Why Texas Sucks

When Republicans say it's about Christian/conservative/family values and you want to show them "pro-life" hypocrisy, consider:

• Texas cuts $ for disabled kids, while forcing women to bury fetal remains because they "value human dignity" so much.

• Judge blocks Texas from requiring fetal remains be buried

• Texas releases abortion booklet with debunked cancer link, suicide risk claim

My mom is a cafeteria lady at a public elementary school in Texas. Their school just had the budget for free breakfasts cut while Texas knew they'd be forking over millions to fight lawsuits challenging their preposterous fetal remain burial law. Texas cares about fetuses, not children.

The full George Carlin quote is brilliant, especially the part right before what you said: "If you're pre-born, you're fine, if you're pre-schooled, you're fucked. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. Pro-life, these people aren't pro-life, they're killing doctors, what kind of pro-life is that? What, they'll do everything they can do save a fetus, but if it grows up to be a doctor they just might have to kill it?"

Isn't it the conservatives who want less government involvement but are very quick to jump in and involve themselves.

American conservatism is unusual (not sure about unique) in that it's a frothy mixture of liberalism (in the European sense) and fascism.

More:

Texas has highest maternal mortality rate in developed world, study finds

As the Republican-led state legislature has slashed funding to reproductive healthcare clinics, the maternal mortality rate doubled over just a two-year period

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/20/texas-maternal-mortality-rate-health-clinics-funding

Texas state rankings (includes DC):

#1 in hazardous waste generated

#1 in population uninsured

#1 in executions

#2 in births

#2 in uninsured children

#3 in subprime credit

#3 in population living in food insecurity/hunger

#4 in teen pregnancy

#4 in percentage of women living in poverty

#8 in obesity

#47 in voter registration

#50 in percentage of high school graduates

#50 in spending on mental health

#50 in percent of women receiving prenatal care

#51 in voter participation

#51 in welfare benefits

#51 in percent of women with health insurance

(These are from the Texas Legislative Study Group, which used to produce these stats every year: http://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2013-04-15/texas-on-the-brink/)

As I've said before, Texas has good people who are so poorly served by their state government (who have drawn some of the worst gerrymandered drawn district lines in the country to keep Republican control, even over the liberal cities). Texas Republicans focus their time and energy and the state's considerable resources on Southern Strategy racial resentment, anti-sex ed, women's sexuality regulation, anti-LGBT, randomly removing liberal historical figures from textbooks, while spending billions subsidizing corporate welfare for oil companies and other companies that benefit the Republicans in power. 

And rather than the poor or other things Jesus actually talked about, Christian conservatives focus on gays, guns, and things like this (and government benefits for the wealthy and industries, obviously)

EDIT:

For those wondering how Texas got this bad, there's the gerrymandering linked above but also the effect of conservative media like Fox News ("War on Christmas," "Obama's terrorist fist bump," God, guns, gays, race dogwhistling):

Tests of knowledge of Fox viewers

A 2010 Stanford University survey found "more exposure to Fox News was associated with more rejection of many mainstream scientists' claims about global warming, [and] with less trust in scientists".[75]

A 2011 Kaiser Family Foundation survey on U.S. misperceptions about health care reform found that Fox News viewers had a poorer understanding of the new laws and were more likely to believe in falsehoods about the Affordable Care Act such as cuts to Medicare benefits and the death panel myth.[76] A 2010 Ohio State University study of public misperceptions about the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque", officially named Park51, found that viewers who relied on Fox News were 66% more likely to believe incorrect rumors than those with a "low reliance" on Fox News.[77]

In 2011, a study by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that New Jersey Fox News viewers were less well informed than people who did not watch any news at all.

67% of Fox viewers believed that the "U.S. has found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al Qaeda terrorist organization" (compared with 56% for CBS, 49% for NBC, 48% for CNN, 45% for ABC, 16% for NPR/PBS).

The belief that "The U.S. has found Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq" was held by 33% of Fox viewers and only 23% of CBS viewers, 19% for ABC, 20% for NBC, 20% for CNN and 11% for NPR/PBS.

35% of Fox viewers believed that "the majority of people [in the world] favor the U.S. having gone to war" with Iraq (compared with 28% for CBS, 27% for ABC, 24% for CNN, 20% for NBC, 5% for NPR/PBS).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#Tests_of_knowledge_of_Fox_viewers

Fox News' co-founder worked on the (infamously racist) Republican "Southern Strategy" to get the South vote for Nixon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#Evolution_.281970s_and_1980s.29 (There's also so much proof of what he's done to women at Fox News that they even apologized in the settlement)

You start out in 1954 by saying, "N----r, n----r, n----r." By 1968 you can't say "n----r" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "n----r, n----r."

Fox News' owner is an Australian media mogul billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, who also has a media empire there biased to Australia's wealthy/conservative political party, as well as in the UK, with his News Corp tabloids, Sky TV, and other media properties he has there which did all of these fearmongering tactics with Brexit

Examples of the biased charts and graphics Fox News uses on its shows here: http://mediamatters.org/research/2012/10/01/a-history-of-dishonest-fox-charts/190225

Daily memos

Photocopied memos from John Moody instructed the network's on-air anchors and reporters to use positive language when discussing pro-life viewpoints, the Iraq War, and tax cuts, as well as requesting that the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal be put in context with the other violence in the area.[84] Such memos were reproduced for the film Outfoxed, which included Moody quotes such as, "The soldiers [seen on Fox in Iraq] in the foreground should be identified as 'sharpshooters,' not 'snipers,' which carries a negative connotation."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#Internal_memos_and_e-mail

Fox News' tactics now on Reddit itself: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/22/palmer-luckey-the-facebook-billionaire-secretly-funding-trump-s-meme-machine.html

Russia's paid troll army also using these tactics and brigading: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html, http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-internet-trolls-and-donald-trump-2016-7
https://np.reddit.com/r/news/comments/5kykml/us_expels_35_russian_diplomats_closes_two/dbrnedf/
https://np.reddit.com/r/news/comments/5hkt4s/cia_reportedly_concludes_russian_interference/db15jyt/

From his interviews with former trolls employed by Russia, Chen gathered that the point of their jobs "was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person."

It's a brand of information warfare, known as "dezinformatsiya," that has been used by the Russians since at least the Cold War. The disinformation campaigns are only one "active measure" tool used by Russian intelligence to "sow discord among," and within, allies perceived hostile to Russia.

SOURCE 

The Banality of Evil

Arendt never argues that Eichmann was not driven by malice, hatred, and racism. She also never argues that he wasn't fully aware of what he was doing or that he was simply a mindless bureaucrat following orders. In fact, she rather explicitly gives examples and argues in favor of both those descriptions of Eichmann.

What Arendt does argue, is that Eichmann's evil comes from having been a "joiner." In a search for some higher meaning, he gave himself to a cause so completely that he was unable to think outside of it's cliche's, standard lines... or from the point of view of other people. By adopting a cause Eichmann created a intellectual fence around himself and relieved himself of having to think critically or examine his convictions. Eichmann rejected the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, didn't believe in Blood libel, in other words, his antisemitism wasn't based on religious beliefs, or a conspiratorial belief in Jewish world domination, he justified it because it was his part of his "fatherland morality." 

Antisemitism was a function of his ardent belief in Nazism. Eichmann, and those like him, didn't seek a rational, coherent world view full of intellectual integrity in Nazism, they sought (and gave themselves fully to Nazism because they received) a sense of brotherhood, righteousness, pride, social capital, and historical importance. To question the fundamental tenants tenets of Nazism was to threaten all that mattered in their lives.

There is pleasure in understanding the world around us and meaning in the unending work of developing and refining a coherent world view. Adopting an ideology, short circuits that effort, providing pleasure and meaning with an unwarranted (and unquestioned) degree of certainty. 

Consequently, fully adopting an ideology, whether it's Nazism or Feminism, is fundamentally not a benign act. People do this on a regular basis: unquestioned, mild, allegiance to their church, to their political party, to traditional values, to their social causes, etc. This is the essence of "the banality of evil" that Arendt talks about. There is a strong intellectual resemblance between the unquestioned beliefs and unexamined assumptions that allow a man to ship millions of people to extermination camps, and the unquestioned assumptions and beliefs that we all operate on, on a daily basis. Psychopathic cruelty and blood-thirst are not required.

So when people claim that Arendt is wrong about Eichmann, they don't need to demonstrate that he was a willing and dedicated mass murderer. Arendt does a good job demonstrating that in her own book. They need to show that he was actively questioning Nazism's tenets not simply rearranging the "cliches" of Nazism to justify his actions.

This article seems to really have it out for Arendt without actually engaging with her thesis in the slightest. They describe her suggestion that Eichmann had "no criminal motives" as "shocking," as if Arendt was soft or forgiving of Eichmann. What Arendt is actually arguing in that quote is that Eichmann was a fanatic who saw nothing criminal or wrong with what he did. I attribute this flagrant misrepresentation of her work to Arendt's controversial position in the Jewish community. Her historically accurate critique of the Jewish response to the holocaust has offended many people. Some would like to believe that the Jews were above the fray, that they didn't react to the horror around them with the mix of heroism and smallness that one would expect of any group of people.

SOURCE