Texas is an evil state, with some of its powerful inhabitants relishing the opportunity to slice up immigrants with razor wire. I’m less worried about the immigrants than I am the existence of Texas Republicans.

But maybe I’m being unfair to Texas. After all, South Dakota, the state uncomfortably close to me, has a governor who is entirely sympathetic to the idea of slashing brown people with razor wire and wants to send the state’s national guard and a bunch of money to help out.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said Wednesday that her administration is considering boosting its support for Texas’ efforts to deter immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, such as sending razor wire and security personnel.

The second-term Republican governor blasted conditions at the border in a speech to a joint session of the Legislature, a gathering she requested Monday after visiting the border last week. Noem, once seen as a potential 2024 presidential candidate, has made the border situation a focus during her tenure.

South Dakota does not have any border with any other country, unless you count the People’s Republic of Minnesota. Maybe they could worry about Canada, except they do have a buffer state of North Dakota, but Mexico is not of any concern. The only southern immigrants they’ve got are being hired by the farming citizenry who like cheap labor. But this is Kristi Noem’s focus? I kind of suspect the motivation is more racism than defending the border.

Fortunately, the Oglala Sioux Tribe has a solid response to that.

At least one person in South Dakota did not appreciate Noem’s glib demagoguery. That person was Frank Star Comes Out, which is in fact his extremely cool name and not the title of a YA novel about a teenager coming to terms with his sexuality. (We checked.)

Star Comes Out is the president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, and he was infuriated by the naked xenophobia and obvious cry for Donald Trump’s attention as his search for a vice presidential candidate ramps up. So he penned a letter to Noem informing her that starting immediately, she is persona non grata on his tribe’s land.

Read the letter. It’s a point-by-point response to every claim Noem has made. President Star Comes Out sees right through her: “I don’t see our Indian people and reservations used as a basis to create a bogus border crisis just to help Trump get re-elected as President and Governor Noem his running mate as Vice-President.”

Only barbarians would consider drowning immigrants to be humane…and to be a good strategy for getting votes. Unfortunately, we have lots of barbarians all up and down this country.

Twenty years ago, Thomas Friedman was a standing joke for his conversations with imaginary cab drivers, his ever-retreating predictions of imminent victory in Iraq, his toxic metaphors, his faux sincerity that everyone could see right through…but he had his sinecure at the NY Times, he spent every Sunday doing the rounds of the pundit talk circuit, he was the darling of every saggy-jowled talk show host. He’s been doing this for decades without justice slapping him upside the head. For all I know (he may be writing and talking, but I’m not reading or listening) he could still be talking about achieving an honorable peace in Iraq in just six more months.

Except now he has latched onto a brand new bloody war and is cheerleading for that from the sidelines. This is all we need, more conservative assholes flatulently gassing the body politic with new poisons and new bad ideas and more demands that we treat a sociological/cultural/religious/political conflict with 2,000 pound laser-guided bombs. Here’s his new metaphor, filtered through a column by Ben Burgis, so you don’t have to give any clicks to the NY Times.

According to Science Daily, the wasp ‘injects its eggs into live caterpillars, and the baby wasp larvae slowly eat the caterpillar from the inside out, bursting out once they have eaten their fill.’

Is there a better description of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq today? They are the caterpillars. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the wasp. The Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah are the eggs that hatch inside the host—Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq—and eat it from the inside out.

We have no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle.

Ugh. What the ever-loving fuck? The Times just published an opinion piece calling for the incineration of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq, and no one stopped to suggest that maybe comparing the inhabitants of four nations to parasitic insects and calling for their fiery extermination was a bad idea? Of course not. This was the same vicious plan he had decades ago, and no one in the media seems to be able to notice how that turned out.

I have a son who, along with a lot of other soldiers, is going to be doing a tour of duty somewhere in that region (they keep the details from us) in the Spring. I’d like to hope that it is a peace-keeping mission to maintain stability there, and would rather it not become a hostile sweep to exterminate parasitic invertebrates, that is, the native population of human beings in those countries.

Over the last several years, I’ve gone from “Who the heck is this Taylor Swift person everyone is talking about?” (yeah, I’m old) to “Those songs are catchy, I get it now.” They’re not in regular rotation on my headphones, but that’s OK, I don’t begrudge anyone their enjoyment.

What I’m especially enjoying, though, is seeing Fox News melt down over Taylor Swift’s political views. They’re getting all testerical and insisting that she needs to shut up, she shouldn’t be allowed to have opinions on anything other than music. Of course, you’re only allowed to talk about political candidates if you’re endorsing the Fox News perspective, as Jack Posobiec does here.

Desperately reaching for some Republican “influencers” in entertainment, he coughs up Kid Rock, Ted Nugent, and…Jon Voight? Does he sing?

They don’t get it. Taylor Swift is a symptom, not a cause. Young artists are not going to be attracted to conservative causes, because Republicans are the death of art. Young educated people are not drawn to conservative causes, because Republicans are the death of learning. Young activists for a multitude of causes, like environmentalism or anti-racism or sexual freedom, are not interested in conservative causes because Republicans are death of all.

But I still believe in free speech. You go ahead, Jack Posobiec, and organize your “battleground state concert tour” featuring Kid Rock, Nugent, and Voight. I always approve of the Republicans throwing their campaign money down ratholes. And I’m sure there’s someone who likes Nugent’s and Rock’s music somewhere.

You should listen to this podcast by NiceMangos in which she tears into multiple episodes of his blog, in particular a joint appearance by Harris and Eric Weinstein. Yikes. The amount of cringe those two generate is not helping with Minnesota’s squish problem.

There’s also this article on NYMag.

I’m very late to the ass-kicking party. My excuse is that I have a serious aversion to Harris.

I made a terrible mistake. I read an essay by that amazing moral “philosopher,” Sam Harris. He hasn’t changed since those days of rationalizing nuking Mecca — he still hates Islam in his slow, ponderous, superficially philosophical way, and now he has written a justification for killing Palestine. Don’t worry, it’s OK, because we’ve always been in a Crusade, and Israel is a shining city on a hill.

So, whether we want to admit it or not, we are perpetually at war with them [Jihadists]. And we must win a war of ideas with everyone, both within the Muslim world and outside it, who is confused about that—and there are legions of the confused. And there is no place on Earth where the truth about jihadism is more obvious or excruciating, and moral confusion about it more reprehensible, than Israel today.

He later claims that there are bright lines that divide good and evil, with Israel definitely on the good side, while Palestinians are evil. To support that rose-colored binary, hhe has to greatly simplify the status of Palestinians in Gaza.

Incidentally, there has been no occupation of Gaza since 2005, when Israel withdrew from the territory unilaterally, forcibly removing 9000 of its own citizens, and literally digging up Jewish graves. The Israelis have been out of Gaza for nearly 20 years. And yet they have been attacked from Gaza ever since.

That is very much a half-truth. Gaza was under a military occupation until 2005, when Israel partially pulled out. Israel still controls the strip, in charge of all land crossings, it still controls access to food, water, electricity, and communications, it controls all access by air and sea, and they reserve the right to send troops in whenever they feel like it. It is maintained as a prison for Palestinians, where the residents are either neglected or at the mercy of Israeli soldiers.

Is anyone surprised that Palestinians might resist? That they might learn to hate the entire nation of Israel? Apparently, Sam Harris is.

But, you see, the West is restrained and would never do any intentional harm, while Muslims have no respect for human life, so it’s OK that they be imprisoned.

At this moment in history, there are people and cultures that harbor very different attitudes about violence and the value of human life. There are people and cultures that rejoice, positively rejoice—dancing in the streets rejoicing—over the massacre of innocent civilians; conversely there are people and cultures that seek to avoid killing innocent civilians, and deeply regret it when they do—and they occasionally prosecute and imprison their own soldiers when they violate this modern norm of combat.

Whoa. Who carries out mass bombing campaigns? Who puts the light shows on TV for the patriotic masses to cheer over? We killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, a majority of whom were civilians, and Harris is going to tell us that we avoid and regret killing innocent civilians? Bullshit. It’s the West that invented that useful term, “collateral damage,” to excuse wholesale murder of innocents.

Yes, Palestinians have been seen to celebrate the killing of IDF soldiers and Israeli citizens. That’s not to excuse it, but to pretend that Israelis don’t similarly celebrate the death of Palestinians is a lie. Of course they do! Both sides are locked in mutual hatred.

The boisterous crowds danced and chanted Jewish religious songs outside Damascus Gate as scores of Israeli police stood guard. In several cases, groups chanted slogans such as “Death to Arabs,” “Mohammed is Dead” and “Burn Your Village” as they stared at Palestinian onlookers. Some of the youths wore clothing identifying themselves as members of Lehava — a far-right Jewish supremacist group that opposes assimilation or romantic relationships between Jews and Palestinians.

Israel has a long history of promoting hateful propaganda to its children. And now Sam Harris is in the business of pushing similar propaganda on American adults.

There is myriad evidence of Israel’s brainwashing of its citizens to erase the humanity of Palestinians spanning many decades.

Israeli scholar Adir Cohen, for example, analysed for his book titled “An Ugly Face in the Mirror – National Stereotypes in Hebrew Children’s Literature” some 1700 Hebrew-language children’s books published in Israel between 1967 and 1985, and found that a whopping 520 of them contained humiliating, negative descriptions of the Palestinians.

He revealed that 66 percent of these 520 books refer to Arabs as violent; 52 percent as evil; 37 percent as liars; 31 percent as greedy; 28 percent as two-faced and 27 percent as traitors.

But Harris believes in a fantasy Israel.

Simply counting the number of dead bodies is not a way of judging the moral balance here. Intentions matter. It matters what kind of world people are attempting to build. If Israel wanted to perpetrate a genocide of the Palestinians, it could do that easily, tomorrow. But that isn’t what it wants. And the truth is the Jews of Israel would live in peace with their neighbors if their neighbors weren’t in thrall to genocidal fanatics.

Wait a minute–why isn’t counting the bodies a way of judging the moral balance? If Hamas killing 1100 people is bad and justifies stopping them, why isn’t killing 27,000 people (including 10,000 children) also bad? I agree that stopping terrorism is good, just like stopping Nazis is good, but the casualties aren’t negligible, they matter. If we’re concerned about justice, we have to balance that with the number killed to accomplish it.

But then…to claim that the mass of Israeli citizens don’t want to commit genocide and could just flip a switch and become a nation of benevolent do-gooders? What nonsense. Those citizens elected Netanyahu. Those citizens have been implementing a policy of brutal containment for 20 years. Those citizens have been characterizing Palestinians as liars and greedy traitors for 60 years. If only they hadn’t been in thrall to genocidal fanatics, says a nation that elected genocidal fanatics.

In the West, we have advanced to a point where the killing of noncombatants, however unavoidable it becomes once wars start, is inadvertent and unwanted and regrettable and even scandalous. Yes, there are still war crimes. And I won’t be surprised if some Israelis commit war crimes in Gaza now. But, if they do, these will be exceptions that prove the rule—which is that Israel remains a lonely outpost of civilized ethics in the absolute moral wasteland that is the Middle East.

Civilized ethics:

Declaring that your opponent lives in a moral wasteland while turning their home into a literal wasteland is either hypocrisy or irony or both. Maybe some Israelis will commit war crimes, he says, as the entire weight of Israeli military might is used to level the entire territory, bombing schools and hospitals and homes. It’s a bright line, he says, because he can excuse all the atrocities on one side as justified, while on the other, everyone is an amoral monster.

To deny that the government of Israel (with all of its flaws) is better than Hamas, to deny that Israeli culture (with all of its flaws) is better than Palestinian culture­ in its attitude toward violence, is to deny that moral progress itself is possible. If most Americans are better than their slaveholding ancestors, if most Germans today are better than the people who herded Jews into gas chambers, if the students protesting this war on your college campus—who are so conscientious that they lose sleep over crimes like “cultural appropriation” or using the wrong pronouns—if they are better than the racists and religious lunatics that inevitably lurk somewhere in their family trees—then we have to recognize that there is no moral equivalence now, between Israel and her enemies.

I’m impressed that he can squeeze in a complaint about those darned woke college students while also complaining about and dismissing Palestinian victims of the most brutal violence as lesser moral actors. He wants to complain about moral equivalence and moral confusion while blithely and dishonestly papering over Israeli violence and oppression with assertions about moral superiority that are not in evidence.

He wants to claim that intent makes all the difference. But what is Israel’s intent? What intent is accomplished by wholesale bombing campaigns that kill massive numbers of civilians? What is the intent of decades of walling off millions of people and isolating them from the rest of the world? There must be an endgame, right? A benevolent, kind, generous endgame that will welcome their Palestinian captives into a world of mutual coexistence, at least, that must be the case if we’re to believe that Israel’s motives are entirely enlightened. Harris doesn’t provide any summary of that intent, except to try to paint Israel as blameless in everything, so there must be one.

Tell me how Israel will win this war. Tell me what clear signal will tell Israel that the violence is over. Tell me what actions Israel will take at the end of this war, if such a thing happens, that will produce a happy, productive, cooperative Palestine filled with partners living side by side with Israeli citizens. Harris can’t do that, because deep down, all he believes is that Islamic people are barbarians at our gates who must be exterminated. For new he’ll be satisfied with fueling the forges of hate on both sides.

You could also tell me how Hamas proposed to win the war it triggered in October. It looks to me like a spasm of hatred and rage on both sides, and I don’t see either side backing down…or “winning” this conflict. I guess Sam Harris would call that “moral confusion.”

I didn’t. I know next to nothing about her. Apparently, she’s facing all kinds of health problems now that she’s in her late 50s and did the usual thing we Americans do when facing a health crisis: go online and ask for donations. Given that simple story, I, a liberal weirdo, would think it deplorable that anyone would have to deal with our lack of a sane health care system. But no. Now the libs are coming for Mary Lou Retton, according to one far right web site.

From America’s Sweetheart to the libs enemy list.

That’s where American hero gymnast Mary Lou Retton, who turns 56 on Tuesday, finds herself after facing death in the fall after battling what her family is calling a rare form of pneumonia. When the public first found out about Mary Lou’s battle, it was also revealed by her daughters that their mother was uninsured.

At that time, the libs, who have no problem with hundreds of thousands of uninsured illegals pouring over the Mexican border, were livid. How dare Mary Lou not have insurance, they screamed on social media.

Now that Mary Lou has survived and appears ready to get on with life, albeit with an oxygen tank and looking like she’s in her mid-60s, the libs want blood and they appear ready to destroy the gold medalist darling because her family won’t disclose what they did with financial donations that were sent to Mary Lou to pay for her medical bills.

She’s not on my enemy list. If I were to scream “How dare Mary Lou not have insurance!” it wouldn’t be a complaint about Retton, but about how we’ve outsourced health care to MBAs in suits running for-profit insurance companies, and about the failure of the American state to provide a reasonable social safety net. I don’t understand the complaint by this far-right yahoo in the slightest.

What does the plight of immigrants have to do with that? They all ought to get basic health insurance applied to them, too.

He actually seems to be upset at one specific columnist for USA Today.

On January 8, super lib USA Today columnist Christine Brennan went on the attack in a column titled, “Months after hospitalization, Mary Lou Retton won’t answer basic questions about health care, donations.”

Brennan wants an accounting of the $459,324 that was raised for Mary Lou.

“Asked in several text messages and a voicemail on Monday about her lack of health insurance until recently, her financial situation and why she refuses to divulge where she was hospitalized or the name of her doctor(s) more than two months after she left the hospital, Retton, 55, declined to reply,” Brennan wrote.

Oh, Christine Brennan is a super lib, however that is defined. All I can see about Brennan is that she writes about sports, nothing but sports, and about the impact of sports on people’s lives, and it’s no wonder I never heard of her. There’s nothing particularly liberal about her output, so that’s mystifying.

However, she has written multiple articles demanding an accounting from Retton about how she is spending the money that was donated to her, which is a) none of her business, and b) not at all liberal. It’s more Karenish than anything. Beyond that, she has written about drug abuse and spousal abuse and discrimination in the sports business — is that what has outraged the right-wing pundit?

He really has a weird idea about super lib values.

Super Libs don’t want to help people like Mary Lou. They want them to repent and admit they don’t live life the right way like a Super Lib like Christine Brennan lives life and hence it’s time for Mary Lou to be dragged.

I guess Retton was a pro-Reagan conservative, but I don’t care. Everyone deserves basic human rights, and I don’t appreciate a frothing MAGA nitwit telling me, incorrectly, what my opinion on helping people is. But this is what people like him do, misrepresent and lie and get everything wrong.

Oh. There was another primary election yesterday, in New Hampshire. Given that the voters had an unappealing choice between two unpleasant people, it was predictable, I think, that the Republicans would choose the very worst.

Let’s stop for a second and appreciate the gravity of this moment. The Jan. 6 Capitol riot occurred three years ago, and the first chance the Republican Party had to rebuke this atrocity in a presidential election resulted in their endorsing it, via nominating the man responsible for inciting said riot.

The Republican party must be crushed.