chasfh

This isn’t even the worst two-week stretch he has had in his career. He had worse in 2016. You can give up on him if you like. I’m sticking around a bit longer.

He doesn't care if you're black or white.

@Useful Idiot: take two aspirins and read this.

Says the guy who strained to get "apostrophication"! 😆

Bill Kristol is Bill Buckley sans the erudition.

The "time for gentile politics as usual has come to an end" made me literally LOL.

Yeah? You think MTG and AOC are yukking it up together over Dom P at The Monocle?

Jesus.

Sounds something like the liberal Catholic Church of my youth. Glad to see there are still vestiges of that surviving through this weird fundamentalism time.

I think they get one of the two next MLB franchises. There’s a lot of outside and tourist money there, which is also why Vegas will get the other team.

So now they’ll do the next best thing and get elected to the school board so they can rid the neighbor’s children’s schools of every last CRT-infested math book.

I imagine they don’t. I also imagine that didn’t factor into the decision much.

That’s part of the equation. Where were the Karens of the 1960s when it came to making decisions about what to show the American news viewer regarding Vietnam? Nowhere, because Karen is a modern social phenomenon that is not just a purveyor of snowflakery—she is a product of snowflakery as well. Karen was born and grew up during the sanitizing of the Middle East wars on TV newscasts, and that’s as back when the nightly network news really mattered.

I won’t argue with you there.

I don’t think the 1960s explains what’s happening in New York or Chicago or Boston or even Atlanta today. Their economic and liveability revolutions all came within the past 30 years. My point was where I think Atlanta will go next if they continue down the path of legislating the evangelical agenda But I do agree that the 1960’s started precipitating the rotten core you see in cities like Birmingham today. “And if you ask me, it all started with that commie stooge Martin Luther Coon!!” 😉

I definitely think it started with that intention. I’m not talking about belief in a deity that came from the first caveman wondering how did I get here—I’m talking about Religion, Inc. Catholic Church comes to mind as one of the OGs of the organized religion scam.

Religion is all about the fiction that it is better to delay gratification in this life in order to achieve perfection in the afterlife. That’s how the poor comfort themselves with their circumstances and, not for nothing, why the rich seek to maintain that thinking among the poor to control them and forestall revolution, to the point of enshrining gratification-delaying principles into law and directly citing that very religious thinking as the inspiration for it.

The continuing educational subordination of the south is a direct result of Jim Crow as well. Remember they spent time and treasure creating parallel systems of everything, particularly education, and even though the second-class system they created for blacks was terrible, punitive and cheap by design, it still cost a lot of taxpayer money to maintain. This kind of circumstance doesn’t turn around by magic on a dime. Even if they were to … ahem … get religion this morning and commit to achieving first-class public accommodations status on par with the best cities in the north and west, it would still take three or five or maybe even more decades to actually achieve it. Of course, that’s definitely not the kind of religion those folks down there are interested in getting.

As I mentioned, Atlanta is just beginning their race to the bottom now. Once they get all the same laws just punish just as hard in place, we won’t see practically anyone who’s not a modestly educated Christian wanting to live there anymore. And if Virginia follows suit, it’ll happen there, too.

My wife and I are taking a driving trip through the south. While here, we have stayed in downtown hotels in Louisville, Jacksonville, Montgomery, and now Birmingham. Nashville is next. The thing that has struck me about these downtowns is how ragged and rundown they are. Lots of buildings vacant, hardly anyone on the streets at night, some street lights are out, and people without homes the only ones on the streets after maybe nine o'clock. It's not like that in my city, which is very clean and well-lit and well-trod by people both resident and tourist well into the night. So what's the difference? Why are things like that in these southern downtowns but not in mine? I think the original difference is slavery. People think that ended in 1865 and that everyone just did a 180 on it, but we all know that's not true. The south tried to keep de facto slavery going with Jim Crow laws for as long as they could afterwards, finally starting to crack a century later. One of the things that started turning states around on Jim Crow was economics: corporations started refusing to even do business in Jim Crow states, let alone relocate there, until that was finally changed. Economics is what got their attention. Still, the south is way behind the north in economic development. I looked up which Fortune 5000 companies have their headquarters in Birmingham, which is the #41 market in America. There is not a single company I'd ever heard of, and in fact only four of the top 500 are there. Why is that? I believe because the legacy of slavery in the south, with its lingering social impact, has hampered economic development in the deep south for generations still to come. Companies relocate to other city downtowns (like Chicago) all the time, but none of them go to deep southern cities, despite the favorable weather and corporate tax advantages, because no company with a highly-educated executive workforce could ever get their people to relocate to Birmingham, Alabama. And as states like Alabama race to the bottom to punish people for having pregnancies they don't want or otherwise can't handle, they are not only never going to have highly-educated people wanting move there, but they will also experience a brain drain of people who grow up there as these states enact more and worse punishing fascistic laws. And that's perfectly OK with the evangelical Christians who run politics in the deep south because of the book of Genesis. Always remember that Eve did not tempt Adam with fruit from an apple tree. The story is that she tempted him with fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It is knowledge that so many people who run politics in the deep south fear. They fear smart people. They don't want them around. Smart people are too smart for them. Smart people make people who run things in the deep south feel inadequate about themselves. That's what these retrograde abortion laws (not to mention voting restrictions and open gun laws and all the rest of that) will finally accomplish: they will keep highly-educated smart people from moving there, and they will drive the highly-educated smart people who are still there away as well. Detractors might point to Atlanta and say see, you're wrong, they're in the deep south and look, they have a thriving economy. To which I would say, all that came when Atlanta tried to be like the north when it came to social and legal protections. Now that Georgia is engaged in a race to the bottom as well, that will eventually change because sooner than later, no one will want to live there anymore, either. I promise you.

Well, they're going to be very disappointed by the supply they see on the shelf.

LOL! Ah, Bunker, you were funnier in the 70s, but this one is a hoot!

I'm'a big fan.

I was watching a network newscast while relaxing in my hotel last night. A story about the Russian takeover of Mariupol was introduced, and the news presenter warned that the story would contain disturbing images. The only images shown that could have even come close to fitting the description of "disturbing" was of a guy being carted off on a stretcher with his face blurred, and some destroyed ordnance and cityscape. No bodies or blood or anything like that was shown. At first this got me wondering how we Americans had become so soft that we need a trigger warning about a blurred face on a stretcher. But then it occurred to me: maybe this is being done on purpose to keep people shielded from the real damage that weapons do to people. Some of us remember the images on the network newscasts of yore of dead American soldiers, and of their caskets being shipped home from Vietnam. We know that the networks showing that on their newscasts was a key turning point in support for that war: viewers were so horrified by what they saw that they changed their minds about supporting their government's war. The networks have never shown anything like that since. They know that doing so would have cratered public support for all those more recent wars in the Middle East. The networks knew that showing dead soldiers in the Kuwaiti desert and on the streets of Baghdad which would have pissed off the government, perhaps resulting in the withdrawal of network access to insiders in Washington, or even regulatory pressure from aggrieved parties there. That's why we will never, ever see images of dead American soldiers or caskets ever again on American news networks. The networks have a business to protect, after all. Perhaps the same principle applies to gun violence in America. You know the old TV news phrase, "If it bleeds, it leads?" Have you ever noticed that whenever your local newscasts run a story about some shooting in your city, they never show any actual blood, or the dead victim lying on the ground, or the spot where the shooting occurred even after it's been cleared away? Instead, all they show are close-ups of yellow tape strung up far from the scene, and a bunch of cops milling about. That's always the entire video, right there. So much for leading with bleeding. So I wonder whether this might be a key to why so many people are indifferent to gun control: we viewers are being shielded from ever seeing the effects of actual gun violence. Maybe showing the actual effects of gun violence on the TV news would finally change people's minds about controlling access to guns, at long last. I'm not talking about the 2A absolutists, the "the more guns we have on the street the safer we'll be" people. They are completely gone and can't be reached. And those who are already horrified by the very thought of gun violence are already on board. I'm talking about the great majority in the middle, the people who hardly ever give any thought to gun violence, because they are never confronted with the reality of it in any capacity. Certainly not on the TV news. I would bet that if ordinary everyday people tuning into the TV news saw at least one dead body—a real person, not a video game villain—riddled with bullets on every newscast they saw, they would be completely horrified in the same way their parents and grandparents were when they saw dead American soldiers on the nightly newscasts of half a century ago. I feel certain that would change a lot of otherwise unengaged minds, because ordinary everyday people would be so shaken by seeing the actual gun violence they've been shielded from for so long that they would demand true effective gun control, just like their parents and grandparents were so shaken by images of dead soldiers that they demanded the end of the Vietnam war.

Yes, Bunker has always realized that.