Bad political arguments

White/male supremacist Vincent James recently live-streamed argument that when men go bad, it’s all women’s fault. You can’t blame men for getting angry when they see young women routinely taking dozens of lovers yet leav some young men frustrated, oppressed and alone: ““Men are discriminated against in family court. Men are discriminated against in the media, and they’re discriminated against in in society as a whole. And they see the way that women act, and they see the way that women treat them, and they see the way that women jump from guy to guy to guy to guy, and so how can you blame them for wanting to sit inside their room and play video games and sort of get lost in a digital universe of their own? And then you see them lash out sometimes. I mean, how can you really blame a guy?”

As noted at the first link, this is the argument, again, that only women have agency: they have choices so they’d better make the right ones. If they make the wrong ones, men can’t control their reactions.

Then there’s a piece of richsplaining on Bloomberg suggesting that it’s much easier than you think to manage inflation — go vegetarian (which is indeed cheaper)! Use mass transit if it’s available! Don’t give your pet chemotherapy! While some of the suggestions are not bad, it ignores some of the real problems — crappy wages and horrifying medical costs (a major source of bankruptcy). Don’t give your pet chemotherapy? Yeah, that’s an expense people deal with every day.

LGM proposes that all anti-vax political arguments are bad, being ultimately nihilism: they’ve decided not to care because their leaders told them it was no big deal. Now they resent everyone who reminds them of their bullshit by not believing in it (something I’ve written about before). Roy Edroso mocks the DC truckers who pretend they’re driving for freedom.

Then we have Senator Mike Braun of Indiana who says he’s fine with bans on interracial marriage because state’s rights! As I’ve mentioned before (don’t have the link), nobody brings up state’s rights (i.e., in this case that Loving v. Virginia deprived states of the right to set their own policies) unless the states are doing stuff they want. Anti-gay marriage activists talked a lot about state’s rights after Obergefell but if the Supreme Court were to ban gay marriage everywhere, the homophobes would celebrate. So if Braun’s okay with states banning interracial marriage (I gather he’s now denying that’s what he meant, though I don’t have the links) he’s probably not neutral on the issue.

This does make me wonder whether that could be a future front in Republicans using lawsuits to intimidate people. Ban gay marriage or interracial marriage (assuming the Supreme Court overturns past rulings) and then sue anyone in another state who provides residents with a marriage license. It wouldn’t surprise me.

The Supreme Court has an easy-to-understand argument on redistricting and voting rights: Democrats and minorities lose. Similarly, a numbers of Republicans doesn’t care whether Biden genuinely got more votes in 2020, they simply believe they should always win — nobody they didn’t vote for is ever legitimate.

#SFWApro.