The most chilling exchange in last night’s debate

This is what we should fear from a Trump presidency:

I didn’t think I’d say this but I’m going to say it, and I hate to say it, but if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there has never been so many lies, so much deception, there has never been anything like it and we’re going to have a special prosecutor.

That’s a classic Trumpism, to try to blunt the odious nature of what he is about to say by claiming that he hates to say it. He clearly knows he’s stepping over the line by advocating turning the US into a Stalinesque autocracy because he needed that initial, meaningless disclaimer, but that’s a real threat, and believable because that’s exactly what the Republicans have done over and over again. They drag the country into what ought to literally be described in this case as a witch hunt, led by fanatical inquisitors, over empty accusations. They will consume time and money. They will be nothing but a true distraction from the business of the Oval Office, and we’ve seen it multiple times, from Whitewater to Benghazi, and every time the sanctimonious asshole in charge, whether it’s a Ken Starr or a Trey Gowdy, will persevere despite a lack of evidence, because the purpose is not to arrive at the truth, but to prolong the harassment.

Trump just promised to legally hound a defeated political opponent with the same tactics that have been used against the Clintons for decades…this time, an opponent who would be out of office and out of power. A potential president of the United States just threatened to use all of his power to torment a private citizen.

Clinton stayed cool, and even smiled, and told everyone to go check the facts, that there’s nothing there.

We have literally Trump, you can fact check him in real time. Last time, at the first debate, we had millions of people fact-checking. So I expect we’ll have millions more fact-checking because, you know, it is, it’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.

Yes, go look up the facts. There is nothing criminal in what Clinton did. A Republican FBI director has already thoroughly scrutinized the data determined that there was no intent to hide anything, and that what was deleted was a collection of personal emails, and that Clinton wasn’t even responsible for their removal. But this fluff and nonsense is what Trump thinks is a useful goal.

He also interrupted Clinton’s response.

Because you would be in jail.

A candidate for the American presidency just threatened to abuse his power and imprison his opponent after the election.

Stop right there. The man is incompetent and unfit for office, and wants to be a tyrant. Fear for the Republic.

I’ve started on a bottle of wine

It’s the only way I’m going to be able to survive this debate.

First question to both: do you think you’re a good role model for children? Clinton answers with her goal to bring people together; Trump babbles like a man on quaaludes about the trade deficit, people getting shot, fixing the inner city. HE DOESN’T ANSWER THE QUESTION. Weird.

Asked about the #trumptape, his answer is it was just “locker room talk”, but look! Over there! ISIS is chopping off people’s heads! ISIS, ISIS, ISIS.

Good god, he’s awful and incoherent.

Clinton responds: he’s unfit, and this is exactly what Trump is. Points out all the groups he has denigrated over the course of this campaign.

Waiting for Trump to explode.

Trump: it’s just words. He’s going to help the African-Americans, the Latinos, and Clinton has done nothing. Sniff. Sniff.

New question: Trump says the campaign changed him. When did that happen?

Trump: That was just locker room talk. Bill Clinton was worse. Hillary Clinton laughed at a victim of rape. Sniff.

He doesn’t answer the question again!

Clinton: When they go low, we go high. The audience can judge whether he respects women. Trump never apologizes. Cites several of his attacks and racism that he never apologized for. You owe the president an apology.

Trump: No, you do. Emails. Emails.

Then he threatens that, if he wins, he’s going to get a special prosecutor to go after her.

Clinton just smiles. Tells people to go fact-check him at hillaryclinton.com, and that it’s a good thing Trump isn’t in charge of the legal system.

Trump: Because you’d be in jail. She’s getting to him.

Christ. He just keeps interrupting and whining. It’s one on three, he says. He’s a bullying coward.

Next question: What will you do about Obamacare? Clinton responds with a discussion of what’s work and what needs to be fixed. Trump: “it’s a disaster”. No details. Sniff. Canadian health care is so awful. He just keeps repeating that disaster word.

Next question: how will you help Muslim Americans deal with rising islamophobia?

Trump starts talking about how Muslims have to report terrorists. Radical Islamic Terror!

Clinton points out that Muslims have been in America since the Revolution, mentions Capt. Khan, who gave his life for the country. It’s dangerous to engage in the demagoguery Trump indulges in. Says we’re not at war with Islam, and it plays into the hands of the terrorists to do as Trump does.

A question to Trump: What about your claim that we need a total ban on Muslim immigrants? Trump now calls it “extreme vetting”. Clinton wants to allow in more Muslims! 100s of thousands of people!

Q to Clinton: you propose allowing more Syrians in. How can you justify that risk? She says she’s not talking about allowing risky people in, but is not going to ban people on the basis of their religion, like Trump wants.

I need more wine. Trump is such an asshole.

Tax cuts. Trump says he’s going to reduce taxes for everyone. Clinton says she’s going to raise taxes only on people making over $250K.

Did Trump avoid paying federal income taxes? He took advantage of tax loopholes, like Buffet and Soros…refuses a direct question to say how many years he avoided paying federal taxes.

Somehow he’s talking about ISIS again.

Clinton was a disaster (his word for the evening) as a senator. Clinton recites a long list of her accomplishments in office.

Fuck. If Trump says “disaster” one more time…

Black man asks a question. Trump responds with “inner city” and “disaster”. Fuck him.

“Would you be a disciplined leader?” Trump can’t even be a disciplined debater.

Supreme Court: Clinton will appoint judges who support Roe v. Wade, and marriage equality. Trump will appoint someone like Scalia. Enough said.

Energy policy: Trump says we have “clean coal”. Damn the EPA. Right.

I give up. Can’t take no more.

Go away, Alain de Botton

Oh, no, another interview with the insipid de Botton. I can’t stand it.

Sean Illing: You’ve said the most boring question we can ask of any religion is whether or not it’s true. Why is that?

Alain de Botton: For me, and I think for many other people as well, the issue of religion actually goes way beyond belief in the supernatural, and yet a lot of the debate around religion started by people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins…

Stop right there. I’m already bored. Christopher Hitchens is dead, and Richard Dawkins is one guy. Why does everyone who is asked to pontificate on modern atheism immediately try to turn it into a cult of personality? There are some atheists who certainly seem to have replaced religion with the worship of their personal favorite godless prophet, but that sure isn’t the central concern of most of us.

But then, de Botton wouldn’t know how to handle an issue that wasn’t reduced to its most simplistic state, and I think he identifies strongly with the whole cult of personality thing himself.

…reduces to familiar questions: Does God exist or not? Do angels exist or not? Is it stupid to believe in angels?

Those are important questions, but only because people still insist on believing in the existence of gods and angels. Most atheists I know are thoroughly satisfied with the answer that no, they don’t exist, and only continue to address them because believers insist on it. I’ve been in debates before; it’s always the other guy who pops up and thinks “Does god exist?” is a respectable debate topic, and I’m the one who says “No, pick something more specific”.

While I understand the kind of emotional resonance around that, I think the real issue is why did people get drawn to religion? Why did we invent religions? What need did they serve? And also what are the aspects around religious life that may be disconnected from belief that nevertheless have great validity and resonance for people outside of faith today?

You know, de Botton, those are the same questions your bugaboos, Hitchens and Dawkins, asked in their books. That they asked in their lectures. That people discuss at atheist conferences now. I know you want to think you’re something special, but you’re not.

Religions are not just a set of claims about the supernatural; they are also machines for living. They aim to guide you from birth to death and to teach you a whole range of things: to create a community, to create codes of behavior, to generate aesthetic experiences. And all of this seems to me incredibly important and, frankly, much more interesting than the question of whether Jesus was or wasn’t the son of God.

Drop in to most of the churches in the United States and stand up and suggest to everyone that this Jesus stuff is irrelevant. See how well that flies. You might be able to get away with it at a UU church, or a Church of Christ, or the liberal branch of a church on a university campus, but elsewhere…whoa. Have your escape route planned ahead of time.

There’s also this absurdly pollyannaish view of religion.

The underlying ambition of religions is impressive to me. They are trying to locate the tenets of a good life, of a wise life, of a kind life. They are interrogating the greatest themes, and so I’m attracted to the aspects of religion that know that human life is quite difficult and that we are going to need a lot of assistance, a lot of guidance. And what religious life is trying to do is to provide us with tools for how to keep being the best version of ourselves.

No, most are not about a good life. They are about servility. They’re about sacrificing part of your life to serve an institution that makes false promises; it’s often about earning a good afterlife, which does not exist.

My experiences with most religions has been that they are about giving you the tools to be the worse version of yourself: intolerant, self-righteous, meddling, and ignorant. There are small religious groups that do try to be the opposite of that, but if you aren’t ready to recognize the difference between Southern Baptists and your own idealized vision of a benevolent religion, you aren’t ready to discuss how to develop a philosophy for living that doesn’t plummet into dogma and solipsism and tribalism.

It’s to distinguish it from the modern incarnation of atheism, which was promulgated by people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens

Shut up, Alain de Botton.

that really made the central aspect of atheism the question of whether one did or didn’t believe. And I suppose I’m interested in the kind of atheism that starts with the assumption that of course God doesn’t exist, we made him up, that’s fine.

While I’m more interested in the kind of atheism that starts with the assumption that the natural world is central and important, and that pursuit of the truth is absolutely essential to understanding that world. Do not let a lie linger unquestioned.

I want to look at the way religions go about things as an inspiring starting point for thinking about what secular culture is lacking and still needs. Because let’s remember that when religion started to decline in the 19th century, in Western Europe…

This is false. The 19th century was not a non-religious era. WWII was driven by religious justifications — “Kinder, Kuche, Kirche“, and the idea that the religious and ethnic other must be cleansed — and the Cold War sent the United States into a self-destructive spiral of conservative religious doctrine that still lingers with us.

But then, de Botton does not consider truth to be an important issue. It’s how you feel about it that matters.

…there was a lot of thinking that was done. People asked how would we fill the gap, the God-shaped hole. And there were lots of theories, and the leading answer, I suppose, was culture.

And that’s religious dogma once again. There is no “God-shaped hole”. When culture was dragooned into believing that culture was in service to a non-existent deity and a self-serving religious institution, it was culture itself that was needed, not the parasitical religious apparatus that was leeching off of it. Kill the parasite, the culture still thrives.

It’s just that the parasite wants you to believe that it is responsible for art and science and music and architecture and poetry, and that if you destroy it you will lose all that beauty. It’s another self-serving lie that de Botton gladly parrots.

A prediction: the Republican party is about to divide itself

I’m not going to go so far as to predict that Hillary Clinton will win in this madhouse of an election, but the odds in her favor keep improving.

More icky revelations about Trump are trickling out.

The Republican party is cutting off support to the Trump campaign.

Many Republican leaders are publicly denouncing Trump, although many are not going so far as to decline to endorse him.

Trump donors are pissed off.

Trump refuses to resign. With an ego that size, can anyone imagine that he would?

Now picture this.

He loses big in the election in November. Even if it’s close, maybe especially if it’s close.

Now put yourself in his shoes, with his narcissism. He’s got to blame someone else, right? Who is he going to blame?

Not Clinton. Not some woman, especially not some woman he thinks is a crook. Maybe there will be some whining of voter fraud, but that’s not going to hold up for long.

He’s going to blame those Republican bigshots, Paul Ryan and John McCain and Reince Priebus and all those governors and senators and congresspeople who failed to support him in the face of these terribly unfair attacks. He has been betrayed. He has been stabbed in the back by his own party.

Trump still has fanatical supporters. Look at Breitbart. Look what’s happening: Trump fans are booing Paul Ryan.

This is what has the Republicans sweating bullets right now. You know they’re busy calculating: they have to repudiate what he said, but how far can they go before they alienate the Trumpian base and find themselves a target of their own fanatics in subsequent elections?

Even scarier — what if he wins? Do you think Trump is the kind of fellow who keeps enemy lists, bears a grudge, and is going to screw over anyone who tried to hurt him the campaign? These guys are trapped.

I do think Clinton will win, though, and then that 30-40% of the rabid electorate that was fueled by racial hatred will pin a Dolchstoßlegende on the Republican establishment and turn on them. They won’t go Democrat, though — they’ll sit there simmering in resentment waiting for a fresh demagogue. It’s just going to get uglier and uglier, but I don’t think the Republicans will benefit.

Republicans in disarray!

It’s good to see, finally. The rats are trying to desert the sinking ship, but don’t let them — and it’s not as if they can. It’s only about a month until the election. Deadlines to put names on the ballot have passed; no matter what the other Republicans do, come November, people will go into their voting booths and Trump’s name will be there, even if every other Republican in the country has repudiated him. He will get many votes from angry white people. All that has changed is that the size of his defeat will probably be larger (although we might also get surprised: this much controversy is probably going to increase the turnout, especially among the racist/sexist/white nationalist electorate).

But it’s also too late for the Republican leadership to untangle themselves from the hideous Trump. They endorsed him. They marched out and made their little speeches approving of the man — even Ted Cruz, who told everyone to vote their conscience at the Republican convention, swallowed his pride and got on board the Trump Train. None of these people should be allowed to escape public censure.

It’s particularly galling because we all knew all along that Trump was a racist, sexist, loud-mouthed hateful boor. He declared that Mexicans were racists and that a judge of Mexican descent couldn’t be trusted; they waffled. He announced that he had a plan to deport Muslims, and he took on a running mate who wanted to bar all Syrian refugees; well, that’s all right then. He proposes shutting down Planned Parenthood and bringing in judges who will overthrow Roe v. Wade, and Pence tried to pass a law requiring formal funerals for aborted fetuses; no problem. Trump wants to end marriage equality, and Pence claims tolerance for gay rights will lead to societal collapse; that’s fine, they agree. He calls women pigs, ugly, fat, and mocks them for blood coming out of their wherever; he’s just speaking his mind. He builds a following of openly racist white nationalists, he foments violence at his rallies; Dick Cheney approves this message.

Everyone knew this. These were not secretive attitudes. He was utterly brazen. We also knew that he was incompetent, had a feeble attention span, was anticipating -science, and was totally unqualified for the job, but those are basically the prerequisites for being a Republican nowadays, so we can’t fault them for overlooking that, but the naked hatred was inescapably obvious, and one thing I’ll say for the Republicans, they usually try to keep their hatred discreetly clothed.

So what suddenly turned everyone against Trump? He said lewd things about a white woman. That is unforgivable. Paul Ryan revealed the real problem. Trump was not chivalrous.

Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified.

Fuck you, Paul Ryan. No. Women don’t need you to be their champion, and reverence is not what they are looking for: fairness and equality are. Especially when your version of “reverence” involves supporting a vulgar bigot who doesn’t trust women with their own bodies.

I’ll believe Republicans are sincere in the repudiation of Donald Trump when they also repudiate all the policies and ideas Trump represented. But until then, bury the lot of them in the dung heap of history.

New entertainment: look up all the people and groups who endorsed Trump before this, when he was a known racist and perpetrator of harassment and sexual assault and were undeterred by his history. For example, here’s a page of Scholars and Writers for America, a long list of very serious very intellectual wankers who think…

Given our choices in the presidential election, we believe that Donald J. Trump is the candidate most likely to restore the promise of America, and we urge you to support him as we do.

Where, apparently, the promise of America is to support slavery and not allow women to vote.

Theranos, soon to be a movie

If you’ve wondered about that spectacular flameout by Theranos, the blood testing company, but didn’t want to read all those articles all over the place, the story is now available in cartoon form.

theranos4

Next, it’s going to be made into a movie with Jennifer Lawrence starring as the grand fraud, Elizabeth Holmes? Say, if I lie and endanger sick people and suck in a few billions from gullible investors, I want George Clooney to play me in the movie of my life.

2 Corinthians 4: 17-18

You knew this day would come.

Your beautiful wife has been on a cleaning kick. She has been tidying the upstairs bedrooms, which used to be the boys’ rooms, which were an awful mess of teenage boys’ junk. You thought you could tuck your preciousses in there, where they would blend in and she would never notice. No one would notice. They were safe.

But then, one evening, she drops a great big box on the ottoman. She looks at you, accusingly.

“I thought you weren’t hoarding these things anymore,” she says.

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“You never know when you might need that special cable,” you say, “You might give me some big home improvement project some day, and that box will hold exactly what will do the job.”

She gives you that look. You know the one. The one where she’d really like to say something critical, but she’s holding it back, because she’s so darned nice all the time.

“Sort it out now,” she says. “I’m hauling everything away tomorrow.”

You go through it all. There was ribbon cable in there. A Centronics parallel interface. A 1200 baud modem. You never know when you might suddenly have a use for a 1200 baud modem, and they’re just about impossible to find nowadays! Oh my god, Firewire cable. You know how much that stuff cost? Appletalk to ethernet adapters. Phone wire. Ancient mice that only worked with the old school Apple mouse connectors. You untangle and sort, and she glares at you and you end up throwing all that history away. You finally cling to only a couple of nice ethernet switches, and you found your handy RS-232 patch adapter, which you slip into your pocket when she wasn’t looking. It’s all going to the dump now.

She doesn’t know about the much bigger stash you keep in the lab, though, so you’ll still be OK if the apocalypse comes and you absolutely must solder up a serial-to-parallel cable, or you’ll die.

Oh, no! She just came down the stairs with the big spool of Cat5! We can’t get rid of that!

Donate!

Everyone wants our money right now — presidential candidates are begging every day. But there are two other organizations that could use some help.

  • Skepticon! They have a contributor matching all donations until midnight tonight. You’ve got six hours!

  • RationalWiki! Help them out in their quarterly fundraiser — it’s all that’s keeping the doors open.

Oh, sure, give some money to Clinton, too.

Very presidential

Ladies and gentlemen, the pick of the evangelical Christian right.

Charles Blow is a bit upset.

Do you think this will change Trump’s supporters’ minds at all? Now you can find out! Breitbart has rather tersely reported the bare facts of this story. Just read the comments.

Lots of “Bill Clinton is worse!” comments.

TRUMP = boys talk. Clinton actually did attacked and raped woman against their will and used his position to do so.

If only it would sink in that Bill Clinton isn’t in the running.

Then there’s the “All men do it” excuse.

If You’re upset about this, you have never been in a mens locker room. Sorry, but men (if they’re straight) talk about women as women talk about men.

Sorry, nope, I don’t, nor do any of my friends.

There are people who are very happy about what Trump said. It makes him a manly man.

BFD! 2005 LMAO, Yawn! At least he’s not a fag!

TRUMP is a true red blooded American, he has AMERICAN CHILDREN not imports or one that is soley a CLINTON political set up

And then there’s simple denial.

Women love Trump and Trump loves women. Nobody cares.