U.S. Politics January 2023: Kevin McCarthy's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Life

AOC dancing naked in the moonlight, covered in children's blood - details at 11

the transfer of power thing was fucked because, although there were definitely a sizable number of people who secretly would have been fine with an extralegal way of keeping him in power, the majority of the GOP didn't want that bullshit to materialize, they just wanted him to win outright and in dominant fashion.

once they saw the coup had sizable popular support among conservatives, more supported it because "hey it's a new tool we only used once before in modern times". once you see the blowback isn't what you thought it would be, it's easier to support terrible shit.

i can't help but think the GOP members are idiots. like, do these nerds -- most of whom are just hoping to become lobbyists after their terms are up -- believe they would fare better in a society with completely broken democratic institutions rather than just largely broken ones? like what kind of society do they think they are opening the door to here?

i think the shock doctrine is relevant here. also, oligarchy is a really good gig if you can convince yourself that it's inevitable and that you deserve to be on top

Hey, apparently Pat Buchanan retired! from what, I have no clue because there was no way I was keeping up with that guy.

The last I heard about him was a few years ago when he was depressed and grumpy because Trump basically had the platform he was trying to get off the ground for decades, only it was extremely Trump-style dumb and destroyed the possibility of Buchanan's ideas ever having credibility

like what kind of society do they think they are opening the door to here?

I'd say society as a concept rarely penetrates their consciousness, even though they are technically among the most important stewards of the social fabric. They think almost exclusively in terms of money, power and status.

hence why they are idiots

well, they saw what happened to Kinzinger & Cheney - they might find Trump repellent on all levels, but he's the party boss now, don't get on his bad side

xpost I saw Pat Buchanan in a Hunter Thompson documentary awhile back! I guess they sort of got along on some level

Probably a society more like India or Israel or Hungary or etc. It's a mistake to think a more fascist USA would immediately collapse into civil war or succumb to a third reich style mass social movement / reign of terror. 21st-c. fascism can thrive in nominally democratic countries, and people are still making lots of money in those countries. I bet there are lobbyists too

xp the Thompson quote was “We disagree so violently on almost everything that it’s a real pleasure to drink with him”

reminds me of jeffries and scalise

Patrick Joseph Buchanan is an American paleoconservative author, political commentator, columnist, politician, and broadcaster

I confess I have not encountered this term before

does that just mean Goldwater stan?

it's been around since the Bush adminstration to distinguish his assholes from previous assholes

fascism certainly thrives in the US, as to Rob’s point above.

and frankly, it has for a long time, and it’s been out in the open, but Trump allowed it to blossom and spread in ways previously unimaginable.

pale ol' conservative

does that just mean Goldwater stan?

― Andy the Grasshopper, Tuesday, January 24, 2023 2:22 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

somewhat, but more a Robert Taft stan

i think table's 'brain detergent' and 'soul rot' metaphors are very apt. there is a lot of pressure in this very inhumane world we've built to become inhuman. gop crazy talk .. like the beliefs are sort of beside the point, the point is that you identify yourself with this group that is at the avant garde of self-destruction. such a vast sea of bullshit we find ourselves in that most people would rather try to turn into reptiles than face any of it for what it is.

that is, what used to be Idaho-based, ZOG-believing gun nuts (a la Ruby Ridge) and violent white supremacist terrorists (a la McVeigh) became mainstreamed in ways that were unimaginable when these former fashies were doing their thing in the 90s

thanks map for the cosign. I also think that the reality of being so exhausted by having to survive under US capitalism makes people loathe to deal with the insanity going on around them… and in some ways, that’s the point

there's still plenty of lip service paid to 'election security' but now some of these nutjobs have moved on to 'democracy is inherently flawed anyway'

They don't say ...

you can even see it in silk, from diamond and silk. so like in 2015 she was apparently a registered democrat and the duo's first online videos were pro black lives matter. then they pivoted to endorsing trump, speaking at his rallies, etc. for a while they had a streaming show through fox news and were regulars on the network. but then, in 2020, they started embracing covid conspiracy theories, causing fox to drop them. the most recent statements from silk are about how she believes her sister died from "vaccine shedding" and that this is part of a deliberate effort by the deep state to cull the population. really intense paranoia.

― treeship., Tuesday, January 24, 2023 12:43 PM (forty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah this whole thing is a really good example of how online clout and social media has poisoned so many people's brains. you hear stories of people getting surgeries just to conform to some sort of popular streamer look so why wouldn't you change your personality and political views as well. given how much we know the algorithms boost conservatives it really feels like you can get massive engagement without being insightful, funny, or interesting, so long as you kiss the ring. for example I'm pretty sure the fucking Dilbert guy doesn't turn into a hardcore chud without Twitter. I mean you can tell just watching these people. They never have anything original to say. they just repeat catchphrases and conspiracies. if you try to connect the dots you wind up sounding like Alex Jones and quite frankly none of them are that creative.

i think table's 'brain detergent' and 'soul rot' metaphors are very apt. there is a lot of pressure in this very inhumane world we've built to become inhuman. gop crazy talk .. like the beliefs are sort of beside the point, the point is that you identify yourself with this group that is at the avant garde of self-destruction. such a vast sea of bullshit we find ourselves in that most people would rather try to turn into reptiles than face any of it for what it is.

― ꙮ (map), Tuesday, January 24, 2023 1:34 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I still think a lot about the "Kanye. Elon. Trump." tweet. not in the sense of "here are three very famous and very insane conservatives" but rather by how much money and power they have, and therefore how much freedom from consequence they are. and knowing there's a whole generation of conservatives who look at these people and think, "I want to become that". they're role models.

then we wonder why films like Triangle of Sadness and Tár, whatever their merits, keep getting made

I wonder if Pence ratted on himself just to get back in the news

michael pence, dreading having to tell mother

An obvious but maybe easy to overlook factor in the ongoing parade of outright lunatics is that there is relatively a LOT of money on the right to fund all of these people. If your racist ranting loses you a sinecure at one of the more upscale think tanks, there's always some other insane billionaire or multi-millionaire with a boutique foundation of their own and some personal right-wing obsession — immigration, school vouchers, abortion, etc — who will snap you up. Same with the expanding right-wing mediaverse, where you can bounce from Fox to Breitbart to NewsMax to whatever. It's not that the left doesn't have its own rich people, but being crazy or radical on the left doesn't attract the same kind of funding. I've been thinking about this a lot as my state increasingly embraces the DeVos vision of dismantling public education — an objectively unpopular cause, based on every survey you can find, and one that is only alive because of some billionaires pumping money into it for decades until they could capture enough GOP party elites.

something I think about a lot is how real news and actual scientific articles are often paywalled while right-wing psycho news is always free. it's wild how all these people who insist they're free thinkers who won't be manipulated are getting 100% of their talking points from billionaires directly funding people like Charlie Kirk and Candice Owens. there's some real persuasive value to the idea that pissing people off only means you're getting close to the truth. it's real childbrained logic..."Why are you mad at me? I just spilled juice on the floor. It was an accident. You shouldn't be mad. Is it that you HATE ME?"

xp there's also the self-funded lunatics like Mike Lindell

This is why killing the FCC's Fairness Doctrine and allowing much greater consolidation and control over mass media were top priorities for the hard right when Reagan was elected president. Those were a huge stumbling block on the road to leveraging wealth into conservative political dominance.

Mike Pence leaked the story so he can be cool.

"I steal docs too! Love me!"

crudely drawn "TOP SECRETS!" on an old PeeChee folder

money and the politics funded by it are cause and effect

btw I wanna point out the XBox story was claiming that having a "power saving" mode was a way of indoctrinating children into "climate conscious politics". they also talked about the fucking M&Ms (not the M&Ms who fuck), saying Mars was taking them away for being "polarizing", even though they were the motherfuckers who were whining about them in the first place! (also, it's obvious they're gonna be 'brought back' in a Super Bowl commercial, who the fuck is actually fooled by this)

FDR was the most hated man in the USA (among the wealthy) for a good reason. Dismantling the New Deal has been their most cherished dream since 1933. They're still only about halfway there, but the super rich are very encouraged by their progress so far.

xpost I was straight-up indoctrinated by the crying indian commercials as a child... and to this day, I throw litter into trash cans! So the threat is real

Anti-littering indoctrination is the Road to Serfdom.

The thing about the Fairness Doctrine is it did not apply to cable, satellite, or internet, anything that requires a purchase. It was mostly radio impacted.

Which doesn't mean that it didn't have a seismic impact, as conservative talk radio was transformative. But Fox News wouldn't have been impacted. It's just that the thirst for it may not have been as large without the conservative radio boom of the 90s.

Nowadays I almost think reintroducing it would have little impact as people get their information from the internet and the damage is largely done

Might even hurt us more. Imagine if booking Fauci on a radio show required the radio to give airtime to anti-vax idiots.

We live in Hell

FDR and the New Deal saved capitalism. These right wing billionaires do not know what they are doing.

They never have.

FDR and the New Deal saved capitalism. These right wing billionaires do not know what they are doing.

― treeship., Tuesday, January 24, 2023 8:31 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's the dialectic between the two that keeps capitalism alive and thriving. they may not know what they're doing but larger forces know that the chaos is needed. otherwise stuff like this might finally start to get some pushback:

In confidential memo, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen celebrated unemployment as a “worker-discipline device” https://t.co/kesjDiTwVJ by @Schwarz

— The Intercept (@theintercept) January 24, 2023

worker
discipline
device

...

btw I wanna point out the XBox story was claiming that having a "power saving" mode was a way of indoctrinating children into "climate conscious politics"

Would be wonderful to see a semiotics course taught by a right-winger

the one thing Conservatives truly despise is conservation

(Teddy Roosevelt excepted, obv.)

I won a conservation essay contest when I was in 6th grade and I was confused because my left-wing parents had not given me good associations with the word conservative.

did u come home crying

Hell no they gave me a little trophy, I was a happy lil dude. (I still have the trophy!)