a country that feels like home to them. That’s what America is. So the blame for polarizing mutual animosity must always fall on those who fought for, or failed to prevent, the developments that made America into something else — a country “real Americans” find hard to recognize or love.

 

The practical implication of the nationalist’s entitled perspective is that unifying social reconciliation requires submission to a vision of national identity flatly incompatible with the existence and political equality of America’s urban multicultural majority. That’s a recipe for civil war, not social cohesion.

 

Yoram Hazony, author of “The Virtue of Nationalism” and impresario of the “national conservatism” conference, argued that America’s loss of social cohesion is because of secularization and egalitarian social change that began in the 1960s. “You throw out Christianity, you throw out the Torah, you throw out God,” Mr. Hazony warned, “and within two generations people can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman. They can’t tell the difference between a foreigner and a citizen. They can’t tell the difference between this side of the border and the other side of the border.”

 

“The only way to save this country, to bring it back to cohesion,” he added, “is going to be to restore those traditions.”

 

Mr. Hazony gave no hint as to how this might be peacefully done within the scope of normal liberal-democratic politics. “It’s not simple,” he eventually conceded. Mr. Hazony notably omitted to mention, much less to condemn, the atrocious cruelty of America’s existing nationalist regime. Indeed, roaring silence around our Trumpian reality was the conference’s most consistent and telling theme.

 

The incoherence of an American nationalism meant to “conserve” an imaginary past was not lost on everyone at the conference. Patrick Deneen, a political theorist at Notre Dame, pointed out that American nationalism has historically been a progressive project. The nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, he noted, arose as the United States began to establish itself as an imperial power of global reach. Building nations has always been about building armies, regimenting the population and centralizing political control.

 

Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs, similarly observed that nationalist projects meant to unite the diverse tribes and cultures of large territories generally involve a program of political mythmaking and the state-backed suppression of ancestral ethnic and community identities.

 

Mr. Levin suggested that a genuinely conservative nationalism, in the context of a vast national territory with an immense multiethnic population, would refrain from uprooting these traditions and communities and seek instead to preserve them in a vision of the nation as “the sum of various uneven, ancient, lovable elements,” because we are “prepared for love of country by a love of home.”

 

But what, today, do Americans call “home”? The next logical step would be to observe that the contemporary sum of rooted, lovable American elements includes the black culture of Compton, the Mexican culture of Albuquerque, the Indian culture of suburban Houston, the Chinese culture of San Francisco, the Orthodox Jewish culture of Brooklyn, the Cuban culture of Miami and the “woke” progressive culture of the college town archipelago, as well as the conservative culture of the white small town. But Mr. Levin, a gifted rhetorician who knew his audience, did not hazard this step.

 

Barack Obama claimed resounding victory in two presidential elections on the strength of a genuinely conservative conception of pluralistic American identity that embraced and celebrated America as it exists. Yet this unifying vision, from the mouth of a black president, primed the ethnonationalist backlash that put Mr. Trump in the White House.

 

The molten core of right-wing nationalism is the furious denial of America’s unalterably multiracial, multicultural national character. This denialism is the crux of the new nationalism’s disloyal contempt for the United States of America. The struggle to make good on the founding promise of equal freedom is the dark but hopeful thread that runs through our national story and defines our national character. It’s a noble, inspiring story, but the conservative nationalist rejects it, because it casts Robert E. Lee, and the modern defenders of his monuments, as the bad guys — the obstacles we must overcome to make our nation more fully, more truly American.

 

Without obstacles, there is no story. The rise of Trumpist ethnonationalism opened a new chapter, a new variation on the primal American theme, and its outcome will again define us. We must remember that it’s our story, that we write it — with our bodies, our money, our voices, our votes. And we must never lose the thread.

 

To reject pluralism and liberalizing progress is to reject the United States of America as it is, to heap contempt upon American heroes who shed blood and tears fighting for the liberty and equality of their compatriots. The nationalist’s nostalgic whitewashed fantasy vision of American national identity cannot be restored, because it never existed. What they seek to impose is fundamentally hostile to a nation forged in the defining American struggle for equal freedom, and we become who we are as we struggle against them.

 

Whether couched in vulgarities or professorial prose, reactionary nationalism is seditious, anti-patriotic loathing of America hiding behind a flag — our flag. We won’t allow it, because we know how to build a nation. We know how the American story goes: We fight; we take it back.

[johnu]

More bullsh*t from NRA sponsored Republicans

 

(US Senator)Tim Scott warns against 'politicizing' mass shootings

 

"The first thing I'd say is that we need to take a step back from politicizing every event," Scott said on "Face the Nation" Sunday.

Spoken like a politician 100% owned by the NRA.

 

NRA Endorses Tim Scott for U.S. Senate in South Carolina

 

Based on his support of and commitment to the Second Amendment, Scott has earned an “A” rating from the NRA-PVF in the November 4, 2014 election. An “A” rating is reserved for a solidly pro-gun legislator who has supported the NRA’s position on votes of importance to gun owners.

 

“Tim backs up his commitment to our Second Amendment Rights with one of the strongest pro-gun and pro-freedom voting records in the Senate,” said Chris W. Cox, chairman of the NRA-PVF.

[kenberg]

Ken, it's not that I disagree with you but I think it's also critical to understand who is on what side of the question and just who it is that needs to alter their views.

 

A holy-scripture-like adherence to a document and a reading of that document to fit beliefs is not the provenance of the middle ground, right-leaning, left-leaning, or left. That is something firmly grounded in the strong-right.

 

Until the strong right - especially the right-media-complex - no longer controls the entire Republican party, we will have nowhere to go and nothing will be done.

 

There is middle ground; unfortunately, we have been deemed unworthy to find it.

 

I will push on this a bit because I think it is important for how the 2020 election is approached. We could lock you and Ann Coulter in a room for three days and if you both emerged alive neither of you would have budged an inch. But this is not true of everyone, and that's where the votes are.

 

I was given my first shotgun when I was about 12. I gave up hunting in my early 20s. Not on some great principle but because I realized that I really wasn't Daniel Boone nor any close replica of Daniel Boone. I am not trying to get people to give up hunting, but weapons that allow a person to kill 20 people in a minute, or maybe it's three minutes or four minutes, should only be in the possession of well-trained people that have a very clear reason to have them. There is no reason to have such a weapon unless you imagine using it, and if they are easy to get then a lot of people will choose to use it. "Production for use" is an old phrase from the silly comedy His Girl Friday, the idea being that if something is produced then we should expect it to be used. If we want it to be used only rarely and only when the situation clearly warrants its use, then we need to control its manufacture and distribution.

 

Of course you and many WC folks agree, but my point is that there are a great many people out there who would also agree. It's important that people not only agree but come to see that widespread ownership of such weapons is so idiotic that it can only be explained as the result of lawmakers who have been bought or intimidated.. Then, when this is understood by a large number of not particularly political people, we will see some action. Forget those who revel in the hope of mowing down a bunch of people, all for good reason they think, they won't be changing. But ordinary people are getting more and more fed up, and that's where we go for votes. The people in the middle ground are exactly who we should be looking at.

[blackshoe]