U.S. Supreme Court: Post-Ginsburg Edition

might be useful

Went on a deep dive to understand vaccine polarization and its immense, irreparable cost https://t.co/Bv8ZJAyIMN

— Joss Fong (@JossFong) February 23, 2022

current conservative commitment to anti-vaccination is a position I find completely baffling. Is there any good explanation other than just "here's something we can use as a wedge issue"?

It is really not difficult, a lot of people would rather die than see the Venn diagram described by "minorities" and "non-heterosexuals" happy

excellent link caek, thanks

there was an episode of that mediocre show Commander in Chief where President Mac (Democrat) took an executive action in an emergency that upset many environmentalists, and Donald Sutherland (rival Republican politician) showed up in support of the environmentalists, one of whom said out loud "Kind of surprised to see you on OUR side". and he wasn't, he was just there to fuck with the Democratic president for cheap political points.

any chance to frustrate liberals and co-opt progressive slogans in the process (i.e. "My Body, My Choice") is like peak troll-boner for these cocks. they don't actually believe anything.

that, and 200% what Dan said.

after all, it's not like conservatives are anti-Big Pharma. they're the assholes who said things like "what's the point of developing drugs if you can't profit from them" and constantly defend big corporations.

but they're also anti-science to a degree, and say shit like "doctors never know anything!". so there is probably some aspect of them that actually is truly anti-vaccine that can't merely be explained by trolling, even if it's an incoherent reason. but mostly, they don't want anybody telling them what to do, which has been the M.O. of conservatives going back 50+ years. "small government stay out of our lives" bullshit. and as someone mentioned last year in another thread, they don't believe THEY'RE going to die from COVID or any other disease, because they have a 'healthy immune system, unlike everybody else'. which is why, dumb as they are, Ebola in the USA freaked them the fuck out, because even as unlikely as it was for anybody to get it, the mortality rate was high, and they were worried they'd get it and get sick or die.

I can't watch that vid rn (at work) but agree very much with "misinformation is an incomplete explanation." It's ALWAYS an incomplete explanation. After all, (1) we all have access to that misinformation, and we aren't all prone to believe it, and (2) we all have access to correct information as well, but that correct information fails to impress those who believe the misinformation. It's not like we live in a dictatorship with a controlled internet where the "misinformation" is the only version we are ever presented. Some people are primed to and even want to believe the misinformation for whatever reason (it owns the libs, it feels good, the alternative just seems scary, etc.).

Yeah the vox explainer I posted is very vox. The motivation for leaders on the right who manufacture consent via fox etc. probably boils down to “the cruelty is the point”.

to me it started as a symbiotic relationship. Trump did all he could to frame the pandemic as a hoax or conspiracy, so the anti-vax quacks and true believers jumped right in behind him and rode Trump's coattails into the mainstream. now it's conservative dogma and they can't back away without committing heresy and being excommunicated.

IDK, Trump was pretty openly pro-vax. He wanted all the credit for it!

More on the “major questions “ judicial doctrine that conservative justices are using to kill agency actions on climate change , vax rules , and more . Punting items back to Congress to decide, rather than letting agencies do so

https://www.vox.com/2022/2/28/22954696/supreme-court-epa-west-virginia-clean-power-plan-brett-kavanaugh-samuel-alito

By the time the vaccine arrived in December 2020 and Trump decided he wanted full credit for it the floodgates had already been opened for months on the line that "it's all a hoax designed to let the government trample on your FREEDOMS" and that current was running too strongly among the Q-adjacent and Q-susceptible for even Trump to swim against.

xxpost but not before he called COVID a 'hoax' and referred to it as the "corona flu virus" and suggested he was going to make all of the states open whether they were ready or not. and refusing to mask for a very long time.

sure, he pivoted to bragging about the vaccine because he knew the pandemic was killing him, but that's because he felt he could steal some independent voters by embracing it/taking credit for it. he also probably thought the vaccine would end the pandemic in like ten minutes too, because that's his kind of magical thinking.

To realize this Master of Branding could've saved thousands of lives by handing out face masks with his name on them and didn't is to wonder what snail mush his brain is made of.

I also think a big part of it for the past year comes down to the hope that failing efforts to slow COVID can be pinned on the Biden administration and help swing upcoming elections towards republicans who can say that the vaccine didn't do what was promised

all underpinned by this idea that most of the people who were going to die from COVID were "them" rather than "us"

It's not like we live in a dictatorship with a controlled internet where the "misinformation" is the only version we are ever presented.

Grimaces in Chomsky

and Other Stories

Number 1: Straight up racist.
Number 2: Right, we always hear about LSAT scores for Republican judges.
Number 3: LSAT scores are about getting into law school, not the quality of a legal mind.
Number 4: Trump's grades and taxes...
Number 5-100: Straight up racist. https://t.co/lvVYHzgQt3

— Dan Rather (@DanRather) March 3, 2022

I have never once been asked my LSAT score since graduating law school.

i can't believe he says stuff like this almost every single day and not only is he not fired, but no one even bothers to ask that he be fired. bill o'reilly was in the same time slot for many years, top rated, and he wasn't fired/mandatory resigned until it became known that fox had already settled five sexual harassment claims on his behalf. the abusing women part of it was fine to fox; people finding out was the problem.

i find it INTENSELY CREEPY that he has the #1 "news" program, and that the #1 radio "news" program was rush fucking limbaugh for years and years, and that joe fucking rogan is the #1 whatever he is. people lap this hatred up on a nightly basis, it is completely fucked up and weird

i realize some people are beginning to regret their first trump era cancellations of friends and family. maybe they should not have done that, maybe they need to learn to forgive and forget a little.

yeah...no. fuck these people 1000000000000000000x over. you can't watch or listen to this shit for more than 5 minutes without feeling like you're inducted a fascist training camp. also i fucking hate tucker carlson's FACE so much, i would love for someone to throw a bowling ball right in the middle of it

xp to people flummoxed by right-wing opposition to vaccination: it seems to me a pretty clear instance of "You can't tell me what to do!" thinking, which is one of the twin pillars of all contemporary right-wing thought, alongside "You can tell the wrong kind of people what to do."

Those who can't find anything to live for,
always invent something to die for.

Then they want the rest of us to
die for it, too.

"The Basic Con," by the late great Lew Welch

the rest of us, god's unchosen people

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was hospitalized with flu-like symptoms and diagnosed with an infection, court says. https://t.co/Zlt736elvM

— CNN (@CNN) March 20, 2022

be still his heart

An infection of what

I have dumbass Black neoliberals in my Facebook feed wishing Clarence Thomas a speedy recovery and I’m like “no, die bitch”

One wonders if he’s vaccinated against the novel coronavirus.

All justices are purportedly vaxed and boosted

Come on Grim Reaper, give us this one please

pls pls pls pls pls pls pls

I've been so good, I deserve it

god? are you listening?????

It's me, everybody who's not a c*** in America.

Perhaps it was from an infected pubic hair on his Coke.

You'll know the matrix is glitching if Biden gets to pick Thomas' replacement.

You'll know the matrix is glitching if Biden gets to pick Thomas' replacement.

Haha, "and the judicial committee approves the nomination of Clarence Thomas Jr.!"

brb, buying Gorsuch BASE-jumping lessons

In the first 35 minutes Grassley and Graham mentioned Miguel Estrada, Janice Rogers Brown, and broken car windows and spittle during the Kav hearings.

the GOP strategy is just to complain about past hearings?

building a justification for the shitty things they're going to do/say?

How’d day 1 go?

I heard Lindsay Graham had a few crackers.

Brown Jackson seems like an excellent nominee, it's just really hard to get enthusiastic about a 3-6 court going into an election where dems are about to get slaughtered. At least it (probably) won't be 2-7 I guess?

used to be alito followed scalia's lead like they were grafted together in a scotus version of the human centipede. why can't he do it just one more time?

the GOP said that they were definitely not going to ask the Judge if she likes beer.

Fuck Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz going after the 1619 Project and CRT at the hearings right now