memfree
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4·16 days agoThat’s not the point, though, is it? It doesn’t matter if Nazis mask faster. What matters is that there are Nazis and other non-state-actors who will happily try to identify and dox people who get in their way. Such doxxers aren’t even necessarily at the protests. They might be in, say, Russia and looking to shut up pro-Western activists in neighboring countries.
It may be that no one in Sweden is immuno-comprosmied and that no one in Sweden could get hacked or doxxed when their identity is uncovered, but for the rest of the world, there are plenty of reasons a person might want to wear a mask that don’t involve wanting to be riot-ready.
Or the thing about his former cabinet secretary’s sexual harassment issue.
From the Daily Beast:
A fellow Democrat […] tweeted last week that she wanted a vice presidential pick who “doesn’t sweep sexual harassment under the rug.”
In his reply:
The governor’s office highlighted his “long track record of protecting survivors and prosecuting predators” when he was attorney general, including exposing "child sexual abuse and cover-ups within the Catholic Church.”
Have you seen people protesting against Nazis in Sweden? That’s the sort of situation where you do not need to fear the state, but the violent and retributive people you are protesting.
At the Florida summit, hosted by conservative group Turning Point Action, Trump promised that if he wins in November, he would “once again appoint rock-solid conservative judges who will protect religious liberty.”
After repeating his usual unfounded claims about mail-in voting, Trump launched into an appeal directed at Christian voters. “Christians, get out and vote!” yelled Trump. “Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years. You know what? It’ll be fixed! It’ll be fine! You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you, Christians!” He added, “You gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”
You did really good work looking that up. I appreciate it!
They know they done bad. They’re already claiming everyone misheard him and that he didn’t really say “colored”. They claim he said “college”.
From Raw Story, “Fox News has asserted that Kilmeade simply didn’t speak clearly and he in fact said "a college sorority.”
By the time The Independent was looking into it, the Fox statement was that news has “completely misquoted and unnecessarily maligned Brian Kilmeade who clearly said college sorority.”
They’re escalating into another indignant outrage that they’re right and everyone else is wrong.
At least for now, I am hopeful. All sorts of other countries have elected women. The U.S. should get with it. I know there will be people who say, “Maybe, but not THAT woman” – but those people always say that about any woman, so that’s never going to be the base.
he wasn’t forcibly subduing conservatives out of being racist with his speech
No one suggested that. That’d never have worked.
he was inspiring people
Exactly!
I fear the article triggered you to only hear the word “dominate” with the most negative of connotations when that isn’t what this is about. This is more akin to saying, “My right hand is dominant” where you mean it is stronger and more skilled, not that it is beating up your other hand as in Alien Hand Syndrome. It is a
Remember when Obama had to address how badly he debated and brushed off his shoulder? That was Obama dominating the conversation. That’s what they mean.
Biden can’t say
Biden CAN say, “What’s happening in Gaza is reprehensible and I want it to stop NOW. The good people of Israel want it to stop, too. They want a new leader, an end to bloodshed, and a return of the hostages, and it is because of those good people that I will NOT abandon Israel. I will do everything in my power to end the conflict, but I will not leave an ally to face what would surely become a multilateral war.”
I’m no speech writer, but the point is to use active language, show a firm commitment, and risk that some will disagree. The article is espousing language like that for anyone running against Trump.
MLK did not “dominate” anyone
MLK dominated the conversation. He spoke in strong terms that didn’t allow for compromise with his ideals. Of course he compromised and cooperated on actual policy, taking what he could get when he could while always demanding more.
No one “owns” AOC
Agreed!
– but to the point: if nothing changes, swings state voters will make Trump our next President. Fish suggests a dominant message like this:
The United States was founded for the purpose of self-government, and our history has largely been an effort to expand the blessings of liberty to larger and larger groups of Americans. Finally, in 1965, we became a full democracy when African Americans in the South got the right to vote. That’s who we are as Democrats.
This country has its faults. We have a horrific history of racial oppression. But look at the incredible progress we’ve made, from the heinousness of slavery, to the idiocy of Jim Crow, to the mighty mind of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court.
That’s what we Democrats are about.
The closing sums up the position:
Spreading the blessings of liberty to all Americans is what America is all about. Liberals have to proclaim how it was done in the past and how we’re going to keep doing it in the future. Talk about how you’re going to beat everybody who wants to go backward. Offer a stirring vision. Forget about prescription drug prices and quit treating voters like despairing stiffs in dire need of a government break.
To be clear, this is all about speech and elections, so when they say, “how you’re going to beat everybody”, it is NOT about physical attacking. It is about winning campaigns and swaying opinions.
Allll that said, I’m going to break with the above message. I don’t know if Fish is correct. He has a lot invested in the idea of looking at if and when politics can be won with “prestige” or requires a display of verbal “dominance” to appeal to the primal side of our nature. He has spent years arguing that to beat Trump, a candidate must hit that note. Maybe he is going down the wrong path. I don’t know.
What I DO know is that we will get Trump for 4 more years if swing voters in a handful of states aren’t convinced to vote (D).
I, too, like the term “confidence” better than “dominance”. In an older NYT piece, the author cited this article as a study in dominance compared to prestige. I hadn’t read it, so I just did and while I,considered that article to be over-full of personal opinion, it did a fair job of comparing chimpanzee politics to Trump’s. Moreover, it compares human politics in terms of dominance versus prestige. Chimps get in physical fights for dominance, so for them “confidence” is not an accurate term, but for humans, “confidence” might be better.
It wasn’t her personality as much as her ability to cut through BS. She exhibited a skill. A quick search turned up this example: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kamala-harris-shut-down-again-221300388.html
I became impressed with Harris during the Impeachment hearings. She was smart, a bit sarcastic, and got as far as she could given the situation. Lots of other people basically wasted their time, but she was stellar.
I think she got a raw deal by getting stuck with ‘immigration duty’ since that’s been an issue for decades and only getting more histrionic, so the deck was loaded against her.
Yeah, I hear complaints that she shoulda/coulda done more in California, but the very few examples I’ve given a look seemed like reasonable can’t-please-everyone issues. Perhaps I need to get more educated, but there’s only so much time in the day.
Thank yuo for postiong this. I haven’t reread it in years and it is a timely reminder.
Given the RNC, this time it reminded me of a new Vox article that had an alternate take of Vance and his book: https://www.vox.com/culture/360909/jd-vance-how-true-is-hillbilly-elegy-classism
From Thompson (with heavy edits):
The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors … successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. … His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner.
… Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity.
… He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains. Already some of them are talking his language—though they have never met him.
…But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery
From Vox:
It’s astonishing to me — though perhaps it shouldn’t be — that Hillbilly Elegy managed to seduce as many liberals as it did given that Vance’s scorn for almost everyone in his poverty-stricken small Ohio town reverberates on every page. He doesn’t do a very good job of disguising it, but he does arguably try…
… The book drips with open disgust for his neighbors, his town, his government and its representatives, and frequently, his mother. It’s full of casual fat-shaming for the bodies around him as well as his own, and constant complaints that no one around him wants to work hard enough to earn a better life for themselves.
At the same time, he also distances himself from the upper class. He seems determined to convince us that he’s superior and detached from the higher social strata into which he’s been inducted. Even after he’s ensconced in law school, he claims to mistrust the people around him, including the dean of his college and random people who enter his life.
Vance acknowledges that both he and his sister still grapple with trust issues as adults due to their childhood experiences of violence, addiction, and abandonment; yet something about the mistrust he displays in Elegy seems consciously deployed. “There were two kinds of people,” he confesses at one point. “[T]hose whom I’d behave around because I wanted to impress them and those whom I’d behave around to avoid embarrassing myself. The latter people were outsiders.”
All of this creates the picture of a man who wants to be seen as a populist hero, a common man risen from the working class into a fairy tale story of success. But throughout Elegy, he unwittingly shows us how much he’s motivated not by empathy or love but by naked ambition and a desperation to be anywhere but here — “here” usually meaning around other people.
This might be the real takeaway from Hillbilly Elegy — not that Vance is an anti-elitist, but that he is, to his core, anti-humanist.
If the choice becomes Harris or Trump, will you stay home or will you vote? For which?
O’Brien asked to speak and it was approved! My guess is: the party figured that Trump voters aren’t going to switch sides no matter who says what, but maybe they can attract a few from the center or left if they allowed a pro-Union speech.
Yours is a thoughtful and well reasoned take. I didn’t think it was trying to soften anyone. I thought it was making a call for more workers to unionize with a list of corporate horrors as the thing to unite against. That said, I do agree that having that message set in the RNC may be a permission structure for moderates. Moreover, I’m certain they let O’Brien speak as a means of wooing low-info voters, but I’m not sure how that’d work since those people aren’t going to hear any of it.
I agree! I was squirming a bit at the beginning when he was graciously thanking the hosts and individuals who have been pro-union, but once he got to the meat of the matter, he was scathing!
– And if anyone is wondering which article you mean, I have the link: https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual
Watch the video. I also linked to the speech as transcribed by realclearpolitics (though I think there’s a couple errors in there).
We need corporate welfare reform. Under our current system, massive companies like Amazon, Uber, Lyft, and Walmart take zero responsibilities for the workers they employ. These companies offer no real health insurance, no retirement benefits, no paid leave, relying on underfunded public assistance. And who foots the bill? The individual taxpayer. The biggest recipients of welfare in this country are corporations, and this is real corruption.
Watch the video.
We need corporate welfare reform. Under our current system, massive companies like Amazon, Uber, Lyft, and Walmart take zero responsibilities for the workers they employ. These companies offer no real health insurance, no retirement benefits, no paid leave, relying on underfunded public assistance. And who foots the bill? The individual taxpayer. The biggest recipients of welfare in this country are corporations, and this is real corruption.
I wish I’d been online yesterday to see this because it is way worse than just not working, so I’m repeating this whenever I see it brought up: They’re targeting swing state voters (via in-person canvassers) to vote Trump. The key pieces are Palantir, which compiles data to see trends and ‘insights’ and a new FEC opinion that says PACs can work with candidates for canvassing. CNBC had a big article on it and states (archive – emphasis is mine):
They also quote the NYT in saying Lonsdale is one of Musk’s political confidants – which is interesting because he’s at Palantir which was you’d think of as his old buddy Peter Theil’s gig. Palantir sells info. As long as they get good info, we can expect them tailor the perfect messages to win over swing states voters, because those voters are (unintentionally) telling them exactly how to do it.