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David Brooks Looks At 'Terrifying Future' Of U.S. Right At Conservative Conference
Writer David Brooks discusses his latest piece 'The Terrifying Future of the American Right,' which details the trends he observed at the National Conservatism Conference in Florida.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/scary-future-america
n-right-national-conservatism-conference/620746/
Donald Trump destroyed the Reagan Republican paradigm in 2016, but he didn’t exactly elucidate a new set of ideas, policies, and alliances. Trump’s devastation of the old order produced a grand struggle on the right to build a new one on Trumpian populist lines.
The NatCons are wrong to think there is a unified thing called “the left” that hates America. This is just the apocalyptic menace many of them had to invent in order to justify their decision to vote for Donald Trump.
NatCons are also probably right that conservatism is going to get a lot more statist. At the conference, Ted Cruz tried to combine culture-war conservatism with free-market economic policies—free trade and low taxes. Marco Rubio countered by, in effect, arguing that you can’t rally cultural populists if you are not also going to do something for them economically. Cultural populism leads to economic populism. Rubio’s position at least has the virtue of being coherent.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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lol
Delusional.
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Are We Winning Yet?
Between 2018-20, U.S. military forces were fighting terrorism in 89 countries.
In 79 of those countries, they were training indigenous forces in how to fight terrorists. In 41, they conducted military exercises either alone or with local armies. In seven, they launched air or drone strikes. In 12 of the countries, U.S. troops engaged in combat operations.
Troops have withdrawn from Afghanistan, leaving 11 countries where they’re engaged in combat operations or are authorized and set up to do so—Iraq, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Cameroon, Libya, Niger, and Tunisia.
The big, often unaddressed question is how effective these operations are—not so much in terms of killing their targets (they’re usually very effective in that department) but in terms of stopping terrorism or destroying terrorist organizations.
The answer, it turns out, is that they’re not very effective.
It is unclear (and often unexamined) whether even “decapitation strikes”—operations where the military kills the leader of a terrorist organization—have a durable impact. In general, these groups name another leader and move on. These strikes are not without some utility, but game changers, they are not.
The war on terror never ended, and isn’t going to any time soon.
More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/02/the-real-lesson-of-joe-bid
ens-big-strike-against-isis.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Yeah...
We don't agree on much, but I think that you and I can agree that what we do with our military is pretty gross.
I think it's important to invest in and maintain our military if we want to keep our status as a top dog superpower, but maybe dial back the imperialism and fucking around a tad.
It also makes me uncomfortable how many decisions are made not only without any of our input, but without our knowledge at all. It doesn't matter how much you've read up on it, you couldn't possibly ever know more than a fraction of what has been done since WWII in the shadows.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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It’s even worse than most of us think.
And ignoring the problem doesn’t solve it — it only makes it worse.
02:42 January 6, a turning point for politics in the US
06:14 Domestic terrorism is biggest threat, says Pentagon
08:38 US Americans are not interested in politics, but politics is interested in them
10:53 Midterm elections in 2022 – Will Trump run again?
16:01 How likely is a Donald Trump win in the 2024 election?
19:39 Would someone within the GOP fight Trump?
21:21 What can the world expect from the US?
22:56 “God protects drunks and Americans”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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With the Civil War in full stride, Frederick Douglass was advocating for the equal treatment of Black Union soldiers. In March, he had issued his famous “MEN OF COLOR to ARMS! broadside calling for Black men to enlist in the Union army. Two of his sons had joined the 54th Massachusetts Black regiment.
Douglass was concerned about the unequal pay of Black soldiers, who received $3 dollars less per month than white privates. He was also incensed by the Union government’s response to the Confederate treatment of Black prisoners of war, who were being tortured, killed and sometimes sold into slavery. He focused his anger at President Abraham Lincoln. “The slaughter of Blacks taken as captives,” wrote Douglass in his Douglass’ Monthly, “seems to affect him [Lincoln] as little as the slaughter of beeves [cows] for the use of his army.”
On August 10, Douglass took his concerns directly to the White House—where, uninvited, he later wrote, he “elbowed” his way up the stairs “past all the angry white office seekers” waiting in line. The President, listening intently, explained that the conditions Black soldiers faced were a “necessary concession” for men of color to serve. While that was not the answer he sought, Douglass later told Major George L. Stearns, a leading recruiter of Black troops, that he admired Lincoln’s “decency and forthrightness” and that he left their meeting confident that “slavery would not survive the war and that the country would survive both slavery and the war.”
Even with no official job in government, Douglass wielded considerable influence on the national conversation around slavery, Black troop equality and Black emancipation. He did so by traveling the lecture circuit, writing editorials in his Douglass’ Monthly, giving speeches or writing letters to intimates and government officials. In all those outlets, Douglass vented about the president. He had grown impatient with Lincoln’s political foot dragging on emancipation, since the president felt he first had to overcome widespread prejudice and “prepare the public mind” for its enactment, according to Blight. And Douglass was infuriated over Lincoln’s support for colonizing African Americans outside the United States after emancipation. In Douglass’ Monthly, he castigated the proposal as a reflection of the president’s “inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.”
After siding with the Radical Republican’s dump-Lincoln movement for the 1864 Presidential election and roundly criticizing the president in public for his leniency on the Reconstruction plan and Black suffrage, Douglass was summoned to the White House by Lincoln for a private meeting. No longer a walk-in, he now had a personal invitation from a President facing criticism from every side during a bloody war, and worried about his reelection.
At their second meeting on August 19, 1864, Lincoln pleaded for support and guidance from one of his most vocal critics. “Lincoln’s main purpose in initiating this meeting was to seek Douglass’s advice on how to increase the number of Blacks who, in the event that he lost the election, could not be returned to bondage,” wrote Columbia University historian Eric Foner in his 2010 book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.
In his third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, the orator wrote that Lincoln asked him “to undertake the organizing of a band of scouts, composed of colored men, whose business should be…to go into the rebel states, beyond the lines of our armies, and carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries.”
Despite his best efforts and support from several other Black leaders, Douglass never got a chance to complete the assignment. “It is remarkable that Lincoln suggested such a scheme to Douglass,” wrote Blight in his book, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War. “It would have forged an unprecedented alliance between leadership and federal power for the purpose of emancipation.”
More a
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Most Americans on minimum wage earn less than a Dickensian allegory for destitution.
Americans make Scrooge seem like a generous paying boss.
According to A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchit makes 15 shillings a week. Adjusted for inflation, that's $530.27/wk. or $27,574/yr. or $13.50/hr.
Politifact has quibbles about this comparison of Americans to Scrooge because comparing the worth of a salary in 1840s England to today is an imperfect science and because working conditions today are better with the advent of the 40-hour work week.
More at https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/jan/03/facebook-posts/chris
tmas-carol-characters-wages-not-best-comparis/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Yeah. $7.25 an hour isn't even worth working anymore. Period.
That's $15,080 gross, assuming anyone making minimum was ever able to get a 40 hour workweek. I'm sure that almost never happens though, so it's part time without any benefits.
In my state, you've still got to pay an average of 4.5% income tax on anything over $1,000, and when you did your taxes this year you'd be paying the FED 10% on anything over $12,550. And you're also paying 7.65 off of every dollar for Social Security/Medicare.
So in the hypothetical situation where you're a full time employee living in Indiana and making the national minimum wage, you've paid $1,153.62 in Social Security/Medicare. You've paid roughly $663.60 in state and local taxes and $253 in Federal taxes.
So that $15,080 is now only $13,009.78.
Granted, you're going to be seeing some form of EIC or another depending on your married status and how many kids you have. I can't even give a figure on that now since they've made crazy changes to the EIC over the last two years. So we'll just say that it's enough on the federal level to get back the FED tax you paid, but not close to enough to get your Social Security/Medicare back unless you've got a few kids and alone or with a spouse who also makes nothing. State EIC isn't worth counting since it's so little it's hardly worth filling out the extra form.
Own a house? (Not Likely) You're paying another $1,000 to $2,500 in property taxes around here, bringing you even closer to $10,000 a year to live on. Don't own a house? Rent isn't cheap around here either, even though we're not paying insane California or New York prices. Just expect that the vast majority of your labor all year is going to rent that crappy apartment.
You still won't have any health insurance from your job though, but you've come dangerously close to the $1,482 per month monthly income cap for state sponsored insurance. A figure which never seems to go up from year to year to match inflation. I guess you'd better start thinking about asking your employer to start cutting your hours soon and certainly turn down any raises or any non-life-changing promotions, or else you're too rich to have health insurance since there's no way you're going to afford Obamacare on your own with what you make.
And forget about vacation time. But that's okay, you didn't have any money to go anywhere anyhow.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Minimum Wage – In Your State
https://minimumwage.com/in-your-state/
I know why the minimum wage is low -- most voters want it that way and their legislatures follow. Oh, the voters might say they want the minimum raised to $15, but words are cheap. The voters see a monetary advantage for themselves by keeping a low minimum wage. Their legislator sees what they see or else the legislator eventually doesn't get reelected. I really don't know why minimum wage activists hope there is legislative solution when the majority of voters don't want a solution.
https://minimumwage.com/news/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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