How deep into madness is the conservative agenda?

The new platform would call for:

• Requiring Texas students “to learn about the humanity of the preborn child,” including teaching that life begins at fertilization and requiring students to listen to live ultrasounds of gestating fetuses.
• Amending the Texas Constitution to remove the Legislature’s power “to regulate the wearing of arms, with a view to prevent crime.”
• Treating homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice,” language that was not included in the 2018 or 2020 party platforms.
• Deeming gender identity disorder “a genuine and extremely rare mental health condition,” requiring official documents to adhere to “biological gender,” and allowing civil penalties and monetary compensation to “de-transitioners” who have received gender-affirming surgery, which the platform calls a form of medical malpractice.
• Changing the U.S. Constitution to cement the number of Supreme Court justices at nine and repeal the 16th Amendment of 1913, which created the federal income tax.
• Ensuring “freedom to travel” by opposing Biden’s Clean Energy Plan and “California-style, anti-driver policies,” including efforts to turn traffic lanes over for use by pedestrians, cyclists and mass transit.
• Declaring “all businesses and jobs as essential and a fundamental right,” a response to COVID-19 mandates by Texas cities that required customers to wear masks and limited business hours.
• Abolishing the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, and guaranteeing the right to use alternatives to cash, including cryptocurrencies.

Don’t forget this!

My idiosyncratic criterion for how bad is getting that years ago, I was focused on the creationist perspective they were always pushing. They still are! The traditional (for creationists) “strengths and weaknesses” language is still being promoted in the official Texas GOP platform.

The thing is, now they’ve got so much more and so much worse evil advocacy in their platform that no one is bothering to mention the old stupidities. I’m actually kind of impressed at their restraint. They’re happy to come right out and say homosexuality is bad and they want to end gay marriage, the income tax, and that they oppose transgender normalizing curriculum and pronoun use, but they can’t quite summon the courage to openly push for a seven day, young earth creation…even though that’s what they want.

This is symbolic of the conflict: Citizens of the Russian Federation from the Free Russia Legion fighting for Ukraine captured Ukrainian citizens from the LDNR formations fighting for Russia.

In other words, the guys with the guns are Russians fighting on the Ukrainian side, and the two prisoners looking hangdog are Ukrainians fighting on the Russian side. It’s all very confusing.

I read the newspapers, and the impression I get is that Ukraine is getting desperate with serious ammunition shortages, while Russians are getting desperate over increasingly heavy casualties, as are the Ukrainians. Ukraine wants to join the EU, but France and Germany are dragging it out, saying it might take decades to negotiate. I don’t think they have decades. No one is going to win this war, are they?

I don’t have any, and I hope you don’t, either, since crypto is going ka-boom.

Bitcoin tumbled below $24,000 on Monday, hitting its lowest level since December 2020, as investors dump crypto amid a broader sell-off in risk assets.

Meanwhile, a crypto lending company called Celsius has paused withdrawals for its customers, sparking fears of contagion into the broader market.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency bitcoin dropped below the $24,000 mark, according to CoinDesk data, and traded around $23,575 at 7:45 a.m. on Wall Street.

Over the weekend and into Monday morning, more than $200 billion had been wiped off the entire cryptocurrency market. The cryptocurrency market capitalization fell below $1 trillion on Monday for the first time since February 2021, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

$200 billion gone? That’s gotta sting.

I did not watch the Jan. 6 Committee hearings last night, but my wife did. I’m suffering from a serious lack of capacity to sit in horror watching pretty much anything, and today I’m waiting on medical information. Yesterday I got an X-ray to check out the state of my spine, and now that they know I’ve got one (it’s leaked out that I’m a registered Democrat, so the existence of a spine had to be tested first), I’m awaiting a probable MRI and an informed treatment plan.

I’ve seen a bit of the hearings on video, and caught up with summaries in the newspapers. At least I’ve confirmed that Liz Cheney has a spine, I guess my party had to import a Republican to get one.

I like the tenor so far: this was a violent insurrection by traitors to the country, and the person responsible was the man at the top, Donald J. Trump. They’re definitely implying that the end result of these hearings is going to be justice for the wicked, and they’re doing a fine job of laying the groundwork of the magnitude of the crime, but I’ve been an American for so long that I’ve become cynical, so I’m anticipating a failure of nerve and a complete collapse of the case, followed by a feeble handslap and prizes and applause for the assholes who collaborated, but are now playing the role of pious witnesses (I see you, Bill Barr and Jared and Ivanka Trump, you ought to be in a holding cell right now.)

I’m just saying, I don’t expect the Democrats or the media to maintain a strong position. Liz Cheney might, though.

Tell me I’m wrong. I wish I had more faith in our political system.

I read Neoreaction a Basilisk a few years ago. It was a hard slog, trying to wade through all the neoreactionary conservative garbage, and stories about Thiel and Yudkowski and Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug. They’re all terrible writers and communicators who are only intelligible to people who have already been infected with their mind-virus. No, don’t try to defend Less Wrong to me — I tried giving them the benefit of the doubt long ago, and found myself sinking into a quicksand of nonsense generated by people who insisted they were the most logical and rational people on Earth.

I don’t generally recommend the book, because it’s very much a specialist tome. It’s like maybe a professional journal on the psychology of mass murderers is a good thing for experts to read, but for the rest of us, no thank you, we don’t need the nightmares. That’s Neoreaction a Basilisk, thorough and expert, but my god, it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of hemlock.

If you really want to savor the flavor, Tucker Carlson interviewed Yarvin. It’s amazing. Carlson starts by saying that pretty much all of modern philosophy is an exercise in narcissism, but Yarvin is one of the few philosophers who sees through all the liberal nonsense. Yarvin is not a philosopher. He’s a software engineer with no expertise in philosophy at all, which tells you something about Carlson honesty and neoreactionary pretense.

Maybe this interview with the author, Elizabeth Sandifer is enough of a taste to let you know how awful and horrible and inane the whole neoreactionary movement is, without listening to pair of pompous asses on Fox News.

Her summary of Yarvin:

I think that there is a long tradition of right-wing “philosophy” that’s really popular among right-wing nutters and as soon as it gets outside that little bubble, it gets absolutely shot to hell by other philosophers. And I think to describe Yarvin in terms he would probably take as a compliment—and I very much mean as an insult—he’s kind of a modern day Ayn Rand.

So his broad philosophical idea is he’s just really obsessed with order. He thinks that order is the absolute best thing that can happen. Chaos, unruliness, rebelliousness—all these things are inherently very, very bad.

And so his belief, as he expressed back in his Moldbug days—and he’s not really backed down off of it in any substantive way—is that basically, California should secede, become its own nation, and simply impose a CEO with monarchic, godlike powers. At the time, he suggested Steve Jobs would be a particularly good pick for the absolute monarch of California and that the purpose of owning California and running it as a corporate monarchy is explicitly for profit. That was also a part of Yarvin’s philosophical vision for what the world should do.

I don’t want to pin him too much with the slightly satirical and deliberately over-the-top clickbait-y idea of making Steve Jobs king of California—that is him using a rhetorical device to get attention. But he does very, very much believe that rich elites should be in absolute control of everything, and people who are not landowners and do not have a ton of money should basically be thought of as the equivalent of slaves.

I think you can see why he appeals to authoritarians. I love this pithy summary of the whole movement.

To engage in Alt-Right thinking is to turn oneself into a vacuous skinsuit animated by raw stupidity. There is literally not a single shred of non-stupidity in the entire thing. Mencius Moldbug, stupid. Milo Yiannopoulos, stupid. Donald Trump, Vox Day, stupid, stupid, stupid. MAGA and The Daily Stormer are stupid. Every single detail of every single aspect of this entire cratering shitstorm in which the human race seems hell bent on going extinct is absolutely fucking stupid.

Yes! That is the entire right wing right now. It’s true of Republicans, creationists, and flat-earthers. Tucker Carlson, stupid. All the idiots saying we can’t enact reasonable gun control, stupid. The people demanding that we punish women for getting abortions, stupid. Billionaires, stupid.

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If you get through that interview, you might also enjoy Sandifer’s deconstruction of Slate Star Codex, yet another scion of the poisonous bowels of Less Wrong.

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The stupidity might be congenital.

I read this story and thought it was too stupid to be The Onion, but maybe was pointless enough to the Babylon Bee…but no! It’s from the Daily Beast!

Far-right provocateur and former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos has found a new gig: Capitol Hill intern for MAGA firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Yiannopoulos, 37, posted to Telegram on Monday morning a photo of what appeared to be a newly issued congressional badge, placed atop a Louis Vuitton briefcase.

“I’ve finally been persuaded out of retirement,” wrote the British right-wing media troll. “But my skills are a bit rusty, so the best role I could land was an unpaid internship with a friend. Pray for me!”

He added: “Mummy always said I’d end up in government.”

Yiannopoulos didn’t respond to a request for comment. But in a statement provided via her spokesperson, Rep. Greene confirmed to The Daily Beast that Yiannopoulos is interning in her office.

“So I have an intern that was raped by a priest as a young teen, was gay, has offended everyone at some point, turned his life back to Jesus and Church, and changed his life,” Greene told The Daily Beast. “Great story!”

I had to check other sources, because this is nuts. Mediaite? Check. Vice? Check. Newsweek? Check. Forbes? Check. Salon? Check. Washington Post? Check.

There’s no avoiding the truth here. The circus is in town, and the clowns have set up shop in the capitol.

I picture all the writers at the satire sites throwing up their heads in despair, and crying at their desks.

I don’t know that the 21st century reality is any better.

Should I print this out and add it to my grandchildren’s Richard Scarry books, or do you think it would be too scary?

It does do a good job of preparing them for what they’re getting into.