Biden’s speech

It was not a great speech. It was full of that tiresome American political boilerplate about liberty and equality, reinforced the myth of out wonderful founding fathers, reassured everyone that we are the greatest nation on Earth, and was full of “souls” and “God” to the point where I wanted to tell him this is not a church. But it did one thing clearly and sharply: it named an enemy. MAGA Republicans. They oppose democracy and we have to prevent them from getting their way.

That’s useful. It helps to have something concrete to oppose for now. He weakened it a bit by claiming that they weren’t the majority of Republicans — all you have to do is look at the divisions of the House and Senate to see that no, the majority of Republicans are aligning with MAGA Republicans — but it’s a start. I do believe that if you asked American voters to line up on one side of the MAGA Republican label or the other, most would shy away from putting on a red hat and puckering up to kiss Donald’s ass (or deSantis’ ass).

I listened to this once.

It’s not going to go down through history as particularly good oratory, but it does make one strong point.

By the way, Fox News put the speech on their channel, only they titled it Biden attacks his fellow Americans during Philadelphia speech. They shouldn’t object, since attacking fellow Americans, like Democrats and gay and trans folk and poor people and minorities and immigrants, is their stock in trade.

Who are these people?

I know their names — Adam Brown, Chris Kemp, Christine Peterson, Gaia Dempsey, Metaculus and Robin Hanson — but I don’t understand why anyone would listen to them babble about subjects they can’t possibly know anything about. So I started listening to this video of a panel about The Far Future & Space Tech Tree: Space & Longtermism, only to have to frequently yell, “how do you know that?” at the screen. None of it made any sense. They’re building castles in the sky on weird presuppositions.

The first guy is Robin Hanson, certifiable whack job, babbling about the risk to his vision of the far future. He’s worried that we’re going to get a world government that is too centralized and too darned successful at making people happy, and that means we’ll lose interest in taking risks, so we won’t expand to fill the galaxy out of fear of encountering big bad aliens.

Think about that. 1) There’s no evidence that a government is taking over the world, and 2) he has no grounds for psychoanalyzing trends over millions of years (yeah, he’s extrapolating over a span that’s probably longer than our species will exist), and 3) he doesn’t like the idea that humans might develop contentment and stability. That would be bad.

It’s nice in a theoretical, principled sense that the professoriate allows people to lounge about and daydream about humanity’s fantasy future, but sometimes you feel like there ought to be at least a token grounding in, you know, evidence of some kind. How could this happen? Hanson is at George Mason University, a place that has been bought lock, stock, and barrel by extremist capitalists of the very far right. The Kochs basically own the place, and it’s become a locus of power for the Federalist Society. You know, the wellspring of the very worst sort of judicial influence.

Documents obtained by alumni and students through the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) over the past year and one half reveal that George Mason University’s public law school has been taken over by the conservative Washington DC based Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy. Since April 2016, the Federalist Society has been influencing faculty and student placement, recommending and establishing legal programs, redirecting large amounts of scholarship revenues to support the Law School’s most-politicized centers for the “Study of the Administrative State” and “Liberty and Law,” and even reorienting the Law School’s judicial law clerk program to place “conservative” law students associated with the Federalist Society as clerks to the nation’s judges.

Two years ago, on March 31, 2016, George Mason University announced that as a result of a $20 million donation from an anonymous donor and $10 million donation from the Charles Koch Foundation, it was changing the name of the Law School to the Antonin Scalia Law School. This generated intense controversy about renaming a publicly-funded state law school after one of the most ideological and polarizing Supreme Court Justice in history. Accompanying that controversy were concerns about inappropriate influence by an anonymous donor and the Charles Koch brothers who have long exerted control over George Mason and its affiliated Mercatus Center and Institute for Human Studies. Less known outside of legal circles is that Justice Scalia was the founding faculty advisor to the Federalist Society in 1982 and its highest-profile member and frequent speaker for the next 34 years, with four speeches at Federalist Society events in 2015 alone.

And that, in turn, reflects a distortion of our political economy by the existence of the obscenely wealthy, the billionaires who can use all their money to promote their personal, idiosyncratic beliefs and bloated egos.

One man has donated $1.6 billion to a nonprofit group controlled by a conservative activist who has crusaded, with startling success, to transform the country’s politics. The only reason the public knows about it? An insider tip-off to the New York Times.
The Times reported this week that electronics mogul Barre Seid last year gave 100 percent of the shares of surge protector and data-center equipment manufacturer Tripp Lite to a group called Marble Freedom Trust. The group is led by Leonard Leo — who has helped bankroll right-wing advocacy on abortion rights, voting and climate change, among other things. His chief focus for a time was reshaping the judiciary as executive vice president of the Federalist Society, including by advising Republican presidents on Supreme Court nominees. The tale of how his group got such a lavish gift underscores the sad state of this country’s campaign finance system.

That kind of money means they don’t have to touch down on reality ever, and it shows. They are not very smart people, they only know how to manipulate the system and maximize profits from their inherited wealth, and that allows them to distort the perception of reality to their advantage.

My only question is…why are really rich people drawn to longtermism? It makes no sense. It’s bad science. Maybe there’s some germ of wish fulfillment there — they imagine living forever and becoming Spaceman Spiff, and going off and dominating the universe in the same way they currently dominate the United States and UK. They want to imagine a world where rich idiots get free rein, like they Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. And the best way to get that is to put buffoons like Hanson in positions of intellectual influence.

Racist? Or not?

The happy lady at the right is Kim Crockett, a Minnesotan who is running for the office of Secretary of State. I don’t want to rush into any accusations here, but she might be a bit racist. I’ll let you be the judge, and just present the facts.

  • She’s a Republican. I know, I know, but let’s assess the preponderance of the evidence.
  • She’s an election-denier who says the 2020 presidential election was “rigged”.
  • She was dismayed at all the Somalis immigrating to Minnesota. “I think of America, the great assimilator, as a rubber band, but with this — we’re at the breaking point,” she was quoted as saying. “These aren’t people coming from Norway, let’s put it that way. These people are very visible.” See? She’s not anti-immigrant. It’s fine if they’re coming from Norway.
  • Now she is concerned about who should be allowed to vote in our elections. “So, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that indeed you can help an unlimited number of people vote if they are disabled or can’t read or speak English, which raises the question: Should they be voting? We can talk about that another time.”

Oh, wait. I think maybe “racist” is an inadequate word to cover the breadth of her bigotry. Never mind.

And she’s running for Secretary of State, the office that oversees our elections! Fortunately, her opponent is a competent DFL guy, Steve Simon, who is going to run right over her in November.

Wipe it all out, and make the Republicans cry

I’ll have you know I took out student loans for college — it was mid-1970s levels of tuition, but it was still debt — and I also had to work my way through for four years, plus summers spent doing stoop labor to build up some savings. And then I paid it all off with the sweat of my brow, diligently making those quarterly payments, and eventually working my way out from under the burden. It was an obligation! I was loaned that money on specific terms, and I signed a contract!

And now Joe Biden is wiping out $10,000-20,000 of debt per college student with a snap of his fingers? They can just forget about it?

Good. It should be more, but this is a great start.

I don’t have good memories of all the labor I put in just to get the education I wanted. I was going to school to learn biology, not to pick weeds or put in long hours cleaning glassware or scrubbing cat poop out of an animal facility, and really, the job I was training for was not one that would ever pay a big salary, so deferring repayments until I was wealthy was never going to happen. So yeah, give those young folks a break, especially since tuition costs have skyrocketed since my day.

I have no patience for the flurry of outraged Republicans demanding that everyone must suffer as they did (as if they did — I predict that the ones who squawk the loudest are the children of privilege who had Mummy & Daddy pay for everything, and buy them a new car and European vacations on top of that). College ought to be free to everyone. It’s the only way we’re going to educate ourselves out of the mess we find ourselves in.

Additionally…

Those poor losers! You should give more money to some bankers to atone for their suffering.

Is polarization really such a bad thing?

Conservatives seem to think it’s grossly unfair that Nearly half of college students wouldn’t “dorm across the aisle”. Look! Republican students are more willing to share a room with a Democrat.

This being Axios, no one thinks to wonder why. Have they considered the possibility that so many far right Republicans have proven themselves to be violent and bigoted? As a college freshman, I had a roommate who was racist and thoroughly unpleasant…am I supposed to have signed up for another semester with him? I don’t think so.

And likewise, what’s with this expectation that we ought to tolerate a Republican as a marriage partner?

46% said they would probably/definitely not room with someone who supported the opposing presidential candidate in 2020 (62% of Dems, 28% of GOP).

53% said they would probably/definitely not go on a date with someone who supported the other side in 2020.
63% said they would probably/definitely not marry someone who supported the other 2020 candidate.

Madness. You should look for compatibility in a partner, and there’s nothing wrong with that. And yet, conservatives are outraged that progressives won’t have sex with them — preferably via the straitjacket of “enforced monogamy” — as if intimacy is supposed to be delivered on demand to anyone who asks for it. The fact that liberal men would rather poke Ann Coulter with a stick, or that liberal women are creeped out by Ben Shapiro, is a sign that liberals are really the intolerant ones. Amanda Marcotte understands what’s really going on.

On the right, there was a lot of trumpeting how this supposedly proves the left are the ones who are “really” intolerant. Radio talker Matt Murphy whined that liberals “don’t believe in our republic cannot abide people who think differently than them.” As if not getting to have sex with or go to parties with liberals is exactly the same as having your basic rights as a citizen stripped from you. “This doesn’t bode well,” complained GOP lawyer and ABC commentator Sarah Isgur, who previously defended the Trump administration’s policy of separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border as a former spokesperson in the Justice Department.

“My most fascinating friendships have always come from ‘the other side,'” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough tweeted, noting that, as a Republican, he “always benefitted” from those conversations. As many people pointed out in response, however, that a Republican like Scarborough gained from friendships with people like “John Lewis, Elijah Cummings, Ron Dellums, and Maxine Waters” doesn’t mean the reverse is true. And that is most likely what this polling is picking up.

I think most liberals would consider a relationship to be a mutual partnership, where both gain reciprocally, rather than something where one side benefits. You enter into it by mutual agreement, not because you are ordered to do so.

Don’t blame the liberals. This is all on the conservatives, who have all been racing to be extreme authoritarian assholes with a sense of entitlement to your room, your life, and your sex, who no one wants to fuck.

Greetings, Comrade MAGAts!

This is a brilliant strategy: engage a red-hat-wearing Trump worshipper as a peer, talk about the class issues that they claim to be concerned about, and lead them down the path to solutions. Next thing you know, they’re agreeing that the big banks need to be broken up, the work place should be collectivized, and they’re all for seizing the means of production.

You do have to avoid some of the buzzwords — the target would probably recoil if you whispered the word “socialism”, and for many of them, you’d have to hide the black folk, at first — but it’s an approach that might get them thinking, anyway. That’s a good first goal, to just get the wheels turning despite being crusted with Republican snot and semen.

Fetterman made Voltaire’s prayer: “O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous”

My fellow Americans, you’ve probably already seen some of the mocking commentary on a Dr Oz campaign ad, in which he goes shopping for crudité in a Pennsylvania grocery store. He was a bit out of touch. How out of touch? Well, I haven’t lived in Pennsylvania for 22 years, and even I know there isn’t a “Wegner’s” there, it’s “Wegman’s”. And then the way he stands there and grabs at a few things in reach…Oz hasn’t been grocery shopping in ages, and it shows.

The real question, though, is John Fetterman’s reply to this rich man going shopping for the first time ever effective campaigning? You bet it is.

The amount of money it takes to run for office is unreal, but it helps when your opponent is so flamingly incompetent.

In other fun Oz smackdowns, the Republican party is cutting its losses and spending less money in Pennsylvania. That’s gotta sting, and it’s also going to have down-ballot effects. Watching Republicans screw up is wonderfully entertaining.

And then, Oz was asked how many houses he owns, which is the kind of question no one ever asks me (my answer would be one, sort of, since we still owe the bank on it). Oz stammered out an answer of two, but he was more concerned with qualifying it and hedging his numbers. The Daily Beast counted for him. It’s TEN. Ten houses.

• a 9,000-square-foot mansion in New Jersey

• a 7,000-square-foot country house in Pennsylvania

• a condo in New Jersey

• a piece of residential real estate in Sariyer, Turkey

• another piece of residential real estate in Sariyer, Turkey

• a Manhattan condo

• another Manhattan condo

• an oceanside mansion in Palm Beach, Florida

• a cattle farm in Okeechobee, Florida

• and a piece of residential property in Konya, Turkey, which appears to be used as a student dormitory

Each one is probably worth far more than my house. He could probably pay off my mortgage for me with a fraction of his monthly pay-out for houses.

This is a good question to ask any big wig politician of either party. You know, I’m going to be generous and suggest that three is not an unreasonable number, since they’re rich: a real home in their home state, plus a residence near the capitol, and what the heck, I’ll throw in a vacation home somewhere nice. Anything beyond that, you’re just pigging out at the trough.

While we’re at it, another sin of the revoltingly wealthy is investing in the stock market. You should be required to divest.