Published at 08:13 on 4 August 2016
The Guardian is arguing that the GOP leadership might intervene against Donald Trump. Wishful thinking.
First, history argues against it. Trump causes conservatives to be jittery because he’s not a conservative. He’s a fascist. This observation is not my own leftist hyperbole at play; a number of conservatives have observed this. However, that’s happened before. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and so on caused conservatives to be jittery in their respective countries, and some prominent conservatives militantly opposed fascism (Hitler’s attempted assassin was a conservative), but the key word is some. The overall pattern was one of uneasy alliance, under the (inevitably incorrect) assumption that the fascist would be controllable once he got power and thus a useful vehicle for the Right to get power.
Second, everything indicates this is the present pattern. He’s won the primary and been coronated at his party’s convention. Far more Republicans have lined up behind Trump in uneasy support than have come out against him. The number of conservative voices raised against Trump will probably increase as the weeks pass, but a wholesale reversal of the general trend is unlikely.
Trump’s gaffes are irrelevant to his base. In regards to that base, Trump was spot-on when he quipped last January:
I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.
Trump’s base isn’t enough to elect him. Look at the primary results: The number of Republican votes against Trump is greater than the number for him. Trump’s negatives are enormous; he will manage to get the support of his base plus a slowly dwindling number of jittery traditional conservatives, but that’s nowhere near enough to win in November.
These trends all could theoretically reverse themselves, but I doubt it. At this stage, Trump really seems doomed. Michael Moore’s fear probably won’t come to pass.
Published at 08:22 on 3 August 2016
In a recent Guardian article about changing (in the direction of less of it) sexual behavior, we find the following:
“The new sexual revolution has apparently left behind a larger segment of the generation than first thought.”
“Left behind?” Really?
Wasn’t the Sexual Revolution about liberating people from socially repressive restrictions that interfered with them following their desires? Haven’t such restrictions continued to vanish in the past decade or so? Same-sex marriage is now the law of the land. LGBTQ people can now serve openly in the military. And so on.
Just because some individuals choose to abstain from sexual activity is no evidence of their being repressed. Maybe those abstainers simply don’t want to be sexually active? If the Sexual Revolution isn’t about their right to remain celibate by choice, then it’s a revolution I want absolutely no part of. You don’t sexually liberate people by replacing an obligation to not have sex with an obligation to have it.
This cuts close to home for me because I’m less sexually driven than the norm, and the (by my standards) hypersexualized youth culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s and then the (again by my standards) hypersexualized gay male subculture always left me feeling out in the cold.
It took a long time for me to disentangle my internalized homophobia from my desire to not be steamrolled into conforming to a culture of casual sex that is simply not the sort of sex I desire. It’s why I identify as queer but not as a gay man; I fit in with the gay male subculture about as little as I fit in with the straight male one. Neither are geared to who I really am.
I’ve found the Millennials’ attitudes about sexual orientation to be much more in line with what I view as true liberation, in fact. They are much more likely to see sexual orientation as a multi-dimensional thing, not a simplistic one-dimensional gay/straight/bi axis.
So color me skeptical about the premise that less sexual activity automatically implies more sexual repression. It sounds like precisely the sort of thing an aging Baby Boomer who is clueless about what liberation really means would come up with.
Published at 07:59 on 2 August 2016
It first caught my attention when Dan Savage claimed it. It didn’t make much sense: why would the Green Party, which is trying to attract more support, do something as stupid as nominate an anti-vaxxer nut as their leader? (Short answer: they wouldn’t and didn’t. Savage lied.) Now the Guardian is repeating the lie.
It seems that Democrats (and their enablers) are engaging in a Big Lie campaign against Jill Stein. This is a technique first widely popularized by the Nazi Party, who accused others of doing it while engaging in plenty of it themselves:
But it remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute responsibility for the downfall precisely to the man who alone had shown a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe which he had foreseen and to save the nation from that hour of complete overthrow and shame. By placing responsibility for the loss of the world war on the shoulders of Ludendorff they took away the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland to Justice.
All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X
The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.
— Joseph Goebbels, Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik
Does Stein do some low-grade pandering to anti-vaxxers? Yes. This crowd is present in the Green Party. She’s a politician. All politicians pander. But (this is important) throwing the anti-vaxxer crowd a harmless bone or two while at the same time openly stating the benefits and effectiveness of vaccines is not the same as being an anti-vaxxer oneself.
Claim she panders. Claim the GP has problems because of that crowd. But don’t claim she’s an anti-vaxxer herself. That’s a lie.
When you resort to such rank dishonesty, Democrats, that says far more about you and your party than it does about Ms. Stein and hers.
Published at 17:59 on 29 July 2016
This time it’s Hillary’s campaign computers that were targeted. Not good. The only thing I have to say is to be cautious about any attempts to proclaim anyone guilty about it absent good, hard evidence.
Published at 07:21 on 28 July 2016
As I predicted, the leopard cannot change his spots, as the latest Trump gaffe, wherein he besought the assistance of foreign espionage, illustrates. The only question is, will Trump’s gaffes be enough to sink his campaign, given what a weak one the Democrats are running?
As I cautioned, it’s turning out that the Russian government might not be involved in the leaked emails after all. This developing story, if borne out, points to poor judgement and lack of emotional maturity on the part of both the Democratic Party leadership and Julian Assange, the former because they hastily embraced a simplistic conspiracy theory, and the latter because he let a personal spat with Hillary override broader and more important considerations.
Published at 08:19 on 27 July 2016
None of the following points conflict with each other. If you think they do, your view of the world is most likely overly simplistic and worthy of reconsideration.
Did the Democrats play dirty pool? They did. And they got caught.
Is the system vile and immoral and in need of a revolution? It is.
Does Hillary represent the hope of any real change? She does not.
Was Sanders’ campaign always the longest of long shots? It was.
Is Hillary winning the election still a distinctly better outcome than Trump winning it? It most definitely is.
Was Sanders right is being something of a holdout and refusing to endorse until the last minute? Yes, because it was a best-faith effort on his part to maximize his effort at changing the corrupt and unjust status quo.
Given the above, had Sanders then basically committed himself to having to endorse Hillary in as strong a voice as possible at the convention? He had.
Should this be considered the end of the story? No; history marches on.
Should only electoral politics be considered a valid tool? Absolutely not! The extremely modest outcome of the whole Sanders exercise illustrates its limitations.
Published at 17:51 on 26 July 2016
- There hasn’t been any definitive evidence linking their release to the Russian government. Yes, the DNC servers were hacked from Russia. They were also hacked from outside Russia (they were hacked more than once). The nature of the internet means that even the hacking that appeared to come from Russia might have actually originated elsewhere. Furthermore, even if the leaked messages did originate from Russia, they could have come from a non-government hacking group.
- Thus, all the hyperventilating from Democrats about it being a Putin plot appears at this point to have at least a whiff of conspiracy-mongering in it. Sad to see people who’d slap down cheap 9/11 or Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories be so eager to jump on such a thing themselves, but it just goes to show what a total joke Establishment politics is (now more than ever).
- Hillary Clinton’s State Department was a key player in backing a coup d’etat that destroyed democracy in Honduras. As such, she doesn’t have any moral ground to stand on when it comes to condemning interference in another country’s democratic processes.
- All that said, a garden-variety Establishment hypocrite is still vastly better than a fascist like Trump.
Published at 08:22 on 25 July 2016
There’s now a definite pattern of shooters who are not a tight part of the ISIS network claiming ISIS as the inspiration for their crimes.
The grim news is that there’s very little that can be done about such attacks. Attacking ISIS itself directly won’t help much. Even if one successfully denies ISIS over the control of any land area, it will still exist as an underground organization, and still be there to inspire certain individuals to do dastardly things. Even if that underground organization is effectively neutralized, some other organization with similar views will arise to take its place.
When it comes to acting as a mere source for inspiration, it’s very hard to stop something from having an effect. There’s no formal network that can be attacked top stop news from traveling, save for news-reporting organizations themselves. And that’s not compatible with the values of an open society.
Published at 09:25 on 24 July 2016
Michael Moore is exaggerating when he states that Trump will win. This is belied by how he closes his article:
(Next week I will post my thoughts on Trump’s Achilles Heel and how I think he can be beat [emphasis added].)
So he’s merely using hyperbole to try and get attention. He’s doing so for good reason: he’s right. Trump can win. Hillary’s tone-deaf V.P. choice shows that plainly.
That the talking heads of Establishment politics can’t see it just proves how irrelevant and out-of-touch Establishment politics (which couldn’t see Trump winning the GOP primary) has become.
Published at 19:02 on 22 July 2016
You think a purveyor of the discredited doctrine of bank deregulation makes a good VP choice? Really?
What are you trying to do, lose this election? Didn’t your disastrously wrong decision to support the Iraq War teach you anything about the perils of pandering to the right wing of your party?
