Racism comes in many forms

One example: a Memorial Day speech by a veteran in Akron, Ohio. It wasn’t the speaker who was at fault; he was trying to tell the story of the first Memorial Day observance, by freed slaves in 1865. The organizers cut his mic to prevent him from being heard.

What at first blush appeared to be a short audio malfunction at Monday’s Memorial Day ceremony in Markillie Cemetery turned out to be anything but.

A ceremony organizer turned off the microphone when the event’s keynote speaker, retired Army Lt. Col. Barnard Kemter, began sharing a story about freed Black slaves honoring deceased soldiers shortly after the end of the Civil War.

The microphone was turned down for about two minutes in the middle of Kemter’s 11-minute speech during the event hosted by the Hudson American Legion Lee-Bishop Post 464.

Cindy Suchan, who chairs the Memorial Day parade committee and is president of the Hudson American Legion Auxiliary, said it was either her or Jim Garrison, adjutant of American Legion Lee-Bishop Post 464, who turned down the audio. When pressed, she would not say who specifically did it.

There had been some previous email back-and-forth between Kemter and Suchan/Garrison in which the organizers objected to including the mention. I might have given them some leeway if the speech had been excessively long and needed substantial cuts, but that isn’t the case for an appropriately brief 11 minute speech. Suchan and Garrison admitted that they’d turned off the sound, but haven’t said why they thought Kemter’s words were objectionable.

We can all guess why, though. Of the thousands of Memorial Day speeches that were given all across the country, Garrison and Suchan have succeeded in making this one newsworthy, and have called attention to themselves in a negative way. Smart move!

I see right through you, conservatives

I thought this was a good overview of critical race theory:

Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

Except for this part:

All these different ideas grow out of longstanding, tenacious intellectual debates. Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism—tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.

I’ve never known a conservative to hold that kind of principled perspective. I’m guessing the author was trying to be charitable, but mainly what I’ve encountered is conservatives trying to rationalize their beliefs, which they acquired by tradition and upbringing rather than by actual reason. Claiming to be a “classical liberal” or that they hold “Enlightenment values” is just an excuse that sounds good…unless, of course, the values they are endorsing are imperialism, colonialism, and the inherent superiority of Western European culture. I can believe they sincerely agree with those aspects of the Enlightenment.

What we’ve got is a set of feel-good labels that obscure the complexity of what the phenomena named actually mean. It’s like saying “I like Thai food” without any further specification.

Donald Trump, failed blogger

I know you’ve already forgotten that Donald Trump has a blog — I talked about it last month, and pointed out that it wasn’t doing well.

How about now?

It has ceased to exist. It is no more. The plug has been pulled, and it has swirled down the drain. It is mulched bits. Gone.

The former president has shut down a blog he created just a month ago, though many of his written statements that appeared on it remain on his traditional website, a spokesman said Wednesday.

Trump had used the short-lived blog as an alternative to Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites that banned him because of his constant false statements about last year’s election loss to President Joe Biden.

He has my sympathies. It takes a certain twisted mindset to maintain a blog, and that’s one psychopathology we can say that he doesn’t have.

Q was just the beginning, now it’s preparing to metamorphose into its next form!

Here’s something else I don’t understand: QAnon. I watched the HBO documentary, “Q: Into the Storm” which covers the phenomenon from its beginning to just after the election, and it suffered from being too close to the problem. It centered almost entirely on Jim Watkins and his son Ron, who were running the various chan boards that hosted Q, with some time spent on prominent QTubers — the documentarian clearly proposes that Ron Watkins is Q and makes a good case for it. What I mainly learned from the documentary is that all of the people behind Qs raging popularity are huge, obnoxious, pompous assholes. It made it hard to watch, when the primary protagonists are these preening twits who have learned the deep secret behind all religions: be cryptic and vague so your followers can read their own beliefs into your pronouncements, promise secret knowledge (even if you don’t have any) so your followers will pay close attention, and be sure to recruit apostles who will do most of your work for you.

It’s an unpleasant spectacle of singularly unpleasant people doing next to nothing but successfully duping hordes of ordinary people to join the cult. But, as I said, it suffers too much from its tight focus on the Watkins duo, who mainly smirk and act evasive. And then it ends, just as the media, like Facebook and YouTube, were finally shutting off the conduits that allowed them to proselytize easily, and it just sort of end. The documentarian has fingered the guilty party — Ron Watkins is Q! — and then it ends. What next? How are the victims of Q propaganda coping? What’s to prevent this from happening again?

At least CripDyke tells us what’s next: more of the same, only worse. As Q gets blocked and banned everywhere his acolytes turn, GhostEzra rises to add more fire and brimstone to followers of Q.

For in the shadow of the valley of Vice it has been revealed that a messiah has come, a prophet named GhostEzra, who comes to rule the denizens of the QAnon world exactly as we would expect. Vice reports that GhostEzra, who now runs one of the biggest if not the biggest QAnon accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, began as upbeat, portraying Trump as the victim of election fraud but also portraying the election fraud as inevitably unsuccessful, something that the QAnons were clearly destined to overturn. But before much time passed, GhostEzra went from being relentlessly upbeat to excoriating followers if they, themselves, were not sufficiently upbeat.*1 It’s one thing to tell others, “Have hope!” and it’s another to tell them, “I will beat you until your morale improves.” GhostEzra, apparently, went all in on the latter.

GhostEzra adds even more of that crucial spice, hate, to the recipe. Hey, if a little anti-Semitism was enough to jazz up Q followers, just think what pouring an overwhelming amount of Jew-hatred will do!

The Marjorie Taylor Greene disease

There she goes again, opening her mouth and saying stupid shit.

Appearing before the Dalton, Georgia, City Council on June 15, 2020, Greene complained about the movement to remove statues of the pro-slavery Confederacy and Christopher Columbus.

We’re seeing situations where Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, all kinds of statues are being attacked, said Greene. It seems to be just an effort to take down history.

She went on to note, And whether I see a statue that may be something that I would fully disagree with, like Adolf Hitler, maybe a statue of Satan himself, I would not want to say take it down, but again, it’s so that I can tell my children and teach others about who these people are, what they did, and what they may be about.

I don’t believe for a moment that a statue of Hitler is something she would fully disagree with.

Also, the problem isn’t “attacking” statues, it’s attacking the ideas that those statues represent. We put up statues of famous men and then ignore the flaws in those people, so it’s the opposite of teaching history to idolize individuals. What am I supposed to teach children when we stroll by a statue of Hitler in the park? That you aren’t supposed to feel sick to your stomach, that you should respect the principles he stood for?

Marjorie Taylor Greene is stupid and demented. And she doubled down!

Over the weekend, Greene had said during an interview that COVID-related mask rules in the House of Representatives are reminiscent of a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star and they were definitely treated like second-class citizens — so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany, and this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.

A mask is a functional item that benefits the wearer, and most importantly, the people around them. It discriminates against respiratory viruses, nothing else. But maybe she’d like to erect statues to coronaviruses?

It’s not just one loon babbling, either. The whole dang Republican party seems to support her.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy released a statement describing Greene’s newest comments about the Holocaust as “wrong” but also attacking Democrats.

At a time when the Jewish people face increased violence and threats, anti-Semitism is on the rise in the Democrat Party and is completely ignored by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, he wrote.

Boy, they really hate Nancy Pelosi. But that’s all backwards — the Republicans are where we find the white nationalists and white supremacists and the people who are trying to restrict democracy and oppose immigration. And they call the Democrats anti-Semitic?

I think what they’re referring to is that there are more Democrats willing to recognize the authoritarian oppression of Palestinians by Israel. That’s not anti-Semitism. That’s opposition to genocide by Israeli “defense” forces. It’s also weak sauce, since the Democrats haven’t been particularly effective in opposing the violence.

But the Republicans will just go on propping up the kind of antic poison that will rip this country apart.

Christ, Texas.

Florida is pretty bad, and Arizona is working its way down the rankings, but I’m going to say it: Texas is the very worst. It’s a shithole state run by horrible people. I’m sorry if you live there, you’re either going to have to flee or elect better representatives.

The latest example of Texan villainy: their house of representatives passed a law to silence teachers.

Republicans in the Texas House passed a bill Tuesday that effectively bans public school teachers from talking about racism, white supremacy or current news events.

The bill, which is being fast-tracked to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to sign into law, states that social studies and civics teachers aren’t allowed to discuss the concept that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,” or the idea that “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.”

It also states that social studies and civics teachers “may not be compelled to discuss current events or widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy or social affairs” as part of a course.

Oh, also…

The legislation also states that teachers don’t have to take professional training ― like cultural proficiency and equity training ― if it makes them feel any “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” because of their race or gender.

If you’re a white man, you can’t be allowed to feel any guilt about your race and gender’s role in American history. At least it’s something that they know they should feel shame, so they have to pass laws to prevent anyone from confronting them.

Just this week, Philosophy Tube posted an appropriate video on ignorance and the state sponsorship thereof. She’s very timely.

Speaking of fleeing Texas, I have one son who has been living there…but he’s getting out this very week to move to the much more progressive state of Washington. A wise move — and I really am sorry for all of you stuck down there in America’s rectum.

The only reason I voted for him is because the alternative was even worse

I agree completely with Marcus: Biden is a horrible jackass. But as the saying goes, he’s our jackass, and he’s the lesser jackass, compared to the previous jackass. Still, let’s primary him and elect someone better.

Also, let’s stop propping up corrupt right-wing regimes, like that of Netanyahu, right now. He’s outright murdering civilians and committing genocide, and we give him the bombs to do it with?

Good advice for new graduates

Adults are rubbish! Don’t trust us or listen to us except for this one thing which is: immediately form yourself into a huge ferocious army of wild youths and destroy everything! Storm the offices of every fossil fuel organization in the world and geosequestrate them all!

Don’t ask us to do that. We’re old and tired and comfortable and we’re leaving it all up to you.

In case you were wondering how Trump’s blog is doing…

Oh, you weren’t? You kind of forgot that it exists? You don’t really care what he says anymore?

Then you already know. It’s a bust.

Four months after former President Donald Trump was banished from most mainstream social media platforms, he returned to the web last Tuesday with “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” essentially a blog for his musings.

A week since the unveiling, social media data suggests things are not going well.

The ex-president’s blog has drawn a considerably smaller audience than his once-powerful social media accounts, according to engagement data compiled with BuzzSumo, a social media analytics company. The data offers a hint that while Trump remains a political force, his online footprint is still dependent on returning to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Part of his problem is that his blog isn’t particularly good or well designed.

“In the case of Trump’s new platform, it is so technologically primitive that there is no way for his followers to even migrate,” Blackburn said. “Who cares about a platform where you can’t even own the libs? There are plenty of other newsletters that people have been adding to their spam boxes for years.”

I know. You weren’t wondering. But now you know!