TygrBright
TygrBright's Journal"The Republican party is obsessed with children - in the creepiest of ways"
From The Guardian: The Republican party is obsessed with children – in the creepiest of ways
This is worth repeating. In 2017, the Republican party now babbling nonsense about public schools and LGBTQ people grooming children for sexual abuse – the party that spent the past week in the Senate arguing that Democrats are soft on pedophiles – officially backed a credibly accused child molester for election to that very body. If the Republican National Committee had gotten its way, there’s a chance we would have spent the past week hearing Roy Moore opine on Jackson’s ethical qualifications. It’s a mercy of sorts that we heard instead from the likes of Hawley who, as the White House noted earlier this month, refused to say whether he’d vote for Moore during his own campaign.
The Republican party’s ambivalence on child abuse extends beyond pure politics and the protection of accused politicians. Nearly 300,000 children between the ages of 15 to 17 were married in the United States between 2000 and 2018. An estimated 60,000 of them were below the age of sexual consent in their respective states; it’s thought that roughly 80% of American child marriages overall are between girls under 18 and adult men. Activists across the country have been pushing hard against those figures over the last few years. And while resistance to child marriage bans can be found on both sides of the ideological spectrum – which one would expect given that child marriage was legal in all 50 states as recently as 2017 – some of the most dogged defenders of the status quo have been red-state Republicans. Not long ago, for instance, the Kansas City Star called Josh Hawley’s state of Missouri “a destination wedding spot for 15-year-old brides” – especially ones who had been impregnated by men, thanks to uncommonly lax laws that facilitated the marriages of more than 7,000 children between 2000 and 2014.
When a ban on marriages to children 14 or younger advanced by a Republican party representative came up for a vote in February 2018, it was opposed by 50 members of the Missouri house – two Democrats and 48 members of her own party. Thankfully, that bill still passed the chamber, and a comprehensive ban on all marriages of adults over 21 to children under 18 was signed into law in Missouri later that year. But the significance of Republican lawmakers’ hesitation wasn’t lost on the marriage ban’s advocates. “Last week they were arguing that the government should be involved in approving a minor’s abortion,” Missouri representative Peter Merideth told the Riverfront Times after February’s vote. “So it’s a mind-boggling contrast when a minor who’s not even old enough to enter into a legally binding contract is being told they can enter into a relationship that makes statutory rape legal.”
It’s no mystery why Hawley and other Republicans are more interested in inventing child abuses and a record of leniency for abusers among Democrats than they are in criticizing their own party’s tolerance for predators. The more interesting question is why Democrats haven’t discredited the right’s narratives on this front more forcefully. While the party’s hands aren’t fully clean – Bill Clinton was on Epstein’s flights too, after all – the hesitance to engage more aggressively probably has less to do with that than it does with their preference for a particular mode of response to Republican attacks in general.
The whole article is spot-on and well worth reading. Good analysis, although I don't entirely agree with the author's take on why Democrats aren't doing a better job of dealing with this stuff. To my mind it's the continuing "Don't get into the mudpit with the pigs and try to wrestle" philosophy that the Party has adopted for so long.
And generally, I agree with that approach. But I would love to see Democrats doing a better job of pointing out the whole "They accuse others of what they are doing themselves, to distract and divert attention from their own crimes" reality that has become the pervasive GOP self-protection strategy.
disgustedly,
Bright
Exploring the Depths of Inhumanity: "Genocide", "War Crime", and "Atrocity"
Terms getting a lot of use these days, especially in connection with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Over and above various dictionary and legal definitions, what are the conceptual meanings of "genocide", "war crime", and "atrocity", and why does it matter?
For "war crime", one clue is in the first word - things that happen during armed hostilities, generally (but not always) within the geographic parameters of those hostilities. The clue in the second word routes us to the various codes that define it: Starting with the Geneva Convention, various conglomerations of nation-states have defined a list of horrors that exceed the general horror level of war.
There is also a clue in the term "genocide", which is a term hybridize from both Greek "genos" meaning race or tribe, and a Latin suffix, "-cide" meaning killing. Very specifically, the term "genos" describes those who are bound not by an ideology, nationality or other conceptual identity, but by genetics: shared descent. This term makes no reference to the context of war.
The most general of the three terms, "atrocity" is etymologically the least distinct, with its Latin root "atrox" having connotations of 'cruel' or 'terrible'. In more recent times legal meanings have evolved under the aegis of the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, referring to a variety of acts that include, but are not limited to, mass murder under the aegis of a polity and/or its leaders.
An illustration of three very clear, distinct acts within the definition of each term:
Troops surrendered and disarmed, being slaughtered by the captors, is an unambiguous war crime.
The Nazi regime identifying and killing everyone of specifically Jewish descent, religiously observant or not, was unambiguously genocide.
The Nazi policy of systematically imprisoning and/or killing everyone identified as being homosexual was an unambiguous atrocity.
So what are the Russians doing?
War crimes, mostly. Probably many also fall within the various legal definitions of atrocities.
Legally, they're not committing genocide, in that Ukrainian nationality is not synonymous with shared ancestry - in fact, Ukraine has a variety of citizens with various ethnic identities and cultures, similar to many nations. Ukrainian citizens of Russian descent are being victimized with the same ferocity as Ukrainians of Greek and Turkic (Gagauz) descent.
All of these inhumane acts can be held accountable.
Clarity in defining the terms, collecting the evidence, and presenting proof to a court with jurisdiction will matter.
The rights of Ukraine and the rest of the world to hold Russians from the level of private, to P* himself, accountable for these crimes, must not be abrogated in any agreement of terms to end hostilities.
Literally, the future of humanity depends upon it.
somberly,
Bright
Is this the socio-evolutionary challenge of the 21st Century?
I believe that if we (humankind) do not learn, relatively quickly, how to succeed as multi-cultural societies, we doom ourselves to the many deaths self-inflicted climate change has waiting for us.
We cannot effectively tackle climate change until we have learned to live in multicultural social units - nation-states, political subdivisions, even neighborhoods.
It's not about ideology per se - many ideologies can build reasonably successful societies in a monoculture. Monocultures tend to deal more easily with issues that challenge multicultural communities.
Yes, the Scandinavian countries led the world in quality of living for decades, but not necessarily because of their 'socialized' poltical system - they have always been pretty monocultural. Even recent migration patterns have not dented that too far, but those same recent migration patterns HAVE produced social frictions that challenge those nations.
Challenges that beset multicultural communities are also exacerbated in post-Colonial states where inter-cultural differences have been overlaid with a shared experience of inferiority to the colonial masters. Post-colonial states that understand the challenges and move quickly to institutionalize mechanisms that address inter-cultural differences have a better chance of long-term success in building their post-Colonial identity than those that deny the issue or address it by attempts at segregation, partition, or continuation of colonialist systems.
Multicultural societies (and eventually we will ALL be there - or dead) have to build infrastructures that ensure equity of value and access to resources, power, and influence for members of all cultural identities.
White people better understand this at a gut level sooner rather than later. Climate change is well and truly blind to human culture. It'll kill us all, indiscriminately, no matter how many wealthy white oligarchs manage to build funkholes for temporary survival.
certainly,
Bright
Why it's "Game Over" for P* - and he's starting to realize that.
Autocracy runs on fear.
It gains power by employing "fear of something worse" than the autocrat, but once the autocrat is firmly in power, it runs on fear of the autocrat and the autocrat's apparatus for inspiring and maintaining that fear.
It works extremely well, as long as people continue to fear.
But what happens when fear of the autocrat is replaced by something else?
Could be fear of something worse than the autocrat - nuclear annihilation, the deaths of children, etc.
Or it could be hope of something better than the autocrat.
Most powerful is a combination of the two.
And both of those conditions now exist in *P's area of control.
He's done.
Because fear is the ONLY tool he has left to use.
The sanctions have deprived him of the ability to deploy greed for his purposes.
He only ever had fear and greed, really.
Then, just fear.
And now it's failing.
I wish for him only enlightenment.
determinedly,
Bright
So here's an idea...
Every American who thinks women who get abortions should be killed, and/or parents of trans children should abuse them, and/or gay people should be invisible and ignored, and/or any kind of history that makes them uncomfortable should not be taught and any teachers attempting to teach it should lose their jobs and/or be jailed...?
Let's exchange them for the Russian anti-war protestors P* wants to lock up and/or kill.
Even-steven, 1:1.
I bet they'd be SO much happier with Daddy P*, and the Russian anti-war protestors would be totally welcome here!
inspirationally,
Bright
We did not want this war. We denied its existence. But now Democrats have a model for fighting.
This war started back as an offshoot of the Cold War, possibly as early as the 1970s, certainly by the end of the 1980s.
It did not take the highest-level strategic appreciation for Soviet Intel to identify a vulnerability in what they regarded as their most threatening adversary - the United States. It was absurdly simple, in fact: In a two-party system, if you can degrade, subvert, and take control of one party, you have the means to destroy the system.
I doubt it was difficult for them to decide which of the two parties they would target.
The GOP definition of "strength" has always had some overlap with authoritarian models and values. And their links with movement conservatism and choices of fear-based propaganda strategy (see "Southern Strategy" et al) made them an excellent fit.
The tactical battleplan seems to have been simple:
Identify loud voices pushing the fear buttons, amplify them, help them proliferate and create the mental constructs of fear and distrust.
Manipulate the agendas of those voices to align them with movement conservative, and eventually neo-conservative leaders.
Supply money, suborn and manipulate to link the GOP ever-more-closely with ever-more-extreme thought leaders, and seed the party with tools ready to exploit extremist agitation.
Morph the politics of fear and hate into the politics of control and repression.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union did not materially interfere with this battleplan - in some ways it actually facilitated and advanced it. A "free" Russia with a sham representative government provided much better cover when the tactics escalated to outright purchase of politicians, party leaders, media outlets, and propaganda voices.
They have been prosecuting this battleplan with increasing effectiveness and, like many such, it produces cumulative momentum and escalation increases by ever-greater factors as the momentum grows.
In 2016 they struck for the final blitzkrieg, and they expected victory by 2020. How not? They had already written off the only meaningful institutional opposition - the Democratic Party - as weak and divided, and they'd done a most thorough (they thought) job of degrading its effectiveness with negative propaganda. That effort was carefully calculated, nurtured in their own forces and then amplified so intensely that its ripple effects propagated into the broader public perception slowly but certainly.
A combination of two things saved us.
One is their incredibly bad choice of tool, and their misreading of the broader American culture and character. Yes, we have all kinds of fault lines of racism, misogyny, homophobia and other forms of fear to exploit, but we also have a stubbornly oppositional resistance to cooperation with authority that backfired on them more than once.
The other factor is the Democrats' unrecognized, and disregarded, secret superpower. A superpower often written off as a weakness, a deficit, a problem for our Party: The "moral strength" factor. The determination to do something not because it is expedient, or because it will pay back favors, or enrich powerful manipulators, but because it advances equity, compassion, and stronger, more diverse communities.
Disregarded, even despised in an era of Realpolitik, effectively overwritten by the clamoring voices of fear and hatred, this superpower has lain dormant. Democrats willing to deploy it have received very little support and encouragement - sometimes active discouragement - from their colleagues and leadership. But in 2019 it was awakened by the basic decency of Joe Biden, and the success of the Russian blitzkrieg was foiled - perhaps temporarily.
But the true strength of this heroism is now revealed by a people and their leader who stood up to Russia, meeting devastating cruelty and unbridled viciousness with determined strength and as much human compassion as they can apply amid the escalating violence. They are demonstrating that it is possible to engage in all-out combat, and not only maintain the moral high ground, but use it to multiply your strength and effectiveness, build broad support, and strike back with exponential power.
Democrats: Party leaders, elected representatives, committed voters - let us learn from Zelenskyy and the people of Ukraine!
Let us stop denying that we are engaged in a war for the survival of American freedom and self-governance.
Let us stop deluding ourselves that our adversaries are not the knowing, committed enemies of American freedom and self-governance.
Let us not be blinded by the propaganda attempting to hide the Russian hand up their puppet asses.
It is time to fight, to fight with the all-out commitment and determination that Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people have shown to saving, not just their nation, but the moral character of their nation.
They have shown us that true strength is not this:
but this:
https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1501900362785173513
("Ukrainian trying to save disabled dogs from a shelter in Irpin, a city shelled by the Russian Army, and take them to a safer place" )
The GOP is, and has been, the Party of P*, for decades.
It is time for the Democratic Party to become the Party of P*'s Opponents, and we can have no more vivid and powerful model than the people of Ukraine and their leader, Zelenskyy.
If we can learn from them, fight like them, our victory may be costly, but it will be certain. And it will secure the blessings of a strong, diverse, compassionate democracy for our grandchildren's children.
determinedly,
Bright
On Gas Prices
Gas prices have rocketed up. Listen to the howls of anguish.
Some of them legitimately evoke sympathy: The single parent juggling three part-time jobs with a total daily commute of 70 miles and the narrowest margin in their budget between survival and disaster.
Some of them, not so much. (Looking at YOU, sad little men compensating for your unacknowledged low self esteem with your giant internal combustion machines.)
Who's "responsible" for this "disaster"?
Could be P*, another sad little man with unacknowledged self-esteem issues and far too much power to inflict misery on others to compensate.
On the other hand, it could be greedy-ass petroexecs, grifting as hard as they can at every conceivable opportunity, knowing that the party will run out of beer sooner or later.
But you know what this really reminds me of?
(Some of y'all already know that my esteemed spouse and I have a lot of experience in the world of addiction, treatment, and recovery.)
Right now, the "free/Western/industrialized/whatthefuckever" world reminds me of a person with addiction who walked all unknowing into an intervention session.
And they have NO plans to give up The Drug.
They CAN'T.
They NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED it, to manage their (long litany of terrible, important-sounding ISSUES.)
Besides, if they didn't have The Drug, they just couldn't FUNCTION! There's nothing else that will work to keep them going!
Or, at any rate, all the stuff the loving intervening family and experienced intervention professionals are offering is like TOTALLY not even possible to replace The Drug. Would take WAY too much pain and effort to make the change.
CERTAINLY can't afford to do it right NOW. Maybe down the road, yanno?
Yes, okay, The Drug is a problem, in some ways. Yes, okay, maybe the person with addiction would be better off without it.
Yes, maybe SOME people manage without The Drug just fine. But those are not the kind of people the person with addiction is. The person with addiction is DIFFERENT and they NEEEEEEEEEEEED The Drug.
No substitutes acceptable or accepted.
Not now, anyway.
Yes, well, it's possible The Drug might go away altogether someday, and that would be horrible, but THIS IS NOT THAT DAY.
And the person with addiction is gonna go right on doing whatever it takes to get The Drug.
And blaming and shaming everyone and everything that increases the difficulty of successfully getting and using The Drug for their own misery.
Yep, it's exactly like that. I'm-a havin' those flashbacks.
And I know how this ends, eventually. One of two ways, anyhow:
1. Person with addiction gets some kind of help, treatment, support, etc. and gets off The Drug; or
2. Person with addiction eventually dies of some addiction-related consequence.
So there we are.
Shall we go back to figuring out who's to blame for $5 a gallon gas?
Or shall we start investing in our own independence from fossil fuels?
We keep getting offered this choice.
Our track record on making it ain't too great, though.
wearily,
Bright
Open Letter to a Russian Soldier in Ukraine
(Anyone, please feel free to translate into Russian and share.)
Dear Soldier,
I don't know if you're getting many communications from home these days. Your leader is imposing censorship - you know how war is. He says he wants to keep morale up.
That should tell you something. What would you be hearing from home?
Well, never mind. I thought a little more communication from the outside world might be welcome, anyway. I know you're surrounded by people who are calling you "enemy" and doing their best to kill you. I can't imagine how awful that must be, to be so far from home in such hostile surroundings.
Your chain of command, of course, expects you to deal with it. No complaining, suck it up, war is war and you're a soldier, and all like that.
When you complained about the rations running out or being outdated, or about having to billet in a field of mud without adequate shelter, they might even have said you were whiny. Being a baby. Whatever your cultural equivalent of being called a "pussy" is, I suppose.
I know you're not like that, though. You are a soldier, you are tough. You're a patriot. You signed up to defend Russia and protect it, and you've put up with plenty these past couple of weeks.
I just wish your superiors respected you more, valued you more. Leaders who value their troops' lives and service plan carefully and ensure they'll have what they need to do the job. Like the Ukrainian army has been stockpiling fresh, high-quality rations since 2014, knowing they'd probably have to fight. They're pretty well-equipped, and their people are all around them, supporting them and doing what they can to help them repel a hated invader.
That would be you. Disrespected by your leadership, dragged out to a cold field of mud with shitty equipment and inadequate supplies and told to "take the territory."
I think the Generals who defended Russia from the Germans in World War II are rolling in their graves. They would have known that only in the extreme circumstances of having your homes and families overrun by hostile invaders, can you expect people to fight so hard, with so little resources and support. They would never have sent YOU to invade someone else's home, with such crappy logistical support.
And why are you invading someone else's home, anyway?
Not just anyone's - your counsins! Your friends' in-laws. The place your family visited that one year and you liked the people so much, even thought that one pretty girl kind of liked you. Why are you being sent to kill them and take their homes?
They never wanted trouble with you. They don't have nukes, like your leaders do. They didn't start this war.
Of course, you're probably hearing that they DID start the war. That they did all kinds of terrible things. It's called "propaganda" and in any war, both sides use it to convince their fighters that they can win.
But I think you're smarter than your leaders give you credit for. I think you know when you're being lied to. And I think you know who's doing the lying.
And I think there's a better future for you without this war.
"The West", here where I am, doesn't hate you. We don't hate Russia.
We're pretty pissed at Putin right now, though. But not you. Or your family, or your neighbors. We'd be plenty happy to do business with you, exchange visits, be friends even. You're not our enemy, though right now you've been maneuvered into being Ukraine's enemy, and we can't really blame them for trying to kill you. (And they seem to be pretty good at it.)
Think about it. Don't you want a better future than what could turn out to be a drawn-out, brutal, pointless war with more than enough shitty rations, miserable billets, and molotov cocktails being flung from every piece of cover?
You're smart, you're tough, you're a patriot. Do your best for your country. I'll leave you to decide what that is.
God bless you.
sadly,
Bright
It is an old conflict.
Human history is a series of conflicts to define what constitutes and conveys power.
On one side, there is the despot whose power derives from a source other than those under control. Superior force, technology, wealth, etc., embodied in the Rule of Will - that is, the will of the despot. Fundamentally, this is inequity, concentrating the means of power.
On the other side, there is the long, slow struggle to define sources of power shared among members of human groups and delegated upward, embodied in a Rule of Law - defined for all and enforced for all. This is the struggle for equity.
They are not always mutually exclusive. Despots often rely on cabals of other would-be/wanna-be despots and those whose self-interest is served by the despotic power model - this is how monarchies and theocracies evolved. But always, the means of power - wealth, military resources, access to knowledge, etc., are strictly controlled and concentrated in the narrowest possible tranche of beneficiaries.
And groups can derive forms of despotism when they become too exclusive and a fear-based dynamic separates members from a world of threatening outsiders - they may willingly embrace a populist despotism and turn their backs on equity if it seems to threaten inclusion of those designated as outsiders.
Broadly-sprawling upheavals, especially wars and their aftermaths, often create a dynamic favorable to the development of a Rule of Law. The chaos of war, the damage, and resulting temporary structural, economic and social fluidity offer opportunities to codify equity in new ways. The European "Revolutionary Wave" of the mid-19th Century followed the conflagration of the Napoleonic Wars.
These periods of progress are generally followed by a countervailing backlash from the holders of wealth, resources, technology, etc., especially those held over from, or influenced by, ancien regimes, and supported by the still-extant institutions of those regimes. (Institutional religion is usually involved in such backlash.) They focus on degrading the codes that limit individual acquisition of power, and reversing the progress toward equity.
Thus the Gilded Age that closed the 19th Century in an orgy of escalating wealth inequity, the restoration and propping-up of senescent monarchies, and unchecked excesses of capitalism.
It took two World Wars with a major worldwide economic disruption in between them, to re-open the doors to forms of government aligned with equity and wealth distribution. Even then we were left with a substantial block of the world's peoples still under the yoke of despotic systems focused on concentrating power and rejecting equity. And a substantial block of designated "outsiders" still denied the benefits of equity under the aspirational Rule of Law.
And all that time, the backlash has been building in the Rule of Law nations, working as always to undo the codification of equity. Working to cripple the enforcement of laws and regulations created to enable broader distribution of wealth and power. Working to concentrate the means of power - in our society, wealth.
Now we stand again at the beginning of a time of intense, world-wide social upheaval - multiple tidal waves of climate disruption, pandemic, and war are crashing around and against us on all sides.
Let us be prepared, this time, to find the Golden Thread again. To twist it tighter, to weave it closer, to tie it securely to a better and stronger Rule of Law, more compassionate political structures focused on equity, and a more broadly shared security founded on equitable distribution of wealth and other means of power.
The stakes have never been higher. The survival of our own species and millions of others on this life raft in space depend upon it.
somberly,
Bright
Here's an idea for the Oligarchs' mega-yachts...
Seize and impound the lot of them. Then form a joint venture company with Ukraine to remodel them slightly, and run them for 5 years as a luxury cruise line running high-priced cruising tours and generating lots of revenue.
After 5 years, their "luxury" factor and the novelty will wear off a bit and they can be refitted to a less-exalted level of accommodation and service and run as a combination eco-tourism and citizen-science fleet doing research tours and project-based engagement on climate change and mitigation. Maybe another 5-10 years doing that, with the "tourist" end paying the bulk of the expenses.
After that, refit and recommission them as a mercy fleet, with hospital facilities, refugee facilities, environmental action services, disaster response, etc.
Ukraine, if they wish, can have the lead role in coordinating the project, and receive a share of revenue from those first 5 years as some reparations from the oligarchs who supported the P* regime.
Just a thought.
creatively,
Bright
Profile Information
Member since: 2001Number of posts: 20,758
