On Sinema at the Sinema: October 2021 US Politics thread

honestly as long as it's somewhat good on climate I'll consider it a big win

xp wasn’t part of Biden’s message that he would be singularly able to convince moderates and Republicans to get on board and do what was best for the country? Obviously that was bullshit and you would have to be a moron/not have paid attention to the last 20 years of politics to believe it for a second but he did make that argument.

Look they’re tackling the important stuff, the minimum wage will have to wait.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee is marking up a bill this week to sanction whoever “directed or carried out” Havana syndrome attacks lol

— aída chávez (@aidachavez) October 19, 2021

Pretty sure "something" will pass.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, October 19, 2021 8:47 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

me, after a few pints

"The Democrats struggling and fighting for a full year to pass a bill that mostly makes ineffective pre-existing programs more complicated and harder to access" is one of those outcomes that's obviously funny but also very difficult to laugh at. https://t.co/xOMIIY6tV6

— David Roth (@david_j_roth) October 19, 2021

Interesting

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/new-public-defenders-joe-biden-quietly-makes-history-courts-n1281787?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=news_tab&utm_content=algorithm&fbclid=IwAR1Bs0_Jed-qN4YOQJFf0p0E0NFAp00tcvEdhQjaY9GLOw5ZlIbl3rglAwY

Sorry, sic

So I’m finally listening to the Revolutions podcast about the French revolution and it is very interesting to hear about about how desperately pre-Revolutionary France needed reform but the system was structurally incapable of making any effective change.

Makes ya think, donit?

Let them eat NFTs

yeah, but out of that difficult situation came modern day France!! it was all worth it, right?

right

as i understand it, after napoleon was finally defeated, he continued to lead france until the middle of WW2, when he was sacked and replaced with de Gaulle. also some colonialism in there

I'd take current France over current US easy.

i've never been to europe :(

that's why i don't know the history :(

i hear in europe that they have these really nice breakfast nooks tho

If you've been to Epcot, you've been to Europe.

epcot was one of my very first memories (grew up in jacksonville til i was 3)

is this epcot, is this europe, or neither?

https://i.imgur.com/mhjPiN3.jpg

https://www.reddit.com/r/WaltDisneyWorld/comments/gqx2pz/saw_this_and_thought_spaceship_earth_had_caught/ - neither. 1976 fire in Montreal.

hmm. ok, in that case. i think the answer is europe

i mean france

Tu me brises le coeur, Karl.

Just to echo some of what has already been said here, it is hard to imagine leaders being more out of touch with the populace they ostensibly serve and the crisis conditions so many are living in.

But I also want to propose that a large part of this is because of Protestant cultures and hierarchies of work that are deeply ingrained in this country. In essence, the crisis is with the entire way that our society is structured, and because these absolute assholes have mostly unjustly benefited from these structures, they just don't care how they've failed the rest of us.

Blah blah this country is doomed, still glad I didn't vote for this sentient raisinfucker

Le plus difficile, c'est que je dois me fier à google translate, parce que... vous ne le croiriez pas, mais mon français est horrible, juste le pire.

My French has deteriorated. Fortunately, my kissing hasn't.

but one thing i know is i don't remember ever voting on whether we were switching from freedom fries back to french fries, and i support american freedom

I don’t buy the Protestant explanation, many of the most egalitarian nations in the world are deeply Protestant.

Sometimes the absolute assholes are just that, absolute assholes.

You're wrong.

Perhaps you've missed the enormous number of articles about people quitting their jobs recently, but there's a serious problem with the way that we view work in the US, and part of it stems from a deeply Protestant ethic of labor.

I mean, Max Weber wrote a book on it more than 100 years ago ffs.

i believe it's the white evangelicals that are the problem, not the protestants. there is a certain puritanical pulse that runs through our culture that can be seen as deriving from protestant influence, but the ugly stuff is white evangelical. there is something very wrong with them, and they benefit enormously from being a religion, because that's seen as above criticism by so many people, rather as a really fucked up giant organization that controls the social policies of a fascist political party

hey guys

many Catholics suck too

But evangelicalism stems directly from Calvinism, a strain of Protestant thinking.

Marilynne Robinson has written a couple fascinating essays rescuing Calvin and Calvinism from themselves.

(Neither here nor there though)

evangelicalism is a branch of protestantism, yes. but the white evangelical problem is a special and unique one in the united states. i don't see this same theocratic political poison spewing from evangelical movements elsewhere, at least not a scale comparable to our own.

see, like marilynne robinson, bill mckibben. these are cool protestants. where are the cool white evangelicals?

all i want for christmas is my two cool white evangelicals

Can we be shown cool white evangelicals + Mike Love?

Perhaps you've missed the enormous number of articles about people quitting their jobs recently, but there's a serious problem with the way that we view work in the US, and part of it stems from a deeply Protestant ethic of labor.

― I'm a sovereign jizz citizen (the table is the table), Wednesday, October 20, 2021 1:27 PM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Well the birthplace of Calvinism offers twice the amount of paid leave and free health care.

Elizabeth Anderson had some good stuff about how Weber’s philosophy does not align with Americans working conditions.

on a very simplified level, it's evangelicals who want to blow up the constitution and turn the country into a theocratic hellscape, and mainstream protestants who want to take some good ideas and means test them into oblivion because so we don't undermine the concept of "work"

fwiw, Calvin died in 1564. It is 2021. Any influence his thinking has over our modern US evangelical sects is extremely tenuous and has passed through dozens of filters, been half-forgotten, adapted, and re-adapted. For example, I don't think such craziness as speaking in tongues has the slightest connection to Calvin's thought, but it is a conspicuous feature among our fundamentalist loonies.

Mandated vaccine in my workplace due in a month and a half. Several managers are going to retire rather than get the jab, and some factory workers will quit or retire. Rip off the bandaid, leave now! But I think the next month and a half will be their chance to vent about government injustice daily, and not to be missed. I don't get leaving a career at a well-paying company on this issue, but hey, if that's the hill they want to die on...

every person faces a test, the first time they're in the midst of a congregation with multiple people speaking in tongues at the same time. you have to figure out how to act, and there isn't time. you either at least nod along to it or you leave afterward and never come back. you can gyrate between those poles for a while but not for long. it is not a simple decision, which is why it is very fucked up to make children do it while they're still learning not to shit their pants

https://wallup.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/162408-calvin-and-hobbes-comics.jpg

To defend VHS (for once) I think he was referring to the Nordic countries, which are (nominally) Lutheran. Although their post-war social democracies also coincided(?) with an extreme drop in church attendance and religious belief...

We're not talking about those countries, tho, and this country was settled by persecuted religious extremists who enjoyed persecuting others, which has ultimately set the tone for how things have gone since then.

this country was settled by persecuted religious extremists who enjoyed persecuting others

Yeah, like those Quakers in Pennsylvania. It's all gotten much more complicated since 1750 or thereabouts.

Cue “American Protestantism isn’t Christianity, it’s the worship of white supremacy, ego and capital.”

Quakers had no problem killing and stealing from the Lenape.

INteresting reading about Quakers in Ibram X Kendi's Stamped too. Them being slavers too who were working against abolition initially.

& the Mayflower passengers were a bunch of self righteous drama queens who thought puritanism wasn't strict enough in England so went to Holland to be more extreme and then headed to the US to be even more sanctimonious innit