Tell me the truth, doc

I’ve been hearing so much pollyannaish bullshit from the highest offices in the land that it’s shocking when the CDC just speaks the truth. We’re fucked.

The coronavirus is spreading too rapidly and too broadly for the U.S. to bring it under control, Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Monday.

The U.S. has set records for daily new infections in recent days as outbreaks surge mostly across the South and West. The recent spike in new cases has outpaced daily infections in April when the virus rocked Washington state and the northeast, and when public officials thought the outbreak was hitting its peak in the U.S.

“We’re not in the situation of New Zealand or Singapore or Korea where a new case is rapidly identified and all the contacts are traced and people are isolated who are sick and people who are exposed are quarantined and they can keep things under control,” she said in an interview with The Journal of the American Medical Association’s Dr. Howard Bauchner. “We have way too much virus across the country for that right now, so it’s very discouraging.”

The Republicans want to stop testing, because it reveals an increasing number of infected. Tracing? What’s that? There’s no serious investment of resources that we’d need to do thorough tracing. The President belittles the idea of wearing a mask, and refuses to wear one himself. Conservative citizens freak out at the idea of wearing a mask. Texans marched on their capitol under the banner of “Bar Lives Matter”, committing a double self-own: refusing to police their own behavior to limit the spread of a disease, and mocking a serious social justice movement. The United States of America is now the deadliest place to live and risk COVID-19 infection, and our numbers are rising. We are in big trouble, and way too many people are refusing to take it seriously, which means the trouble is only going to get worse.

I fear the November elections will be the spark that makes this country explode…unless we’re moribund with disease by then.

Crawl back in your hole, Peterson, you’re going to get spanked everywhere

Now that Jordan Peterson has crawled out of the dark hole he had retreated to, we have to make sure he never again gets the prominence he used to have. If you want to enjoy a stunningly thorough take-down of the man, here you go.

“You have to admire Hitler! […] Because he was an organizational genius!”

These are not the words of a neo-Nazi. They are words stated, with the utmost conviction, by Jordan B. Peterson, the psychologist and anti-“political correctness” guru whose YouTube channel boasts 2.8 million subscribers, in one of his Biblical Series lectures from 2017.

While Peterson’s hostile statements on feminism and what he calls “cultural Marxism” have been thoroughly dissected in the media, but his views on Hitler, National Socialism, and the Holocaust have not, bar a very few exceptions. Peterson, an academic who declares that he chooses his words “very, very, carefully” has made so many incorrect statements about Hitler that it verges on revisionism.

Peterson has repeatedly said that he has “studied Hitler a lot,” but every statement he utters about Hitler makes this very hard to believe. It’s worth diving into Peterson’s unsettling understanding of Hitler, from his strangely generous framing of the Nazi leader, through his misrepresentation of chronology, his misuse of historical sources, to his odd re-writing of Holocaust history.

I think history makes it clear that Hitler was the Donald Trump/Boris Johnson of the 1930s — a blustering con man with bad ideas who wrecked his country. While we’re flattening the apologists who make excuses for them now, let’s also make sure Trump and Johnson don’t get the opportunity to become the Hitler of the late 1930s, WWII, and the Holocaust.

Freezepeach warriors discover the terrible truth

Recently, as social media have begun a belated crackdown on the odious rantings of the far right, the trolls have begun emigrating to more open media, places where the promise is made to never, ever censor Free Speech, no matter how vile. The first thing they ought to realize, though, is if you knock out the bottom of the barrel, discourse is going to plunge to new lows. The second thing is that removing any limitations is mainly going to appeal to people with no respect for others, and you’re going to be wallowing in bad actors. The third thing is…you can’t run an active forum without moderation. It’s a law of nature.

So Parler, the latest free speech fad, is throwing away any pretense and cracking down on views it doesn’t like.

Well, that did not take long at all. On Friday we predicted that just like every other social media platform out there, the new favorite among people who falsely say that Twitter is censoring conservatives, would start taking down content and shutting down accounts just like everyone else. Because, if you run any sort of platform that allows 3rd party speech, sooner or later you discover you have to do that. In Friday’s post, we highlighted Parler’s terms of service, which certainly allows for it to take down any content for any reason (we also mocked their “quick read on Wikipedia” style understanding of the 1st Amendment).

Exactly. Everyone who has maintained even a little blog with a comments section knows this is true — if you don’t have a moderation policy, there will be swarms of abusers who who will take advantage of the laxity. Even if you do have a moderation policy, there will be people who try to work around it, just because they can. You will always have to block people; there is no such thing as a viable policy of absolutely unfettered free speech.

The only question is who will be blocked, and for what reasons, and that will always be a reflection of the values on your site. Not censoring Nazis is not a neutral stance, it is actively pro-Nazi.

A level-headed look at CHAZ

I’ve seen the hack job Tucker Carlson did on CHAZ (some of it is imbedded in this one), so it’s good to see some honest evaluation of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.

Warning: it’s by a lefty YouTuber, Thought Slime, who I’ve long thought was a pretty good one. That means I can expect he’ll announce that he’s got a book deal with Jordan Peterson, or that he’s a headliner at CPAC, because that’s how the past decade has trained me to think of people I like.

Spiders, at least, haven’t let me down yet.

Once they get popular, though…

The cops sure are working hard to craft a victimhood narrative

If the cops want to argue that a large part of the public mistrusts and actively hates the police, I’d have no problem agreeing. My impression of cops has nose-dived from “well-meaning but flawed civic servants” to “overpaid bullying racist thugs with way too much fondness for violence” in the last decade or two, so I feel it’s true from personal experience, not to mention all the incidents of cops flat-out murdering people.

But when you’re reduced to claiming that the public is also a master of devious sleight-of-hand, trying in numerous sneaky ways to attack the police, my belief is greatly strained. I don’t believe that service workers are trying to poison cops, or intentionally making them wait at McDonalds, or slipping tampons into their frappucino. That’s just silly.

You want to tell me that some protesters have thrown rocks at cops in riot gear at demonstrations, I’ll believe you. You even have video of that sort of thing. But I’ll also tell you that cops have been using tear gas, sometimes firing it nearly point blank into people’s faces, and that if the worst you can say is this dubious claim that a Starbucks barista put a tampon on your drink, I’m not going to be impressed.

We already know your reputation has hit rock bottom, and that you’re still digging.

Is no statue safe anymore?

Nope. Even being a president on Mt Rushmore makes you safe.

The statue of Teddy Roosevelt at the AMNH is coming down.

The New York Times reports that it was the museum’s decision to remove the statue, which has sat at its main entrance for the last 80 years; the city agreed it was time to take it down. Though the statue intends to honor Roosevelt—New York’s former governor, a U.S. President, and a famed naturalist whose father was one of the museum’s founders—it also depicts colonialism, as evidenced by the stereotypical Native American man and African man who flank the horseback-riding white man at its center. In 2017, activists splashed blood-red paint on its base, noting that the statue “is bloody at its very foundation.” And with reignited nationwide conversations about and removals of statues depicting Confederate generals, slaveholders, and genocidal explorers, the museum decided it was time to revisit Roosevelt.

Maybe we should look at every monument and ask exactly what it is commemorating. A monument that celebrates the national park system, yes. A monument that celebrates one guy riding gallantly above exploited peoples, no.

The spectacle of Republican cannibalism is always entertaining

Ah, the country is swirling down the crapper thanks to toxic conservatives, but at least we can savor the desperate clawing of the terrible people responsible at each other. I give you the Illinois Patriarchy Institute, which is mightily enraged at a recent Supreme Court decision that says employers can’t punish people for being gay.

I and others have been shouting from our virtual rooftops for over a decade that there is no greater threat to First Amendment protections than that posed by the subversive “LGBTQ” movement. Can conservatives not yet see the end of the short pier toward which GOP leaders have long been pushing them? Really?

(Im)moderate Republicans, Libertarian-leaning Republicans, Republicans with dollar signs rather than Scripture reflected in their myopic eyes have been pushing conservatives toward the end of the short pier, hoping that either spines will crumble or conservatives will tumble into the dark waters. Supremacist Court Justice/lawmaker Neil-the-Usurper-Gorsuch just gave conservatives a huge shove toward the watery abyss.

Also, there are gays in the Republican party!

Conservatives get all giddy with chills running up their legs when homosexuals like Guy Benson, Dave Rubin, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Brandon Straka express Republican-ish views. “Oh gosh, the cool kids like us, they really like us!”

Meanwhile, those smart, articulate, good-looking homosexuals seek to change the Republican Party from within—like a cancer or a Guinea worm (am I allowed to call it the Guinea worm any longer?). We welcome camels into the tent at our peril.

The author suggests that all these Republicans ought to join the Democratic party. No, thanks, they’re awful people, and we are already full up on them. You keep ’em.

Is there hope for November?

The Preznit had a rally in Tulsa yesterday — no one is questioning why a sitting president is so insecure he needs these pointless mini-Nuremburgs — and beforehand, his managers were touting the YUGE numbers of people who signed up to attend. Then the rally happened.

In the days leading up to Trump’s Saturday rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he and his allies ginned up expectations for a massive crowd with campaign officials telling CNN that more than a million people had registered to attend, and one local official stating they expected 100,000 to show up near the arena.

But those crowds didn’t appear as large as expected Saturday afternoon, leading to an abrupt change of plans by the campaign. A campaign source told CNN that the team was abandoning plans for the President to speak to an “overflow” area outside the arena in Tulsa where only a couple dozen people were standing near the outdoor stage less than two hours before the rally.

The campaign had been leaning toward canceling Trump’s remarks to the overflow crowd for fear of angering the President if there aren’t as many people there as he expected when he lands.

Is there hope? Is his support fading? Maybe. But then there’s this.

He managed to drink a glass of water and is so proud of himself — and the crowd roars! His base might be shrinking, but the ones he has left are zealous morons.

Of course, when I allow myself to consider the possibility he might lose in November, I have to remind myself that his replacement will be Biden.

There ain’t much hope left here.