monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

As you've so often demonstrated.

How members of congress perform relative to Trump's victory is kind of important when it comes to winning congressional elections.


And yet it's not so hard. Losing by a slim margin in a state Trump won in a landslide is a good thing -- not because moral victories are worth a damn, but because they bode well for results in states Trump won narrowly. Not rocket science.

The Fox News reporters in the room described it, as you obviously know, by saying that "Gianforte grabbed Jacobs by the neck with both hands and slammed him into the ground behind him".

So Jacobs called it "body slamming", the Fox reporters called it"grabbed by the neck and slammed into the ground". You want to argue that "choked" is nevertheless a totally unwarranted description, go ahead, be weaselly.

I've already addressed it. The Fox news reporter, Acunia , originally said that completely retracted it. Try to keep up, eh?

I'm gonna have to agree with you here...but it probably felt sooooo good to slap that little asshole that he just couldn't resist.

Of course. But it is almost completely unhelpful to merely state that there is a political divide, particularly in a nation which has only two competing parties. It's a formulation (like "all politicians lie") which leaves no allowance for changes over time, abnormal periods or for assymetries.

Two guys get in a fight at a bar. Does it follow that both are equally responsible for that fight?

But I've never described the Democratic Party in that manner.

Well, that's good news to hear, then.

But "bad news" insofar as the exposure of incompetent limey authorities is concerned. If I was a limey, I would really be pissed off. They were investigating a reporter there for criminal "hate speech, when she was insisting that more action was called for.

Maybe their laissez faire approach will get more attention now.

Well, OK, Finn. He obviously lost his temper, but the whole incident ended within a second or two, with no real injuries.

According to Gianforte's account, he tried to grab the recorder (phone) and they both fell to the floor when Jacobs grappled with him.

An extremely minor, everyday event, in my view, not justifying calling him a thug and treating it like a federal case. I'm not one to get all outraged if a guy does something he has the legal right to do, "stupid" or not.

But, as I've tried to make clear, my concerns really have little to do with this particular, minor issue, per se. It is the general "guilt by accusation" tendency, the "I have rights, you don't," and the "law is what I want it to be" aspects that really bother me. I see that kinda lame-ass **** far too often around this here joint.

And, on top of that, you have the MSM actually saying that's it's all Trump's "doing." Ridiculous.

An example of the cheese-eating "I have rights, you don't" school of law is the case where the City of Philadelphia was ordered to pay the Boy Scouts of America over a million dollars in damages for violating their constitutional rights.

In that case an overwhelmingly homosexual city council passed some "anti-discrimination laws." These laws, they said, made it mandatory for the Boy Scouts to accept homosexuals in their organization, to take them camping, sleeping in tents with normal boys, etc.

It never occurred to them (well, actually it did, but they ignored it) that the citizens of this country have the right of "free association," and the right to choose the companions they want to associate with, whether any homosexual approves of their associates or not.

The only "rights" the homosexuals "saw" was their supposed "right" to deprive citizens of their inherent rights.

Siiiigggghhhhhhhhhhhh

Big surprise here, eh?:

But I'm not trying to be helpful. I've opined more than once in this forum that I don't have much hope at all for bridging the divide and that it is going to get worse not better.

I've noticed that further on you've denied ever stating the opinion which I obviously exaggerated to make a point. Of course you've never expressed such a specifically dramatic opinion, but here you are referring to asymmetry and one party being more responsible than the other and I suspect that if you do believe that there is hope for bridging the divide you believe it will require far more change from the right than the left.

Again, even you are not about to claim that the left is entirely flawless as respects the state of political tribalism in America, but the theme of your ongoing narrative has always been and always will be that the right is the source of what ails the US and while the left may need to tweak things around the edges, it's the utterly corrupt right that requires a major overhaul. Your coyness is unconvincing.

Well that's got itpretty much ass-backwards, as Layman tends to do. The Boy Scouts, reacting to massive protests from Scout leaders, Scouts, and outraged parents, essentially abandoned their anti-gay positions. As a straight ex-Scout, I say right on, about damned tune,

What is "ass-backwards, eh, Jack? What is "it?"

y0ur post,

And that's exactly what their constitutional right of association allows them to do, whether some homophobe approves, or not.

As is often the case, Jack, your fanatical devotion to ideology seems to prevent you from even understanding the point being discussed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-40073951

That's a common theme on this board.

I think that you are correct when you say that Pres. Trump is symptomatic of our emerging tribal divide, but I think the coarsening of our political culture can be seen to have occurred without blaming one side or the other. As any student of U.S. political history knows, the Jefferson vs. Adams campaign was pretty ugly and similar partisan squabbles have been seen ever since, each side outfitted with its own "independent press" and proclaiming its own "alternative facts".

Sure you would! I think most conservatives see the '60s as the beginning of the breakdown, but it didn't start with Mario Savio. The "Free Speech Movement" was a response to heavy-handed restrictions on freedom of expression on college campuses. It reflected the reaction of educated people to the stultifying paternalism of the time, influenced by the writings of the Beats and Britain's "Angry Young Men". The Establishment had grown self-satisfied and stale.

Other conservatives might point to the use of mind-altering drugs. But the quest for psychedelic enlightenment and euphoria was a response to the stultifying rigidity of post war culture — "Father Knows Best", Madison Avenue, and McCarthyism — a shallow world of forced smiles, inane commercial jingles, and simplistic political fairy tales about "Good and Evil". (We were the "Good" of course.)

"Black power" and opposition to the war also played a part, but again, the fact that people felt that they were responding to racial segregation or a war perceived as an outcome of imperialism, situations which were seen as violations of our nation's true purpose, makes me wonder if there were really any alternatives to the militant rhetoric, demonstrations, and protest marches. In any case, the culture war between the hippies and the hard hats seemed to fade over the next decade. I remember my surprise after returning from Vietnam and seeing that even street hoodlums were wearing the hair long and sporting bell bottoms.

The next big event was the rise of political evangelicalism — itself a response to the emergence of feminism, environmentalism, and the concept of homosexual rights. The big difference here was that the Democrats no longer controlled the South and the "Moral Majority" had regional political clout. The free market Republican Party, longing to increase its membership beyond the country club set, began to recognize that it could cobble together a large chunk of voters based on opposition to abortion, opposition to "affirmative action", and basic opposition to "the government". This gave the Republicans a solid majority at the polls for the first time since FDR. No way they were going to interfere with this winning formula. Rural white culture, once relegated to the sidelines of the GOP as urban black culture is within the Democratic base, became the preeminent force as the old coalition of bankers, WASPs, and businessmen began to split up.

These political twists and turns naturally unfold over time as groups form and coalesce around particular issues that emerge from material conditions. There have always been forces in ascension and forces in decline and opportunistic politicians have always found ways to attach the rising and fading of social causes and conditions to their favored political narrative. So what makes it seem worse now than ever before? I see a few factors, starting with an indirect one, the global population explosion which has caused increased competition for resources and markets. Economic growth is seen as the exclusive engine of social progress and this makes environmentalism a danger to the bottom line in the short run even as environmental decline is a bigger danger to all of us in the long term. But economics is king; there is no competing model to challenge the pursuit of profit as the solution to poverty.

The biggest single cause of rampant tribalism is the revolution in electronic communication. Every technique developed by marketers to identify customers and develop ad campaigns tailored to specific concerns has been appropriated by political technicians who pander to specific constituencies. Computer analyses are used for everything from framing potential issues with particular words and phrases to actually shaping electoral districts to achieve certain political ends. The electoral base, like the consumer base, has been divided up into competing interests and popular culture falls in line, with specific media companies formed to sell political products to sectors of the population. Social media now allows each person to be courted and cajoled by algorithmically driven marketing:

NYRB
One can only expect this sort of thing to be refined and continued.

I don't know of a solution to tribalism either, Finn. We may differ in that I am more willing to consider that perhaps there is no solution. Humanity started off on its course with an idealized eventual destination of improved life in a better place. Overcoming many obstacles and negotiating narrow passageways we believed ourselves to be approaching our goal, slowly but steadily. During the past few generations many of us believed the goal was almost within our grasp. Hunger, disease, and war would be banished along with sectarian ignorance.

A small hunting party might discover that a once promising trail leads to a precipice and the sought-after goal is revealed on a distant peak — they have no choice but to turn around and take a different branch of the trail. But we can't turn back. Our little hunting party has turned into a huge undisciplined fractious mob and we can no longer negotiate a return along the narrow footpaths which led us to where we are. Our vision of a rosy future was based on temporary conditions which have since been eclipsed by the accumulation of mental and material waste products. We're victims of our own mindless pursuit of excess.