Who for Minnesota Governor?

The frontrunner is Democrat Tim Walz. I scratched him off my dance card long, long ago: he’s got an A+ rating from the NRA. That ought to be the kiss of death for any politician any more.

On the other hand, Rebecca Otto has the recommendation of environmentalists and climate scientists like Michael Mann, along with an excellent record as the state auditor. She’s pro-democracy and pro-environment.

An A+ from climate scientists vs. an A+ from the freakin’ NRA. This one’s an easy choice. I want Rebecca Otto for governor of Minnesota.

Even with electoral victories, we have to worry about being undermined by the media

The liberal media is a myth. It’s been bought and sold by the rich. Take a look at this critique of the editor of the NY Times editorial section, James Bennett.

By now, there’s a somewhat prolific repertoire of writings critical of Bennet’s tenure. The beef is primarily with the op-eds as opposed to the editorial page, which remains a champion of progressive values, especially on urgent issues like gun control, climate change and, of course, opposition to the policies pouring forth from the Trump White House. It’s not surprising that some of the most blistering assessments have come from anti-establishment precincts. Here’s Glenn Greenwald: “If your goal were to wage war on media diversity in all of its forms, and to offer the narrowest range of views possible, it would be hard to top the roster of columnists the paper has assembled . . . Beyond the obvious demographic homogeneity, literally every one of them fits squarely within the narrow, establishment, center-right to center-left range of opinion that prevails in elite opinion-making circles . . . None is associated with or supportive of the growing populist left or the populist right; they all wallow in the vague, safe, Washington-approved middle ground, members in good standing of the newly overt neoliberal-neoconservative alliance.”

It’s all got the same flavor, whether it’s the Sunday morning news shows or the op-eds of most of the elite newspapers: wealthy old white guys droning on to support failed ideas backed only by tradition. It’s agonizing to watch.

Charles Pierce forecasts the future.

You can almost taste the flopsweat from the elite political media. They’re warming things up in case there really is a Democratic wave in the fall. Experience tells us that, if that happens, the elite political media will immediately engage the dampers on anything a Democratic majority might want to do that is in anyway Democratic or (horrors!) liberal. Expeditions to the Trumpish hinterlands will depart immediately. Appeals to “bipartisanship” will deafen the gods. This is what happened in 2006, when the country revolted against George W. Bush and his many crimes and failures. This is what will happen next fall, too.

You’re seeing it with the hilarious contortions of James Bennet regarding how he’s putting together his Opinion staff, and this obvious ratings extravaganza is another indication that all the old tracks are being set down again. In 2006, this phenomenon helped with the efforts to toss the Avignon Presidency down the memory hole so that people wouldn’t notice how it was the logical end to 30 years of conservative politics. It’s going to take even more of an effort to do that with this disaster. No wonder they’re starting early.

I’m afraid that’s a safe prediction. Trumpistani’s win: we get stories about sad, stupid people who are unhappy that we don’t respect their self-harming opinions. Trumpistani’s lose: we get stories about sad, stupid people who are unhappy that they don’t get to inflict their self-harming opinions on the rest of us. The media will do whatever they can of the myth of the Golden Age of Trump, just as they’re resusciating George W Bush’s reputation, and as they’ve always enshrined the myth of St Ronald Reagan.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a reality-based media that was less interested in pampering the opinions of the yahoos who still buy their papers and more concerned with reporting facts? Bret Stephens should never have gotten a column, not because he’s conservative, but because he rejects the facts of climate change.

David Brooks, the Times, and well-deserved rudeness

Drew Magary lets the NY Times editorial page have both barrels. It’s great stuff prompted by David Brooks recent excremental whine that we need to be nice to gun owners and Republicans in MAGA hats.

So let’s talk about rudeness for a moment, because we live in rude times. The president is a pig. His underlings are nothing but a bunch of opportunists and enablers. And the rest of GOP is staffed by a wide range of scum, from camera-friendly establishment monsters like Paul Ryan to outright crackpots like this guy. When the president’s own little pukeson decides to endorse a conspiracy theorist truthering the motives of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas teenagers, I feel like that’s a much greater sign of the end of civilization than someone rightfully telling a lady at the Times that she should take the L.

None of these people deserve civility. In fact, civility only serves to enable them. The fact that Trump can go party at his fucking country club on the same weekend 17 teenagers were slaughtered inside a school, and have NO ONE surrounding him say an unkind word to him, is damnable. And when Brooks cries out for “respect” for the coterie of stubborn gun owners who lap up the NRA’s propaganda, he is tacitly maneuvering to blunt the momentum of the Parkland kids who, with a welcome brashness, have kickstarted a very real and potentially effective anti-gun movement. He would like everyone to calm down. He would like everyone to think things over.

But this is not a time to calm down. Kids are fucking dead. Their friends are rightfully, and loudly, pissed about it. David Brooks has no right to tell people who are mad as hell to stop being mad as hell. He can afford to be calm and collected because he is so wealthy and sequestered that nothing truly awful can happen to him. His civility is a luxury. He only wants to talk about this shit in civilized terms because he lives a civilized life. His words are those of a man whose foremost experiences in life have happened inside his own rectum. He deserves to have his ass dragged every time someone hits PUBLISH on his behalf.

Oh, yeah. The NY Times has been scorned by Trump, so instead of seeing that as an opportunity to be free of any need to suck up to power, they’ve been frantically trying to appease the Republicans. This is the opposite of what a good newspaper should do.

We should be engaged in revolution right now, but Magary feels that violence isn’t the answer (I agree). So what can he do?

That leaves me with words. That leaves me with rudeness and the power to SHAME. In the real world, I do my best to be nice to people. I say “please,” and “thank you,” and I try not to be an inconsiderate prick. Sometimes I fail, because I am a big goober, but I do try. And I have tried my best to make sure my children aren’t rude, either. People who are rude all the time suck. You and I both know that. As a baseline, rudeness is bad.

But as a weapon, it’s vital. Rudeness is the proper option when polite entreaties for sanity are ignored. I am very rude online to people. I have regrets about how I’ve deployed this rudeness, but I do not regret being rude to those who have continually demonstrated that they do not deserve such courtesies. Ivanka Trump shouldn’t be able to fly in public without getting an earful from her fellow passengers. Your local GOP Congressman shouldn’t be able to stage a town hall without residents openly telling him to go fuck himself. And the Respectable Conservative arm of the Times deserves every non-threatening piece of hate mail they get.

All hail rudeness. It is the appropriate mode of interaction in rude times.

I’m going to Scandinavia for a few months!

At least, I wish it were so — Turning Point USA thinks it would be a great comeuppance for us to spend a few months in a country with a political system we like.

TPUSA must believe their propaganda that every other country is a hellhole compared to the US to even think this argument works. Kinda like this ignoramus:

Right-wingers seem to know nothing about history, or economics, or politics, or science, either.

Do you really want to give me a gun?

It suddenly sunk in with all this talk about arming school teachers to prevent mass shootings — hey, that’s me! I teach! What kind of gun do I get? A big one? I want something intimidating, you know, like that monster handgun Dirty Harry waves around.

Then I want to know the rules of engagement here. Do I get to shoot students for just carrying a gun, or do I have to wait for them to kill someone first? Do I get the same benefit of the doubt that cops get –like, if I see a student reach inside their coat, or move their hand down towards their belt, is it OK if I shoot them? Just in case?

Also important: if I aim to shoot a suspicious-looking student, and miss and kill some other student in the crowd, I won’t be blamed for it, will I? It’s just collateral damage to protect our precious students, these things happen, it’s just part of the cost of maintaining the peace.

If I murder a student while teaching, I would like to have at least 30 days paid leave, so that I can recover from the emotional trauma. A medal for bravery would be nice, too. I think we should add a section to our yearly tenure and promotion review in which we tally up our confirmed kills, and all the faculty applaud our brave teachers who have shot someone in the performance of their teaching duties.

You can trust me! For sure, I wouldn’t be like that Utah teacher who shot herself by accident. I’d be safe. I’d have the safety on at all time, and no bullets in the chamber, until, that is, it was time for me to intentionally shoot a student, a responsibility I would take very, very seriously.

I am concerned, though, that we have a 14:1 student:faculty ratio here, and I see a lot of my colleagues in the community spaces with students milling about. There’s going to be some intense competition to bag students, and I’m going to have to be quick on the draw if I want to be first. Maybe I need a bigger gun? Or two guns? Or maybe a hand grenade? I wouldn’t want the chemistry department to get a higher score than the biology department, you know.

James O’Brien sees right through them

Hate solves nothing, but as it fails, its proponents can only respond by escalating the hatred.

Just to add the cherry on top, there’s Marco Rubio pretending he hasn’t been bought.

Then the student closed in. “So, Senator Rubio,” he said casually, “can you tell me you won’t be accepting a single penny from the NRA?”

The crowd cheered like it was a slam dunkfest.

“People buy into my agenda,” insisted Rubio, ignoring the public disgust with buying and selling politics.

“So you won’t take more NRA money?” Kasky pressed on.

“That’s the wrong way to look at it,” Rubio said. “People buy into my agenda.”

OK, Rubio, so your agenda aligns with that of a radical terrorist organization, the NRA.

Contemptible disinformation

It happens every time. A terrible event happens, and despicable conspiracy theorists/propaganda agents respond by spreading terrible lies. It’s happening right now with the survivors of the Parkland shooting, a concerted effort to discredit anyone who criticizes the status quo by lying about the event.

Some students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School immediately took to social media calling on President Donald Trump and Congress to do something about guns and calling out commentators like Fox’s Tomi Lahren for saying now wasn’t the time to talk about guns. David Hogg, a student journalist who interviewed students on lockdown during the shooting, made several TV appearances demanding leaders take action. Another student, Emma Gonzalez, called out the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the legislators who do its bidding. Melissa Falkowski, a teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, went on CNN calling on Congress to do more to “to end gun violence, to keep our kids safe.” Lori Alhadeff, whose 14-year-old daughter was killed, screamed at President Trump on CNN to “do something.” Student survivors are organizing a march on Washington D.C..

And now, Parkland survivors are targets for fake news campaigns, conspiracy theories, harassment and doxxing. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has already suggested that the entire shooting is a false flag, which implies that all of the survivors are actors in an elaborate hoax. As survivors speak up, there are already attempts to attack and discredit them individually.

There are tells that let you know these sources are lying to you. These words are dead giveaways: False flag and Crisis actor. You see someone babbling about that, they’re simply awful, dishonest, crazy people. Another giveaway is when they start piecing together photos of the victims or the crime scene and try to match them to other photos they’ve crudely googled to pretend that the actual victims were actually in Hawaii or something, when all they’ve demonstrated is that people resemble other people. Just shut them down.

There are some people/sources that have negative credibility.

Alex Jones
Tucker Carlson
Fox & Friends
Gateway Pundit
NRATV
Lucian Wintrich
Dinesh D’Souza
r/theDonald
4chan
Anyone with the last name “Trump”

And many more. One additional problem, though, is that Twitter has become the perfect propaganda machine — anyone can manipulate it to automate broadcasting thousands of tweets promoting the lies invented by other disinformation agents, masking their origin and making sound like they have a broad base of support.

Information has become a tool to be twisted and manipulated by the right wing. We should be afraid. This is how democracies fall.