A. wanting things to be a certain way: taxes, welfare, health, immigration, law, policing,
B. wanting things to be the way that the democratic system decides, even if that conflicts with what you want in A.
It's hard. It's complicated.
Trump and his supporters self-define as the majority. An election showed that the majority didn't support their politics; therefore the election must be rigged. It's a rejection of democracy itself.
Once one party believes it has a right to rule by definition, regardless of what elections might say, everything becomes permitted: voter suppression, partisan control of vote counts, gerrymandered state legislators overturning results.
Star Trek's big-nosed, big-eared money obsessed Ferengi with a numbered list of religious rules they observe, played on screen by Jewish actors. We don't have to look far to find racist Jewish stereotypes in popular fiction.
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace introduced Watto, the fat, greedy slaver with a black hat, big nose and beard, a stereotype so blatant that it caused a minor scandal when the film was released. Not a big enough scandal to change the character, of course.
I guess my point here is that this Harry Potter goblins discourse shouldn't happen in a vacuum just cos it suits other agendas. If we're doing this, let's do this. I suspect @jonstewart would agree.
Dr Vladimir Zelenko was one of the earliest HCQ pushers. Despite being a Hassidic Jew, he's now claiming the vaccines are the New Testament's 'Mark of the Beast'.
It's pretty unusual for an Ultra-Orthodox Jew to promote Christian scripture. But that's what Zelenko did on Charlie Kirk's show a couple of weeks ago, citing Revelation 13:15-17 in support of his claim that the coronavirus vaccines contain secret tracking technology.
He also claimed the vaccine a "poison death shot", said they cause AIDS, that Microsoft has patent 060606 (666, geddit?) to track you in the vaccines... and all that was just in the 6 minutes I could bear to listen to.
1. The Guardian decides to do a 'Who's YOUR person of the year" thingy where they'll print some reader submissions, eg "My person of the year is Britney cos she's free now" or whatever.
2. After a couple of days they stop accepting replies because they have enough for the article.
3. Twitter decides that this was a *competition* with a winner based on user votes, despite it never saying this. They further decided that JK Rowling must have been winning the competition and that the Guardian therefore scrapped it.
First, the obvious: it's a miracle that the Capitol invaders never came face to face with Members of Congress or VP Pence. Only a combination of coincidence, timing, quick thinking (especially by Officer Goodman) and luck prevented a hostage situation or worse.
If a staffer in the Senate Parliamentarian's office hadn't rescued the Electoral Vote envelopes from Senate chamber before it was taken, the invaders would probably have destroyed them, and the Joint Session might not have reconvened that night. today.com/news/woman-pic…
Israel is to ease its quarantine rules for Covid. Vaccinated or recovered people will have to take a PCR test immediately and isolate until a negative result. They're then asked to avoid "crowded places" for leisure and entertainment purposes for 10 days.
Until now, vaxxed people were exempt from exposure isolation... except for from Omicron. But with Omicron now likely the dominant variant, in reality thousands of vaxxed people were in 14 day quarantine (shortened to 7 days with a neg test on day 7).
I am sympathetic to shortening exposure quarantines or replacing them with rapid testing. But Israel's new policy doesn't make much sense. Day 1 is too early to expect a positive PCR from Omicron. And the 'crowded places' rule is unenforceable.
It starts with the Problem of Trump. "This guy looks like a narcissistic moron but he's a billionaire President so he must be a genius 4d chess player". Trump's
MAGA base thought of him as a cool, calm calculating man with a plan who never loses.
Yeah. I know.
Remember covfefe, a not-at-all mysterious typo that hardcore Trumpers said was a secret Arabic message or some other code?