The Virginia Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of High-Quality Posts

[Joe Republic]

Re: Idaho teachers in trouble for dressing as border wall/Mexicans

Just another example of the moral decay and rotten culture of rural America.  Rampant, endemic drug use/addiction, unhealthy diets, sedentary lifestyles, loyalty to damaging and anti-social media, religious, and political spheres...unsafe and unhealthy sex lives (this is true everywhere)..and an extreme anti-intellectual/anti-education culture that has poisoned every facet of rural society.

Valuing education, community, and being active, optimistic civically engaged citizens would allow poverty alleviation and a slow climb out of this hole.  Something to be proud of instead of posturing pride.

[Joe Republic]

Same thread:

This thread is simply a chronological list of the "easily offended".

Nope, it's a list of people who get that being a teacher requires a level of professionalism greater than that of your average job and much greater than just going out for your normal social life, vs. those who haven't picked up on that yet and who don't understand that kids aren't grown-ups.

It's another version of a thread of white guys asking "why can't I use the n word" and not being interested in the actual answer why they can't.

[Joe Republic]

Rick Santorum is a colossal douchebag, I'm happy for him that his Daughter pulled through though.

I'll bet Bella doesn't think he's a douchebag.

That ought to count for something when you think about it.  Rick Santorum walks a walk that would make many people here crap in their pants if they were actually faced with the same situation.

Using this girl to promote an anti-abortion agenda is disgusting.  She was born into insanely unlikely financial circumstances that allowed for exorbitant amounts of money to be spent to keep her alive.

We have a healthcare system that would deprive her of such care in nearly every circumstance.  Yet you would want to force a poor mother of someone like Bella to give birth, incur debilitating medical expenses that would stop at some point due to inability to pay, and then be forced to watch her daughter suffer and die.

I sincerely pray to God that Bella is a lesbian, because I want Rick Santorum to have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to raise up a hellbound abomination.

You claim you support some kind of universal healthcare and are given an approximate choice at the voting booth to work towards that goal...but you say no.  Instead, you vote for A system where personal wealth means your dud of a child will be raised up and used as an example for the good, Godly pro-lifers while the children of the poor are neglected..and if not while children, certainly once they make it to adulthood.

“16Then the LORD said to Moses, 17“Say to Aaron, ‘For the generations to come, none of your descendants who has a physical defect may approach to offer the food of his God.

18No man who has any defect may approach—no man who is blind, lame, disfigured, or deformed; 19no man who has a broken foot or hand, 20or who is a hunchback or dwarf, or who has an eye defect, a festering rash, scabs, or a crushed testicle.

21No descendant of Aaron the priest who has a defect shall approach to present the offerings made by fire to the LORD. Since he has a defect, he is not to come near to offer the food of his God. 22He may eat the most holy food of his God as well as the holy food, 23but because he has a defect, he must not go near the curtain or approach the altar, so as not to desecrate My sanctuaries. For I am the LORD who sanctifies them.’”

“Yeah..that one..yeah.. the cripple...give him food but...just keep him out of site.  I don’t want him desecrating my sanctuary.”

[Joe Republic]

Why do Republicans hate children so much after they're born? Why are they trying to take away their healthcare and let them die from pre-existing conditions?

They take the contempt they have for women and the contempt they have for a woman’s personal autonomy and twist it into a fake, disingenuous “love” for the fetus.  They see abortion as a direct attack on male autonomy and their “entitlement” to have “their” woman/women subservient to them.

That is all of it.  This is proven by the way they deal with children once they are born.  They don’t give a f**k about fetuses or babies.  They’d rip the fetus out with a slotted spoon if it is what suited them, so long as it was the MAN making the choice.

What they really want is pro-choice for men.  Force the woman to have the child and then choose whether to stay or take off.

[Joe Republic]

The crisis is a humanitarian one, not a security one. If we had appropriate refugee policies, these people could be vetted and placed somewhere safe. Instead, they're forced to request asylum or try to get in illegally as they have no other options for a safe place to turn to.

Can you imagine if Germans hadn't been allowed in to the US during the political unrest in the 1820s-1840s? If the Irish had been kept it during the potato famine in the late 1840s? The Chinese Exclusion Act was disgusting and kept out immigrants of a certain culture while European immigrants continued to flow in all the way up to 1917.

Our country is doing well economically and there are more jobs than can be worked by the current residents. This issue will continue to get worse as Boomers are hitting retirement age. There is no logical reason to restrict these refugees. Obviously vetting is required, but beyond that, there is no reason to keep out people who have risked their lives to come here. Pretending this is a security risk or an "invasion" is a willful act of ignorance and hatred.

[Joe Republic]

Did anyone really compare the ICE camps to Nazi concentration camps though? I mean it was the Brits who originally invented concentration camps in South Africa and I always assumed that the contemporary comparisons with the Trump camps refered to those?

It I have made the comparison, as have many others. 

The technical point - which Republicans are desperate to the point of Lovecraftian madness to try and confuse - is that concentration camps and death camps are not the same thing.

A concentration camp is,

A camp where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners, prisoners of war, refugees etc., are detained for the purpose of confining them in one place, typically with inadequate or inhumane facilities.

A death camp is,

A prison camp in which a large number of prisoners die for various reasons, such as starvation, disease, brutality and neglect.

Sometimes it is used specifically to refer to extermination camps set up by the government of Nazi Germany.

All these camps are horrible, whatever their exact definition or classification. They're all, I think, crimes against humanity. I'm confident that most people would agree death camps are worse than concentration camps, but that's ultimately just arguing about how horribly evil something is - and all of them are so evil no decent human being wants anything to do with enabling any of them.

Which brings us right back around to the GOP's desperate attempts to twist semantics in order to avoid being judged for their own actions.

First, Republicans confuse 'concentration camps' with 'death camps'.

Second, Republicans get very indignant at supposedly being accused of mass murder and genocide, charges of which they are innocent so far. (If you don't count Yemen, started by Obama, continued by Trump and his Republicans.)

Third, Republicans claim that since they aren't running death camps (which, again, they are not) they can't be running concentration camps either (yes, Republicans are running concentration camps) because they're the same thing (which they are not) which must mean they're doing nothing wrong at all  on immigration (which wouldn't be true even if they weren't running concentration camps).

I know it gets confusing - modern Republicans  have weaponized stupidity. This is far from the only issue where Republicans lie about definitions in order to try and get away with abusive and criminal behavior. From Trump's many impeachable actions to stacking the deck for internet service providers, lying and spreading confusion are key Republican tactics.

I suppose it's possible that the errors are made in good faith and Republicans are reliably ignorant and stupid to the level of criminality. But if that's the case, they still shouldn't be running a burger joint, much less the United States of America.

In the end, I think Never Again has the best reaction to any Republican attempt obfuscate their atrocities:

“ the semantics. Children are dying. That should be enough,” she said. “My goal is not to convince you to use those semantics. It’s to get you to stop these atrocities.”

Sophie Ellman-Golan, Never Again Action spokesperson, said the group isn’t waiting for conditions to match those of the Holocaust to take action.

“We look at what is happening and what our government is doing immigrant communities,” Ellman-Golan told The Daily Beast. “We see nothing less than a mass atrocity. While conditions might not exactly mirror the Holocaust, we shouldn’t wait for them to mirror the Holocaust to take action. That’s why we say ‘never again’ means never again for everyone, and never again means now.”

[Joe Republic]

What Trump should do is go old school by standing on a stump or a box in the middle of an open field (or road), and give his rambling speeches that way:

Step right up, folks! Hyyyyyyydroxicloroquine! What's hydroxychloroquine, you say? It's Dr Don's patented patent medicine. Got the lupus? We'll keep that wolf at bay. Malaria? This is some Belle Aria! Got the 'rona in Barcelona? Covid's not morbid with these beauties!

You, sir! Come on up. What's your name? Don Jr? What a coincidence! We've never met before today, correct? Folks, this young man...has coronavirus. Don't flee, don't panic, there's no cause for alarm...with Dr. Don's hydroxychloroquine! See! He's cured already!

These pills can be yours, but there's a limited supply, and the next town over's interested. Act quickly...

[Joe Republic]

The key to dealing with Republicans that seems to continually escape the Democrats to the point where I'm finding it difficult to believe it's not deliberately, is to call their BS for what it is. Whether its "immigrant caravans", trans kids, "critical race theory" or Harris visiting the border, the Republicans spew a never-ending stream of BS. Not even lies, just BS. Countering the BS is futile, because it takes far more energy than it does to generate it, and has far less impact even when done successfully.

What needs to be done is to associate BS with the Republican brand. Don't persuade people Republicans are wrong, persuade them that Republicans are a joke. Get it to the point where when any non-cultist citizen hears or sees a Republican speak, their immediate, instinctive reaction is "oh, more Republican BS". Make "Republican BS" (or some equivalent) the "there you go again" of the 2020s.

No matter what the subject is, whether its nuking hurricanes, coming up with excuses to abuse kids, having a meltdown over some random thing a Democrat did, or asking the forest service change the orbit of the Earth, taking Republicans seriously empowers them. They are a vile, dangerous joke, and that is how they should be treated. Always.

[Joe Republic]

I forgot what it’s like for the out-of-power party to need to resort to pure disingenuousness for political point-scoring. Under Trump, reality did most heavy lifting for the Democrats on its own.