Every town has got one

Spotted in Morris: crude, ugly “WE ALL MATTER” sign, dirty American flags and blue line flags, and to top it all off, “JESUS” on the roof. It really needs a few Trump signs for that special je ne sais quoi, but maybe those went down after the colossal failure.

I’m sure the neighbors appreciate the reduction in property values all around — it keeps the taxes lower, you know.

What else would you expect from royalty?

For some reason, this Oglaf cartoon seems particularly appropriate today.

Maybe an institution built around the notion of an intrinsic inherited superiority, which raises its members in a warm bath of entitlement and privilege, isn’t the best structure for producing an enlightened leadership? We should expect the products of such an upbringing to be, naturally, self-serving bigots?

I don’t know why that came to mind today.

(By the way, that Oglaf cartoon is a two-parter, but page 2 culminates in someone getting a good consensual pegging, as Oglafian humor tends to do.)

That’s how you do it

I am lukewarm on Biden, but I have to say this: he was really smart in his choice of press secretary. Jen Psaki is a star.

You would think a journalist would know better than to claim “a lot of Americans are saying” — especially when it turns out she has her notes in front of her that translates “a lot of Americans” into one stupid, dishonest, inept and particular American.

Darwin, Victorian

Adam Rutherford presents a balanced assessment of Darwin.

Darwin was a liberal, and an abolitionist, perhaps influenced by his taxidermy tutor in Edinburgh, a Guyanese man called John Edmonstone who had once been enslaved. But we must be honest in our assessment of him and his work. He was a man of his time, and The Descent of Man contains many passages that seriously jar today, being scientifically specious and politically outmoded. Darwin never mentions Edmonstone by name, only as a “full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate”. He speaks of how the “civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races”.

In the more elegant quotations, you may note the typically Victorian use of “man” to mean all humans. It is less forgivable given Darwin’s belief that women were intellectually inferior: “If men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women in many subjects, the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman.” At least part of his incomparable legacy is that we now know this to be incorrect.

That’s fair. Basically, everyone who lived over 50 years ago was stuffed to the gills with wrong ideas — wrong as we know them to be now, and 50 years from now the next generation will be appalled at what the majority believes now (“You went to church, and thought capitalism was good?”) — but at least he was in the vanguard of those trying to bring about a better world for all.

Still, when Bill & Ted fetch him back to the modern day in their telephone booth, I expect to be disappointed. I can imagine Darwin tut-tutting on Twitter about all those women in comic book movies, and suggesting, in the name of the betterment of mankind, that maybe those ladies should be home tending the children, and maybe they aren’t better than a dog anyways, what with all these modern ideas. Let’s keep him in the 19th century!

Hmm. Maybe we could use that telephone booth to send a lot of 21st century babblers back the 19th, where they’d be happier.

I scrutinize our local philosophy offerings with some trepidation

Every year, our philosophy department puts on a colloquium series on some topic in philosophy — this year, it’s the philosophy of conspiracy theories. Very timely! And I don’t see that our local conspiracy theorist faculty member is mentioned, and maybe not even involved, so there’s hope it might be good.

The first public lecture is tonight, titled “Conspiracy Theories and Public Trust”, over Zoom. I really don’t need to pile more on my plate, but maybe I can listen in while I’m grading papers.

What is the government for?

I had a phone conversation with my son, who currently lives in San Antonio, Texas, about the current situation there. They’re having rolling blackouts to deal with the cold and power failures, and oh boy, did his wife give us an earful. She’s disgusted with Texas — she’s from South Korea, and they’d never allow this kind of collapse of services in Korea. They spent a few hours standing in line to get food and water, and today they’re going to the Army base to try and take showers, since they haven’t had any running water for several days.

Meanwhile, Senator Ted Cruz fled the state to vacation in Cancun, Mexico. I’m surprised that Mexico would allow such riff-raff to cross their border. I am not surprised that Chickenshit Cruz would run away.

And (ex)-Mayor Tim Boyd of Colorado City, Texas, posted an amazing rant on Facebook that is so beautifully representative of how Republicans think.

The mayor of Colorado City, Texas has resigned after sparking outrage with a Facebook post where he told residents complaining of power outages during an unprecedented cold snap to “get off your ass and take care of your own family.” Tim Boyd, who announced his resignation Tuesday, also wrote that “if you don’t have electricity, you step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe.” “No one owes you or your family anything; nor is it the local governments responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Sink or swim, it’s your choice!” he wrote. The town, with a population of about 4,000, is located in Mitchell County, where many were left without power as record-setting cold weather batters much of the state. In a subsequent post, Boyd apologized, writing, “I was only making the statement that those folks that are too lazy to get up and fend for themselves but are capable should not be dealt a handout.”

Uh, what, exactly, is local government for? When I elect a mayor, or a city council, or a state representative, what I want is a good steward of the resources of my region, who will take responsibility and use those resources to help every citizen. Did this mayor regard his position as a sinecure, or an opportunity to bleed off what he could into his pocket? Maintaining the services that all of those people paid taxes for is not a handout! Even if a citizen did not pay taxes for reasons of poverty or disability, that does not mean you get to deny a responsibility to them. Even Boyd’s “apology” is an insult and a failure to recognize his mayoral obligations.

My daughter-in-law is correct. We should try to be more like South Korea, where the civic infrastructure is taken seriously.

Texans are screaming in outrage, so ol’ Chickenshit Ted is cutting his inappropriate vacation short. But of course he’s got to squeeze out a little extra chickenshittery: he’s asking for the Houston police to protect him from his constituents!

If you’re mourning the death of Rush Limbaugh, you’ve revealed how rotten you are

Some people are mourning the death of Rush Limbaugh.

Media Matters, you say? Thanks for reminding me.

Jesus, but he was a horrible, repulsive, nasty little man, the primordial archetype of the modern Republican.

For more than 30 years, Limbaugh’s show helped to set the agenda for hosts across the country, and it’s not clear who is likely to succeed him as talk radio’s unifying voice.

One possible replacement may ironically be the only Fox News prime-time host without radio experience. Tucker Carlson’s monologues are already frequently cited by right-wing radio hosts, and his emphasis on culture war topics — particularly his xenophobic, anti-trans, and misogynistic content — aligns well with standard talk radio fare.

But even Carlson is unlikely to match the hold Limbaugh had on a now-declining industry. Today, conservative talk radio is just one facet of a much larger right-wing media ecosystem, where television hosts and conservative writers all sound somewhat like Limbaugh. This ecosystem controls a political party whose latest president regularly sought the counsel of Fox News hosts.

Even without one of its central architects, a right-wing media machine built on outrage and cruelty will continue to deceive its audience long into the future.

He’s dead, but what’s still horrifying is that there are still right-wingers who praise him and think he was “funny”. That says a lot about his sycophants.