“Trump said it, so it must be a lie!”
That’s really not a terrible axiom. Oh, it’s not 100% accurate, but most of what he’s said over the years has ranged from mild exaggeration to only true in certain circumstances all the way up to a bald-faced whopper. He repeats the lie often and loudly, and some will come to believe him — and others automatically disbelieve.
Herein, however, comes a problem: Sometimes, people end up disbelieving what he says even though there’s some truth to it.
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It’s a year since the Dobbs decision, and, at the moment when pregnancy charities anticipate a spike in demand for their services, donations have collapsed.
Leaving morality entirely to one side, let’s examine cold hard fact. The average price tag for an abortion is $1500; the cost of giving birth ranges between $12-25,000, not counting the $10,600 per year that a child costs to raise. And nobody is stepping up to pay it.
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Consider the following:
– People have the right to identify themselves as they see fit.
– Mislabeling groups of people is an effort to dehumanize them.
– Dehumanization is the first step toward legitimizing pogroms.
– Mass vilification is the second step.
– Ya know who mislabeled people in order to vilify and eliminate them? Nazis.
– Therefore, anyone who misapplies the label “Fascist” to their political enemies is a literal Nazi.
That last step is of course a logical fallacy; it’s employed here deliberately in order to illustrate that calling people fascists merely because one dislikes them is in point of fact the identical fallacy. Even if one applies it to only those with an authoritarian bent is dangerously inaccurate; Stalin and Mao were both absolute rulers, and each was about as far away from fascist as it’s possible to be and still lead a cult of personality.
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Happy Indictment Day!
Only not.
Sure, “Teflon Don” got marched into court, had to get fingerprinted, and is facing full public disclosure of his hush money payments. It’s embarrassing. On the other hand, nothing he’s accused of has ever garnered more than a fine, not in any case I’ve ever seen. (NOTE: I’m not a lawyer.) The action itself — paying hush money — wasn’t illegal, or even immoral, and every campaign after Eisenhower has had a damage control unit.
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The fundamentalist fringe of the Republican party believes they’ve won a major victory now that Roe’s been struck down. They’re wrong, but we’ll save that for later.
An awful lot of Republican voters celebrated this weekend, even as protesters flooded the streets in cities across the nation. Republican party insiders know better. They’re counting the marchers and examining the present demographics of Texas and Georgia, and they’re slowly coming to the realization that they may well have just lost the mid-term elections by a landslide. Democrats haven’t been this unified since before Obama.
(more…)We’ve achieved corporate feudalism in our lifetimes. Congratulations.
You must have wanted it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have bought it. Now that your votes don’t matter but money does, we vote with our dollars, and what we buy rules the world. That’s why our hamburgers are extruded and why they sugar the buns at McDonald’s.
Did you know there was a time when you could get an actually good-tasting burger at McDonald’s? It had real meat and everything. Brilliant (more…)
It’s here.
Tuesday’s vote will decide who stays in the race and who goes home. It may decide who comes out of July’s convention as the final candidate. In that sense, it’s quite possible it may determine our next president. I cannot overstate the importance of this primary event.
On the other hand, common wisdom has it that, as always, The Fix Is In. There’s (more…)
One could write volumes about Donald Trump the celebrity, the business mogul, the particularly slimy real estate developer, and so on. I’m giving that a miss. As a public person I find him odious and in business I’d resort to extreme measures to avoid him (I haven’t ruled out self-defenestration). Beyond saying that, it’s entirely immaterial for our purposes. Our subject is Donald Trump as president: the pros and cons of his tenure, his chance at escaping unscathed from impeachment to run again, and his likelihood of winning in 2020 based on the issues. That should be enough for one article.
(What: You didn’t honestly think I would give him a pass just because he’s the Evil One, did you?) (more…)
“This meme shows what evil bastards Republicans are.” [LIKE] [SHARE]
It’s this sort of attitude that’s what’s wrong with America today. It’s horribly counterproductive. Your meme will never convince the unconvinced; all it does is make the Democrat feel smug without compelling them to do anything whatsoever.
I’m sure you’ll understand if I don’t (more…)
It’s been a month now since I first posted my “Dispassionate Look At A Border Wall”, with the intent to provoke reasonable discussion on the issue. Because this, like most issues, is not a simple one, I’ve also written a short series on things that we need to do either before, alongside, or even instead of such a wall. These explain why it’s in the national interest of the United States to support the Mexican economy as well as compelling practical reasons to increase legal immigration.
In this article, I intend to demonstrate the absolute necessity of a new, modern, and effective approach to the War On Drugs in order to address the intolerable conditions along our southern border. (more…)
The Not Fake News 
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