• 16 Posts
  • 42 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Prior to Brown, many of today’s suburban municipalities were just neighborhoods of the cities they were near, neighborhoods that were almost entirely populated by white people due to racist administration of FHA loans, racist zoning laws, and racist real estate business practices. Post Brown is when a lot of them started to be spun off into independent municipal governments by state legislatures with their own mayors and city councils and school districts.

    So, rereading it now, I feel like I should correct my initial comment here - it wasn’t the white people with FHA loans who started this process of creating segregated communities, it was the ones who administered those loans and who were writing the laws incorporating them as independent government entities.


  • The only reason suburbs even became a thing in this country was because white people with FHA loans wanted nice houses close to their jobs and the amenities of cities but didn’t want their tax money going to fund black kids schools, and a lot (not all but a lot) of “socially liberal but fiscally conservative” people just want to get recognition for being an ally but descend into the kind of thinking and talking that would make Stephen Miller blush the moment they’re actually asked to actually do anything to support marginalized communities, so I’m not surprised at all to see suburban Republicans fall for this

    e; technically it wasn’t the white people with the FHA loans who created the suburbs as we know them today so much as it was the ones administering them and in the halls of power voting on the creation of municipalities







  • Remember when people said things like, “At least Trump is an idiot narcissist, if someone halfway intelligent were to come along with his politics and lack of morals we’d be in real trouble”? Vance is that guy, he can play up his bullshit blue collar back story when he’s telling the Republican culture warriors we need to deregulate businesses, he can play up his Yale law school education when he’s telling the business leaders he needs to go after immigrants, and he can play up his military record when he’s telling Congress to defund Ukraine. He’s a bullshit artist who can be all things to all people and the only consistent belief he’s shown throughout his career is that he personally ought to have more power.


  • I’m pretty convinced the entire goddamn Republican party is happy to end democracy.

    Yes, they have been slowly moving towards that view since the great depression and new deal made it so they couldn’t win an election on the strength of their ideas alone. So they tried making up shit about Communists in the 1950s, and when that wasn’t enough they started bringing KKK types into their party by dog whistling about civil rights laws with Goldwater and Nixon in the 1960s.

    Lying to voters and opposing the rights of racial minorities to (among other things) be able to vote without intimidation was already super anti-democratic and they have been all about that for 50 years or more. Really the only thing different now is how they’re saying quiet parts loud.






  • For what it’s worth, MSN’s reprint of Reuters’ report had this passage

    Rather than verbally attacking Trump in the coming days, the White House and the Biden campaign will draw on the president’s history of condemning all sorts of political violence including his sharp criticism of the “disorder” created by campus protests over the Israel-Gaza conflict, campaign officials said on condition of anonymity.

    But in Reuters version of it (which has been updated more recently) that passage is gone - https://archive.is/cpvVW

    I’d bet some old dipshit who’s been doing campaign work for the Democratic party long enough to have a soundbite about school bussing integration programs said this idiotic crap, then someone on Biden’s campaign under the age of fifty read it and told the old dipshit what an incredibly stupid self-own that was, and forced the old dipshit to call up Reuters and ask them to pull that quote.

    It would be a lot better if we didn’t have to go through these episodes of old dipshits saying fucking stupid and offensive shit about their own base, but I think there are at least people on the Biden campaign who realize how completely fucking stupid this talking point would be.


  • He’s an Ivy League educated social climber who hobnobbed with Peter Theil and lawmakers before he got famous writing a book where he cosplayed as a poor person so he could tell rich people exactly what they want to hear about poor people

    From a quick glance at my résumé, you might think me an older, female version of Vance. I was born in Appalachia in the 1960s and grew up in the small city of Newark, Ohio. When I was 9, my parents divorced. My mom became a single mother of four, with only a high school education and little work experience. Life was tough; the five of us lived on $6,000 a year.

    Like Vance, I attended Ohio State University on scholarship, working nights and weekends. I graduated at the top of my class and, again like Vance, attended Yale Law School on a financial-need scholarship. Today, I represent people who’ve been fired illegally from their jobs. And now that I’m running for Congress in Northeast Ohio, I speak often with folks who are trying hard but not making much money.

    A self-described conservative, Vance largely concludes that his family and peers are trapped in poverty due to their own poor choices and negative attitudes. But I take great exception when he makes statements such as: “We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy. . . . Thrift is inimical to our being.”

    Who is this “we” of whom he speaks? Vance’s statements don’t describe the family in which I grew up, and they don’t describe the families I meet who are struggling to make it in America today. I know that my family lived on $6,000 per year because as children, we sat down with pen and paper to help find a way for us to live on that amount. My mom couldn’t even qualify for a credit card, much less live on credit. She bought our clothes at discount stores.

    Thrift was not inimical to our being; it was the very essence of our being.

    With lines like “We choose not to work when we should be looking for jobs,” Vance’s sweeping stereotypes are shark bait for conservative policymakers. They feed into the mythology that the undeserving poor make bad choices and are to blame for their own poverty, so taxpayer money should not be wasted on programs to help lift people out of poverty. Now these inaccurate and dangerous generalizations have been made required college reading.

    [Bolding added]





  • Yeah, there are definitely some parts of this where I disagree with the author, but the very next paragraph makes a good point

    A fascist party can only come to power when it attracts multiple constituencies, whose members do not think of themselves as fascists. The fascist leader represents the compromises necessarily involved in democratic politics as unmanly. But fascism needs to appeal to a broader ideology than the mere destruction of democracy. Patriarchy is just such an ideology. By doubling down on traditional gender roles, by the restriction of women’s rights, and by villainizing LGBT, a fascist party attracts religious conservatives. The strutting masculinity of the fascist leader appeals to powerful business elites, who tend to view the world in terms of “winners” and “losers”, and often view their own success as a product of their masculinity (it doesn’t hurt if the leader also vows to promote their interests). Survival in a violent struggle for power is the ultimate badge of honor in the fascist worldview. Violence leans into and supports it.

    So long as we’re still in an electoral situation, violence is a bad look. I’m not even saying the Democratic party should or can do anything here, I’m just underscoring that this weekend’s events has made this election tougher to win.

    e; grammar are confusing