Let’s distort history!

That seems to be a right-wing theme. You may recall that a few weeks ago I posted a letter to the editor by Michael Lackey, who is actually an authority on German cultural history in the 20th century — he has published a book on Nazi propaganda of the time, and one of the things he emphasized is how the Nazis fully embraced Christianity, used Christian imagery in their propaganda, and established the legitimacy of their regime by relating it to the dominant Catholic and Lutheran faiths of the people. He compared that to the current Republican adoration of evangelical Christianity, which has been a remarkable enabler of fascism.

Of course, he has gotten pushback in the local paper. The latest is a letter from Evelyn A. Guggisberg, who is appalled that anyone would think Nazis were Christian.

It is unconscionable for Lackey to say what he is saying. When one sees tho that one of his sources is the Washington Post, a noted fake news outlet, it does become understandable why he thinks such folly.

So what is a conservative Christian anyway? A Christian is one who follows Christ. Either you follow Him, or you don’t. For Lackey to say that the Nazis or Hitler were Christian is ludicrous beyond belief! Christ was once accused of being of the devil. It is not uncommon for true followers of Christ to be accused of all kinds of things which are not only not true, but quite opposite.

She doesn’t actually refute his claim with any evidence, because she doesn’t have any. She’s reduced to an argument by definition, rather than any facts. Nazis couldn’t have been Christians, because Christians by definition are all about love and tolerance, and wouldn’t ever be associated with anti-immigration policies, homophobia, racism, discrimination, or police-state violence.

I guess America isn’t Christian then, either.

I kind of stopped reading her letter at this point:

I happen to be an avid Trump supporter. I wasn’t always. It was my faith which brought me around. I happen to abhor perpetual lying. I have come to learn that is what democrats and fake news reporters excel in. How mournful that Lackey still believes such lies apparently. I don’t believe that there ever has been a president in our nation’s history who has been more belittled or lied about than Donald Trump.

This historical denialism seems to be a major strategy on the American Right — in particular, the demonization of the American Left by claiming that they are indistinguishable from Nazis in all of their views and policies, which requires some pretty serious lying about the positions of the Nazis in order to pretend that Bernie Sanders and Adolf Hitler are identical. The video below by Three Arrows is an excellent antidote to that, and also exposes Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, and Dinesh D’Souza as the dishonest buffoons they are.

Have our senators read their Bible?

The reading for today is Genesis 18, in which Abraham bargains with God to save the city of Sodom.

22And the men turned their faces from thence, and went toward Sodom: but Abraham stood yet before the LORD. 23And Abraham drew near, and said, Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? 24Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein? 25That be far from thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked: and that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? 26And the LORD said, If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes. 27And Abraham answered and said, Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes: 28Peradventure there shall lack five of the fifty righteous: wilt thou destroy all the city for lack of five? And he said, If I find there forty and five, I will not destroy it. 29And he spake unto him yet again, and said, Peradventure there shall be forty found there. And he said, I will not do it for forty’s sake. 30And he said unto him, Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak: Peradventure there shall thirty be found there. And he said, I will not do it, if I find thirty there. 31And he said, Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord: Peradventure there shall be twenty found there. And he said, I will not destroy it for twenty’s sake. 32And he said, Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak yet but this once: Peradventure ten shall be found there. And he said, I will not destroy it for ten’s sake. 33And the LORD went his way, as soon as he had left communing with Abraham: and Abraham returned unto his place.

And we look upon the Republican party today, as they gather to decide whether to elevate a drunkard who abuses women to the Supreme Court. Peradventure there will be one or two found there who will be among the righteous? Trust not in Susan Collins, who will play with the media as one does with a cat toy. Do not let your faith rest in Jeff Flake, who can speak piously while acting as a loyal servant of Satan. Face the day with equanimity, for either one Republican will find reason and justice in their soul, or the people shall rain upon the Republican party brimstone and fire, and overthrow that party, and all the electorate that grew upon the ground. Justice will be had one way or another.

Also remember the end of that story: the LORD only found one righteous man in Sodom, and he was the kind of guy who’d send out his daughters to be raped by a mob. The LORD destroyed his city. The “righteous” man ends up hiding in a cave near Zoar, drinking himself into oblivion, and fucking his own daughters.

Who says there are no good stories and no lessons to be learned from your Bible?

No poors allowed

Our administration wants to slide in new rules to keep those poor people out of the country.

In a 447-page proposed rule issued on Friday, the administration proposes sharply limiting legal immigration for those that aren’t already wealthy and privileged.

The proposed rule would favor granting permanent legal status to immigrants who make more than 250% of the federal poverty line. For a family of four, that means an income of $62,750 per year.

This exceeds the median household income in the United States.

I will only accept this if it is applied retroactively, meaning Trump’s immigrant grandfather and all of his descendants must leave immediately. It means I’ll also have to move to Norway or Sweden, but that’s a small price to pay.

Why free speech is sometimes a curse

John Oliver rips into the Republican efforts to prop up Kavanaugh in the first 9 minutes, but go ahead and watch the rest where he describes Facebook as a toilet. A lot of it is spent on how Facebook blithely allowed inflammatory hate speech to flow in Myanmar, with the excuse that they didn’t have enough people fluent in the language to police it, but I have to say — they allow it fo flow pretty freely in English, too.

Another account

Here we go again…another woman, Deborah Ramirez, has stepped forward to testify about Brett Kavanaugh’s drunken behavior at Yale. It’s a story vetted by Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer, two journalists with a rock-solid reputation.

Will the Republicans finally withdraw this nomination? If they push it through, all they’ll accomplish is to diminish the authority of the Supreme Court still further.

America is Animal House

The Washington Post has a good story on Christine Blasey Ford, and let’s get this out of the way: she’s also a product of wealthy, preppy, privileged, private school and country club culture. I despise those people. That they are the class that dominates politics is one of the big problems with this country.

But she got out — she fled as far as she could from the kind of people that Brett Kavanaugh instead chose to wallow with. The kind of people who thought getting drunk until they vomited was the height of fun.

Every summer, the “Holton girls” would pack into a rented house for Beach Week, an annual bacchanal of high-schoolers from around the region. The prep schools that formed Ford’s overlapping social circles usually gathered at a Delaware beach town each year. Kavanaugh, in his senior-year yearbook, cited his own membership in the “Beach Week Ralph Club.”

Like Kavanaugh, Ford was part of that alcohol-fueled culture. But those unchaperoned parties, at beach rentals and Bethesda basements alike, frequently left the girls feeling embattled.

“The boys were pretty brutal,” Evers said. “They would do what they could to get you drunk, and do whatever they would try to do to you.”

And then those boys go on to become lawyers and politicians, and do whatever they would try to do to the American people.

I have to say that this Twitter thread (read it all here) pretty much has American culture pegged.

Remember those cheap comedies from the ’80s, like Porkies or Revenge of the Nerds? I remember laughing at them, but what they were really doing is instilling in us a forgiveness for the excesses of Asshole Culture. Sure, they’re committing rape, they’re humiliating women, they’re praising turning the tables on bullies by becoming bullies yourselves, but boys will be boys, and isn’t it funny to peek in the girls’ showers or their bedroom windows and see boobies?

Try watching them now. They haven’t stood the test of time, and are painful to see, because now (I hope!) we can all see that the underdogs are all privileged white boys who have managed to succeed only by finding a new group of victims, usually women, to exercise power over. They are stories about clawing your way up the hierarchy by stomping hard on people, where you win by being cunning and brutal and making your opponents suffer, and your reward is getting the girl, whether she likes it or not.

And today, Cthulhu help us, it’s the people who absorbed those messages who now run the country.

You know, it pains me to say it, because I loved the anti-establishment message of another of those ’80s comedies, Animal House, and it actually does have some funny moments, but…it’s part of the problem. It celebrates sexism (don’t you like to see boobies?), and it is underdogs battling the privileged, but it’s two frat houses fighting for dominance. It’s the frat system that is the problem, and no one ever seems to think of leaving the whole rotten edifice. Then the hero is Bluto Blutarski, who is a crass, crude, ignorant failure who uses bluster and unearned confidence to claw his way up the ladder…he is the archetype of Trump. Real-life Blutarskis are not funny anymore.

It is sort of funny in a laugh-through-the-tears, ironic way that in the closing credits of the movie, they say that Blutarski goes on to become a US senator. It’s too true. That’s why we can still laugh. But do you still laugh when you see all the Blutos actually running congress? Becoming Supreme Court judges? Getting elected president? I don’t think so.

Jordan Peterson, fragile little snowflake and misogynist

I remember the old days of the internet, when some dork would throw a hissy fit and demand that we skeptics immediately remove all our mean statements about their devoutly held beliefs, and threaten us with legal action. And we’d all laugh at such absurdity, because once it’s on the internet, it’s being spread widely and isn’t going to go away, no matter how fiercely you stamp your foot or how loudly you scream.

I’ve personally experienced their ire: Pivar, Shermer, Carrier, to name just a few. Their efforts are futile. The facts do not disappear when they make you uncomfortable. Yet they still don’t get it.

The only difference today is that now it’s the so-called rationalists who are making willy-nilly threats of lawsuits to silence their critics, all while simultaneously genuflecting before the altar of free speech. It’s freakin’ weird, man. You’d think their heads would explode, or that at least their followers would notice the hypocrisy and turn their backs on them. But they don’t.

Latest in the litigious free-speechers who want to shut people up: Jordan Peterson. He’s suing someone who criticized his book.

In June, he threatened to sue Down Girl author and Cornell University assistant professor Kate Manne for defamation, after she criticized his book, 12 Rules For Life, and more generally called his work misogynistic in an interview with Vox. (Peterson previously filed a lawsuit against a university whose faculty members, in a closed-door meeting, argued that showing his videos in a classroom created an unsafe environment for students.) In letters to Manne, Cornell, and Vox, Peterson’s lawyer, Howard Levitt, demanded that all three parties “immediately retract all of Professor Manne’s defamatory statements, have them immediately removed from the internet, and issue an apology in the same forum to Mr. Peterson. Otherwise, our client will take all steps necessary to protect his professional reputation, including but not limited to initiating legal proceedings against all of you for damages.” (You can read the full letter below).

Among the statements Levitt objected to: Manne’s contention that Peterson’s book included “some really eyebrow-raising, authoritarian-sounding, and even cruel things,” as well as her observation that “it doesn’t seem accidental that [Peterson’s] skepticism about objective facts arises when it’s conveniently anti-feminist.” The lawyer and his client were equally unhappy with this line: “I also suspect that for many of Peterson’s readers, the sexism on display above is one tool among many to make forceful, domineering moves that are typical of misogyny.”

You don’t do this. You don’t bluster and threaten to sue critics of your book, no matter how savage their reviews. You especially don’t sue them when they can quote you and support all of their contentions, when your whole schtick is making broad-brush characterizations of people as archetypes and stereotypes.

I don’t get it. I get abused far worse, over a longer period of time, by various people who despise me, and they aren’t shy about doing it publicly (although, admittedly, they often do it behind the veil of anonymity), and I’ve never once thought about suing someone far it. These free-speech paladins, on the other hand, do it all the time.

Reminder: we’re still fundraising to defend ourselves from one SLAPP suit by one of these asshats. Not one of the usual freeze-peach suspects has spoken out against that suit — they’re inviting him to speak at their conferences, instead.