2017 Democratic Thread

[StrangeSox]

I don't know if anyone's been following the Catalonian independence referendum thing, but this made me laugh

 

[StrangeSox]

The pro life rep who pressured his mistress for an abortion will be retiring

 

https://twitter.com/CBSPittsburgh/status/91...src=twsrc%5Etfw

 

 

Remember kids, the only moral abortion is my abortion!

[StrangeSox]

Rep. Paul Gosar thinks George Soros may have paid fake Nazis to gin up violence in Charlottesville.

[Quin]

Rep. Paul Gosar thinks George Soros may have paid fake Nazis to gin up violence in Charlottesville.

 

Elle Reeve wants to call him a dumbass so bad in that clip.

[StrangeSox]

Buzzfeed has a big article on the rise of the white supremacist alt-right via Breitbart.

 

 

Here's How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream

A cache of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News reveals the truth about Steve Bannon’s alt-right “killing machine.”

 

Lots of emails documenting their strategies, how they were fed information by various media and silicon valley sources, and how they embraced the racism and nationalism undergirding the movement. This is just the setup for the article as it goes into a much more detailed and documented timeline. Really helps to understand where this movement came from, how they gained influence and what impact they've had on American politics.

 

The Breitbart employee closest to the alt-right was Milo Yiannopoulos, the site’s former tech editor known best for his outrageous public provocations, such as last year’s Dangerous f***** speaking tour and September’s canceled Free Speech Week in Berkeley. For more than a year, Yiannopoulos led the site in a coy dance around the movement’s nastier edges, writing stories that minimized the role of neo-Nazis and white nationalists while giving its politer voices “a fair hearing.” In March, Breitbart editor Alex Marlow insisted “we’re not a hate site.” Breitbart’s media relations staff repeatedly threatened to sue outlets that described Yiannopoulos as racist. And after the violent white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Breitbart published an article explaining that when Bannon said the site welcomed the alt-right, he was merely referring to “computer gamers and blue-collar voters who hated the GOP brand.”

 

These new emails and documents, however, clearly show that Breitbart does more than tolerate the most hate-filled, racist voices of the alt-right. It thrives on them, fueling and being fueled by some of the most toxic beliefs on the political spectrum — and clearing the way for them to enter the American mainstream.

 

It’s a relationship illustrated most starkly by a previously unreleased April 2016 video in which Yiannopoulos sings “America the Beautiful” in a Dallas karaoke bar as admirers, including the white nationalist Richard Spencer, raise their arms in Nazi salutes.

 

These documents chart the Breitbart alt-right universe. They reveal how the website — and, in particular, Yiannopoulos — links the Mercer family, the billionaires who fund Breitbart, to underpaid trolls who fill it with provocative content, and to extremists striving to create a white ethnostate.

 

They capture what Bannon calls his “killing machine” in action, as it dredges up the resentments of people around the world, sifts through these grievances for ideas and content, and propels them from the unsavory parts of the internet up to TrumpWorld, collecting advertisers’ checks all along the way.

 

And the cache of emails — some of the most newsworthy of which BuzzFeed News is now making public — expose the extent to which this machine depended on Yiannopoulos, who channeled voices both inside and outside the establishment into a clear narrative about the threat liberal discourse posed to America. The emails tell the story of Steve Bannon’s grand plan for Yiannopoulos, whom the Breitbart executive chairman transformed from a charismatic young editor into a conservative media star capable of magnetizing a new generation of reactionary anger. Often, the documents reveal, this anger came from a legion of secret sympathizers in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, academia, suburbia, and everywhere in between.

Edited October 6, 2017 by StrangeSox

[bmags]

Buzzfeed has a big article on the rise of the white supremacist alt-right via Breitbart.

 

 

Here's How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream

A cache of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News reveals the truth about Steve Bannon’s alt-right “killing machine.”

 

Lots of emails documenting their strategies, how they were fed information by various media and silicon valley sources, and how they embraced the racism and nationalism undergirding the movement. This is just the setup for the article as it goes into a much more detailed and documented timeline. Really helps to understand where this movement came from, how they gained influence and what impact they've had on American politics.

 

I remember Buehrle>Wood claiming that the alt right had nothing to do with Spencer or the white nationalists, and when I pointed out the Milo piece that starts off this article (which featured Milo saying that a Spencer publication was one of their essential readings), he said it may have been but it wasn't part of the movement.

 

And it turns out much of that article was written by the guy behind stormfront and organizing the Charlottesville rally.

 

But this could not be a better summary:

 

"“Please don’t forward chains like that showing the sausage being made,” Yiannopoulos wrote back. “Everyone knows; but they don’t have to be reminded every time.”

 

By Yiannopoulos’s own admission, maintaining a sufficiently believable distance from overt racists and white nationalists was crucial to the machine he had helped Bannon build. As his profile rose, he attracted hordes of blazingly racist social media followers — the kind of people who harassed the black Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones so severely on Twitter that the platform banned Yiannopoulos for encouraging them.

 

“Protip on handling the endless tide of 1488 scum,” Curtis Yarvin, the neoreactionary thinker, wrote to Yiannopoulos in November 2015. (“1488” is a ubiquitous white supremacist slogan; “88” stands for “Heil Hitler.”) “Deal with them the way some perfectly tailored high-communist NYT reporter handles a herd of greasy anarchist hippies. Patronizing contempt. Your heart is in the right place, young lady, now get a shower and shave those pits. The liberal doesn’t purge the communist because he hates communism, he purges the communist because the communist is a public embarrassment to him. … It’s not that he sees enemies to the left, just that he sees losers to the left, and losers rub off.”"

[StrangeSox]

B>W claimed Breitbart hated Trump around the time one of their writers was pushed around by Lewandowski, which was early 2016 and well after they were clearly in the tank for him. Not the most reliable commentator.

 

To be honest, I thought this line was a better summary of the modern conservative response to the rise of white nationalism and nazism.

 

He added that during his karaoke performance, his "severe myopia" made it impossible for him to see the Hitler salutes a few feet away.

 

 

 

There's a lot to digest in there, but it does give a look inside how white-washed racism came to win Trump the election and run this country.

[StrangeSox]

So much of this too comes down to how much wealth ideological billionaires have to throw around that can completely shape our country. Accumulation of that much wealth by so few gives them enormous power and is hugely detrimental to the country and to democracy.

 

 

e.g. Breitbart (and other far-right conservative media outlets funded by ideological billionaires) were able to shape the overall media coverage of the 2016 election https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2017/08/mediacloud

Edited October 6, 2017 by StrangeSox

[GoSox05]

The Mercer family are scum.

 

 

I liked the part where Milo said that when he gave his speech in Chicago and BLM showed up that he was secretly very scared. Good.

[StrangeSox]

 

Roy Moore in 2009: 'Only thing I know that the Islamic faith has done in this country is 9/11'

 

GOP leadership is fully behind this man

[StrangeSox]

Really good piece on what people should be taking away from the Breitbart/Milo/White Supremacist expose

 

The Milo Emails: Don't Make The Gamergate Mistake Again

 

There's a tendency — for some — to react to the Breitbart/Bannon emails sort of dismissively. Bannon especially comes off in some of the emails like a teenager firing off pugnacious IMs in a multiplayer video game chatroom. The emails reveal in fuller detail the somewhat stunted language of "#war" that we hear people like Bannon espouse in public. There's so much chaos and infighting and bluster that it's easy (and oh so satisfying) to make fun of.

 

It was easy for most people to dismiss Gamergate for a number of reasons (a deep history of not taking both the on-and-offline harassment of women seriously until its too late, the fact that it was, on the surface, about video games, the fact that the conversation was frequently relegated to the murkier areas of the internet). Mostly though, it was easy to dismiss those doing the harassing as a bunch of mouth-breathing virgins sitting in their parents' basements and acting out war games. There was an idea that this crowd isn't just small but that it has no power. That turned out to be very far from the truth.

 

I've thought about this observation probably once or twice a week since I heard it. Such a big part of trying to report on the pro-Trump media and the Breitbart movement in general is trying to understand the scale of what you're reporting on. In some ways the size is unknowable. But the quote stuck with me as it hinted at something I've felt in my reporting: that there's a largely silent, generally quite young contingent that feels unheard and that political correctness and social justice have run amok.

 

The Milo emails offer the first bit of definitive proof of this. In my mind, it's the biggest bombshell in the story. And, for those looking to resist Trumpism, it seems like it should be a stark warning sign. It's no wonder that — as Milo was getting these emails, he was compelled to put out content like this:

 

I've talked to countless people who abhor the Breitbart/Milo/pro-Trump movement and there's always this sense that so much of Trumpism is a vestige of an older generation. That the next generation (generally thought to be more tolerant and progressive) will be the saving grace. But this doesn't really align with the reality of what we're seeing every day on the internet in places like 4chan, Gab, Twitter, and in Discord chats where armies of young kids are coming together to join the counterculture and participate in 'Great Meme Wars.' For example, I spent a month inside a pro-Trump meme chatroom and noticed that most of the people in it — plotting to bring down CNN with an information war —were still in high school:

 

But the piece is most powerful in my reading as a hint at the scale and intensity of the Trumpism movement. As Quinta Jurecic said: it's a reminder that many people (besides Joe and others who reported on this early) should have taken this movement seriously when it began to bubble up. And it's a reminder not to dismiss it and make the same mistake again.

[GoSox05]

Germany's largest trade union pushes for shorter working hours for 3.9 million workers

 

 

Would love to see more of this kind of thing in this country.

[southsider2k5]

Germany's largest trade union pushes for shorter working hours for 3.9 million workers

 

 

Would love to see more of this kind of thing in this country.

 

We been trending down in hours worked for a while now as a country. We are down about 200 hours per year since 1950 and about 50 hours per year since 2k

[Dick Allen]

We been trending down in hours worked for a while now as a country. We are down about 200 hours per year since 1950 and about 50 hours per year since 2k

More vacation time or PTO as it is called these days.

[GoSox05]

Turns out Americans work really hard...but some want to work harder

 

 

Adults employed full time report working an average of 47 hours per week, which equates to nearly six days a week, according to Gallup. That's about an hour and a half more than they reported a decade ago.

 

Nearly four in 10 workers report logging 50+ hours on the job.

 

 

Just way too many hours for full time workers. I know people that are putting in 50+ hours on a regular basis.

Edited October 11, 2017 by GoSox05

[CrimsonWeltall]

Roy Moore's charity was a big grifting operation and he probably committed serious fraud and tax fraud.

 

I'm sure this won't matter.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...m=.d409aa340d4e

[StrangeSox]

It's 2017 and a video game is controversial because it's about killing lots of Nazis.

[Big Hurtin]

Roy Moore in 2009: 'Only thing I know that the Islamic faith has done in this country is 9/11'

 

GOP leadership is fully behind this man

Why wouldn’t they be? Most of them probably got a little hard when they heard that.

 

[GoSox05]

The Senate's oldest member is running for a sixth term but will likely face a primary challenge.

 

Was hoping she would just call it a day, but she needs to be challenged.

 

 

In more local news Dan Lipinski is facing a primary challenger this March.

 

Slowik: Lipinski facing Democratic challenger Newman in March primary

 

 

[southsider2k5]

Hillary cancels media today after fall.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oc...-hour-interview

 

Blames Trump for fall.

[Reddy]

Blames Trump for fall.

Really?

[Balta1701]

Really?

I think it's pretty clear that he despises her on a very personal level.

[Quin]

Blames Trump for fall.

 

Nah, more like Trump takes credit.

[Reddy]

I think it's pretty clear that he despises her on a very personal level.

Doesn't make it any less absurd.

[Balta1701]

Link

It's been almost two weeks since McDonalds revealed they hadn't produced enough promotional Szechuan sauce to satisfy the rabid Rick and Morty fanbase.

 

Fans everywhere are mildly disappointed. Desperate for sauce packets, a vocal population has made their demands known. Nearly everyone, it seems, has an opinion on the matter.

 

So where is Hillary Clinton?

 

In a times like this, we expect our leaders to take action. Maybe shouldn't be surprised that neo-liberal sellout Hillary Clinton — who we all know is the hands of big condiment — has failed to issue a public statement on the matter.

 

That doesn't make it any less damning.

 

Over the years, Hillary Clinton has made her "love" for hot sauce known in multiple interviews, even going so far as to carry a bottle of hot sauce in her bag. Her affection for spice just doesn't feel genuine: compare it to President Obama's love of mustard, which is obviously 100 percent authentic and comes directly from his far more authentic soul.

 

Hillary makes herself out to be a friend of the condiment community. Photo-op after photo-op show her at diners, pouring ketchup and hot sauce onto her overcooked burgers in a poll-tested, DNC-approved, strategy to make her look human.

 

Yet when the Szechuan sauce crisis finally emerged, the former Secretary of State had nothing to offer us but her craven silence.

 

Let me be clear: There is one person to blame for the Szechuan sauce outage, and that person is not the CEO of McDonalds. That person is somehow Hillary Clinton.

 

Perhaps if Hillary Clinton hadn't been so aligned with other condiments, McDonalds wouldn't have been so underprepared for their initial corporate promotion. People like Hillary Clinton have been lining their pockets with Heinz Ketchup wrappers and selling the Democratic party's condiment preferences to the highest paying bidder for years. Over time, voters became slowly alienated by third-way condiment Democrats. Some of whom, it is believed, use organic ketchup in a desperate attempt to satisfy their high-sodium lobbyist base.

 

Can we really blame voters for turning to Taco Salad Donald Trump in a time of such great need? I've been to these communities. I've seen the salt shakers full of rice. I've witnessed the pre-ground pepper.

 

It's time for Hillary Clinton to finally accept her full responsibility for the temporary Szechuan sauce outage, the 2016 election, climate change, this random hole I got in my pants yesterday, Harvey Weinstein, the mediocre seventh season of Game of Thrones, ugly birds, polio, Hurricane Maria and rompers for men — before leaving politics for good.

 

Then, and only then, will we finally probably not forgive her.