Seth Meyers says that Florida governor Ron DeSantis scolding high school students for wearing masks during an event that he attended is the latest example of Republicans seemingly having decided that many of the party faithful like their elected leaders to act like obnoxious jerks.
One of the nice things about the arrival of streaming services is that we now get to see many programs produced in countries where the language is other than English. I tend to watch a lot of police procedurals, a genre that seems to be very popular worldwide as can be seen from the many mini-series that are being shown in a variety of languages. (Spoiler alert: In what follows, there is a spoiler for a minor plot line in the Spanish (Galician) series Bitter Daisies that can be seen on Netflix.)
In these shows, there are of course human corpses galore but one expects them so their appearance does not really disturb unless the filmmakers go out of their way to show blood and gore and violence, which, fortunately few of them do. Most often, the dead bodies are just briefly seen in the crime scene or in the morgue or the autopsy room.
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The Republican party should be very complacent about their chances of winning majorities in both the US Senate and House of Representatives in the mid-term elections to be held in November. Usually the party that holds the presidency loses seats in mid-term elections and since the Democrats currently hold such wafer-thin majorities, even a slight swing away from them would make them the minority in both chambers. In addition Joe Biden has particularly low ratings and the issue of inflation is hurting him. The only upside for Biden and the Democrats is if the pandemic really and truly goes away, the country opens up again, and the economy starts booming with lots of jobs being created. The Ukraine war is a wild card whose effect on US elections will be hard to predict.
But clearly there is some concern in the Republican party leadership that there is a wild card that could mess up their plans and that is Donald Trump. He clearly sees his own needs and satisfying his ego as the most important thing and the needs of the Republican party a distant second.
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There’s quite a lot going on under the surface.
These two big companies that make a lot of profits are facing unionization efforts and have resorted to disgusting union-busting tactics. This is of course no surprise for Amazon, one of the most openly rapacious of companies but Starbucks does not have such a bad reputation and this union-busting is tearing the mask off to reveal that it is not that different from Amazon in its anti-worker ethos.
An Amazon union avoidance official told employees at JFK8, Amazon’s largest New York City warehouse, that if they unionize, certain workers could see their salaries reduced to minimum wage, or that negotiations could start with minimum wage as a baseline, according to leaked audio from the mandatory anti-union meeting that took place Wednesday and was obtained by Motherboard.
…Much of the tenor of the 14-minute meeting, held at Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse that is currently trying to unionize, was like this, with Amazon’s representative stressing that the election has “significant and binding consequences not just for yourselves but for future associates, your coworkers, and potentially for your family.” The subtext of the entire speech was that things could very possibly become worse for workers if they unionize, and that they should think very, very hard before voting to do so.
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On his show Last Week Tonight John Oliver tackled the topic of sex work, a topic that is surrounded by a whole lot of misconceptions, ignorance, hypocrisy, and just plain old prudishness, and the people who suffer because of these things are the sex workers themselves, who are often at the receiving end of laws and other efforts to ‘save’ them that end up actually hurting them. One of the big problems is the conflating of sex work with sex trafficking, two very different things that require very different responses.
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As a general rule, I tend to view with deep skepticism the reasons given by political leaders for their actions, especially when they go to war, since they usually justify the decision in lofty but vague terms while what drives their actions is usually more concrete and far less noble. So when Russian president Vladimir Putin said prior to the invasion of Ukraine that the west was threatening Russia by bringing NATO forces ever closer to his country and that Ukraine entering that western military alliance would be an intolerable threat to their security, I tended to think that there must be at least some other factors driving his decisions.
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His show Last Week Tonight did an excellent job deconstructing what Critical Race Theory is and how the right wing, by means of massive distortions funneled through their echo chambers like Fox News, has managed to persuade some white people that it is part of a widespread campaign to demonize them as evil. They are not evil. But these people are snowflakes who get really bent out of shape by any suggestion that the history of the US has resulted in racist policies that favor white people being embedded in its political and legal structures. They also do not want their children to engage with issues of race at all, never mind the fact that children of color have no such choice since they have to engage with issues of race pretty much every day.
Oliver says that the laws to ban the teaching of CRT in schools (something that rarely happens since CRT is an academic discipline usually taught in graduate schools, especially law schools) are really being pushed by those who want public funds can be given to allow parents to pay for their children to attend private schools, a movement that goes by the name of ‘school choice’.
While I have been watching the tragedy of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine unfold, and view it as a gross geopolitical miscalculation by Russian president Vladimir Putin, the members of the US trucker convoy that is trying to replicate what happened in Canada see a darker conspiracy at work, that the Ukraine invasion was designed to take attention away from their effort.
Ryan Wright stood around a campfire in Lupton, Arizona, a town on the Navajo reservation where members of an American trucker convoy protest were resting for the night. As the fire flickered he discussed a conspiracy myth about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, he proffered, was a distraction. “I’m not the only one that feels this way,” Wright said. “But I feel like it’s a big fat smokescreen to keep everyone distracted on what is really going on in the world.”
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