Some of you may have seen this awful video that was making the rounds a while back.

In May, Jazmina Saavedra streamed video of herself harassing a transgender woman in a Denny’s bathroom. For half an hour, Saavedra paced in the restaurant, shouted at the transgender woman through the stall wall, and laughed with a friend about how she carries a stun gun and pepper spray for situations like that.

“So, that guy is violating my right to use the ladies’ room here, and he’s saying he’s a lady! Stupid guy,” Saavedra said in the video, which Facebook removed.

The most appalling thing about it was Saavedra’s smugness: she was full of sanctimonious and self-righteousness as she harrassed this poor woman who was just trying to use the bathroom, and she also made unsupported accusations that she was a drug user. And the thing of it is, Saavedra was the one who posted the video of her own disgraceful behavior! She was proud of it!

She was also a Republican political candidate at the time. Good news: She lost the election in a landslide. We need more happy results like that.

Ontaria elected a goggle-eyed pale-faced lipless toad to run their government this week, one who takes pride in his regressive ideas and is a kind of Trump Lite. I was kind of thinking of making a Nelson Muntz “Ha-Ha!” remark, but I can’t. I just can’t.

I’m so sorry, friends to the North. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

How else can you interpret an article with the title, The Origins of America’s Unique and Spectacular Cruelty. We are unique! We are spectacular! We are #1!

Unfortunately, we seem to be specializing in all the wrong things.

But by now, American cruelty is both legendary — and one of the world’s great unsolved mysteries. Just why would people in a rich country leave their neighbours to die for a lack of basic medicine, their young without good jobs or retirements, make their elderly work until their dying day, cripple students with lifelong debt, charge new mothers half of average income just to have a baby — not to mention shrug when their kids begin massacring each other at school? What motivates the kind of spectacular, unique, unimaginable, and gruesome cruelty that we see in America, which exists nowhere else in the world?

I can agree that the cruelty of our culture is obvious and manifested everywhere, but I hate to deflate our sense of exceptionalism, but we aren’t alone. Look at what Israel is doing to Palestinians, how the United Kingdom and other European states are responding to immigration, how every human society reacts to the Other, how even a civilized nation like Germany could be stirred up by a demagogue to willingly commit atrocities, how Belgium afflicted criminal abuse on the people of the Congo. Our difference seems to be our willingness to perpetrate these torments on ourselves.

The author’s speculation about what causes us to be so horrible tends to fall flat, unfortunately.

My answer goes something like this. Americans, you must remember, grew up in the shadow of endless war. With two “sides” who championed atomic individualism, lionized competition and brutality, and despised weakness and fragility. And thus, America forgot — or maybe never evolved — the notion of a public interest. Each man for himself, everyone against everyone himself. So all there is left in America is extreme capitalism now. Few championed a more balanced, saner, healthier way of life, about a common good, about virtue, about a higher purpose. And in that way, America has become something like, ironically enough, a mirror image of its great enemy, the Soviet Union. It is a totalist society, run by and for one end — only a slightly different one: money.

I disagree. I was born in the 1950s and grew up in this archetypical American society, and it’s not true that we “grew up in the shadow of endless war”, unless you take “shadow” literally. We didn’t experience war. Wars were something that happened elsewhere, to which we supplied cannon fodder. Wars were not something we suffered under, and while there was the ominous terror of nuclear war, we were also blithely confident that we’d win, no matter what. Wolverines! The American character was one of irrational optimism. The history we were taught was all about Manifest Destiny, the near-divinity of the Founding Fathers, our role as the Leaders of the Free World. We are always the winners, and the losers are always the worst people who fully deserved their fate.

The extreme capitalism part I agree with. To me, the best interpretation of the American spirit in literature is personified by Milo Minderbinder in Heller’s Catch 22: irrepressibly cheerful, blind to the harm he does to others, willing to bomb his friends if it increases the value of his shares, and relentlessly sailing through a war that is nothing but a business opportunity to him. We are a people untouched by fear and unable to imagine the consequences.

The rest of the world has good reason to be terrified. Their only consolation ought to be that we’re probably going to wreck ourselves before we can exercise our full capacity for destruction on others.

Eric Greitens has announced his resignation. May many more Republicans follow suit.

I’m not telling you how Get Out ended, though.

It was a landslide, too — 68% to 32% to repeal the 8th amendment to their constitution.

You can throw out the repellent, archaic parts of your constitution? What a brilliant idea, America!

I’m glad someone else is paying attention to Sam Harris, because I just can’t. Too many years of wrestling with creationists has given me some nasty allergies to bad reasoning and arrogant codswallop. But at least Marcus Ranum has the spine to tear into Harris’s terrible arguments defending Israel’s atrocities. It’s long, but worth reading.

Congress voted to roll back the various regulations that protected us from another wave of corruption and bank failures. What is most disappointing is that a group of Democrats voted with the Republicans on this bill for fat cats.

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO)
Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE)
Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE)
Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-IN)
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH)
Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND)
Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL)
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) (to think I voted for this guy)
Sen. Angus King (I-ME)
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV)
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO)
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL)
Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI)
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)
Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT)
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA)

This one was a no-brainer.

Attention Dems supporting S. 2155 and looking for an off ramp to change your mind: THE CBO SCORE IS IT. CBO says it:

– increases likelihood of bank failure + taxpayer bailouts
– helps biggest banks, including $250B+, maybe Citi and JPMorgan
– adds $670 million to deficit

— Chad Bolt (@chadderr) March 6, 2018

I am not looking forward to the next election, because this is what we have to look forward to: greedy, rotten bastards on the Republican side and a battery of spineless Democrats trying to look like they’re resisting, but not resisting too hard, since they want to keep that sweet, sweet cash flowing from the same sources fueling the Republicans.

We are so screwed. There will be more cash grabs and emergency bailouts of the banks in the future.

She visited Minneapolis, went to a restaurant with her mother, and someone threw the contents of a glass of water at her. It’s the kinder, gentler version of Nazi-punching. And now I’m all confused.

Does Tomi Lahren deserve public scorn and opprobrium? Yes. She’s a horrible person profiting off the dissemination of hate and ignorance. I can’t get worked up about somebody dousing her with water…but at the same time, it would also be legit to arrest and fine the water flinger for assault (likewise, the guy who punched Richard Spencer did commit a crime). You take action, you take responsibility for the action.

But also, I recognize my own inconsistency. It’s one thing for someone to punch Richard Spencer, a male Nazi, but I’d be extremely uncomfortable if someone were to punch Tomi Lahren, his female equivalent. Part of it is the unfounded expectation that a man is supposed to be able to defend himself, while a woman is not. Part of it is the optics: it looks bad for anti-Nazis to be punching down on women (but that it’s even “punching down” to hit a woman is problematic). If you watch the video at the link, you’ll also hear someone shouting misogynistic slurs at Lahren — I don’t want that guy on my side, either.

In my perfect world, people who preach hate wouldn’t have a platform or an audience because no one would want to listen to them, and they’d wither away into irrelevance. In this far from perfect world, we have to struggle with appropriate responses to destructive ideas that rise to popularity in imperfect ways.