I didn’t ask to live in interesting times

But here we are. It’s been a rough decade — we had a terrible one-term president who appalled most of us with his incompetence and corruption, and seemed to inspire the authoritarians and racists and wanna-be fascists. One of our political parties tumbled down into outright insanity, which isn’t a good thing for a country run by a two-party system. We’re repeating the Gilded Age crap, with billionaires getting richer and richer. The ongoing climate crisis continues to be ignored by our capitalist overlords. Then layer a pandemic on top of all that that has killed a million Americans and triggered another million or so it flamboyant science denial, rapidly spread by the greed of the social network poombahs.

We should cry out like Job, I should think. But now we get a major land war in Europe to add to the world’s tribulations.

I have no idea how that war is going. One thing that has repelled me lately on the media are all the pundits, whether they have a cushy sinecure at some major newspaper or they are Joe Nobody, sitting in his car opining at a camera (oh, how I loathe those videos of middle-class, middle-aged white guys sitting in their cars talking at their phones) telling me which side is going to win. Worse is when they declare why their side is going to when. Near as I can tell, the Right thinks the Russians will conquer because they despise pronouns, while the Left thinks Ukraine will win because Zelensky is sexy. They don’t know. I don’t know. It’s a cacophony of pure noise that isn’t helping.

So, what I do know…

Russia is making a massive effort, throwing all kinds of soldiers and artillery and tanks at Kharkiv. They could win the military battle, it wouldn’t surprise me. Ukrainians are brave, but bravery doesn’t stop a bullet. I have no idea what the outcome of the war will be, other than pain and death and misery, and we’ll have to helplessly wait and see what happens. Isn’t that annoying? Big dramatic bloody events occur, and we here on the other side of the world have to wait.

I do know that Russia is losing the diplomatic war rather brutally. Suddenly, coalitions and alignments and nations that have been around for practically a lifetime are shifting! I haven’t seen this kind of transformation since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Finland is discussing joining NATO? Sweden is increasingly antagonistic to Russia? Ukraine has requested to join the EU, and some countries want to fast-track that application? It’s all happening so scary-fast. We’re racing towards a polarization and alignment of forces that we haven’t seen since the Cold War, and let me tell you, that’s not a good thing.

What I do find encouraging, though, is that the world was quick to react with open condemnation of Russia for invading a sovereign state and killing citizens. I just wish that the world had been equally damning when the US invaded a sovereign state and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocents — we can hope that what emerges out of this new world is an agreement that bullying smaller nations by powerful ones will no longer be tolerated.

Unless, of course, the bullying nation decides everyone needs a good scourging with nuclear fire.

And that’s all I know. Sit. Wait. Watch.

Hey, Job has sort of a happy ending, right? He loses his family, his health, and his security, but God gives him new kids at the end? It’s kind of warped that the Old Testament thinks families and kids are fungible, so I’m not going to take much consolation from that.

Let’s start a social media site!

It’s easy, right? You could write it in BASIC and run it off the old Apple II in your closet. You just accept a text string from someone calling in, and you post it on a web page, and presto! Fame and money start rolling in.

Even Donald Trump could do it! Or think he could do it, because that man is delusional.

The rollout of Donald Trump’s social network has predictably been a disaster. Truth Social’s debut on Monday was marred by technical problems and a gigantic waiting list, while some people who actually were able to use the service complained of being “censored.”

Truth Social “has been almost entirely inaccessible in the first days of its grand debut because of technical glitches, a 13-hour outage and a 300,000-person waitlist,” The Washington Post wrote yesterday. Trump Media & Technology Group CEO Devin Nunes said on a Fox News show that Truth Social’s goal is to be “fully operational at least within the United States” by the end of March. The waiting list is now over 500,000.

I wonder how many of those half million are lookie-loos gawking at the train wreck, how many are reporters who figure they just have to report on this desperate ex-politician’s fantasy (they don’t, by the way), and how many are sincere followers of Trump AKA chucklefucks?

Of course he didn’t design this himself.

Truth Social was built using Mastodon open source software.

They just grabbed some existing software, plastered some graphics and revised some of the text messages, and called it good.

I have an account on Mastodon. I didn’t have to wait in line to get it, just found an instance that didn’t have the Donald on it, and started typing. Isn’t the point of Mastodon to have a decentralized distribution of servers, anyway?

Also, it’s a bit ironic to name the failing media site created by a politician known for constantly lying “truth”.

Ireland isn’t going to take it

This is what journalists were supposed to do, I thought. At least this one time, one confronts a liar for Putin with the evidence.

You know, this is exactly what I wanted journalists to do to American politicians when we invaded Iraq. We didn’t get much of it. Instead, we got polarization driving people to Fox News, that nest of lies. And now Fox News is demonstrating that they always were a propaganda mill for conservative authoritarians — could you imagine Tucker Carlson doing anything but fawning over a Russian ambassador making excuses for atrocities?

The Irish people are also protesting outside the Russian embassy, while Irish political parties are calling for the expulsion of the Russian ambassador (although the EU is asking to keep embassies in place, which makes sense if there is to be any hope of a diplomatic solution –– a forlorn hope, but I guess it’s there.)

If you’re “woke”, you oppose Putin

Yesterday was my day for despair. Now that’s over with, and it’s time for rage.

I can’t do anything about Russia or Ukraine, but jesus, do we ever have a bunch of walloping idiot apologists here at home. The curious thing is that they’re neatly lining up across the chasm that has formed in our political divide. If you’re a Trumper, now you’re in Putin’s pocket — and that’s an about-face from Republicans I would never have expected. If you’re into crypto, of course you’re going to take the Russian side, since crypto is little more than a money laundering scheme for oligarchs. And now the IDW is rationalizing for Russia.

It’s like everyone is projecting their pet obsessions onto Ukraine. No, we don’t spend more time talking about pronouns that it does about things that matter. First of all, pronouns do matter, obviously, since they send the Heyings of the world into a frothing fury. And they seem to matter most to the people who hate the idea. If you tell me that you prefer to be addressed as “he,” “she,” or “they,” I’ll accept it as a matter of course and as a matter of courtesy. The anti-woke brigade will react as if you’ve just launched missiles into their Donbass. We aren’t fighting over pronouns, that war was won by the people who recognize that humans live cooperatively in a society.

The people who don’t recognize that side with Putin.

Here’s another thing that pisses me off: when they decide that they must be über-rational because they accept evolution, and therefore evolution must side with the Russians.

The evolutionary lens is logic and first-principles driven, rather than conclusion or ideology driven. Jesus fucking christ. Evolutionary biology is not a formula that you can plug your variables into, and out pops a fixed, flawless solution. Evolution is a diversity machine. It makes peacocks and parasitic worms. It produces humans with a battery of emotional and social needs, and the more complex the organism, the more unpredictable the outcome. Heying is the classic reductionist dudebro who thinks it is reasonable to strip away the complexity of reality to claim that Science with a capital S has decided that their narrow world view is the correct one.

And then they pretentiously announce the superiority of their perspective. I am one of the initiated, and I can tell you that Heather Heying is full of shit. She’s just a dogmatic reactionary who has found a rationale that feeds her ego and allows her to dismiss everyone else as wrong.

Also, Jesse Singal and Heather Heying joining hands to agree that the Woke are bad makes me want to puke.

A tiny glimmering of good news

The police officers who assisted in the murder of George Floyd have been found guilty.

A jury has found three former Minneapolis police officers guilty of violating the civil rights of George Floyd Thursday afternoon. All three officers were found guilty on all counts.

Tou Thao, the officer who held back bystanders when George Floyd was killed, was convicted of depriving Floyd of his right to medical care and willfully failing to intervene. J. Alexander Kueng, who helped restrain Floyd by kneeling on his back, was convicted of the same charges.

Thomas Lane, who held the 46-year-old Black man’s feet, was found guilty of depriving Floyd of his right to medical care as well.

It’s a good start. Now let’s see changes in the culture of the police in Minneapolis.

It’s WAR in Europe

I’ve been reading various articles on events in Ukraine, and I thought, wrongly, that it was going to be one of those prolonged smoldering affair, with Russia taking bites out of a country with regions that leaned towards Russian unity, but oh no, it’s just flat out total war, with the Russian army moving to take over the whole country of Ukraine.

Russia launched a broad attack on Ukraine from multiple directions early Thursday, bombarding cities, towns and villages and advancing toward the capital, Kyiv, as Ukrainian forces tried to stem the onslaught of Russian ground forces and air power.

Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said Russian troops were fighting to break into the wider Kyiv region and crossed the regional border, where Ukrainian forces were battling to repel them.

Putin’s excuse is that they’re carrying out a program of “demilitarization and denazification”. Riiight. This is nothing but imperial conquest. People are dying. Cities are being bombed.

Meanwhile, here in the US, fifth-columnists are buckling down to the dirty work of painting Putin’s gangsters as the ‘good guys’. Why? Because the Russians are “anti-woke” and label their bathrooms the way god intended them to.

It’s insanity everywhere. Don’t listen to Erik Prince & Steve Bannon — they’re just evil.

They really hate rainbows, don’t they?

All things must fall into a rigid binary. Everything. The right-wing rainbow is just a block of red next to a block of violet. When they do black and white photography they take it literally — max contrast, only solid blacks and solid whites. It’s all hex #000000 and hex #ffffff. It’s ridiculous.

Here’s the latest imaginary binary, wordcels vs shape rotators. There are only two kinds of brains!

Quick, how many cubes can you rotate in your brain? If you’re struggling to even form the image of a cube in your mind, let alone rotate it, then I’m sorry to say that you’re not a shape rotator. You are, in fact, probably a wordcel. If you have no idea what wordcel and shape rotators are, I will explain it to you, and I’m sorry your curiosity has brought you to this article.

At its base, the dichotomy is simple. Wordcels are people who are good with words. Shape rotators are people who are good with math and abstract thought. Use of the terms has skyrocketed online in the past few months, and especially in the last few days.

I’m sorry, this is insanely stupid. Here’s Marc Andreessen trying to be quantitative and instead coming out as a guy who makes up imaginary statistics to characterize people he doesn’t like.

Classic wordcel gibberish.

But look, these are bogus categories — there is a spectrum of mental ability, with different people having a different range of abilities, it’s not all one or the other. Further, individuals vary over time: when I’m writing something other people will have to read, I’m thinking about the words, even if the subject is something scientific. I can also get locked into problem solving mode, where I’m wrestling with abstractions. When I used to write code — and I’m sure some of you are familiar with this — I’d get into the zone where your brain is 100% machine, focused on tracing multiple lines of logic to track down a bug or implement some novel and non-intuitive function. It was great until you snapped out of it at 3am and forgot where you were or how to speak. I’ve literally had moments of verbal paralysis where my brain had to stop carrying out spatial deconvolutions to remember what English was.

These loons are taking the variety of entirely human modes of thinking and trying to cluster them into two terribly unuseful discrete and rigid “types”. People don’t work that way!

But there is a purpose to their madness. Once again, it’s a verbal — dare I say “wordcel”? — tool for conservatives to attack the left for being inferior thinkers while simultaneously patting themselves on the back for thinking like “scientists”. Let’s label those loser Woke folk with a shiny new derogatory term, never noticing how unscientific their whole approach is.

Much of America’s culture war can be cynically flattened and viewed through the lens of these two words; “woke” wordcels live in the land of philosophy and books and liberal colleges, clinging to ideals espoused in their precious books, tweeting about Wordle, while shape rotators are out here coding, building businesses, doing engineering, etc. etc.

And oh, boy, here comes the validation they need:

Hah. I doubt a Jungian psychologist can spin even one three-dimensional cube in his mind!

Sheesh, now I’m doing it. This is stupid. Still, it might catch on with all these right-wing aliens from Remulak.

Freedom to piss on your neighbors’ lawns

She looks nice. Too bad that’s the smile of a bonkers, blissed out religious fanatic. “Coercion is not consent” is a nice sentiment, but that’s not what Ephesians 6:12 says. It says,

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

That’s a problem. She’s not supporting the truck convoy in Canada, she thinks she’s in a battle with vast supernatural powers. She’s not. The truckers use “FREEEEDOM!” as a slogan, but the protest is really about a bunch of well-off working class people trying to protect their privileges and pretend their bogus beliefs about viruses and vaccinations are valid. These are people who are cranky-ass babies who don’t want to get vaccinated against a disease that has killed about a million people in the US because their preachers or right-wing radio and television have told them not to. Under it all is…religion.

Christian sermons of varying lengths emanate regularly from the main flatbed stage on Wellington Street and from curbside preachers using microphones attached to portable speakers. Their words waft in the air and mix with the rumble of diesel engines and fumes, thumping dance music, the tinge of marijuana.

Starting Friday, “Jericho marches” began circling the parliamentary precinct every morning. The name refers to the Old Testament story of the Israelites walking around the walls of Jericho for seven days. On the seventh day, the Israelites marched seven times, blew rams horns and shouted. The walls came tumbling down.

This past Saturday, a woman draped in a Canadian flag led the march with a megaphone in hand.

“When we sing, enemies flee,” she said as she entered the grounds of Parliament Hill. “Hallelujah, hallelujah.”

The march then joined a mass of people gathered in formation to spell the word “freedom.”

It’s madness. Nothing but madness.

It’s not about freedom, or vaccines, or even just religion. This is a loony fringe of a fringe who are exploiting the fact that the powers-that-be, the police, the media — you know, the actual rulers of the darkness of this world and spiritual wickedness in high places — will give them loving attention and pander to their every whimper and whine. They really are spoiled babies who have discovered that tantrums will get them praise on their favored media.

It’s easy to shorthand these shambolic yet menacing gatherings as “anti-vaccine-mandate”—and they are, glancingly, the way the movie Robocop is about a robot cop, or Animal Farm is a study in zoology. The weeks-long occupation underway in Ottawa—its big rigs symbolizing the distilled essence of “white working class” mythology that cloaks these protests, nominally against vaccine mandates and coronavirus safety protocols, but in actuality accruing a vast baggage train of right-wing grievances and conspiracies—has become a memetic form, to be eagerly adopted and copied, as far as possible, all over the world. It’s worth noting that as vocal as they are, this is an extreme political minority: Canada’s population has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, at 80% fully vaccinated, and among truckers, the rate is even higher, at nearly 90%. As with any large-scale right-wing protest, the police have reacted with a profound lassitude that is tantamount to complicity, and it takes the most wide-eyed cop-boostering stance of centrist faux-ignorance to pretend that this is not solidarity but incompetence. Police have allowed certain menaces—from open fires to public urination to noise complaints to road blockades—to continue unabated, in the name of the protesters’ free speech. “In Ottawa Protests, a Pressing Question: Where Were the Police?” read a comical New York Times headline, manufacturing consent with a frenetic both-hands jerkoff motion.

The question of “why the police seemingly abandoned the country’s seat of power,” as the Times put it, is a question that answers itself: law enforcement apparatuses are a law unto themselves, fed strength by a neoliberal state that needs them to enforce its deadly inequalities. No one is watching the watchmen as they cheer from the sidelines, and that’s true on both sides of the border. Though the police have cleared a smaller bridge blockade that stopped trade between the U.S. and Canada for days in Windsor, Ontario, and seized a cache of guns on the border in Alberta, the Ottawa protests continue apace. Given the laxity that thus far has allowed the protest to grow in Ottawa, gain notoriety, proffer real menace (and so many racist and antisemitic hate crimes a hotline was set up to report them), and issue unhinged proclamations unfettered, imitator protests have already arisen in Canberra, Italy, London, Wellington, Paris, Jerusalem and elsewhere.

It’s a perversion of the concept of freedom. Freedom from responsibility? Freedom from criticism? Freedom to spread disease? Freedom to foul your diapers and let nanny change them? Freedom to believe and act on conspiracy theories?

You don’t have the freedom to afflict your neighbors, but that’s the only freedom conservatives actually want.

This is some unbelievable alternate history nonsense!

Jonathan Turley is a lawyer and professor at George Washington University, and he brings shame to the profession.

Oh my god yes. What if they had cracked down on the Civil Rights movement, or arrested Martin Luther King? What a horrible, unimaginable what-if to propose!

What’s that? They did? How odd that a goddamn professor would never have heard of Letters from a Birmingham Jail, never seen the photos of police dogs and fire hoses turned on black citizens. I guess that’s the state of conservative education nowadays.

He goes on to whine that the police are treating the anti-vaxx protesters like terrorists. There is no comparison between these bozos and the civil rights protesters. After the murder of George Floyd, freeways in Minneapolis were choked with people demanding their civil rights and freedom from oppressive policing. These truckers are ignorant yahoos demanding the right to be plague rats in society. They are terrorists. Easily triggered terrorists who will melt down if you whisper the words “ram ranch” to them.