Republicans: continued

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Tero
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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Tero » Mon Nov 08, 2021 11:40 pm

Gov't sponsored TV character promoting kid vaccination.
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https://esapolitics.blogspot.com
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Said Peter...what you're requesting just isn't my bag
Said Daemon, who's sorry too, but y'see we didn't have no choice
And our hands they are many and we'd be of one voice
We've come all the way from Wigan to get up and state
Our case for survival before it's too late

Turn stone to bread, said Daemon Duncetan
Turn stone to bread right away...

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Sean Hayden
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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Sean Hayden » Tue Nov 09, 2021 1:17 am

Brian Peacock wrote:
Mon Nov 08, 2021 7:19 pm
Sean Hayden wrote:
Mon Nov 08, 2021 4:29 pm
Brian Peacock wrote:
Mon Nov 08, 2021 9:33 am
Sean Hayden wrote:That depends on who you ask.

The point is that if Republicans are conflating CRT with nonsense like the book above, the Democrats are happy to focus on that, rather than any reasonable concerns in favor of portraying their opponents as hopelessly ignorant racists.
This got me pondering...

The point of these kind of faux culture war conflicts is to control and maintain a set of public narratives that define the demarcation zone between political parties. Whether it's masks and vaccines, or guns, babies and Jesus, or pronouns, campus toilet arrangements, snowflakeism, wokism, pornography, rap, multiculturalism, CRT, antifa, safe spaces, colouring books, stop the steal, Mr Potato Head, BLM, statues, blah blah blah etc etc, the topics are designed to encourage people to engage emotionally with perceived social slights, injustices and threats to their freedon and/or way of life - in order to give them reasons to i) vote for political entities which identify such threats and promise to oppose them, and/or ii) to vote against political entities who are said to embody those threats. Who wouldn't have 'reasonable concerns' about any of this if they'd been drip-fed a never-ending lists if stories designed to to prime and trigger outrage in this way?

When one has reasons to vote this or that way, even if those reasons are not based in actual factual reality, then surely one must have some reasonable concerns? ;)

When you know something to be true, or just believe something is true, or is likely to be true, or should probably be true, it's very difficult not to act on that 'truth'. Politics bods call these things wedge issues because they highlight an apparent clear difference between 'us' and 'them'. Herman and Chomsky called this political process 'manufacturing consent' - a game as old as time.

The question is, how do you identify and address the real, factual, material issues that face, say, the state education system today (resources, pay, retention, ethos, discipline, achievement, improvement ...) if every time you hear someone important discussing schools and colleges they're talking about CRT, student mask mandates, institutional Marxism or gender neutral toilets? I guess the other question is, from which political direction does most of this stuff waft in from?

Anyway, here's a message from the past...



Can you imagine politics and policy based on that kind of outlook in the current climate? No, me neither.
I think it's less this than an ecosystem of conflicts. Where you see design I see natural processes and interactions. We aren't attempting to draw a line between parties but witnessing actual differences across multiple fronts play out. It is not a fake conflict.

--//--

Sorry for the short reply, I just wanted to throw something out there quickly. I will return to this later to do it more justice. :cheers:
Don't sweat about the short reply. You know me - I'm on a short fuse most of the time anyway :)

One might argue that all personal interactions are political - at least in some way. I'm sure we all know of assholes who seem rather overly invested in 'office politics' for example; family politics can be a nightmare too; don't get me started on politics as an aspect of intimate relations. Different people want different things from certain situations and, being a social species, we often try to create conditions around us that give us, or increase the chances of us getting, the things we want. So yeah, we can frame the culture wars as 'natural processes and interactions' if you like, but at the same time political operators put in a lot of effort and filthy lucre into focus groups, and ad campaigns, and PR companies, media consultants, political strategists, etc etc, a lot of it outsourced for convenience.

Similarly we could frame that toothpaste ad we've all seen 100 times as part of 'natural processes and interactions', you know, the one with that reassuring person in a white lab coat in a bright, vaguely sciencey room talking to camera and telling us that there's something dangerous going on in our mouths that we're no aware of, the one that tries so hard to make us feel a bit unsettled or jittery before swinging in with the solution to a threat we weren't even aware of: splash the brand logo, splash the stinger, splash the slogan.

We know advertising works because there just so damn much of it. The culture wars are like those kind of toothpaste ads - designed with intent and purpose to attach an emotional response to a perceived threat before presenting the solution to that threat. As the title of my next book has it - Political Advertising and the Culture Wars: strawmanning for profit and gain! Like the toothpaste ad this kind of political chicanery may piggyback regular social synergies but they're not merely 'natural processes and interactions', they're abstracted beyond that, and they do form a part of an ecosystem, one rooted in money, power, control, and status.
The point of seeing it as an ecosystem and focusing on natural processes and interactions is just to avoid creating godlike entities in our narratives e.g. money and governments. When too many things are explained through one of these entities without regard to complicating factors including forces beyond our control --the natural processes and interactions--that thing becomes a godlike object.

When used as an explanation these entities tend to conceal important realities like that there is a genuine concern about teaching "white privilege", or that those same politicians seeking to divide us are themselves divided by their own thinking and personalities (natural processes).

This isn't to deny what you've said about attempts to control and manipulate. We are creators. But none of us exercise godlike control or have a god's privileged view.

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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Sean Hayden » Tue Nov 09, 2021 1:37 am

Joe wrote:
Mon Nov 08, 2021 6:50 pm
Sean Hayden wrote:
Mon Nov 08, 2021 4:10 pm
I'm glad to hear it Joe. But we were discussing what Republicans opposed, and that was the possibility of such ideas spreading beyond places like California. The possibility is real and so is the Democrat denial and misinformation surrounding it. According to Democrats, worrying about this issue is equivalent to "whites not wanting to teach about race". Who can honestly look at examples like what I gave and come away with that impression? It's hopelessly immature in my opinion.

I agree they may not be playing dumb. That reminded me of Hitchens speaking to Sean Hannity:
"You give me the awful impression, I hate to have to say it, of someone who hasn't read any of the arguments against your position ever."
--//--

You may not be Houston, but everybody worries about what Texas education gets up to... :biggrin:
Ah, but don't forget that we were also discussing the possibility that this is another in a long line of GOP red herrings that will fall down the memory hole once it's served it's purpose. Remember the migrant caravans, Hunter Biden's laptop(s), and Obama's birth certificate?

How about poor Terri Schiavo and Joe The Plumber?

There's just too much of that sort of misdirection in the GOP past for me to dismiss the chance they're at it again. :{D
:lol: --true

Don't forget about, what was it again, some holiday we used to celebrate before libruls killed it. I'll think of it eventually...

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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by JimC » Tue Nov 09, 2021 2:52 am

Sean Hayden wrote:
Tue Nov 09, 2021 1:17 am
But none of us exercise godlike control or have a god's privileged view.
But a very small minority of "us" exert enormously more control, and have vastly more privileges than the rest, and have the ability (not perfect, not "god-like", but very effective) of influencing political events in our ecosystem to their own advantage, and for their descendants.
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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Tero » Tue Nov 09, 2021 12:55 pm

RURAL PEOPLE POLL: THE ELECTIONS ARE NOT TRUSTWORTHY
https://ruralpoll.unl.edu/pdf/Trustresearch%20brief.pdf
https://esapolitics.blogspot.com
http://esabirdsne.blogspot.com/
Said Peter...what you're requesting just isn't my bag
Said Daemon, who's sorry too, but y'see we didn't have no choice
And our hands they are many and we'd be of one voice
We've come all the way from Wigan to get up and state
Our case for survival before it's too late

Turn stone to bread, said Daemon Duncetan
Turn stone to bread right away...

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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by L'Emmerdeur » Wed Nov 10, 2021 1:21 am

Sean Hayden wrote:
Mon Nov 08, 2021 4:50 am
--taught yet Joe. It's wishful thinking to consider it not an issue just because it's happening elsewhere. It's not like elsewhere they aren't working to bring it to you.

Officially the Democrats support all Americans. But they were happy to play dumb about any concerns behind the confusion surrounding CRT. It only takes a second to find what these voters are actually worried about. It's just easier all around to pretend not to see it. You don't have to expose yourself to public scrutiny about a difficult subject and you can feign frustration at your opponents hopeless ignorance --what can you do, what can you do?
The people who are up in arms about 'teaching CRT' (as a stand-in for helping students understand and confront white privilege) are weaponizing their white fragility. You can point to a flawed book and use it to characterize the whole project, but white privilege is real and it's worthwhile to teach the history behind it and how it manifests in modern society. Those who vehemently deny it and insist that their children not be taught about it should be understood, but by no means should they be catered to.

I've waded through more than one of the videos from regressive pundits that you've posted here. I'll offer you an essay in return: 'Why Talk About Whiteness?'

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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Sean Hayden » Wed Nov 10, 2021 4:02 am

The more I learn about the project the more I dislike it. I read your link. Here's one for you: https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-in ... s-training
Last month, the City of Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights sent an email inviting “white City employees” to attend a training session on “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness,” a program designed to help white workers examine their “complicity in the system of white supremacy” and “interrupt racism in ways that are accountable to Black, Indigenous and People of Color.” Hoping to learn more, I submitted a public records request for all documentation related to the training. The results are disturbing.

At the beginning of the session, the trainers explain that white people have internalized a sense of racial superiority, which has made them unable to access their “humanity” and caused “harm and violence” to people of color. The trainers claim that “individualism,” “perfectionism,” “intellectualization,” and “objectivity” are all vestiges of this internalized racial oppression and must be abandoned in favor of social-justice principles. In conceptual terms, the city frames the discussion around the idea that black Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “blackness” and white Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “whiteness”—that is, the new metaphysics of good and evil.

Once the diversity trainers have established this basic conceptual framework, they encourage white employees to “practice self-talk that affirms [their] complicity in racism” and work on “undoing [their] own whiteness.” As part of this process, white employees must abandon their “white normative behavior” and learn to let go of their “comfort,” “physical safety,” “social status,” and “relationships with some other white people.” As writer James Lindsay has pointed out, this is not the language of human resources; it is the language of cult programming—persuading members they are defective in some predefined manner, exploiting their emotional vulnerabilities, and isolating them from previous relationships.
--//--

White privilege exists. But this conception of it is problematic.

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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by JimC » Wed Nov 10, 2021 4:36 am

I agree, Sean. Way over the top.
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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Sean Hayden » Wed Nov 10, 2021 5:31 am

I'm afraid your reaction may be taken as evidence of your white fragility. This isn't a problem for us of course, but for anyone who finds themselves under the leadership of such thinkers --a total nightmare.

I'm reminded of a time I was given a full extra month in a correctional facility by experts who mistook my stupidity for hard-assed defiance. I simply didn't realize when they asked us 'who here thinks these two trouble makers shouldn't be sent back to the judge', that there was only one right answer: silence. --psst, put your hand down dumbass... :biggrin:

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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by JimC » Wed Nov 10, 2021 6:02 am

It is perfectly reasonable for educational authorities to look clearly and objectively at aspects of the racist past (both the US and Oz, by the way). And to invite an examination of the systemic forms of racism that still exist, as well as ways this can be eliminated going into the future. But to lay a burden of guilt on young people based on the sins of "whiteness" is both absurd and self defeating.
Nurse, where the fuck's my cardigan?
And my gin!

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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Sean Hayden » Wed Nov 10, 2021 6:11 am

Jumping to solutions is also a part of white fragility.
One might ask just how a people can be poised for making change when they have been taught that pretty much anything they say or think is racist and thus antithetical to the good. What end does all this self-mortification serve? Impatient with such questions, DiAngelo insists that “wanting to jump over the hard, personal work and get to ‘solutions’” is a “foundation of white fragility.” In other words, for DiAngelo, the whole point is the suffering. And note the scare quotes around solutions, as if wanting such a thing were somehow ridiculous.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ty/614146/

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Tero
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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Tero » Fri Nov 12, 2021 12:45 pm

https://esapolitics.blogspot.com
http://esabirdsne.blogspot.com/
Said Peter...what you're requesting just isn't my bag
Said Daemon, who's sorry too, but y'see we didn't have no choice
And our hands they are many and we'd be of one voice
We've come all the way from Wigan to get up and state
Our case for survival before it's too late

Turn stone to bread, said Daemon Duncetan
Turn stone to bread right away...

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Tero
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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Tero » Fri Nov 12, 2021 4:20 pm

Republican arrested!
E3193966-C348-47DC-AEE2-FC993C680C22.jpeg
https://esapolitics.blogspot.com
http://esabirdsne.blogspot.com/
Said Peter...what you're requesting just isn't my bag
Said Daemon, who's sorry too, but y'see we didn't have no choice
And our hands they are many and we'd be of one voice
We've come all the way from Wigan to get up and state
Our case for survival before it's too late

Turn stone to bread, said Daemon Duncetan
Turn stone to bread right away...

User avatar
Tero
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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Tero » Sat Nov 13, 2021 4:26 pm

88F03A18-7A27-4DE7-8299-01CAC54521F8.jpeg
Who knew? She fucks any male at the gym, then reads some of the book.
https://esapolitics.blogspot.com
http://esabirdsne.blogspot.com/
Said Peter...what you're requesting just isn't my bag
Said Daemon, who's sorry too, but y'see we didn't have no choice
And our hands they are many and we'd be of one voice
We've come all the way from Wigan to get up and state
Our case for survival before it's too late

Turn stone to bread, said Daemon Duncetan
Turn stone to bread right away...

User avatar
Sean Hayden
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Re: Republicans: continued

Post by Sean Hayden » Sat Nov 13, 2021 7:21 pm

Just remember that him is some version of her and let that sink in...

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