My therapist today suggested an actual cognitive cause: remember that hip new pediatric theory that told parents to ignore their babies when they cry (like in the 1970s & 80s)? Turns out that may have made two generations of people without capacity for empathy. Seems relevant about now perhaps...
I get the sense that the media is not purveying as sincere Republicans' calls for healing and unity. I think at least some of the mainstream media types are saying "Wow! After 40 years of Republicans saying Democrats are anti-American terrorist-loving pedophiles, perhaps Republicans calling for unity and healing is a bit of a stretch."
And, yeah: Sedition needs to be rooted out, publicly tried, and severely punished. You cannot be a patriot is you're calling for the violent overthrow of the government.
I don’t think any conservative pundit stood a chance with the “let them down easy” approach as long as their God King continued to scream about the election being stolen. We even saw Fox lose viewers when it tried this approach, the nuts just moved to OANN and Newsmax because those outlets were telling them what they wanted to hear.
And the important thing is I doubt most of the nuts REALLY believe Trump won, although if you stick a microphone in their faces that’s what they’ll tell you. They just think the herrenvolk votes should be the only ones that count – literally and figuratively.
The true believers will tell you Trump got 80 million votes, including 6 million votes switched to Biden by Hugo Chavez’s Dominion machines, so ergo quid pro quo pluribus demonstrandum: Trump won.
And yet, one wonders how pols, including Donnie, have done a historically disastrous job responding to the pandemic could get anywhere as many votes as they did. Without delusion and/or electoral fraud, I mean. Then again, a shit ton of electing unfit leaders is what made the current situation possible.
Yeah there are some crazy mofos out there, but what’s interesting is despite Trump’s normalization of white nationalism, most of his supporters STILL prefer to say “pedophile lizard people hacked the voting machines for Soros” than want to say “Black people shouldn’t vote.”
He didn't do that by himself. White nationalism has always been absolutely normal in this country. If it weren't, the media wouldhave been able to say "that's white nationalism five years ago." They couldn't why? Because they & their audience basically assumes the problem is not the nationalism but the volume of the nationalism.
Can't overlook the contributions of voters and the media who have now passed a tipping point of providing disinformation making their audiences more poorly informed than if people instead ignored the news.
Trump was just saying "Biden didn't get 81 million votes, he got 80 million computer votes," which SEEMS to imply that he only got 1 million actual votes, not that implicature is ever anything but a crapshoot with him.
Cool -- I figured that as the hours while on, that lot would keep raising the numbers. "Every citizen on the planet voted for our glorious leader. The numbers are plain!"
It's a question to what extent the GOP base believe the bullshit or how much they have a need to be seen believing it. It gets great press in the Times!
I have long said theirs is a double consciousness -- they certainly wouldn't bet money on Trump being re-installed, and aside from the small group of birdbrains who actually tried it, they'd never put their asses anywhere near the line to make it happen. But it is their Official Story, just like the Golden Rule, on which they'd also never act.
I got your healing right here: the Democratic Party of Wisconsin has started running ads on the local TV stations we olds, including the Maga fans, watch every day telling Ron “Sedition Man” Johnson to resign. Unfortunately we can’t recall the dumbest Senator in the Treason Caucus, but we have apparently started the 2022 election, getting a considerable jump on the party of irresponsibility.
•Donnie's Dr. Feelgood just passed away. (Reminder: Taxis pass, people pass away.) What will Crazy Donnie do now???
•Poor liberal media! First, that they're liberal is not fact-based when it comes to politics but is just a conservative shibboleth. Which is to say 110% pure bullshit. When it comes to all things political, they're straight establishment which, I hate to break the news, is pretty much conservative. The risk to the media now is their reduced credibility which is to say their propaganda is less credible.
•What Donnie did, as is constantly mentioned and immediately ignored or forgotten, was to make the believed but unspoken instead shouted at the top of his lungs and fat little fingers. But the true Americans, the fine people, have believed that bullshit for decades, since Tricky Dick and his Southern Strategy. Which is the true 1970s-to-now through-line.
•For what little it's worth, I'm not certain yet that Old Joe will be inaugurated; I'm'a not counting out some "fine person", some "patriot", some "good American" whacking him. Because that's pretty much the kind of nation we are. I'm sure my prediction is, uh, dead wrong but I won't believe it &c.
The reason why the accusation of "fake news" hurts so much is that Anglo-American media is highly conservative, verging on fascist, all in on justifying naked imperial aggression against the black & brown world, and totally committed to suppressing any kind of leftist discourse. We all grew up in that, know it's true, & many of our elders still instinctually hate Communism or assume Africa is poor & backwards. Fake news works. American as apple pie [so long as you provide your own apples].
Essentially what I said. Literally nothing liberal in the areas that matter. And that’s compounded by a fear of alienating people who would never be part of the audience.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so complicit in the nation becoming a failed state.
At the end of Chaucer's "Troilus & Criseyde" the soul of the slain Troilus, betrayed in love, killed in a futile war, ascends to the seventh sphere of the cosmos and looks down and laughs at his life & this existence. Chaucer stole the scene from Boccaccio, and that is probably borrowed from Dante's Paradiso, where he looks down from the heaven and sees earth as a contemptible place, the "little threshing ground that makes us fierce" (I think that's Ciardi's translation).
Stoicism is cool I guess, but is it a force for social justice?
"Patient given blood pressure test. Patient argued with reading, even upon several re-tests, by different nurses, with different devices. Claimed his blood was pure & therefore high pressure was completely to be expected. Yeesh whatever. I refilled his two dozen prescriptions & got him out of the office. Later found out he clogged the toilet. Did I go to med school for this?"
"No one has ever seen blood pressure like this. Staggering numbers. Doctors, big guys with chests as thick as their glasses and they're crying and they say sir your blood is a gift to science. Barren fields sprout trees. Very white trees."
Nice of Bornstein to stick it out in this veil of tears until Donnie's last week in office, just in case Roy needed him for another quick cameo appearance.
Thailand's Prime Minister came to power in a very old-fashioned, check-all-the-boxes coup (tanks on the street, previous PM exiled and her cabinet members told their services were no longer required, martial law imposed, etc.) and for the next year or so all the TV stations had to play a literal "Unity!" song every night at 6 PM.
It was in Thai, obviously, but my wife translated it for me and it was just about what you'd expect, which meant you'd contemplate suicide if you had to listen to it every night. Generally she just muted the TV when it came on, but occasionally she just left it on and ignored it. When she did, I found myself singing (to the tune of The Happy Wanderer),
UniTEE,
UniTAH,
UniTEE,
UniTAHAHAHAHAHAHA
UniTEE
UniTAH
My - tanks - are - in - the - street.
...until she had to tell me she didn't want to hear it one more time, and I saw that she was not fucking kidding.
So anyway, you can see how this isn't a message which really resonates with me.
"None of these people, nor many other conservatives, had the nerve to just tell the MAGA mob, Fuck off, you people are nuts."
Because there were two points when right-wing pundits learned they couldn't push back without losing their audience---in 2015/2016 before Trump got the nomination and when QAnon started picking up steam.
Specifically, I remember how anti-Trump Glenn Beck was (he even contributed to National Review's "Against Trump" special issue!). It wasn't the only reason, but his audience largely abandoned him during that time, and Glenn had to claw his way back in by groveling at Trump's feet. It's a lesson a lot of right-wing pundits have learned over the last few years, the same one that GOP reps in congress have also had to learn: people don't listen to you because they're interested in what *you* have to say; they listen to you because you're a vessel for the messages they want to hear. And once you stop becoming a useful vessel, your audience will abandon you. There are plenty of other channels.
Totally agree with this: these garbage rage clout-chasers have been all in on fomenting revolution & are as expected attempting to weasel back out, hoping their Mercer/Moonie lucre keeps the dream alive. So many yeses:
But I'm starting to see this, here & elsewhere, and I will futilely try to argue against it:
* "Qtard" -- We're better than this. An ablesist slur that implies DD folks are more violent or dangerous than others, which we know is absolutely not the case. [this is only moment approaching a "call-out" -- the others are just trends in media.]
* The insurrectionists are crazy or stupid: Some certainly are, but most are not. Also people wth mental illness are again no more violent or dangerous than anyone else statistically. We might make the gate then what's "irrational" & that's slightly better. Fascism is an irrationalist philosophy, so that at least charts. BUt USian society clings together entirely through irrational beliefs: Jesus came back from the dead, Sky Daddy watches you while you jerk off, America means freedom, white men invented civilization, trickle-down theory works. These are contrafactual credos that lots & lots of otherwise "normal" folks adhere, and many of them would kill for.
I keep saying this statement from Ibram X. Kendi, & no one pays any attention here or elsewhere, but his argument is that white supremacism doesn't come out of ignorance but a lizard-like awareness of what one believes to be their own self-interest. That's in fact what most psychologists would probably call a rational decision, even if it results in bizarre actions & statements. [It's the name, isn't it? The name scares people off...]
* The insurrectionists are ignorant Southern crackers: again, not proving to be the case as a whole. We're seeing doctors & lawyers, college-educated dudes. Northern liberals need this myth of superiority (it's a part of toxic white innocence), but it only leads to the abandonment of the vulnerable in red states, like the kind that led to the unchecked reign of the KKK and Jim Crow laws. [And ignores that the worst police violence against BLM protestors happened in Northern Democratic cities this past year...]
Why do we need these [irrationalist] myths of our own?
Mr. Roso gets out of the boat enough & shows us why: the rot that creates this fascist insurrectionary movement is in the code of modern politics, in the two-party system, in the history of whiteness, in American exceptionalism, in the West as the source of human civilization, in anti-Communist hysteria. This list right here? I guarantee more than a few of us or your circles of friends assume most of these things are either basically okay or are unchangeable facts of life.
The point isn't that I'm "triggered, lib?" -- an ugly kneejerkoff reaction that many on all sides are prone to fall into when challenged. This argument rather insists we have to think about what work these linguistic tags & cultural assumptions do to hinder our collective effort to extirpate white supremacy from this society. White people want to get through this by disavowing it & pretending it's not us [hence saying that neurodiversity or illness explains it all] -- but it absolutely is, and every white non-fascist person must take responsibility for bringing it down.
I want to select one point to talk about, and that is "tard", "retard", "Q-tard" as ableist slurs. I don't use the word because it bothers people I respect, but to me, in my head, "retarded" has long since lost its diagnostic relevance, along with "moron" and "imbecile", both of which used to be medically recognized terms but are now archaic and used differently.
When I see a person with Down's syndrome (for example), I don't think, "That person is retarded". I think "There is a person with Down's syndrome." But the word remains loaded and offensive to many people, so I just don't use it. But I understand Mr. Roso's use of it: willful, habitual, ridiculous, inexcusable ignorance.
Now I will concentrate on the rest of your comment.
Yes, I think a lot of these objections to angles and terms and the ghosts of ideologies past hovering over us all are people arguing with themselves. I do not acknowledge anyone who hangs onto anti-commie, white supremacist culture, traditional gender roles, and a slew of other old ideas. I tell them straight they are silly, just like folks who don't believe humans have walked on the Moon. If they want to kill me because I have adapted to the 21st century and they think they can return to some previous time without goods from China and smart phones and a different set of values including the fact that real estate and gold are not the basis of actual value, well, I just walk away because I am not here really to educate anyone, including myself.
I don't mean to be curmudgeonly -- my issue is really the need to pathlogize this shitshow. Cray means the rest of us can just imprison or medicate this & we'll be fine. The future is probably far more troublesome. We need ethical, humane deprogramming and in a hurry. If I say "re-educate" everybody's Stalinist ears will prick up, but we have to teach a way around the horrible myths that enable them but keep us afloat as well.
And to even say anything about at all to you, good sir,is because I know you are on the side of right, and your work has been nothing but education & awareness. That's why I support you not only with mucky pelf but also snarky comments
Thank you, Mag. I always value your insight. Yes, the term is so out of date that it functions as nothing but a slur. Maybe in another 25 years it will gain the status of "moron" which has ableist roots, but is in common parlance & doesn't offend too many people. Maybe. Also, it used to be pretty common to say something you didn't like was "gay," right? Same diff.
I am on edge about it because the Nazis use it all the time as a slur, and actively want to kill neurodivergent folks. I like effective language, based in awareness of its effects & impications. All good writers are. I want my metaphors to be tight & mean what I say as much as possible. Sometimes that means pushing the edge of outrage.
I'm not an advocate for political purity. We all have different tactics to fight back. I try to speak my mind, but not abandon the cause out of minor issues.
I was musing yesterday on the unintentional effects of metaphoric language. My favorite is Bari Weiss' "Intellectual Dark Web". Okay, chile -- let's break it down. The "Dark Web" is a conceptual space so utterly controlled by libertarian principles that you can purchase atom bomb parts, a poached blue whale penis, or a child sex slave. So basically by saying she is part of a "Intellectual Dark Web," she freely admitting her "arguments" are a blue whale's penis. And I'm good with that. You do you, gurl.
You didn't have to really -- I'm not judging you or anybody here in any way & my point was bigger & more cuturally focused, I hope. I would like to think of you & all the alicubists as my people, cousins maybe. Maybe we disagree from time to time, but we all still make of Aunt Gladys for her Jello salads.
I'm happy to report that ex-Aussie Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is continuing his attack on Rupert Murderoch and his propaganda team with a steady stream of video exposes.
His 1/2 million signatures petition for a Royal Commission to ensure a strong, diverse Australian news media has been presented to Parliament. As the current Australian government is a cesspit of ultra conservative/'religious', corrupt, reactionary, thieving, lying buffoonish ideologues, this unlikely to happen any time soon.
So, I would be very happy to see the U.S. web community led by Media Matters (who have been faithfully documenting the Fox and other media atrocities), in conjunction with many other prominent, upright, progressive web stalwarts (*ahem) , take advantage of the current fortuitous political climate and petition to demand a Senate inquiry into the media's role in this seditious shitfuckery. Wouldn't it be nice to see the father of Hate Radio, Gush Pimpwhore on the stand? Along with his hatemonger ilk, Newt Gingrich, Anne Coulter, Stuart Varney, etc etc ad nauseum. And, simultaneously bring back the Fairness Doctrine !
I'm also hopeful that the political miscreants that supported and fomented this treason, i.e. Cruz, Grahame and McConnell and their multitude of malodorous minions are marched in front of a suitable judiciary and politically castrated, and that they are prosecuted FIRST.
Because, although there were some murderous dolts and a multitude of Nazi and KKK weasels in the crowd of LowIQanonens, who all sorely deserve some gaol time so that they can partake in some compulsory comprehensive education in civics, I would be sorely distressed if it was only Drumpf's Gumps who were the fall guys for this, the most inept coup evah.
"𝘞𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥𝘯'𝘵 𝘪𝘵 𝘣𝘦 𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘦𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘧 𝘏𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘙𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘰, 𝘎𝘶𝘴𝘩 𝘗𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘥?" It would, but I can hear the whining right now: "How dare you heartless liberals persecute this dying old man!" Still, there needs to be a reckoning for all the reactionaries who have brought us to this terrible moment, including the right wing media hatemongers and their financial backers.
The creeps who call themselves "patriots" and then advocate and advance acts of sedition need to be charged, tried and convicted, and punished to the full extent of the law. The law will deter further political crimes by these and other bozos. I guarantee none of them will stand up and shout give me victory or death when a judge sentences them to fines, imprisonment, and a lifetime labeled as an anti-American terrorist. Spell out the ways they have violated the Constitution and give them copies to read in prison. These are not folks who have some learned and thoughtful understanding of the course of human events and historical trends. They live in an alterverse more like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and National Treasure.
Alterverse, yes! I wonder what US education was like, 1950-1970. The people I talk to who were processed entirely in those years are steeped in mythology (Washington and Lincoln were pure, we won every war by dint of being brave and free, etc) and genuinely offended by any suggestion that maybe that isn't the whole story. Like, the "point" of the slavery "story" isn't that it "ends in freedom," thereby "proving we're the greatest country," ya know? That view, of history not as contingencies to grapple with but as a story with a moral to teach, must be at least partly the fault of our Cold War public school system. And I wonder to what extent those old methods are still in place, fucking us up for the next 50 years too.
I'll only say that at least they (we, I should say) learned what the actual tenets of our founding were -- which is why people started to protest that they weren't being lived up to, and also why they stopped teaching them.
Ha! And I can cosign this. My late-'80s education never connected all those fantastic 18th century tenets to any events after 1955. Even in AP History (not to brag, but I was in AP History), the class ended with Brown v Board of Ed, 1954. Then our teacher took a day to talk about his personal memory of the JFK assassination, and then... we turned into a study hall, even though there were two weeks left of actual school. So. In a class where we'd carefully examined how America failed its tenets at the Trail of Tears, in the Know-Nothing movement, and with Dred Scott... us kids sure as hell were steered away from applying that same critical eye to Watergate, COINTELPRO, the murder of Fred Hampton, Wounded Knee -- really anything even remotely ongoing. It was as if history had already happened and we were living in something else, to which history did not apply.
I went to high school in Liberal New York City, in a neighborhood which was mostly Black and Jewish, and what we learned about Reconstruction was 1) carpetbaggers and scallawags and 2) that if only Lincoln hadn't been assassinated there would have been Healing and Unity instead of the punitive, vengeful policy the North adopted under the Radical Republicans.
It wasn't quite Birth of a Nation, but too damned close for comfort. (Not that I had the slightest idea at the time.)
That whole scene from Michael Clayton -- where the line 'do I look like I'm negotiating' comes from -- is well-written, powerfully acted and incredibly satisfying. It resembles real life about as much as anything from Avengers: Endgame, but it's a wish-fulfilling salve in these trying times.
Anyone notice Trump saying "our movement" three times in his little "no violence" post-Impeachment II video? That's gotta be a special Stephen Miller fantasy for his fellow kleine fascista out there. (Not to mention Trump saying "no true supporter of mine" three times. He's in his own little Cult of Me at this point.)
Thanks to four years of the Piece Of Shit, his lunatic cult, and Republicans pandering to him and it (e.g., Michigan State Leg: Wanna carry AR-15's in the statehouse? Sure, why not!), I've become a paranoid nailbiter. When I read that Trump's newly installed lackeys at the Pentagon are overseeing 15-20,000 fully armed National Guard troops for the Inauguration, the first thing that entered my mind was the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Nuts, isn't it? But then, how many law enforcement and military McVeigh types have we already seen in his "movement"?
America has a long and proud tradition of mocking and denigrating politics and politicians, it's considered a basic right. One side-effect is that a majority (according to noted authority Dr. Otto Yerass) have little to no understanding of what politics is or how it is supposed to work. You combine that with many Americans, young and old, taking a good look at the future and they Do Not Want. At All. Olds see the glorious past, when you could tell a pretty girl to smile without getting arrested and everything cost a nickel lost forever, and the knucklehead yoots see no future for them at all. With that audience, any neckbeard with a comforting theory or babe with a glock and a YouTube channel has a shot. As a well-known political theorist said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Ironically, the only thing that might save the United States is if people start taking it unironically.
Slavoj Zizek suggests in the "Sublime Object of Ideology" that irony is counter-revolutionary, meant to suppress the outrage that would lead to activism & engagement, & ultimately change.
You can also see how irony is weaponized in alt-right recruitment efforts that create consent by couching hate speech in "just joking yeesh," but that joking turns soon into actual serious hate speech.
I wonder what they think JFK Jr. is doing now.
Eric Munshel was in my son’s HS class in Blue Ridge GA: Ross says he was aggressive and not to bright?
No clue what is wrong with his mama.
Wait, who?
The first Zip Tie Guy
My therapist today suggested an actual cognitive cause: remember that hip new pediatric theory that told parents to ignore their babies when they cry (like in the 1970s & 80s)? Turns out that may have made two generations of people without capacity for empathy. Seems relevant about now perhaps...
I get the sense that the media is not purveying as sincere Republicans' calls for healing and unity. I think at least some of the mainstream media types are saying "Wow! After 40 years of Republicans saying Democrats are anti-American terrorist-loving pedophiles, perhaps Republicans calling for unity and healing is a bit of a stretch."
And, yeah: Sedition needs to be rooted out, publicly tried, and severely punished. You cannot be a patriot is you're calling for the violent overthrow of the government.
I don’t think any conservative pundit stood a chance with the “let them down easy” approach as long as their God King continued to scream about the election being stolen. We even saw Fox lose viewers when it tried this approach, the nuts just moved to OANN and Newsmax because those outlets were telling them what they wanted to hear.
And the important thing is I doubt most of the nuts REALLY believe Trump won, although if you stick a microphone in their faces that’s what they’ll tell you. They just think the herrenvolk votes should be the only ones that count – literally and figuratively.
The Emperor of Selfishness cannot fail; he can only *be* failed.
The true believers will tell you Trump got 80 million votes, including 6 million votes switched to Biden by Hugo Chavez’s Dominion machines, so ergo quid pro quo pluribus demonstrandum: Trump won.
And yet, one wonders how pols, including Donnie, have done a historically disastrous job responding to the pandemic could get anywhere as many votes as they did. Without delusion and/or electoral fraud, I mean. Then again, a shit ton of electing unfit leaders is what made the current situation possible.
You have to remember that in 1932 after 3 years of the worst depression in history Hoover got 40% of the vote.
Yeah there are some crazy mofos out there, but what’s interesting is despite Trump’s normalization of white nationalism, most of his supporters STILL prefer to say “pedophile lizard people hacked the voting machines for Soros” than want to say “Black people shouldn’t vote.”
"Trump’s normalization of white nationalism"
He didn't do that by himself. White nationalism has always been absolutely normal in this country. If it weren't, the media wouldhave been able to say "that's white nationalism five years ago." They couldn't why? Because they & their audience basically assumes the problem is not the nationalism but the volume of the nationalism.
Can't overlook the contributions of voters and the media who have now passed a tipping point of providing disinformation making their audiences more poorly informed than if people instead ignored the news.
What's hysterical about this lie is that it's so obviously engineered as psy-op. Most crackpot dictators claim they got "all the votes," right?
Trump was just saying "Biden didn't get 81 million votes, he got 80 million computer votes," which SEEMS to imply that he only got 1 million actual votes, not that implicature is ever anything but a crapshoot with him.
Cool -- I figured that as the hours while on, that lot would keep raising the numbers. "Every citizen on the planet voted for our glorious leader. The numbers are plain!"
It's a question to what extent the GOP base believe the bullshit or how much they have a need to be seen believing it. It gets great press in the Times!
I have long said theirs is a double consciousness -- they certainly wouldn't bet money on Trump being re-installed, and aside from the small group of birdbrains who actually tried it, they'd never put their asses anywhere near the line to make it happen. But it is their Official Story, just like the Golden Rule, on which they'd also never act.
The there's this:
https://ritholtz.com/2021/01/what-is-wrong-with-these-people/
I got your healing right here: the Democratic Party of Wisconsin has started running ads on the local TV stations we olds, including the Maga fans, watch every day telling Ron “Sedition Man” Johnson to resign. Unfortunately we can’t recall the dumbest Senator in the Treason Caucus, but we have apparently started the 2022 election, getting a considerable jump on the party of irresponsibility.
A few points:
•Donnie's Dr. Feelgood just passed away. (Reminder: Taxis pass, people pass away.) What will Crazy Donnie do now???
•Poor liberal media! First, that they're liberal is not fact-based when it comes to politics but is just a conservative shibboleth. Which is to say 110% pure bullshit. When it comes to all things political, they're straight establishment which, I hate to break the news, is pretty much conservative. The risk to the media now is their reduced credibility which is to say their propaganda is less credible.
•What Donnie did, as is constantly mentioned and immediately ignored or forgotten, was to make the believed but unspoken instead shouted at the top of his lungs and fat little fingers. But the true Americans, the fine people, have believed that bullshit for decades, since Tricky Dick and his Southern Strategy. Which is the true 1970s-to-now through-line.
•For what little it's worth, I'm not certain yet that Old Joe will be inaugurated; I'm'a not counting out some "fine person", some "patriot", some "good American" whacking him. Because that's pretty much the kind of nation we are. I'm sure my prediction is, uh, dead wrong but I won't believe it &c.
The reason why the accusation of "fake news" hurts so much is that Anglo-American media is highly conservative, verging on fascist, all in on justifying naked imperial aggression against the black & brown world, and totally committed to suppressing any kind of leftist discourse. We all grew up in that, know it's true, & many of our elders still instinctually hate Communism or assume Africa is poor & backwards. Fake news works. American as apple pie [so long as you provide your own apples].
Essentially what I said. Literally nothing liberal in the areas that matter. And that’s compounded by a fear of alienating people who would never be part of the audience.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so complicit in the nation becoming a failed state.
It is funny if you step back far enough: like about at the orbit of Pluto
Not funny haha. Funny like this fucked up. Haha would require viewing from far beyond Pluto.
At the end of Chaucer's "Troilus & Criseyde" the soul of the slain Troilus, betrayed in love, killed in a futile war, ascends to the seventh sphere of the cosmos and looks down and laughs at his life & this existence. Chaucer stole the scene from Boccaccio, and that is probably borrowed from Dante's Paradiso, where he looks down from the heaven and sees earth as a contemptible place, the "little threshing ground that makes us fierce" (I think that's Ciardi's translation).
Stoicism is cool I guess, but is it a force for social justice?
I hope Bornstein left instructions on where to find the duplicate of Trump's medical records with someone trustworthy.
"Patient given blood pressure test. Patient argued with reading, even upon several re-tests, by different nurses, with different devices. Claimed his blood was pure & therefore high pressure was completely to be expected. Yeesh whatever. I refilled his two dozen prescriptions & got him out of the office. Later found out he clogged the toilet. Did I go to med school for this?"
"No one has ever seen blood pressure like this. Staggering numbers. Doctors, big guys with chests as thick as their glasses and they're crying and they say sir your blood is a gift to science. Barren fields sprout trees. Very white trees."
Nice of Bornstein to stick it out in this veil of tears until Donnie's last week in office, just in case Roy needed him for another quick cameo appearance.
Thailand's Prime Minister came to power in a very old-fashioned, check-all-the-boxes coup (tanks on the street, previous PM exiled and her cabinet members told their services were no longer required, martial law imposed, etc.) and for the next year or so all the TV stations had to play a literal "Unity!" song every night at 6 PM.
It was in Thai, obviously, but my wife translated it for me and it was just about what you'd expect, which meant you'd contemplate suicide if you had to listen to it every night. Generally she just muted the TV when it came on, but occasionally she just left it on and ignored it. When she did, I found myself singing (to the tune of The Happy Wanderer),
UniTEE,
UniTAH,
UniTEE,
UniTAHAHAHAHAHAHA
UniTEE
UniTAH
My - tanks - are - in - the - street.
...until she had to tell me she didn't want to hear it one more time, and I saw that she was not fucking kidding.
So anyway, you can see how this isn't a message which really resonates with me.
"None of these people, nor many other conservatives, had the nerve to just tell the MAGA mob, Fuck off, you people are nuts."
Because there were two points when right-wing pundits learned they couldn't push back without losing their audience---in 2015/2016 before Trump got the nomination and when QAnon started picking up steam.
Specifically, I remember how anti-Trump Glenn Beck was (he even contributed to National Review's "Against Trump" special issue!). It wasn't the only reason, but his audience largely abandoned him during that time, and Glenn had to claw his way back in by groveling at Trump's feet. It's a lesson a lot of right-wing pundits have learned over the last few years, the same one that GOP reps in congress have also had to learn: people don't listen to you because they're interested in what *you* have to say; they listen to you because you're a vessel for the messages they want to hear. And once you stop becoming a useful vessel, your audience will abandon you. There are plenty of other channels.
Free market, baby.
Alanis Morrisette would definitely say this was ironic
Totally agree with this: these garbage rage clout-chasers have been all in on fomenting revolution & are as expected attempting to weasel back out, hoping their Mercer/Moonie lucre keeps the dream alive. So many yeses:
But I'm starting to see this, here & elsewhere, and I will futilely try to argue against it:
* "Qtard" -- We're better than this. An ablesist slur that implies DD folks are more violent or dangerous than others, which we know is absolutely not the case. [this is only moment approaching a "call-out" -- the others are just trends in media.]
* The insurrectionists are crazy or stupid: Some certainly are, but most are not. Also people wth mental illness are again no more violent or dangerous than anyone else statistically. We might make the gate then what's "irrational" & that's slightly better. Fascism is an irrationalist philosophy, so that at least charts. BUt USian society clings together entirely through irrational beliefs: Jesus came back from the dead, Sky Daddy watches you while you jerk off, America means freedom, white men invented civilization, trickle-down theory works. These are contrafactual credos that lots & lots of otherwise "normal" folks adhere, and many of them would kill for.
I keep saying this statement from Ibram X. Kendi, & no one pays any attention here or elsewhere, but his argument is that white supremacism doesn't come out of ignorance but a lizard-like awareness of what one believes to be their own self-interest. That's in fact what most psychologists would probably call a rational decision, even if it results in bizarre actions & statements. [It's the name, isn't it? The name scares people off...]
* The insurrectionists are ignorant Southern crackers: again, not proving to be the case as a whole. We're seeing doctors & lawyers, college-educated dudes. Northern liberals need this myth of superiority (it's a part of toxic white innocence), but it only leads to the abandonment of the vulnerable in red states, like the kind that led to the unchecked reign of the KKK and Jim Crow laws. [And ignores that the worst police violence against BLM protestors happened in Northern Democratic cities this past year...]
Why do we need these [irrationalist] myths of our own?
Mr. Roso gets out of the boat enough & shows us why: the rot that creates this fascist insurrectionary movement is in the code of modern politics, in the two-party system, in the history of whiteness, in American exceptionalism, in the West as the source of human civilization, in anti-Communist hysteria. This list right here? I guarantee more than a few of us or your circles of friends assume most of these things are either basically okay or are unchangeable facts of life.
The point isn't that I'm "triggered, lib?" -- an ugly kneejerkoff reaction that many on all sides are prone to fall into when challenged. This argument rather insists we have to think about what work these linguistic tags & cultural assumptions do to hinder our collective effort to extirpate white supremacy from this society. White people want to get through this by disavowing it & pretending it's not us [hence saying that neurodiversity or illness explains it all] -- but it absolutely is, and every white non-fascist person must take responsibility for bringing it down.
It's got to be said -- sorry it's got to be me.
I want to select one point to talk about, and that is "tard", "retard", "Q-tard" as ableist slurs. I don't use the word because it bothers people I respect, but to me, in my head, "retarded" has long since lost its diagnostic relevance, along with "moron" and "imbecile", both of which used to be medically recognized terms but are now archaic and used differently.
When I see a person with Down's syndrome (for example), I don't think, "That person is retarded". I think "There is a person with Down's syndrome." But the word remains loaded and offensive to many people, so I just don't use it. But I understand Mr. Roso's use of it: willful, habitual, ridiculous, inexcusable ignorance.
Now I will concentrate on the rest of your comment.
Now I have been cancelcultured! This really *is* a Substack newsletter!
Yes, I think a lot of these objections to angles and terms and the ghosts of ideologies past hovering over us all are people arguing with themselves. I do not acknowledge anyone who hangs onto anti-commie, white supremacist culture, traditional gender roles, and a slew of other old ideas. I tell them straight they are silly, just like folks who don't believe humans have walked on the Moon. If they want to kill me because I have adapted to the 21st century and they think they can return to some previous time without goods from China and smart phones and a different set of values including the fact that real estate and gold are not the basis of actual value, well, I just walk away because I am not here really to educate anyone, including myself.
Lol -- I do my part! :)
I don't mean to be curmudgeonly -- my issue is really the need to pathlogize this shitshow. Cray means the rest of us can just imprison or medicate this & we'll be fine. The future is probably far more troublesome. We need ethical, humane deprogramming and in a hurry. If I say "re-educate" everybody's Stalinist ears will prick up, but we have to teach a way around the horrible myths that enable them but keep us afloat as well.
And to even say anything about at all to you, good sir,is because I know you are on the side of right, and your work has been nothing but education & awareness. That's why I support you not only with mucky pelf but also snarky comments
Thank you, Mag. I always value your insight. Yes, the term is so out of date that it functions as nothing but a slur. Maybe in another 25 years it will gain the status of "moron" which has ableist roots, but is in common parlance & doesn't offend too many people. Maybe. Also, it used to be pretty common to say something you didn't like was "gay," right? Same diff.
I am on edge about it because the Nazis use it all the time as a slur, and actively want to kill neurodivergent folks. I like effective language, based in awareness of its effects & impications. All good writers are. I want my metaphors to be tight & mean what I say as much as possible. Sometimes that means pushing the edge of outrage.
I'm not an advocate for political purity. We all have different tactics to fight back. I try to speak my mind, but not abandon the cause out of minor issues.
I was musing yesterday on the unintentional effects of metaphoric language. My favorite is Bari Weiss' "Intellectual Dark Web". Okay, chile -- let's break it down. The "Dark Web" is a conceptual space so utterly controlled by libertarian principles that you can purchase atom bomb parts, a poached blue whale penis, or a child sex slave. So basically by saying she is part of a "Intellectual Dark Web," she freely admitting her "arguments" are a blue whale's penis. And I'm good with that. You do you, gurl.
Awright, I changed it.
You didn't have to really -- I'm not judging you or anybody here in any way & my point was bigger & more cuturally focused, I hope. I would like to think of you & all the alicubists as my people, cousins maybe. Maybe we disagree from time to time, but we all still make of Aunt Gladys for her Jello salads.
Plus "QBall" is pretty funny.
"Qbag" works for me.
I'm happy to report that ex-Aussie Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is continuing his attack on Rupert Murderoch and his propaganda team with a steady stream of video exposes.
https://www.facebook.com/MrKRudd
His 1/2 million signatures petition for a Royal Commission to ensure a strong, diverse Australian news media has been presented to Parliament. As the current Australian government is a cesspit of ultra conservative/'religious', corrupt, reactionary, thieving, lying buffoonish ideologues, this unlikely to happen any time soon.
So, I would be very happy to see the U.S. web community led by Media Matters (who have been faithfully documenting the Fox and other media atrocities), in conjunction with many other prominent, upright, progressive web stalwarts (*ahem) , take advantage of the current fortuitous political climate and petition to demand a Senate inquiry into the media's role in this seditious shitfuckery. Wouldn't it be nice to see the father of Hate Radio, Gush Pimpwhore on the stand? Along with his hatemonger ilk, Newt Gingrich, Anne Coulter, Stuart Varney, etc etc ad nauseum. And, simultaneously bring back the Fairness Doctrine !
I'm also hopeful that the political miscreants that supported and fomented this treason, i.e. Cruz, Grahame and McConnell and their multitude of malodorous minions are marched in front of a suitable judiciary and politically castrated, and that they are prosecuted FIRST.
Because, although there were some murderous dolts and a multitude of Nazi and KKK weasels in the crowd of LowIQanonens, who all sorely deserve some gaol time so that they can partake in some compulsory comprehensive education in civics, I would be sorely distressed if it was only Drumpf's Gumps who were the fall guys for this, the most inept coup evah.
If only we had that kind of guts.
If we did, VV would still be alive
VV?
Village Voice?
Some Democrats do, but not nearly enough.
I'm pretty there will be some examples made out of basic chuddery, but the complicit traitors (cops, congressers, or senators) will go on as before
yeah QAnon Barbie ain't going nowhere but back to Congress
"𝘞𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥𝘯'𝘵 𝘪𝘵 𝘣𝘦 𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘦𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘧 𝘏𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘙𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘰, 𝘎𝘶𝘴𝘩 𝘗𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘥?" It would, but I can hear the whining right now: "How dare you heartless liberals persecute this dying old man!" Still, there needs to be a reckoning for all the reactionaries who have brought us to this terrible moment, including the right wing media hatemongers and their financial backers.
The creeps who call themselves "patriots" and then advocate and advance acts of sedition need to be charged, tried and convicted, and punished to the full extent of the law. The law will deter further political crimes by these and other bozos. I guarantee none of them will stand up and shout give me victory or death when a judge sentences them to fines, imprisonment, and a lifetime labeled as an anti-American terrorist. Spell out the ways they have violated the Constitution and give them copies to read in prison. These are not folks who have some learned and thoughtful understanding of the course of human events and historical trends. They live in an alterverse more like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and National Treasure.
Alterverse, yes! I wonder what US education was like, 1950-1970. The people I talk to who were processed entirely in those years are steeped in mythology (Washington and Lincoln were pure, we won every war by dint of being brave and free, etc) and genuinely offended by any suggestion that maybe that isn't the whole story. Like, the "point" of the slavery "story" isn't that it "ends in freedom," thereby "proving we're the greatest country," ya know? That view, of history not as contingencies to grapple with but as a story with a moral to teach, must be at least partly the fault of our Cold War public school system. And I wonder to what extent those old methods are still in place, fucking us up for the next 50 years too.
I'll only say that at least they (we, I should say) learned what the actual tenets of our founding were -- which is why people started to protest that they weren't being lived up to, and also why they stopped teaching them.
Ha! And I can cosign this. My late-'80s education never connected all those fantastic 18th century tenets to any events after 1955. Even in AP History (not to brag, but I was in AP History), the class ended with Brown v Board of Ed, 1954. Then our teacher took a day to talk about his personal memory of the JFK assassination, and then... we turned into a study hall, even though there were two weeks left of actual school. So. In a class where we'd carefully examined how America failed its tenets at the Trail of Tears, in the Know-Nothing movement, and with Dred Scott... us kids sure as hell were steered away from applying that same critical eye to Watergate, COINTELPRO, the murder of Fred Hampton, Wounded Knee -- really anything even remotely ongoing. It was as if history had already happened and we were living in something else, to which history did not apply.
I went to high school in Liberal New York City, in a neighborhood which was mostly Black and Jewish, and what we learned about Reconstruction was 1) carpetbaggers and scallawags and 2) that if only Lincoln hadn't been assassinated there would have been Healing and Unity instead of the punitive, vengeful policy the North adopted under the Radical Republicans.
It wasn't quite Birth of a Nation, but too damned close for comfort. (Not that I had the slightest idea at the time.)
Dunning school foofaraw, me hates it
That whole scene from Michael Clayton -- where the line 'do I look like I'm negotiating' comes from -- is well-written, powerfully acted and incredibly satisfying. It resembles real life about as much as anything from Avengers: Endgame, but it's a wish-fulfilling salve in these trying times.
This was a terrific film in every way, IMO. Been waiting for Gilroy to even come close to it since. Wha' hoppen?
Anyone notice Trump saying "our movement" three times in his little "no violence" post-Impeachment II video? That's gotta be a special Stephen Miller fantasy for his fellow kleine fascista out there. (Not to mention Trump saying "no true supporter of mine" three times. He's in his own little Cult of Me at this point.)
Thanks to four years of the Piece Of Shit, his lunatic cult, and Republicans pandering to him and it (e.g., Michigan State Leg: Wanna carry AR-15's in the statehouse? Sure, why not!), I've become a paranoid nailbiter. When I read that Trump's newly installed lackeys at the Pentagon are overseeing 15-20,000 fully armed National Guard troops for the Inauguration, the first thing that entered my mind was the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Nuts, isn't it? But then, how many law enforcement and military McVeigh types have we already seen in his "movement"?
That "movement" reference stuck out for me like flashing lights and klaxons, which I believe are noisy scary things.
Delivered in his surly forced-to-say-it voice; his followers got the real message while the media spew bullshit based on their fantasies.
This is a such a good article. It should be in the wapo, where, unfortunately, throughlines like this are not drawn. Media fails America.
At the very least, it should be made free for non-subscribers.
We're gonna need a bigger Supermax.
America has a long and proud tradition of mocking and denigrating politics and politicians, it's considered a basic right. One side-effect is that a majority (according to noted authority Dr. Otto Yerass) have little to no understanding of what politics is or how it is supposed to work. You combine that with many Americans, young and old, taking a good look at the future and they Do Not Want. At All. Olds see the glorious past, when you could tell a pretty girl to smile without getting arrested and everything cost a nickel lost forever, and the knucklehead yoots see no future for them at all. With that audience, any neckbeard with a comforting theory or babe with a glock and a YouTube channel has a shot. As a well-known political theorist said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Ironically, the only thing that might save the United States is if people start taking it unironically.
Slavoj Zizek suggests in the "Sublime Object of Ideology" that irony is counter-revolutionary, meant to suppress the outrage that would lead to activism & engagement, & ultimately change.
You can also see how irony is weaponized in alt-right recruitment efforts that create consent by couching hate speech in "just joking yeesh," but that joking turns soon into actual serious hate speech.
Nickels? They had pictures of bees on 'em. Give me five bees for a quarter, we'd say.