Carly Fiorina got in on the outrage act. Close to being red-faced and hysterical, it seemed she had really occupied the roll of incensed partisan, and she rode that pony right up to the edge.
“As regards Planned Parenthood, anyone who has watched this videotape, I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” -- Carly Fiorina
Unfortunately - Fiorina might have trouble finding the videotape to show Clinton. No video has surfaced showing the scene Fiorina describes taking place inside a Planned Parenthood facility.
So to start things off, Donald Trump slags the fuck outa the US Hispanic population. Then he spends a few stump speeches and TV appearances telling us what unbelievably crappy negotiators America's business and government leaders are because they can't get a trade deal without sending everybody's jobs to Mexico and China. Next, he straight out stomps on Megyn Kelly on national TV in front of god and everybody, which leads pundits all along the political spectrum to say (essentially) that he's acting like a developmentally arrested adolescent with a raging case of something that looks like a cross between Gynophobia, Little Man Syndrome and Late Stage Syphilitic Dementia. And now, Mr Trump spins the yarn about how he's always felt he was in the military because he spent a coupla years at a prep school that happened to require the bad boy legacy fucks who get sent there to fix their behavioral problems to wear uniforms that were more or less reminiscent of those worn by members of the actual Military Division of USAmerica Inc. Put that one together with the John McCain is no hero comment, and you're not gonna be the most popular dog at that particular kennel club. Brown people Business guys Women Military He's alienated every major slice of the voter demo that everybody knows the GOP has to score big with if they want any chance at all. So I guess my question is: How much longer will we wait; what else does the guy hafta do before Alex Jones floats the False Flag hypothesis? And will it be the plain vanilla version of Trump wanting to destroy the GOP, or will it go higher than that, with Trump being nothing less than a cat's paw for the Bilderbergs and blah blah blah?
Maybe it really is just Trump being Trump - it's nothing but Brand Boosting; and he's spouting all this weird shit looking for the exit line that nobody will give him. But at the same time, I can't stop thinking about Poe's Law - "...without a clear indicator of the author's intent, parodies of extreme views will, to some readers, be indistinguishable from sincere expressions of the parodied views." It's a wonderment.
How much Americans appear to know about science depends on the kinds of questions asked, of course. Science encompasses a vast array of fields and information, and the questions in the new Pew Research survey represent a small slice of science knowledge. On Pew Research Center’s set of 12 multiple-choice questions – some of which include images as part of the questions or answer options – Americans gave more correct than incorrect answers; the median was eight correct answers out of 12 (mean 7.9). Some 27% answered eight or nine questions correctly, while another 26% answered 10 or 11 items correctly. Just 6% of respondents got a perfect score.
These findings come from Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel, a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults. The survey of 3,278 adults (including 2,923 adults online and 355 respondents by mail) was conducted Aug 11 - Sept 3, 2014.
The test is easy - almost ridiculously so - and not because I'm just that fucking awesome. And I don't think it's important to know these few things just because they're important things to know in and of themselves. They are, but - I think we have to widen that out and understand that it's important for us to know these (or other) things as a way of keeping ourselves better-informed in a more general sense. What did Mr Jefferson say about the health of a democracy being dependent on a well-informed electorate? And what's become apparent as far as people being well-informed in the age of Alex Jones and Benny Hinn and DumFux News?
We "tried" desegregation and integration for about one generation, and just as the "achievement gap" was closing in a very significant way; just as minorities were beginning to manifest the side bennies of education (longer healthier lives, net worth, etc), we bailed. We gave in to the whiny-butt pussies of the Radical Right and we fucking bailed - on ourselves. hat tip = Ta-Nehisi Coates via twitter
Rushdie makes the point that the bigots are always on about how everybody's treating them oh so very badly. You may notice, btw, that this is the standard play that so many "conservatives" pull all the fucking time.
Calling them out for being intolerant means you're being intolerant.
Call them out for some racist shit they say, and it means you're the real racist.
Tell them to stop using their religious beliefs to rationalize discrimination against LGBT, and you're discriminating against them because of their faith.
Smack down a bully, and that just means you're bullying the bully.
But the killer point comes (starting at about 2:00) when Linda Chavez demonstrates perfectly that she's way past her freshness date. She launches into the same old crap about how (paraphrasing) "people need time to be brought along slowly". Bullshit. Comfortable white people said exactly the same thing in the 50s and 60s when asked about Segregation and "Black Rights". Comfortable owners and managers said exactly the same thing when union organizers were demanding fair labor practices.
US history is chock full of examples of foot-dragging on issues that basically have centered on getting this country to start living up to the promises it made to itself. You know - "all men are created equal" and that silly old notion of "a more perfect union" thing. Go back as far as you feel like going, and you'll find another Linda Chavez telling us that "they want too much too soon - it's all moving too fast - people need time to get used to it - it's all so new, these ideas of equality and fairness".
Stay with this Tim Wise thing til about the 4:00 mark:
If I plug in the word "gay" when I hear "black" or "people of color", and substitute "straight" for "white", suddenly it seems as if some of these concepts are in fact kinda universal - oooh, maybe that's what Mr Jefferson meant by "we hold these truths to be self-evident"(?).
Change can be a scary thing, but we're supposed to treat people right - and we can't afford to continue not treating people right just because it's inconvenient; or because we think we need our families and our friends and our neighbors to agree with us first.
