Cringey Sunday

Yikes, after the visceral horror of mismanaged lab work, I needed a finisher of extremely cringey behavior, and the Internet provided. It’s this guy.

He rushed the stage at the California Democratic party convention to snatch the microphone away from Kamala Harris, because he wanted to talk about some “big ideas” — apparently, he’s concerned about extinctions, which I can sympathize with, but in this case the guy with the man-bun was inappropriate and disruptive and making his cause look bad.

I was impressed with how it was handled, though: no tough-guy threats, no violence, they just smoothly shuffled him off the stage and took him to the exit — they didn’t even press charges. I don’t know if that was a mistake, though, because the perpetrator seems completely clueless about what he has done wrong and will learn nothing from his behavior. He doesn’t even seem embarrassed, just smugly confident.

Whoa, his name really is “Randy Rainbow”?

His father’s name was Gerry Rainbow, and they named him Randy. It’s not a stage name. That’s the least of the trivia I learned from this profile of the YouTube star.

I think he’s fabulous, and all of his videos are entertaining…that’s the important thing. He also says he’s not very political, which I can believe. He’s just a normal guy with considerable musical talent who is just expressing a normal, ordinary perspective on the current odious absurdity. Check out his channel if you haven’t already.

Also, how does Santa determine who is naught and nice?

The British Army seems to be trying to screen out dangerously demented Extreme Right Wing (XRW) individuals with a checklist.

That seems like a good idea to me, and those look like common markers for bad behavior right there. I can say that, because I’d score a zero. The real right-wingers on social media sites are pissed off about it, because they conform with at least some of the items on the list.

That, though, is where I start to see problems here. If someone says they think it’s true that they “describe themselves as patriots”, but also detest the idea of “white-only communities”, are they still an XRW? Can you be 10% XRW, or is it an all-or-nothing sort of determination? Is there any weighting of the terms? Sticking “-istan” on place names is stupid, but using racial slurs and violence is far worse.

How are people supposed to use this list? It just says “Look out for individuals who…”, which is terribly vague. OK, if I, for instance, have a co-worker who does any of these things, am I supposed to report them, complain to HR, sign them up for attitude readjustment, get them fired, what?

The chief utility seems to be as a kind of meta test: print it out, show it to someone you suspect of being an XRW, see if they explode into an angry rant, which will out them as an XRW. Then what?

The British military only hints.

Addressing the ‘XRW chart’, an army spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that “robust measures” were in place to make sure they didn’t have people with “extremist views” in the armed forces.

“Robust measures”…what are they?

I agree that anyone who meets any of those criteria is not very bright and is conforming to right-wing cliches, but it’s not sufficient to just wave around a list. You need to explain how to interpret the list and what actions will be taken against people who express some number of the attitudes on it.

Freedom’s just another word for…flammable?

At first, I thought it had to be some strange typo: the department of energy has started calling natural gas “freedom gas” made up of “molecules of U.S. freedom”. But no, apparently this is a trial balloon that has been flung about before.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry, a former Texas governor, has equated natural gas with “freedom” in the past. In January 2018, Perry told Fox Business that giving allies access to energy choices is a “priceless” kind of freedom.

“The United States is not just exporting energy, we’re exporting freedom,” Perry said.

One of the first people to have called the export “freedom gas” appears to have been a European journalist from the platform Euractiv. While the Perry was visiting Brussels in April, the journalist asked if “freedom gas” was an accurate description.

Perry agreed, saying that the U.S. is “again delivering a form of freedom” to Europe. “And rather than in the form of young American soldiers, it’s in the form of liquefied natural gas.”

The American people can’t possibly be as stupid as Rick Perry, can they?

I’m also wondering what they’ve been huffing down there in the department of energy.

The imaginary free speech crisis is a ploy to silence free speech

I work on a college campus, and I can tell you that we get more diverse political views than are represented on, say, Fox News. Public display boards are plastered with that Turning Point USA bullshit. The College Republicans routinely bring in speakers with inane points of view — anti-abortion, pro-religion, anti-environmental crap that I despise. If I, a left-leaning college professor at a liberal arts college, have no power to silence right-wing stupidity, then how can you claim that we have so much censorship power? If you’re so in favor of free speech, why do you complain about students using their free speech to protest?

Well, somebody understands that there is no free speech crisis on college campuses, at least.

“Chilling” is the word used in the Washington Post headline to describe college students’ supposed hostility to free speech. A new poll appears to indicate that 20% of college students believe it is appropriate to use violence to shut down hateful or offensive speakers. Thanks to a carefully orchestrated campaign, the notion that universities are hostile to the free exchange of ideas is slipping into mainstream opinion. It is a phony crisis manufactured by the same people who fuel the engines of climate denial. Right wing activists and donors are fighting to undermine universities because their values cannot thrive there. Modern conservatism is failing on campus because it shrivels in an atmosphere of intelligent, open debate.

That’s right. I do think if a speaker comes on campus to advocate for violence against certain groups, then we shouldn’t tolerate the intolerance, and they should be told to go speak at a Klan rally instead, and that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to pelt them with milkshakes as they’re safely escorted away. That does not mean that we oppose a diversity of ideas…it means that doing harm will not be supported.

The idea that this reasonable assumption of non-destructive behavior is somehow “chilling” is a product of people like the Koch brothers or Dennis Prager or Charlie Kirk. They’re the ones who run the propaganda mills that are trying to shut down the free exchange of ideas and replace them with slavish dogmatism. They aren’t even very good at that.

More interesting than the flaws in the poll’s execution is the buried lede: the poll failed. Look behind the absurd headlines and the poll demonstrates the opposite conclusion. College students are much more open to free speech than the general public. If it’s “chilling” that 20% of college students misunderstand free speech, what word should we use to describe the quarter of the American public and almost half of Republicans who support censoring unfavorable media outlets. Also from this poll, the college students who identified as Democrats were more open to free speech than their Republican peers. And perhaps the most important lesson from these poll results: a carefully constructed poll can get a small minority of respondents to endorse almost anything.

The real problem is that a majority of college students have outgrown the reactionary Old Guard, the 1950s mentality that is crumbling away as the white majority recedes into an angry, resentful minority. Women outnumber men. The assumption of privilege is under assault.

What is really happening on college campuses? Young Americans, exposed to some of the most intellectually open environments that have ever existed in a human society, are rejecting the values of The Last Jim Crow Generation to an almost unanimous extent. This trend extends beyond politics. Younger Americans are making better, smarter, more morally admirable choices than their parents and grandparents in almost every respect. Today’s college students are less likely than their forebears to use illegal drugs, smoke cigarettes, or engage in dangerous or irresponsible sexual practices. They are less likely to get pregnant or marry early. Younger Americans are better informed, more tolerant of dissent, and less bigoted than older generations. They even have higher average IQ’s. Our political system is about to be rocked by a wider generation gap than we faced in the Sixties.

We should be proud that a younger generation is turning out better than we were, but no — instead, rich fucks just want to poison the well of new ideas. We have an opportunity here, to encourage people who could repair the damage my generation has done, don’t let the cowering guardians of the status quo burn it all down.

Remembrances

This Memorial Day, I learned that the very first Memorial Day was a remembrance by freed black slaves in Charleston, South Carolina in honor of the union dead. That seems like a significant fact we weren’t taught in school.

It bears reminding, too, that our soldiers fought a major war to end the Nazi threat. A lot of people have forgotten that swastikas were once trophies taken from a fallen enemy, not something to celebrate today.

My wife and I traveled to St Cloud, Minnesota today, where the Veterans of Foreign Wars were putting up a new monument. It was a surprise for her. My sons had gotten together and donated to have her father’s name, Robert Gjerness, put on the monument: he was a Minnesota native who had served as a Marine Raider in the Pacific War, and had fought some of the fiercest battles there, like Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal. He didn’t talk much about it, but he’d let his grandchildren play with his box of medals, and they have fond memories of their grandfather, who died a few years ago.

We remembered.

It’s the least we can do.

Perfectly on point for Wenatchee

Every state has a little Florida Man in it. In Wenatchee, Washington, Cameron Wilson was carrying a gun in his front pocket — we’re already in the territory of Bad Ideas — when it went off and sent a bullet ripping through his testicles.

Upon arriving at the hospital, a doctor was operating on the gunshot wound when a balloon of marijuana slipped out of Wilson’s anus, court records show, according to the report.

So he was smuggling marijuna in his rectum, in a state where marijuana is a legal drug. That’s just brilliant.

I grew up in the lush, cosmopolitan, progressive Western side of Washington, and it’s terrible to say, but Mr Wilson is representative of how we saw the Eastern half of the state, which was the domain of conservative ranchers, feral teenagers, and a thriving drug trade. And now, there’s a proposal to split Washington in two! It makes sense at a cultural level — East and West are very different places — but it makes no sense at all that Eastern Washington would want it. They’d lose all the economic benefits of sharing resources with the wealthy Puget Sound region, and they’d no longer be able to check the more progressive policies that come out of Seattle. They’d be a poor, arid, politically weak rump of a state.

Worse, the proposal is coming from Matt Shea, a Christian Identitarian who wants to wage Biblical war on sodomites, atheists, communists, and heretical Christians (“Biblical war” means, to him, killing any man who resists and taking their women and children as slaves), and who was divorced for spousal abuse, and who organized and led a hate group in Spokane. He’s completely wackaloony.

Shea claims his breakaway state of Liberty would rival Texas in prosperity. Except, or course, that Eastern Washington lacks oil or a seaport or much of anything in the way of industry or trade. They do have cows. And sagebrush. Pretty scenery. Rocks.

Oh, and real estate and a massive nuclear waste site.

And though Liberty would have far fewer people, it would gain national political clout and rival or surpass many other Western states in population and wealth. It would be larger than Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas. It would continue to capture billions of federal dollars to clean up the Hanford nuclear site.

It’s also populated with people who shoot their balls off. The kind of people who would vote for Matt Shea.

Comrades! To the barricades…errm, the Dairy Queen!

When Black Lives Matter took to the streets and inconvenienced white folks trying to get to the mall or cost truckers time and money, people complained that this was an inappropriate way to protest. They never seemed to realize that that was the point.

“Our purpose is to disrupt people’s routine, and disrupt their peace,” coalition leader Brandi Grayson said. “Because racism is very inconvenient for people who have to live with it in their day-to-day life, whether in school or in work. It’s very inconvenient. And it’s very disruptive. So we, in a sense, want to give people a glimpse of that.”

When teachers demonstrate and strike to protest salaries and working conditions, you can rely on a Betsy DeVos to complain that they shouldn’t strike during school hours.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos suggested Monday that teachers hold demonstrations over issues such as compensation during “adult time” so they don’t cause harm to students by disrupting educational hours.

“I think it’s important that adults have adult disagreements on adult time, and that they not ultimately hurt kids in the process,” DeVos said when asked if she supported teacher strikes at the Education Writers Association national seminar in Baltimore, according to The Associated Press.

Well, you see, Betsy, if they don’t disrupt the work you are paying them poorly to do, you won’t feel any incentive to change their working conditions…ah, Christ. No one’s going to get through to that dimbulb. But the point is to wake people up to the vital work they’re doing, not to make continued neglect easy.

There are two kinds of people out there. The ones who won’t cross a picket line, or will get out of their car to join a Black Lives Matter protest, and the complacent ones who are more outraged at a 15 minute delay in getting to The Gap or having to make arrangements to accommodate keeping the kids at home (which can be a difficult sacrifice, I will admit), then they are at endemic racism or that teachers have to pay out of pocket to buy supplies to teach their kids.

Now the complacent ones have got a new complaint. People are throwing milkshakes at fascists, bigots, white ethnostate advocates, neo-Nazis, and preening political assholes. Oh, dear. Suddenly they have discovered a sense of empathy for white fascists that they never had for their victims.

Seth Andrews is unhappy with this development. It’s childish to act against scum.

The guy who is really over the top is Sam Harris, who sees these as practice runs for assassinations.

Harris, of course, is the guy who wouldn’t go anywhere without a security team, who’d show up for conferences with armed burly guys in the wings; even when he flew to Australia, he had a security guard escort him on the plane. It was comical. That was at a time when I was getting daily death threats in my mail, was showing up for events without fear, and Mr Paranoid needed a big man with a gun to keep him safe. You know, Richard Dawkins was showing up at these conferences sans bullet-proof vest and a SWAT team, and he was always a far bigger target than Harris.

But the important point is that people of principle are beginning to escalate, still not doing real physical harm against opponents who have shot people, murdered them with cars, or dispatched roving gangs to assault people on the street. They are throwing dairy products or eggs.

Good.

For years, people who write about the dangers of the right have been belittled as “keyboard warriors”, myself included. I could easily write ten thousand words about the villainy of fascism, and be mocked for not actually doing anything that these vermin would care about — they’ll continue on their merry, vicious way no matter how many pleading op-eds beg them to stop, or exhort opponents to vote. But let a few people rise up and actually piss off a bigot, let them act to express their righteous anger, and suddenly a subset of the people who profess sentiments in favor of the Left are whining, piously deploring that matters have escalated and decrying action.

Too late. The escalation occurred when Nazis marched, chanting anti-semitic slogans and appearing on the news calmly calling for genocide, and when they used clubs, guns, and vehicles to injure and kill protesters. That was when we needed violence to be stopped. Now is when public condemnation has to be loud and undeniable, when those who foster violence need to be shamed and exposed, by people who also reject the use of violence. A thrown milkshake is an effective tool to denounce the monsters in our midst.

What these critiques misunderstand is why milkshaking is so potent against Farage and his brethren: It humiliates them. Nothing animates the far right or shapes its worldview quite so much as the desire to humiliate others—and the fear of being humiliated themselves. It’s why alt-right trolls, projecting their own sexual insecurities, enjoy calling their opponents “cucks.” It’s why they rally around blustery authoritarian figures like Donald Trump who cast themselves as beyond embarrassment, shame, or ridicule. They brandish humiliation like a weapon while craving release from it.

Getting doused in a milkshake robs far-right figures of the air of chauvinistic invulnerability that they spend so much time cultivating. They hunger to be taken seriously despite their racist views. They want to be described as dapper, to be interviewed on evening news broadcasts and weekend talk-show panels, and to be seen as a legitimate participant in the democratic process. Most politicians to the left of Enoch Powell would brush off milkshaking as a harmless stunt. For those seeking mainstream legitimacy, it’s another searing reminder that they don’t belong.

It’s also not dismissable as mere virtue signaling, because smearing bad people with dairy products has a cost: the fascists come with thugs who will beat you bloody, and it does have legal repercussions. The people who stand up and embarrass these dangerous extremists are goddamn heroes, as are the protesters who walk out and block freeway traffic for a cause, or the union members who sacrifice their livelihood to better the lives of their comrades.

The people who clutch their pearls and whimper at the effrontery of defying the status quo, on the other hand, are goddamn useless cowards.