TV review: The United States of Conspiracy (2020)

The US is awash with conspiracy theories. That itself is not surprising since conspiracy theories have long had an appeal for those who think that big events must have big causes and seek to find them by creating elaborate narratives that purportedly tie together many seemingly unrelated facts into a single narrative structure.

What is surprising and disturbing is that so many people seem to be willing to believe them and hucksters are willing to exploit that gullibility to enrich themselves. The PBS investigative news program Frontline has just released the above gripping 55-minute documentary that looks at this question, focusing mainly on one of the biggest creators and propagators of conspiracy theories, Alex Jones. He is so cruel that he unleashed his mobs on the parents of the children who were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School by claiming that it was all a hoax, staged by the government. He and his followers made life hell for them. Jones not only feeds the dark fantasies of many people, he also has the ear of Donald Trump who often says in public the things that Jones said a few days earlier.

Since Trump has long believed the crackpot ideas of someone like Jones, it hardly surprising that he would promote the crackpot ideas of others as well.

These are the people now in control of the Republican party and the US government.

Good riddance to Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss

These two writers and columnists have both left their positions, decrying what they claim is an atmosphere of intolerance for their views in their respective workplaces. Sullivan has quit New York magazine while Weiss has left the New York Times. Weiss was also one of the signatories to the ‘cancel culture’ letter. It should be noted that they both resigned and were not fired, but in leaving both wrote the kind of self-pitying ‘people are being mean to me’ screeds that prominent people say when they are criticized.

This article describes what led to their respective departures.
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Trump’s pandemic press conferences are pointless

When Trump announced that he was going to restart the daily coronavirus press conferences, I assumed that it would include the scientific and medical members such as Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and the head of the CDC Robert Redfield. But no. Trump has decided to do them solo. Trump does not even include lackeys like the secretary of health and human services Alex Azar or Mike Pence, the head of the Task Force.

So basically these press conferences are a waste of time because Trump is ignorant and never has anything useful to say but will just ramble and issue statements that are useless at best and dangerously misleading at worst. Trump is just starved for attention and is no doubt hoping that he can reverse the beating he is taking in the polls on his handling of the pandemic and can be seen as more authoritative than Fauci behind whom he lags woefully in the polls in terms of being trustworthy about the issue. Trump is clearly irritated by this and is being peevish.
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How pathetic can you get?

On Sunday, Trump said that he was too busy dealing with the pandemic to be able to throw the first pitch at the New York Yankees game on August 15th. There was just one problem.

When he abruptly announced on Sunday that he would not be throwing out the first pitch at the Yankees game August 15, Donald Trump claimed that it was because he couldn’t break his “strong focus” on the coronavirus pandemic and a host of other issues he’s never before had a problem ignoring. But the real reason he won’t be taking the mound next month is far simpler: He hadn’t actually been asked.
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How I learned to stop worrying and love the singular ‘they’

The problem of what pronoun to use to describe the third person singular has been around for a long time because in English this pronoun has been a gendered one. It used to be that people used the male form of he/him as the default that was tacitly supposed to include both genders but that assumption has long been rejected as sexist. People who are grammatical purists tried to find various ways around it. Resorting to switching everything in a sentence to just the plural form was not always possible and even when it could be done, tended to make sentences less specific and more bland. The more awkward circumlocution ‘he or she’ or ‘his or her’ tends to get really tedious after a while.
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The bipartisan war machine

For all the visible divisions between Democrats and Republicans on some hot-button issues, one should never forget that they are both just different wings of the single War Party and this is always apparent when it comes to budget appropriations when the two sides (with a few exceptions) join forces to shovel more money to the already bloated military, while money that is urgently needed elsewhere is denied.
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