The ongoing disappointment with the Democrats continues

Primary these motherfuckers. I never want to see their faces again.

I didn’t expect much of Biden, to be honest, but the constant failure of the Democrats to put up much of a fight for anything is depressing. I know, we’re going to hear it’s all Manchin and Sinema’s fault (and I agree, they are both colossal fuckwitted blockheads), but at some point you have to stand up and declare that there are core principles to being part of the party, and that the apparatus of the party is going to actively fuck up your re-election chances if you don’t cooperate. What I suspect, though, is that the bidness Democrats are secretly grateful that they’ve got Manchin/Sinema around as an excuse to instead fuck over their electorate.

So now the Democrats plan to kill family leave and Medicare/Medicaid expansion from their budget, all because a few convenient die-hards are resisting the idea of supporting Democratic voters. I note that the right-wing hates the idea of health care and actually supporting families, so this is basically caving in to the Republicans. If I wanted to vote for Republican policies, I would have voted for a Republican, you know.

The damning thing about this strategy is that it is so short-sighted. By ditching their principles and the only reason to vote for a Democrat — other than that they aren’t openly maniacal, perverse monsters — they are damaging their own chances in the next election cycle.

The House Democrats at most risk of losing their seats in the 2022 midterm elections are urging their colleagues not to jettison a set of popular programs from President Biden’s economic and social spending package, warning that failing to deliver on these promises to voters could pave the way for Republicans to regain control of Congress.

These vulnerable Democrats argue that expanding Medicaid into certain states, allowing the government to negotiate prescription drug prices, expanding Medicare coverage and providing for paid family leave are key to both motivating Democrats to vote in the midterm elections and to winning over the small but key group of independent voters who could otherwise back their Republican challengers.

“No normal person can understand why we can’t negotiate for drug prices,” Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) said. “So what they see when we can’t pass that year after year is greed, and I have no problem saying I’m frustrated with the other side of the aisle, but in this case, my own party because that one is just a simple thing we could do.”

All four policies are at risk of being left out of the final bill due to opposition from centrist Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), whose votes are key on every issue given the 50-50 Senate, as well as a small group of Democrats in both chambers opposed to giving Medicare too much authority to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies.

I am so, so tired of hearing about Manchin/Sinema, two parasites profiting from their intransigence with the reward of tremendous amounts of attention…and not enough of it is negative. I am also tired of watching Biden mumble placid centrist excuses for doing as little as possible.

I ask again, as I do in every election, what positive reason do I have for supporting Democrats? Is it really going to be just “they aren’t Trump” forevermore?

You can’t say that

Those fervent conservative Free Speech Warriors have hit on a new strategy to protect our sacred right to say anything we want to anyone we want to: banning the bad words. Wisconsin Republicans have proposed sweeping censorship of words and concepts from the public schools there.

Curiously, they forgot to ban “irony”. Maybe they didn’t know the word exists.

Fortunately, the bill is just posturing by sanctimonious Republicans, and has virtually no chance of passing. If it did, I suppose I’d have to gallop across the border to rescue my granddaughter once she hit school age.

It’s such a strangely blatant defiance of the principles these people usually hide behind, but there’s a reason for it. We can’t make our white children conscious of racism.

The Wisconsin Assembly passed legislation on a party-line vote Tuesday that would bar public schools from teaching critical race theory, the latest Republican-controlled legislative chamber to take action on a culture war issue that erupted in school board meetings around the country this summer.

The measure mirrors efforts in other states to block teachers from instructing students on concepts of racial injustice or inherent bias.

But in testimony before a Wisconsin Assembly committee considering the bill in August, one of the measure’s lead authors went farther than in other states, spelling out specific words that would be barred from the classroom.

“It has come to our attention, and to some of the people who traveled here to Madison today, that a growing number of school districts are teaching material that attempts to redress the injustice of racism and sexism by employing racism and sexism, as well as promoting psychological distress in students based on these immutable characteristics,” state Rep. Chuck Wichgers (R) said of his bill. “No one should have to undergo the humiliation of being told that they are inferior to someone else. We are all members of the human race.”

Nothing in Critical Race Theory is about telling anyone they are inferior — quite the opposite. You can tell what really concerns him, though: the idea that white people might be told they’re inferior. When it was just discrimination against brown people, then it was OK to talk about their imaginary inferiority.

Wichgers, who represents Muskego in the legislature, attached an addendum to his legislation that included a list of “terms and concepts” that would violate the bill if it became law.

Among those words: “Woke,” “whiteness,” “White supremacy,” “structural bias,” “structural racism,” “systemic bias” and “systemic racism.” The bill would also bar “abolitionist teaching,” in a state that sent more than 91,000 soldiers to fight with the Union Army in the Civil War.

The list of barred words or concepts includes “equity,” “inclusivity education,” “multiculturalism” and “patriarchy,” as well as “social justice” and “cultural awareness.”

Whoops, there goes social studies and history.

Shouldn’t you be brought up short if you find yourself agreeing with Putin?

Putin is the new poster child for toxic masculinity. Tell me if this sounds familiar.

Russian President Vladimir Putin again attacked Western liberalism in a fiery address on Thursday, blasting so-called cancel culture and advances in gay and transgender rights.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Putin stressed that his country should adhere to its own “spiritual values and historical traditions,” while steering clear of “sociocultural disturbances” in the West.

Some Westerners believe “the aggressive deletion of whole pages of their own history, reverse discrimination against the majority in the interests of minorities … constitute movement toward public renewal,” Putin said. “It’s their right, but we are asking them to steer clear of our home. We have a different viewpoint.”

Putin, who told the Financial Times of London newspaper in 2019 that liberalism had become “obsolete,” has loudly advocated for what he considers to be traditional family values. In his Thursday remarks, he said the notion that children are “taught that a boy can become a girl and vice versa” is monstrous and “on the verge of a crime against humanity.”

He also suggested that transgender rights supporters were demanding an end to “basic things such as mother, father, family or gender differences.”

Growing up in the 60s and 70s, it was engrained into us that the left were the commies, which was an evil ideology, obviously, and only bad guys would favor the Russians (the hippies were more anarchist than communist, though), while the righteous right-wing was populated with American patriots. Now it’s clear that the conservatives were moving towards totalitarianism, while at the same time the Russian leadership was converging on the same, leaving communism to become synonymous with the criminal right. I can’t see much difference between Russian Putin and American John Bircher anymore.

He really, really, really misses Twitter

Donald Trump tried this before, with his pathetic little “blog” that closed up shop in short order. Now he’s trying again, with what he calls his new social media company.

Donald Trump has announced plans to launch a social media platform called TRUTH Social that will rolled be out early next year.

The former president, who was banned from Facebook and Twitter earlier this year, says his goal is to rival the tech companies that have denied him the megaphone that was paramount to his rise.

Like his previous effort, though, he’s just half-assing it, taking existing frameworks and making the minimal effort to slap a few cosmetic changes on it. This TRUTH social thing seems to be nothing but a Mastodon instance with his name on it, and there is zero thought put into security and checking accounts on the back end. People have already cracked it and found the registration page, despite the fact it isn’t opened yet, and created joke accounts on it. I saw that someone managed to put a photo of a pig pooping on its testicles prominently displayed (I’ll spare you all), as well as registering under various obvious pseudonyms.

This thing is going to flop and fail hard. Once word gets out to the gullible millions that it’s really just an unintentional honey trap — sign up to praise Lord Trump, and someone is going to slurp up your registration info to laugh at you, or worse — I don’t think it can thrive. Hey, did you hear that hackers stole the Oath Keepers registration list and have exposed 35,000 members identities, including a swarm of Republican politicians? TRUTH Social is going to be so fragile and porous, with tissue-paper thin defenses, the hackers are just going to drool in its general direction and rip on through.

But that doesn’t matter. This is an ego-trip for the ex-president. Or is it something more? Like maybe another grift?

Former president Donald Trump’s media venture, Truth Social, could give his new company access to $300 million.

However, some of the investors who funded the venture weren’t aware that Trump would be involved, according to a report from the New York Times.

“The details of Mr. Trump’s latest partnership were vague,” the Times reports. “The statement he issued was reminiscent of the kind of claims he made about his business dealings in New York as a real estate developer. It was replete with high-dollar amounts and superlatives that could not be verified.”

He knows who his real marks are: stupid rich investment bankers who don’t even bother to look to see who they’re giving hundreds of millions of dollars to. And who needs that much money to set up a Mastodon instance?

After this one goes belly up, look for the Donald to beg for half a billion dollars to set up a Discord server. And for his clientele to pay for it.

I know that pain

Lawsuits, as I know from personal experience, cause great personal stress and financial difficulty. They are effective when appropriately applied against the bad guys.

A federal lawsuit against the organizers of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which has rattled hate groups and white supremacist leaders, goes to trial this month.

The suit already has helped to dismantle some of America’s most well-known white supremacist groups, and it has financially crippled one leader of the so-called “alt-right,” the white supremacist and nationalist movement that came to prominence under President Donald Trump.

“It’s very stressful, and very costly,” said Richard Spencer, one of the defendants in the lawsuit and the former de facto leader of the “alt-right,” in an interview. “This level of pressure is definitely scary.”

Good. He should be scared. When we were sued, we could at least console ourselves with the awareness that we had done nothing wrong (not always an adequate defense when dealing with the law), but these fascist neo-nazis have to know that they’re doing evil.

It does remind me of two things, though.

  • Damn Richard Carrier for making me feel a tiny glimmer of sympathy for the murderous Charlottesville rally organizers.
  • I have to periodically express my gratitude for our readers and donors who dug us out of that unpleasant hole. Thank you all very much!

I’d rather not think about the fact that a national mob of anti-Semitic criminal rioters probably has more supporters than a blog network that promotes something as benevolent as freethought.

There’s a tumor growing in Texas

A very red state

Behold, the official Republican Party Platform for Texas in 2020. THIS…IS…MADNESS!

opposing any effort to classify carbon emissions as a pollutant
abolishing the EPA
repealing the Endangered Species Act
prohibiting teaching “sex education, sexual health or sexual choice or identity in any public school”
recognizing pornography as a “public health crisis”
abolishing Child Protective Services
abolishing the Department of Education
teaching American history courses “heavily weighted toward the study of original founding documents”
opposing the use of any national or international education standards
requiring mandatory daily pledges of allegiance to both the United States and Texas
banning critical race theory from schools
banning any lockdowns, contact tracing, or mask mandates as public health measures
newly limiting the time disabled people can receive SSDI benefits
eliminating the minimum wage
banning cities from passing paid sick leave ordinances, rent control, or plastic bag bans
abolishing school-based mental health care providers
“oppos[ing] all efforts to validate transgender identity”
repealing all limits on campaign contributions to politicians
repealing all estate taxes
eliminating same-sex marriage
eliminating no-fault divorce and supporting covenant marriage
entirely eliminating abortion
introducing a right to use cryptocurrency to the Texas Bill of Rights
requiring employers to verify citizenship status through E-Verify
abolishing all federal welfare programs
drug testing state welfare recipients
adding “the right to refuse vaccination” to the Texas Bill of Rights
stopping fluoridation of the water supply
disallowing prescription drugs manufactured outside the U.S.
limiting Medicaid
banning Drag Queen Story Hour from libraries
allowing people to bring guns into schools
a prohibition on using gas or vehicle taxes for public transit or bike lanes
opposing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and using mass deportation instead
abolishing the refugee resettlement program
eliminating birthright citizenship
new criminal penalties for desecrating the American or Texas flag
revoking the tax-exempt status of any organization that “knowingly aid[s] and abet[s] illegal immigrants”
ending the H1B foreign worker visa program
ending daylight saving time
“support[ing] an aggressive war on terrorism”
requiring cities that cut police budgets to cut property taxes by the same percentage
eliminating all public funding for public broadcasting
repealing the “motor voter” law that allows voter registration at state DMVs
withdrawing from the United Nations
“unequivocally oppos[ing]” the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

This is just the same old poisonous crap I heard from the John Birch Society in the 1970s…except I don’t recall that they hated bike lanes quite so much. I might believe some people are so deluded that they think some those options are a good idea, but the majority of Texans, if confronted with this list, would reel back in horror. Wouldn’t they?

The cult of masculinity is just another religion

Rev. Carlson & Father Rogan

I should be used to this by now. I spent decades punching back at the weaponized stupidity of creationism: I saw it as a pathological extreme generated by narrow domains of primitive religious thought, but I also recognized it as an expression of a peculiar human property of our minds. We seek out patterns to make the world comprehensible and predictable, and we are susceptible to latching on to whatever idea gives us security, and instead of testing and challenging it, we can instead fall into the trap of selectively reinforcing whatever makes us feel better about ourselves.

My error, though, was to think too small. Get rid of religion, we get rid of a major pitfall. I still think that’s true (but very, very difficult), but I did not anticipate that humanity would simply find another dangerously deep hole to fall into right away, and that encouraging people to find another path with that “reason and logic” stuff would lead them there so fast.

I also did not expect that our doom would be maleness, the new cult same as the old cult. Yikes. I’m a member of that club. So let’s get the perspective of someone outside the club, a woman, in this case Amanda Marcotte, who I think is spot on in her analysis. The noisy mouthpieces of the far right are dominated by a group of regressive jerks who are riding to personal prosperity on the backs of the fears and inadequacy of the worst men. Tucker Carlson, for instance, is an appallingly stupid person who has found a wild niche of pandering to angry men.

As feminist writer Jessica Valenti noted in her newsletter, in the past, Carlson has done segments of his show denouncing “fatherless” homes and claiming children brought up in them are “poor, uneducated and have disciplinary problems.” But now he, a father of four, is making fun of men who actually want to be present in their children’s lives. “Are fathers necessary for stable families and children, or is spending time with your kid a sign of weakness and something to be laughed at?” Valenti asks.

What this dissonance reveals, of course, is all the hand-wringing about “fatherlessness” is just a feint. After all, many divorced or separated fathers are deeply involved with their children’s lives. No, as the Proud Boys rally this weekend showed, what’s really at stake is anger at women for rejecting subservience. Single mothers, same-sex marriages, and egalitarian marriages all show that there’s nothing inevitable about male-dominated marriage. That threatens men who are attracted to the dominance fantasy of traditional marriage to silence their own nagging sense of inadequacy.

It’s not just Carlson and the Proud Boys who have figured out how to monetize male mediocrity and fragility.

Just to clarify, though, “male mediocrity and fragility” is not saying that being a man means you are intrinsically mediocre and fragile. Any group will have a subset of individuals who are mediocre and fragile, the weak links that a con artist can scoop up, organize, and turn into a force for evil. It means there is a troubling group of humans who have been recruited into a cadre with a stereotypically male flavor, who then send money to and increase the power of people like Carlson. You can find this in any group. For instance, right now we can see TERFs harvesting female mediocrity and fragility, and atheists profiting off atheist mediocrity and fragility. OK? Not all men. Not all women. Not all atheists. But there are still characteristics of those groups that can be manipulated and abused.

It’s also not just Carlson. She doesn’t mention him, but Jordan Peterson is another classic example of someone harnessing mediocrity for personal gain, and she does talk about Joe Rogan.

Podcaster Joe Rogan has made a mint off of appealing to the sea of men who want an easy boost to their self-esteem through chauvinistic chest-thumping, rather than developing real skills and a personality. Rogan can be a little more subtle than Carlson about it, but ultimately, they’re playing on the same set of anxieties and insecurities in American men, and prescribing the same toxic masculinity as a supposed cure.

In Rogan, it’s easy to see, for instance, how refusal to get the COVID-19 vaccine got encoded for the fragile masculinity set as a way to “prove” their manly bona fides. He falsely claimed that “healthy” men who are “exercising all the time” don’t need the vaccine. He repeatedly suggested that vaccine mandates were somehow an assault on freedom, rather than what they are: a common sense health measure that helps free everyone from far more miserable pandemic restrictions. Taken together, it paints a picture of vaccination as the behavior of supposedly weak men. Unsurprisingly, then, Rogan ended up with COVID-19 and had to admit that he had kept finding excuses to put off getting a vaccine he had routinely insinuated was emasculating.

Right. Turning anti-vaccination sentiments into a chest-thumping display of masculinity is the new trap. We can turn any stupidity into a virtue if we couple it to some aspect of stereotypical manliness. See also America’s gun obsession.

Once you’ve got your in-group of weak, gullible men (in this case) you have to find a target to push around. What use is your power, otherwise? So here we go. Let’s go after the transes! And the gays! And the libs!

Carlson went after a gay man with a breastfeeding joke. Rogan’s preferred target for exercising his gender anxieties is all too often trans people.

Rogan has repeatedly used his show to make fun of trans people, paint being trans as a perversity, and elevate anti-trans bigots as somehow experts on the subject. Now that comedian Dave Chappelle has joined in making being transphobic a point of pride, unsurprisingly, he and Rogan are going on tour together. The obsession with trans people isn’t just gross, it’s a little confusing. Why do these cis men care so much about the lives of trans people who have nothing to do with them?

The ugly truth is that trans people, because they’re a small and misunderstood minority, just feel like an easy punching bag for these insecure men to take their gender anxieties out on. The very existence of trans people is a reminder that gender — and therefore gender hierarchy — is a social construct, and therefore can be analyzed, criticized, and even changed. Or, as in that famous 2019 rant from a One America News Network host, transgender penguins are a threat to the “family unit” and everything conservatives hold dear.

What’s also interesting here is how easy it is to spot these self-appointed leaders dragging us down into a sewer. It used to be we could just lock in on televangelists and such, who would happily label themselves with an easy and contemptible myth, and overlook all those people who seized on other myths that we didn’t think were so contemptible (like being a man), and churned them into red meat to feed their followers. We have to get better at spotting these charlatans, and they aren’t all going to be conveniently wearing clerical collars. Some of them just sport testicles.

Hey, here’s another insecure fraud who’s making bank off male mediocrity and fragility: Steven Crowder.

Warning: that video contains what I think is the most tasteless, cruel, pointless “comedy” routine I’ve ever seen, in which Crowder and his cronies pretend to act out the George Floyd murder to show that kneeling on someone’s neck is totally harmless. That didn’t get him instantly demonetized and evicted from social media channels everywhere? That’s another part of the problem, that these fools and liars are enabled by toxic social media rules.

Not my neighbors, I don’t think

But I wouldn’t put it past some of the other locals. It seems some of our far-right Trumpkin Americans are blustering on Tik-Tok about rising up and murdering the libs, bragging about putting up black flags as a sign of no quarter given (I think they’re usually accustomed to flying white flags). Their reasoning, though, is bizarre.

So, we’re the enemy, and they’re openly professing to want to execute us… So, why are they doing this?

Covid vaccinations, mostly. They believe that Joe Biden has declared a civil war on them by mandating that employers with over 100 employees and the military have vaccinations.

Yes, they say civil war, and they say it’s already started. But, unfortunately, many of them also live in states where masks and vaccines are required by state governments, healthcare, and law enforcement.

An alarming number of military members have been making Tik Toks talking about how they are being discharged because they refuse the vaccine. It’s alarming because there is probably an equal number of guys on there talking about the civil war plans and actively using Tik Tok to recruit these military and ex-military members.

The biggest message they have been sending out is, “it’s time” or “the time is now.”

They primarily use Tik Tok as a recruiting tool and let others know their willingness to commit violence. Then they tell people to message them or where to find them on Telegram.

I’m not scared. I think this is a small fringe of fanatical assholes, and if they were to rise up they’d cause some people grief and pain before they’d be put down. They rely on hiding in the shadows to have any courage.

What bugs me most is how goddamned stupid their ideas are.

We saw this coming long ago

Pat yourself on the back, creationists. You’ve succeeded beyond your wildest dreams. I’d give special appreciation to the Discovery Institute, which came up with so many potent slogans. “Teach the controversy!” “Teach both sides!” So many school administrators and politicians fell for it, taking it for granted that what a school was supposed to do was throw every crank idea at the students, and let them sort it out…while teachers were supposed to sit back and provide no guidance from hard-earned learning and experience, because that would be “bias”. How dare you teach all that evidence-based science about evolution and the history of life on Earth, don’t you know that’s discriminating against fringe theories that have no logical, rational, evidential basis? Make room for Ken Ham, right next to Darwin and Fisher and Simpson and Beadle and Tatum and…it’s a long list.

But that’s the triumph of their idea, that education shouldn’t be based on merit, and that teachers are useless unless they promote their propaganda.

And now it’s come to this.

A senior school administrator in the Lone Star State was recorded telling educators that if they’re going to keep books about the Holocaust in their classrooms, they must also stock material representing “opposing” views or “other perspectives.”

NBC News has obtained a recording that it says features Carroll Independent School District executive director of curriculum and instruction Gina Peddy explaining to teachers that House Bill 3979 requires them to offer alternative information when it “comes to widely debated and currently controversial.” That, by her account, includes the systematic execution of millions of people — mostly Jews — at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.

“Make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives,” Peddy said.

You can hear the whole thing here. Listen to the administrator tell the teachers how she wants to work with them and help them, but if they offer a book that teaches about the Holocaust, they better also include a book about Holocaust denial. The teachers sound appalled and horrified.

The administration’s excuse:

In a statement, a Carroll spokeswoman said Peddy’s example about the Holocaust reflects the district’s attempt to comply with a new state law that requires teachers to present multiple perspectives when discussing “widely debated and currently controversial” issues.

The law says we have to “teach both sides”. That is so familiar, as is the language about “widely debated and currently controversial” issues. All you need to do to make an issue widely debated and currently controversial is to get a local ignorant church pastor to stand up and argue for bullshit. Presto! Debate! Controversy! Therefore it has to go into the curriculum. It’s only fair, after all.

That’s not how education works. It has never worked that way. You can thank the creationists for a decades-long campaign to misrepresent how science and teaching work so they can get their fables and lies into the classroom. The end result: opening the door for Nazis and kooks to pollute public education. Fuck those motherfuckers, every one.

I’ll probably end up voting for Kamala Harris in the next election

After all, can you imagine a Republican stating these obvious truths?

This does not mean I agree with everything she, or the Democratic party, says or does, but that there is a clear, distinct separation between the two parties on at least some issues, and I’ll always go for the one that doesn’t lie about our history.