Yeah. Time for the Love It or Leave It crowd to follow their own advice. I keep returning to this simple list of admonishments:
"Don't like the gummint? Then stop breathing our clean(ish) air. Stop drinking our clean water. Stop driving on our public roads. Stop listening to the radio transmitted 'cross our public airwaves. Stop working at the publicly-funded defense plant. Git yer ass outta our national parks. Oh, and that social security – give it all back."
There's plenty more to add but it's Monday and my life won't live itself, so I gotta go do it...
Reminds me of the Craig T. Nelson quote about how he grew up poor, "We were on foodstamps, nobody helped us" (arguing that poor folks today expect too much help.)
It's nothing new. I'm sure I had a " I'm surrounded by idiots " moment when I was 10 or 11. I still have moments where I feel like folks on the left are just now catching on.
I was out amongst the rabble this weekend at a Horse Show in Central Indiana. I'll be honest- they didn't seem very roused. I was at the show at the same facility in August 2016 and the place was lousy with Trump. Somebody made a fortune selling the Rubes those cheesy flags. This year nothing. There was one little kid in an NRA shirt.
We have crazy letters to the editor, crazy candidates for local office, Trump flags around town, and a “Fuck Joe Biden” flag on a crane out by the lake where thousands of families come each week to enjoy the state park. So is the prestige media actually wrong? No, no it is I who am out of touch.
It was hot at the horse show. Which, duh, Midwest in July. Didn't stop folks from demonstrating their oh so very Astute Grasp of the Obvious by saying " Sure is hot" to one another every few minutes.
Two guys were talking next to me in the horse barn. One says " Sure is hot." The other says " Yeah that global warming-" The first guy says
" That shit is scary . They need to do something. " Then they climbed into their 2500 Ram truck and went to get lunch.
It was nice to get away. The facility where the show is held it's part of a 400-acre Veterans Memorial Park that was built in the late 1800s. Back when they had money for those kinds of big Public Works. It runs along a ridge right outside of town with four different lakes terraced down to the floor of the valley. The whole place is beautifully landscaped in a big way. There was obviously a landscape architect involved . The place is full of hundred-year-old black walnut trees, 80 ft spruce, enormous weeping willows, giant Sweetgum trees and best of all
these huge American Elm trees.
Most of the elm trees in this country we're decimated by the Dutch elm disease in the early 1900s.. It was a terrible loss. Elm trees were considered the very best Street tree. They've got small leaves and tend to not drop a lot of twigs so they're very easy maintenance. They have tall straight trunks, with no branching until you get up past the 30 to 40 ft mark. Then the branches will arch out 40 or 50 ft from there.
Plant a row of these on either side of a street 50 ft wide and they would Arch out and grow together over the middle of the street leaving it shaded and protected. This was really common in American cities.
Imagine that. Driving your carriage through long tunnels of shade. Going the places you needed to go.
I spent quite a bit of time riding my e-bike all over the park. It was good.
In Buffalo where I grew up, even streets in working class neighborhoods had those beautiful arches of elm trees. Sadly, today the old neighborhood is bleak and barren.
Adding: so far we’ve kept the crazies off the school board and city and county commission. Also, plenty of people are really offended by the vulgar anti-Biden flags. However if the prestige media thinks “liberals” where I live are just unfamiliar with Trumpies hooting and hollering and showing their big red asses to everyone, well, maybe they need to get outside the Ohio diners and talk to some *other* people who live there too.
I have a whole suitcase full of "Hey, now, that's just your inner Hitler talking" responses to all the trumped-up USian fascisti, but they don't come 'round here much...
A few years ago a friend, with whom I generally agree with in political matters, reacted to my statement that I thought the main driver of MAGA ideology and support of Trump was racism. He chided me, saying that I’m in a bubble and that there are honest conservatives who have concerns about government regulation and individual rights. He had been traveling through the South and Southwest, doing his own incidental Cletus safari (it wasn’t the purpose of the trip, just a vacation). He has changed his tune, which I am very glad of.
I had that argument once with a manager who was otherwise very rational.
"What percentage do you think are racist then? 40%? 60%?" He didn't have an answer b/c we both knew the answer was far higher than his thoughtful consideration of GOP voter-feelings actually merited.
It's clearly racism. I know from drinking with these guys for 40 years. Booze is truth serum. They say it out loud when they are lit, deny it before they've had too many.
yeah to a certain large extent it's a rural/urban divide, but really it's more an attitudinal one. the bubble is more prominent in the sticks because of its isolate condition. I've lived in both the most conservative of states---wyoming and western Virginia---and NYC. you can either be open and receptive to viewpoints opposed to your own, or choose to live in fear and denial of the possibility of the validity of other points of view. in the orbs, we're necessarily exposed to diverse lifestyles; no so much in the rural areas.
My wife periodically goes to a rural electric board meeting where half the members are eager to go to conventions in downtown Minneapolis, and the other half is convinced the place is Mogadishu by day and burned down nightly—even when told otherwise by people who were just there and enjoyed a Twins game.
Is anything more pathetic than the earnest efforts of media labeled “lame stream,” “fake news,” etc. to report sympathetically on the people who believe that? Professional ethics and simple human decency requires one to treat patients who don’t believe in vaccines, antibiotics, basic reproductive biology, but that doesn’t mean they should be treated as the “real” Americans whose opinions must be respected. Meanwhile, I’m trying (with variable success) to avoid calling MAGAs “nuts,” “crazy,” etc. out of deference to people with actual mental health issues. Nothing beats “wrong” or “lying” for covering the spectrum of their opinions.
Hearted for "I’m trying (with variable success) to avoid calling MAGAs “nuts,” “crazy,” etc. out of deference to people with actual mental health issues"
Tho I think there's plenty opportunity for confluence...
What gets ne is the deferential treatment reporters give to Rightwing nuts who are more than openly hostile to the very existence of the free press. "Even though Buddy-Bob threatened to kill me more than once during the course of the interview, and despite his brandishing a Glock every few minutes, his views about the lizard people taking over need to be addressed by serious liberals everywhere."
Tom Tomorrow had a bit about this: "Well this right-winger wants to murder me, but on the other hand, people on the left want me to do my job better", he did it funnier, of course.
"Meanwhile, I’m trying (with variable success) to avoid calling MAGAs 'nuts,' 'crazy,' etc. out of deference to people with actual mental health issues."
Good for you, but in my view a person with mental health issue is not "nuts." A nut is nuts. And these people are nuts. (They may have mental health issues coincidentally.)
As someone with mental health issues, I've got to agree with that. The MAGA nuts are not suffering from delusions or crippling anxiety* that leads to disordered thoughts and poor decisions. They are willfully shutting out evidence that anyone can see in service of their racism, sexism, and homophobia.
And it's not about cognitive ability, either. Anybody who can run his landscaping business well enough to afford a boat has all the cognitive ability anyone needs to function in the modern world. It's about deliberately turning OFF what cognition you have in select moments, because thinking would lead to conclusions you don't like.
I saw a documentary about those folks, there was definitely some turning off of the cognitive abilities when they said "yes" to a Rudy Giuliani press conference out front. But not so much right-wing fanaticism as "Gosh a candidate for President wants to use our property? How can we say no? It's such an honor!" And to be fair, they did sell a shitload of t-shirts out of the deal, so maybe their cognition was on the mark after all.
(Set-up info: I have a business that abbreviates to "B.A.S.S.")
If Rudy and Co. called me and said they wanted to do a press event in front of my business, I would leap at the chance! Not just because I might make bank on the rubes who would show up, but because I'd know that Rudy and his people are too stupid to know that my B.A.S.S. is NOT the Bass Angler's Sportsman Society. It would be too good an opportunity to yet again humiliate America's Mayo.
One of my more pathetic fantasies is to ask a ranting MAGA gasbag, "Would it matter to you if you were wrong? Just hyppothetically. If a trusted source assured you your opinion and 'facts' on this topic were wrong, would it matter? Would it cause you to change your position?"
I fully expect most of them would answer, "No." I think they'd see that (insupportable, absurd) stance as, not only owning the libs (and their precious "truth"), but bravely defying reality itself, in the service of what they'd think of as patriotism, but what I would (and do) think of as unprocessed resentment, self-pity, and dogged, proud lack of self-examination.
"We can't hand a win to the media" was what one of Trump's aides said in response to the question of whether the President should condemn the Jan. 6 mob violence. So yes, "I know this is wrong, but there's no way in hell you will ever get me to admit it publicly, because that might bring vindication to the people I hate."
I am relatively open to this viewpoint. But I also know most people saying "nuts" don't actually think this hard about it. It's just a slur for a lot of people.
As the person around here who probably does the most bitching about this, I appreciate it. I'd settle for people being more thoughtful about how they use the words, because yes, some people do have mental illnesses that cause them to go behave like, well, Trump.
But I've always thought the problem wasn't so much the people who are genuinely crazy, it's the ones who tell each other "take on the toughest guy in the yard" stories and then go out and act like the real world is a prison and they're gonna be the boss.
Is Trump really crazy in some way? Possibly. Is he also a spoiled, over-indulged, bullying asshole who has discovered he can get his way by acting crazy? Oh yes. Is there any treatment that could make him less that way? Probably not. So fuck it. He self-IDs as sane, so I'm gonna call him a selfish fucking asshole who cosplays as a sociopath because Americans have generally been abused into authoritarianism and it works.
This is slightly complicated by the fact that I am legitimately crazy, and we don't all agree on the utility of words like "insane". Most of us think crazy and insane are a lost cause, and are just focusing on the jerks trying to make everyone with BPD into a lying whore so no one believes them.
Precision helps though. And telling ourselves that someone's mentally ill too often goes into "Well, they can't help it," or "we should lock up the mentally ill people", two attitudes I see side by side a lot more often than I'd be comfortable with if anyone knew my legal name.
Sorry, I'm in pain, depressed, and bitchy. I meant that to all be me praising you for your insight.
A doctor I respect once told a patient within my hearing, "This medication will control your [diagnosed mental illness], but it won't make you less of an asshole. That's on you."
You're a better person than they deserve. Because there is no way they should be doubting your expertise, especially when you are bound by oath to *help* them. Instead, a bunch of yahoos go get on Al Gore's Internet, find some made-up shit, and bring it in to you as if it's equivalent.
Recently got my doctor to briefly furrow his brow when, before discussing my MRI results, I said to him "I've done my own research and discovered that I actually need a trained medical professional to interpret this thing."
The word you're looking for is "irrational", a symptom of mental health issues but not the thing itself. Wrong doesn't do their fantasies justice, and its not a lie if you believe it, sort of. I do agree that calling followers of MAGA "nuts" or its variations is unfair slander of people with mental health issues.
I beg to disagree: I think many of them rationally reach bad conclusions using a combination of bad data (facts and how the world works) and bad values (their 'good' is often our 'bad', e.g. my hobby-horse of their preferring vicarious enjoyment of The Leader's absolute freedom of action to their own civil liberties).
I guess you're using the more formal definition of "rational", which I am too lazy to look up. By that standard its rational to believe in mass voter fraud and Democrat-run global pedophile rings, since people on TV and the Internet have "evidence" its true. Fair enough.
Their "good" is whatever makes them feel comfortable now, and they believe their civil liberties are inviolate because they are Real Americans. Trump is only going after Those people, not them, so as honest people they have nothing to fear.
If you understand nothing else about conservatives, understand this: They're now well beyond half a century of being wrong about everything all the time, and having that wrongness demonstrated very publicly at every turn. Whether it's "tax cuts pay for themselves" or "invading Iraq will be a cakewalk" or "teaching abstinence-only will reduce teen pregnancy" or "Ivermectin cures covid," whatever principle they've pushed has turned out to be catastrophically wrong.
This has made conservatives feel that liberals are always looking down on them, laughing at them, and holding them in great contempt. Their response has been two-pronged: Become ever more vicious and ruthless, and build an information bubble so that the reality of being wrong all the time can be "corrected."
Thus do we come to Republicans ham-handedly editing footage of Biden speaking. They say he's senile, reality says he's not--so to make sure reality doesn't show them to be wrong again, reality has to be "corrected" to make them right.
Adding: I would not be surprised to see Fox News running colorized photos of Berlin or Dresden in 1945 and claiming the photos were taken in New York city or Chicago last week.
Lawyers Guns& Money, a blog of mixed regard here at REBID. I read it regularly, but the comments can be tedious, but the main pagers can write some really good posts and there are some commenters who I like. Derelict is one of the ones whose comments are worth reading.
It's true, faced with the prospect of gay marriage, they go with "Will destroy America" instead of "Will make many people happy and cause absolutely no harm to anyone else." When faced with Covid for the first time, they chose "Will be over by April" over "Will kill more than a million Americans." Sorry, wrong again, Conservatives!
I swear, if you tried to design an algorithm that would give you the 100% guaranteed-wrong answer to every question, you couldn't do worse than American Conservatism. A monkey flipping a coin would be right more often than these people.
Always wrong in the most spectacular ways. And more than willing to double-down rather than admit to being wrong.
More than 60 years ago, Ronald Reagan said that something like Medicare would destroy America and enslave us all. Republicans still believe that, and even their own lived experiences cannot change that belief. I have listened in dumbstruck awe as geezers who have received tens of thousands of dollars in free medical care decry Medicare as a threat to America's work ethic and creeping socialism.
Mostly they just shrug it off and go on to being totally wrong about the next new thing. But that has to weigh on you, over time, that backlog of wrong opinions that you avoid talking about now. "Oh, yeah, I was a big fan of King, and that "Content of their character" thing you betcha!" The constant lying, especially to yourself, must have an effect.
I suspect that a large percentage of elderly Republicans really believe that the Medicare Supplemental plan they bought is covering the full freight of their medical costs: "The government didn't pay for my operation, look, I payed for it myself, $100 a month!" In a way, it's understandable, the supplemental plan sends them a bill every month in the mail, while Medicare premium gets subtracted automatically from their Social Security, so Medicare picks up 90% of the costs without attracting much notice, especially when you really, really don't want to notice.
An America in which people don't die of being poor in old age nearly as often as they used to do, and most of the rest of us are rightly afraid of such, is in fact a different America. They, or at least their Social Darwinist cadres, consider this a terrible divergence from its being 'natural and kind', that is 'acting like the sort of animal itʼs supposed to be' .
What they want is a land where the poor rely on Christian charity. This allows them to coerce the poor into "believing " the religious claptrap. Refuse to say you love Jesus and Pat Robertson? Go starve!
I think I see your point, and maybe so, but our life expectancy over the last few years is sinking like a Russian warship . And it's been so since well before Covid. What we're doing is normalizing high rates of sickness and shortening lifespans.
I must admit that I do think of them contemptuously, at which point at my best I remember that that they, like any mugger, con-man, or storm-trooper got that way for reasons, quite often those reasons are abuse, and the goals are 0.) to limit the damage they can do and 1.) is to have fewer people mistreated into being people like them.
… which the clichéd, stupid, cultural relativist in my head automatically denounces as 'genocide'.
Like all conservative perversions of plain English, sure, let's add bubble.
Everyone has biases. The question or issue is whether reality can get through.
The GOP voters in the heartland support elected officials whose responses to Covid were literally murderous. Problem for those people? Not at all. I'll submit that if Democrat pols were responding like Trump on down did and have, liberals would let's say adjust their biases. Whatever they'd do, adhering to their biases, or staying within the bubble, by and by is not what they'd do.
So, you know, there's biases and there's biases.
As for the media, they provided a real public service back in that anomalous civil rights/Vietnam/Watergate era when reporting was fairly honest. Then, Blacks had issues, Vietnam was an abomination and failure, and Tricky Dick was an unfit piece of shit. Now we have pretty much the opposite: Civil rights is, what? a nothing burger? Nothing the military does is wrong -- killing civilians is fine, Richard Engel gets bitchy because we choose not to continue the military shit show in Afghanistan, and there's nothing wrong with the GOP other than Donnie. (See, again, Covid.) This lack of mainstream honesty has done and is ever doing real harm to the nation; the mainstream is fully complicit in the nation's continuing decline since the 80s. Indeed, 60s/70s-style reporting would be the proper response to eliminating or at least greatly reducing bubbles.
That said, behind the bubbles of the conservatives is the reality of what they want, which is small government, which is what they elect, and what they're getting. So, you know, in that sense, their bubbles aren't all that important, but the inability of libs to see that because of their bubbles is a problem, maybe a bigger one.
"the reality of what they want, which is small government, which is what they elect, and what they're getting..."
Oh, but they're NOT getting it. The size of the federal government grew under Trump, as it always does under every President, Republican or Democrat. That's what enrages them, when are they finally gonna get a guy who has the guts to fire half the federal workforce? If even Trump couldn't do it, what do we need, President Steve Bannon?
Yeah, but that's the *good* government, persecuting the queers and the sluts and the non-whites. I mean, a good part of my city's budget is spent on cops, and they hate paying taxes but man do they think we need more cops in Seattle.
The persecution budget - especially ICE - did go up under Trump, but what didn't happen was any major reduction in the non-persecuting parts of the budget. Republican voters have been told for decades that, right off the bat, any Republican President should abolish the Department of Education. And yet that didn't happen, even while Republican held the trifecta. Yes, the Dept. got turned into a fund for Christian grifters under Betsy DeVos, but that's not what the base was promised, and they're pissed, and it feeds all their paranoia about a Deep State uncontrollable even by the President.
Look to the size of the federal workforce in ~1968, when there were fewer than 200 million citizens. Roughy 2.8 million on the payroll. Now look to the workforce circa 2020. Still ~ 2.8 million, but about 330 million citizens. (Sure, leaves out the private contractors but that is not the point here. Federal payroll is the primary cost of federal gummint.) The Hurricane Whisperer was just another in a long line of payroll slashers...
But that's not what they want, is it? To have some gradual decrease in the relative size of the federal government due to inflation and population growth? Can't see that fitting on the bumper of my F-350. What they want - what they have ALWAYS wanted - is some guy to go all Chainsaw Al Dunlap on the whole fucking thing. And what they got is Government By Continuing Resolution, when the whole federal budget from last year mostly gets rubber-stamped into the next year. Not the revolution they asked for, and it absolutely enrages them, it's why they hate most Republicans in Congress almost as much as they hate the Democrats (they've got a lot of hate to go around.)
After four years of Trump, and two years of total Republican control, it astonishes me that we still have a National Endowment of the Arts and a National Science Foundation. Not because they love the Arts and Sciences, oh no, but mostly because they just couldn't be bothered. Like civilization was saved by pure laziness.
Agencies live budget-to-budget just as people/families live paycheck-to-paycheck., with the caveat that if you don't spend all your money from this year's budget you have to turn the extra back in to the Treasury. And budgets are made up a couple years in advance, so when something like COVID happens Congress can't afford to be obstructive despite the rhetoric.
So some "drain the swamper" MAGA gets to DC and finds that he and the eleven thousand voters that sent him there don't mean jack nor shit at the actual power level. So he makes noise and stunts that endear him to the media and to the folks back home, while getting placed on the Looking Out The Window Committee to keep him out of the way while real work gets done.
I think Trump's first budget submitted had lots of cuts and even eliminations of whole government agencies, Congress just ignored it and passed an adjusted copy of the previous year's budget. After that, I don't think they even bothered to try, Trump certainly didn't care (but "didn't care" is after all his default setting.)
FFS, it’s not the literal size it’s the power. Check out the OSHA and EPA decisions as well as the recent gun control and electoral bills -- indeed, even the ACA -- where the feds cede power to the states. For that matter, the Covid response as a nationwide response to a global pandemic has been a failure up to this very moment.
Yes, lots of changes through the courts to limit federal regulatory power. And was that what the Republican base was promised? No, they were told the whole government is useless, you could shut it all down (excepting the cops and military) and we'd all be fine, here's a list of four cabinet-level agencies I promise to shut down, even if I can only remember three of them. It's the mismatch between the scale of their desires and the scale of the actual change that infuriates them (along with about a thousand other things that infuriate them.)
And I think you might be misreading my comment - and not for the first time - as "Don't worry, everything's fine!"
If I misread it, it’s that GOP base isn’t or hasn’t been getting what they want. They clearly are. We should be so lucky. Then again, last time we got we wanted we did pretty much nothing to keep it. The GOP, by destroying democracy, is ensuring that they won’t have that problem. (Could be wrong there; time will tell.)
"If I misread it, it’s that GOP base isn’t or hasn’t been getting what they want."
Yes, that's the misreading, right there. Your original quote: "small government, which is what they elect, and what they're getting..."
"Getting what they want" in terms of banning abortion isn't getting "small government." Lots of wins for them on the culture-war front thanks to the Supreme Court, but an actual program of shrinking the size of the federal government isn't something the Republican party even tried to do under Trump.
I actually made no reference to abortion. What I did refer to was the administrative state being weakened and the groundwork for major reductions being laid. I also noted how it’s being done by SCOTUS.
Or as Jonathan Swan notes over at Axios, the secret is to flood the careerist zone with our own careerists and change the game to one unwinnable by the old rules.
There's some cheese log calls himself something like Lucious Moldbug with a scheme to get rid of government by "retiring" the entire federal civil service. The Trump brain trust is running with it to develop an Executive Order when they get control. I've said before if he gets back there will be no "adults in the room" bullshit, this is just a taste of the Krakken-releasing in store.
I like this -- and it's something we've always sensed, if not known outright. The whole idea of MAGA is a bubble around reality & history, a place where diversity & tough questions are filtered out. This is the essence of the odela-rune* sometimes seen on fascist paraphenalia: a lost 'homeland' where everything was perfect & happy until... mumble mumble whatever happened...
In this way, the basic plot of the MCU miniseries "WandaVision" could not be more relevant: trauma leads to a bubble of sequestration, literalized as pop culture nostalgia. Just because the traumas of the MAGAkin are more Traum than reality doesn't make them any less dangerous, as we are seeing.
* Fun Bonus GM Fact: the odela rune (pronounced 'ethel' in Old English) never meant 'homeland' in the sense that modern people have taken it. 19th century philologists started saying that. The more likely meaning is 'estate' or 'backyard' (as I like to say).
Hear, hear and well put. The right wing Bubble -- more like a cast-iron bathysphere mired in its own ooze but that's a mouthful -- has been impenetrably insane since the day Rush Limbaugh's backers realized there was good money in taking it national. Traditional media, for all of its spelunking in Heartland Diners, has always underestimated the power of right-wing radio and the Fox echo-system, and its role in the creation and maintenance of the grievance and hate we're afflicted with. Trump voters aren't big readers of the Times and WaPost, so they'll never know that Bret Stephens has renounced his former condescension to embrace them unless they hear it on Fox and Friends. This all makes liberal and conservative obsessions with dueling op-eds kind of pointless in the long run, when Trump gained more voters in 2020 then he started with. What I wonder about is where is the liberal equivalent of the non-stop right-wing event tours -- from grifter high school graduate Charlie Kirk's Turning Point to Save/Revive/Restore/America to CPAC -- that not only creates local buzz but gets picked up and blasted through mainstream news -- yet another right-wing Bubble blast that goes unanswered.
"where is the liberal equivalent of the non-stop right-wing event tours"
Behind every event like that is a billionaire happy to pay the bills. Not so many liberal billionaires willing to spend their money on that sort of thing (right-wing paranoia about George Soros aside.) Liberals get their money from individual donors (especially now that we're the party of the educated professional elites, doncha know) and individual liberal donors give to Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and lots and lots of individual candidates. But not so much to liberal think-tanks and the Battle of Ideas.
See now, this whole segmenting-us-into-national-bodyparts needs more thought. I'm getting a much more 'Ruptured Spleen Diner' vibe. There's probly more to it than that – surely the Pacific Northwest is the 'Cold Shoulder', and Mississippi: the 'National Appendix', maybe.
I’m not going to spend any time trying to find the full quote in which the following phrase is contained, but what the hell did Cox mean by “fourteen days to bend the curve”?
At the very beginning, there was talk of people just not fucking giving each other covid for long enough to bring cases down so the hospitals weren't overwhelmed with refrigerated morgue trucks and beds in the hallways and nurses working hand-operated ventilators.
It would have been a lovely thing. Instead, people still ended up wearing masks, so obviously that was just weird witch doctor thinking and we should never try to stop a pandemic again.
Like, half the people I hate right now aren't going "Covid isn't real." They're going "Covid is real, nothing we can do about it, I guess you'll just have to die." They do the same thing with climate change, mass shootings, and all the rest of it. (To be fair, the other half of them are absolutely denying the existence.)
Yeah, that's the other, admittedly more prominent, half. But a good chunk of them legitimately think covid is only killing useless eaters, so even if they could cure it without having to actually do anything, like wear a mask in a fucking doctor's office, they wouldn't.
God, I'm so tired of that. If losing weight worked like these assholes think it does, people wouldn't still be fat. If fucking millionaires can't manage to lose weight and have to keep doing diet programs--and diet commercials--then it's obviously not as easy as "eat less and exercise more".
I know people need to come up with a reason they're safe from the uncertainty of the world, especially with two global pandemics going on, but if you're gonna tell yourself Just So stories about why Only Bad People get sick, stop pretending you give a shit about reality.
I think I recall that when were first had a general shutdown where you were supposed to stay home unless you were an essential worker, that was presented at first as "two weeks to bend the curve" - as you describe. But then it went on for a long time and assholes started protesting because they couldn't get haircuts, and then they started claiming it was all a like from the beginning.
I believe Fauci said that if everyone got the vaccine, it would take 14 days to flatten the Covid transmission curve. Much like the 2nd Amendment, the right wingers leave out the first clause
I keep thinking about the young true-believers who wound up testifying live at the hearings. (I was that young once, if never that crisply turned out.) From the moment they stood and took the oath, they were dead men & women walking, at least professionally. They are cast into the political wilderness for the audacity of growing a conscience, and speaking out about same.
They weren't yokels in the diner on State Routes 5&20. They were inside the belly of the beast, and doing their damnedest to help Trump right up to the second they weren't. So what changed on January 6th? Matthew Pottinger looked like he hasn't had any sleep since then.
Watching in real time, I was sorry for what they're going through. The loneliness and sense of coming unarmored must be horrific At the same time I kept yelling at the screen, "What were you thinking for all that time before today?"
The yahoos will happily die of covid, because they're so far down the rabbit hole. Hell, they'll start murdering their neighbors if they get the go-ahead. The committee witnesses are the ones who should have known better. They had the advantages of education, and years of experience with the real Donald Trump.
I wonder if they regret the decision to turn on Trump. The mass of his followers, with and without real political power are going to stick with him to the bitter end.
Sarah Matthews assured us that she had supported Trump all along, "for all the things he did for our country." That's what got me yelling "NAME ONE" at my TV. Seriously, what was it, the wall? Attempted repeal of Obamacare? I'd be willing to drive out to a diner in Ohio if one of these Reasonable Republicans would tell me ONE positive accomplishment that made it all worth it. (Yeah, I suppose it was the tax cuts, lowering the top marginal rate from 39% to 35% meant ALL THE WORLD to them.)
I'm not a Dungeons&Dragons person, but I know of Lawful Evil. In real life, people with that alignment almost never care about lawlessness if it's confined to the right Wrong People, but if it's on a formal stage in what until recently was a white male preserve anything against The Niceties….
I mean, sure, now there're some women and dark people there now, but _here_ are the seats from which Sens. McCarthy and Bilbo spoke…here is room where rural 'drys' delayed reäpportionment for eight years in the 'Twenties, there where Truman' s national health plan was killed. Pay some respect to the System, many others wouldn't have elected Trump _once_.
Good article. What's also odd to me is the conservative miniature bubbles (champagne bubbles?) in blue states like mine. While ineptitude and corruption may exist in public projects, people don't realize how good they have it on the whole because liberals are in charge. The Trump signs, sporadic in my neighborhood, are proof.
Oh ya, it was horrible don’t’cha know! We stopped at the SuperAmerica and they was totally out of those little marshmallows for the green jell-o salad Mabel was making for the church potluck. Well, that was enough for us! We assumed the whole city got burnt down, so we high-tailed it home and haven’t been out since!
I was once in a diversity workshop with a guy who told the horrifying tale of driving through Chicago, heard what he thought was a gunshot, and then instantly assumed it was aimed at him because he was White. Seriously, that was his story.
I nearly got a bullet through my head one night, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't because I was white. It was because *my house was behind the trees and someone was firing into the air*.
White dudes are so proud of how they aren't afraid of guns.
Hearted for the white dudes' pride...Guns are stupid-making.
I was in my truck, patrolling a large rural property when I came upon an unfamiliar truck headed toward me on the narrow road. I pulled over and stopped to let it pass. The driver slowed and inched up opposite me, like neighbors might if stopping to say hello. I said hi. He had the barrel of a rifle under his arm, resting on the frame of the window, the muzzle pointed right at me. I said "Don't point that thing at me." He apparently decided I was OK and slowly pulled it away from the window. We introduced ourselves and explained why we were there, to show our legitimacy, and that was that.
Guy ran a gun range and seemed to like taking his business along with him...
On the other hand, I was pumpin' my bicycle tire usin' the compressor at some little gas station down south when BANG! I blew it up...next thing there's a guy runnin' out the station with his gun wavin'...maybe he thought I was aimin' the bicycle at him...
Yes, it's true, liberals like me did say Trump was a fascist, and what did we do about it? 1) We encouraged people to vote in the 2018 midterms to provide a Congress that could act as a check on his fascism 2) When evidence came to light that Trump tried to muscle a foreign leader into investigating his political opponents, we encouraged that same Congress to impeach him. When that impeachment died in the Senate, we shook our heads in disappointment, and wrote angry letters to the editor. If "Send an armed mob to the capitol to murder Republicans" was on the list of responses, I guess I didn't get the invite.
I adore the "so you won't listen to people you disagree with" people. Dude. I spent a good part of last night convinced I'm not depressed and am in fact just lazy because other people think I should just go for a jog or try shrooms. "Do you ever think you might be wrong and other people might be right, though?" Fuck off. I'm convinced everybody's more right than I am. The thing is, you can't navigate life open to every fucking useless opinion someone wants to waste your time with. That way lies Amway, Christianity, and also abuse.
So I got very, very good at finding people with more discernment--better bubbles--than me. And I listen to them. Why in the name of fuck should anyone listen to every silly goddamned idea someone they don't know has? Especially when those people have in no way shown themselves to be experts on the subject matter or even vaguely sensible?
You call it a bubble. I call it "not letting trolls waste my time to get themselves off".
Haven't these people heard we're now livin' in the attention-based economy? Sure, I'll listen, my going rate is $20 a minute. Now share your views on how climate change is a hoax, I'll set the timer.
"The thing is, you can't navigate life open to every fucking useless opinion someone wants to waste your time with. That way lies Amway, Christianity, and also abuse."
2 marks, at least...
"Amway, Christianity and abuse" is right up there with "Rum , sodomy and the lash" in my pantheon of triads.
"Rum , sodomy and the lash" just reminds me of that quote from Major Kong in Dr. Strangelove: "Heck, a fella could have a pretty good time in Vegas with all that stuff."
That was my first eye-opener way back when I spent a year outside the northeast for the first time. I was stunned people took Amway seriously. I remember I said to my boss "but it's clearly bullshit" And he launched into a full-throated defense of it. All I could think was that I'm working for an idiot.
I don’t think anyone needs to listen to their day-to-day grievances and engage with them, but legitimate media and the Democrats should strive to understand where those grievances are coming from, i.e. their manufactured nature, and their real grievances that they are unable or unwilling to articulate. Approaching it from that perspective is far more interesting and could conceivably make a difference, unlike the typical response you so ably critique.
Yes, you identify the cure for the MAGA cult disease. The MAGA grift involves turning the self-identified group's real problems to false causes (scapegoated other groups and themselves, their own weakness). The proper response is accurate information. Unfortunately brain chemistry makes it easier to use fear of loss and pin the problems on readily-identified villains with simplistic historical narratives already attached to them. Anecdotes and lies are often easier than statistics and data analysis.
Bernie Sanders gets re-elected despite the fact his voting constituents are largely enthralled to the right-wing propaganda of popular media (e.g., talk radio). He has to reiterate the facts and the policy approaches, and, I have heard, a lot of the voters still tend to revert after he goes away because the right-wing narrative is easier, ubiquitous, and more appealing psychologically.
Well, you identify the deeper cause of the problem. Yes, the propagandists use brain chemistry against the more vulnerable. And although I agree that accurate information is important, I think brain chemistry has to be taken account in the ways in which we deliver accurate information, which is to say we should use anger and fear about what the Republicans are doing to re-alter the brain chemistry of the converted.
Yeah. Time for the Love It or Leave It crowd to follow their own advice. I keep returning to this simple list of admonishments:
"Don't like the gummint? Then stop breathing our clean(ish) air. Stop drinking our clean water. Stop driving on our public roads. Stop listening to the radio transmitted 'cross our public airwaves. Stop working at the publicly-funded defense plant. Git yer ass outta our national parks. Oh, and that social security – give it all back."
There's plenty more to add but it's Monday and my life won't live itself, so I gotta go do it...
'you must be joking! I've earned these things by virtue of being a Real American!'
ie, white
Reminds me of the Craig T. Nelson quote about how he grew up poor, "We were on foodstamps, nobody helped us" (arguing that poor folks today expect too much help.)
I am surrounded by their bubble
It's nothing new. I'm sure I had a " I'm surrounded by idiots " moment when I was 10 or 11. I still have moments where I feel like folks on the left are just now catching on.
I was out amongst the rabble this weekend at a Horse Show in Central Indiana. I'll be honest- they didn't seem very roused. I was at the show at the same facility in August 2016 and the place was lousy with Trump. Somebody made a fortune selling the Rubes those cheesy flags. This year nothing. There was one little kid in an NRA shirt.
We have crazy letters to the editor, crazy candidates for local office, Trump flags around town, and a “Fuck Joe Biden” flag on a crane out by the lake where thousands of families come each week to enjoy the state park. So is the prestige media actually wrong? No, no it is I who am out of touch.
It was hot at the horse show. Which, duh, Midwest in July. Didn't stop folks from demonstrating their oh so very Astute Grasp of the Obvious by saying " Sure is hot" to one another every few minutes.
Two guys were talking next to me in the horse barn. One says " Sure is hot." The other says " Yeah that global warming-" The first guy says
" That shit is scary . They need to do something. " Then they climbed into their 2500 Ram truck and went to get lunch.
At least they didn't deny it was happening.
Sorry for not asking! But I'm sure you had a good time, poignant anecdote notwithstanding.
It was nice to get away. The facility where the show is held it's part of a 400-acre Veterans Memorial Park that was built in the late 1800s. Back when they had money for those kinds of big Public Works. It runs along a ridge right outside of town with four different lakes terraced down to the floor of the valley. The whole place is beautifully landscaped in a big way. There was obviously a landscape architect involved . The place is full of hundred-year-old black walnut trees, 80 ft spruce, enormous weeping willows, giant Sweetgum trees and best of all
these huge American Elm trees.
Most of the elm trees in this country we're decimated by the Dutch elm disease in the early 1900s.. It was a terrible loss. Elm trees were considered the very best Street tree. They've got small leaves and tend to not drop a lot of twigs so they're very easy maintenance. They have tall straight trunks, with no branching until you get up past the 30 to 40 ft mark. Then the branches will arch out 40 or 50 ft from there.
Plant a row of these on either side of a street 50 ft wide and they would Arch out and grow together over the middle of the street leaving it shaded and protected. This was really common in American cities.
Imagine that. Driving your carriage through long tunnels of shade. Going the places you needed to go.
I spent quite a bit of time riding my e-bike all over the park. It was good.
In Buffalo where I grew up, even streets in working class neighborhoods had those beautiful arches of elm trees. Sadly, today the old neighborhood is bleak and barren.
Adding: so far we’ve kept the crazies off the school board and city and county commission. Also, plenty of people are really offended by the vulgar anti-Biden flags. However if the prestige media thinks “liberals” where I live are just unfamiliar with Trumpies hooting and hollering and showing their big red asses to everyone, well, maybe they need to get outside the Ohio diners and talk to some *other* people who live there too.
I have a whole suitcase full of "Hey, now, that's just your inner Hitler talking" responses to all the trumped-up USian fascisti, but they don't come 'round here much...
A few years ago a friend, with whom I generally agree with in political matters, reacted to my statement that I thought the main driver of MAGA ideology and support of Trump was racism. He chided me, saying that I’m in a bubble and that there are honest conservatives who have concerns about government regulation and individual rights. He had been traveling through the South and Southwest, doing his own incidental Cletus safari (it wasn’t the purpose of the trip, just a vacation). He has changed his tune, which I am very glad of.
I had that argument once with a manager who was otherwise very rational.
"What percentage do you think are racist then? 40%? 60%?" He didn't have an answer b/c we both knew the answer was far higher than his thoughtful consideration of GOP voter-feelings actually merited.
I'll be that guy: they're so racist they *changed parties* when the Democrats started accepting Black people.
"Cheney, party of 2."
"Cheney, party of 1."
"Cheney...Cheney?"
It's clearly racism. I know from drinking with these guys for 40 years. Booze is truth serum. They say it out loud when they are lit, deny it before they've had too many.
Yup.
They're not sure which flag to buy, yet.
Well it sure as shit won't be Camembert!
Confederate or Nazi? This is a time for that "Why not both?" meme.
yeah to a certain large extent it's a rural/urban divide, but really it's more an attitudinal one. the bubble is more prominent in the sticks because of its isolate condition. I've lived in both the most conservative of states---wyoming and western Virginia---and NYC. you can either be open and receptive to viewpoints opposed to your own, or choose to live in fear and denial of the possibility of the validity of other points of view. in the orbs, we're necessarily exposed to diverse lifestyles; no so much in the rural areas.
My wife periodically goes to a rural electric board meeting where half the members are eager to go to conventions in downtown Minneapolis, and the other half is convinced the place is Mogadishu by day and burned down nightly—even when told otherwise by people who were just there and enjoyed a Twins game.
Hey, Minneapolis is ground zero of the BLM Armageddon, doncha know!
And 1st in the AL Central!
Diversity is our Strength
Is anything more pathetic than the earnest efforts of media labeled “lame stream,” “fake news,” etc. to report sympathetically on the people who believe that? Professional ethics and simple human decency requires one to treat patients who don’t believe in vaccines, antibiotics, basic reproductive biology, but that doesn’t mean they should be treated as the “real” Americans whose opinions must be respected. Meanwhile, I’m trying (with variable success) to avoid calling MAGAs “nuts,” “crazy,” etc. out of deference to people with actual mental health issues. Nothing beats “wrong” or “lying” for covering the spectrum of their opinions.
Hearted for "I’m trying (with variable success) to avoid calling MAGAs “nuts,” “crazy,” etc. out of deference to people with actual mental health issues"
Tho I think there's plenty opportunity for confluence...
What gets ne is the deferential treatment reporters give to Rightwing nuts who are more than openly hostile to the very existence of the free press. "Even though Buddy-Bob threatened to kill me more than once during the course of the interview, and despite his brandishing a Glock every few minutes, his views about the lizard people taking over need to be addressed by serious liberals everywhere."
Tom Tomorrow had a bit about this: "Well this right-winger wants to murder me, but on the other hand, people on the left want me to do my job better", he did it funnier, of course.
"Meanwhile, I’m trying (with variable success) to avoid calling MAGAs 'nuts,' 'crazy,' etc. out of deference to people with actual mental health issues."
Good for you, but in my view a person with mental health issue is not "nuts." A nut is nuts. And these people are nuts. (They may have mental health issues coincidentally.)
As someone with mental health issues, I've got to agree with that. The MAGA nuts are not suffering from delusions or crippling anxiety* that leads to disordered thoughts and poor decisions. They are willfully shutting out evidence that anyone can see in service of their racism, sexism, and homophobia.
*except the economic kind, of course
And it's not about cognitive ability, either. Anybody who can run his landscaping business well enough to afford a boat has all the cognitive ability anyone needs to function in the modern world. It's about deliberately turning OFF what cognition you have in select moments, because thinking would lead to conclusions you don't like.
Four Seasons Reprise is always welcome...
I saw a documentary about those folks, there was definitely some turning off of the cognitive abilities when they said "yes" to a Rudy Giuliani press conference out front. But not so much right-wing fanaticism as "Gosh a candidate for President wants to use our property? How can we say no? It's such an honor!" And to be fair, they did sell a shitload of t-shirts out of the deal, so maybe their cognition was on the mark after all.
(Set-up info: I have a business that abbreviates to "B.A.S.S.")
If Rudy and Co. called me and said they wanted to do a press event in front of my business, I would leap at the chance! Not just because I might make bank on the rubes who would show up, but because I'd know that Rudy and his people are too stupid to know that my B.A.S.S. is NOT the Bass Angler's Sportsman Society. It would be too good an opportunity to yet again humiliate America's Mayo.
One of my more pathetic fantasies is to ask a ranting MAGA gasbag, "Would it matter to you if you were wrong? Just hyppothetically. If a trusted source assured you your opinion and 'facts' on this topic were wrong, would it matter? Would it cause you to change your position?"
I fully expect most of them would answer, "No." I think they'd see that (insupportable, absurd) stance as, not only owning the libs (and their precious "truth"), but bravely defying reality itself, in the service of what they'd think of as patriotism, but what I would (and do) think of as unprocessed resentment, self-pity, and dogged, proud lack of self-examination.
"We can't hand a win to the media" was what one of Trump's aides said in response to the question of whether the President should condemn the Jan. 6 mob violence. So yes, "I know this is wrong, but there's no way in hell you will ever get me to admit it publicly, because that might bring vindication to the people I hate."
They say no. They say they're not wrong, so you can't prove it.
People who have never considered the possibility that they are wrong scare the shit out of me.
I am relatively open to this viewpoint. But I also know most people saying "nuts" don't actually think this hard about it. It's just a slur for a lot of people.
As the person around here who probably does the most bitching about this, I appreciate it. I'd settle for people being more thoughtful about how they use the words, because yes, some people do have mental illnesses that cause them to go behave like, well, Trump.
But I've always thought the problem wasn't so much the people who are genuinely crazy, it's the ones who tell each other "take on the toughest guy in the yard" stories and then go out and act like the real world is a prison and they're gonna be the boss.
Is Trump really crazy in some way? Possibly. Is he also a spoiled, over-indulged, bullying asshole who has discovered he can get his way by acting crazy? Oh yes. Is there any treatment that could make him less that way? Probably not. So fuck it. He self-IDs as sane, so I'm gonna call him a selfish fucking asshole who cosplays as a sociopath because Americans have generally been abused into authoritarianism and it works.
This is slightly complicated by the fact that I am legitimately crazy, and we don't all agree on the utility of words like "insane". Most of us think crazy and insane are a lost cause, and are just focusing on the jerks trying to make everyone with BPD into a lying whore so no one believes them.
Precision helps though. And telling ourselves that someone's mentally ill too often goes into "Well, they can't help it," or "we should lock up the mentally ill people", two attitudes I see side by side a lot more often than I'd be comfortable with if anyone knew my legal name.
Sorry, I'm in pain, depressed, and bitchy. I meant that to all be me praising you for your insight.
A doctor I respect once told a patient within my hearing, "This medication will control your [diagnosed mental illness], but it won't make you less of an asshole. That's on you."
Ask your doctor if "Stop being such a fucking douchebag" is right for you.
This unexpected insight is a gift, thanks.
Come for the incisive commentary, stay for the free medical advice!
You're a better person than they deserve. Because there is no way they should be doubting your expertise, especially when you are bound by oath to *help* them. Instead, a bunch of yahoos go get on Al Gore's Internet, find some made-up shit, and bring it in to you as if it's equivalent.
Recently got my doctor to briefly furrow his brow when, before discussing my MRI results, I said to him "I've done my own research and discovered that I actually need a trained medical professional to interpret this thing."
Ah, the brow furrough of professionalism...
The word you're looking for is "irrational", a symptom of mental health issues but not the thing itself. Wrong doesn't do their fantasies justice, and its not a lie if you believe it, sort of. I do agree that calling followers of MAGA "nuts" or its variations is unfair slander of people with mental health issues.
I beg to disagree: I think many of them rationally reach bad conclusions using a combination of bad data (facts and how the world works) and bad values (their 'good' is often our 'bad', e.g. my hobby-horse of their preferring vicarious enjoyment of The Leader's absolute freedom of action to their own civil liberties).
I guess you're using the more formal definition of "rational", which I am too lazy to look up. By that standard its rational to believe in mass voter fraud and Democrat-run global pedophile rings, since people on TV and the Internet have "evidence" its true. Fair enough.
Their "good" is whatever makes them feel comfortable now, and they believe their civil liberties are inviolate because they are Real Americans. Trump is only going after Those people, not them, so as honest people they have nothing to fear.
rational, noun
All for me, rations for y'all.
Cross-posted from LGM:
If you understand nothing else about conservatives, understand this: They're now well beyond half a century of being wrong about everything all the time, and having that wrongness demonstrated very publicly at every turn. Whether it's "tax cuts pay for themselves" or "invading Iraq will be a cakewalk" or "teaching abstinence-only will reduce teen pregnancy" or "Ivermectin cures covid," whatever principle they've pushed has turned out to be catastrophically wrong.
This has made conservatives feel that liberals are always looking down on them, laughing at them, and holding them in great contempt. Their response has been two-pronged: Become ever more vicious and ruthless, and build an information bubble so that the reality of being wrong all the time can be "corrected."
Thus do we come to Republicans ham-handedly editing footage of Biden speaking. They say he's senile, reality says he's not--so to make sure reality doesn't show them to be wrong again, reality has to be "corrected" to make them right.
Adding: I would not be surprised to see Fox News running colorized photos of Berlin or Dresden in 1945 and claiming the photos were taken in New York city or Chicago last week.
The doctored and/or wrongly attributed photos have been already seen, but just posts from more "lone wolf" propagandists.
One may lie with layout! (Also the "streets aflame" photo is doctored.) https://twitter.com/edroso/status/1395780472530210816
Lie down with layout, wake up with typos!
Better that than waking with Flea.
Flea would be better than Anthony Kiedis
'Yabba dabba, yabba-dabba-doo now!'
Actually, these days Kiedis looks like he's preparing to cut Torgo's hand off.
Sublime. What’s LGM?
Lawyers Guns, and Money. Google lawyersgunsmoneyblog.
Lawyers Guns& Money, a blog of mixed regard here at REBID. I read it regularly, but the comments can be tedious, but the main pagers can write some really good posts and there are some commenters who I like. Derelict is one of the ones whose comments are worth reading.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2HH7J-Sx80
Warren Zevon, an excitable lad...
It's true, faced with the prospect of gay marriage, they go with "Will destroy America" instead of "Will make many people happy and cause absolutely no harm to anyone else." When faced with Covid for the first time, they chose "Will be over by April" over "Will kill more than a million Americans." Sorry, wrong again, Conservatives!
I swear, if you tried to design an algorithm that would give you the 100% guaranteed-wrong answer to every question, you couldn't do worse than American Conservatism. A monkey flipping a coin would be right more often than these people.
Always wrong in the most spectacular ways. And more than willing to double-down rather than admit to being wrong.
More than 60 years ago, Ronald Reagan said that something like Medicare would destroy America and enslave us all. Republicans still believe that, and even their own lived experiences cannot change that belief. I have listened in dumbstruck awe as geezers who have received tens of thousands of dollars in free medical care decry Medicare as a threat to America's work ethic and creeping socialism.
Mostly they just shrug it off and go on to being totally wrong about the next new thing. But that has to weigh on you, over time, that backlog of wrong opinions that you avoid talking about now. "Oh, yeah, I was a big fan of King, and that "Content of their character" thing you betcha!" The constant lying, especially to yourself, must have an effect.
The whole despite-their-lived-experience thing is a mind blower, innit.
I suspect that a large percentage of elderly Republicans really believe that the Medicare Supplemental plan they bought is covering the full freight of their medical costs: "The government didn't pay for my operation, look, I payed for it myself, $100 a month!" In a way, it's understandable, the supplemental plan sends them a bill every month in the mail, while Medicare premium gets subtracted automatically from their Social Security, so Medicare picks up 90% of the costs without attracting much notice, especially when you really, really don't want to notice.
Despite Mr. Hendrix' exhortations to the contrary, they have never been experienced.
It did destroy the old America, a little.
An America in which people don't die of being poor in old age nearly as often as they used to do, and most of the rest of us are rightly afraid of such, is in fact a different America. They, or at least their Social Darwinist cadres, consider this a terrible divergence from its being 'natural and kind', that is 'acting like the sort of animal itʼs supposed to be' .
What they want is a land where the poor rely on Christian charity. This allows them to coerce the poor into "believing " the religious claptrap. Refuse to say you love Jesus and Pat Robertson? Go starve!
I think I see your point, and maybe so, but our life expectancy over the last few years is sinking like a Russian warship . And it's been so since well before Covid. What we're doing is normalizing high rates of sickness and shortening lifespans.
I must admit that I do think of them contemptuously, at which point at my best I remember that that they, like any mugger, con-man, or storm-trooper got that way for reasons, quite often those reasons are abuse, and the goals are 0.) to limit the damage they can do and 1.) is to have fewer people mistreated into being people like them.
… which the clichéd, stupid, cultural relativist in my head automatically denounces as 'genocide'.
Yes, the widespread deployment of the smallpox vaccine was genocide, not just against smallpox, but against the smallpox-having community.
I like a digital solution.
Middle, or middle-and-index?
whatever them ones and zeros decide...
Like all conservative perversions of plain English, sure, let's add bubble.
Everyone has biases. The question or issue is whether reality can get through.
The GOP voters in the heartland support elected officials whose responses to Covid were literally murderous. Problem for those people? Not at all. I'll submit that if Democrat pols were responding like Trump on down did and have, liberals would let's say adjust their biases. Whatever they'd do, adhering to their biases, or staying within the bubble, by and by is not what they'd do.
So, you know, there's biases and there's biases.
As for the media, they provided a real public service back in that anomalous civil rights/Vietnam/Watergate era when reporting was fairly honest. Then, Blacks had issues, Vietnam was an abomination and failure, and Tricky Dick was an unfit piece of shit. Now we have pretty much the opposite: Civil rights is, what? a nothing burger? Nothing the military does is wrong -- killing civilians is fine, Richard Engel gets bitchy because we choose not to continue the military shit show in Afghanistan, and there's nothing wrong with the GOP other than Donnie. (See, again, Covid.) This lack of mainstream honesty has done and is ever doing real harm to the nation; the mainstream is fully complicit in the nation's continuing decline since the 80s. Indeed, 60s/70s-style reporting would be the proper response to eliminating or at least greatly reducing bubbles.
That said, behind the bubbles of the conservatives is the reality of what they want, which is small government, which is what they elect, and what they're getting. So, you know, in that sense, their bubbles aren't all that important, but the inability of libs to see that because of their bubbles is a problem, maybe a bigger one.
"the reality of what they want, which is small government, which is what they elect, and what they're getting..."
Oh, but they're NOT getting it. The size of the federal government grew under Trump, as it always does under every President, Republican or Democrat. That's what enrages them, when are they finally gonna get a guy who has the guts to fire half the federal workforce? If even Trump couldn't do it, what do we need, President Steve Bannon?
Yeah, but that's the *good* government, persecuting the queers and the sluts and the non-whites. I mean, a good part of my city's budget is spent on cops, and they hate paying taxes but man do they think we need more cops in Seattle.
The persecution budget - especially ICE - did go up under Trump, but what didn't happen was any major reduction in the non-persecuting parts of the budget. Republican voters have been told for decades that, right off the bat, any Republican President should abolish the Department of Education. And yet that didn't happen, even while Republican held the trifecta. Yes, the Dept. got turned into a fund for Christian grifters under Betsy DeVos, but that's not what the base was promised, and they're pissed, and it feeds all their paranoia about a Deep State uncontrollable even by the President.
Careful now. Relativity check:
Look to the size of the federal workforce in ~1968, when there were fewer than 200 million citizens. Roughy 2.8 million on the payroll. Now look to the workforce circa 2020. Still ~ 2.8 million, but about 330 million citizens. (Sure, leaves out the private contractors but that is not the point here. Federal payroll is the primary cost of federal gummint.) The Hurricane Whisperer was just another in a long line of payroll slashers...
But that's not what they want, is it? To have some gradual decrease in the relative size of the federal government due to inflation and population growth? Can't see that fitting on the bumper of my F-350. What they want - what they have ALWAYS wanted - is some guy to go all Chainsaw Al Dunlap on the whole fucking thing. And what they got is Government By Continuing Resolution, when the whole federal budget from last year mostly gets rubber-stamped into the next year. Not the revolution they asked for, and it absolutely enrages them, it's why they hate most Republicans in Congress almost as much as they hate the Democrats (they've got a lot of hate to go around.)
After four years of Trump, and two years of total Republican control, it astonishes me that we still have a National Endowment of the Arts and a National Science Foundation. Not because they love the Arts and Sciences, oh no, but mostly because they just couldn't be bothered. Like civilization was saved by pure laziness.
You need to get a bigger truck...
Sorry, 350 F's is all the F's I have to give.
Yeah this.
Agencies live budget-to-budget just as people/families live paycheck-to-paycheck., with the caveat that if you don't spend all your money from this year's budget you have to turn the extra back in to the Treasury. And budgets are made up a couple years in advance, so when something like COVID happens Congress can't afford to be obstructive despite the rhetoric.
So some "drain the swamper" MAGA gets to DC and finds that he and the eleven thousand voters that sent him there don't mean jack nor shit at the actual power level. So he makes noise and stunts that endear him to the media and to the folks back home, while getting placed on the Looking Out The Window Committee to keep him out of the way while real work gets done.
I think Trump's first budget submitted had lots of cuts and even eliminations of whole government agencies, Congress just ignored it and passed an adjusted copy of the previous year's budget. After that, I don't think they even bothered to try, Trump certainly didn't care (but "didn't care" is after all his default setting.)
FFS, it’s not the literal size it’s the power. Check out the OSHA and EPA decisions as well as the recent gun control and electoral bills -- indeed, even the ACA -- where the feds cede power to the states. For that matter, the Covid response as a nationwide response to a global pandemic has been a failure up to this very moment.
Talk about 🫧...
To be fair, I think what Steve really meant to say is "Fuck the Truck – just spot me a bigger bumper!"
Living in Madison, WI, I've seen just how much political messaging can be fit on the rear end of a Prius.
Yes, lots of changes through the courts to limit federal regulatory power. And was that what the Republican base was promised? No, they were told the whole government is useless, you could shut it all down (excepting the cops and military) and we'd all be fine, here's a list of four cabinet-level agencies I promise to shut down, even if I can only remember three of them. It's the mismatch between the scale of their desires and the scale of the actual change that infuriates them (along with about a thousand other things that infuriate them.)
And I think you might be misreading my comment - and not for the first time - as "Don't worry, everything's fine!"
If I misread it, it’s that GOP base isn’t or hasn’t been getting what they want. They clearly are. We should be so lucky. Then again, last time we got we wanted we did pretty much nothing to keep it. The GOP, by destroying democracy, is ensuring that they won’t have that problem. (Could be wrong there; time will tell.)
"If I misread it, it’s that GOP base isn’t or hasn’t been getting what they want."
Yes, that's the misreading, right there. Your original quote: "small government, which is what they elect, and what they're getting..."
"Getting what they want" in terms of banning abortion isn't getting "small government." Lots of wins for them on the culture-war front thanks to the Supreme Court, but an actual program of shrinking the size of the federal government isn't something the Republican party even tried to do under Trump.
"Right-sizing. Shrinking is so, ummm, squirmy-making..."
I actually made no reference to abortion. What I did refer to was the administrative state being weakened and the groundwork for major reductions being laid. I also noted how it’s being done by SCOTUS.
Or as Jonathan Swan notes over at Axios, the secret is to flood the careerist zone with our own careerists and change the game to one unwinnable by the old rules.
Losers whine, losing losers!
There's some cheese log calls himself something like Lucious Moldbug with a scheme to get rid of government by "retiring" the entire federal civil service. The Trump brain trust is running with it to develop an Executive Order when they get control. I've said before if he gets back there will be no "adults in the room" bullshit, this is just a taste of the Krakken-releasing in store.
Don't know 'bout no Krakken, but yeah...
It's time to remind them why there was a Pendleton Act, passed in 1883. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/pendleton-act
"Following the assassination of President James A. Garfield by a disgruntled job seeker...."
Ah, so THAT'S how you get legislation through Congress!
I believe it is Mencius Moldbug, although I do not read the material in the right wing fever swamps
I like this -- and it's something we've always sensed, if not known outright. The whole idea of MAGA is a bubble around reality & history, a place where diversity & tough questions are filtered out. This is the essence of the odela-rune* sometimes seen on fascist paraphenalia: a lost 'homeland' where everything was perfect & happy until... mumble mumble whatever happened...
In this way, the basic plot of the MCU miniseries "WandaVision" could not be more relevant: trauma leads to a bubble of sequestration, literalized as pop culture nostalgia. Just because the traumas of the MAGAkin are more Traum than reality doesn't make them any less dangerous, as we are seeing.
* Fun Bonus GM Fact: the odela rune (pronounced 'ethel' in Old English) never meant 'homeland' in the sense that modern people have taken it. 19th century philologists started saying that. The more likely meaning is 'estate' or 'backyard' (as I like to say).
Ha!
'backyard' (as I like to say)
I like saying 'backyard' too, but never quite so heavily back-loaded.
Hear, hear and well put. The right wing Bubble -- more like a cast-iron bathysphere mired in its own ooze but that's a mouthful -- has been impenetrably insane since the day Rush Limbaugh's backers realized there was good money in taking it national. Traditional media, for all of its spelunking in Heartland Diners, has always underestimated the power of right-wing radio and the Fox echo-system, and its role in the creation and maintenance of the grievance and hate we're afflicted with. Trump voters aren't big readers of the Times and WaPost, so they'll never know that Bret Stephens has renounced his former condescension to embrace them unless they hear it on Fox and Friends. This all makes liberal and conservative obsessions with dueling op-eds kind of pointless in the long run, when Trump gained more voters in 2020 then he started with. What I wonder about is where is the liberal equivalent of the non-stop right-wing event tours -- from grifter high school graduate Charlie Kirk's Turning Point to Save/Revive/Restore/America to CPAC -- that not only creates local buzz but gets picked up and blasted through mainstream news -- yet another right-wing Bubble blast that goes unanswered.
"where is the liberal equivalent of the non-stop right-wing event tours"
Behind every event like that is a billionaire happy to pay the bills. Not so many liberal billionaires willing to spend their money on that sort of thing (right-wing paranoia about George Soros aside.) Liberals get their money from individual donors (especially now that we're the party of the educated professional elites, doncha know) and individual liberal donors give to Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and lots and lots of individual candidates. But not so much to liberal think-tanks and the Battle of Ideas.
Wish I was a professional elitist – all this volunteer elitism is bringin' me down...
"Heartland Diner"
See now, this whole segmenting-us-into-national-bodyparts needs more thought. I'm getting a much more 'Ruptured Spleen Diner' vibe. There's probly more to it than that – surely the Pacific Northwest is the 'Cold Shoulder', and Mississippi: the 'National Appendix', maybe.
I think we all know which body part Florida represents. Every boy in your 3rd-grade classroom saw it, when the teacher showed you that map.
I left to you the decision to label Florida, confident you would not shirk.
I’m not going to spend any time trying to find the full quote in which the following phrase is contained, but what the hell did Cox mean by “fourteen days to bend the curve”?
I assumed it was vaccine-connected gibberish, but who knows?
I’ll go with idiopathic verbal diarrhea as my diagnosis, then.
[shrug]
Yeah, safe assumption...
I was thinking the same thing. It was a reference to COVID-19 restrictions.
"Look, if this mask-wearing bullshit can't end a global pandemic after TWO FULL WEEKS, then to hell with it."
At the very beginning, there was talk of people just not fucking giving each other covid for long enough to bring cases down so the hospitals weren't overwhelmed with refrigerated morgue trucks and beds in the hallways and nurses working hand-operated ventilators.
It would have been a lovely thing. Instead, people still ended up wearing masks, so obviously that was just weird witch doctor thinking and we should never try to stop a pandemic again.
Like, half the people I hate right now aren't going "Covid isn't real." They're going "Covid is real, nothing we can do about it, I guess you'll just have to die." They do the same thing with climate change, mass shootings, and all the rest of it. (To be fair, the other half of them are absolutely denying the existence.)
I see a lot of "It's just like a cold or the flu, just get over it."
Yeah, that's the other, admittedly more prominent, half. But a good chunk of them legitimately think covid is only killing useless eaters, so even if they could cure it without having to actually do anything, like wear a mask in a fucking doctor's office, they wouldn't.
I've also seen, "Lose some weight and you won't have worry." That's how I know I'm dealing with a skinny idiot.
God, I'm so tired of that. If losing weight worked like these assholes think it does, people wouldn't still be fat. If fucking millionaires can't manage to lose weight and have to keep doing diet programs--and diet commercials--then it's obviously not as easy as "eat less and exercise more".
I know people need to come up with a reason they're safe from the uncertainty of the world, especially with two global pandemics going on, but if you're gonna tell yourself Just So stories about why Only Bad People get sick, stop pretending you give a shit about reality.
That's not reality, that's magical thinking.
I think I recall that when were first had a general shutdown where you were supposed to stay home unless you were an essential worker, that was presented at first as "two weeks to bend the curve" - as you describe. But then it went on for a long time and assholes started protesting because they couldn't get haircuts, and then they started claiming it was all a like from the beginning.
I believe Fauci said that if everyone got the vaccine, it would take 14 days to flatten the Covid transmission curve. Much like the 2nd Amendment, the right wingers leave out the first clause
I keep thinking about the young true-believers who wound up testifying live at the hearings. (I was that young once, if never that crisply turned out.) From the moment they stood and took the oath, they were dead men & women walking, at least professionally. They are cast into the political wilderness for the audacity of growing a conscience, and speaking out about same.
They weren't yokels in the diner on State Routes 5&20. They were inside the belly of the beast, and doing their damnedest to help Trump right up to the second they weren't. So what changed on January 6th? Matthew Pottinger looked like he hasn't had any sleep since then.
Watching in real time, I was sorry for what they're going through. The loneliness and sense of coming unarmored must be horrific At the same time I kept yelling at the screen, "What were you thinking for all that time before today?"
The yahoos will happily die of covid, because they're so far down the rabbit hole. Hell, they'll start murdering their neighbors if they get the go-ahead. The committee witnesses are the ones who should have known better. They had the advantages of education, and years of experience with the real Donald Trump.
I wonder if they regret the decision to turn on Trump. The mass of his followers, with and without real political power are going to stick with him to the bitter end.
Good point!
Sarah Matthews assured us that she had supported Trump all along, "for all the things he did for our country." That's what got me yelling "NAME ONE" at my TV. Seriously, what was it, the wall? Attempted repeal of Obamacare? I'd be willing to drive out to a diner in Ohio if one of these Reasonable Republicans would tell me ONE positive accomplishment that made it all worth it. (Yeah, I suppose it was the tax cuts, lowering the top marginal rate from 39% to 35% meant ALL THE WORLD to them.)
I'll bet she meant immigration cruelty and those Supreme Court justices and Federal judges.
I thought I was hearing an echo when I yelled that...
"I was that young once, if never that crisply turned out"
Careful, describing your relatively pedestrian attire with that estimable phrase might be encroaching on Roy's speciality...
Naytheless, 2 marks!
I'm not a Dungeons&Dragons person, but I know of Lawful Evil. In real life, people with that alignment almost never care about lawlessness if it's confined to the right Wrong People, but if it's on a formal stage in what until recently was a white male preserve anything against The Niceties….
I mean, sure, now there're some women and dark people there now, but _here_ are the seats from which Sens. McCarthy and Bilbo spoke…here is room where rural 'drys' delayed reäpportionment for eight years in the 'Twenties, there where Truman' s national health plan was killed. Pay some respect to the System, many others wouldn't have elected Trump _once_.
The loons, Norman. Listen to the loons!
I'm sorry, I gave this the one Like I had to give, but I don't understand why it doesn't have All the Likes on the Internet.
Good article. What's also odd to me is the conservative miniature bubbles (champagne bubbles?) in blue states like mine. While ineptitude and corruption may exist in public projects, people don't realize how good they have it on the whole because liberals are in charge. The Trump signs, sporadic in my neighborhood, are proof.
Those folks get the best deal of all, able to vote Republican without ever having to suffer the consequences.
I'm stuck on the Welkian bubble machine image...
Oh ya, it was horrible don’t’cha know! We stopped at the SuperAmerica and they was totally out of those little marshmallows for the green jell-o salad Mabel was making for the church potluck. Well, that was enough for us! We assumed the whole city got burnt down, so we high-tailed it home and haven’t been out since!
I was once in a diversity workshop with a guy who told the horrifying tale of driving through Chicago, heard what he thought was a gunshot, and then instantly assumed it was aimed at him because he was White. Seriously, that was his story.
I nearly got a bullet through my head one night, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't because I was white. It was because *my house was behind the trees and someone was firing into the air*.
White dudes are so proud of how they aren't afraid of guns.
Hearted for the white dudes' pride...Guns are stupid-making.
I was in my truck, patrolling a large rural property when I came upon an unfamiliar truck headed toward me on the narrow road. I pulled over and stopped to let it pass. The driver slowed and inched up opposite me, like neighbors might if stopping to say hello. I said hi. He had the barrel of a rifle under his arm, resting on the frame of the window, the muzzle pointed right at me. I said "Don't point that thing at me." He apparently decided I was OK and slowly pulled it away from the window. We introduced ourselves and explained why we were there, to show our legitimacy, and that was that.
Guy ran a gun range and seemed to like taking his business along with him...
On the other hand, I was pumpin' my bicycle tire usin' the compressor at some little gas station down south when BANG! I blew it up...next thing there's a guy runnin' out the station with his gun wavin'...maybe he thought I was aimin' the bicycle at him...
Just like a liberal, bringing a bicycle to a gunfight.
Actually, the bicycle brought me...
Yes, it's true, liberals like me did say Trump was a fascist, and what did we do about it? 1) We encouraged people to vote in the 2018 midterms to provide a Congress that could act as a check on his fascism 2) When evidence came to light that Trump tried to muscle a foreign leader into investigating his political opponents, we encouraged that same Congress to impeach him. When that impeachment died in the Senate, we shook our heads in disappointment, and wrote angry letters to the editor. If "Send an armed mob to the capitol to murder Republicans" was on the list of responses, I guess I didn't get the invite.
I adore the "so you won't listen to people you disagree with" people. Dude. I spent a good part of last night convinced I'm not depressed and am in fact just lazy because other people think I should just go for a jog or try shrooms. "Do you ever think you might be wrong and other people might be right, though?" Fuck off. I'm convinced everybody's more right than I am. The thing is, you can't navigate life open to every fucking useless opinion someone wants to waste your time with. That way lies Amway, Christianity, and also abuse.
So I got very, very good at finding people with more discernment--better bubbles--than me. And I listen to them. Why in the name of fuck should anyone listen to every silly goddamned idea someone they don't know has? Especially when those people have in no way shown themselves to be experts on the subject matter or even vaguely sensible?
You call it a bubble. I call it "not letting trolls waste my time to get themselves off".
Haven't these people heard we're now livin' in the attention-based economy? Sure, I'll listen, my going rate is $20 a minute. Now share your views on how climate change is a hoax, I'll set the timer.
Stealing this. Normally I just ask them if they've ever considered the possibility that they might be wrong. Nope!
$20 a minute, only in gold coin, none of your filthy fiat money
No crypto!
"The thing is, you can't navigate life open to every fucking useless opinion someone wants to waste your time with. That way lies Amway, Christianity, and also abuse."
2 marks, at least...
"Amway, Christianity and abuse" is right up there with "Rum , sodomy and the lash" in my pantheon of triads.
"Rum , sodomy and the lash" just reminds me of that quote from Major Kong in Dr. Strangelove: "Heck, a fella could have a pretty good time in Vegas with all that stuff."
Ha!
That was my first eye-opener way back when I spent a year outside the northeast for the first time. I was stunned people took Amway seriously. I remember I said to my boss "but it's clearly bullshit" And he launched into a full-throated defense of it. All I could think was that I'm working for an idiot.
I don’t think anyone needs to listen to their day-to-day grievances and engage with them, but legitimate media and the Democrats should strive to understand where those grievances are coming from, i.e. their manufactured nature, and their real grievances that they are unable or unwilling to articulate. Approaching it from that perspective is far more interesting and could conceivably make a difference, unlike the typical response you so ably critique.
Yes, you identify the cure for the MAGA cult disease. The MAGA grift involves turning the self-identified group's real problems to false causes (scapegoated other groups and themselves, their own weakness). The proper response is accurate information. Unfortunately brain chemistry makes it easier to use fear of loss and pin the problems on readily-identified villains with simplistic historical narratives already attached to them. Anecdotes and lies are often easier than statistics and data analysis.
Bernie Sanders gets re-elected despite the fact his voting constituents are largely enthralled to the right-wing propaganda of popular media (e.g., talk radio). He has to reiterate the facts and the policy approaches, and, I have heard, a lot of the voters still tend to revert after he goes away because the right-wing narrative is easier, ubiquitous, and more appealing psychologically.
Well, you identify the deeper cause of the problem. Yes, the propagandists use brain chemistry against the more vulnerable. And although I agree that accurate information is important, I think brain chemistry has to be taken account in the ways in which we deliver accurate information, which is to say we should use anger and fear about what the Republicans are doing to re-alter the brain chemistry of the converted.