Trump is plumb obsessed

With the US and the world reeling from the pandemic, the economy staggering, large numbers of people unemployed and finding it hard to make ends meet, losing their health insurance, and getting evicted, what is Trump obsessing about? Plumbing. No, really. He seems to have a fixation that water does not come out fast enough from the showers to make his hair ‘perfect’ and he wants the regulations changed.

I don’t know what he is talking about. Why would taking a longer shower affect how your hair looks after it dries? Does he think that hair keeps absorbing water and that the more it absorbs the less ‘perfect’ it is, whatever that means? How self-absorbed with your looks can you get? This is in addition to his earlier complaints that new water saving devices were adversely affecting the performance of toilets, dishwashers, and washing machines.
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A victory for a Republican QAnon devotee

While on the Democratic side we have seen a steady increase in the numbers and popularity of candidates with progressive views, it is the opposite on the Republican side, with candidates with extreme right wing views doing well. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Georgia where a follower of the conspiracy cult QAnon who has in addition made racist, Islamophobic, and anti-Semitic comments, has won the Republican nomination for a congressional seat. Given that district’s strong Republican leanings, she will very likely win the November election and be in Congress starting next year. (Watch out, Louie Gohmert! You are in danger of losing your title for being the stupidest member of Congress.)
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Stephen Colbert has a funny, incisive analysis of yesterday’s developments

He made fun of the Biden-Harris appearance in an empty gymnasium where they kept socially distanced. US presidential campaigns, especially party conventions have, in my opinion, far too much pomp and pageantry, with large crowds cheering on cue and balloons and confetti and the like. I find those things utterly boring and never watch such events and I must say that I much prefer the current scaled-down, low-key format. I hope that even after the pandemic ends, we keep things the way they are now.

If we get rid of the glitz, then we will get to see more of the substance.

The expected attacks on Harris begin

As expected, the attacks on Kamala Harris started immediately. What is surprising is that she has long been the favorite to be selected by Joe Biden and one would have expected any competent campaign to have carefully prepared a coherent and consistent line of attack. But the statements by Trump, his surrogates, and the Republican party have been scattershot.

Standing in the White House briefing room on Tuesday, Mr. Trump read from some prepared notes, assailing Ms. Harris for being against fracking and “very big into raising taxes.” At another point, Mr. Trump appeared unfamiliar with his own campaign’s line of attack. When a reporter with The New York Post asked the president about his own campaign ad calling Ms. Harris a “phony,” the president asked for clarification.

“She was a what?” Mr. Trump said.

And hours after the campaign and the Republican National Committee called Ms. Harris the “most liberal” member of the Senate, the R.N.C. sent out an email blast saying that progressives hated her because she was not progressive enough.

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The Squad remains undefeated and even grows

Over the past couple of weeks, there have been some notable results. The four female progressive Democratic congresswomen (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortx, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley, known collectively as ‘the Squad’) who came into office in 2018 by overthrowing well-entrenched establishment candidates and caused consternation within the party hierarchy, all faced well-funded opposition in their primaries. The people who funded the opposition no doubt hoped to blunt the growing narrative that the party needed to adopt more progressive policies and not, as it usually does, kowtow to the finance, business, and military sectors. The good news is that all four won re-election easily. The upset win by Cori Bush in Missouri may mean that the Squad now actually increases to five.
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Biden’s pick of Harris makes life difficult for Trump

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden announced yesterday that California senator Kamala Harris would be his running mate. It was something I had been expecting all along. Harris breaks a barrier by being the first woman of color to be nominated to be vice-president of one of the major political parties but in almost every other respect she is not a trailblazer. Her politics are very much Democratic party establishment. She is not a progressive and her past performance as a prosecutor leaves plenty to be desired as she vigorously used all the powers at her disposal to wage the infamous ‘war on crime’ that resulted in large numbers of people being sent to prison for long terms out of proportion to the nature of their crimes. This is one reason that her choice makes life difficult for Trump. He will try to portray her as someone who is the ideological love child of Lenin and Fidel Castro but that is highly unlikely to stick.
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Trump is clearly increasingly desperate

Seth Meyers wonderfully deconstructs Trump false statements about what his latest Executive Orders will do. The correct answer is ‘very little’. They are either meaningless or unconstitutional. Some measures he has proposed, like the deferment in the payroll taxes and the deferment of student loan repayments only last until December, i.e., until after the election. Trump is essentially using them as bribes, suggesting that if people want them to continue, they will have to re-elect him. What next, giving everyone a loan that will only need to be repaid after the election? Pathetic.

Meyers also discusses Trump’s delusional hope that his face might be added to Mount Rushmore.

Trump seems to have a problem with persistent female reporters

Over the weekend Trump stormed off from a press conference when a female reporter kept pressing him about why he keeps claiming credit for an action that Barack Obama did when he was president back in 2014. Jack Shafer writes that there is a pattern here.

It starts with a reporter, usually a female reporter, asking President Donald Trump hard, tenacious questions at a news conference. Trump’s jaw seizes up, rattled and dumbfounded by the questions that he can’t or won’t answer, he abruptly ends the presser by saying, “Thank you, very much” and stalking out of the room.
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The complex issue of cultural appropriation

Cultural appropriation, the term given (usually censoriously) to anyone who attempts to portray a culture other than their own, has led to a great amount of heated debate. I have been struggling to make sense of this complex question. On the one hand, it can plausibly be argued that however much research one does about a different culture, however much one can intellectually understand the point of view of someone whose life experience is very different from one’s own, one can never feel how that person feels about anything, and hence any attempt to speak through the other person’s voice will be inauthentic.
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The weird QAnon cult

I have long been fascinated by the sociology of cults, the psychology of cult members, and the conspiratorial thinking that afflicts them. I think my interest is because I was a religious believer well into adulthood and now I find myself wondering how I could have believed for so long in things that I now feel are patently nonsense. One factor is that I was born into a religious family and when growing up one tends to unthinkingly absorb the influences of one’s immediate surroundings. Though I grew up in a liberal Christian tradition that did not require me to believe in the more outlandish things that fundamentalist, evangelical, and biblical literalist Christians do, even the most stripped down versions of Christianity require believing in some pretty wild things. So to some extent, I shared similarities with cult members.
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