If you have any doubt about what part of the electorate Trump plays to, his repetition of this talking point is solid proof. One of the MOST common phrases you see among "COVID truthers" is "they are turning car accidents into COVID-19 deaths for money". They can't provide a single example, but it is fucking gospel on Facebook. Always some anecdotal "I have a friend who has a cousin who is a nurse, and she says":
The GOP are literally arguing here that having more votes is bad because each individual vote counts less. We have a word for that.
Democracy.
This is your modern conservative party.
It's a modern something party. I'd substitute a different word at this point. These arguments are among the most absurd opinions that have ever been offered in American politics.
The entire conservative project since the 1970s has been laser focused on reducing the number of votes cast. This isn't by happenstance. Because THEY know their chances go down as the overall vote total goes up. There is audio of one of the godfathers of the conservative movement, Paul Weyrich, saying this to a crowd basically VERBATIM.
Discouraging voting by dragging campaigns into the gutter is one thing. Openly advocating for legally cast ballots to be thrown out (preemptively) is quite another.
You mention several quotes from Rowling expressing empathy for trans people--those things were exactly why I first thought Rowling was doing the right thing, when I first read that article months ago. It was only when I noticed the shift in her tone that I realized they were insincere.
Do you suppose that a shift in her tone towards cynicism could be rooted not in her being insincere in empathizing with transwomen who have been targeted by violent men, but rather in her receiving an endless torrent of violent threats, including sexualized ones? One extreme example was a young male person posing with their erect penis in front of the trans flag, another one posting a picture of them seemingly having sex with someone whose face was painted like Voldemort, and I think at least one of these was posted under one of her Tweets where she was responding to children's drawings related to her book The Ickabog.
This article contains some of the less extreme examples... which are still fairly extreme in their casual hatred and misogyny/ageism IMO:
We're coming back to the same problem: as you mentioned, Rowling knows expressing certain views will incite criticism. This is more reason for her to pretend to be sympathetic; it is LESS reason to be honest. And when you say feel "empathy and solidarity" for trans women, all while vocally opposing any attempt to protect them or their interests, the phrase is meaningless.
Could you elaborate in what what you think Rowling has been "vocally opposing any attempt to protect [transwomen] or their interests"? What kind of protection, and what kinds of interests?
The only time she indicates any amount of respect for any trans woman's identity is for a woman she met who is older than her, and in the quote you provide, she goes on to specify that she believes that trans women must undergo a yearslong process to "prove" their dysphoria is real. She explicitly criticizes any attempt to make it easy for women to transition.
First of all, I really want to say that nobody is entitled to having their identity respected. I don't believe, for instance, that religious Jewish people are "chosen" in any way like their faith claims. Yet this "disrespect" towards their identification as a "chosen people of God" definitely doesn't mean that I would tolerate them being discriminated against. They are entitled to their belief, and I'm entitled to my disbelief, and it should be illegal for e.g. an employer or landlord to discriminate on the basis of either personal position.
I see it as being the same way with transgender identity. One is entitled to believe that they're a woman/man/nonbinary/etc., and I'm entitled not to believe that there is any objective truth to that identification. (My theory is that it's rather a result of very deeply internalized gender stereotypes. I've actually written a bit about my own limited experience with dysphoria, should anyone be interested!)
And yet I fully agree that it should be illegal to refuse employment, housing, etc. to a person simply because they identify as transgender.
The thing is, transitioning legally is the first step in any trans woman's journey to get the same legal rights as anyone else. And when you say it shouldn't be easy for trans women to get equal treatment, that it should only be accessible after years of legal hoops, you're knowingly demanding that trans people are treated worse than others.
Does not compute... In which way does it cause trans people to "not get equal treatment" or be "treated worse" when their legal sex does not reflect the gender that they identify with? E.g. non-transitioned transwomen are still entitled to use all facilities/services/etc. that are offered to legally male people, and trying to hinder them from that right would be sex discrimination.
Back in my early days of interacting with this debate, I actually asked Reddit's /r/AskTransgender sub whether they had any reports of transwomen being assaulted when using men's rooms, because this would make for a very strong argument in favor of their position. (In contrast, via a simple Google search one can find numerous reports of transwomen being assaulted after using women's rooms, and even a handful of reported cases of women being assaulted by transwomen in women's rooms...)
The answer I received from /r/AskTransgender was that it's a moot question whether such evidence exists, because according to them, transwomen are simply unconditionally entitled to use women's spaces. I.e. it's not about being safe, being treated well, having one's human rights protected etc., but merely about having one's personal feelings about gender identity validated.
Needless to say, this was a very disillusioning interaction with the trans community. I care not much about what they believe about themselves or others, but I do care about their safety and human dignity like everyone else, so that's what I'm focused on.
I can hear you saying that some people's dysphoria is so bad that in some way they literally "can't" use the facilities that correspond to their birth sex. But as sad as it is, isn't that a personal problem? I don't see how it gives them a right to ignore women's feelings in turn -- there are many women who feel extremely uncomfortable about the prospect of having to share certain facilities with anatomically male people, often also as a result of psychological issues arising e.g. from having had to endure male violence.
You also invert her own words here:
"When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth."
From the article it seems to me that she is not concerned about people who have demonstrated they really are trans, but about those who merely claim to be as a means to an end.
This is the exact opposite of what she said--she specifically refers to "any man who believes or feels he’s a woman." This is not a reference to cis men pretending to be women for ulterior motives; this is Rowling's definition of a trans woman: a man who "believes" he is a woman.
You say we're talking about men who pretend to be women (cis men), but Rowling says she's talking about men who "believe" they're women (trans women).
In line with what I said above: I think Rowling is fully entitled to see transwomen as "men who believe they are women" and this doesn't prove that she doesn't care about their human dignity.
But even having said that, I think you're misinterpreting her words. There really are a lot of... let's just say "strange" men out there who believe all sorts of weird things, including and not limited to believing that they're transgender while going around with a full beard and being very proud of the size of their member. Contrast that to a transwoman who actually wants to and tries to assimilate into society as a woman.
A prime example of this strange sort of person would be for instance the person I mentioned at the beginning, who posed with an erect penis in front of a trans flag and publicly tweeted the photo to Rowling. I think the attached comment read "suck my ****" or something. A person like that certainly should not be able to trivially attain a document that legally mandates women to allow them into female facilities.
And as I've mentioned before, Rowling is by her own admission opposing anything that makes it easier to meet those standards and get equal treatment.
I don't see any evidence that she opposes "anything that makes it easier" to complete the process of attaining a Gender Recognition Certificate. The current proposal (discarded in the UK for now) is to make it absolutely trivial to get one, literally by signing a single document and having your legal sex changed on the spot. The same is being proposed in Germany right now (first hearing of the proposed law in a few days), again explicitly with a simple signature and the ability to change your sex again once every year... (Plus some other questionable things like letting 14 year-olds decide this for themselves and getting the authorities involved if the parents don't want to allow it. If anyone can read German, I helped host the following info site on the topic: https://fffrauen.de/ )
If somebody tells you that you have to undergo a 5-year waiting period before you're allowed to vote, would you say they support your right to vote? I cannot emphasize this enough: one of the main legal ways that trans people lose their rights is by governments putting up obstacles to transitioning legally.
When you put equal treatment behind a barrier, making that barrier higher means opposing equal treatment. That's the entire problem.
I would still like to understand which type of equal treatment trans people are missing out on when their legal sex does not reflect their gender identity.
Assaulting a fem-presenting male person while using the men's room, firing a fem-presenting male person for not dressing masculine enough, denying housing to a fem-presenting male person, etc. are all either already illegal, or definitely need to be made illegal ASAP, and that has nothing to do with gender identity; it's a matter of basic sex discrimination (usually with a good doze of homophobia).
@Taylan: I shouldn't have to say that TERFs aren't comparable morally to pedophiles or Nazis; I made it clear I was talking about the terminology rather than the people. I did not say the people were similar; I said that TERF isn't a slur for the same reasons that Nazi and pedophile are not slurs.
If that seems implausible, ask yourself why Nazi and pedophile are not slurs. I'm assuming you'd agree they were not slurs, and if you had to explain why not, I'm guessing your argument would be fairly similar to mine.
There are various reasons why "Nazi" and "pedophile" aren't slurs.
For instance, Nazi is short for NAtionalsoZIalist (German for national socialist) which is a term the Nazis identified with. And the expressions of hatred against Nazis are based on their extremely dehumanizing ideology and propensity to gruesome violence, i.e. a "justified hatred" if there is one.
The term pedophile originates, if I'm not mistaken, from clinical terminology. (I know it's Greek but so are many medical terms... They weren't all coined by the Greek, were they?) It's been used widely by psychologists in an objective way since decades. I'm also pretty sure that most criminally minded pedophiles identify with the term (judging by some of my experiences on 4chan and the darknet). And again, the expressions of hatred are usually based in their gruesome crimes, making it again a "justified hatred." A situation in which a genuinely innocent man with pedophilia as a clinical condition is dehumanized through use of the term "pedo" might, on the other hand, be a scenario in which I might say that "pedo" is, in fact, being used as a slur / hate speech. (Kind of not a hill I'd like to die on though.)
None such things apply to the term "TERF." It's a very young term (oldest documented usage 2008), it's not a term identified with by the people it labels (except in ironic or "reclaiming" ways), and its usage alongside violent rhetoric came very soon after its initial coinage. Hateful "jokes" like "what's better than 1 dead terf, 2 dead terfs" were already documented as early as August 2014, a mere 6 years after the first documented use of the term at all.
For the record, "radical feminist" is a broad term in the feminist community; a lot of feminists call themselves radical, as a positive term. Radical doesn't have the same meaning as it does in the general population. And again, the majority of people who call themselves "radical feminist" are critics of TERFs. Yet feminists who exclude trans women also often call themselves "radical feminists." Radical feminist, by itself, is too broad of a term.
There is a relatively concrete definition of "radical feminism" which one can even read about on Wikipedia:
Note that Wikipedia pages about radical feminism and transgender issues are extremely biased. For instance that page claims that Andrea Dworkin has "supported recognition of trans women as women" which is blatantly false. Dworkin is one of the most prominent radical feminists, so they're constantly trying to drag her to their side, since she's passed in 2005, but in the 10 books she's written in her life and many more talks she's held, there isn't a single documented instance in which she said that she believed transwomen to be women. Her first book, Woman Hating, is the only one in which she talks about anything trans at all (saying that "transsexuals are entitled to a sex-change operation which should be provided by the community" -- paraphrased -- should be around page 180 or 200 or so), and she writes that transsexualism as a phenomenon might disappear in a post-patriarchal society.
I was active on Wikipedia for 1-2 years constantly trying to fix such blatant mistakes but I've received an endless torrent of dogpiling and even verbal abuse, and was eventually banned without any clear breach of a rule being cited. They literally just claimed I was there to stir trouble, because I constantly tried to fix their bias. Username is TaylanUB in case anyone wants to go look.
From the other three radical feminists who supposedly saw transwomen as women according to Wikipedia: Catharine MacKinnon confirmed it a few years ago, so I accept that, John Stoltenberg is a man who has been heavily criticized by the radfem community multiple times, and about Monique Wittig I don't know but wouldn't be surprised if they twisted her words too since she's passed away in 2003.
On the other hand, radfems who are deemed "TERF" include and are most likely not limited to: Germaine Greer, Alice Schwarzer (very recently came out as trans-critical after decades of supporting them through more difficult times), Ti-Grace Atkinson, Mary Daly, Nikki Craft (close friend of Andrea Dworkin), Robin Morgan, Sheila Jeffreys, Janice Raymond, and among the new wave of radfems today: Meghan Murphy, Sarah Ditum, Claire Heuchan, Victoria Smith, Karen Ingala Smith, arguably Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, oh and of course Julie Bindel.
Those are all off the top of my head, it's not like I keep a list or anything. That's why I say that being "trans-exclusionary" (not really but let's go with the term) is the norm in radical feminism, where being "trans-inclusionary" (again, just going with the common term here) would be the exception. Hence I would say that "TERF" is to "radical feminist" a bit like "feminazi" is to "feminist." If there's any subgroup of radical feminists that need a specific descriptor for deviating from the rest, it would be "TWIRFs." (Not a term I'm seriously proposing.)
And for the record, the majority of lesbians are also trans-inclusionary.
Not really. Perhaps many lesbians superficially repeat pro-trans slogans as they follow the latest trends in liberal politics, but this study's results show that, for starters, 71% of lesbian women (from a sample size of 111) would not even consider dating any transgender person. From the 29% who would consider it, only 9% would consider dating a transwoman whereas the other 20% would only consider dating transmen i.e. a female-born person. Let me repeat: 9% of lesbians would consider dating a transwoman, 20% would consider dating a transman, and 71% would consider neither. I think this goes to show that, as soon as matters get personal, most of them don't really see transwomen as women / transmen as men.
Lesbians also form the main resistance among the L, G, B and T against the transgender movement's problematic aspects. See for instance Get The L Out UK (or the NZ counterpart) and their publication Lesbians at Ground Zero. The organization LGB Alliance is also mainly lesbian-led and, mind you, contains some of the original founders of Stonewall UK.
I was volunteering as a poll monitor earlier today and I got into a long conversation with this ASL interpreter who was helping translate for deaf folks at the polls. I learned a lot of stuff I never knew about the deaf community, and my girlfriend and I are having dinner with the lady and a couple of her friends on Monday.
Apparently a local judge has been denying funding for services for the deaf population. A lot of folks in the community can't read English because their sign language isn't written, and yet the judge provided no interpreters for one of only two sites in the entire county that was supposed to have support for deaf folks. The only interpreters available were outside volunteers. The lack of access is illegal but the judge is not held accountable for it.
She actually led some of her deaf friends to a press conference to call attention to the issue, and she got three different news groups to interview her afterwards. It was an inspiring sight, seeing folks speak up about voter disenfranchisement in real time.
I'm going to reply to a few different arguments you're making - mostly pushing back on them. I'm not as learned in Trans issues, so I'm just going to point where I think your argument is insufficient or doesnt really work for me.
1 - On the subject of identity: I dont think I would qualify whether Jewish people are "The Chosen" is a matter of identity so much as a theological concept regarding their religion. I would say denying them their Jewishness would be more akin to ignoring their identity. I could imagine (and do not believe for a second, to be clear) someone regarding a person as being "Not a real Jew" because they dont support Israel or do not live in Israel. We broadly consider an attitude such as that as being anti-semitic. I do agree that people are free to accept another person's identity - but perhaps we should consider what that says about ourselves.
2 - ON the subject of misinterpreting Rowling: I dont find anecdotal evidence to be terribly useful here. Other people's mileage may vary.
3 - on the subject of slurs: I dont think the age of a term is of particular interest to me. Incidentally, Nazis also hated being called that term. While I dont personally consider any of the three terms to be "slurs", I could agree that they are mostly used as a pejorative.
I also dont find the argument that the term is used in violent jokes to be particularly instructive on it being a slur. The internet is famously good at making everything violent or bad. This seems like an exceptionally low bar to clear if we want to reclassify terms into slurs.
4 - On the subject of Lesbian support of the trans community: I would not say dating preference is a good metric for evaluating the support of a community. Polling in general is going to be problematic due to the bias implicit in asking about a group suffering discrimination (to a group suffering a similar but mostly unrelated discrimination).
Anyways. I'm not saying you need to respond to any of these points. You'll notice I'm not taking much in the way of a firm stand on the issues simply because I dont know a great deal about them.
I was volunteering as a poll monitor earlier today and I got into a long conversation with this ASL interpreter who was helping translate for deaf folks at the polls. I learned a lot of stuff I never knew about the deaf community, and my girlfriend and I are having dinner with the lady and a couple of her friends on Monday.
Apparently a local judge has been denying funding for services for the deaf population. A lot of folks in the community can't read English because their sign language isn't written, and yet the judge provided no interpreters for one of only two sites in the entire county that was supposed to have support for deaf folks. The only interpreters available were outside volunteers. The lack of access is illegal but the judge is not held accountable for it.
She actually led some of her deaf friends to a press conference to call attention to the issue, and she got three different news groups to interview her afterwards. It was an inspiring sight, seeing folks speak up about voter disenfranchisement in real time.
This is at least related in part to the request of the Texas GOP to throw out the drive-up ballots. Even if you ignore why that is COMPLETELY reasonable in the midst of an out of control pandemic, on a more basic level, you are basically arguing that the votes of the handicapped or infirm should be invalidated because they didn't walk an extra 100 feet. It's some truly sick stuff. It's really no different than asking for a ramp for wheelchairs to be removed.
Yeah, at the trans conference it happened twice in two and a half days that someone had left the toilet seat up when I went into the stall. I was evicted from the male bathrooms many, many years ago and I have never seen a seat up in the women’s bathroom before or since that conference.
Yeah, I actually thought that I heard the therapist wrong but it ate at me. So I paid for the next session and as soon as it started I asked about it, You meant blockers right, not testosterone? She was emphatic that he was on testosterone. Going to be honest, I am not okay with that. So I left, would have gotten my letter for surgery that day but I could not stay. It would have been the same as saying that I thought the therapist, family or pharmacist was right to do what they did. I would have loved to have had estrogen at that age, everyone knew that this is who I am but... had they given me estrogen then they would have been criminally negligent to do so. Period. Maybe someday they will have a definitive test at a young age and it may be okay, this is not that day though.
I honestly don’t care about Rowling, whatever her views are, well she has been ostracized hasn’t she? TERFs? Again, don’t really care much, not effecting my life after all. What in the world would I do with a woman? I could care less if they don’t want to have sex with me and they are about as far off the middle of the population as I am and have as little pull. Probably I fit in easier than many of them and I have nothing but sympathy for their plight. Probably many of them have suffered abuse at some point but even if they haven’t, they have had a tough road. Funniest thing though. Ever seen a woman claim their man when a good looking woman grabs his attention? Hilarious! They get real close and physical, lovey I guess. Funnier still is a woman claiming her woman when I am sitting next to them at restaurant, or just walking by. First of all, I am not in any way attractive, also not in any way physically or romantically attracted to women, I am almost 51 and I am trans. Cracks me up! Who imagines that they have any control over who their partner finds attractive?
I don’t think anyone owes me anything. I will fit in the best I can, no one needs to make room for me. I knew that I needed to have the world see me as a woman, even if they know I am trans, to fit in. I think that my transition has gone well, I certainly have no complaints, I understand how hard it can be for someone who is not passable after years of transition though. I have been there, heard all of the names, been ostracized, laughed at, threatened and beaten. My jaw still clicks and my hip goes wonky sometimes. We can get past this, the world is changing, but sometimes you push the world and the world pushes back. Not a good position to be in when you are such a vast minority and there are such negative views of you already.
What I am saying, people have a right to feel however they wish about me. It is up to me to change their minds or ignore them the best I can. Not entirely awesome to have another minority take aim at me, to be honest though they are the very easiest of the population for me to ignore.
On the subject of Lesbian support of the trans community: I would not say dating preference is a good metric for evaluating the support of a community.
Yup. There are actually a lot of cis lesbians who do date non-op trans women, but you don't need to want to sleep with someone in order to want them to have equal rights. Lesbians with genital preferences that preclude any interest in non-op trans women are also allies.
I mean, some people do use "eww, gross" as the basis for their political beliefs, but I don't think that's the norm.
Armed Trump cultists harassed a Biden Bus on I-35 while ramming volunteer vehicles & blocking traffic for 40 mins forcing the Biden campaign to cancel an event in Texas.
The same group of Trump supporters has been following the bus around the country in an attempt to disrupt events in key battleground states.
When a democratic presidential candidate tried to tour texas in 1963 it didn't go well either. Damn snowflake conservatives fall back on violence when they don't get their way.
Now they are trying to push the story that there are MORE Hunter Biden laptops. I don't know how this guy had any money to actually spend on drugs, when he was clearly using all his funds to buy portable computers and just abandoning them at various points across the country. Maybe he used laptops the way Hansel and Grettel used breadcrumbs. The Twitter comments about this are getting good:
Normally, Saturday is pretty good for me, as it's the last day of my week, the work is pretty relaxed, and I am looking forward to two days off. However, this is not one of those weekends. I just want Tuesday to be over, whether that means the massive exhale of a Biden win, the soul-crushing realization of another improbable (but still possible) Trump EC needle-thread, or if we are going to be contesting this thing against corrupt courts. Like Tom Petty said, the waiting is the hardest part:
Here is video of what @smeagolheart talked about earlier. There is absolutely no room for interpretation about what was happening here:
Excusing or supporting the Republican Party at this point is nothing less than full-throated support of the arbitrary disenfranchisement of random citizens and authoritarianism.
Excusing or supporting the Republican Party at this point is nothing less than full-throated support of the arbitrary disenfranchisement of random citizens and authoritarianism.
Probably a Nothingberder JJ. Apparently only one of the nine justices needed to ask for this brief from the county. The Texas Supreme Court is unlikely to invalidate any votes...
Excusing or supporting the Republican Party at this point is nothing less than full-throated support of the arbitrary disenfranchisement of random citizens and authoritarianism.
Probably a Nothingberder JJ. Apparently only one of the nine justices needed to ask for this brief from the county. The Texas Supreme Court is unlikely to invalidate any votes...
Well, Johnson has finally decided to bite the bullet and England will have a new 4-week national lockdown starting next Thursday. It's 6 weeks since SAGE formally advised this, as the evidence of a growing second wave was already so clear at that time. The government has responded with steadily growing measures, but none have been able to stop the growth in the virus.
I remember quite a while ago saying to @Balrog99 that a second wave was coming in Europe, but it wouldn't be allowed to grow as far as the first wave as countries would take action to stop that. Well, not for the first time I was a bit optimistic . The level of infections now in England is probably still slightly short of that in March, but not by much.
Looking at some charts for the UK you can see the issue. The first of those shows the growth of diagnosed cases. Even though there is far more testing than there was in March, this is of course well short of the real number (on the basis of the random population testing now done, the true level of cases now is probably approaching 100,000 a day).
It does though give a good view of how quickly cases have been growing since the start of September. Prior to that cases were trending up, but very slowly. The government thought they could manage more social interactions, but have been unable to do so. A particular trigger was behavior in young adults, with high growth in cases there - much of that linked to the reopening of universities and the new school year. Those increased numbers in that age group could be seen feeding through into older age groups in the following weeks until by the end of September many scientists were advising that existing measures would not be sufficient and there was no option, but a national lockdown to prevent a second wave being worse than the first.
The number of deaths has been growing for a while as well, but the lag between cases and deaths means that it's still not that far up the peak.
However, significant additional deaths are already baked in as a result of the rise in cases that's already happened - probably to around 600 a day (still better than the first wave, though only because treatments have improved and the mortality rate reduced by around half). In itself though, I don't think this is what has forced Johnson's hand.
The real trigger I suspect is the rise in hospital admissions - up well over 10 fold in the last couple of months. One of the worst effects of the first wave was the way other NHS services were reduced and the government had said they would not let that happen again - but it has already started to do that. On the current trajectory, hospitals would be full in many areas in just a few weeks time and even the Nightingale facilities (constructed in the first wave, but barely used) would be overwhelmed soon thereafter - and that's if they could find staff to put in them, which is by no means guaranteed.
As I've said before, there are no good options in dealing with Covid-19. However, I find it hard to believe that a country which is so clearly responding to events rather than predicting and planning for them is selecting the least-worst option. It's not that the UK is at all unique in its position - there are a fair number of European countries with higher incidence of the disease and Belgium, France, Italy and Germany among others have all announced some variant of a national lockdown in the last few days. I do worry though that so little seems to have been learnt from the first wave. Once more many countries are only reacting when the situation has become grave. I suspect that is largely because they're concerned there would have been a public backlash if actions were taken before everyone could see there was a need for those - but that is a failure of public leadership. We're no longer in March when information was far scarcer and people generally knew little about the potential harms from the disease. It should absolutely have been possible to lead a national conversation explaining what would happen if no action were taken and why earlier action would ultimately cost less for everyone (in economic as well as health terms).
One country I'd point to where that seems to have happened to a far greater extent than the UK is Germany. They escaped the worst of the first wave as a result of locking down at an earlier stage of the epidemic. Since then they've monitored the situation closely, provided good advice and coordinated properly between local and national authorities. And now they're going for a lockdown to try and prevent the worst effects from a growing epidemic, rather than reacting to that. This map illustrates the issue - Germany is surrounded by countries with higher levels of infection and I don't think that's a coincidence ...
For those who remember the poorly-constructed, visibly staged, blatantly editorialized and totally unverified sex tape+fake press video discussed earlier in this thread, it turns out that GTV, the outlet that published the video, was created by Steve Bannon (the former head of Breitbart who was charged with stealing funds from a border wall funding campaign) and a pro-Trump Chinese billionaire named Guo Wengui, who met with Rudy Giuliani to figure out an attack plan against Biden the weekend of October 10th: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/us/politics/rudy-giuliani-biden.html
It's not particularly surprising that the source of the bogus anti-Biden video just happened to be Trump's old allies.
I see Trump has now fully endorsed the tactics of the interstate truck mob in Texas. Giving his blessing to what was nothing less than reckless endangerment and blatant intimidation. This is a fascist movement, and it's time for everyone to start saying so out loud. These people aren't remotely interested in the democratic process anymore. They aren't even pretending it should matter. Masks are off.
This whole thing is a farce. Trump needs to lose really, really badly because if he only barely loses, the GOP will remain a harbinger of this attitude for years to come.
This whole thing is a farce. Trump needs to lose really, really badly because if he only barely loses, the GOP will remain a harbinger of this attitude for years to come.
It already has been their attitude. It's how they were installed into power last time they drove the country into the ditch. I wonder if people even properly appreciate how unpopular Republican policies have been for the last 30 years, and how the last 3 GOP Administrations have wrecked the economy each time, gotten us into a neverending, full-scale ground war in the Middle East, let an American city drown for a week, and now appear to be content with letting unknown hundreds of thousands of Americans die while not even ATTEMPTING to do anything about it. Catastrophic isn't even a sufficient word to describe how they govern. At this point, they are closer to apocalyptic. Having them anywhere near the reins of power is a disaster waiting to happen.
This whole thing is a farce. Trump needs to lose really, really badly because if he only barely loses, the GOP will remain a harbinger of this attitude for years to come.
It already has been their attitude. It's how they were installed into power last time they drove the country into the ditch. I wonder if people even properly appreciate how unpopular Republican policies have been for the last 30 years, and how the last 3 GOP Administrations have wrecked the economy each time, gotten us into a neverending, full-scale ground war in the Middle East, let an American city drown for a week, and now appear to be content with letting unknown hundreds of thousands of Americans die while not even ATTEMPTING to do anything about it. Catastrophic isn't even a sufficient word to describe how they govern. At this point, they are closer to apocalyptic. Having them anywhere near the reins of power is a disaster waiting to happen.
It will be impossible to fully know just how damaging this all was, but consider that a current study has found that Trump's rallies have led to 30,000 COVID cases and 700 deaths. That's a relative drop in the bucket, the 18 listed rallies end in September and he's doing two-a-days in the middle of the biggest spike in the US (and the woirld). I think that number is going to go up. By a lot.
This whole thing is a farce. Trump needs to lose really, really badly because if he only barely loses, the GOP will remain a harbinger of this attitude for years to come.
It already has been their attitude. It's how they were installed into power last time they drove the country into the ditch. I wonder if people even properly appreciate how unpopular Republican policies have been for the last 30 years, and how the last 3 GOP Administrations have wrecked the economy each time, gotten us into a neverending, full-scale ground war in the Middle East, let an American city drown for a week, and now appear to be content with letting unknown hundreds of thousands of Americans die while not even ATTEMPTING to do anything about it. Catastrophic isn't even a sufficient word to describe how they govern. At this point, they are closer to apocalyptic. Having them anywhere near the reins of power is a disaster waiting to happen.
Fascists, no, I won't go there. Ideologues, yep, totally with you. Need to go? Hell yes! I might even have changed another conservative vote. I'm not for sure (he wouldn't say), but I might have at least taken one more vote from Trump (just not sure I added a vote for Biden). He admitted to at least voting for Dingell (who's pretty moderate and reasonable).
Preaching for a side I don't agree with because it's the better of two evils is the best I could do. I could have been even more convincing with a better candidate on the left. Just sayin' for the future.
How about somebody who isn't a near senile, old, white man next time around? I'd have felt better siding with the not so dottering old white man with the courage of his convictions for the record (Bernie is who I'm referring to if it isn't obvious, although he'll be too old in 2024)...
This whole thing is a farce. Trump needs to lose really, really badly because if he only barely loses, the GOP will remain a harbinger of this attitude for years to come.
It already has been their attitude. It's how they were installed into power last time they drove the country into the ditch. I wonder if people even properly appreciate how unpopular Republican policies have been for the last 30 years, and how the last 3 GOP Administrations have wrecked the economy each time, gotten us into a neverending, full-scale ground war in the Middle East, let an American city drown for a week, and now appear to be content with letting unknown hundreds of thousands of Americans die while not even ATTEMPTING to do anything about it. Catastrophic isn't even a sufficient word to describe how they govern. At this point, they are closer to apocalyptic. Having them anywhere near the reins of power is a disaster waiting to happen.
Fascists, no, I won't go there. Ideologues, yep, totally with you. Need to go? Hell yes! I might even have changed another conservative vote. I'm not for sure (he wouldn't say), but I might have at least taken one more vote from Trump (just not sure I added a vote for Biden). He admitted to at least voting for Dingell (who's pretty moderate and reasonable).
Preaching for a side I don't agree with because it's the better of two evils is the best I could do. I could have been even more convincing with a better candidate on the left. Just sayin' for the future.
How about somebody who isn't a near senile, old, white man next time around? I'd have felt better siding with the not so dottering old white man with the courage of his convictions for the record (Bernie is who I'm referring to if it isn't obvious, although he'll be too old in 2024)...
There really isn't any evidence that Biden has been a bad choice as far as a CANDIDATE goes. In fact, even if he loses, I'm still probably not going to think that. He has run on exactly what he should have, which is Trump's abandonment of the American people on COVID-19, and letting Trump himself prove that time after time after time. His campaign has been the equivalent of a disappointed parent. He's a basically harmless seeming white guy who people (generally) like. He has made no gaffes of ANY kind really, much less major ones. No, if Trump somehow wins, or stays in office by other means, it's going to say something much darker about America than "the Democrats should have picked the socialist instead". I don't have any idea what Biden should have done differently in these circumstances. The ball is in the air now. The outcome has, likely, already been decided. Now we wait.
That doesn't mean that all conservatives are fascists. Some Trump supporters may be, but that doesn't mean we all are. If I can see the light that means I'm not alone...
This whole thing is a farce. Trump needs to lose really, really badly because if he only barely loses, the GOP will remain a harbinger of this attitude for years to come.
It already has been their attitude. It's how they were installed into power last time they drove the country into the ditch. I wonder if people even properly appreciate how unpopular Republican policies have been for the last 30 years, and how the last 3 GOP Administrations have wrecked the economy each time, gotten us into a neverending, full-scale ground war in the Middle East, let an American city drown for a week, and now appear to be content with letting unknown hundreds of thousands of Americans die while not even ATTEMPTING to do anything about it. Catastrophic isn't even a sufficient word to describe how they govern. At this point, they are closer to apocalyptic. Having them anywhere near the reins of power is a disaster waiting to happen.
Fascists, no, I won't go there. Ideologues, yep, totally with you. Need to go? Hell yes! I might even have changed another conservative vote. I'm not for sure (he wouldn't say), but I might have at least taken one more vote from Trump (just not sure I added a vote for Biden). He admitted to at least voting for Dingell (who's pretty moderate and reasonable).
Preaching for a side I don't agree with because it's the better of two evils is the best I could do. I could have been even more convincing with a better candidate on the left. Just sayin' for the future.
How about somebody who isn't a near senile, old, white man next time around? I'd have felt better siding with the not so dottering old white man with the courage of his convictions for the record (Bernie is who I'm referring to if it isn't obvious, although he'll be too old in 2024)...
There really isn't any evidence that Biden has been a bad choice as far as a CANDIDATE goes. In fact, even if he loses, I'm still probably not going to think that. He has run on exactly what he should have, which is Trump's abandonment of the American people on COVID-19, and letting Trump himself prove that time after time after time. His campaign has been the equivalent of a disappointed parent. He's a basically harmless seeming white guy who people (generally) like. He has made no gaffes of ANY kind really, much less major ones. No, if Trump somehow wins, or stays in office by other means, it's going to say something much darker about America than "the Democrats should have picked the socialist instead". I don't have any idea what Biden should have done differently in these circumstances. The ball is in the air now. The outcome has, likely, already been decided. Now we wait.
The evidence will be if Biden loses. We'll find out soon enough...
I don't know if I can continue to continue to analyze numbers anymore for the next two days. I've looked at everything from everyone I trust up, down, around and sideways. It is very likely (basically 90%) that Biden wins this election. Everything points to it, from the fundamentals of what we are going through right now, to the poll numbers, to the obviously sky-high turnout.
I'm not gonna get better than 90%. It's not high enough for me, because Trump is THAT bad, and as long as the GOP is in his throes, they are too. 90% is 10 balls in a paper sack. 9 of them are blue, one of them is red. It's not at all likely when you reach into that bag you will pull out the one red ball. But it's not inconceivable. But that's just reality. Biden should win. It's not a guarantee. We aren't going to get a guarantee. That's just where we're at.
I don't know if I can continue to continue to analyze numbers anymore for the next two days. I've looked at everything from everyone I trust up, down, around and sideways. It is very likely (basically 90%) that Biden wins this election. Everything points to it, from the fundamentals of what we are going through right now, to the poll numbers, to the obviously sky-high turnout.
I'm not gonna get better than 90%. It's not high enough for me, because Trump is THAT bad, and as long as the GOP is in his throes, they are too. 90% is 10 balls in a paper sack. 9 of them are blue, one of them is red. It's not at all likely when you reach into that bag you will pull out the one red ball. But it's not inconceivable. But that's just reality. Biden should win. It's not a guarantee. We aren't going to get a guarantee. That's just where we're at.
We won't likely find out on Tuesday either. I doubt I can resist watching the debacle though. God knows I wish I could...
Comments
The GOP are literally arguing here that having more votes is bad because each individual vote counts less. We have a word for that.
Democracy.
This is your modern conservative party.
It's a modern something party. I'd substitute a different word at this point. These arguments are among the most absurd opinions that have ever been offered in American politics.
The entire conservative project since the 1970s has been laser focused on reducing the number of votes cast. This isn't by happenstance. Because THEY know their chances go down as the overall vote total goes up. There is audio of one of the godfathers of the conservative movement, Paul Weyrich, saying this to a crowd basically VERBATIM.
Discouraging voting by dragging campaigns into the gutter is one thing. Openly advocating for legally cast ballots to be thrown out (preemptively) is quite another.
Do you suppose that a shift in her tone towards cynicism could be rooted not in her being insincere in empathizing with transwomen who have been targeted by violent men, but rather in her receiving an endless torrent of violent threats, including sexualized ones? One extreme example was a young male person posing with their erect penis in front of the trans flag, another one posting a picture of them seemingly having sex with someone whose face was painted like Voldemort, and I think at least one of these was posted under one of her Tweets where she was responding to children's drawings related to her book The Ickabog.
This article contains some of the less extreme examples... which are still fairly extreme in their casual hatred and misogyny/ageism IMO:
https://medium.com/@rebeccarc/j-k-rowling-and-the-trans-activists-a-story-in-screenshots-78e01dca68d
Could you elaborate in what what you think Rowling has been "vocally opposing any attempt to protect [transwomen] or their interests"? What kind of protection, and what kinds of interests?
First of all, I really want to say that nobody is entitled to having their identity respected. I don't believe, for instance, that religious Jewish people are "chosen" in any way like their faith claims. Yet this "disrespect" towards their identification as a "chosen people of God" definitely doesn't mean that I would tolerate them being discriminated against. They are entitled to their belief, and I'm entitled to my disbelief, and it should be illegal for e.g. an employer or landlord to discriminate on the basis of either personal position.
I see it as being the same way with transgender identity. One is entitled to believe that they're a woman/man/nonbinary/etc., and I'm entitled not to believe that there is any objective truth to that identification. (My theory is that it's rather a result of very deeply internalized gender stereotypes. I've actually written a bit about my own limited experience with dysphoria, should anyone be interested!)
And yet I fully agree that it should be illegal to refuse employment, housing, etc. to a person simply because they identify as transgender.
Does not compute... In which way does it cause trans people to "not get equal treatment" or be "treated worse" when their legal sex does not reflect the gender that they identify with? E.g. non-transitioned transwomen are still entitled to use all facilities/services/etc. that are offered to legally male people, and trying to hinder them from that right would be sex discrimination.
Back in my early days of interacting with this debate, I actually asked Reddit's /r/AskTransgender sub whether they had any reports of transwomen being assaulted when using men's rooms, because this would make for a very strong argument in favor of their position. (In contrast, via a simple Google search one can find numerous reports of transwomen being assaulted after using women's rooms, and even a handful of reported cases of women being assaulted by transwomen in women's rooms...)
The answer I received from /r/AskTransgender was that it's a moot question whether such evidence exists, because according to them, transwomen are simply unconditionally entitled to use women's spaces. I.e. it's not about being safe, being treated well, having one's human rights protected etc., but merely about having one's personal feelings about gender identity validated.
Needless to say, this was a very disillusioning interaction with the trans community. I care not much about what they believe about themselves or others, but I do care about their safety and human dignity like everyone else, so that's what I'm focused on.
I can hear you saying that some people's dysphoria is so bad that in some way they literally "can't" use the facilities that correspond to their birth sex. But as sad as it is, isn't that a personal problem? I don't see how it gives them a right to ignore women's feelings in turn -- there are many women who feel extremely uncomfortable about the prospect of having to share certain facilities with anatomically male people, often also as a result of psychological issues arising e.g. from having had to endure male violence.
In line with what I said above: I think Rowling is fully entitled to see transwomen as "men who believe they are women" and this doesn't prove that she doesn't care about their human dignity.
But even having said that, I think you're misinterpreting her words. There really are a lot of... let's just say "strange" men out there who believe all sorts of weird things, including and not limited to believing that they're transgender while going around with a full beard and being very proud of the size of their member. Contrast that to a transwoman who actually wants to and tries to assimilate into society as a woman.
A prime example of this strange sort of person would be for instance the person I mentioned at the beginning, who posed with an erect penis in front of a trans flag and publicly tweeted the photo to Rowling. I think the attached comment read "suck my ****" or something. A person like that certainly should not be able to trivially attain a document that legally mandates women to allow them into female facilities.
I don't see any evidence that she opposes "anything that makes it easier" to complete the process of attaining a Gender Recognition Certificate. The current proposal (discarded in the UK for now) is to make it absolutely trivial to get one, literally by signing a single document and having your legal sex changed on the spot. The same is being proposed in Germany right now (first hearing of the proposed law in a few days), again explicitly with a simple signature and the ability to change your sex again once every year... (Plus some other questionable things like letting 14 year-olds decide this for themselves and getting the authorities involved if the parents don't want to allow it. If anyone can read German, I helped host the following info site on the topic: https://fffrauen.de/ )
I would still like to understand which type of equal treatment trans people are missing out on when their legal sex does not reflect their gender identity.
Assaulting a fem-presenting male person while using the men's room, firing a fem-presenting male person for not dressing masculine enough, denying housing to a fem-presenting male person, etc. are all either already illegal, or definitely need to be made illegal ASAP, and that has nothing to do with gender identity; it's a matter of basic sex discrimination (usually with a good doze of homophobia).
There are various reasons why "Nazi" and "pedophile" aren't slurs.
For instance, Nazi is short for NAtionalsoZIalist (German for national socialist) which is a term the Nazis identified with. And the expressions of hatred against Nazis are based on their extremely dehumanizing ideology and propensity to gruesome violence, i.e. a "justified hatred" if there is one.
The term pedophile originates, if I'm not mistaken, from clinical terminology. (I know it's Greek but so are many medical terms... They weren't all coined by the Greek, were they?) It's been used widely by psychologists in an objective way since decades. I'm also pretty sure that most criminally minded pedophiles identify with the term (judging by some of my experiences on 4chan and the darknet). And again, the expressions of hatred are usually based in their gruesome crimes, making it again a "justified hatred." A situation in which a genuinely innocent man with pedophilia as a clinical condition is dehumanized through use of the term "pedo" might, on the other hand, be a scenario in which I might say that "pedo" is, in fact, being used as a slur / hate speech. (Kind of not a hill I'd like to die on though.)
None such things apply to the term "TERF." It's a very young term (oldest documented usage 2008), it's not a term identified with by the people it labels (except in ironic or "reclaiming" ways), and its usage alongside violent rhetoric came very soon after its initial coinage. Hateful "jokes" like "what's better than 1 dead terf, 2 dead terfs" were already documented as early as August 2014, a mere 6 years after the first documented use of the term at all.
There is a relatively concrete definition of "radical feminism" which one can even read about on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_feminism
Note that Wikipedia pages about radical feminism and transgender issues are extremely biased. For instance that page claims that Andrea Dworkin has "supported recognition of trans women as women" which is blatantly false. Dworkin is one of the most prominent radical feminists, so they're constantly trying to drag her to their side, since she's passed in 2005, but in the 10 books she's written in her life and many more talks she's held, there isn't a single documented instance in which she said that she believed transwomen to be women. Her first book, Woman Hating, is the only one in which she talks about anything trans at all (saying that "transsexuals are entitled to a sex-change operation which should be provided by the community" -- paraphrased -- should be around page 180 or 200 or so), and she writes that transsexualism as a phenomenon might disappear in a post-patriarchal society.
I was active on Wikipedia for 1-2 years constantly trying to fix such blatant mistakes but I've received an endless torrent of dogpiling and even verbal abuse, and was eventually banned without any clear breach of a rule being cited. They literally just claimed I was there to stir trouble, because I constantly tried to fix their bias. Username is TaylanUB in case anyone wants to go look.
From the other three radical feminists who supposedly saw transwomen as women according to Wikipedia: Catharine MacKinnon confirmed it a few years ago, so I accept that, John Stoltenberg is a man who has been heavily criticized by the radfem community multiple times, and about Monique Wittig I don't know but wouldn't be surprised if they twisted her words too since she's passed away in 2003.
On the other hand, radfems who are deemed "TERF" include and are most likely not limited to: Germaine Greer, Alice Schwarzer (very recently came out as trans-critical after decades of supporting them through more difficult times), Ti-Grace Atkinson, Mary Daly, Nikki Craft (close friend of Andrea Dworkin), Robin Morgan, Sheila Jeffreys, Janice Raymond, and among the new wave of radfems today: Meghan Murphy, Sarah Ditum, Claire Heuchan, Victoria Smith, Karen Ingala Smith, arguably Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, oh and of course Julie Bindel.
Those are all off the top of my head, it's not like I keep a list or anything. That's why I say that being "trans-exclusionary" (not really but let's go with the term) is the norm in radical feminism, where being "trans-inclusionary" (again, just going with the common term here) would be the exception. Hence I would say that "TERF" is to "radical feminist" a bit like "feminazi" is to "feminist." If there's any subgroup of radical feminists that need a specific descriptor for deviating from the rest, it would be "TWIRFs." (Not a term I'm seriously proposing.)
Not really. Perhaps many lesbians superficially repeat pro-trans slogans as they follow the latest trends in liberal politics, but this study's results show that, for starters, 71% of lesbian women (from a sample size of 111) would not even consider dating any transgender person. From the 29% who would consider it, only 9% would consider dating a transwoman whereas the other 20% would only consider dating transmen i.e. a female-born person. Let me repeat: 9% of lesbians would consider dating a transwoman, 20% would consider dating a transman, and 71% would consider neither. I think this goes to show that, as soon as matters get personal, most of them don't really see transwomen as women / transmen as men.
Lesbians also form the main resistance among the L, G, B and T against the transgender movement's problematic aspects. See for instance Get The L Out UK (or the NZ counterpart) and their publication Lesbians at Ground Zero. The organization LGB Alliance is also mainly lesbian-led and, mind you, contains some of the original founders of Stonewall UK.
Apparently a local judge has been denying funding for services for the deaf population. A lot of folks in the community can't read English because their sign language isn't written, and yet the judge provided no interpreters for one of only two sites in the entire county that was supposed to have support for deaf folks. The only interpreters available were outside volunteers. The lack of access is illegal but the judge is not held accountable for it.
She actually led some of her deaf friends to a press conference to call attention to the issue, and she got three different news groups to interview her afterwards. It was an inspiring sight, seeing folks speak up about voter disenfranchisement in real time.
I'm going to reply to a few different arguments you're making - mostly pushing back on them. I'm not as learned in Trans issues, so I'm just going to point where I think your argument is insufficient or doesnt really work for me.
1 - On the subject of identity: I dont think I would qualify whether Jewish people are "The Chosen" is a matter of identity so much as a theological concept regarding their religion. I would say denying them their Jewishness would be more akin to ignoring their identity. I could imagine (and do not believe for a second, to be clear) someone regarding a person as being "Not a real Jew" because they dont support Israel or do not live in Israel. We broadly consider an attitude such as that as being anti-semitic. I do agree that people are free to accept another person's identity - but perhaps we should consider what that says about ourselves.
2 - ON the subject of misinterpreting Rowling: I dont find anecdotal evidence to be terribly useful here. Other people's mileage may vary.
3 - on the subject of slurs: I dont think the age of a term is of particular interest to me. Incidentally, Nazis also hated being called that term. While I dont personally consider any of the three terms to be "slurs", I could agree that they are mostly used as a pejorative.
I also dont find the argument that the term is used in violent jokes to be particularly instructive on it being a slur. The internet is famously good at making everything violent or bad. This seems like an exceptionally low bar to clear if we want to reclassify terms into slurs.
4 - On the subject of Lesbian support of the trans community: I would not say dating preference is a good metric for evaluating the support of a community. Polling in general is going to be problematic due to the bias implicit in asking about a group suffering discrimination (to a group suffering a similar but mostly unrelated discrimination).
Anyways. I'm not saying you need to respond to any of these points. You'll notice I'm not taking much in the way of a firm stand on the issues simply because I dont know a great deal about them.
This is at least related in part to the request of the Texas GOP to throw out the drive-up ballots. Even if you ignore why that is COMPLETELY reasonable in the midst of an out of control pandemic, on a more basic level, you are basically arguing that the votes of the handicapped or infirm should be invalidated because they didn't walk an extra 100 feet. It's some truly sick stuff. It's really no different than asking for a ramp for wheelchairs to be removed.
Yeah, I actually thought that I heard the therapist wrong but it ate at me. So I paid for the next session and as soon as it started I asked about it, You meant blockers right, not testosterone? She was emphatic that he was on testosterone. Going to be honest, I am not okay with that. So I left, would have gotten my letter for surgery that day but I could not stay. It would have been the same as saying that I thought the therapist, family or pharmacist was right to do what they did. I would have loved to have had estrogen at that age, everyone knew that this is who I am but... had they given me estrogen then they would have been criminally negligent to do so. Period. Maybe someday they will have a definitive test at a young age and it may be okay, this is not that day though.
I honestly don’t care about Rowling, whatever her views are, well she has been ostracized hasn’t she? TERFs? Again, don’t really care much, not effecting my life after all. What in the world would I do with a woman? I could care less if they don’t want to have sex with me and they are about as far off the middle of the population as I am and have as little pull. Probably I fit in easier than many of them and I have nothing but sympathy for their plight. Probably many of them have suffered abuse at some point but even if they haven’t, they have had a tough road. Funniest thing though. Ever seen a woman claim their man when a good looking woman grabs his attention? Hilarious!
I don’t think anyone owes me anything. I will fit in the best I can, no one needs to make room for me. I knew that I needed to have the world see me as a woman, even if they know I am trans, to fit in. I think that my transition has gone well, I certainly have no complaints, I understand how hard it can be for someone who is not passable after years of transition though. I have been there, heard all of the names, been ostracized, laughed at, threatened and beaten. My jaw still clicks and my hip goes wonky sometimes. We can get past this, the world is changing, but sometimes you push the world and the world pushes back. Not a good position to be in when you are such a vast minority and there are such negative views of you already.
What I am saying, people have a right to feel however they wish about me. It is up to me to change their minds or ignore them the best I can. Not entirely awesome to have another minority take aim at me, to be honest though they are the very easiest of the population for me to ignore.
Anyway, night all
Michelle
I mean, some people do use "eww, gross" as the basis for their political beliefs, but I don't think that's the norm.
The same group of Trump supporters has been following the bus around the country in an attempt to disrupt events in key battleground states.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/us-election-biden-bus-trump-supporters-texas-event-cancelled-b1477876.html
When a democratic presidential candidate tried to tour texas in 1963 it didn't go well either. Damn snowflake conservatives fall back on violence when they don't get their way.
Monday ? ?
Tuesday ? ?
Wednesday ? ?
Thursday ? ?
Friday ? ?
Putting these songs on my playlist as I listen and dance away as the stock market is going “down, down, down!” ? ?
Here is video of what @smeagolheart talked about earlier. There is absolutely no room for interpretation about what was happening here:
Excusing or supporting the Republican Party at this point is nothing less than full-throated support of the arbitrary disenfranchisement of random citizens and authoritarianism.
Probably a Nothingberder JJ. Apparently only one of the nine justices needed to ask for this brief from the county. The Texas Supreme Court is unlikely to invalidate any votes...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.statesman.com/news/20201030/court-fight-over-harris-county-drive-thru-votes-raises-alarm?template=ampart
You're right about the Texas courts, but the new wrinkle is they are taking it federal because of what happend there.
I remember quite a while ago saying to @Balrog99 that a second wave was coming in Europe, but it wouldn't be allowed to grow as far as the first wave as countries would take action to stop that. Well, not for the first time I was a bit optimistic
Looking at some charts for the UK you can see the issue. The first of those shows the growth of diagnosed cases. Even though there is far more testing than there was in March, this is of course well short of the real number (on the basis of the random population testing now done, the true level of cases now is probably approaching 100,000 a day).
The number of deaths has been growing for a while as well, but the lag between cases and deaths means that it's still not that far up the peak.
The real trigger I suspect is the rise in hospital admissions - up well over 10 fold in the last couple of months. One of the worst effects of the first wave was the way other NHS services were reduced and the government had said they would not let that happen again - but it has already started to do that. On the current trajectory, hospitals would be full in many areas in just a few weeks time and even the Nightingale facilities (constructed in the first wave, but barely used) would be overwhelmed soon thereafter - and that's if they could find staff to put in them, which is by no means guaranteed.
As I've said before, there are no good options in dealing with Covid-19. However, I find it hard to believe that a country which is so clearly responding to events rather than predicting and planning for them is selecting the least-worst option. It's not that the UK is at all unique in its position - there are a fair number of European countries with higher incidence of the disease and Belgium, France, Italy and Germany among others have all announced some variant of a national lockdown in the last few days. I do worry though that so little seems to have been learnt from the first wave. Once more many countries are only reacting when the situation has become grave. I suspect that is largely because they're concerned there would have been a public backlash if actions were taken before everyone could see there was a need for those - but that is a failure of public leadership. We're no longer in March when information was far scarcer and people generally knew little about the potential harms from the disease. It should absolutely have been possible to lead a national conversation explaining what would happen if no action were taken and why earlier action would ultimately cost less for everyone (in economic as well as health terms).
One country I'd point to where that seems to have happened to a far greater extent than the UK is Germany. They escaped the worst of the first wave as a result of locking down at an earlier stage of the epidemic. Since then they've monitored the situation closely, provided good advice and coordinated properly between local and national authorities. And now they're going for a lockdown to try and prevent the worst effects from a growing epidemic, rather than reacting to that. This map illustrates the issue - Germany is surrounded by countries with higher levels of infection and I don't think that's a coincidence ...
It's not particularly surprising that the source of the bogus anti-Biden video just happened to be Trump's old allies.
Saying the quiet bit outloud.
This whole thing is a farce. Trump needs to lose really, really badly because if he only barely loses, the GOP will remain a harbinger of this attitude for years to come.
It already has been their attitude. It's how they were installed into power last time they drove the country into the ditch. I wonder if people even properly appreciate how unpopular Republican policies have been for the last 30 years, and how the last 3 GOP Administrations have wrecked the economy each time, gotten us into a neverending, full-scale ground war in the Middle East, let an American city drown for a week, and now appear to be content with letting unknown hundreds of thousands of Americans die while not even ATTEMPTING to do anything about it. Catastrophic isn't even a sufficient word to describe how they govern. At this point, they are closer to apocalyptic. Having them anywhere near the reins of power is a disaster waiting to happen.
It will be impossible to fully know just how damaging this all was, but consider that a current study has found that Trump's rallies have led to 30,000 COVID cases and 700 deaths. That's a relative drop in the bucket, the 18 listed rallies end in September and he's doing two-a-days in the middle of the biggest spike in the US (and the woirld). I think that number is going to go up. By a lot.
Fascists, no, I won't go there. Ideologues, yep, totally with you. Need to go? Hell yes! I might even have changed another conservative vote. I'm not for sure (he wouldn't say), but I might have at least taken one more vote from Trump (just not sure I added a vote for Biden). He admitted to at least voting for Dingell (who's pretty moderate and reasonable).
Preaching for a side I don't agree with because it's the better of two evils is the best I could do. I could have been even more convincing with a better candidate on the left. Just sayin' for the future.
How about somebody who isn't a near senile, old, white man next time around? I'd have felt better siding with the not so dottering old white man with the courage of his convictions for the record (Bernie is who I'm referring to if it isn't obvious, although he'll be too old in 2024)...
There really isn't any evidence that Biden has been a bad choice as far as a CANDIDATE goes. In fact, even if he loses, I'm still probably not going to think that. He has run on exactly what he should have, which is Trump's abandonment of the American people on COVID-19, and letting Trump himself prove that time after time after time. His campaign has been the equivalent of a disappointed parent. He's a basically harmless seeming white guy who people (generally) like. He has made no gaffes of ANY kind really, much less major ones. No, if Trump somehow wins, or stays in office by other means, it's going to say something much darker about America than "the Democrats should have picked the socialist instead". I don't have any idea what Biden should have done differently in these circumstances. The ball is in the air now. The outcome has, likely, already been decided. Now we wait.
Black voters, children gassed by police on their way to the polls.
https://journalnow.com/news/local/police-use-pepper-spray-on-protesters-including-children-marching-to-alamance-polls/article_80b1623e-1bbb-11eb-b41e-8bda43ab2098.html
Trump celebrates, encourages violence against his political rivals
America boards up fearing election violence
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/30/business/retailers-election-protests.html
This
is
not
normal
this is Trump's America. He instigates violence and division and is a crook and a conman.
That doesn't mean that all conservatives are fascists. Some Trump supporters may be, but that doesn't mean we all are. If I can see the light that means I'm not alone...
The evidence will be if Biden loses. We'll find out soon enough...
I'm not gonna get better than 90%. It's not high enough for me, because Trump is THAT bad, and as long as the GOP is in his throes, they are too. 90% is 10 balls in a paper sack. 9 of them are blue, one of them is red. It's not at all likely when you reach into that bag you will pull out the one red ball. But it's not inconceivable. But that's just reality. Biden should win. It's not a guarantee. We aren't going to get a guarantee. That's just where we're at.
We won't likely find out on Tuesday either. I doubt I can resist watching the debacle though. God knows I wish I could...