The Resistance won’t prevail by being “nice”

The Washington Post claims that “Liberal hostility toward Trump aides could galvanize the GOP base”, and implies that we all ought to be more like Mr Rogers.

Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, a Republican who is close with President Trump, was accosted by liberal activists on Friday night as she watched a documentary called “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” Ironically the film highlights Fred Rogers’s teachings of love and kindness, but Bondi had to be escorted from the theater in Tampa by police as partisans screamed at her.

Fred Rogers was a wonderful guy, and I would be delighted if American society were as civil as The Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Unfortunately, our King Friday XIII is planning pogroms, Queen Sara Saturday is sneering at anyone who cares, and Princess Tuesday made $82 million last year off her crony capitalist connections. If any hint of our reality were expressed in his puppet village, I’d like to think that Mr Rogers would be slapping the fuck out of those rotten puppets and burning the whole neighborhood to the ground.

“Kind” and “weak” are not synonyms. These are times when kindness needs to get off its butt, stand in a line, and fight back.

Also, see previous post.

Free speech, but only if you aren’t rude to Jordan Peterson

Lindsay Shepherd is suing Wilfrid Laurier University for causing her emotional distress and making her unemployable by criticizing her use of a Jordan Peterson clip in a classroom. I can sort of see both sides in that argument: it is stressful for a TA to receive a rebuke for their teaching style, and the faculty committee was a bit heavy handed. But on the other hand, the faculty also have a responsibility to regulate what’s taught in lab and discussion sections, so they were well within their rights to tell her that was inappropriate.

It’s a stretch to claim it affects her future employment, though, because it was Lindsay Shepherd herself who recorded and released the contents of a private meeting. If these faculty were contacting prospective employers and telling them “don’t hire her, she likes Peterson”, that would be a different thing…did they do that? No? Then what’s made her unemployable is her release of the recording.

But OK, this does sound like something that should be settled in court.

What doesn’t, though, is that now Jordan Peterson is suing Wilfrid Laurier for defamation…for statements made in private, that were made public by Lindsay Shepherd. He is not suing Shepherd.

Comments in the meeting included a comparison of Peterson’s speech to Hitler, and a comparison of his opinion to that of an anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-women white supremacist. They also called him “academically suspect” and said he exhibited “charlatanism,” according to the unproven Statement of Claim.

Despite the fact that the meeting was private, Peterson and his lawyers allege the faculty should have known the content of the meeting could have lasting consequences.

“Although the individual Defendants did not personally disseminate and broadcast it further… they could have reasonably anticipated that … [Shepherd] would inform others of what had occurred,” the statement reads.

I don’t get it. I’ve said that Peterson is a charlatan, both publicly and privately. Is everyone on the planet who has pointed out that he is an incompetent fraud now liable to be sued? Is this how Peterson’s version of free speech works?

Our president is a petulant little child

We now have the story behind this infamous photo.

“It was at this point, towards the end of the summit, that Chancellor Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada got together with some of the allies and really wanted to press Trump directly to sign the communiqué, that talked about the commitment to a rules-based international order. Trump was sitting there with his arms crossed, clearly not liking the fact that they were ganging up on him. He eventually agreed and said OK he’ll sign it. And at that point, he stood up, put his hand in his pocket, his suit jacket pocket, and he took two Starburst candies out, threw them on the table and said to Merkel, ‘Here, Angela. Don’t say I never give you anything,’” Bremmer described to CBS.

You know, right now Angela Merkel has a stronger claim to being “leader of the free world” than does the American president, and it’s annoying how little respect she gets.

This isn’t the first time Merkel, who has been chancellor since 2005, has had strange encounters with her male counterparts. In 2008, Italy’s former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi once tried to play hide and seek with the chancellor, and in 2009 he kept her waiting for a meeting while he chatted on the phone. In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin famously brought a dog to a meeting with Merkel, who is known to be afraid of dogs. And former President George W. Bush surprised Merkel by giving her a shoulder rub in 2006.

She’s not progressive enough for me, so this isn’t an endorsement, but still…she’s so much better than Trump. And Berlusconi and Putin and Bush.

Oh, and Trump paid a visit to Minnesota yesterday. Duluth is way over on the other side of the state, though, so I didn’t go (yeah, that’s the only reason). He lied about a bunch of stuff, promised to win Minnesota in 2020, praised that great guy, Kim Jong Un, and praised himself.

“Our people are the smartest and hardest working. You ever notice they call the other side the elite? I have a much better apartment than they do. I’m smarter than they are. I’m richer than they are. I became president and they didn’t and I’m representing the most lovely and best people on earth — the deplorables. You remember that?”

Hate the elites…and by the way, I’m more elite than they are.

And people cheered. That’s the most chilling part. People still cheer this cheesy old liar.

What would Liam Neeson do?

Say he got word that some terrorist had kidnapped hundreds of babies and was holding them hostage until the government met his ransom demands — and he’s no piker, he’s asking for tens of billions of dollars.

Well, I’m a little disappointed that no action hero has stepped forward to deal with this situation.

Trump administration officials have been sending babies and other young children forcibly separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border to at least three “tender age” shelters in South Texas, The Associated Press has learned.

Lawyers and medical providers who have visited the Rio Grande Valley shelters described play rooms of crying preschool-age children in crisis. The government also plans to open a fourth shelter to house hundreds of young migrant children in Houston, where city leaders denounced the move Tuesday.

Since the White House announced its zero tolerance policy in early May, more than 2,300 children have been taken from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, resulting in a new influx of young children requiring government care.

Rachel Maddow has the response I would make, because I’m no action hero either.

A #NationalStrike? Think about it.

From Libbie Grant on Facebook, here’s something we can prepare for.

Folks. There is serious talk today all over Twitter about organizing a national strike to force the GOP-controlled Congress to either impeach Trump or force his resignation. This is a great idea, but it’s something we need to prepare for, and we may not have a whole lot of time to prepare.

What is a national strike? It’s when everybody in the country refuses to spend money. If you can also refuse to go to work and do your job, that’s good too, but the crucial part is the refusal to spend money. 70% of the USA’s GDP is personal consumption. That means our entire economy–and by extension, our government–depends on us spending money on the stuff we use or own. We have almost no exports anymore; our exports are, in effect, our individual citizens’ personal consumption.

Those of you who are my age or older remember what happened just after 9/11. Everybody was freaked out and shocked, so Americans hunkered down in their homes and did nothing, went nowhere, bought nothing unless they absolutely had to. Just a few days of decreased spending had a massive impact on our economy and our government. I remember George W. Bush going on TV and pleading with Americans to start spending money again. That wasn’t just another idiotic thing W said because he’s a dummy; it’s what Congress asked him to do because they found themselves unable to function at that critical time due to the sudden cessation of our economy.

That’s a national strike. That’s what we can do–what we NEED to do–in order to force the Republican-controlled Congress to act. They will NOT act without it.

We all need to be preparing now for the national strike. With luck, it will only need to last for a few days, and Congress will cave. But we should be prepared for a longer strike if necessary.

Here’s what you need to start doing right now in order to make this strike effective and ensure you can continue to participate without putting yourself or your loved ones at risk of too much discomfort.

-Stock up on non-perishable food, enough to last up to a month. Canned stuff. Can your own goods now if you know how to do it and have the equipment. Go for foods that are calorie-dense and/or filling. Dried beans are cheap and will keep you going indefinitely. Buy a ton of them and store them in solid, critter-proof containers.

-Make sure you have a good can opener and a spare.

-Stock up on medications and other care supplies for a month or more.

-Stock up on all the pet supplies you will need for a month or more.

-Assume that this evil, fascist government will attempt to fight back by shutting down utilities in some cities. That may include your city. So that means you must: 1) Get those big 5-gallon water jugs, lots of them, and fill them up now, and put secure coverings over the openings so bugs can’t get in. Store them in a safe place. 2) Have camping supplies? Great! Stock up on white gas or other fuel sources to run camping cook stoves. If you don’t have a camping stove already, get one now. They aren’t terribly expensive and you can find used ones on Craigslist. You should have one anyway in an emergency kit (as those of us who live in earthquake country know!) 3) Be sure you have working flashlights and plenty of batteries. 4) Get a solar charger for your personal electronic devices. 5) Pull out some cash and keep it in a safe place in case you need to buy anything in a real emergency situation. Or put aside valuable items you think you can trade to your neighbors. 6) Consider what your town is like during the summer and think ahead to your comfort needs. Plan how to meet those needs without electricity or money. Maybe that means identifying the coolest location in your neighborhood and making a plan to spend the hottest hours of the day there. Start thinking about this stuff now. 7) Check in with your elderly and disabled neighbors to be sure they are similarly prepared for utility shutdowns and have supplies laid away and a way to contact help if they need it. 8) Make a plan for waste disposal if those utilities are shut down, too.

Be prepared. A national strike is almost certainly coming at this point. With luck, it won’t be a long-term situation and it’ll be over in a matter of a handful of days. But be sure you’re ready in case it’s not over so quickly.

I would support this. The only question is what fraction of the population would actually join in…because face it, there are a heck of a lot of people who think fascism is just fine.

Another thing that could be done: Marches are planned all across the country for 30 June. I’ll be there!

Yep, they’re Nazis. No more waffling about it.

I’ve been told I’m a member of gang of nihilists whose life’s mission is to undermine all of western civilization, so I’m totally unsurprised by the latest rhetoric from the neo-Nazis at Fox News.

You think any of these people care about family separation? If they did, they’d be upset about the collapse of the American family, which is measurable and real. They’re not. They welcome that collapse, because strong families are an impediment to their political power.

Name a few lefties who hate families, OK? All that stupid labeling that we heard when the war in Iraq was being justified because they “hate freedom” is now spilling over into their characterization of their political opponents here in the US. They’re tearing children from their parents’ arms, and telling us that we just hate families.

Kinder, Küche, Kirche! Volksaufklärung und Propaganda!

The police do not have citizens’ best interests at heart

How can I say that? Once again, we have evidence of cops acting criminally.

Police in Minneapolis asked medical responders to inject people with ketamine, a powerful sedative, even if they were already restrained in handcuffs or strapped to a gurney, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.

The newspaper, which obtained a copy of the city’s civil rights review on the practice, wrote on Friday that police pressured EMS to inject victims as they begged them not to. In some cases, the drug caused the victim’s hearts or breathing to stop, requiring intubation or other medical treatment to revive them.

The department’s own conduct manual categorizes ketamine as a powerful “date rape drug” — not just because it immobilizes victims, but can tamper with memory, even erasing victims’ recollections of their time on the drug. Ketamine is a sedative used medically in humans and animals, and has a long history of recreational use.

That’s interesting. I used to use ketamine routinely as an anesthetic on cats and rabbits, before we whipped out the dental drills and bored holes in their skulls and lowered electrodes into their brains. It’s potent stuff. Sometimes too potent — we had to monitor the anesthetic closely, because the line between respiratory/cardiac failure and waking up in the middle of surgery was so narrow. Routinely injecting it into citizens to calm them down? Sounds like a bad, dangerous idea, and kind of pointless when they’re strapped down.

I’ve also been given a low dose of ketamine, once when I blew out my knee and was lying there with a limb bent in strange orientations and out of my head with agony. It was odd — it left me disoriented and confused and so out of it that the doctor was able to wrench all the bones back into place. That was nice, but still not something I want a cop to be directing an EMS tech to be shooting me with, for their convenience.

The only good thing about this reckless policy is that using a dissociative sedative is preferable to shooting someone, the other strategy of civilian management the Minneapolis police department favors.

There was something we’re supposed to remember, or we’re doomed to repeat it. What was that thing again?

I’m suddenly seeing a lot of contempt for the humanities, goaded on by people like Jordan Peterson, who has said the humanities are not only dead but foully rotten. I disagree, of course, and would like to point out that history is one of the humanities (not to disparage the other branches, though — I’d be happy to write a defense of all of them). That we’ve forgotten, or choose to forget, much of our history is a problem. Case in point: Jeff Sessions’ denial that the policies he supports resembles those of Nazi Germany.

“Well, it’s a real exaggeration, of course. In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country,” Sessions said. “We need to think it through, be rational and thoughtful about it. We want to allow asylum for people who qualify for it, but people who want economic migration for their personal financial benefit, and what they think is their families’ benefit, is not a basis for a claim of asylum.”

Whoa. Sessions is acknowledging implicitly the similarity between Nazi Germany and 21st century USA, and is straining to find some little difference between us, and that’s the one he wants to claim? Perhaps he needs to be reminded of Nazi policy.

Toward the end of the 1930s, and especially from the latter half of 1938, massive Jewish emigration from Germany and Austria became an explicit objective of Nazi policy.

He might also want to learn something about Nazi propaganda. Der Ewige Jude portrayed Jews as parasites, in Germany to prey upon and profit from good German human beings; further, it blamed them for organized crime, generally violent tendencies, and rape. How has Trump characterized immigrants? No differently.

The Nazis did not suddenly burst upon Europe with concentration camps and mass executions. They started with a little seed of anti-semitism and nurtured it until it flowered into the Holocaust. It’s the same here; this is how it’s done, with a gradual ramping up of the offenses against humanity until we get to full blown atrocities. Catch it early. Nip it in the bud. Of course, you can only do that if you’ve studied the humanities.

While the Republicans are hurtling headlong into evil, I can’t excuse the Democrats, either.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who spearheaded legislation to ban the separation of families at the border, also linked the detention policies to World War II Germany.

“This is the United States of America; it’s not Nazi Germany,” Feinstein told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Monday. “We don’t take children from their parents. Until now.”

Until now? I am reminded of how wrong that statement is every day: located right next to the science building where I work is an old brick building, the last vestige of the Morris Industrial School for Indians, founded in 1887 by the Catholic Church as a boarding school for Indians. We separated children from their parents, sometimes forcibly, sometimes with economic pressure, and we held them captive for years at a time. Approximately two thousand kids were held here over the lifetime of the school.

…like other boarding schools, the Morris program alienated students not necessarily adverse to learning to read and write. Only English was to be spoken; the curriculum emphasized the value of the white man’s way and at least implicitly the evil of the child’s home.

We don’t have a lot of stories about what went on inside the school — control was fairly complete, the administrators had power over what was written by a student body brought in largely illiterate. But some accounts exist.

Methods of discipline at Minnesota boarding schools were harsh. Some schools had cells or dungeons where students were confined for days and given only bread and water. One forced a young boy to dress like a girl for a month as a punishment; another cut a rebellious girl’s hair as short as a boy’s. Minnesota boarding schools recorded epidemics of measles, influenza, blood poisoning, diphtheria, typhoid, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, pneumonia, trachoma, and mumps, which swept through overcrowded dormitories. Students also died from accidents such as drowning and falls.

Boarding school staff assigned students to “details”: working in the kitchen, barns, and gardens; washing dishes, tables, and floors; ironing; sewing; darning; and carpentry. The schools also extensively utilized an “outing” program that retained students for the summer and involuntarily leased them out to white homes as menial laborers.

One of Minnesota’s most famous boarding school survivors is American Indian activist Dennis Banks. When he was only four years old, Banks was sent three hundred miles from his home on the Leech Lake Reservation of Ojibwe, in Cass County, to the Pipestone Indian School. Lonesome, he kept running away but was caught and severely beaten each time. Another student, at St. Benedict’s, recalled being punished by being made to chew lye soap and blow bubbles that burned the inside of her mouth. This was a common punishment for students if they spoke their tribal language.

Another reminder: Adolf Hitler admired and emulated the American methods of genocide.

The idea of a prison camp – specifically Auschwitz, in Oświęcim, Poland – where Hitler’s soldiers could shoot, hang, poison, mutilate and starve men, women and children en mass was not an idea Hitler, the bigot, came up with on his own. In fact, the Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer John Toland wrote that Hitler was inspired in part by the Indian reservation system – a creation of the United States.

“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history,” Toland wrote in his book, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography. “He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”

We say, “Never forget”. We’re damned good at forgetting, though, which is why we’ve got a great big sign out in front of that building to remind us.

I haven’t even mentioned the willingness of Americans to enslave people and break up families if it profited them. There has been no end of evil committed by the people of this country, and now Feinstein wants to claim “We don’t take children from their parents”? When have we not? This country was founded on slavery and the slaughter and re-education of its native people.

We can’t change the past. We have to bear the burden of our history forever. The one thing we can do is to move beyond the past, be better, grow and change to never again commit these crimes against humanity, to not be evil. Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump, and the Republican party seem to be committed to the idea that our national character must be one of oppression and persecution forevermore, while the Democrats choose to live in a fantasy past that denies our history…which enables the crimes to continue.