Australian Atheists Forum

The fucking border 'crisis.' It's probably never been as difficult to illegally enter the US on foot, from the south as it is now. FFS. Are they worried about 'illegal' migrants taking hard working American prisoners jobs?

pipbarber wrote: ↑Fri Feb 02, 2024 6:31 pm The fucking border 'crisis.' It's probably never been as difficult to illegally enter the US on foot, from the south as it is now. FFS. Are they worried about 'illegal' migrants taking hard working American prisoners jobs?

Nah. They just need an Other to hate.

Irrev-Black wrote: ↑Fri Feb 02, 2024 6:34 pm

pipbarber wrote: ↑Fri Feb 02, 2024 6:31 pm The fucking border 'crisis.' It's probably never been as difficult to illegally enter the US on foot, from the south as it is now. FFS. Are they worried about 'illegal' migrants taking hard working American prisoners jobs?

Nah. They just need an Other to hate.

Yeah and wouldn't it be lovely if they hated billionaires and mining companies and private health insurers and all those responsible for climate change, the opioid crisis and so on and so on....

Lots of potential really, wasted on ghosts.

Arizona to cancel election and just have the legislature pick electors. Well it doesn't say it like that but that's what it means, basically they can just ignore who won the election and select their own people;

An Arizona lawmaker wants to give the state Legislature the power to appoint presidential electors regardless of who wins the popular vote.

And guess who it comes from, if you guessed a criminal who is already under investigation for signing on as a false Elector to try and overturn the last election, well, you would be exactly right. Why is this man still there making laws?

The proposal comes from State Sen. Anthony Kern. The Glendale Republican was a frequent figure in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

He was among the lawmakers who signed onto a document falsely claiming to be one of Arizona’s electors for former President Donald Trump.

The Arizona Attorney General’s Office confirmed Kern and the other fake electors were under investigation last year.

https://www.knau.org/knau-and-arizona-n ... pular-vote

Irrev-Black wrote: ↑Fri Feb 02, 2024 6:34 pm

pipbarber wrote: ↑Fri Feb 02, 2024 6:31 pm The fucking border 'crisis.' It's probably never been as difficult to illegally enter the US on foot, from the south as it is now. FFS. Are they worried about 'illegal' migrants taking hard working American prisoners jobs?

Nah. They just need an Other to hate.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/ ... er-carlson

It's no small matter for a superpower (or even a big power) to switch alliances. The last major switch i can think of was the Soviets joining the allies in ww2, but perhaps there are other instances. In any case, Trump is clearly moving in that direction and Fucker carlson's putin interview will help to smooth the path.

The ramifications of it all are potentially significant, especially for australia. However, they are way more significant for Ukraine and Israel and Europe.

It's a tad hyperbolic i know, but i do sometimes feel that we are 9 months away from a whole new world order that will be vastly worse than the one we have now, and the one we have now is fucking terrible.

pipbarber wrote: ↑Thu Feb 08, 2024 1:53 pm
It's no small matter for a superpower (or even a big power) to switch alliances. The last major switch i can think of was the Soviets joining the allies in ww2, but perhaps there are other instances. In any case, Trump is clearly moving in that direction and Fucker carlson's putin interview will help to smooth the path.

The ramifications of it all are potentially significant, especially for australia. However, they are way more significant for Ukraine and Israel and Europe.

It's a tad hyperbolic i know, but i do sometimes feel that we are 9 months away from a whole new world order that will be vastly worse than the one we have now, and the one we have now is fucking terrible.

I remember Antony Greene rattling off elections around the world, and he had this shorthand "labour versus capital" for the countries where you had a choice between the left and right parties. Australia, the UK and the US were in that basket. But I now think Labor/Labour/Democrats have fairly comprehensively switched to "capital", and so the old "centre-right" parties have switched to, erm, religio-nationalist populism. Or shall we just call it fascism?

Whatever you call it, the adherents make their way to the far right at different speeds, but Trump and Carlson are out in front identifying Putin's Russia as a good model for them to follow.

A weird part of this transition is the barnacles from the old fashioned anti-American left who didn't notice that Russia isn't socialist any more, so you get Julian Assange (before he got locked up) hosting a show on Russian state media's RT, and the likes of John Pilger and Roger Waters being weirdly pro-Putin.

Another weird thing is what I just decided to call "Schroedinger's Nazi". You can decry genocide and holocaust denial in one tweet, and in the next you can inadvertently slip into 1930's style anti-semitic tropes as you support Palestine. Or Musk can renovate his Nazi bar one day, and meet the Israeli Prime Minister the next.

It's more a new world disorder.

stylofone wrote: ↑Thu Feb 08, 2024 4:18 pm I remember Antony Greene rattling off elections around the world, and he had this shorthand "labour versus capital" for the countries where you had a choice between the left and right parties. Australia, the UK and the US were in that basket. But I now think Labor/Labour/Democrats have fairly comprehensively switched to "capital", and so the old "centre-right" parties have switched to, erm, religio-nationalist populism. Or shall we just call it fascism?

Whatever you call it, the adherents make their way to the far right at different speeds, but Trump and Carlson are out in front identifying Putin's Russia as a good model for them to follow.

A weird part of this transition is the barnacles from the old fashioned anti-American left who didn't notice that Russia isn't socialist any more, so you get Julian Assange (before he got locked up) hosting a show on Russian state media's RT, and the likes of John Pilger and Roger Waters being weirdly pro-Putin.

Another weird thing is what I just decided to call "Schroedinger's Nazi". You can decry genocide and holocaust denial in one tweet, and in the next you can inadvertently slip into 1930's style anti-semitic tropes as you support Palestine. Or Musk can renovate his Nazi bar one day, and meet the Israeli Prime Minister the next.

It's more a new world disorder.

I guess it's the Overton window being pushed rightward. And yet, just to add to the new disorder, ethics on the street level is drifting leftward. Feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, anti-racism, environmentalism etc are actually developing and evolving powerfully, despite the rightward drift from above. Capital doesn't really care, it co-opts all sides everywhere...except the anti-capital sentiment within the progressive movement. But capitalism, as a collective structure, might also be wondering how it can make money from 'anti-capitalism.' It's a parasite after all, it consumes itself just as contentedly as it consumes everything else.

It is fascinating though. Perhaps these contradictory currents are a quality of modernity? I remember a book by my half my namesake, Benjamin Barber, from 1995, Jihad versus McWorld. It was about the strange moment when the post communism world seemed to be embracing the vacuous stupidity of western consumerism and free markets but at the same time also embracing nationalisms and tribalisms and all kinds of religious fundamentalism. Possibly the last popular analysis of the state of the world prior to the internet. Hmm.

What i think is important to acknowledge is that politics is different now, in the internet post truth age. Electoral politics is changing as quickly as the climate, but i'm not sure that is broadly accepted to be the case. We still lean on alliances and practices and traditional analytics that are, quite frankly, 20th century, while the relevant powers make their own experiments and advances. It's why i think Trump really might win this next election. It's also why we are completely fucked, because there has never been a time when we needed to all agree on some basic facts in order to save ourselves, and yet we've probably never been more fragmented.

The Red Shirts are out in force!

On live tv, fox news, a group of New York "angels", a group of red clad vigilantes, set upon a man, claiming he was a migrant, and he was caught shoplifting, he was later picked up by the police and charged for shoplifting. But the narrative has turned, he was not a migrant but a resident of the Bronx, he was indeed speaking Spanish, probably to another Spanish speaker, no crime there, the shoplifting? No evidence at all, apparently he was being a loud mouth before the interview started and this was all invented as an excuse to beat him down and feed him some pavement;

More information has been released from the NYPD about the man that was attacked by the group called Guardian Angels during a live interview on Sean Hannity's Fox News program this week. The Angles claimed that the man was a migrant and that he had been shoplifting, but it turns out he's just a resident of the Bronx that had annoyed them before the segment began. The NYPD also said that there's no evidence to support the shoplifting claims, so this looks like it may have just been an assault

Assault, on live news, I can see the defense having problems here when it goes to court!

stevebrooks wrote: ↑Sat Feb 10, 2024 5:12 pm The Red Shirts are out in force!

(snip)

Ah, Curtis Sliwa! A McD's night manager who started playing vigilantes back in 1979, and more recently (according to Wikipedia), "the Republican nominee for the 2021 New York City mayoral election".