There’s a tumor growing in Texas

A very red state

Behold, the official Republican Party Platform for Texas in 2020. THIS…IS…MADNESS!

opposing any effort to classify carbon emissions as a pollutant
abolishing the EPA
repealing the Endangered Species Act
prohibiting teaching “sex education, sexual health or sexual choice or identity in any public school”
recognizing pornography as a “public health crisis”
abolishing Child Protective Services
abolishing the Department of Education
teaching American history courses “heavily weighted toward the study of original founding documents”
opposing the use of any national or international education standards
requiring mandatory daily pledges of allegiance to both the United States and Texas
banning critical race theory from schools
banning any lockdowns, contact tracing, or mask mandates as public health measures
newly limiting the time disabled people can receive SSDI benefits
eliminating the minimum wage
banning cities from passing paid sick leave ordinances, rent control, or plastic bag bans
abolishing school-based mental health care providers
“oppos[ing] all efforts to validate transgender identity”
repealing all limits on campaign contributions to politicians
repealing all estate taxes
eliminating same-sex marriage
eliminating no-fault divorce and supporting covenant marriage
entirely eliminating abortion
introducing a right to use cryptocurrency to the Texas Bill of Rights
requiring employers to verify citizenship status through E-Verify
abolishing all federal welfare programs
drug testing state welfare recipients
adding “the right to refuse vaccination” to the Texas Bill of Rights
stopping fluoridation of the water supply
disallowing prescription drugs manufactured outside the U.S.
limiting Medicaid
banning Drag Queen Story Hour from libraries
allowing people to bring guns into schools
a prohibition on using gas or vehicle taxes for public transit or bike lanes
opposing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and using mass deportation instead
abolishing the refugee resettlement program
eliminating birthright citizenship
new criminal penalties for desecrating the American or Texas flag
revoking the tax-exempt status of any organization that “knowingly aid[s] and abet[s] illegal immigrants”
ending the H1B foreign worker visa program
ending daylight saving time
“support[ing] an aggressive war on terrorism”
requiring cities that cut police budgets to cut property taxes by the same percentage
eliminating all public funding for public broadcasting
repealing the “motor voter” law that allows voter registration at state DMVs
withdrawing from the United Nations
“unequivocally oppos[ing]” the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

This is just the same old poisonous crap I heard from the John Birch Society in the 1970s…except I don’t recall that they hated bike lanes quite so much. I might believe some people are so deluded that they think some those options are a good idea, but the majority of Texans, if confronted with this list, would reel back in horror. Wouldn’t they?

The cult of masculinity is just another religion

Rev. Carlson & Father Rogan

I should be used to this by now. I spent decades punching back at the weaponized stupidity of creationism: I saw it as a pathological extreme generated by narrow domains of primitive religious thought, but I also recognized it as an expression of a peculiar human property of our minds. We seek out patterns to make the world comprehensible and predictable, and we are susceptible to latching on to whatever idea gives us security, and instead of testing and challenging it, we can instead fall into the trap of selectively reinforcing whatever makes us feel better about ourselves.

My error, though, was to think too small. Get rid of religion, we get rid of a major pitfall. I still think that’s true (but very, very difficult), but I did not anticipate that humanity would simply find another dangerously deep hole to fall into right away, and that encouraging people to find another path with that “reason and logic” stuff would lead them there so fast.

I also did not expect that our doom would be maleness, the new cult same as the old cult. Yikes. I’m a member of that club. So let’s get the perspective of someone outside the club, a woman, in this case Amanda Marcotte, who I think is spot on in her analysis. The noisy mouthpieces of the far right are dominated by a group of regressive jerks who are riding to personal prosperity on the backs of the fears and inadequacy of the worst men. Tucker Carlson, for instance, is an appallingly stupid person who has found a wild niche of pandering to angry men.

As feminist writer Jessica Valenti noted in her newsletter, in the past, Carlson has done segments of his show denouncing “fatherless” homes and claiming children brought up in them are “poor, uneducated and have disciplinary problems.” But now he, a father of four, is making fun of men who actually want to be present in their children’s lives. “Are fathers necessary for stable families and children, or is spending time with your kid a sign of weakness and something to be laughed at?” Valenti asks.

What this dissonance reveals, of course, is all the hand-wringing about “fatherlessness” is just a feint. After all, many divorced or separated fathers are deeply involved with their children’s lives. No, as the Proud Boys rally this weekend showed, what’s really at stake is anger at women for rejecting subservience. Single mothers, same-sex marriages, and egalitarian marriages all show that there’s nothing inevitable about male-dominated marriage. That threatens men who are attracted to the dominance fantasy of traditional marriage to silence their own nagging sense of inadequacy.

It’s not just Carlson and the Proud Boys who have figured out how to monetize male mediocrity and fragility.

Just to clarify, though, “male mediocrity and fragility” is not saying that being a man means you are intrinsically mediocre and fragile. Any group will have a subset of individuals who are mediocre and fragile, the weak links that a con artist can scoop up, organize, and turn into a force for evil. It means there is a troubling group of humans who have been recruited into a cadre with a stereotypically male flavor, who then send money to and increase the power of people like Carlson. You can find this in any group. For instance, right now we can see TERFs harvesting female mediocrity and fragility, and atheists profiting off atheist mediocrity and fragility. OK? Not all men. Not all women. Not all atheists. But there are still characteristics of those groups that can be manipulated and abused.

It’s also not just Carlson. She doesn’t mention him, but Jordan Peterson is another classic example of someone harnessing mediocrity for personal gain, and she does talk about Joe Rogan.

Podcaster Joe Rogan has made a mint off of appealing to the sea of men who want an easy boost to their self-esteem through chauvinistic chest-thumping, rather than developing real skills and a personality. Rogan can be a little more subtle than Carlson about it, but ultimately, they’re playing on the same set of anxieties and insecurities in American men, and prescribing the same toxic masculinity as a supposed cure.

In Rogan, it’s easy to see, for instance, how refusal to get the COVID-19 vaccine got encoded for the fragile masculinity set as a way to “prove” their manly bona fides. He falsely claimed that “healthy” men who are “exercising all the time” don’t need the vaccine. He repeatedly suggested that vaccine mandates were somehow an assault on freedom, rather than what they are: a common sense health measure that helps free everyone from far more miserable pandemic restrictions. Taken together, it paints a picture of vaccination as the behavior of supposedly weak men. Unsurprisingly, then, Rogan ended up with COVID-19 and had to admit that he had kept finding excuses to put off getting a vaccine he had routinely insinuated was emasculating.

Right. Turning anti-vaccination sentiments into a chest-thumping display of masculinity is the new trap. We can turn any stupidity into a virtue if we couple it to some aspect of stereotypical manliness. See also America’s gun obsession.

Once you’ve got your in-group of weak, gullible men (in this case) you have to find a target to push around. What use is your power, otherwise? So here we go. Let’s go after the transes! And the gays! And the libs!

Carlson went after a gay man with a breastfeeding joke. Rogan’s preferred target for exercising his gender anxieties is all too often trans people.

Rogan has repeatedly used his show to make fun of trans people, paint being trans as a perversity, and elevate anti-trans bigots as somehow experts on the subject. Now that comedian Dave Chappelle has joined in making being transphobic a point of pride, unsurprisingly, he and Rogan are going on tour together. The obsession with trans people isn’t just gross, it’s a little confusing. Why do these cis men care so much about the lives of trans people who have nothing to do with them?

The ugly truth is that trans people, because they’re a small and misunderstood minority, just feel like an easy punching bag for these insecure men to take their gender anxieties out on. The very existence of trans people is a reminder that gender — and therefore gender hierarchy — is a social construct, and therefore can be analyzed, criticized, and even changed. Or, as in that famous 2019 rant from a One America News Network host, transgender penguins are a threat to the “family unit” and everything conservatives hold dear.

What’s also interesting here is how easy it is to spot these self-appointed leaders dragging us down into a sewer. It used to be we could just lock in on televangelists and such, who would happily label themselves with an easy and contemptible myth, and overlook all those people who seized on other myths that we didn’t think were so contemptible (like being a man), and churned them into red meat to feed their followers. We have to get better at spotting these charlatans, and they aren’t all going to be conveniently wearing clerical collars. Some of them just sport testicles.

Hey, here’s another insecure fraud who’s making bank off male mediocrity and fragility: Steven Crowder.

Warning: that video contains what I think is the most tasteless, cruel, pointless “comedy” routine I’ve ever seen, in which Crowder and his cronies pretend to act out the George Floyd murder to show that kneeling on someone’s neck is totally harmless. That didn’t get him instantly demonetized and evicted from social media channels everywhere? That’s another part of the problem, that these fools and liars are enabled by toxic social media rules.

Not my neighbors, I don’t think

But I wouldn’t put it past some of the other locals. It seems some of our far-right Trumpkin Americans are blustering on Tik-Tok about rising up and murdering the libs, bragging about putting up black flags as a sign of no quarter given (I think they’re usually accustomed to flying white flags). Their reasoning, though, is bizarre.

So, we’re the enemy, and they’re openly professing to want to execute us… So, why are they doing this?

Covid vaccinations, mostly. They believe that Joe Biden has declared a civil war on them by mandating that employers with over 100 employees and the military have vaccinations.

Yes, they say civil war, and they say it’s already started. But, unfortunately, many of them also live in states where masks and vaccines are required by state governments, healthcare, and law enforcement.

An alarming number of military members have been making Tik Toks talking about how they are being discharged because they refuse the vaccine. It’s alarming because there is probably an equal number of guys on there talking about the civil war plans and actively using Tik Tok to recruit these military and ex-military members.

The biggest message they have been sending out is, “it’s time” or “the time is now.”

They primarily use Tik Tok as a recruiting tool and let others know their willingness to commit violence. Then they tell people to message them or where to find them on Telegram.

I’m not scared. I think this is a small fringe of fanatical assholes, and if they were to rise up they’d cause some people grief and pain before they’d be put down. They rely on hiding in the shadows to have any courage.

What bugs me most is how goddamned stupid their ideas are.

We saw this coming long ago

Pat yourself on the back, creationists. You’ve succeeded beyond your wildest dreams. I’d give special appreciation to the Discovery Institute, which came up with so many potent slogans. “Teach the controversy!” “Teach both sides!” So many school administrators and politicians fell for it, taking it for granted that what a school was supposed to do was throw every crank idea at the students, and let them sort it out…while teachers were supposed to sit back and provide no guidance from hard-earned learning and experience, because that would be “bias”. How dare you teach all that evidence-based science about evolution and the history of life on Earth, don’t you know that’s discriminating against fringe theories that have no logical, rational, evidential basis? Make room for Ken Ham, right next to Darwin and Fisher and Simpson and Beadle and Tatum and…it’s a long list.

But that’s the triumph of their idea, that education shouldn’t be based on merit, and that teachers are useless unless they promote their propaganda.

And now it’s come to this.

A senior school administrator in the Lone Star State was recorded telling educators that if they’re going to keep books about the Holocaust in their classrooms, they must also stock material representing “opposing” views or “other perspectives.”

NBC News has obtained a recording that it says features Carroll Independent School District executive director of curriculum and instruction Gina Peddy explaining to teachers that House Bill 3979 requires them to offer alternative information when it “comes to widely debated and currently controversial.” That, by her account, includes the systematic execution of millions of people — mostly Jews — at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.

“Make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives,” Peddy said.

You can hear the whole thing here. Listen to the administrator tell the teachers how she wants to work with them and help them, but if they offer a book that teaches about the Holocaust, they better also include a book about Holocaust denial. The teachers sound appalled and horrified.

The administration’s excuse:

In a statement, a Carroll spokeswoman said Peddy’s example about the Holocaust reflects the district’s attempt to comply with a new state law that requires teachers to present multiple perspectives when discussing “widely debated and currently controversial” issues.

The law says we have to “teach both sides”. That is so familiar, as is the language about “widely debated and currently controversial” issues. All you need to do to make an issue widely debated and currently controversial is to get a local ignorant church pastor to stand up and argue for bullshit. Presto! Debate! Controversy! Therefore it has to go into the curriculum. It’s only fair, after all.

That’s not how education works. It has never worked that way. You can thank the creationists for a decades-long campaign to misrepresent how science and teaching work so they can get their fables and lies into the classroom. The end result: opening the door for Nazis and kooks to pollute public education. Fuck those motherfuckers, every one.

I’ll probably end up voting for Kamala Harris in the next election

After all, can you imagine a Republican stating these obvious truths?

This does not mean I agree with everything she, or the Democratic party, says or does, but that there is a clear, distinct separation between the two parties on at least some issues, and I’ll always go for the one that doesn’t lie about our history.

Speaking of uncool: Blue Origin about to fly

It seems to me that the way to remove all the glamor and heroism of space travel is to hand out passes to corporate executives and hammy 90 year old actors, which is exactly what Blue Origin is about to do. It’s like a confession that all this is about is naked, blatant PR and pandering to capitalists.

Way to kill the dream, guys. Kids who want to become an astronaut now know the pathway is to get a marketing degree or make lots of money or pretend to be an astronaut on a TV show really hard. Aspire to be spam in a can, kids! You don’t need skills, just an insider angle.

We should have known when they made the Death Star logo

Mary and I are planning on getting new phones in the near future, and we’d even consider switching networks — we’re on T-Mobile, but Google-Fi is tempting. The one thing that is off the table is AT&T, and if we had AT&T now, we’d be rushing to ditch it. The revelation that they built OAN, the rabid conservative network that out-foxes Fox, is just too appalling. The money and the incentive was provided by AT&T.

OAN founder and chief executive Robert Herring Sr has testified that the inspiration to launch OAN in 2013 came from AT&T executives.

“They told us they wanted a conservative network,” Herring said during a 2019 deposition seen by Reuters. “They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [leftwing] side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.”

Hold it right there: name these seven leftwing news networks. Please. If they mention CNN or MSNBC, centrist/conservative channels, I could use the laugh.

Since then, AT&T has been a crucial source of funds flowing into OAN, providing tens of millions of dollars in revenue, court records show. Ninety percent of OAN’s revenue came from a contract with AT&T-owned television platforms, including satellite broadcaster DirecTV, according to 2020 sworn testimony by an OAN accountant.

Herring has testified he was offered $250 million for OAN in 2019. Without the DirecTV deal, the accountant said under oath, the network’s value “would be zero.”

Here’s a sample of OAN’s quality news information, subsidized by AT&T.

In case you’re confused, the people he’s accusing of “overthrowing the election”, who will be exposed by the audits in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin and who should be executed, are not the insurrectionists who attempted a coup at the goading of an ex-president — no, he wants the people behind the valid election apparatus of the United States murdered. Thanks, AT&T!

Let me know soon if you get news that T-Mobile has been funding the Taliban, or Google has been a front for Hydra, or Sprint is planning to blow up the Moon. Also, if you find any of those mysterious American leftwing news sites, let me know in the comments.

What sorting algorithm is that?

Interesting. An animated graph COVID-19 cases in the top 25 states, color-coded by party affiliation. Watch the chart gradually bleed red.

Diseases should not afflict people on the basis of who they voted for, but there they are.

Come see the violence inherent in the system!

Gab, the social networking site, is having some troubles, again. They’re being attacked! By bad actors! Oh no!

This is my favorite ironic line from the complaint.

Do you want this website to stay online or do you want to be able to threaten and incite violence by somehow claiming it’s “free speech” (it’s not.)

Wholesome, pure, violence-free Gab…you know, the site that welcomed Nazis.

Since its inception, Gab has welcomed deplatformed social media users, generally attracting those on the far right. When Twitter suspended a number of alt-right accounts just after the 2016 election — including white nationalist Richard Spencer’s — Gab welcomed them with open arms.

And QAnon.

In early October, when Facebook purged a number of accounts connected to QAnon, Torba published a blog post welcoming them to the site. “Gab is happy to announce that we will be welcoming all QAnon accounts across our social network, news, and encrypted chat platforms,” Torba wrote. He added, “Members of the QAnon community have been active on Gab for several years. We have never seen any calls for violence, threats, or any other illegal activity from this group of people.”

Except for fomenting the Jan. 6 insurrection, of course.

The Capitol mob began organizing weeks ago for the violence that occurred on January 6, planning inside conspiracy theory and far-right online communities on platforms like Parler and Gab. Groups that typically live in the darker corners of the internet stepped into the spotlight when they took the Capitol and broadcast the breach around the web.

…

The groups that stormed Capitol Hill this week have long been active on platforms like Gab and 4chan, and more recently, they’ve adopted newer tools like the lightly moderated social media site Parler and the anonymous messaging service Telegram to organize.

And who could forget?

The platform made headlines in October 2018 after a gunman opened fire in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue and killed 11 worshipers. Robert Bowers, who is accused of the crime, spent years posting anti-Semitic rhetoric on Gab. His final post before the shooting read, “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

No sir, no violence here. It’s all those people trying to shut down a hate and conspiracy theory site who are being violent.

Here’s another blast from tolerant, lovely Andrew Torba from last year: the people going after Gab are Mentally ill tranny demon hackers (he’s very serious).

Irony gasps back to life! Thanks, Florida GOP.

Florida, America’s poxed appendage

Their finances are in a shambles now, because one man held the keys to all of the accounts.

After spending months railing against COVID-19 precautions and criticizing Dr. Anthony Fauci, a Republican Party official in Florida passed away this week — leaving his county-level GOP organization without access to critical financial accounts.

Gregg Prentice, 61, served as accountant for the Hillsborough County GOP and also chaired the organization’s committee for election integrity. A software engineer by trade, Tampa Bay’s local Patch outlet reported that he built and maintained the local Republican party’s campaign finance software last year and was responsible for filing its monthly reports to the Federal Elections Commission.

A FEC filing from the surviving members of the organization claims that Prentice died without sharing login information for these accounts, or any sort of instructions for how to use them. The letter also tells the regulatory agency it will likely need more time to complete a report on its August fundraising numbers, and foreshadows trouble compiling the local party’s financials for future months as well.

Can you guess how he died? Can you? Guess! The Republicans are frantically straining to get extensions, so they explained how.

As a Political Party Committee, we file our FEC reports on a monthly basis. For several years we have been submitting the reports electronically, and for over a year we have done this with software developed by one of our members, Gregg Prentice. Gregg’s software converted data from our Quickbooks accounting software to supply the information needed by the FEC.

Unfortunately, Gregg passed away suddenly from Covid 19 on Saturday, September 11, 2021. Gregg did not share the software and instructions for its use with our officers. We will have to enter the August data manually, and according to the information we have received from our FEC analyst, Scott Bennett, we may likely have to re-enter the data from our first 7 months of 2021. We will be struggling to get all of this entered in the proper format by our deadline on September 20, but we will try to do so with our best effort.

Killed by a virus he had denied. It would be sad if it weren’t so fitting.

In addition to his role compiling the Hillsborough County GOP’s financials, Prentice spent most of the past year fearmongering about COVID-19 vaccines, mask mandates and other pandemic safety measures. Like many other conservatives in public life, he took aim in particular at White House COVID-19 adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, writing on Facebook that America needed to “End Faucism.” He also argued that “we need more socialist distancing than we do social distancing.”

Think of all the work the party would have been spared if only Gregg had taken a few minutes to get vaccinated. The pandemic is going to not only cull Republican voters, but is going to disrupt their organization. I hate to suggest it, but in the name of our common humanity, go get the shot, Republicans and other kooks.