Yes. All my life I thought the reasons fascists et al were bad was because of what they did... smashing businesses, burning books, destroying art, beating people, killing people...

Apparently it wasn't WHAT they did that was bad, it was just WHO they did it to.

Sorry to have lost the tweet from Drezner, but the sentiment was: Democrats have not named even one realm of authority in the presidency which ought to be withdrawn now that the office is held by the opposing party.

People want presidents to be powerful. I don't know why.

Ah, found it. I screwed up the context, though we still haven't heard anyone ask Drezner's question.

"People want presidents to be powerful. I don't know why."

Well, of course not. As insightful as you aspire to be, your own glorious lighting obscures some of the darkness as it blurs many things.

Everyone is a "Karen" to some degree. We only talk about the President, only show up for the Presidential election, because we are too important OMG!!11!! to deal with any of those lesser people in office. We want the President to solve EVERY problem, BANG! DONE!.

I presume you've heard of the many who thought they didn't have to pay for anything when Obama was elected.
But if you're wanting whoever is President to solve problems in your life, you're gonna have a bad time.

> As insightful as you aspire to
> be, your own glorious lighting
> obscures some of the darkness
> as it blurs many things.

That would be offensive if it were coherent.

Crid, if Rad were talking about certain electric lights instead of about you, it would make more sense.

That is, I've seen electric lights that were so glaring (and/or badly positioned) that they caused more problems than they solved, so it was difficult to concentrate on what I wanted to look at. There's a similar situation on any cloudless day, in the late afternoon, when the sun keeps getting in your eyes.
_________________________________________

But if you're wanting whoever is President to solve problems in your life, you're gonna have a bad time.
__________________________________________

That reminds me of the late Sheri S. Tepper, novelist and executive for Planned Parenthood. She wrote a pamphlet in 1978 for young heterosexual women on how to be taken seriously in general. It talks a lot about financial independence.

The rules in the pamphlet are:

1. "Don't expect anyone to MAKE you happy." (Note how THAT's rule number one!)

2. "Make up your mind about sex."

3. "Get paid what you're worth."

4. "Consider yourself first." (Subdivided into "Make your own plans." "Do things for yourself." "Keep your own bank account." "Work out agreements.")

5. "Don't try to play it both ways." ("Don't play poor little me." "Don't mistake courtesy for patronage." "Don't fall into the rhetoric trap." "Don't let them get away with it." "Don't allow stereotypes to continue." "Don't cheat." [That is, don't get pregnant 'accidentally.'] "Don't blow it by bad management." [Financial management.])

6. "Don't expect it to be easy." ("Be patient." "Don't be afraid of feelings." "Don't use feelings as a weapon.")

7. "Take care of yourself." (Your health, in particular.)

> it would make more sense.

"lighting obscures some of the darkness as it blurs"?

> executive for Planned Parenthood.
> She wrote a pamphlet

The Bee had a great one the other day.

Mildly amusing.

Maybe I missed something, but aside from the removing of statues and the changing of names, I haven't heard of any powerful organizations - or mobs - demanding that any really large institutions, such as colleges, actually go out of business because of who their founders were. Takes Bob Jones "University," for one, where George W. Bush kicked off his 2000 campaign.

In other words, when a huge number of people feel they really, really need what a certain business or institution provides, they're not about to boycott it or shut it down - or allow others to shut it down. (Firing individuals like Amy Cooper is another matter.)

And, of course, when you leave aside those grief-stricken women who got abortions only for severe medical reasons, women who have abortions didn't want to get pregnant in the first place. Regardless of their color.

> Mildly amusing.

Can't quite hear your chuckle.

> Regardless of their color.

Is there a racial disproportion in abortion?

There may well be, but even adults can't always get their hands on reliable birth control. Especially when they're poor and living in despair. Plus, poor teens are more likely to be careless about birth control than affluent teens, whether they hoped to get pregnant or not. (And I don't know just how often sex ed teachers make it clear that even the Pill needs a back-up, since it's not foolproof. That back-up could be expensive.)

On top of that, while a teen can certainly be bullied by a boyfriend into getting an abortion, that would mean the boyfriend would have to help pay for it, which he may not be willing to do. Parents might try to do that too, but they're in for a shock when they find out that no parent can legally force a daughter into having an abortion - and since very few girls or women choose adoption these days, the girl knows she's got her parents trapped into providing child support, if that's what she really wants.

Not to mention that about 60% of women who have abortions already have children and want them to have real opportunities in life. (Which might help to explain why white supremacists are said to be anti-abortion. Better to have more poor white babies than more affluent black families. Something like that.)

> Better to have more poor white
> babies than more affluent black
> families.

Not tracking here. Whites are diminishing black wealth through reducing black abortions?

In my experience, adults are sensational at getting their hands on reliable birth control.

Is there a racial disproportion in abortion?

Apparently: black women account for 40% of abortions according to this:

https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/state-indicator/abortions-by-race/?currentTimeframe=0&selectedDistributions=black&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D

But I see that NYState's and a couple other states numbers weren't reported. I've heard that in NYC, there are more black babies aborted than live births.

Non-Hispanic black women continue to be disproportionately impacted by abortion. In 2016, as in previous years, more African American babies were aborted than were born alive in New York City.

https://lozierinstitute.org/abortion-reporting-new-york-city-2016/

> black women account for 40%
> of abortions

Riiiight, which is why PP's heritage deserves our clearest consideration.

(The illustration of the Babylon Bee tweet really sells the joke.)

You make it sound as though black women trust the advice of strangers (often, white strangers) over the advice of their family and friends. Riiiight. The only reason they might do that is if they don't WANT to hear the opinions of their family and friends. Why would they do that, unless they've already made up their minds and don't want to be swayed? It's not as though anyone is unaware that welfare exists. Or as if black people all think alike when it comes to abortion.
____________________________________

In my experience, adults are sensational at getting their hands on reliable birth control.
____________________________________

From Katha Pollitt:

"Here are some reasons why women I know became pregnant: because her IUD came out one morning; because her husband failed - once, in 13 years! - to put on his condom in time; because she and her live-in trusted to the calendar and had a diaphragmless tryst on the beach; because she thought breast-feeding prevented ovulation and, anyway, she'd given birth just six weeks before. Stupid, trivial reasons, the same sort of reasons you might give for missing a train. (I'm sorry, you apologize later, I misread the schedule, I couldn't find a taxi, the meeting ran late.)

"Most of the time, people catch their trains, and most of the time, adult, middle-class, sensible women take care of birth control, and birth control takes care of them. (I'm not talking about teen-agers or the poor or the helpless here.) But a woman has about 30 years of potentially fertile sex - that's a long time to go without a slip-up. That's one reason why more than half the pregnancies in this country are accidents, and why, if you follow 100 women over their reproductive lives, 46 of them will have had an abortion by menopause, and many will have had more than one."

Also:

"...you don't find many 15-year-olds dropping out of the Dalton School to have babies. Girls with bright futures--college, jobs, travel--have abortions. It's the ones who have nothing to postpone who become mothers."
________________________________

Which brings me to your question. Yes, women DO use birth control - and abortion - to help themselves and their families to get into the middle class and stay there, as I already explained. So making both birth control and abortion difficult for black people to access is one way to keep them down. (White supremacists, even women, are also not too likely to oppose the general idea of "keep 'em barefoot and pregnant," even for white women, if only out of jealousy of younger generations.)

And, haven't we all heard that politicians often prefer voters who stay poor and are thus easy to control? Making such services hard to get is obviously a way to do that.

And, even adults don't always understand that one always has to use two contraceptives, unless they're TOLD that, over and over. (How many doctors, in the 1960s, bothered to tell that to married women on the Pill? Not that many, I'll bet - they probably arrogantly thought "oh, EVERY married woman wants a baby anyway, so what does it matter if she has one earlier than she wanted to?")

Finally, as a teen, I read the following: "Four out of five teenage girls who have unprotected sex over a year will find themselves pregnant. Four out of five. That doesn't leave you much leeway." But, as a teen, I remember thinking "a lot of teens would read that and think 'you mean I have a one-in-five chance of winning the lottery? Yippee! I'll take that chance!' "

> You make it sound as though
> black women trust the advice
> of strangers (often, white
> strangers) over the advice
> of their family and friends.

Who said anything about advice? Is that in one of the links?

It's just that a lot of the time, when people bring up Margaret Sanger, eugenics, and the number of recent abortions among black women, the accusation turns out to be that those women are being manipulated into choosing abortion. If that were true, we'd be hearing far more stories of black women regretting their abortions, right?

Of course, there aren't many women who regret having an abortion anyway, because 1) such women typically manage to decide not to have one, beforehand, and 2) if there were many, the anti-abortion forces would make them the leaders of their forces at every opportunity. You think they'd pass up a chance to put as many black women at the forefront as possible?

I would ask you to slow down.

> You think they'd pass up a
> chance to put as many black
> women at the forefront as
> possible?

Huh?

You've climbed high up into this mighty oak of a decision tree with all these delicate branches… But I didn't say any of those things. Certainly none 'a lot of the time.'

re: Their perceptions and if we can call them that, principles, are more along the lines of "autonomy for me, but not for thee,"

Millennials think of political affiliations as though they're astrological signs. They tend to perceive them as 'types' of people and focus on what personality traits they believe are associated with those types. You can see this if you observe their political discussions online.

They tend to fixate on someone's motives and what they intend or 'really mean' by endorsing some cause or position. Similarly positions are criticized by spinning some narrative around how it will make people feel and/or make bad people do. It's carried out as though everyone's in an intimate personal relationship with the entire society, or more accurately a fictional society as imagined by the people involved.

I suspect this is what lends to all the cancelling and over the top claims of harm.

> Millennials think of political
> affiliations as though they're
> astrological signs.

That's a great line. May I have it? Just for indoor stuff, light-cocktail-party duty.

…Because a lot of today's woke rhetoric has the same feel as an invitation to Zodiac chatter at a college mixer in the 1970s.

> They tend to fixate on someone's
> motives and what they intend or
> 'really mean' by endorsing some
> cause or position.

You should comment here more often.

“Millennials think of political affiliations as though they're astrological signs. They tend to perceive them as 'types' of people and focus on what personality traits they believe are associated with those types. You can see this if you observe their political discussions online.”

Lazy thinking. A cliff notes version of categorizing people into us and others, and as old as the hills.

Generally used by those with massive cases of projection about what must be behind other’s beliefs and principles.

You see it a lot from Artie, and JD. Binary outlook.

Nobody sane could possibly prefer Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton, simple choice, yada, yada.

I have a boomer friend whose new religion, replacing traditional Catholicism, was a warped environmentalism focused primarily on recycling, global warming, and banning plastic bags.
Or at least that was where she was two years ago.

However she has a hefty dose of germophobia mixed in with her world view. I gotta wonder where she is at now psychologically with this Covid thing.

Hi Crid! In Indiana for the weekend. Thinking about you.

It is a bit more than that Isab.

"They tend to fixate on someone's motives and what they intend or 'really mean' by endorsing some cause or position." ~Norah

That is key for my generation. After 12+ years of institutionalized lying you don't take anyone's words at face value. Everyone is lying all the time. So the technique is to take all their lies and try to divine some truth that lies under it . . . but it doesn't really work. Calling it kin to astrology is quite accurate. For the most part what people say is just boilerplate. It doesn't have any real meaning. It is more the ritual repetition of words. There is no deeper meaning to be divined and no real connection to actions.

You are right that the phenomenon isn't unique to my generation. After all Crid is the most millenial person I know while still being firmly outside of that demographic. Hollywood with it's disconnect from reality provides much the same environment.

People sometimes say that politics, itself, is silly. (Like astrology.)

Well, if so, then why is it so important to vote - or even to have the right to vote? Puzzling.

Also, I'd heard that Mother Jones believed, more or less, that voting didn't change anything, especially for the poor, so she thought, why should she support a suffrage movement started by RICH women? (I once asked singer Ronnie Gilbert - from the Weavers - about this, since she'd portrayed Mother Jones in a play, and she said yes, that was pretty much it.)

But I wonder if anyone ever asked MJ: "Well, if voting doesn't change anything, why are there all these Jim Crow laws, etc, in the way of the black vote? What are whites afraid of?"

Voting is frustrating for those demanding immediate and dramatic social change. Especially when they don't get their way in a single election.

Gone are the days when incremental change was accepted and even part of the strategy. The NAACP sued many school districts over a period of several years to get the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The organization accepted that it would take time to effect real change.

Politics is silly. So is sex. And to people of a certain age pooping. Just because something is silly doesn't mean it isn't important.

Isab Says:

"You see it a lot from Artie, and JD. Binary outlook.

Nobody sane could possibly prefer Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton, simple choice, yada, yada."

Why do you have to constantly lie?... and why are you constantly obsesses about Hillary Clinton?

She is a nobody... a non-entity.

I have always understood why Hillary Clinton was a disliked figure, which is why I never supported her candidacy.

Despite that you constantly make a caricature of any position I have put forth to create your own fiction of a "binary thinker".

My criticism of you in this arena has never been your preference of Trump over Clinton... but the seeming impossibility of you to levy any direct criticism of Trump at all.

That failure is disturbing as there are many flaws to discuss, and yet to hear you talk about the situation is to generate a constant list of complaints about a complete political nobody.

It is like me asking you you what you love about your husband and instead of getting anything positive I just get a laundry list of complaints about your high school boyfriend.