JHUS Staging

Blog

  • We Can’t Be Nice About Any Of This Anymore

    Duh.

    Lately it seems like I’ve been on a bit of a tear, as they say.  There’s been some status messages, and even a short video, all coming back to the core idea we’ve got to stop explaining basic things to people who completely understand them but pretend not to because the pretense allows them to continue engaging in unacceptable behavior.

    I don’t mean to ever discourage reading or genuine intellectual curiosity.  I absolutely believe that understanding what the facts are is critically important, and that of necessity that means understanding what a fact is, is pretty important too. 

    I’m just over the constant going back and forth with people who act like they don’t get it.

    It sucks up too much energy.

    Explaining why black lives matter and what that phrase means when it’s been under public discussion since 2013 is waste of time, as is arguing back and forth over what groups where and why “own” what “interest” in whatever related commercial trademarks there may be and how they’re used and why.  First and foremost the conversation must begin with the basic understanding that black lives matter.  Full stop.  Anything beyond that is nonsense and argument, because anything beyond that means on some level and to some degree you are willing enough to compromise that basic idea to bother arguing about it.

    Same thing with explaining why Confederate statues don’t have any place in the United States, same thing with explaining people why they should wear a mask in the midst of an ongoing deadly pandemic, on and on. We just expend so much time and energy on people not to educate them but to chip away at the idea that their position has some social acceptability, that we can’t ever move forward because these sandbaggers keep siphoning all our energy into just not going backwards any faster.

    Manners?

    Green-shaded map with scaled solors to show which states have more or less difference in gap between average wages for women and men. pay rate.
    The darker colors have smaller gaps; the darkest, the *smallest* gap is about 10% (women make a little over 90% what men do), and the lightest – in Utah, women make less than 70% of men on average.

    Meanwhile women are still making 70 or 80 cents on the dollar, black people are still getting shot by cops on an almost daily basis if not more than daily, there are still thousands of kids in cages in the middle of a global pandemic and we’re doing worse than nothing to help them including losing them entirely.

    I’m really not trying to be rude about it, but at this point who’s more rude here? The person who is continuing to act as though they don’t understand the arguments why human beings should be human beings and we shouldn’t put up statues to people who bought and sold human beings and fought against the interests of human freedom because that is neither honorable nor laudable?  Or the person who says “enough, we’re moving on now?”

    Who’s being more disrespectful, the person who refuses to wear a simple facemask, repeatedly demonstrated to have zero to negligible ill effects, in the middle of a deadly global pandemic that’s already killed at least – depending on your source – 125-130-ish thousand people just in the United States at the time I’m writing this, and probably many more? Or is the person who firmly insists we’re done arguing about it now and have the best guidance possible, and that’s WEAR A MASK WHEN YOU GO OUT, being rude by their firm insistence?   Who dies in which direction?  How many cases are there, EVER, of people dying because they were wearing a mask?  Right.  Wear the damn thing. If you’ve got reason beyond selfish and spurious hypochondria not to, you really WILL have the advice of a doctor because you’ve already got other serious problems.

    In the vast majority of cases that first person is simply not being honest. It’s silly that we keep having to say the same things over and over as if each individual person is always hearing it for the first time. For instance I’m quite sure that my friend’s friend, whose remark started the comment that became this article, has heard all of these arguments before. He just doesn’t want to accept them. He can’t find a reasoned basis in objective fact and ethical behavior to support his position so he just pretends not to understand the arguments against it.  Maybe that’s a conscious decision, maybe it’s not, I don’t know the man well enough to say.  But that’s what’s happening.

    At some level that stops even being about questions of racism or sexism or xenophobia or bigotry, and just starts being about personal character and integrity.  I know people are going to find that offensive and outrageous and insulting, but it’s more offensive and outrageous and insulting to continue to insist that we don’t understand the basic realities of life whenever they’re inconvenient for us.

    Consequences

    Worse, it’s deadly.

    This whole “I don’t get it” game is half the problem in a lot of places right now, where you’re talking about coronavirus or gender issues or racial issues or economic disparity issues or any of it.  Half of any of those problems at least is people who just insist on pretending not to get it because if they admit they understand the arguments they have to admit that they’ve been wrong. Nobody likes to do that, so we’ve developed this elaborate set of communications to justify not doing it.

    That has to stop now. That’s really what all of this is teaching us.

    In another example, there’s a big kerfuffle up the road from me in Allendale, Michigan over the removal of a “confederate statue,” arguably more a civil war memorial featuring a generic confederate soldier.

    That statue, though, was placed in 1998. It’s less historically relevant than The Simpsons, Nirvana, or Baywatch. And, it’s in Michigan. Nobody from this state fought for the breakaway traitorous republic; the statue doesn’t represent anyone who has any sort of tie here.

    But obviously it must be important, after all apparently nobody in that town heard about the Civil War until 133 years after it was over and that’s why we’ve got to keep the statue!

    Top of Allendate, Michigan civil war memorial statue showing a Confederate and Union soldier with their backs to each other looking into the distance in different directions, each carrying a flag that faces the viewer.
    Top feature of Allendale MI civil war memorial statue. Statue photos courtesy reddit.com user u/resister_sister

    No more of that nonsense. It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time, and it’s a bunch of dishonest and disingenuous people complaining about things that don’t even have the slightest significance to them other than having something to complain about.

    In the greater part, right now especially, they are complaining simply because other people whose oppression these people have benefited from for centuries are demanding an end to that oppression.  The loudest subgroup of those voices, those with legitimate grievances that remain ignored, are those who descended from or look like the people who have been largely enslaved and dehumanized throughout the entire history of this country.  And those people are saying “you see this?  This is what we’re talking about!”

    That scares people whose current state of privileged comfort is in some way is a product of their privilege and social standing they were born to and other irrelevancies like their gender or the color of their skin.  They are facing the reality that pretty much their entire way of thinking is wrong and cruel and intolerable and it must stop. They’ve lived so long with privilege, they think they’re entitled to it.  They’re afraid they can’t compete without the advantages privilege brings, against those who have historically been denied those privileges.  So when the oppressed rise up and say “you see this?” the response of the oppressors is “I don’t know what you mean,” and they keep right on going.

    Solutions

    So the privileged are scared again because their privilege is threatened and they imagine that’s a threat to their comfort.  That’s where all this comes from, right, is this stupid zero-sum thinking where in order for me to have, you have to do without.  Some people, most of them simply mislead and others deliberately misleading, push that way of thinking to rationalize their own greed or self-interest above and beyond others. It’s uncomfortable for people who have defined themselves around a core creed to realize that it’s cruel and harmful, not only to those against whom it is directed but also against those who create it and perpetuate it.  They don’t want to change because it’s not comfortable and they think it means they’ll lose something.

    That, my friends, is just too bad.  Those privileged folks are just gonna have to handle themselves, because if they continue behaving that way and treating the problem that way, they may just end up right.  Problem is, so will we all, again, and that crap has to end or we’re going to end.  So the traditionally privileged can just go find find those bootstraps they’re always telling the oppressed to pull themselves up by. Because the world is moving on, with them or without them.

    The truly stupid thing is, it’s not even really “taking away” anything; it’s just making sure other people have access to the same opportunities and “rights” even if they’re *not* born into privilege &c.

    Those people who are afraid they can’t compete on a level playing field rely on the power of their privilege to continuing to sabotage the game.

    Photo of Allendale civil war memorial showing a black child, probably male, crouched between the backs of the legs of the Union and Confederate soldiers, holding a tablet that says "Freedom to Slaves Jan 5 1863."
    All of this is to say nothing of the fact that the statue itself perpetuates the idea that freedom of black Americans is a gift from white men rather than their right as human beings.

    The problem is – and this is why I’ve been saying for years that “kumbaya liberalism is dead” – those same people have learned that they can manipulate the good nature of people who are decent.  They can claim injury where there is none, or ignorance that is really saccharine stupidity, and rely on The Good Guys™ to continue being gentle.

    It’s time we faced the difficult reality that the long term result of that has been a lot of good, dead people and a lot of live crappy ones, and it’s quickly becoming an existential threat to the species.

    As I’ve paraphrased Heinlein so many times: survival and propagation of the species is the only universal morality.  Ultimately, as a totality of human consciousness and existence, anything threatening that single universal morality will be eliminated, one way or another, just as happens with Darwinian selection for any other species, to the greatest extent that can possibly be exerted by that totality.

    What makes that humane and ethically acceptable – or what defines the point at which it becomes so – is the effect of individual human will.  At some level, all else being equal, we can each choose to act in ways that benefit or detract from the universal morality.  “Lower” life forms don’t always have a choice about that.

    In the US and other nations we’ve built entire systems that detract from the sole universal human morality, and we’ve insisted on treating the very things about those systems which detract from that fundamental drive to survive as though they are themselves required for our survival.

    We have, rather than elevating and empowering human life, chosen to subjugate and restrict it for our own material benefit.

    That has to stop, and we can either choose to stop it or the greater will of the collective species will absolutely act to stop it one way or another.

    Conclusions

    When our self-serving idiocy begins to work against the universal morality of other species and we refuse to put an end to it ourselves, those species do their best to fight back.

    When we act against the universal morality of great numbers of species, we act against the universal morality of all life, and all life will work together to ensure we can’t keep doing that.

    This is how all of this crap keeps going on, every bit of it. Including coronavirus, even including an alarming percentage of seismic activity in the last fifty years, to say nothing of the natural disasters that are made worse by our destruction of the environment, and it just keeps going and it all starts with individuals thinking clearly and ethically. Individuals who make a deliberate choice to refuse to at least make the genuine effort to *try* to do either one of those things are making a deliberate choice to die.

    We no longer have the option of first considering the hurt feelings of the privileged.  Especially when it’s mostly adults acting like little kids, being afraid to remove a band-aid and see the healing where a wound used to be.  None of this is really going to “hurt” anybody, beyond the blow to their ego in finding out they’ve got to actually start living up to their own self-image, they’re not allowed to keep faking it anymore.

    The coddling of these egos has to stop, and it has to stop now.  It’s killing us, in very large numbers, and those numbers are going to get larger still before they start shrinking.  Aside from basic human selfishness in the immediate sense, what mostly keeps this going is that arguing over these things is a multibillion dollar industry, and in spite of the generalized damage is inflicts on society as a whole, it props up the power and lifestyles of the ownership class.

    But if we don’t change what we’re doing, NOW, they’re not going to start shrinking until so many people have died that the human population is no longer a threat to the rest of the world or itself.

    We can no longer, as a matter of that universal human morality I keep talking about, continue to be polite to the stupid.  Yes, there are going to be people who genuinely don’t get it, but that’s what education is for.  That’s ignorance and it can be fixed.  I’m talking about stupidity, which is willful ignorance or pretense to it.  There are many more people who get it just fine and pretend not to – they play stupid – like the people who get a fake “emotional support animal” just because they notice people with real ones and are pissed off that someone is getting something “special” and they’re not.

    The protection of these people’s feelings has to end, or it’s going to end us.  It sounds cruel, but it isn’t.  What’s cruel is the price everyone has to pay to keep propping all this BS up.

    Sorry.

  • The Ownership Class

    “Ownership class” is a phrase I use fairly often, and even in doing so I understand that it can be ambiguously interpreted.  For that reason, I’ve added this definition to the JH Lexicon, to be defined as follow:

    The “ownership class” is not simply filled with the people who own things; rather it refers to the very, very small group – on the order of no more than a few hundred individuals, give or take at any particular point, and depending on how you’re measuring – who control most of the world’s wealth.

    These people control everything from institutions of higher learning (and on an ever-greater scale, primary education) to the media where we get the information we’re supposed to be learning to understand in school but aren’t.  As comedian and philosopher George Carlin pointed out as have others, it is simply not in the interests of this small group of people to have a generally informed, educated, and engaged population.  That sort of person challenges their power and can take it away.

    So they control the information, Orwell-style, to keep us distracted from their mendacity.  Part of that is ensuring that we’re always fighting and competing amongst ourselves, often over superfluous notions like religion that have no substantive impact on the Universal Morality.

    As mentioned above, in any given context “they” could refer to as few as the half-dozen or so people who own more of the world’s wealth between them than the “bottom” half of the total human population, or it may refer to as many as a few hundred people who make the most money from and control the behaviors of the largest corporations in the world.  It is not any one ethnic group, skin color, religion, gender, or sexuality per se, although the tables have been tilted largely in favor of some people based on those considerations.  It’s about individuals, making individual decisions including the decision to influence, for selfless or selfish means, the decisions of others.

  • The “Universal Ethic” or “Universal Morality”

    I often use the phrase “universal morality” in my writing, or refer to that morality.  It’s a paraphrase of a quote by Robert Heinlein, to wit:

    All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can — and must — be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a “perfect society” on any foundation other than “Women and children first!” is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly — and no doubt will keep on trying. – Time Enough For Love

    In the context he was writing, “racial” here doesn’t refer to “ethnic” but rather the “human race.”  While I don’t agree with everything the man wrote, his ability to distill ideas was remarkable.  Even as his work and characterizations seem more archaic and even offensive with time, that very fact is because we are finally internalizing realities that in some cases Heinlein was once very much ahead of when the rest of the world was behind.

    This basic truth, that human morality can and ultimately must boil down to “what keeps the species alive and propagating,” leads to other inevitable realities.  And it is not merely “a” basic truth but the basic truth of the human species or any other.  To whatever extent possible, both we internally as a species and all the other species to whatever extent it is possible for them, work to ensure out own perpetuation, and one of the important ways we do that is through strength in numbers.

    However, with human beings the more educated and affluent they are, the more “necessary work” can be done by fewer actual human beings, because they will continue to develop technology both for production and recreation, which means they’ve got things to do both for fun and to help ensure their ability to survive, other than reproduce.

    Over time as the species becomes better educated and more affluent, ideas like human rights, gender equality, women not having to be enslaved to their reproductive ability, humans not treated as “less than” because they own a smaller piece of the planet’s wealth or they have different skin color or shape to their facial features or texture to their hair, all become both more self-evident and more imperative to pursue to ensure the further progress, survival, and propagation of the species.

    However, the paradigms that are now beginning to seriously crumble as I write this in the early summer of 2020 rely on aspects of inequality and prejudice and privilege and entitlement to perpetuate themselves to the detriment of this universal morality, and those who are unable to or refuse to abandon them thus ultimately will be a terminal subspecies.  I don’t say they “should be eliminated” or any such provocative nonsense, and that’s important.  They are being eliminated right now, by natural occurrence often brought on as the direct consequences of their own behavior, and the longer a subset of us exist who continue to try to avoid this reality, the longer it will be until we can truly progress forward as a species in the never-ending pursuit of survival and propagation.

    Nobody’s “doing that” or enjoying the fact that it’s happening; it’s the natural consequence of us continuing to work against our own interests as well as those of the other species on this planet whose lives are critical to our own one way or another.  It will continue until we stop acting that way, because we are a threat to the universal morality not only within our own species but for every other, and those species together create a discrete system of life which also has its own collective survival and propagation as its number one universal priority on which all other activity is based at every level, and they act the same way.

    That’s where the viruses come in and even the earthquakes from fracking.  Literally we’re breaking the planet for everything, and everything including ourselves absolutely will come together, one way or the other, being it by some “natural” agent like a pandemic or disaster, or “man-made” through war or greed, to mitigate our influence on the rest of the planet to a survivable nature and level.

    Because at all levels of life human and otherwise, the one universal and fundamental morality is and must always be the survival and propagation of life.

  • Support Historical Statues (Fundraiser)

    In light of recent events, all the protesting and complaining about the removal of confederate-themed statuary from various US cities has convinced me that the statue defenders are right.  It’s just plain wrong for a bunch of hand-wringing, pearl-clutching liberal pantywaists to try to remove our glorious history by destroying monuments to a breakaway republic that attempted to destroy the United States in the name of owning people.

    How could anyone possibly be expected to remember the glorious and noble battle to own black people if we don’t have statues of random traitors scattered about our cities?  Why, pretty soon they’ll be tearing down statues of Christopher Columbus and we’ll forget he discovered our beautiful country!  (*He didn’t.  He never set foot in what became the continental United States.  He was also an incredible dick.  And there were plenty of people here when he got here, as the Vikings almost certainly found out five hundred years before Columbus did.)

    So with that in mind, I’ve decided to start a campaign to place this statue of Osama bin Laden in the 200 largest cities in the United States!  Sure, some people might think we’re glorifying a radical terrorist who killed thousands of Americans in an attempt to end the United States – just like those goofy Antifa liberals think that’s what we’re doing with confederate statues – but REAL AMERICANS know the truth:  if we don’t put these statues up, pretty soon people are going to forget all about 9-11 and IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN!

    TRUE PATRIOTS JOIN NOW!  For your contribution over five hundred dollars, we will inscribe YOUR NAME as a TRUE AMERICAN PATRIOT at the bottom of a statue in the city you select, from the list below:

    New York New York 8,323,340
    2 Los Angeles California 4,015,940
    3 Chicago Illinois 2,694,240
    4 Houston Texas 2,340,890
    5 Phoenix Arizona 1,703,080
    6 Philadelphia Pennsylvania 1,591,800
    7 San Antonio Texas 1,578,030
    8 San Diego California 1,447,100
    9 Dallas Texas 1,382,270
    10 San Jose California 1,033,670
    11 Austin Texas 988,218
    12 Fort Worth Texas 932,116
    13 Jacksonville Florida 926,371
    14 Columbus Ohio 922,223
    15 Charlotte North Carolina 905,318
    16 San Francisco California 896,047
    17 Indianapolis Indiana 875,929
    18 Seattle Washington 783,137
    19 Denver Colorado 734,134
    20 Washington District of Columbia 720,687
    21 Boston Massachusetts 710,195
    22 El Paso Texas 685,575
    23 Nashville Tennessee 673,167
    24 Detroit Michigan 667,272
    25 Portland Oregon 664,103
    26 Las Vegas Nevada 662,000
    27 Oklahoma City Oklahoma 655,407
    28 Memphis Tennessee 647,374
    29 Louisville Kentucky 624,890
    30 Baltimore Maryland 590,479
    31 Milwaukee Wisconsin 585,589
    32 Albuquerque New Mexico 561,188
    33 Tucson Arizona 553,871
    34 Fresno California 538,195
    35 Mesa Arizona 527,666
    36 Atlanta Georgia 523,738
    37 Sacramento California 521,769
    38 Kansas City Missouri 505,198
    39 Miami Florida 486,388
    40 Colorado Springs Colorado 485,946
    41 Raleigh North Carolina 481,958
    42 Omaha Nebraska 470,702
    43 Long Beach California 463,218
    44 Virginia Beach Virginia 447,841
    45 Minneapolis Minnesota 437,069
    46 Oakland California 435,224
    47 Tampa Florida 413,704
    48 Arlington Texas 402,762
    49 Tulsa Oklahoma 396,543
    50 Bakersfield California 390,233
    51 New Orleans Louisiana 390,128
    52 Wichita Kansas 388,771
    53 Aurora Colorado 382,742
    54 Cleveland Ohio 379,233
    55 Anaheim California 352,911
    56 Honolulu Hawaii 342,933
    57 Riverside California 336,285
    58 San Juan Puerto Rico 331,165
    59 Santa Ana California 330,389
    60 Henderson Nevada 330,084
    61 Lexington Kentucky 328,690
    62 Corpus Christi Texas 325,406
    63 Stockton California 316,996
    64 St. Paul Minnesota 311,895
    65 Cincinnati Ohio 306,487
    66 Irvine California 303,956
    67 Greensboro North Carolina 299,946
    68 Pittsburgh Pennsylvania 294,860
    69 Lincoln Nebraska 293,905
    70 St. Louis Missouri 293,792
    71 Orlando Florida 291,739
    72 Plano Texas 288,539
    73 Anchorage Alaska 285,634
    74 Newark New Jersey 282,862
    75 Durham North Carolina 282,737
    76 Chula Vista California 277,289
    77 St. Petersburg Florida 271,842
    78 Jersey City New Jersey 271,099
    79 Fort Wayne Indiana 270,989
    80 Toledo Ohio 270,651
    81 Chandler Arizona 268,675
    82 Laredo Texas 264,703
    83 Madison Wisconsin 264,030
    84 Scottsdale Arizona 262,222
    85 Lubbock Texas 260,823
    86 Reno Nevada 260,258
    87 Gilbert Arizona 258,935
    88 Buffalo New York 255,244
    89 Glendale Arizona 254,500
    90 North Las Vegas Nevada 253,923
    91 Winston-Salem North Carolina 251,762
    92 Chesapeake Virginia 248,106
    93 Garland Texas 246,627
    94 Irving Texas 243,738
    95 Hialeah Florida 243,208
    96 Norfolk Virginia 242,234
    97 Fremont California 239,525
    98 Boise Idaho 234,576
    99 Paradise Nevada 233,689
    100 Richmond Virginia 232,055
    101 Arlington Virginia 231,803
    102 Spokane Washington 223,266
    103 Tacoma Washington 222,603
    104 Modesto California 218,758
    105 Fontana California 218,573
    106 Des Moines Iowa 217,891
    107 San Bernardino California 217,671
    108 Baton Rouge Louisiana 216,701
    109 Frisco Texas 215,060
    110 Salt Lake City Utah 213,367
    111 Moreno Valley California 212,992
    112 Oxnard California 212,715
    113 Santa Clarita California 210,543
    114 Birmingham Alabama 208,940
    115 McKinney Texas 208,487
    116 Port St. Lucie Florida 206,410
    117 Fayetteville North Carolina 205,646
    118 Grand Rapids Michigan 205,289
    119 Glendale California 204,765
    120 Rochester New York 203,792
    121 Huntsville Alabama 202,910
    122 Amarillo Texas 202,028
    123 Huntington Beach California 201,941
    124 Spring Valley Nevada 199,722
    125 Cape Coral Florida 199,503
    126 Tallahassee Florida 199,205
    127 Yonkers New York 199,021
    128 Aurora Illinois 198,870
    129 Grand Prairie Texas 198,442
    130 Akron Ohio 198,148
    131 Little Rock Arkansas 197,371
    132 Montgomery Alabama 197,282
    133 Overland Park Kansas 196,636
    134 Augusta Georgia 196,303
    135 Tempe Arizona 194,218
    136 Sunrise Manor Nevada 192,934
    137 Knoxville Tennessee 191,060
    138 Sioux Falls South Dakota 190,519
    139 Columbus Georgia 189,296
    140 Mobile Alabama 186,804
    141 Ontario California 186,653
    142 Vancouver Washington 186,516
    143 Worcester Massachusetts 186,433
    144 Fort Lauderdale Florida 184,599
    145 Chattanooga Tennessee 184,143
    146 Shreveport Louisiana 183,819
    147 Brownsville Texas 183,748
    148 Peoria Arizona 180,219
    149 Rancho Cucamonga California 180,031
    150 Salem Oregon 179,944
    151 Providence Rhode Island 178,901
    152 Eugene Oregon 178,329
    153 Elk Grove California 177,406
    154 Santa Rosa California 177,132
    155 Newport News Virginia 177,064
    156 Pembroke Pines Florida 177,058
    157 Oceanside California 176,950
    158 Cary North Carolina 175,102
    159 Fort Collins Colorado 172,862
    160 Corona California 171,213
    161 Garden Grove California 170,328
    162 Springfield Missouri 169,552
    163 Alexandria Virginia 165,748
    164 Bayamon Puerto Rico 165,383
    165 Clarksville Tennessee 164,496
    166 Enterprise Nevada 164,314
    167 Hayward California 161,314
    168 Jackson Mississippi 160,080
    169 Lakewood Colorado 158,660
    170 Lancaster California 158,627
    171 Hollywood Florida 158,239
    172 Palmdale California 156,299
    173 Salinas California 155,619
    174 Springfield Massachusetts 155,472
    175 Bellevue Washington 154,647
    176 Killeen Texas 153,973
    177 Kansas City Kansas 153,600
    178 Macon County Georgia 152,519
    179 Sunnyvale California 152,427
    180 Pomona California 152,405
    181 Escondido California 152,245
    182 Pasadena Texas 151,891
    183 Murfreesboro Tennessee 151,066
    184 Naperville Illinois 149,196
    185 Joliet Illinois 148,227
    186 Paterson New Jersey 145,871
    187 Savannah Georgia 145,754
    188 Rockford Illinois 145,020
    189 Midland Texas 145,012
    190 McAllen Texas 144,279
    191 Waco Texas 144,015
    192 Roseville California 143,921
    193 Torrance California 143,912
    194 Thornton Colorado 143,890
    195 Metairie Louisiana 143,481
    196 Miramar Florida 143,219
    197 Bridgeport Connecticut 143,010
    198 Olathe Kansas 142,841
    199 Denton Texas 142,173
    200 Surprise Arizona 142,049

    Act now, we’re limited to only five inscriptions per city!

    (Disclaimer.  This is obviously a joke at the expense of idiots.  However if you would like to contribute to keeping me in a position to continue creating new work, you can find out more about how to do so here.  Thanks!)

  • It’s Not Over. Not Even Close.

    [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSRCcMlTxls[/embedyt]

    Breonna Taylor’s murderers have not been charged. The accessories to that murder are still employed.

    The man who fractured Martin Gugino’s skull is out on bail, along with the only other officer of dozens who witnessed the assault and did nothing.

    We still have an avowed and publicly declared fascist controlling the executive branch, and scores of not-so-publicly declared fascists in Congress, to say nothing of a judiciary that has been filled with rot.

    22 states still have no legal age requirement for marriage, with parental consent – “parental consent” being a mechanism used for thousands of years to legitimize pedophilia.

    8 states still forbid atheists from holding office.

    There are still uncountable millions without health insurance – 44 million *before* COVID, and untold millions more since. Health care is still treated as a benefit of employment rather than a human right.

    Profit interests still hold power – in some cases nearly absolute power – in our prisons and criminal justice system, our schools, our hospitals, and our elections.

    Women still aren’t paid the same as men.

    Thousands of police with records of violence, including both domestic violence and illegal assaults of captives, continue to be employed.

    Nothing, still, has been done to help the over half a million homeless people, including about 18 thousand unaccompanied, unsheltered minors, in this country – again, pre-covid numbers.

    Nothing, still, has been done to help the 38 million Americans living in poverty – pre-covid.

    Legal abortions are still nearly impossible to obtain in vast stretches of our nation.

    Most states still do not have laws requiring mandatory termination of parental rights in cases of rape.

    Hundreds of police officers have walked off their jobs in recent weeks in protest against demands for accountability and transparency related to abuse of police power.

    Thousands of pathetic, cowardly, entitled, overgrown infants continue to terrorize the streets of this nation with terrorist displays of deadly force and threat of violence against any and all who threaten the totalitarian oligarchy these supplicant bootlickers think is going to benefit them as long as they’ve got enough guns and MAGA hats.

    Oh, and in case we’re not noticing, COVID-19’s “second wave” is happening before the first one was over because these same sniveling lickspittles can’t stop kissing their own asses long enough to grasp what “deadly pandemic” means.  It probably doesn’t help that, under the guise of “freedom of speech,” much of the media and even the “president” himself continue to insist it’s not a thing, because if it was they’d lose money.

    The struggle, as they say, is not merely “not over.” It’s barely begun. It’s not going to be easy. Some of us may lose our lives in this struggle, as some of us already have, to say nothing of grievous and permanently disabling injuries at the hands of militarized police and white fascist bigots who have, in at least some cases, been coddled by police rather than properly arrested and charged.

    Some of us will become estranged (or further estranged) from family. Some of us will end marriages. Some of us will lose our livelihoods for speaking out. I personally have been targeted by fake “Antifa” trolls (and they ARE fake, at least one of them is well known to me and has been stalking me for decades) who outed my home address, putting nine other innocent people in danger of violence at the hands of bigots and fascists who might not like what I have to say.

    None of us wants to go through that, and yet…we must. We must because decency and compassion demand it. We must because the very concepts of human freedom and dignity are at stake. We must because until the oligarchy that controls most of the planet is crushed into a bad memory, we are all a moment’s notice away from returning to the darkest of all imaginable dark ages, a world in which all the evils of the past combine with the technology of the future to create a dystopian hellscape that Orwell couldn’t have imagined in his worst nightmares.

    “It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here? What better time than now?”

    We MUST keep fighting.  MUST.  It’s been a minute since anyone in this country had to truly and seriously consider whether they’re willing to risk their lives to uphold and advance the cause of human decency, compassion, and dignity; to wonder if they might just end up being a martyr for the causes of justice, equality, prosperity, and peace.

    That time is now.  That place is now.  We who cherish genuine freedom and who seek genuine progress are looking directly into the eye of our moment in history.  One hundred years from now, either this moment will be taught as the moment when we finally decided to start living up to our own hype…or it won’t be taught at all.

  • Fear, Part 2

    (This article originally appeared on my site in September 2013.  It has been slightly updated for re-publication.)

    Scared_Child_at_Nighttime_800h by Pink Sherbet Photography via Wikimedia Commons. Resized from originalDon’t be afraid.

    Don’t be afraid to see where this is going.

    Don’t be afraid to follow the trail to the end.  It’ll be worth it.

    As long as I have memories, I’ve had a “problem” with wearing my heart on my sleeve.  I think that’s a universal metaphor, but in case anyone’s not familiar with it:  that is to say I don’t hide what I think and feel.  I’m very straightforward, blunt.

    You might notice that I put that word problem in quotes, in the first paragraph above.  Not because it’s a euphemism, but because I have never, ever understood – and never will – why so very many people are so embarrassed to be human in public.  Why is “this is how I feel” ever a “problem?”

    One of the reasons I think I developed this behavior – and if you think it’s something that only exists on Facebook you definitely haven’t been paying attention – is a simple matter of social self-defense:  Why would I want to hang out with or be friends with or really want anything to do with someone who doesn’t care what I think or how I feel?

    Part of it is also this:  the most effective solution to evil and ignorance is to drag it out into the light and call it what it is.  I “put myself out there.”  And when someone turns their back, I know they weren’t really my kind of people in the first place.

    When someone decides it’s “entertaining” that I’m angry or hurt or feeling in need of external validation or broke?  To ridicule someone else’s difficulty or pain?  That’s a giant red flag, to anyone:  this person sucks.  This person, the way this person thinks and acts, how this person treats other people when they believe there are no consequences…it is a Bad Thing.

    But it’s not just a bad thing, It is the Bad Thing.  Absolutely everything that is twisted up and broken in this world can be described by the same words, phrases, and concepts.  From the schoolyard bully to the world’s most brutal dictators, there are unifying elements:

    • lack of empathy
    • lack of reason
    • high degree of self-absorption; not “I think about myself a lot,” but “I think the world around me is mine, and if what I do has consequences in anybody else’s life, too bad for them.”
    • low self-esteem expressed as a driving need to control every aspect of the world around them.
    • absolute intolerance of criticism.

    I’m sure there are others, but I’m writing off the top of my head.  Whether it’s the neighborhood frotteur or the guy pushing the big red buttons, they all share those real  “problems.”

    So the problem is, right now the world is defined on those people’s terms – and make no mistake, those people are just as many “liberals” as “conservatives” as “independents” as “libertarians” as whatever.  Your favorite social group is not exempt.

    When you allow yourself to absorb the output of those people, you start to become like them.  It spreads.

    And it’s killing us.

    In a trillion tiny cuts and a billion gaping wounds, it’s killing us off.

    They have defined the rules of the game, those rules are designed to give them an exponentially increasing advantage in the game, and they have taught you that the only way to be happy and fulfilled in life is to play the game their way…knowing that you can never possibly win.

    People wonder why I’m so adamant about not doing things like swiping other people’s original content, pretending to be a news site when you’re really a glorified RSS feed, being certain that when you present yourself as an information source you are an information source.  Not a PR campaign for a political ideology or a ring toss on the back fairway of the political carnival for your own amusement and profit.

    Because you see, it’s all the same thing.  It’s all the same lack of empathy, the same lack of reason, the same self-centeredness, the same low core self-image, the same refusal to ever admit outwardly that they might be wrong about something; they might even be jerks.

    They might be exactly the kind of jerks a lot of people reading them think they’re fighting against.

    And they don’t care, and they make the rules.

    And they’re wrong.

    Those of you who read my Facebook page or blog regularly, or have for a while, know that I’ve had intermittent problems with various kinds of harassment from these sorts of people.  My regular FB page readers will know what I mean – the “get a job,” “get a haircut,” post multi-terabyte screed examining my life crowd, the little group of trolls and the folks who run the BS “news” sites.

    Those people control a big chunk of left-wing, progressive, and liberal conversation on Facebook, and by extension throughout the world.  Millions of readers, millions of shares.

    And they are no different from [insert your favorite “bad news” source here], no different from [pick a conspiracy theory about world domination you really like], no different from [your go-to example of an obviously bought and paid for politician].

    They’re all the same, you see.  Because it’s all the same behavior.  Consistently.  Every time.

    They tell you what to think, they tell you why you should be angry or happy or sad.  They tell you what constitutes success in life, and they ridicule you for failing to achieve it even as they do everything in their power to stop you.  If you have something they want, they will take it.  If they cannot take it they will destroy it.  And if you don’t like it?  Too bad.

    They are in control of not just the US, but increasingly the rest of the world as well.  To the point that many of the world’s most developed nations have taken undeniable, unquestionable turns back toward the tyranny and oppression that their very existence was dedicated to wiping off the face of this planet.

    It’s all the same, you see.

    And those of us whose eyes are open, those of us who have been those things and realized how wrong they were, understand the key method by which they hold their power:

    They prevent you from communicating effectively.

    To the very point of redefining truth so that only their version of reality is allowed.  See, for instance, the Texas Board of Education attempting to teach mythology as science.  See, for instance, the entire mentality that has led us to the point where facts themselves are no longer accepted as facts because we can no longer agree on what a fact is due to the deliberate erosion of our critical thinking skills over a period of generations.

    To the extent that they not only teach us to be afraid to speak, but they teach us to make others afraid to speak.

    Used to be politicians would blow smoke up our collective asses as a matter of routine, and we knew they didn’t believe their own lies and they knew they didn’t believe their own lies and the one that had enough things we liked (often lies, sometimes not) got to play Big Man In Charge.  Sometimes, a politician could convince a lot of people to believe his or her lies, and they would gather more power and increasing ability to convince more people of their lies.

    But now…they believe their own lies.  There are really people on this planet, people who consider themselves intelligent and well-informed, people in leadership and decision-making roles that affect all our lives every minute of every day, who believe that deregulating business will empower individual liberty.  There are people who believe a magical all-knowing and eternal creature imbues the zygote of human beings with a special quality that makes them separate and distinct from all other creatures the moment sperm meets egg.  There are people who don’t believe global climate change is happening.  There are people who believe the cure for diseases is to not be tested for them.  One of those people is currently the President of the United States.  There are people who believe that religious freedom means the freedom to force everyone else to respect and be indoctrinated by their religion.  And these people will brook no dissent.

    They’re all the same, where it counts.

    The only way to stop them is to speak.  Don’t be afraid to be wrong, and don’t be afraid to admit it.  Don’t be afraid to admit you’ve made mistakes, to yourself or anyone else.  Don’t be afraid to correct them.  Don’t be afraid to let anyone else know you’ve been wrong or made a mistake.  Don’t be afraid to need help, and don’t be afraid to ask for it.  Don’t be afraid to not be good at everything or know everything, and don’t be afraid to seek knowledge and expertise wherever and whenever you can in whatever subject matter or pursuit interests you.  Stop letting them make you afraid to be who you are.

    But Speak.

    Stand up and speak.

    Get informed, but most importantly get real.

    Get real.

    Be who you are.

    Stand up to those who tell you that because who you are isn’t a big money-maker, you’re a failure as a person and what you have to say or do in this world is unimportant.  Stop thinking that because your job isn’t glamorous or cool, it’s not worth having even if you enjoy it.

    Stop being a “what” and start being a “who.”

    Don’t be a Democrat or Republican or liberal or conservative or libertarian.  Stop worrying about whether you’re a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or a Taoist or a Buddhist or an atheist or agnostic or Jainist or Satanist or any other kind of –ist.  Stop worrying about which direction you lean in, and which direction other people lean in.

    Just be a decent human being.

    There’s no excuse for looking at hungry people and going “well, do they deserve to eat?  Did they earn their food according to the rules we set forth?”

    There’s no excuse for a nation with 18 million empty homes to have three million homeless people. (And say, how’s the math work on that anyway?  How do they figure those homes are going to be filled?)

    There’s no excuse to ridicule people for having self-doubt or being misinformed (although one might fairly poke those who choose to be misinformed, one must also consider that most of us live every day of our lives being filled with misinformation).

    Those aren’t decent things to do and every single person on this planet knows that in their heart.  It’s not something I need to prove or support with argumentation and reason; you know it and I know it, and that’s just the truth.  You might pretend you don’t know it.  You might even have yourself allllllmost completely convinced.  It’s not only self-evident, it’s reinforced consistently by every single important work of philosophy and religion in human history.  It’s not just a nice thing to do; it is fundamental to the survival of our race.  And we just love to tell ourselves that we are already doing everything right, it’s just the other people.  The people who aren’t my -ism and don’t lean my direction.

    But deep down, you know the way we treat each other sucks ass from top to bottom about 95% of the time, and you know that to some degree, that almost certainly includes you.  It has certainly included me, although I like to think I’ve managed to get it down to maybe 60%.  I’ve met people who got it down to maybe 20% or even 10.

    But it’s always there, and it’s taking us over and dragging us back to the middle ages.  If it continues, it’s a near-certainty that it will drag some parts of this planet back to pre-humanity while leaving the rest in prehistoric conditions supplemented by the junk our current attempt at evolution leaves behind.

    The only way to change that is to stand up and speak out, and that includes within our own minds, to the bully inside ourselves.  For many of us, from what I see when I look around this world, that’s got to be where it starts.  That’s certainly where it had to start with me, and as the aphorism goes “we all fall short of the glory…”  Pobody’s nerfect; not me, not you, not this religious figure or that deity or the other world leader.  We must all, individually, cultivate the ability to accept that and not let it stop us from always seeking to improve our own treatment of others in thought and deed…but by no means can that be where it stops.

    You must stand up, and you must speak.

    Speak against the bullies, the liars, the tyrants.

    Correct the misinformation and demand that those who propagate it stop doing so.

    Admit your mistakes and share the lessons you’ve learned from them.

    Stand up and speak out.

    Don’t be afraid of being “infiltrated.”

    Listen to your heart.  I don’t care what religions you do or don’t belong to; I simply believe that each and every human being alive on this planet has a heart, and I believe those hearts tell us the same things.  Call it instinct, call it learned behavior, call it whatever you want to call it; I’m a creative artsy-fartsy mofo and I choose to call it having a heart.

    Listen to your heart and speak.

    Stand up and refuse to be misled.

    Stop hating, you know it’s a waste of time.

    Stop getting wrapped up in ego-feeding internet arguments, you know it doesn’t solve anything.

    Reject those who refuse to stop hating and stop fighting, and focus on how to retrain ourselves and, over time, make these things just as instinctive as procreation, and eventually those who refuse to stop hating and stop fighting will die off and we can get on with the business of evolving.

    Focus on how to deprogram ourselves from the big lies we’ve been told throughout our recorded history.

    That is how to “beat the one percent.”  That is how to break the monopolies that exist on our information.  That is how to turn back the rising tide of stupidity and distraction and misinformation.  Start inside yourself.  Get real.  Stand up.  Speak out.  Be who you are.  Do not submit to fear.  That is the only freedom.

    That’s the only way to bring humanity to a sane, sustainable condition.

    If those of us who reject the tactics and confused mentality of the bullies and tyrants of the world just do that…they can’t win.  It’s the only way they can’t win, because when it’s all said and done?

    Well, when it’s all said and done…

    You cannot be controlled if your mind is free.

    Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.” – Robert Heinlein, “If This Goes On –“

  • Five Bad Arguments That People Use All The Time

    There’s a lot of bad argumentation on the internet, that’s no secret.  More ways have been invented to insult your mother in the last ten years than ever previously existed, thanks to the social media.

    You find a lot of arguments and bickering, and that too is a tired observation.  What’s not so tired, though, is noting the overuse, misuse, and fallacy of some “points” that come up time and time again.

    It’s time to rid ourselves of these five “arguments.”  Generally speaking, they serve little to no positive purpose, except as an attempt by the person making these arguments to establish dominance in the conversation.

    You don’t want to be that person.

    So here’s five clichéd non-arguments that you can eliminate from your linguistic repertoire, and in so doing, you’ve done a little bit to make the world a little less stupid.  Thanks for that.

    (A note:  attentive readers may think this article looks familiar; it’s a re-work of a piece I originally posted back in 2013.)

    5. “Name calling means you lose”

    Nonsense.  If I think you’re a jerk and I say so, nothing has been “lost” except perhaps the comfortable, criticism free bubble in which you live.

    Of course, that rebuttal is no less oversimplified than the original assertion.  The reality – as so often happens – is that this is a case-by-case situation.  If you think you’re making some profound political statement by referring to the president as “Barry” or always including his middle name when you talk about him, or if your discourse regularly includes words like “libtards” or “repukes,” then it’s a pretty safe bet that you don’t really have anything to say.

    On the other hand, if you are espousing/promoting a hateful, ignorant ideology, it does not make the slightest difference to the (in)validity of that ideology if I point out that it’s hateful and ignorant.  It doesn’t add validity to your ideology if I tell you that you’re a greedy, selfish asshole for promoting it.  Jeffery Dahmer does not suddenly become a martyr because I say he’s a dick.  This is silly schoolyard nonsense that adds nothing to the conversation except a clear statement that the person making this assertion is desperately trying to control it.

    4. “You Mentioned Hitler; You Lose”

    Also, with all due respect to Mike Godwin, not nearly as iron-clad a conversation stopper as people like to think.  While it’s certainly true that buzzwords like “nazi,” “communist,” “socialist,” and others are often employed as ad hominem attacks with no real bearing on the subject at hand (and often a manifest ignorance as to what those words actually mean), it’s also entirely reasonable to point out when someone is making a suggestion or drawing a parallel that is uncomfortably reminiscent of the Nazi ideology.  For instance, some idiot bigot on some forum or the other that I was recently reading made a remark to the effect that homosexuals should be imprisoned and subject to any and all manner of “examination” to determine what “went wrong.”  Besides the obvious logical flaw (who says anything “went wrong?”), in reality this statement reminded me strongly of Dr. Mengele’s horrific human experimentation during the Nazi years which included gross violations of the rights and dignity of thousands of gays, Jews, Roma, and even included invasive and in some cases fatal research on twins.

    I made a remark mentioning Mengele, and suddenly it’s all about how I “lost.”  I didn’t “lose” anything, nor was I trying to “win” anything.  I was trying to draw the writer’s attention to the nature of what they were defending, and to make the larger point that this sort of passive-aggressive enabling is exactly how oppression is empowered.  What enabled Mengele wasn’t some secret and obscure distortion of his psyche, although there were plenty of psychological issues there.  But what allowed him to get away with it simply an extension of the same crap you hear every day:  the deliberate dehumanization of various groups of people.

    You see it constantly – consider how we refer to undocumented immigrants as “illegals,” for instance.  They’re not people anymore, certainly not living breathing human beings with dreams and hopes and aspirations and a rich and complex emotional life, because if they were then those of us who choose to regard them as sub-human might have to actually stop acting like assholes.

    Mr. Trump, being what he is, has not only encouraged this way of thinking but given those who engage in it a false sense of social approval and acceptance, which is why it’s become so prevalent in the last three years (and it wasn’t exactly uncommon before that).

    To some extent, any such grouping or pigeonholing is an exercise in the same behavior.  Reducing everyone to “libtards” or “teabaggers” is rooted in the same place.  This expression is pernicious and devious and nearly ubiquitous; consider how so many of these labels are used to depersonalize individuals and hold them accountable for the imagined misdeeds of their imagined co-conspirators.  Consider how words like “thug,” “urban,” or “ghetto” are all commonly used euphemisms in mainstream media for “black,” particularly “poor young black men.”  Consider the phrase “migrant laborer.”  I promise you, even if you can’t admit it to yourself, that when you read that phrase the picture that came into your head was of a Mexican – not a “Latino,” a “Mexican.”  And now when I say “This is Joe, he’s a migrant laborer,” there’s a whole set of attributes that goes with that phrase, which you have now just imparted to Joe.  You even have a picture in your head, right now, of what Joe probably looks like…and you and I both know that Joe looks like a guy with dark skin, black hair, probably a little short, probably not dressed in expensive clothes, probably not driving a new car.

    Joe looks like that because that’s what you’ve been trained to think a “migrant laborer” looks like.  You were trained that way because someone, somewhere decided it was to their advantage that you think that way.  Someone decided Joe would be a lot easier to oppress if you could be made to forget that Joe is a human being who loves his wife and kids and has insecurities and worry and gastrointestinal distress and runny noses and enjoys a good joke.  If you can forget about Joe and just deal with “migrant laborer,” then Joe isn’t a fellow human anymore; he’s a usurper and a thief driving around the country in a low-rider with 85 of his cousins in the trunk.  Rather than a person, he’s a racist stereotype.

    This behavior wasn’t invented by Mengele; he just used it as an excuse to go a couple of horrific steps further.  After all, these are “not really people,” so there’s no ethical qualms about experimenting on them, right?  See also:  The Tuskeegee Experiments,  Calmette-Guerin (experimental testing of a TB vaccine on infants of First Nations tribes in Canada, which actually happened prior to Mengele’s ascension in the Nazi party), or the Eugenics Board of North Carolina, among many others.  (The latest, this Florida man who didn’t understand why he was being arrested for killing a guy who came to his door, telling police he didn’t see what the problem was because he’d “only shot a n—-r.”  See?  Not a person anymore – an archetype, a symbol, an icon, a representative member of a predefined sub-human class.)

    While it’s important to avoid casual comparisons to the horrors of the Holocaust, it’s also important to remember that one of the biggest things which allowed the Holocaust to happen is that people by and large refused to call out oppressive actions and attitudes.  One of the ways this was enabled was by depersonalizing the victims.  They are “only Jews,” they are “only homosexuals,” they are “only midgets,” they are “only twins,” they are “only gypsies (Romani),” they are “only [anything but Aryan],” so why should the ethics which apply to human experimentation, apply to these groups which are obviously not human?  VERY dangerous road to toddle down, it’s a slippery slope from step one.

    3. You’re Intolerant Because You Dislike My Intolerance, Therefore You Lose

    Another classic bit of nonsense from the peanut gallery.  My refusal to put up with you being a stupid bigot does not mean I’m “intolerant,” it means I refuse to put up with stupid bigots.  I also refuse to put up with axe murderers, but that doesn’t make me “intolerant.”  It makes me somewhat less likely to fall victim to an axe murderer.

    This is a favorite refuge of stupid bigots who are desperately clinging to the idea that their stupid bigotry is not actively, visibly dying out in our lifetimes; that being a bigot is still something people can do and expect to live without consequences for it.

    You can try all you want to pretend that’s the same thing as “refusing to put up with blacks” or “refusing to put up with homosexuals” or whatever your thing is, but in the end this line of argument leaves out two things:

    1. You choose to be a bigoted prick.  You weren’t born that way.  For any adult to behave or believe in such a manner, as an adult or even a reasonably intelligent older child you have to make a decision to ignore all of the facts and logic and reason which clearly suggest that bigotry is stupid.
    2. Nobody is hurting you by being gay or black or whatever.

    As my friend Pope Snarky pointed out so succinctly, tolerating intolerance is not itself an act of tolerance; it is an act of passive-aggressive intolerance.  It’s the behavior of the bigot who has enough ego to worry that being a bigot will have negative social repercussions, but not enough actual character to stop being a bigot.  So, with their hands “tied” by public perception, they have to sit back and live vicariously through the stupid bigots who are ridiculous and delusional enough to think that their behavior is acceptable anywhere outside of their circle of bigoted friends.

    2.  I Don’t Like The Source, Therefore The Information Is Wrong, Therefore You Lose

    I’ve burned myself on this one several times.  A few years ago, one of those half-ass “liberal” “news” sites ran an article about the gathering of several fairly unhinged individuals to basically take over a small Pennsylvania town where a very unhinged individual – who happens to be the Chief of Police – was faced with a 30-day suspension for being a stupid douchebag.  Instead of taking it like a person of honor and maybe even getting the hint that his cro-magnon chest-thumping is not appropriate or acceptable behavior for a nine year old child (let alone for a man charged with the duty of protecting a small town), he doubled down and did even stupider, more insane things until he got his ass fired.

    My mistake was that I initially blew the story off because I knew the source was garbage clickbait that tended to lie a lot in their headlines.

    Turns out that, aside from the predictably salacious, hysterical headline, the clickbaiters had the gist of the story right – that a bunch of yobbos with guns had shown up in this small Pennsylvania town for the express purpose of terrorizing both citizens and local government into backing down.

    I blew it, because I looked at the source first.

    This isn’t to say that you should believe everything you read.  It’s not to say that when someone quotes a “News of the World” or “New York Post” or “Washington Times” article that you should assume that person is well-informed about media quality or that the story itself isn’t either made up from whole cloth or grossly distorted from one core fact.

    However, if I’d taken a second to check the story out I would have seen that (as usual) this particular site was just rehashing reports from actual news organizations, and saved myself the embarrassment of having to publicly admit that I blew it.  So before you jump to point out that this paper or that one is junk, remember this one key reality:

    The National Enquirer broke the story of John Edwards’ affair.

    Obviously that doesn’t mean that I should stop thinking of “breaking news” in the context of many sites as more like “broken news,” but it does mean that I should check out legitimate information sources before assuming that any story – even a Fox News Exclusive – is entirely wrong.

    1.  Taking Offense At My Offensiveness Is Violating My Rights!

    There’s a little aphorism that floats around in various forms and guises, which basically says that if I’m offended about something, then it’s my choice to be offended and what I’m really doing is acting like a cheap bully that’s trying to control the conversation.

    So next time someone claims that you’re some kind of terrible person for being offended at their racial or gender or sexuality stereotypes, and you ought to stop being a bully and trying to tell them what they can and cannot say, just find an offensive joke that you know they’ll take personally and for them to get offended…and then use their own argument against them.  “What, now you’re going to try to tell me what I can and can’t say?  How dare you!  What are you, some kind of nanny-state liberal treehugger who wants to tell me what I’m allowed to think is funny?  You’re just choosing to be offended because you want to dictate what I can and cannot say, it’s not me that’s offensive, it’s that you are choosing to take offense so you can bully me into silence.”

    If they can’t figure out that their reasoning is entirely invalid after that, you’re either dealing with a complete idiot, or with a troll who doesn’t actually care about making a meritorious argument.  In either case, they can safely be dismissed and you need no longer waste time trying to have an intelligent conversation with them.

    Bonus Round: You Lose!

    This, the careful reader will note, is the common fallacy to all of these arguments.  The phrase “you lose” and the attitude that lies beneath it are clear indicators that the person making the argument isn’t really trying to engage in a discussion at all; they’re trying to engage in a competition.  They don’t want to learn, they want to “win,” which is of course entirely pointless in any genuine exchange of ideas.  If you’re getting involved in a discussion to “win” something, you’re turning it into a battle, instead of a conversation.  The only way to truly win that game is to not play it in the first place.

  • On States’ Rights and Moderate Conservatism

    What happens when you try to turn ownership of human beings into a “state’s right.”

    In this time of rapidly changing social conditions and a somewhat painful removal of our self-comforting delusions of morality, it’s time we start talking seriously about how we misuse words.

    One of the most abused and misused phrases in modern American conversation is “states’ rights.”  The civil war wasn’t about slavery, it was about “states’ rights.”  It was the War of Northern Aggression, how dare those Washington Bigshots tell us fine, genteel people how to live our lives.  Every time the Confederate Flag, or the civil war, or slavery is mentioned, at some point someone will try to cloak themselves in the ostensibly noble trappings of “defending states’ rights.”

    Advocates of this argument, however, never seem to want to discuss the marked tendency of “states’ rights” arguments to fall on the side of “let states oppress people however they want, and make sure the federal government doesn’t have the teeth to stop them,” since that was after all the original point?

    Why is it when people want to own other people, keep some people from attending public school, force women to be brood mares, declare certain types of consensual adult non-commercial sex illegal, or teach religious myths as science, it’s suddenly about “states’ rights?”

    I notice nobody was hollering about “States’ rights” when the PATRIOT act was passed.

    Never heard anyone make a “states’ rights” argument about allowing abortions beyond the guidelines established at the federal level.

    Never heard anyone suggest that regulating social behavior under the glare of a deadly global pandemic was a “state’s right,” even though the feds have completely blown every single chance they had to work the bully pulpit and explain to people why it’s so important.

    [do_widget id=text-2]

    Never heard anyone make a “states’ rights” argument favoring gay marriage even though that’s precisely what that issue has come down to.

    Never heard anyone make a “states’ rights” argument that states be allowed to demand that only science – rather than religious myths – be taught in public school science classes.

    Never heard anyone make a “states’ rights” argument favoring strong social welfare programs.

    Never heard anyone make a “states’ rights” argument favoring a higher minimum wage (although, again, that’s precisely what it’s come down to).

    Never heard anyone make a “states’ rights” argument favoring strong environmental protection.

    Never heard anyone make a “states’ rights” argument about abolishing the death penalty.

    Never heard anyone make a “states’ rights” argument against media consolidation.

    Never heard anyone make a “states’ rights” argument supporting polygamy – indeed, for Utah to even *become* a state they had to explicitly outlaw that practice.

    Never heard anyone argue for a state’s right to refuse to privatize their prison systems. It’s been done – again, Utah for one – but nobody used that argument to rationalize it.

    Never heard anyone argue for a state’s right to forbid charter schools.

    Never heard anyone argue for a state’s right to do a whole lot of really good, positive things…just for a state’s right to screw average people in favor of profit for the elite.

    About the only positive states’ rights arguments I’ve ever heard in my life – a long life full of political awareness – have been in favor of legalizing cannabis.

    Meanwhile, where were the moderate conservative voices leading up to the Iraq war?

    Where are the moderate conservative voices in the gay marriage debate?

    Where are the moderate conservative voices in the cannabis legalization debate?

    Where are the moderate conservative voices curtailing the Texas board of education’s headlong rush into theocracy?

    Where are the moderate conservative voices calling for the US to catch up to the rest of the civilized world in terms of health care or education or criminal justice?

    Where are the moderate conservative voices opposing unjustified war-making?

    Where are moderate conservative voices favoring penal code reform, ending discriminatory law enforcement practices, ending employment discrimination and wage disparity, ending the enslavement and oppression that results from people not having access to health care?

    Where are the moderate conservative voices supporting arts education and public broadcasting?

    Where are the moderate conservative voices supporting organized labor?

    Where are the moderate conservative voices supporting a woman’s right to decide for herself whether to carry a pregnancy to term?

    [do_widget id=text-3]

    Where are the moderate conservative voices supporting the right of gay people to marry?

    Where are the moderate conservative voices supporting environmental regulation?

    Where are the moderate conservative voices opposing wealth disparity?

    Where are the moderate conservative voices opposing wage disparity based on gender and race?

    Where are the moderate conservative voices that recognize the vested interest of government in preventing parents from destroying the minds of their children with corporal punishment and religious indoctrination?

    Where are the moderate conservatives supporting OSHA and FEMA and the CDC and the Department of Education?  These are all well-established institutions; conservatives should be working to preserve and protect them, but it seems like all they’re interested in protecting is dog-whistle statues honoring bigots, claiming the Confederacy as their “heritage” in spite of the reality that most of the people making that claim had nothing to do with the Confederacy, nor did their forebears.

    Where are the moderate conservatives who can respect and address a topic at hand rather than flying off on a self-indulgent pity party about how unfair it is that they’re labeled as conservatives at all, yet failing to recognize that they’re openly admitting that being called conservative is an egregious insult these days?

    Even those conservatives who seem less obnoxious and more willing to take a principled stand on important issues in opposition to their home-field narrative aren’t particularly moderate – people like John McCain or Mitt Romney – aren’t really all that moderate; they’re just not frothing xenophobic whackjobs 24/7 so they look moderate in comparison to the mainstream right.

    We’d love to think the US Army had these confederate soldiers buried by black men just to piss off the bigots that were left alive, but it’s probably just another case of giving black people the job white people don’t want.

    The reality that these self-described moderate conservatives are overlooking is simply this:  conservatism as it is currently defined in this country can not be moderate and is not conservative.  There’s simply nothing moderate about imposing theocracy, creating or enforcing laws that define people as second-class citizens based on their sexuality, sanctioning murder under the guise of vengeance pretending to be justice, forcing women to carry the pregnancies caused by their rapists to term, prosecuting war for profit, spending half the GDP on the military, giving business and industry carte blanche to convert the republic into a feudal state, or indoctrinating children to be consumers first and citizens last.

    The last moderate conservative to actually win an election was Barack Obama…and of course, rather than being properly labeled as a moderate conservative – which he unquestionably is, ever major decision by his administration supports that and he’s defined himself that way more than once – he’s a “radical socialist liberal.”

    Maybe if this mass of moderate conservatives who only seem to have something to say when they want to complain about how conservatism has branded itself for the last thirty years would speak up about anything other than having their feelings hurt by generalities about the right wing, I’d have more sympathy.  Maybe if the “states’ rights” argument was ever used to justify doing the right thing, it would have more legitimacy.

  • How To Start Fighting The Fascist Occupation Of The USA

    Nazi Rally, Nuremberg, 1935
    Nazi rally of SS and SA troops in Nuremberg, Germany, 1935. Image public domain via US National Archives & Wikimedia Commons.

    In my last article I discussed some broad generalities that empower and normalize the slow-motion fascist occupation of the United States Government.   Now, let’s start talking about solutions.

    I’ve asserted that this occupation exists and is actively working to reshape our nation.

    Based on the feedback, that’s not a real hopeful message, and it wasn’t intended to be.  It’s not happy news, and we all need a swift kick in the butt for letting things get this far.

    Beating ourselves up even more, however, isn’t going to solve the problem.  Feeling hopeless…well, it sure isn’t my goal to make people feel that way, at the same time I’m forced to think that it’s not a bad thing.  There are millions of people in this country who feel, and have felt, that hopelessness every single day of our lives, and maybe it’s not a bad thing for the shoe to be on the other foot, so to speak.  In spite of that, though, wallowing in self-recrimination (or inducing you to do so) isn’t my purpose in writing.

    [su_dropcap]N[/su_dropcap]ow is the time to stop wallowing in it and start looking within ourselves and at the greater society as a whole and decide what we’re going to do about it, what we need to do about it, if we intend to have hope at all, let alone successfully end the occupation.

    Step one is always:  look in the mirror.  Look at the accouterments of your life.  Look at your own behavior.  Do you sit and say nothing when the drunk uncle starts preaching MAGA at the family reunion?  If you’re white, do you just sort of laugh uncomfortably when your white friends tell “n****r” jokes?  That’s a surface thing, right there.  A glaring, enormous bit of personal behavior you can change to help undermine all of the thought and behavior patterns that empower and normalize fascist thinking.  Stop flinching.  We all own this, and we’re all going to have to take these steps one way or another.

    [do_widget id=text-2]

    Maybe in your world, the aggressions aren’t so cut and dried.  Maybe instead of wearing white hoods and talking about what has eight legs and says “Hodedo,” Uncle Bigot is more into the what-abouts.  Like every time a cop kills a person who was no real threat to them, pulling out the ‘what about his criminal record’ and ‘why didn’t he cooperate’ and ‘black on black crime’ tropes.  What are the assumptions in that thinking?  Don’t we all, to some degree or another, find ourselves thinking in these terms?  Even I, anti-authoritarian as I am, get a laugh out of Det. Olivia Benson illegally breaking in to a suspects apartment while they’re mid-coitus and making a joke about “exigent circmstances, I heard a woman scream,” or watching some doofus on COPS try to tell the officer arresting him that he hasn’t smoked pot while he’s got a joint behind his ear in plain sight of the camera.

    I kind of hate to give up that guilty pleasure, that schadenfreude.  We all do it, it’s just part of human nature to get a little personal lift out of going “look at that idiot!”  But back to the mirror – how do these narratives normalize fascist authoritarianism?  As others have pointed out, why are the internal affairs investigators in police procedurals always written as the “bad guys” who are just interfering in the ability of a “good cop who isn’t afraid to break the rules” to get his man?  Why do police portrayals in general come down to either egregious violations of civil rights normalized under the guise of “justice,” or comically inept rubes who don’t know which end of the gun the bullets come out of?

    Is it sinking in yet?

    [su_dropcap]W[/su_dropcap]e’re gonna have to give some of these things up.  Here’s another thought – why are our schoolchildren (and I’ll get you did it to) taught to pledge allegiance to a flag, before they’re taught how to uphold the values that flag ostensibly represents?  Being the little social outcast I am, I stopped participating in like fourth grade, but this isn’t about me patting myself on the back for being so woke – there’s enough of that shallow, empty garbage on the internet.  What I want to know is, what are you teaching your kids about that flag?

    Because it’s parenting too, right?  We thrive in this country on authoritarian parenting.  While hard, recent data is difficult to come by, indications are that somewhere between 60 and 90% of parents still believe that spanking is an acceptable form of discipline (PDF), even though every serious study of the issue in the last fifty years has unambiguously said it’s not just ineffective but highly counter-effective.

    [do_widget id=text-3]

    Yet we continue to do it, don’t we?  We’ll say with a complete lack of self-awareness “my parents spanked me and I turned out fine,” even though we manifestly didn’t because we turned out to be someone who thinks hitting a child is okay, and it’s not.

    We’ll argue back and forth all day long about teaching “respect,” but we’re not teaching respect; we’re teaching fear of authority and rule by force, aren’t we?  Isn’t it true, and isn’t it time we accepted as true, that if we’re doing our jobs properly our kids are absolutely going to rebel against us and push back against our values and demand that we validate and justify those values whether doing so makes us comfortable or not?  Are you a parent who falls back to “because I said so” and “as long as you live in my house,” instead of being able to admit and discuss our own flaws in thinking, or for that matter to effectively explore and explain our values?

    How does that normalize unquestioning fealty to authority, and how does that empower and normalize what ultimately becomes fascism in our kids’ thinking?  Have you really thought about that?  Have you looked inside yourself and asked whether you, yourself, haven’t been normalized and acclimated to authoritarianism – which is the root of fascism – far more deeply than you realized?  Or have you decided that it’s just “easier” to say “because I said so” rather than taking the chance of having to defend your position and coming to the realization that you can’t?

    Nobody said this was going to be easy.  In fact I’m trying to make clear that it’s very much going to be hard.  Even those of us who have been going over these things in our minds and making adjustments for years still have plenty of work to do.  What I’ve written here isn’t an all-encompassing plan of action; it’s a start.  The point I’m making – or trying to, in my clumsy way – is that it starts with us.  You, me, your crazy aunt, your kindly old gramma who keeps making the snide remarks about der Schwarze.

    Your kindly old gramma does that because when you don’t ask her to stop, that makes it okay for her.  Your crazy uncle probably cares a whole lot less about worshiping Trump than he does about gaining attention and feeling like people think he’s smart, because nobody’s bothered telling him that they really don’t.  Your drunk brother-in-law yammers on about “the antifa terrorists” because nobody around him has bothered standing up to that ignorance, or even pointing out the basic linguistic reality that “opposing anti-fascism” is “fascism.”

    [su_dropcap]T[/su_dropcap]hese are tough conversations to have.  They may cost you relationships and friendships that you’d rather not lose.  This process is not painless…but getting here wasn’t painless for millions of disenfranchised, marginalized, and oppressed people, whether that’s a race, a sexual identity, or just being someone like me who doesn’t fit comfortably into other people’s pigeonholes.

    While I can’t really make it easy for you, perhaps these thoughts will help.  I’ve gone through these processes myself many times, and continue to do so daily.  Just try to remember; for every dominant social group you’re a member of, there are thousands of people who have been hurt by our passive-aggressive refusal to stand up against the status quo of nationalism, xenophobia, othering, and so forth.

    You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the culture in which you were raised.  In accepting that responsibility and living up to it, you become part of the improvement of the culture as a whole.

    A little cognitive dissonance experienced in the process of trying to grow to be better people really isn’t that much to ask.  Is it?

  • The United States Is Under Fascist Occupation

    Donald Trump w German Chancellor Angela Merkel
    Click image for original

    There is a fascist occupation happening in our country.

    The United States of America is currently occupied by fascists, up to and including the President.

    That’s not hyperbole.  I wish it were.  Frankly, I’ve been saying that we’re in a state of coup for years now, but it’s finally to the point where no reasonable person can deny it.

    You need to understand that this did not happen overnight, nor by accident. For forty years, fascists – calling themselves “constitutional republicans,” “christian fundamentalists,” and other dishonest labels – have been deliberately occupying every level of government in this country. It’s part of their strategy, and it’s been widely reported since at least the late 1980’s, and we all just ignored it because “it can’t happen here” and “we’re better than that.”

    In 2016, they took the White House…or so you’d think, but the reality is that happened in 1980 and we didn’t notice.

    None of this is an accident. It’s planned, it’s been planned, and it’s been a long time coming, and we didn’t just let it happen, we helped it happen. We helped it happen by getting gung-ho and enlisting after 9-11, we helped it happen by allowing the military-industrial complex to not just eat up a sizeable portion of our GDP but to entangle itself in the profit margins of the elite, so as to ensure they too would help advance the coup.

    We helped it by deifying Ronald Reagan, who was a really terrible human being, a white supremacist, anti-environmentalist, homophobe, bigot, and misogynist…but he was so darned polite and well-spoken and affable while he did it, and it made us feel all warm and fuzzy about hating the mythic “welfare queens” and ignoring the AIDS crisis because it was a “gay disease.”

    This is starting to make you angry, reading this article.  You’re thinking to yourself “hey wait a minute now, I’m not part of this, and attacking that nice old man Reagan is just a step too far!”

    But I could literally hyperlink every word in this article to a different story about how this has been happening for decades, and some of the articles are decades old.  We didn’t listen.

    Military contractors, police contractors, and yes even the people who produce cop shows, wittingly or unwittingly, have all been footsoldiers and communication directors for the slow rolling conversion of this nation into a fascist state.

    They’ve done it through propaganda, they’ve done it through appealing to venal material greed, they’ve done it through appealing to our egos, they’ve done it through programming the very same young men and women who sign up to defend this nation to feel their fealty to a flag, a political party, icons, and symbols while slowly fading out even the most basic notions of common decency and social contract from education under the rubric of “fighting socialism.”

    We haven’t just been had, we’ve been taken. I’ve got my own responsibility to bear in that – I should have been screaming this much more loudly from the rooftops decades ago, but like a fascist occupant of a group that thinks it’s a manners and common ground organization is so good at arguing, you’ve got to make the message palatable, right? Because politics done right is politics that destroys a democracy without the democracy realizing who’s firing on it. Because the only thing Occupy Democrats is occupying is their own material greed. Because people of no ethics and fewer morals can push people like me right out of a potentially good organization with manipulative claptrap like being “cognizant of my agenda,” an agenda that didn’t exist and an accusation that I should have punched in the mouth when it was made.

    We’re all guilty on this one, or at least most of us, even if only by virtue of having bought in to any number of tropes and propaganda narratives designed to make us doubt the strength of our SYSTEMS when it’s not the systems but the PEOPLE who are the problem.

    If we’re lucky, it’s gonna be a long ride.

    If we’re not, pretty soon they’re just gonna stop even trying to pretend, and we’re going to be crushed. Including Mr. Cognizant Of Your Agenda and Mr. Occupy Democrats and Matthew “Addicting Info” Desmond and all the other accidental and deliberate double agents who have all contributed to the coup in their own way.  Usually their own way is by trying to gain money and ego boosts by destroying political discourse with pandering and shallow sloganeering and refusal to stand up and speak truth without shame under the stupid, self-serving rubric of popular appeal and “growing the page” and “getting more likes.”

    I have watched organizations not just abandon their principles but allow them to be turned into weapons – and some of those I *have* warned about in plain text, repeatedly, but still pulled my punches because I have friends whose feelings I didn’t want to hurt and whose friendship I didn’t want to lose who are major players in those organizations.

    I don’t think most of those folks are wittingly working for the enemy, mind you. I think they’re well-intended and mostly just like me, trying to find the best way to avoid hurting people’s feelings.

    We’ve allowed calls for civility and decorum to be weaponized, and our own best intentions turned into tools of treason against our country.

    I should have stood up taller, spoken more loudly, but until now, nobody would have listened anyway.

    I think some people – and some of you are reading this, or at least there’s no reason you shouldn’t be – are much more ready to listen now than they were six months ago, or five years ago, or ten, or twenty.

    There’s still time to turn this around and be the nation we’ve been pretending to be…but it’s going to take work, and it’s going to cost some people some friendships, and maybe worse.

    Suit up, kids. This really is the “moment” I’ve been telling you was coming for a long time, and it’s gonna get uglier before it gets better.