September 28, 2023

Two Parent Families ARE Better For Kids. . .

. . . But Right-Wing policies which lionize "traditional family values" don't help to create the stable homes that they claim to support.

[T]he problem isn’t a cultural rejection of marriage, or a nationwide feminist rejection of the nuclear family (I wish). Most people want to get married. The problem is that decades of largely conservative policy-making have fueled inequality, gutted the working class, left a generation of men isolated and under-employed and unmoored, impoverished families and made it harder for women to both control their own fertility and find suitable partners.

September 11, 2023

Woke up this morning to a little news alert on my phone.

Swiped the little icon to read, "White House offers shameless lie." I did NOT tap on the headline to open up that particular click bait. I did, however, ask myself, Which White House?

September 3, 2023

"You're Not Equal"

Posting the link to this article--which features a link to video content--here in this thread because I'm not techno-saavy enough to present the contents any other way.

There are over 4500 comments to this story and, of course, many of them are racist*. I didn't even watch the video content because I don't want the ugly images and words stamped on my brain. Just reading the story and many of the comments are so discouraging that I want a giant meteor to destroy the planet.

Okay, so I can be melodramatic. I need to remind myself that Black people face this kind of crap all the time and the number of them who want that meteor to swing by is probably on par with the statisical average of other ethnic groups, right? Seriously, at times like this, I try to remind myself of what Anne Frank wrote in her diary. She was in the midst of one of the worst "discriminatory episodes", (if you can call it that) in human history and she still believed in the basic goodness of humankind.

I tell myself that if someone in those circumstances can still hold onto hope, then I have no right to give up. All I can do is examine my own ideas and thinking process, treat people with decency and kindness and vote responsibily. Also, I come here to DU to remember that I am not alone is seeing through and condemning prejudice and discrimination of all kinds.

Apologies if this is a duplicate.



* They are also sort of stupid, but that just drags us into a chicken and egg philosophical rabbit hole, doesn't it?

September 2, 2023

Carlson, Heritage, Russia: Follow the money

Another offering from OnlySky:

This point here, is a clear indication that the American Right Wing doesn't respect traditional American values.

In 2022, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC, the annual political conference attended by American conservative activists and elected officials) took the rather bizarre and unexpected decision to set up shop, not in Pennsylvania or Texas, Ohio or North Carolina, but in Budapest, Hungary. This was bizarre for some fairly obvious reasons, meaning that “leading American conservatives who are supposedly deeply committed to the ideals of personal liberty, limited government, free markets, human dignity, and the like will be joining forces behind one of the most authoritarian and antisemitic heads of state in the world. “

The article's author zeroes in on the Heritage Foundation and its connection with Tucker Carlson.

If Heritage Foundation is directly funded by these Hungarian organizations, then the link from the dictator Putin, through fascistic autocrat Viktor Orban, to American politics is evident. But even without direct funding (something that might be hard to cast light upon), then the insidious influence is actually clearly there for the world to see anyway, moving from Russia through Hungary, and on via Heritage to CPAC and Tucker Carlson, and then onto the American public via Fox News and Elon Musk’s X.

There is a lot to unpack in this article, and it makes me more curious about Carlson's dismissal from Fox. Fox's viewership may have a different perspective about what makes for the American Ideal, but they are still very committed to the idea of American sovereignty. Was Tucker a little too close to selling us out in an overt act of treason?

(Oh, and if that seems like a leading question full of spurious speculation, please remember that no one deserves to be subjected to such bullshit as much as Tucker, "We're just asking", Carlson. )