Clearly he was not paying attention in her class…
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I hope you are right, but honestly, I do not see it going in that direction amongst the Republican Party.
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And Hawley is now routinely interviewed on the BBC for the ‘conservative perspective.’ Another rough beast is being born, slouching toward DC.
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⊥rump is the poster boy, but he’s a symptom, not the cause. The era may well carry his name in the history books, but it will not end when he leaves office.
How about president? Because everything you’re saying about Tom Cotton below
Could literally apply to ⊥rump before he was elected.
We didn’t get the current president in spite of what he said as a candidate, we got him exactly because of what he said as a candidate.
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Except there’s nothing radical about it. It was literally written into the constitution.
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Well, Trump got elected because of the hubris of running Hillary Clinton, a candidate we knew to be the devil incarnate to an enormous number of American voters. Even that unpopular she beat him in the popular vote. Had we ran someone else, he wouldn’t have won.
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Will someone please process this asshat into a tee shirt? Would love a “made with REAL cotton” wearable
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That’s kind of what I mean. This wave is in the Republican party. and people emboldened by the presidency.
The only reason we know about My Pillow is the fact people like that have almost run out of advertisers. I mean, even Facebook isn’t immune from getting the smell on them. That isn’t lessening, that is actually getting worse for them.
Maybe I am optimistic, but I see the chunk of societal ice they are standing on getting smaller and smaller. What happens when there is no social media outlet left, no network that can risk having them on? No corporation that will hire them?
You don’t understand the power of delusion do you? Anything seen as negative about them is “fake” and a lie. And when you have a cult around you that will believe your words before their own eyes…
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It seems to me Mr. Cotton has–unintentionally, I’m sure–implicitly endorsed the moral necessity of reparations.
He asserts two premises:
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the United States as it now is, the most powerful and wealthiest nation on the planet, only got that way because of the “necessary evil” of chattel slavery, and
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"America is a great and noble country founded on the proposition that all mankind is created equal. We have always struggled to live up to that promise, but no country has ever done more to achieve it.”
There is a moral and logical contradiction between the evil of chattel slavery and the assertion that America is a noble nation. As it stands, one of these two premises is false. In order to undo this contradiction, if we are to claim that nobility as ours, we must redress the “necessary” evil with a “necessary” good–reparations to the victims of that evil, and to their descendants.
In simple terms even the right wing should understand: A nation borne of evil, one that acknowledges that evil, but refuses to expiate that evil is, and will remain, evil.
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That is not what he meant, though. 
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He kind of is, though - it’s implicit in calling it a “necessary” evil. That not only acts to justify it, but if it was necessary once, it could be again…
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That’s it, isn’t it? I don’t think he’s necessarily (hah!) wrong about the “necessary” part. It probably was necessary to make America what it is today. It’s just that the “evil” was so monstrous that it wasn’t worth it.
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Well, yeah, I know. Which is why I said he “unintentionally” endorsed the moral necessity of reparations. His (and his ilks) inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the logical and moral conclusion to be drawn from what he did say is evidence of their moral cowardice and/or hypocrisy. Which was the point I was trying (apparently not very well) to make.
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It’s not hubris in the same way it’s not hubris not to negotiate with terrorists. If you do give in they will do the same thing over and over again.
Had the Democrats not run Hillary they wouldn’t have been able to run any woman, PoC or slightly left leaning candidate ever again because they would all have gotten the Hillary treatment until they were withdrawn.
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I have so many mixed feelings about this. Not about Tom Cotton, my feelings are very clear there, but about the “necessary evil” comment. On the one hand, it’s probably true. Also, given that, we haven’t done anywhere near close to enough to try to heal the damage from it. On the other hand, the core idea that representative government is impossible without slavery has been part of the Western philosophical tradition since Aristotle, and frankly in a pre-industrial-revolution world (and even more so in Aristotle’s day pre-printing press), it’s genuinely hard to imagine a democracy or republic without slavery working at a scale larger than a single small village. We don’t have to like it to try to understand it. On the third hand, for generations technology is and has been rapidly getting rid of that “necessity” component, which is what is making our oligarchs and aristocrats scared enough to work so hard to consolidate power today.
The Hillary treatment took over 20 years to get where it was in 2016, and had very particular circumstances. Les Foster, Seth Rich, Benghazi, etc., etc. I don’t think they could create that kind of mythos over another female candidate quickly and easily. What female candidate compares today?
Anyway, how’d not negotiating with terrorists work out? Four years of Trump, and then what? We’re running a decidedly not-Left guy who probably would have won in 2016.
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That’s the galling thing: He’s not wrong. If you think the system we’ve got today is basically all right, and the ends justify the means… his logic isn’t hard to follow.
The only way people are willing to accept the violence inherent in today’s version, is if they don’t have to look at it. The BLM protests force an uncomfortable look at what people have come to accept as “normal”.
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