Justice Thomas makes it clear decisions support our rights are next

[fuckholedc]

On 6/25/2022 at 9:03 PM, pervinmt said:

Which is exactly what the red states want. They want to drive away anyone who is different from them, or doesn't agree with their ideals. They are actively trying to divide the US.

And they are right. Let's spilt the US into an actual democracy where everyone has guaranteed civil liberties and let the fascists have their own country.  Then seal the borders to keep the Nazis out.

[fuckholedc]

Also since the Nazis don't want any privacy, actually out all the LGBTQ R's and white supremacists this time.  Any actionable information should be publicized.

Edited July 21, 2022 by fuckholedc

[hntnhole]

1 hour ago, BootmanLA said:

wackadoo Republicans

These idiots would make it illegal to take a shit on Sundays ... just so "Whoever" doesn't have to smell it on "his" day.

[NEDenver]

5 hours ago, hntnhole said:

I agree, he does, that that's rather weak water compared to Cheeto-Head's attitudes. 

I think the reason that some Dems/Progressives in the US are a bit down on Biden, is that he spent 30 years in a Senate that wasn't divided so bitterly along party lines.  Biden strongly believes in the Senate as it used to be, and still thinks things possible years ago are still possible in the radicalized Senate of today.  I also think that the latest kick-in-the-balls by Mr. Manchin of WV, the man who has soaked up 1.5 years of Biden's Presidency with his soft-spoken murmurings about "let's try and see what we can do" - but then slamming the door shut on even the most modest progressive causes over and over and over again, has finally torn the blinders of history off Biden's eyes.  Remember, he became Vice President in 2008, and thus away from the Senate for 14 years, during which time Mr. McConnell of KY has been writhing, snake-like, through the Congressional weeds, plotting and planning his "conservative takeover", so recently foisted upon the US. 

Finally, President Biden is making noises about actions taken by Executive Order, which bypasses Congress.  So, maybe he can start forcing some sorely-needed things through now that the truth has made itself so clear. 

On another note, we send our very best wishes to President Biden for an early and complete recovery from his covid diagnoses.  We, of all folks, should never wish illness on others (however difficult that may be regarding the trumpet of that ridiculous orange pompadour).

Biden’s attitude about the functionality is perplexing.  Maybe he could find someone with a front row seat to the Senate’s dysfunction during the Obama presidency who could explain that the Republicans stopped cooperating in the governance of the nation.  

[hntnhole]

13 hours ago, fuckholedc said:

Let's spilt the US into an actual democracy where everyone has guaranteed civil liberties and let the fascists have their own country.

Really ..... which particular corner of the current USA did you have in mind to waste on them? 

I'd rather the hatemongers get re-programmed, and eventually resume the national life with the rest of us.  Once Cheeto-head is either in the clink or dead, the air in the reactionaries balloon will gradually dissipate, and with proper reforms, we can move forward again.  

[rawTOP]

9 hours ago, hntnhole said:

Really ..... which particular corner of the current USA did you have in mind to waste on them? 

The solution I’ve seen is this… The United States of Canada and then Jesusland (ruled by the American Taliban)…

I feel sorry for New Mexico they’re the blue oasis in Jesusland. Maybe they can join Mexico (but that’s not nearly as good as joining Canada). 

Personally I completely support a national divorce. For a long time now I thought the Civil War was a mistake. We should have just let them go their own way and taken in any slave that managed to get to the Union. 

[hntnhole]

^  I love it.  I wonder if the Canadians would like it all that much though ..... Surely the present nation of Canada wouldn't care to have such a long, exposed border with Jesusland.  And, we already know how much they (don't) know about building a long border wall ...... 

One modification does occur though.  I think USoC should keep Alaska.  That way we can watch Putin's collapse from the roofs of our houses.  But poor old Illinois should really be a part of CreepyLand.  It's only the City of Chicago that's the real bastion of Democratic power; the rest of the state has been reddish for a long time.  It's only the vestiges of the old machine that keep the State Government blue.  

And imagine the saliva running out of Jesusland's mouths, when they realize that California alone possesses an economy far larger than the rest of their entire country.  But, jealousy has always been one of their hallmarks.  

Edited July 22, 2022 by hntnhole
sassier commentary

[EricX]

49 minutes ago, rawTOP said:

I feel sorry for New Mexico they’re the blue oasis in Jesusland. Maybe they can join Mexico (but that’s not nearly as good as joining Canada). 

Colorado is also Blue. Perhaps they can form a mini union of their own. 

[BootmanLA]

The other problem I see with this map (beyond NM and Colorado) is that other areas are also changing. Virginia is shifting purple-blue (they have a Republican governor but the problem there is a bar on re-election to consecutive terms). Arizona and Georgia are also trending in that direction - perhaps not irrevocably, but both states have two elected Democratic US Senators, showing Democrats CAN win statewide in each state. 

The bigger issue, however, is setting a precedent that if enough wackadoo right-wingers take over a state's government, they can pull out of the Union. IF we had a "Dumbfuckistan" like the red areas of the map here, you can bet they'd write a Constitution without protections for the right to vote AT ALL, so that they could maneuver themselves into permanent power, such that even if a lot of liberals somehow settled in a red state, they'd never be able to vote out the nuts and rejoin America.

BUT - having established that you can LEAVE the U.S. (the blue parts), Dumbfuckistan would be pushing people into the remaining blue states trying to flip them red, and then they'd argue that they have a right to leave, too, because Dumbfuckistan seceded and we let it go. That doesn't mean there would be reciprocity, since Dumbfuckistan would have weighted the vote in favor of straight white male Christians, so the U.S. would be under constant siege as they tried to take state after state. They might succeed with Michigan or Pennsylvania.

Tempting and amusing as it is, this would be a disaster for the country as a whole.

[ErosWired]

7 minutes ago, rawTOP said:

Personally I completely support a national divorce.

United we stand. Divided we fall.

That solution assumes a considerably greater homogeneity of thought - a purer redness of red - than exists in all the red states, and forecloses on the possibility of change. Yet the national view on same-sex marriage, just for example, has evolved from broad rejection to broad acceptance in a single generation. What would such a partition mean for the millions of people who don’t fit the new unfettered Red Rule? Are you so sanguine about consigning them to a fate of cruelty, repression, and deprivation of basic rights? Is your solution a mass exodus on a scale unprecedented in the Western Hemisphere? (Note: a whacking great chunk of all that Canadian real estate is essentially uninhabitable.)

The notion of a “United States of Canada”, by the way, presumes that Canada would ever be willing to accept Americans under a joint flag - which I much doubt, and who could blame them?

No. The idea is nonsense.

A great deal is made about slavery being the reason for the American Civil War, but it was only one of the rights the states accused the federal government of stripping away. It was a question of whether states could essentially make their own rules and still reap the benefit of a federal union without sharing in its unified commitments and principles - which of course no state can. It’s no wonder that Texas behaves now in the radical and rebellious way it does; you can’t spend ten minutes in Texas without someone reminding you that Texas was once an independent republic, and they never stop muttering about seceding again - indeed, they were the last Confederate state to rejoin the Union.* I lived in Dallas for four years; it becomes tiresome.

What we are witnessing right now is nothing less than a resurgence of the States Rights doctrine, and it is no more valid now than it was in 1861. Neither is secession. We will achieve nothing by Balkanizing the North American continent except our mutual downfall.

 

*Georgia rejoined the Union before Texas, but had to do it again afterward because some representatives were unseated.

 

[cumslutfuckpig]

I think we can make a case for a partitioned CO, NV, and that gets us NM. AZ?  We just shut off the water and things will e care of themselves.  IA and VA are worth keeping. DE should go.  ME had better behave.  As for Canada … way less cohesive than we are, just more tolerant.  If partitioning starts, expect the Bloc Québécois to seize the opportunity and watch Ontario try to strip the Hydro Quebec lands in the north off 

[ErosWired]

6 hours ago, rawTOP said:

We should have just let them go their own way

This statement continues to trouble me.

This is America. There is no “them”. There is only “We”.

We the People do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

A rock’s throw from my house is a cemetery wherein lie the graves of Civil War soldiers from my family. Some are Confederate graves. Some are Union. The stones all bear the same last name.

I am a Kentuckian. I can walk up to a Californian, a Mississippian, a North Dakotan, a New Yorker, and feel that I am among my countrymen, not that I am surrounded by foreigners.

What “they” are you referring to who are not a part of us? And if we are not a part of them, what gives us the right to claim the Constitution over their native claim? It’s the same birthright.

Anyone espousing a dissolution of the Union cannot stand on the backs of the founding fathers to make their case; the case would be anathema to the founders. They cannot pretend to be of a kindred spirit with Lincoln, for whom the Union was paramount. And if they stand opposite the founders, if they stand opposite to Lincoln’s principle, can they claim their principles are fundamentally American principles? They cannot.

Set aside this profitless talk of division. Set aside this false labeling of our own countrymen as other to us. We are one people. That we disagree on some things does not mean we disagree on all, or even on the ones that ultimately define us. Set aside this talk of “them”, and when you speak of “we”, include us all.

[Guest]

11 hours ago, rawTOP said:

The solution I’ve seen is this… The United States of Canada and then Jesusland (ruled by the American Taliban)…

I feel sorry for New Mexico they’re the blue oasis in Jesusland. Maybe they can join Mexico (but that’s not nearly as good as joining Canada). 

Personally I completely support a national divorce. For a long time now I thought the Civil War was a mistake. We should have just let them go their own way and taken in any slave that managed to get to the Union. 

Besides other's more wise input, including about the feelings of CanadiansI in this matter, I would be cynical that this solution would achieve any kind of 'Peace in Our Time'.

Totalitarian and extremist regimes have always thought their way is the best for everyone else in the world and for every part of it. They have never stopped at any border, not even when first committing to establishing these borders themselves as in the Munich Agreement of 1938 by Nazi Germany.

Another example of the false security that borders give is of course 9/11 as you as Americans and New Yorkers on BZ know much better than anyone.

The situation in the Balkans and the Israeli - Palestine conflict is more proof that this kind of thinking is a dead-end.

To me this kind of direction indicates a defeatist attitude, a giving up on the idea of human progress itself.

 

I firmly believe that to stop the extremists in every part of the world our direction should be the ideas that were laid down under the guidance of the GREAT Eleanor Roosevelt in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 as the best and only way out of this.

That would need working towards all the countries in the world REALLY implementing them, including the Arab/Muslim world, African nations, the Russian Federation and indeed your United States of America too and - knowing this is something that a lot and perhaps a majority of Americans are not in favour of - submitting to a higher authority in these matters of Human Rights with the power to overturn rulings of even national supreme courts.

That's not being in favour of a world-government, but it is taking serious that all of our actions are limited by the rights of other's and that Human Rights should be inviolable. And accepting the consequences of that conviction.
Even - and perhaps most - those actions and laws, that are claimed to be founded on the belief in one (or more) mythological supernatural being when they - too - trespass on the Rights of others.

 

Too achieve this we need non-violence because that in itself violates one of our most basic Human Rights: the Right to Life.
That we needed wars in the past to change things for the better, does not mean we can achieve this now and in the future in a better way.

 

🕊️

 

Edited July 23, 2022 by Guest

[hntnhole]

16 hours ago, ErosWired said:

A great deal is made about slavery being the reason for the American Civil War

Allow me to disagree:  That conflict was essentially an economic one.  The agrarian-based economy of the Southern States found itself in a stand-off with the industrialized North.  While the economic power of the South - based, of course, on the utter depravity of enslaving other human beings for the economic benefit of the Plantocracy - began to fade, and the Northern States became increasingly Industrialized and more and more powerful, an inevitable reckoning would have to come.  This was increasingly apparent from around the mid-to-late1840's, simmering ever hotter, until the conflagration finally erupted.  

The filth of enslaving other human beings, and basing the plantocracy on that fact, only provided the hook upon which to begin the secessionist movement.  It is interesting to note that human behavior doesn't sink deeply into the pit of hellish behavior until one group has the chance to unseat another more powerful group.  That instinct, I suppose, is the common curse of humankind, since it occurs constantly throughout human history.  It's easy to appear genteel when we're squatting on top of the heap; less-so when we begin to slip off the apex. 

So, no.  Slavery was not the principal issue.  Fading economic power on one side, and burgeoning economic power on the other was the cause.  Some historians believe that the South never had a ghost of a chance, considering the weight of the economic engine of the North.  Even outstanding military talent couldn't win it for the South; the Shenandoah Campaign lasted from the beginning of that war to the very end of it. The sheer crushing industrial might of the North is what won, and in doing so, brought an end to the outrage of American slavery. 

[ErosWired]

3 hours ago, hntnhole said:

Fading economic power on one side, and burgeoning economic power on the other was the cause.

With respect, you fall into the same category as all others who claim “the” cause of the Civil War. The arguments made in defense of single causes continue to cause division, and to my mind are simply an extension of the hardheaded lack of mutual listening that prompted the damn thing in the first place. The causes were several, as diverse as the reasons that individual Americans took up arms to fight in it. For many Confederates, my family among them, their decision to pick up arms had nothing to do with the balance of economic power, nor with the disposition of slaves - they were poor dirt farmers who had no economic power, owned no slaves and were more likely to work in fields alongside them, and chose to put down their grubbing hoes and pick up rifles only when they found themselves invaded by armies that started shooting them and eating everything in sight. A captured Confederate was famously once asked by his Union captors, “Why are you fighting?” To which he replied, “Because you’re down here.”

If you must have a single, core cause of the American Civil War, the one thing that ultimately made a fratricidal war possible in this nation, then here it is: Americans decided there was an “Us” and a Them”. That was the weakness in the society. Had that not been so, I submit to you that there would have been no shot fired at Fort Sumter.