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UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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The First Invasion of America and the cultural earthquake it’s unleashing.
Michele Gelfand wrote a book called “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers.” Gelfand has spent her career comparing national cultures. Some nations grow up relatively spared from foreign invasion and the frequent devastation of infectious disease. Gelfand finds that these are loose nations: individualistic, creative but also disordered, uncoordinated and reckless.
Other nations have not been so lucky. Harsh necessity has made them tight nations. Hardship has taught them to pull together, to be more conformist, but also better at building social order and self-control.
We Americans have been rule-breakers, the classic loose nation.
Here’s what has struck me forcefully: That whole version of the American creed was all based on an assumption of existential security. Americans had the luxury of thinking and living the way they did because they had two whopping great oceans on either side. The United States was immune to foreign invasion, the corruptions of the old world. It was often spared the plagues that swept over so many other parts of the globe.
We could be individualistic, anti-authority, daring and self-sufficient because on an elemental level we felt so damn safe.
But what happens to a loose nation when the sense of security disappears? Over the first two decades of the 21st century, starting with 9/11, America has lost its sense of safety, the calm confidence that the future is ours, that our institutions are sound or even minimally competent.
And if there was any shred of existential safety left, surely the pandemic has taken it away — around 100,000 dead so far, an economy ravaged. We’ve had threats before, a few foreign incursions like in 1812, even pandemics when America was less just than it is today. But we’ve never had them smack in the middle of a crisis of confidence, a crisis of authority, plus social and spiritual crises all at once.
So in that sense, this is the first invasion of America for most living Americans. This is the first time that a menace has crossed our borders, upended the daily lives of every American and rocked our ancient sense of safety. Welcome to life in the rest of the world.
More at www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/opinion/us-coronavirus-history.html
Download for free Michele Gelfand’s book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World
https://libgen.unblockit.me/search.php?req=Michele+Gelfand
Description:
Celebrated social psychologist Michele Gelfand offers a radical new theory about cultural differences that explains why some countries, cultures, and individuals rigorously abide by a host of norms, and others do precisely the opposite, with surprising results.
Why are clocks in Germany always correct, while those in Brazil are frequently wrong? Why are Singaporeans jailed for chewing gum? Why do women in New Zealand have three times the sex of females worldwide? Why was the Daimler-Chrysler merger ill-fated from the start? And why does each generation of Americans give their kids weirder and weirder names?
Curious about the answers to these and other questions, award-winning social psychologist Michele Gelfand has spent two decades studying both tight societies (with clearly stated rules and codes of ethics) and loose societies (more informal communities with weak or ambiguous norms). Putting each under the microscope, she conducted research in more than fifty countries and collaborated with political scientists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, anthropologists, and archeologists. Her fascinating conclusion: behavior seems largely dependent on perceived threats. It's why certain nations seem predisposed to tangle with others; some American states identify as “Red” and others as “Blue”; and those attending a sports contest, health club, or school function behave in prescribed ways.
Rule Makers, Rule Breakers reveals how to predict national variations around the globe, why some leaders innovate and others don’t, and even how a ti
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Dishonest Elections Project: Conservative group fighting to restrict voting tied to powerful dark money network
The Guardian reports:
A powerful new conservative organization fighting to restrict voting in the 2020 presidential election is really just a rebranded group that is part of a dark money network already helping Donald Trump’s unprecedented effort to remake the US federal judiciary, the Guardian and OpenSecrets reveal.
The organization, which calls itself the Honest Elections Project, seemed to emerge out of nowhere a few months ago and started stoking fears about voter fraud. Backed by a dark money group funded by rightwing stalwarts like the Koch brothers and Betsy DeVos’ family, the Honest Elections Project is part of the network that pushed the US supreme court picks Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, and is quickly becoming a juggernaut in the escalating fight over voting rights.
The project announced it was spending $250,000 in advertisements in April, warning against voting by mail and accusing Democrats of cheating. It facilitated letters to election officials in Colorado, Florida and Michigan, using misleading data to accuse jurisdictions of having bloated voter rolls and threatening legal action.
Calling voter suppression a “myth”, it has also been extremely active in the courts, filing briefs in favor of voting restrictions in Nevada, Virginia, Texas, Wisconsin and Minnesota, among other places, at times represented by lawyers from the same firm that represents Trump. By having a hand in both voting litigation and the judges on the federal bench, this network could create a system where conservative donors have an avenue to both oppose voting rights and appoint judges to back that effort.
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2020/05/27/dishonest-elections-projec
t-conservative-group-fighting-to-restrict-voting-tied-to-powerful-dark-money-network/
The Right-Wing Legal Network Is Now Openly Pushing Conspiracy Theories
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/leonard-leo-federalist-soc
iety-voter-fraud.html
Captured Courts -- The GOP’s Big Money Assault On Our Independent Judiciary
https://bit.ly/3esMX4R
From the Supreme Court on down, the special interests responsible for these judges’ selection and confirmation are effectively capturing the judicial branch, packing our courts with politicians in robes.
With a captured judiciary, the Republican Party can do its donors’ dirty work through the courts without fear of electoral consequences. It is nothing less than a crisis for American democracy, which depends on a fair and impartial judiciary.
Behind this capture scheme lie hundreds of millions of dollars in anonymous spending, funneled through an elaborate web of front groups. It is impossible to understand this capture scheme without understanding who is spending so much money to capture America’s courts—and how and why.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Dishonest Elections Project: Conservative group fighting to restrict voting tied to powerful dark money network
The Guardian reports:
A powerful new conservative organization fighting to restrict voting in the 2020 presidential election is really just a rebranded group that is part of a dark money network already helping Donald Trump’s unprecedented effort to remake the US federal judiciary, the Guardian and OpenSecrets reveal.
The organization, which calls itself the Honest Elections Project, seemed to emerge out of nowhere a few months ago and started stoking fears about voter fraud. Backed by a dark money group funded by rightwing stalwarts like the Koch brothers and Betsy DeVos’ family, the Honest Elections Project is part of the network that pushed the US supreme court picks Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, and is quickly becoming a juggernaut in the escalating fight over voting rights.
The project announced it was spending $250,000 in advertisements in April, warning against voting by mail and accusing Democrats of cheating. It facilitated letters to election officials in Colorado, Florida and Michigan, using misleading data to accuse jurisdictions of having bloated voter rolls and threatening legal action.
Calling voter suppression a “myth”, it has also been extremely active in the courts, filing briefs in favor of voting restrictions in Nevada, Virginia, Texas, Wisconsin and Minnesota, among other places, at times represented by lawyers from the same firm that represents Trump. By having a hand in both voting litigation and the judges on the federal bench, this network could create a system where conservative donors have an avenue to both oppose voting rights and appoint judges to back that effort.
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2020/05/27/dishonest-elections-projec
t-conservative-group-fighting-to-restrict-voting-tied-to-powerful-dark-money-network/
The Right-Wing Legal Network Is Now Openly Pushing Conspiracy Theories
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/leonard-leo-federalist-soc
iety-voter-fraud.html
Captured Courts -- The GOP’s Big Money Assault On Our Independent Judiciary
https://bit.ly/3esMX4R
From the Supreme Court on down, the special interests responsible for these judges’ selection and confirmation are effectively capturing the judicial branch, packing our courts with politicians in robes.
With a captured judiciary, the Republican Party can do its donors’ dirty work through the courts without fear of electoral consequences. It is nothing less than a crisis for American democracy, which depends on a fair and impartial judiciary.
Behind this capture scheme lie hundreds of millions of dollars in anonymous spending, funneled through an elaborate web of front groups. It is impossible to understand this capture scheme without understanding who is spending so much money to capture America’s courts—and how and why.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Hilarious how somebody can believe something like this 100%, yet you bring up the name George Soros or mention the Deep State and that's just ultra-right-wing conspiracy hokum.
HILARIOUS
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:6ix, you have nothing truthful on George Soros, while I have names, dates, dollar signs, and dirty tricks played by the GOP. 6ix, you know nothing truthful, and in my experience with poorer Texas Trump voters, they also know nothing. Maybe the Republican political party should give itself a more truthful name, a proud name from history, for people like you:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Hilarious how somebody can believe something like this 100%, yet you bring up the name George Soros or mention the Deep State and that's just ultra-right-wing conspiracy hokum.
HILARIOUS
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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No. You don't speak truth. You regurgitate a truckload of Progressive diarrhea from sites like Vox and MotherJones all day long. Many times not even properly quoting them and framing your posts as if they were something you wrote yourself.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:I still see occasional news reports that describe Trump as a “populist.” But Trump’s economic policies have been the opposite of populist: They have been relentlessly plutocratic, centered largely on a successful effort to ram through huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and a so far unsuccessful attempt to take health insurance away from poor and working-class families.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
No. You don't speak truth. You regurgitate a truckload of Progressive diarrhea from sites like Vox and MotherJones all day long. Many times not even properly quoting them and framing your posts as if they were something you wrote yourself.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Nor have Trump’s trade wars brought back the good jobs of yore. Even before the coronavirus plunged us into depression, Trump had failed to deliver major employment growth in coal mining or manufacturing. And farmers, who supported Trump by large margins in 2016, have suffered huge losses thanks to his trade wars.
So what has Trump really offered to the white working class that makes up most of his base?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
So what has Trump really offered to the white working class that makes up most of his base?
An alternative to the Bush/Clinton/Obama era that destroyed them.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:Your Trump alternative, what is it? Did Trump give you a job? How is your pay raise? Do you get medical and dental insurance? Is there a retirement plan? How is your 401K doing after Trump's stock market crash? How about the National Debt? Is it lower now so that the Federal Government can pay you Social Security benefits during retirement? Trump promised to make the Debt zero, you know. He's not making progress on that promise.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
So what has Trump really offered to the white working class that makes up most of his base?
An alternative to the Bush/Clinton/Obama era that destroyed them.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
I know the answer to all the questions: NOTHING MATERIALLY IMPROVED FOR YOU, 6ix. (Everything improved for me.) But for you, 6ix, there were all those immaterial things, psychological benefits, that only exist inside your mind to make America great again. I am looking forward to the material goodies Trump has been and will be giving me if he is reelected and 6ix can look forward to whatever Trump has been raining down on him, the warm and fuzzy feelings about Trump he can't describe.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Your Trump alternative, what is it? Did Trump give you a job? How is your pay raise? Do you get medical and dental insurance? Is there a retirement plan? How is your 401K doing after Trump's stock market crash? How about the National Debt? Is it lower now so that the Federal Government can pay you Social Security benefits during retirement? Trump promised to make the Debt zero, you know. He's not making progress on that promise.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
So what has Trump really offered to the white working class that makes up most of his base?
An alternative to the Bush/Clinton/Obama era that destroyed them.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
I know the answer to all the questions: NOTHING MATERIALLY IMPROVED FOR YOU, 6ix. (Everything improved for me.) But for you, 6ix, there were all those immaterial things, psychological benefits, that only exist inside your mind to make America great again. I am looking forward to the material goodies Trump has been and will be giving me if he is reelected and 6ix can look forward to whatever Trump has been raining down on him, the warm and fuzzy feelings about Trump he can't describe.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
lol
You say that as if anything would have been better for any of us if Hillary were president.
You also say that as if money means anything to me beyond paying bills and having food to eat.
There are other things that the Trump admin has done that I put much more value on than money. Fake news is fake, and sane people aren't afraid to say it out loud anymore. The wall is being built. Nobody gives a shit about SJWs and PC bullshit anymore. Democrats are constantly showing their hypocrisy for the world to see every single day because Trump goads them into doing it because they are idiots and fall into his traps over and over and over again.
I'm not a Republican, but the more time passes the bigger fan of Trump I become.
November is going to be a blowout.
It will be fun to watch you bitch and moan about it for another 4 years.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:"I'm not a Republican." You think anybody believes you? I hear the same nonsense from mealymouthed Texans who never vote for anybody but Republicans. Are you gonna become a turncoat if Trump loses? Will you rip the GOP insignia from your uniform and try to pass as an Independent if he is defeated? It is far too late for you to pretend you are anything but a Republican, so why not be proud you say "NO!" to everything Democrats believe in. Be the Republican you are, 6ix. When Trump wins by a blowout, take credit for prescience and wear the MAGA cap for four more years.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I'm not a Republican, but the more time passes the bigger fan of Trump I become.
November is going to be a blowout.
It will be fun to watch you bitch and moan about it for another 4 years.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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