This is how you get lunatics in high office. Do you want more delusional politicians with selfish, unrealistic ideas running the country?
This is where we’re at. Those two grossly wealthy clowns probably actually believe they understand the qualifications for the office, and it’s something stupid like Instagram popularity or how many records you’ve sold or how full of yourself you are.
So, how are you celebrating the Fourth of July? I’m not. It’s just another day when idiots will crank up the jingo and make me embarrassed to be an American, so I don’t have any reason to party — quite the contrary, I plan to duck down low and hope the whole shameful episode goes away soon.
The president, on the other hand, took the opportunity yesterday to amplify his disgrace with a partisan demonization of his critics.
“The radical ideology attacking our country advances under the banner of social justice. But in truth, it would demolish both justice and society,” Trump said. “It would transform justice into an instrument of division and vengeance and turn our free society into a place of repression, domination and exclusion. They want to silence us, but we will not be silenced.”
The president, who recently signed an executive order aimed at punishing those who destroy monuments on federal property, referred to “violent mayhem” in the streets, even though many of the mass demonstrations have been largely peaceful. He warned that “angry mobs” were unleashing “a wave of violent crime” and using “cancel culture” as a weapon to intimidate and dominate political opponents — in what he compared to “totalitarianism.”
And Trump asserted that “children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe the men and women who built it were not heroes but villains.”
“This radical view of American history is a web of lies,” he added.
“They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive,” Trump said. “But no, the American people are strong and proud, and they will not allow our country and all of its values, history and culture to be taken from them.”
To demonstrate totalitarianism, Trump also had Indian protesters, who have long protested the seizure of their land to build a ‘patriotic’ monument to American colonialism, sculpted by a racist, arrested. Message received.
We’re living in interesting times, when we face the ongoing threats of a pandemic and climate change, when the police have been rampaging against the citizenry, when naked racism is exposing itself everywhere, when the government is a nest of corruption and incompetence. One might wonder what our president might do to address these issues, rather than inflame them. Don’t worry. He has a Plan. A cunning plan, no less, one that we’ll hear much more about as he runs for re-election.
In an effort to fight back, he announced a surprise executive order establishing “The National Garden of American Heroes”, a vast outdoor park featuring statues of “the greatest Americans to ever live” – a selection sure to provoke debate and controversy.
You see, the real problem is that statues are under threat, and we have to provide a refuge from oppression for a huge gallery of random collections of statues. Someone threatens to tear down a statue of slaver and traitor Robert E. Lee? Send in a helicopter and whisk it away to some acreage full of other statues of people no one should like. A retirement home for representations of dead people of dubious character, if you will, sprinkled with a few monuments to people like Ulysses Grant and Harriet Tubman to give the shameful dead some respectability.
That’s a Trumpian solution, all right, celebrating the problem and making it worse, creating a centralized repository of bad art and bad history which he can have patrolled by armed guards who will shoot and/or arrest people who dare to protest his celebration of freedom. He also desperately wants to make this nonsense a campaign issue, because for sure he won’t be running on his record or his abilities.
I don’t know that my Minnesota ancestors fought in the Civil War, but the Iowa side of the family did, in the Western campaigns under Grant. I’ve been in this state for 20 years, my mother and grandparents were born here, so it’s fair that I take a little pride in the bravery of the 1st Minnesota.
No Minnesotan should ever flaunt the Confederate flag.
Finally, Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s enabler/associate/partner in crime, has been arrested. Now it might get interesting — Epstein may be dead, but Maxwell knew as much if not more about his activities and all the people who took advantage of their ‘hospitality’. I wonder if she’ll spill the beans, or if she’ll conveniently decide to commit ‘suicide’? There may be some members of the European and American aristocracy sweating right now.
A Republican delivers delicious commentary on masks.
Alex Castellanos, a veteran Republican strategist, said the divide over whether to cover one’s face is, like many things in the Trump era, political.
“Mask-wearing has become a totem, a secular religious symbol,” Castellanos said. “Christians wear crosses, Muslims wear a hijab, and members of the Church of Secular Science bow to the Gods of Data by wearing a mask as their symbol, demonstrating that they are the elite; smarter, more rational, and morally superior to everyone else.”
That’s kind of true. The thing is that crosses and the hijab don’t affect COVID-19 transmission, while masks do. Recognizing the reality of the data does make you smarter and more rational (but not necessarily superior). As usual, though, this is an attempt to disparage evidence-based thinking by comparing it to religious thinking, when the accuser thinks religion is just ducky, making it also a weird smear against himself.
He always seems to have the right take on things.
James O'Brien on the Tory MPs celebrating the end of freedom of movement: "How does a country end up imposing economic sanctions on itself and celebrating the abolition of freedoms enjoyed by its own citizens?"@mrjamesob | #Brexit pic.twitter.com/ZN8F3bbcV1
— LBC (@LBC) July 1, 2020
Both the US & UK are afflicted with these awful people who punch themselves in the face to make the liberals cry. I don’t get it, but that’s what’s poisoning our politics right now.
I’ve been hearing so much pollyannaish bullshit from the highest offices in the land that it’s shocking when the CDC just speaks the truth. We’re fucked.
The coronavirus is spreading too rapidly and too broadly for the U.S. to bring it under control, Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Monday.
The U.S. has set records for daily new infections in recent days as outbreaks surge mostly across the South and West. The recent spike in new cases has outpaced daily infections in April when the virus rocked Washington state and the northeast, and when public officials thought the outbreak was hitting its peak in the U.S.
“We’re not in the situation of New Zealand or Singapore or Korea where a new case is rapidly identified and all the contacts are traced and people are isolated who are sick and people who are exposed are quarantined and they can keep things under control,” she said in an interview with The Journal of the American Medical Association’s Dr. Howard Bauchner. “We have way too much virus across the country for that right now, so it’s very discouraging.”
The Republicans want to stop testing, because it reveals an increasing number of infected. Tracing? What’s that? There’s no serious investment of resources that we’d need to do thorough tracing. The President belittles the idea of wearing a mask, and refuses to wear one himself. Conservative citizens freak out at the idea of wearing a mask. Texans marched on their capitol under the banner of “Bar Lives Matter”, committing a double self-own: refusing to police their own behavior to limit the spread of a disease, and mocking a serious social justice movement. The United States of America is now the deadliest place to live and risk COVID-19 infection, and our numbers are rising. We are in big trouble, and way too many people are refusing to take it seriously, which means the trouble is only going to get worse.
I fear the November elections will be the spark that makes this country explode…unless we’re moribund with disease by then.
Now that Jordan Peterson has crawled out of the dark hole he had retreated to, we have to make sure he never again gets the prominence he used to have. If you want to enjoy a stunningly thorough take-down of the man, here you go.
“You have to admire Hitler! […] Because he was an organizational genius!”
These are not the words of a neo-Nazi. They are words stated, with the utmost conviction, by Jordan B. Peterson, the psychologist and anti-“political correctness” guru whose YouTube channel boasts 2.8 million subscribers, in one of his Biblical Series lectures from 2017.
While Peterson’s hostile statements on feminism and what he calls “cultural Marxism” have been thoroughly dissected in the media, but his views on Hitler, National Socialism, and the Holocaust have not, bar a very few exceptions. Peterson, an academic who declares that he chooses his words “very, very, carefully” has made so many incorrect statements about Hitler that it verges on revisionism.
Peterson has repeatedly said that he has “studied Hitler a lot,” but every statement he utters about Hitler makes this very hard to believe. It’s worth diving into Peterson’s unsettling understanding of Hitler, from his strangely generous framing of the Nazi leader, through his misrepresentation of chronology, his misuse of historical sources, to his odd re-writing of Holocaust history.
I think history makes it clear that Hitler was the Donald Trump/Boris Johnson of the 1930s — a blustering con man with bad ideas who wrecked his country. While we’re flattening the apologists who make excuses for them now, let’s also make sure Trump and Johnson don’t get the opportunity to become the Hitler of the late 1930s, WWII, and the Holocaust.
Recently, as social media have begun a belated crackdown on the odious rantings of the far right, the trolls have begun emigrating to more open media, places where the promise is made to never, ever censor Free Speech, no matter how vile. The first thing they ought to realize, though, is if you knock out the bottom of the barrel, discourse is going to plunge to new lows. The second thing is that removing any limitations is mainly going to appeal to people with no respect for others, and you’re going to be wallowing in bad actors. The third thing is…you can’t run an active forum without moderation. It’s a law of nature.
So Parler, the latest free speech fad, is throwing away any pretense and cracking down on views it doesn’t like.
Well, that did not take long at all. On Friday we predicted that just like every other social media platform out there, the new favorite among people who falsely say that Twitter is censoring conservatives, would start taking down content and shutting down accounts just like everyone else. Because, if you run any sort of platform that allows 3rd party speech, sooner or later you discover you have to do that. In Friday’s post, we highlighted Parler’s terms of service, which certainly allows for it to take down any content for any reason (we also mocked their “quick read on Wikipedia” style understanding of the 1st Amendment).
Exactly. Everyone who has maintained even a little blog with a comments section knows this is true — if you don’t have a moderation policy, there will be swarms of abusers who who will take advantage of the laxity. Even if you do have a moderation policy, there will be people who try to work around it, just because they can. You will always have to block people; there is no such thing as a viable policy of absolutely unfettered free speech.
The only question is who will be blocked, and for what reasons, and that will always be a reflection of the values on your site. Not censoring Nazis is not a neutral stance, it is actively pro-Nazi.
Hey! All the noise and protests and criticism of social media seems to be having an effect. YouTube has banned Stefan Molyneux, Richard Spencer, and David Duke (jesus, what took them so long?). Reddit has killed The_Donald, ChapoTrapHouse, and 2000 smaller subreddits. Again, why did they tolerate the intolerable until now?
Goodbye, good riddance, you won’t be missed.
