The heart of the law is mercy ohhh

After having squandered their good-name on riotous living. Kavanaugh or Franken as the prodigal son. A character in a parable Jesus told to illustrate how generous God is in forgiving sinners who repent.

Yeah, I still think these Proud Boy types would be better if they were participating in regular church potlucks and bowling leagues with mostly-normal people instead of socializing with other angry anime Nazis on 4chan.

They'd still at least be KKK members who are all mostly normal people. Just not flaunting it in public.

That's again...better? Feel like a broken record but I think you guys are underappreciating a handful of factors that on their own only improve things a bit but together add to meaningful progress?

Hotter take: Indoctrinating Christianity from a young age teaches cognitive dissonance, rationalizing horrific acts, and making **** up with a straight face. Aka a perfect training ground for the GOP.

Conservatives during Eisenhower's time were spraying black people at lunch counters.

They were right that there's a conspiracy to kidnap kids and sexually abuse them. It just didn't exist until Trump was elected.

How totally unlike today's alt-right.

OK, but churches were deeply involved with the heavy lifting and organization involved with the civil rights movement. How does something like that play out in our modern age of atomized consumers without roots or a sense of community? Maybe the same thing can be done with online groups, idk.

Somehow liberals need to come up with some sort of community-building exercise that takes the place of church life that was the anchor of communities in the past. Something where you force yourself to get outside your 4chan bubble and feel fellowship with people who aren't 100% on your wavelength.

While I agree with this, it's still better than military-fetishizing nationalism, which is the alternative belief system being offered in the face of declining Christianity.

I'll add to the discussion that conservatives were right that it was a bad idea to basically try to legislate from the Presidency via executive order, as Obama frequently did. Their concern over this was hypocritical as hell but they were still right.

Just saw a Tim Kaine ad where he attacked his opponent, who is a massive scumbag Trumpkin, for......... allegedly opposing wasteful military spending, apparently we need 355 Navy ships and not a ship less. Goddamn, this country is ****ed so hard.

If church attendance is so important for social cohesion shouldn’t we be able to see similar correlation in other countries? Sweden for example is mostly irreligious while having high social cohesion.

Charter schools. Republicans' motivations are 100% evil as always. But broken clock, etc.

I personally know of multiple families in places like Kansas City and Los Angeles where the public schools are so abysmal that charter schools are an absolute godsend.

I have first-hand experience of the utter violent chaos that is the KC public schools. Imagine you're starving and you have only rancid rotten food to eat that might kill you, then someone offers you fresh dog food.

Also the 55 mph speed limit was probably an overreach. And if you want to get technical, prohibition was a progressive movement.

That's all I got.

On the times conservatives have been wrong vs. progressives, just off the top of my head:
national parks
public libraries
slavery
child labor laws
jim crow
segregation
worker safety laws
clean air and water laws
overtime/40-hour-week
the new deal
medicare
medicaid
social security
the CCC
food stamps
minimum wage
seatbelt laws
smoking bans
putting calorie information on menus
the FDIC
the FDA
endangered species act
gay marriage
illegal weed
USDA
affirmative action
a free national highway system was actually a pretty progressive idea in its day - Ike was a stealth progressive in some ways

Current issues where they're obviously on the wrong side of history:
UHC
climate change
gun control
immigration
progressive taxation
campaign finance laws
voter suppression
police brutality

Aren‘t conservatives the reason public schools in the US are the equivalent of rancid rotten food?

I'm gonna guess that corrupt, useless, incompetent school boards are the biggest problem. Some cities aren't that bad. I was in Houston public schools as well - a very racially diverse class - and it was like night and day compared to KC. My mom worked for the KC school district for a while, and had nothing but horrible things to say about most of the board members.

I didn't personally experience LA - but everything I've read reminds me of KC. I volunteered at an elementary school for my job and saw them serve Kindergarteners and 1st-graders a meal that would make me full as a grown adult. Naturally 90% of it wound up in the trash can - two 55-gallon buckets full of wasted food. That's one day in one elementary school, just K-1st, in a district that has 500 elementary schools. Imagine the waste. Is someone getting their pockets lined here?

I asked the janitor if any of it was saved (including the stuff that was shrink-wrapped and never opened) - she said no. I'd like to think that someone was sneaking that stuff out of the dumpster. I just can't imagine the level of not caring that has to exist up and down the line for that to happen. The obvious follow is that if that happens with something simple like wasted food - how much care do they put into education?

We also volunteered at a science and math charter school a different year, which I guess is technically a "public" charter school - whatever that means. The headmaster there told us they have kids from 57 different zip codes, some of them ride two hours each way. She said when she calls parents it's like they won the lottery. She also said there were enough charter schools in LA that if you were really determined you would probably get into one of them.

My philosophy is if you can at least save some of the kids, the ones who really want to learn and escape the chaos, it's worth it.

they were right that Tennessean red-state native Shawn Lane might be the sickiest guitarist ever

I'd hesitate to say it's conservatives' fault; conservatives don't have much to do with the state of NYC public schools, which are disastrously segregated.

Chris Hayes' Why Is This Happening podcast had an interesting episode last week: "The Myths of the Ruling Class with Anand Giridharadas"

...where one of the good arguments his guests made was about school funding in the USA:

(god bless NBC for posting transcripts of this podcast, and also it was a good episode and you guys should listen to it)

Maybe? Counter-point: less people are participating in religious institutions and (informally, but you'd agree?): the GOP is even MORE wedded to gaslighting, insipid rationalizations, and straight up lying than ever before.

Sure. I am taking it as prima facie true that we all see the evolution from Eisenhower to Nixon to Trump as a slope downward, which isn't to say Eisenhower was ideal, I mean he wanted the CIA all over the world liquidating his political opponents, Nixon was obviously feckless, the US did horrible things in Vietnam. The US is this fantasically ****ty place basically forever, we'll never find angels to hold up as paragons, certainly not leadership.

But I *think* what you are not saying, but ham-handedly trying to sneak in here is that increasing secularization has actually spared black people from water canons.

Again, maybe? As Trolly pointed out, and I'll build on, what has effectively spared black people from water canons in the South are the statutory protections offered by the federal government built by the CRA and the Warren Court.

Where did the political pressure for THAT germinate? A big part were Christian communities and churches:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation...ights_Movement

This is also approaching hot-take territory but I think history here has been too kind to liberal/leftist types and not given nearly enough credit churches, because I think the common historical tropes focus hard on the Freedom Summer campaigns and the murders of political activists like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner but often ignores the 10-15 years of hard work America's churches did in the lead up to build public consensus around the urgency to end segregation. Note too (hot take territory) our historical narratives function very similarly around the Abolition Movement in the 1850s wherein it's assumed to have sprung from nowhere precisely instead of being deeply intertwined with the Third Great Awakening.

But, in any case, I ain't gonna dwell on "was it churches?" or "was it northern liberals?" because in the end it was largely black people that fought and won their own freedom, but I think our common historical consciousness ignores how frankly progressive churches were on race relations relative to the public in the 1940s-1960s, and how much that work led to what culminated in the public-buy-in for the laws that emerged from the Civil Rights era. This is almost unfathomable now because, as I've belabored, our common popular conceit of church is now adulterated by right-wing grift churches and televangelists that are really caught up in the morass of modern finance capitalism.

But, OK. Think of it differently. That is to say: if you had some alternate universe, rolled back the Civil Rights Act and various jurisprudence that ended de jure racial discrimination, but magically plopped the world in 2018 America with THIS Republican Party, are we really betting the water canons wouldn't be firing? Worse? Might want to bookmark this post, there might very well be a lot ****ing worse in our future, although it's probably migrants from Central America that are going to bear the brunt of America's rising fascism, maybe not black people, what a dark ****ing prop market, **** this country. The fact is black people are already under the thumb of America's paramilitary cop + prison industrial complex so again, we should be wary of narratives that assume we've drastically improved race relations in America, the water canons have just been replaced with stop+frisk and tossing poor blacks into prison for non violent drug offenses, although obviously in some important ways it's much better. See above as to *why* that is, though, and the historical processes that led to it.

In any case: Without churches, without institutions, without trade unions, without normal human interactions like verbal conversations, looking at faces that aren't Fox News anchors, in 2018 America... I really have no idea where you'd turn to these days to inculcate any sense of decency in people like "hey let's not build a giant ****ing wall and starve migrants in the desert?" or "our military does not need to be roaming around Central America harassing migrants?" in the same way civil rights activists could partner with churches to talk to their communities about ending segregation.

This is all an insane hypothetical but I think you're trying to argue, just quietly, that actually participation in church/religious institutions is WHY black people weren't afforded race-blind public accommodations, why they were lynched, why miscegenation was prohibited, whatever.

Say that if you think it, we can debate it, but if you don't, then this whole "well bad things happened during the Eisenhower era too?" is a basic non-sequitur. Because no one is arguing America: 1950s was utopia. Grant me that Eisenhower --> Nixon --> Trump is an obvious devolution and that's all I really need here to go find correlated factors; I maintain institutional decay is a big one, and I think the decline of traditional religious institutions and practices is in our Venn Diagram a big circle within that circle.

And to the extent that social conservatives warned about that, I think they were correct.

They were Democrats doing that when Eisenhower was POTUS but then the Republicans went HAM in the 60's to bring them into the party so **** them!

18 days!

they also hung "witches" and tortured jews and invaded the middle east multiple times.

Getting a bit deraily, but I'm beginning to believe that giving people something to believe in and a sense of purpose in their lives is maybe the biggest challenge of our century. The lack of any kind of common belief system in the modern world is toxic to any sense of community.

How about no.

Ohio's Schools Lost Nearly $600 Million To ECOT Since 2012

You think these alt-right Pepe dip****s wouldn't have been just as savage?

I agree. I think there's a lot of wisdom here. I think it's a bit worse than that though. The reality is a sort of capitalist, hyper competitive mindset has taken over the elites where the thing they deeply believe in is sort of like "accumulate as many resources, capital and status as you can." For them, for the winners of this, it makes perfect sense that the system is working beautifully and we should perpetuate it and it's something aspire to.

For anyone below the top echelons of status hierarchies, we've eroded like all other things that have meaning in people's lives. This is a very dangerous game for elites to play because these people aren't going to just live and die quietly as life's losers and accept the systemic conditions that perpetuate this system, and there are going to be competing worldviews that fill in the spaces where nothing much exists.

One elephant in the room here is of course the alt-right style politics and rising fascism / authoritarianism here in the US and globally, but I maintain that isn't THAT popular. The second, kind of more pernicious problem is that the liberal / left part of the spectrum can't rally a response to the meager, dark offerings of community and purpose that the alt-right offers because we are also offering ~nothing. That's why the right is winning a grasp of political systems with only slim pluralities and not even majorities of the masses, because the masses are largely just ****ing entirely adrift and offered literally nothing at all. You have the elites, offering hyper competitive cutthroat status Hunger Games to stay one step ahead of robots and giving everyone else who can't compete cheap screens to stare off into, you have the alt-right giving a competing vision of nationalist blood and soil politics, and literally no alternate third vision to inspire anyone, no meaning, nothing, just a big gaping hole.

So I'm not suggesting there aren't other, secular ways to duplicate the good things that church life did.

Main point is that religion has been a key part of the social glue for human societies for thousands of years. It's not just fanatics burning witches, it's regular everyday schleps who don't even care about the Jesus stuff all that seriously but still show up to be social and catch up on all the local happenings. Liberalism has dismantled all that in like 2-3 generations and done a poor job of replacing it with anything, at least in the US, which has led to a cohort of angry unsupervised young men finding their identity in the derposphere and 4chan.

Obviously there are a lot of negative consequences to the tribalism and irrationality that comes with organized religion, I'm not suggesting we bring that back, but maybe we need to take a hard look at places like Norway or wherever and see how they're making things work --I'm taking your word for it that Scandinavian societies have figured this out, don't really have any experience as to what life is like there. As a casual observer it does seem like ethnonationalism is making disturbing inroads in a lot of Europeland.

Put simply and glibly, the masses of the world are offered:

1) winning extreme competitions
2) tribalism
3) nothing / mobile games / 4chan / Fox News

That's not a tenable situation.

I don’t know. Maybe this is a self awareness problem, but I’m not winning capitalism, am not religious, and still manage not to be a piece of ****. My working conditions are...fine? I spend like 35 hours a week at work, actually work about half that, and make enough to live comfortably in the suburbs. I possess no special skills.

Which doesn’t solve any problems; but let’s not let deplorables off the hook so easily.