All those things that would happen when pigs fly, are gonna happen now!

Current front page of Fox News: It takes you here to a page titled "Antisemitism on campus surges as agitators take over", with the pinned post from Bradford Betz saying what the front page says.

This is report discusses the cultural environment in which men's liberation occurs. It points out that the right has successfully weaponized neoliberal discontent to further it's anti-democratic goals. Under the heading "Self-Help Toxic Masculinists and Conspiritualists Weaponize WASH":

Self-help, already intimately intertwined with the hustle mindset, is today being infused with deeply misogynistic propaganda by far-right popular culture figures like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Andrew Tate. [...] Through podcasts, webinars, interviews, lectures, and books, these men and others like them are using their enormous platforms to offer solutions to the so-called “crisis of masculinity”—a conservative talking point that warps the complex and legitimate social and economic issues facing men, particularly working-class men, into a rallying cry against progress and equality—in an effort to reassert male dominance, heteronormative gender roles, and traditional patriarchal family structures. To do this in a way that reaches wide swaths of people and allows for a shred of plausible deniability, they use the seemingly innocuous language of self-help and self-improvement.

Self-help and self-improvement reinforce the "neoliberal self", "an entrepreneurial subject" where "personal grown and fulfillment are said to be attained through competition with others." But, as the report repeatedly emphasizes, neoliberalism as a cultural order generates and regenerates deep, deep dissatisfaction with it.

Reading what I've read so far, I thought to myself, "What does men's liberation mean, exactly?" (I'm not sure why this community popped into my mind...but it did). Because, without this neoliberal angle, men's liberation risks thrusting men back into a misanthropic culture as feminists. Sure, that's better than being a right-wing, patriarchal zealot, but it's not truly liberating.

While I would obviously recommend the report itself, given that it's 50 pages, I understand that's incredibly unlikely. Maybe throw it in Claude and ask it some questions.

In any case, what do you think?

If we were to treat the notion of “colorblindness” as the animating principle of the Constitution, the law, and the very concepts of justice and quality, we would thereby concede the moral, ethical, and ideological debates to those who assert that our interpretation of the world must be based, one way or another, on race. Instead, we should regard liberty, not “colorblindness,” as our highest ideal.

To be a Christian in America today is undeniably low-status, and all the more so if one ascribes to any form of orthodox theology. High status jobs, meanwhile, are cordoned off by advanced degrees, and therefore inaccessible to men who do not graduate college. [...] Young women leaving church might be doing so due to a staunch commitment to egalitarianism, but more likely they are leaving because of a more general sense that church is not cool.

• Chris Cross
• Debby Downer
• Ernesto Cattywampus
• Francine Leanmean

At the country’s founding, “there was a Christian political theory that was assumed as a consensus position, and the laws of nature and nature’s God don’t make sense without a common shared understanding of the divine and of created order,” Meadowcroft said, adding that the belief that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” as the Declaration of Independence states, “only makes sense within the long story of the Christian West.”

Biblical language has been used throughout American history, from the founding and Abraham Lincoln’s arguments to end slavery, to combating communism and advancing the civil rights movement.

“We’re saying we need to return that biblical language and an acknowledgment of our Christian heritage to the public sphere if our institutions and our assumptions about human nature and the law are going to make sense, and that the longer that we keep those out of the public sphere, the more unmoored we become from these core moral assumptions that undergird our whole constitutional system and the more lawless our future will be,” Meadowcroft explained. “So this is not a call to revolution, or civil war, or any such thing, it is rather a restoration, a re-founding, and an establishment of genuine constitutional order again.”

To get a clearer picture of what Bidenflation looks like, we need to compare prices between now and when Biden took office. That's what TIPPinsights did, and the results show you that Bidenflation isn't just worse than the White House wants you to believe — it's worse than you might have realized.

Food prices increased by 20.6% under Biden compared to only 2.2% as per BLS CPI, a difference of 18.5 points.

TIPP CPI data show that Energy prices increased by 29.6%. But, according to the BLS CPI, energy prices improved by 1.9%. The difference between the two is a whopping 31.5 points.

The Core CPI measures the price increase for all items, excluding food and energy. In the year-over-year measure, the Core TIPP CPI is 16.5% compared to 3.8% BLS CPI, a 12.8-point difference.

Further, gasoline prices have increased by 29.9% since President Biden took office, whereas the BLS CPI shows that gasoline prices have improved by 3.9%, a difference of 33.8 points.

The latest IRS data on who bears the income tax burden demonstrate yet again the benefits of lower tax rates over higher rates.

When President Donald Trump entered office, the richest 1% of tax filers ($675,000 income and above) paid a little more than 40% of the income taxes collected.

The 2017 Trump tax cut reduced the effective highest federal tax rate to 37% from 42%.

But the most recent IRS tax return data (for 2021) confirm that even as these rates were lowered — not to mention the corporate tax rate cut from 35% to 21% — the share of the tax burden shouldered by the 1% rose to almost 46%.

Written by the guy who came up with the Laffer Curve, Arthur Laffer.

The great constitutionalists, from Aristotle to Montesquieu to Madison, believed that the populace should have a voice, but they also thought, with Cicero, that the well-being of the people was the highest law. Survival and flourishing is most important, not pandering to popular passions.

Any small “r” republican knows that a good society divides up power among authorities, repositories, and mysteries, such that all are checked and balanced; neither the bounder nor the mobile vulgus can become tyrannical. Pluralist theory seeks both safety and stability in multiplicity. The wisdom of crowds—and brokering institutions.

Intelligence is easy to find online, but there’s precious little wisdom. Those of us who spend too much time in the digital world (for me, it’s a job requirement) are all too familiar with the firehose of the latest news, trends and controversies. Within hours, they’ll be replaced by new topics just as meaningless.

Many experts have sounded alarms that this torrent of ephemera and the mad chase for clicks are rewiring brains, reducing attention spans and altering how we process information. Too often, we focus on the transient and urgent and abandon the meaningful and eternal.

Some of y'all should do what this guy did: read a book and touch some grass.

Discourse Magazine is an online publication of the Mercatus Center, a conservative think tank.

You should know about these sites, especially for this upcoming election season, because they are referential and nonpartisan. Each website has a line about the content.

Politics

ProPublica's Represent—Find your legislators and the legislative work they're undertaking on your behalf

Fast Democracy—Find legislation in all 50 states, but we'll probably focus on legislation in our state

Ballotpedia's Ballot Lookup Tool—Know how you're going to vote before you go!

Government Sites

Congress.gov—Information specific to both the House of Representatives and Senate.

Regulations.gov—Federal agencies need your comments on their proposed rules.

Federal Register— Everyday, the government compiles a publication of proposed rules, notices of Federal agencies, executive orders and various other things. You can find it all here!

USA Spending.gov—Investigate how your tax dollars are being spent!

Federal Election Commission—Wonder who is giving how much to a particular candidate during an election? Find it here.

Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED)—Not technically a government website. Has all the important economic indicators.

Reference

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy—An excellent resource about philosophy. You can dive into a comprehensive overview of logic, democracy, or whatever philosophy you can think of!.

Oxford Research Encyclopedia—A general encyclopedia

Britannica—Another general encyclopedia