Hey, I guess my vote can be bought

I’m going to vote for a candidate with this plan:

The first step in addressing this crisis is to deal head-on with the outstanding debt that is weighing down millions of families and should never have been required in the first place. That’s why I’m calling for something truly transformational — the cancellation of up to $50,000 in student loan debt for 42 million Americans.

My plan for broad student debt cancellation will:

  • Cancel debt for more than 95% of the nearly 45 million Americans with student loan debt;
  • Wipe out student loan debt entirely for more than 75% of the Americans with that debt;
  • Substantially increase wealth for Black and Latinx families and reduce both the Black-White and Latinx-White wealth gaps; and
  • Provide an enormous middle-class stimulus that will boost economic growth, increase home purchases, and fuel a new wave of small business formation.

Once we’ve cleared out the debt that’s holding down an entire generation of Americans, we must ensure that we never have another student debt crisis again. We can do that by recognizing that a public college education is like a public K-12 education — a basic public good that should be available to everyone with free tuition and zero debt at graduation. My plan for universal free college will:

  • Give every American the opportunity to attend a two-year or four-year public college without paying a dime in tuition or fees;
  • Make free college truly universal — not just in theory, but in practice — by making higher education of all kinds more inclusive and available to every single American, especially lower-income, Black, and Latinx students, without the need to take on debt to cover costs.

Some people will say we can’t afford this plan. That’s nonsense. The entire cost of my broad debt cancellation plan and universal free college is more than covered by my Ultra-Millionaire Tax — a 2% annual tax on the 75,000 families with $50 million or more in wealth. For decades, we’ve allowed the wealthy to pay less while burying tens of millions of working Americans in education debt. It’s time to make different choices.

Right now that candidate is Elizabeth Warren, but I’m open to others adopting this idea. In fact, I think it ought to be on the Democratic party platform, and that any candidate who wants to represent the will of the American people ought to be promoting it.

Note: I have no student loan debt — I only had a small debt to begin with, and paid it off years ago — I’m not planning to attend college in the future, and my kids have all completed undergraduate education, and I’m not really going to acquire any personal gain from this (although I sure wish somebody’d put this in place round about 2000, before my trio of offspring started marching off to university and broke us). So I’m not really being “bought”. This is a change that would be good for the country. Let’s build up our human infrastructure!

Also note that her plan specifically covers 2-year public colleges, which is just as important as our ivory tower institutions, and that she has specific plans for HBCUs and MSIs. Warren knows her stuff.

Why isn’t every candidate immediately recognizing a good idea and jumping on the bandwagon? Even the Republicans should be able to see the virtues.

Nurses play cards, cops eat donuts, and other stereotypes

You’ll have to excuse my home state. Walla Walla is a lovely town in a beautiful part of the country, but it is in the eastern half of Washington, which has more than its fair share of rural ignoramuses.

I understand… making sure that we have ‘rest breaks’ and things like that. But I also understand that we need to care for patients first and foremost… I would submit to you that those [critical access hospital] nurses probably do get breaks! They probably play cards for a considerable amount of the day!

Sen. Maureen Walsh (R), Walla Walla

I’ve known a few nurses in my time. What I don’t get is why, if they’re spending most of their time playing cards all day, they come home with aching backs and sore feet all the time? I’ve been in hospitals before, and I’m the one who is lying in bed the whole time, while the nurses are all hustling about on tight schedules, getting the work done. What card game is this that can be done in short bursts and is physically demanding?

I must also beg to differ. This Republican is defending an exemption that benefits hospitals, allowing them to demand mandatory overtime from the nursing staff rather than hiring enough nurses to do the job without overworking them, and that means that care for patients is not first and foremost — hospital profits are. Understandably, that is a very Republican position to take.

Damn, but American health care is such a chaotic mess, thanks to capitalism.

Žižek vs Peterson: A nothingburger.

I guess Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek had their great debate in Toronto yesterday. You know how I feel about debate and Jordan Peterson, while Žižek is simply someone I don’t read and have no interest in, so you can guess how enthusiastic I was about this event. Fine, you like to watch a couple of gomers share a tureen of warm spit on a stage — knock yourself out, have a grand time, I’m not going to tell you you can’t. I’m more interested in Nathan Robinson’s commentary on it.

I didn’t get far in that, even. The debate started an hour late, and practically the first thing out of Peterson’s mouth is that he didn’t have time to read any of Žižek’s work (neither have I, but I’m not the one challenged to debate him), and even more surprisingly, he admits that he, voluble scourge of Postmodernist Communists, studied up by reading the Communist Manifesto … for the first time ever.

Oh, come on. It’s a long pamphlet, a summary of the ideas for the proletariat. This is the minimal amount of effort you put into preparing for a debate that some of your fans are paying $1500 to see? After you’ve spent years damning an ideology that you haven’t read?

It sounds like Žižek’s performance wasn’t much better.

I hope all the attendees got their money’s worth.

Invade Africa — all of Africa — to punish “woke Twitter” for the Notre Dame fire

Andy Ngo, always a reliable source of hypocrisy, started a Twitter thread to document all the wicked Leftists who expressed joy at the burning of Notre Dame. It’s bizarre, because many of those Leftists are making legitimate points. France led a colonial empire, but we don’t see as much grief for the murdered and exploited peoples. Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque was burning at the same time, and got only a tiny fraction of the attention. Notre Dame is the responsibility of the French state, and there has been bickering for years about the cost of maintenance with the Catholic Church, yet the church still uses it for religious services. Catholicism is an odious cult, yet it gets treated with unwarranted respect (again, Notre Dame’s historical value is preserved by the French Republic, yet this is treated as a loss for Catholicism). Americans demolish Indian lands to build ugly monuments or dig mines, but there’s rarely an outcry about disrespecting their history (well, Indians cry out; we rarely pay any attention).

It’s complicated. I think it’s important to preserve European historical sites, but I feel the same about Native American sacred sites and the Sultan Ahmed Mosque and Jagannath Temple and Borobudur and a thousand other places, even when I have little cultural connection to them and may even detest the religion that drove their construction. Human history is full of majestic accomplishments, but they’ve all got warts on them. We’ve got to appreciate the good behind them, but never forget the warts. A tragedy like the Notre Dame fire occurs, and people rush to both deify and demonize the building — let’s try to have some perspective, OK?

I sympathize with the people who feel some schadenfreude at the destruction of one artifact that represents crimes against humanity at the same time that it represents a great human achievement. I don’t mind them reminding us all of the badness that lurks within that monument — I’d do the same. As long as you’re tolerant, no matter how angry you are, and not plotting active destruction yourself, I can respect that.

The interesting thing about Ngo’s thread, though, is that, as you might expect, it’s drawn out the right-wing hypocrites. They’re all deploring how hateful the Left is for expressing a personal dislike of Catholicism, or French imperialism, or thinking it’s only fair that France feel the kind of loss other nations have felt. But they’ve got their own rabid bigotry that they overlook.

There’s the usual call to destroy Islamic holy sites.

You know, Al-Masjid Al-Haram is even older than Notre Dame. If you’re calling for its destruction, you aren’t motivated by an appreciation of history or art, but by simple ideological vengeance. Then you don’t get to complain when people have an ideological contempt for Notre Dame.

Or how about this delusional threat?

He, personally, is going to invade Africa. All of Africa. This vast continent, with a deep history and thousands of complex cultures, is responsible for burning European cathedrals, and he is going to march over there and spank everyone. His reason? To spite people on Twitter he doesn’t like.

Mr Ngo wanted to expose wicked Leftists, but ended up holding a mirror to his own clique.

Tangled web, check. Woven, check. Deceived…uh, not check.

There’s a newspaper in Alabama that has a reputation for promoting some incredibly racist garbage, the Democrat-Reporter, which was run by a good ol’ boy named Goodloe Sutton. “Was”. It’s been sold.

Maybe.

The new owners are CT Harless and Sabrina McMahan, nominally. The story has to be read to be believed. They are incapable of saying any word of truth, and lead a reporter who asked a few simple questions about their background on an amazing runaround. “Are you the CT Harless who said he was an Imperial Wizard of the American White Knights?” “No, that was my brother.” “Your name is Chuck Harless?” “No, Chris, my brother is Chuck, we were both called CT.” (sounds confusing.) “But you bought the paper?” “No, I don’t own it. I’m just helping out the owner.”

It goes around and around, and there’s a transparent charade where CT has a friend call up the reporter posing as “Chuck” of the KKK to disavow any connection. It’s so stupid, with constantly changing excuses, that it’s hilarious. And of course CT/Chuck/Chris/Sabrina are threatening to sue the reporter if he publishes any of it. I still don’t understand why they’re being so evasive, unless it’s just that they have the habit of lying.

I don’t think the KKK/American White Knights are recruiting the very best.

Would you vote for this dead-eyed ignorant wanker?

Then you’re in luck! Carl Benjamin, anti-immigrant, anti-European Union, anti-feminist, all-around bigot, is running for a seat in the European parliament, on a platform of undermining the European Union. It’s a bit like those tea party fanatics who want to eliminate the federal government running for congress all the time, so it’s not that crazy.

Oh, wait…yes it is.

Anyway, his argument for why he should be elected is that he’s extremely popular with alt-right trolls on YouTube, so he has already succeeded in cultivating an electorate, which is, I guess, true.

He’s better known on YouTube as Sargon of Akkad, for reasons unknown. I asked around about why he uses that moniker, since he never talks about the ancient history of Mesopotamia, doesn’t have any credentials in history, and doesn’t even seem to like people from the Middle East, and no one gave me an answer. I think I’ve figured it out, though. There are a great many people with largely right-wing views who got their start on YouTube hiding behind cartoon avatars: a knight in a tuxedo, an angry kangaroo, etc., and pretending to be an Akkadian king fits right in, and also has a bit of pretension. I think it’s like the masks of television wrestling. They’re all playing a simple-to-understand cartoon persona. They think they’re all luchadors.

Which, they think, is another reason to vote for them.

I stand with Ilhan, too

Ibram X. Kendi
It goes without saying that #IStandWithIlhanOmar. And anyone who does not stands with Congresswoman Omar stands with Islamophobia, with racism, with politicians deploying lies to inflame racial and religious terror in the country. There is no middle ground in the struggle against bigotry. The sideline is behind the lines of bigots. The bigots have cast themselves as striving against bigotry, while they have cast those striving against bigotry as the bigots. The bigots have cast themselves as the victims and cast the victims as the bigots. But nothing new there: that is the history of bigotry. Congresswoman Omar is not perfect. I’m not. I’ve expressed bigotry. Confessed my mistakes. None of us are perfect. But many of us act as if we are. What are we striving against, and for? Her record makes clear she is striving against bigotry, striving for a world of equity. Finally, it is a fact that Congresswoman Omar was not talking about 9/11 in the way Trump cast her. But bigots hate the truth as much as they hate people.

Ivanka the Vacant

I don’t like reading articles where the story is entirely buried between the lines — if you’re a journalist, plain-spoken brevity is a virtue. That’s why this article in The Atlantic about Ivanka Trump is agonizing. It’s long, and all you’re going to glean from it is that Ivanka is a cipher who takes great pains in maintaining a poised appearance, and is careful to avoid any conflict with her asshole father. The author is equally careful to avoid criticizing Ivanka, who, characteristically, refuses to go on the record anywhere in the story, and clearly got the access to write the story by a history of pandering to the Trump family. Like the first time she met Ivanka:

Ivanka was hard to miss—taller and prettier than everyone else. I was a fan, as were most girls I knew. We thought she had it all—her own company, a pretty family, a pretty apartment. When I saw an opening, I told her as much. She thanked me and told me she liked my dress. We took a photo together, which I posted on Instagram.

Wait. A “fan” of Ivanka, along with most of her friends? Until she got elevated to an unearned position of power, I and most of the people I know had no idea who this pampered rich girl was. What kind of person did you have to be to be aware of Ivanka Trump?

Then, even as the author is trying to be inoffensive, she succeeds in revealing through what she doesn’t say how empty Ivanka is.

It’s a great boring slog of an article, but I did run across one interesting comment. It’s Donald Trump once again attributing a virtue to … fucking genetics.

The president went on: “She’s got a great calmness … I’ve seen her under tremendous stress and pressure. She reacts very well—that’s usually a genetic thing, but it’s one of those things, nevertheless.” He added: “She’s got a tremendous presence when she walks into the room.”

Calmness is usually a genetic thing? Then how did Ivanka inherit it, since her father is a temperamental histrionic toad?

Thomas Massie isn’t a scientist, either

I almost gave Thomas Massie a little credit. I won’t make that mistake ever again.

In his grilling of John Kerry, he first asks Isn’t it true you have a science degree from Yale? Kerry explains that it’s a bachelor of arts degree in political science. Then Massie asks, How do you get a bachelor of arts in a science?

If he’d been asking that as a sincere question, I’d be sympathetic. Incoming students always ask about the difference between a BA and a BS degree, and it’s a legitimate source of confusion. Basically, there is no difference. It isn’t as if one is for Artists and the other is for Scientists, and to the surprise of many, it’s not as if a BA is easier than a BS. It usually reflects how many credits outside your major you took, and what the tradition at the university is. The University of Minnesota Morris offers a BA in biology only, because we’re a liberal arts college and we require a fairly broad education for everyone. It’s still a science degree. At Temple University, we offered both the BA or the BS — they had exactly the same core requirements, the only difference being that the BA required that you take more foreign language courses, so it was actually harder to earn a BA.

But the bottom line is that there is no substantial difference between a BA and a BS, and nothing that will affect your future employment or career choices. Unless you encounter a dope like Thomas Massie, who goes on to say that a BA degree is not really science. Kerry does clearly state that he has a BA in political science from a liberal arts college, but Massie leaps on that with this ridiculous bilge:

I think it’s somewhat appropriate that someone with a pseudoscience degree is here pushing pseudoscience

No. Neither a political science degree nor a bachelor of arts degree is pseudoscience. Any sympathy with his initial expression of confusion is now thoroughly dissipated. This guy is a fool.

He has since followed through with this claim:

Everybody knows that political science is a specialty that focuses on a certain body of knowledge. “Science” is not a magic word. You can’t define the validity of a discipline by picking over the etymology of the words in the label. It’s simply idiotic.

Other Republicans, like Gosar and Steube, made similarly ignorant contributions to the conversation. As Kerry pointed out, this was not a serious discussion. It can’t be, as long as Republican dimwits are involved.

By the way, Massie has a degree in engineering…not science. I guess he is disqualified from the conversation. Or would he rather push his climate-change-denying pseudoscience on everyone?