I took the Pew Quiz just to check my views with my party affiliation — you never know, maybe I’m actually a Republican deep down inside, and I’ve been voting incorrectly for the past few decades. It was disappointing.
Hey, is that arrow labeled “YOU” a few pixels shy of the left edge of the scale? And is the average member of the Democratic party actually what I would consider a horrible conservative?
She seems to have been a successful advocate for science and mathematics, and for education in general with a great track record since her days in Arkansas.
I was a child in Arkansas while Hillary was empowered to make a focused effort on improving outcomes for children. From fourth through ninth grade, I attended a “gifted and talented education” (GATE) class, a program built as part of Hillary Clinton’s reforms by the Standards Committee. The classes were loosely structured, with no rigid testing schedules or rote memorization, but they encouraged critical discourse and embraced creative divergence. GATE opened my eyes to a world of opportunity.
Hillary Clinton’s educational reforms were year-round. From seventh through 12th grade, I was able to attend multi-week, residential summer learning programs at small universities across Arkansas that offered middle- and high-schoolers immersive camps in fields like mathematics, theater, geology and more. Charismatic professors taught all of the programs. Most importantly for my family, they were provided by the state of Arkansas at no cost to students. The programs, known as “Academic Enrichment for the Gifted in the Summer” (AEGIS) started in 1984, a year after Hillary Clinton assumed the chair position of the Standards Committee. By the 1990s, AEGIS had ballooned to more than 25 programs serving thousands of students every summer. The program would not have existed without Hillary Clinton’s leadership.
Mathematics and sciences (or what we call “STEM” today) were of particular importance to Clinton. In a 1983 interview with the Associated Press, she remarked, while suggesting that Arkansas had overemphasized athletics, “I think it’s time for getting a little fanatic about math and sciences.” STEM is the foundation of today’s technology industry, and only a handful of pioneers in the public education space had the foresight to appreciate its value for future members of the workforce. By far the most significant impact Hillary Clinton’s educational reforms had in my life was through her work to create a free public boarding school for math and science nerds like me: The Arkansas School for Mathematics and Sciences (ASMS).
That also explains why the Republicans hate her so much. She fought ignorance, which is the core of the Republican party platform.
So, Donald Trump paid a visit to Minnesota today, which was odd and pointless. This state is pretty much a lock for Clinton, but he flew in, claiming that there’s going to be a surprising upset in the state. He drew a few thousand deplorables to cheer him on, like this fellow:
I don’t think that’s the kind of appeal that will work here, and it’s kind of delusional of him to think so.
He also spent a lot of his time raging about those horrible immigrants in Minnesota.
Trump charged that too many Somali immigrants were admitted with faulty vetting and later recruited by radical elements. “A Trump administration will not admit any refugees without the support of the local communities where they are being placed,” he said. “It’s the least they could do for you. You’ve suffered enough in Minnesota.”
We’ve suffered? Hang on there — we have a lot of Hmong and Somali immigrants here, and they don’t make us suffer. They’re good people. I’ve got a fair number of them in my classes, and they do as well as the third and fourth generation immigrants (like almost all of us) and as well as the native population. I don’t resent them at all, I’m glad to have them here…so what is this bullshit with a loud-mouthed New York millionaire tax-dodger flying in to tell us who belongs here and who doesn’t?
The person I’d like to kick out is a certain ranting orange thug. You know, the kind who encourages his fans to murder people.
Isn’t it great how the Republican Party and this election have cooperated to drag the reputation of our nation down into a shemozzle?
Lynna is your curator. I don’t think this thread will run dry for a long time.
I got a solid 10 hours of sleep last night — I’m hoping that has cleared the last wisps of fog from this chaotic week out of my brain. I have decided I’m also not going to worry about this election any more: it’s out of my hands because I know who I’ll be voting for, the monstrous orange nincompoop has been wrecking the support of minorities and women, and they’re the ones who are going to decide this year, and most importantly, I have learned that Beyoncé is campaigning for Clinton. Game over, man.
I will worry about the aftermath later, but I think our homegrown candy-floss Hitler has effectively put a bullet in the brain of the Republican party, and there may be long-drawn-out and furious thrashings to come (it never used that brain much, so it’s not an insta-kill), but we’ll deal with those as they arise. Not even going to try and guess what the world will be like on Wednesday.
For now, I’m going drink some coffee and retire to my happy place. Even though that happy place is full of papers I need to grade.
It sounds so well-meaning — Prop 60 would require all porn films to use condoms. That’s got to be good for the actors and actresses, right? If I walked in cold to a voting booth and saw that idea, with no prior research, I’d probably say “yeah, sure” and punch in “yes”. Only it turns out that you really should listen to the people it affects the most, and the porn stars are all dead set against it. I’m not even a consumer of porn, so my opinion shouldn’t matter at all, and this bill seems to be designed to cater to the prejudices and ignorance of us straight unkinky vanilla people.
Proposition 60 looks great at first glance. I wouldn’t fault anyone who doesn’t know anything about it for voting “yes” if that’s all they knew about it. I can easily imagine myself getting suckered into voting for it if I didn’t have such strong connections to the sex worker communities. But the fact is, it’s a lousy law, the latest in a long string of attempts by the AIDS Health Foundation to profiteer off the fear of sex and the stigmatizing of sex work. I want to talk about why it’s a lousy law here, but I want to do more than that, too: I want to use it as a demonstration of why it’s important for everyone in this country who works for a living to pay attention to the organizing efforts of sex workers and support them.
It’s also good to look at who the law rewards, and who it punishes. Even if your well-meaning idea is to protect poor sex workers from their choices, like any good Puritan, maybe you ought to rethink the proposition when the consequences are to do further harm to those you piously wish to “defend”.
Where Proposition 60 is concerned, this reality isn’t just a matter of optics: It determines who the law punishes. Performers who shoot and distribute their own material are subject to prosecution under the law if condoms aren’t visible in their films. The limited media coverage of this point has focused on the argument that married couples who make porn in their own homes could be sued for not using condoms. That’s a legitimate example, but it misses one of the most important points: The porn workers who are most likely to be targeted by such a clause aren’t going to be married, hetero cisgender couples, but those with the most marginalized identities.
…
Besides who it targets, the enforcement mechanisms of Proposition 60 are weird and poorly thought-out. If the state doesn’t act on a reported violation, any Californian is able to act as plaintiff and sue the producer for not showing condoms in their film. If the lawsuit is successful, the plaintiff — who again, can be any Californian who watched a porn film and didn’t see condoms being used — gets 25% of the judgement. Fines can go up to $70,000 for repeat violations, which is a pretty strong motivation to sit around watching porn that doesn’t turn you on.
Oh, no. That’s all we need — a financial motivation to let yet another collection of straight-laced people to pruriently spend their time watching pornography so they can get the added thrill of passing judgment on others. Getting paid for being prudish and judgmental? Win-win for awful people!
In a stunning fit of bad taste and bad design, the Newark immigration & customs control has a terrible feature. Everyone landing at that airport gets filtered through a customs screening room, a large space with long, slow moving lines, and mounted dead center is a large television. It is tuned to CNN. My welcome back to the USA was Wolf Blitzer (spit) yammering about two things: emails, and polls. Good god, America, you are being poisoned by the media. Rather than policy, we hear only about trivia and the state of the horse race. Charles Pierce summarizes my feelings.
I am perilously close to perishing for the desire of wanting somebody to win the presidency on the merits. I am tired of polls and micro-analytics based on splitting the electorate into bite-sized pieces. And I am tired of pundits who don’t know dick about the people for whom they claim to be speaking. (Hi, Joe! Mika! Good ta see ya!) And I am tired of surrogates, all of them, and not just the crazy ones that speak for El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago, but all the people dealing in arguments and talking points and bullshit that passed their sell-by dates sometime around last Memorial Day.
One more week of this bullshit, but I do not expect to see an improvement after the election, since our media seem to be totally incapable of considering ideas and actions outside of their effect on Nate Silver’s numbers games.
So I got home some time after 2am, collapsed into bed slept a few hours, and got up to teach my classes. The first thing that greeted me when I opened my office door, unfortunately, was that I’d set the due date for lab reports for the end of last week, and you can guess what I found: piles and piles of papers slid under my door. That wasn’t so bad, though; I expected it, and it was the first major writing assignment of the term, so I’m kind of looking forward to reading them. What I didn’t expect, and that soured my stomach, was that the latest issue of the Morris North Star, our far-right student newspaper, was also stuffed under there. This is what I got to see:
Gag. Thud. Barf. I am so disappointed in some of our students for their lack of empathy, total absence of wit, and outright stupidity. I also heard that someone spoke up at a conservative forum on campus, expressing their fear of being seen as conservative at UMM, and they used as an example their certainty that they could never attend a class taught by yours truly, PZ Myers, while wearing a college republicans T-shirt. Little do they realize that at a small college like ours, where our teabagging students aren’t shy about expressing themselves on their horrible little rag, I already know…and it makes no difference in my biology classes.
Now if I were grading them on their sense of humor or their consciousness of their fellow students, they’d be failing, but I haven’t figured out a way to include those topics on exams about cell biology or genetics. Or if I could test them on hypocrisy — you know they’re not very aware when they can complain that they can’t wear a conservative slogan on a t-shirt (they can) because of ‘political correctness’, but at the same time than can run cartoons that ignorantly denigrate other students because ‘politically incorrect’ is a mark of pride to them.
It’s also the case that I can’t fail students for being assholes, unfortunately.
OK, one bit of good news. This was waiting for me in my mailbox.
Now all I have to do is catch up on my sleep, get over my jetlag, and have this annoying throbbing headache end, and maybe I can read it.
I was horrified years ago when Fox News emerged as the shambling, dishonest, sleazy voice of conservative thought — I mean, I thought the National Review was a racist organ, but at least they put on bow ties and talked in elevated accents and pretended to be decent human beings, and William F. Buckley Jr. was clearly an intelligent man with odious views. Fox News decided that intelligence was irrelevant and that the odious views were what sold. And the Republican Party embraced it all and decided to jettison intelligence along with decency (although one could argue that they led the way with Reagan).
Brace yourself. It gets worse. Fox News is now passé. It is insufficiently contemptible for the next crop of conservative politicians.
They are all jumping to…Breitbart.
Trump is going to cash in on his electoral defeat by forming an alliance with Breitbart, creating an abomination called Trump TV so far. That may change, since the Trump name is so tainted that it isn’t being used on any of his new hotels.
And if you thought Trump was bad, wait until you get a load of the next generation of far right conservatives. Curt Schilling is considering a political career, and hitching his star to Breitbart. After all, if the primary qualifications for running for office as a Republican are a loud mouth, racism, and ignorance, he’s a perfect match.
Another guy who is trying to rehabilitate his political career by diving into the raging dumpster fire is Dinesh D’Souza. So presidential.
Obama's dad dumped him at birth & his mom got rid of him at age 10–did they know something we didn't when we signed up for this guy? pic.twitter.com/owhOt6IAwB
— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) October 21, 2016
Obama’s dad dumped him at birth & his mom got rid of him at age 10–did they know something we didn’t when we signed up for this guy?
Just wait. After the 2020 elections, when Breitbart is branded as a loser and gets discarded like Fox News, the Republicans will go looking for an even more repulsive vehicle for their views, and we’ll see the rise of Aryan Nation TV. Then, in 2024, when that one goes bust as a medium for getting Republicans elected, they’ll have to go even lower. I don’t know what form that horror will take, though. Maybe they’ll join forces with the Catholic Church.
There was a time when I could hate-read David Brooks, back when I was young and virile and mighty and barbarously savage and could stomach a bit of hackery, but those days are long gone and now I rely on his chief eviscerator, Driftglass, to do the dirty work of rending his pious bullshit. His latest does a fine job of exposing the Republican party’s evasive strategy: always pretend the bad actor was not a true member of the party, and constantly reinvent itself in name only while promoting the same old bad behavior. Brooks is their most experienced actor at pretending to be shocked, shocked I tell you at the shenanigans he previously endorsed but have now been revealed to be criminal failures.
Driftglass also mentions the other curious phenomenon that has so wrecked our country: conservatives ruin everything they touch, and when they are caught at it, they fall upwards into the loving arms of the media, where they then get to spend the rest of their careers papering over their abuses…and bringing in the next crop of crooked conservatives to help them in their propaganda. If you ever wonder how the press got so awful in this country, you can start by blaming Watergate.
Bonus points for citing this Charles Pierce piece. We shouldn’t be surprised that Trump is thinking about refusing to abide by the results of the election. This is exactly what the Republicans have been doing for decades. He’s just more brash and less slithery than your standard Republican con artist.
It also leads to a scary prospect. I think Trump will lose, and lose hard…which just means that all those godawful idiotic Trump surrogates will be promoted to higher positions at Fox News and CNN and all the other outlets, and will never ever go away.
