Remember all those years ago when we laughed and laughed at the mooks carrying protest signs saying “keep government out of my Medicare”? I know I sure do!
Good times! But it turns out that we had them all wrong. The Tea Party is made up of psychic geniuses.
Somebody commented on my cross-post about the election at my other blog. Well, “commented” isn’t quite the right word—more like “Demsplained.” I’ve been seeing a lot of this, and I am not having it. I’ll spare you the whole self-righteous rant, but I do want to address the overall gist by responding to a few brief excerpts.
Stop blaming Bernie supporters.
Not if they stayed home on election day, no. They absolutely share the blame. (I voted for Sanders in the primary.)
Stop blaming white people.
The ones who overwhelmingly voted for Trump? The ones who stayed home or cast third-party votes in swing states? No.
Stop blaming Black people or Latinos.
Only a Trump-magnitude asshole would ever do that.
Stop blaming people who voted their conscience.
Jeezus Christ. EVERYONE voted their conscience, and even people who stayed home did so because of conscience. Their consciences suck. I can and will hold accountable every single one of them if they had any part in this outcome. Lard knows they’re highly unlikely to ever do it themselves. Especially not with people like you ranting about how blameless they all are.
You’re looking for me to suck it up and sing kumbaya with people who by their own action or inaction threw women, LGBTQs, immigrants, Muslims, Native Americans, the disabled, blacks and Latinxs, the poor, the environment, 20 million people who will lose health insurance etc. under the fucking bus because “They want us fighting among ourselves,” “They want us divided,” and “That’s how they always win.” No. That is an abuser’s tactic, and that shit does not fly with me. Not any more.
I am not the one who did the fucking “dividing” here; YOU are refusing to hold accountable those who are actually responsible. They, and you, need to OWN THAT SHIT.
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If you’re getting a sense of deja vu like I am, I think its because the parallels to Big Tent Atheism™ are only too obvious.
We the People suck. The deadly contagion of right-wing conservatism in the US will no longer be restrained, however tenuously and imperfectly. It has been unleashed to destroy the earth like flesh-eating bacteria. It will start, as it always does, with more death and harm to the bodies of the most marginalized among us, and eventually work its way to harming the very people who enable it—which is to say, harming almost everyone.
[CONTENT NOTE: misogyny including slurs, racism, violence against logic, incoherence, banality, Nazis, sex toys.]
I had almost forgotten about this, what with all my squirrel monitoring duties and sofa painting and suchlike. But buried in my inbox was a gift from the WordPress gods in the form of two consecutive auto-moderated comments, written in response to a post I wrote back in July about the harms of benevolent sexism, and purporting to offer “an opposing viewpoint.”
It’s bad enough of course that the Catholic Church as an institution has precisely zero respect for the bodily autonomy of living people. Like all authoritarian panty-sniffers, the hierarchy strives to control every aspect of human existence in keeping with its morbid and moribund dictates whenever and wherever it can get away with it. Now, in accordance with its bizarre and stunted worldview, the Vatican has helpfully narrowed its mandates for what Catholics can and cannot do with their bodily remains even after they’re fucking dead.
A few weeks ago commenter “permanganater” took time out of his busy schedule to mansplain to me why, how and what I “should be focusing on tackling” on my own blog. I mocked him for that (per #deathtosquirrels protocol), then Brony took him apart for completely misreading the very post he was complaining about. He floundered on, and I ignored him.
Also relevant: readers here will no doubt recall with great reverence and awe my brilliant new hashtag #muschniwogdowis, an acronym for Most US Citizens Have No Idea What Our Government Does Or Who It Serves.
Well here comes permanganater again on a #muschniwogdowis post to say this:
Phyllis Schlafly is dead. Whoo-hoo!
Yes I know, I know. I am a terrible person and you should definitely stay far, far away from me and especially my blog. It’s true that I was actually a bit sad when Scalia kicked the bucket, but that was only because I would forever be denied the number one experience on my bucket list: mooning that fucker.
But Schlafly? I feel nothing but unadulterated joy in her passing. #sorrynotsorry
I cannot wait until Dick Cheney’s day comes. I might throw a goddamn parade!
A friend and Loyal Reader™ forwarded me a recent screed by Sam Harris. He asked if I would be willing to indulge him in letting him know what in it, if anything, I think is “objectionable, disagree with or find otherwise ill-advised.” Harris’s post, entitled “What Hillary Clinton Should Say about Islam and the ‘War on Terror,’” is written in the form of a proposed speech that he would like for the Democratic nominee for president to give before the November election. “Its purpose,” Harris says, “is to prevent a swing toward Trump by voters who find Clinton’s political correctness on the topic of Islam and jihadism a cause for concern.”
I did a debunking of Harris almost two years ago on this very topic. It was a tedious exercise, mainly because like all right-wing conservatives and reactionaries, he bases his irrational, evidence-free, simplistic, black-&-white views and arguments, such as they are, on falsehoods and factual inaccuracies that are a cakewalk to disprove. The task was all the more unbearable because I’ve always found Harris an unoriginal and uninteresting thinker and a witless and dull writer, so much so that I’m genuinely amazed he is not a regular op-ed columnist for the New York Times.
That said, he is certainly an incendiary polemicist. Or he tries to be anyway, but for me he comes off as smug and comically uninformed as any ordinary Fox News host. Except for a few items that popped up in my feeds, Harris had largely dropped off my radar. Those sure were a couple of doozies, though. Last year he made his jaw-dropping claim that far-right fabulist and then-presidential candidate Ben Carson is “one of the best people” on the subject of Islam and terrorism, even as Carson’s “own advisers admit [he] struggles with grasping basic facts surrounding international conflicts.” Before that, Noam Chomsky—who is the farthest thing from an unoriginal and uninteresting thinker or a witless and dull writer—ate him for lunch. Oh, and then there was that one time I made a bobblehead of Sam Harris for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
Researching for today’s post, however, I came across many more Harris grotesqueries that I was fortunate enough to miss, ignore or block from memory: support for racial profiling, torture, preemptive nuclear war, demanding that the US government admit that it is and ought to be “at war with Islam” and that “The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.”
Sensible fascists. Jeezus.
A decade ago, Harris wrote that Muslim immigrants to Europe exploit the Western values of their host countries by “demanding tolerance for their backwardness, their misogyny, their anti-Semitism, and the genocidal hatred that is regularly preached in their mosques.” He is inexplicably unaware that, in accordance with his much-touted “Western values,” his fellow US citizens not only demand “tolerance for their backwardness, their misogyny, their anti-Semitism, and the genocidal hatred that is regularly preached in their mosques churches“—and also happens to be the foundational principle upon which US “civilization” is and has always been based—they fucking receive it. He’s also unaware that immigrant populations assimilate to their host culture within a few generations—well, at least if they’re treated decently, for instance by having their host country not declare war on their religion or its presidential candidates threatening and demonizing them.
I honestly don’t know why I am undertaking this task again. Maybe because I find it troubling that anyone but a Fox News viewer would take the guy seriously on this issue, when conducting a cursory investigation into the facts and evidence for yourself will reveal how completely and utterly wrong he is about a unique nexus between Islamic religious ideas and terrorism (and misogyny), as well as how unethical, irrational, irresponsible and dangerous it is to promote such falsehoods. Maybe I’m doing this because I have some unhealthy masochistic tendencies I really should bring up in therapy. Maybe it’s because I like honoring the 1940s-era pianist and comedian Oscar Levant who said, “The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”
Well, regardless, now I’ve gone and done it. My comments and edits to Harris’s latest…whatever it is are in blue.
SPOILER ALERT: Sam Harris is still wanking all over the same, tired hobbyhorse. He has learned nothing. And he likely never will.
Today we are treated to an infotaining essay on the subject of Libertarians by SJ (Science Junkie), my good friend and self-proclaimed Loyal Subject™ (hahaha. WINNING). Science Blogs-era Pharyngula readers from a few years back might recognize his ‘nym. :D
Please give SJ a warm Death to Squirrels welcome!
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[CONTENT NOTE: photographic image depicting a large animal carcass lying in a street, and several impoverished young children; casual ableism.]
Three years ago a I posted a blog at my favorite palace in which I heaped contempt on the Libertarians’ patron saint, Ayn Rand. The vastly overrated novelist and “philosopher” died in 1982, but her legacy of superficial, egocentric “moral principles” lives on as a quasi-philosophy and cornerstone of a mean-spirited and delusional political party that is, at least for now, marginalized. (Warning: Things can change quickly here in Loonyland, so don’t write the Libertarians off.)
The graphic below was the inspiration behind the present title, and also for my earlier blog. As I wrote then, “The only problem with the graphic is the word philosopher, which belongs in scare quotes. Philosopher, my ass. If Ayn Rand is a philosopher, Michele Bachmann is a Constitutional scholar. Rand is the late-night infomercial of political philosophy. In a sane, educated society, she would be a standing joke, à la Bachmann.”
