Blogs attract comments, at least they do if you make it possible for people to leave them. Even after politics heated up to hatred, I didn't want to give up comments altogether, so I've been moderating them. Sometimes things don't make it through moderation, and sometimes that bears mention.
For the helpful person who left a comment consisting entirely of information cut and pasted from the hot pepper list at Pepperscale.com: thank you very much and it's good stuff, but we don't just take content from a site. That's "scraping," and is frequently a copyright violation. Nevertheless, it's a great link, which I am happy to share: Pepperscale.
Another commenter was...not so helpful. Addressing my pointing out that former Vice President (and arch-Republican) Dick Cheney will be voting for Democrat and current Vice President Kamala Harris in the upcoming Presidential election, he wrote darkly (and illiterately) about "Globalist" government and America's "managed" democracy. These terms are, in fact, antisemitic dogwhistles, and when someone uses them, he's revealing a great deal about himself while telling you nothing accurate about the world. While it's a handy way to identify members of the covert hooky-cross crowd, the claims are hateful blather. Let the record show that Dick "Darth Vader" Cheney is a United Methodist, about as mainstream a version of Protestantism as you could find. There is no Jewish conspiracy pulling the strings of world government; the one government in the world that is dominated by Jewish people has got its hands full right now trying to keep their own electorate from shutting Israel down. This ancient nonsense remains the same nonsense it has been all along, and is always used to manipulate people and gain power for demagogues -- who never have any coherent plan themselves, only a lust for power and a desire to beat up the weak.
Commenters, I will check your links and references. Hostile or threatening comments will not be published, nor will comments supporting Trumpism,* which I consider to be a dangerous political movement with plenty of its own loud megaphones. I will look up terms and claims and if you are too vague or obscure, your comment will not be published, simply because I don't know what you're talking about and prefer to err on the side of caution.
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* The leaves me open to charges of "You just hate Trump." But you know, I don't. I think he's a very sad man, an aging and desperate example of the kind of prejudiced, not very clever asshole managers I have worked for in a few jobs, men who didn't quite have what it took and inflated themselves with bullshit while lording it over the underlings who were doing their best to keep the bad boss propped up. They did so because if he fell, it was going to rain crap on everyone under him. I didn't like the situation and those guys would always get worse and worse as time went on. Sometimes their bosses removed them before things came to a head, much as voters did in 2020. Sometimes they failed spectacularly, and anyone near them when it happened took damage. I think the United States of America, its government and citizens, deserves better than that.
It's funny. If the mainstream Democratic candidates had said half of what Trump says publicly, they'd absolutely freak out. But a lot of people are incapable of processing the idea "if it's bad when their people do it, then it's also bad when my people do it".
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