Hey everyone, I’m your ridiculously photogenic host John Henry and this is the Morning Message!
This person is not your friend. This person is someone who is seeding arguments against the left while pretending to be ON the left, agitating for unnecessary and cruel compromises that leave millions of Americans in the lurch in the name of “bipartisanship.”
From a progressive perspective there is no reason for a “deal” because we’re not putting anything remotely radical or controversial on the table (aside from the saccharine controversy stirred up by the fascists).
If the power core of the Democratic Party had your best interests in mind they’d be fighting tooth and nail for everything we need – student loan forgiveness, publicly funded health care and higher education, hell put a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage as the top line in the budget just so the GOP has to waste time arguing about that and the rest of it goes through unchallenged. There is ZERO reason to compromise with the fascists here, other than that power core’s unwillingness to push for the spending we actually need.
This tweet is from someone trying to gaslight the progressive left out of pushing for substantive reform and improvement of our systems. Whether they know that’s what they’re doing is not relevant. It’s what they’re doing. Call them out and don’t let them normalize the idea that effective social programs are a “pipe dream.”
Fascist Followup
Over the weekend I published a new article at Medium (disclosure – I may make a few cents from people reading it, but it’s not paywalled) which provides a broad, survey-level examination of a huge network of anti-western social media and web pages trolling super-hard for traffic in a variety of ways targeting folks who may be particularly vulnerable to disinformation and manipulation including boomers and US military personnel and their families with fascist propaganda.
I’ve now followed up on that “officially” by doing what I could to get it in front of the face of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. We’ll see what they do with it.
My approach would be to rip the mask off the whole thing and now let’s sit down and talk about why Americans are so extraordinarily vulnerable to fascist propaganda, and do something to address that problem directly with the American people…and I mean like a two-hour network broadcast interruption for a national class on information literacy followed by an all-out comprehensive initiative to inoculate the American people against the viruses of hate and autocracy just as we do against any others…and expecting, of course, the same pushback from the same tragically benighted folks who refuse to vaccinate or mask up in response to Covid.
Remember, folks: just because they’re wearing your colors or look like you doesn’t mean they’re on your team.
Hey there kids, after a bit of a mental health break I’m back and at it.
Me Stuff
I’ve changed the title of this newsletter to reflect the shift in focus away from me and more toward news and comment. Necessary URLs will be set up with redirects so old links continue working.
You can skip to the next header if you don’t care about internet drama.
I’m not going to go on about this too much because it just feeds the beast, but this is once again a pattern that I’ve been observing for a long time.
Close friends with whom I’ve discussed it over the years know that I’ve suspected the source for well over a decade, but they finally slipped and outed themselves beyond any reasonable doubt when trying to recruit yet another troll to do their dirty work last week.
This person’s behavior is rooted in whisper campaigns and back-room antics, ingratiating themselves to the clickbait crowd or not realizing they outed themselves many, many times over the years.
It includes calling my new roommate – within literal hours of my changing my address on my voter registration and domains, who I’ve mentioned previously has a terminal stage four cancer diagnosis so that’s totally on-brand for le stalker, they did the same to my parents’ last years – to harass them with similar lies, which was pointless.
It’s gross, sick, and obsessive. The person responsible has been involuntarily committed to psychiatric confinement in the past, and has tried repeatedly to con me into committing myself…often in response to some emotional distress I’m experiencing that they actually inflicted.
Going into the ugly details of that person is more attention than they deserve. Unfortunately I have a triggerable mental illness and they know it and they know my triggers because they’ve been trying to cuddle up to me for a quarter-century so it has to be spoken about a little.
The evidence is sufficient for me, but not likely to be enough to take to court and get a restraining order that wouldn’t do any good anyway.
Eventually they’ll crash and burn and end up back in the nice white room with the soft walls, the only reason they’re not there now is they’re predatory as hell and keep attaching themselves to insecure women with lots of money (this isn’t speculation; more than one of his partners has asked me to get him to stop in the past, as though that’s within my power). Their endgame for me is to leave me with nowhere else to turn so they can play hero, like a fire-fighter who sets the fires themselves so they can get the praise for putting them out.
The bottom line is this person has been trying to push me over the edge of suicide for about twenty-five years because they resent me talking them out of their own (and leaving them no honorable way to rationalize it), and every time it doesn’t work they escalate with a new low. In the end there’s no punishment worse for that person than having to wake up every day being who they are and knowing they’re too weak of character to ever be anything else.
So now, I’m still quite down and not feeling greatly motivated but I’m forcing myself to get back on the ol’ horse and keep riding now because if I let this keep me idle much longer it’s only going to further damage my work and reputation. Enough of the personal drama, let’s get on with it.
The (Actual, Very Late) Morning Message
Two stories I want to look at quickly today.
The first is the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton in Texas, which is doing a great job of getting the “capitalist, let’s keep up appearances” fascists arguing with the “we’ve won so let’s stop pretending this is about anything but gaining power” fascists.
To be clear, Paxton’s behavior being illegal and unethical isn’t what’s driving this. What’s driving it is the risk that allowing him to get away with it anymore will tend to tip off the marks and people will start looking more closely at how the GOP does business. As a sidebar it helps get lefties cheerleading part of the GOP and attempts to create a narrative that the whole party isn’t completely off the rails into full blown fascism, which of course is not true.
Keep your eye on this situation and watch for one GOP faction to try leveraging it as a redemption tour, “see, we’re not all bad!” They are.
The other story is the launching and subsequent detection of a massive new fascist disinformation/propaganda campaign designed to troll people susceptible to such things into outing themselves and following fascist agitprop pages.
Particularly insidious about this run is that the majority of it is couched in appeals to nostalgia and military worship in the US, including active duty personnel and their families. Pages with names like like “I Love US Military” interspersed with “cute animals” and “hey old people who aren’t real good with computer literacy, don’t you long for the good old days?” bait to reel people in, then they start seeding fascist messaging to see who drops, knowing what whoever’s left is a prime target for their work. Probably the most important story I’ve ever written, and probably going to be ignored until some lone-wolf stochastic terror attack leads back to one of them.
Sorry it’s a little short and boring today, but there it is. We’ll see you in the actual morning tomorrow, hopefully!
Good morning you and good morning me I am your highly refined and erudite host John Henry, let’s get into today’s Morning Me!
Yesterday we did a whole meta thing about this newsletter. Today we start moving the Morning Me into being less about “me” and more about doing the work I do. With that in mind let’s take a look at some news. This story at WRAL in Raleigh, NC today provides us with a nice look at how the media turns language to the advantage of those it serves. Check out this screenshot:
Gosh I wonder who was driving a police vehicle to a call?
What I want you to see here – and be sure you read the accompanying article! – is how much effort went into avoiding the statement “a police officer struck a civilian with a police vehicle.” The lead is ridiculous and goes so far out of the way to avoid speaking that core idea aloud that it ends up reading like someone stole a cop car and then stopped it, got out, and hit someone. That’s still a step up from the headline and the body of the story though, in which they repeatedly discuss how a “vehicle” was involved – “hit by police vehicle” in the headline, and in the story you get this gem:
“The biggest shock for some locals was stepping out and finding a police car involved.”
– someone who apparently thinks police cars are autonomous
It’s not until the next to the last sentence – twenty words from the end of the story – that you finally find mention that there was an officer driving the vehicle.
This headline and story are an absolute triumph of the passive voice. It reads like if they could’ve avoided mentioning that police were involved at all, they would’ve – “pedestrian hit by speeding vehicle.” All personal responsibility of the driver is cast aside – a cop didn’t hit someone while driving too fast, someone went and got themselves hit by a police vehicle responding to a call! How dare that scofflaw get in the way of our brave men and women in blue!
[NARRATOR stands and salutes a billowing American flag in the background as a marching band plays “The Battle Hymn Of The Republic”]
It really is this abstruse and arcane. Media producers really do go to this level of fine-toothed Orwellian filtering to ensure the information they feed you advances their interests.
I’m telling you as someone whose education easily qualifies them to be the people who do this: it is not accidental. This piece was gone over to remove as completely as possible any reference to the police officer who was driving the truck. The purpose of this is to separate and diffuse reactions centering on that fact – the debates over when emergency responders should be breaking traffic laws, who the driver was and what their record looks like, the history of the department overall related to traffic safety of officers on duty and in response – to avoid energizing discussion that reflects negatively on police and authority in general. I guarantee the original copy was more direct before the editors at WRAL put hands on it, unless they were the original writers.
End result: you read this story about a police officer who probably was not doing their best work at the moment striking and injuring a pedestrian, and you walk away thinking “boy that guy got lucky, he should be more careful.” The thought of “what’s the deal with that cop” never crosses your mind. If anything it gets shunted to general internal grumbling about “cops” and how they drive, but nothing specific to focus energy on…so the energy dissipates and what could have led to protests – certainly should lead to some pointed questions and public engagement! – instead is a throwaway story that nobody bothers paying attention to.
Words matter, and what matters most is that you pay attention to the words being used to tell you how and what to think.
And that’s about all the time we’ve got for a short morning newsletter/podcast. It’s Tuesday so supporters and Patrons can look forward to a new JH Afterparty newsletter in an hour or three, and everyone else can look forward to last week’s Afterparty dropping today at noon eastern.
That’s it for the Morning Me, this has been John Henry reminding you that all our work here is brought to you by YOU and your support is desperately needed, swing by johnhenry.us/money to find out how you can contribute. Whether it’s five dollars or five thousand, it’s all desperately needed to keep me alive and this entire operation running.
Thanks again and don’t forget the best support is spreading the word so like, share, comment, and tell your friends: when you want truly independent political activism and information, you start with John Henry.
In part one of our series on the National Debt, we discussed what “debt” is and why in spite of well-intended contradiction the fact is that the “national debt” is a real thing and it has real meaning, just not at all the meaning we’re sold in political rhetoric.
We left off with a brief note about the gradual decoupling of the US dollar from the value of gold, beginning with FDR’s expansion of the dollar in 1933. Remember, our core purpose here is discussing debt, specifically the “national debt,” with additional necessary examination of concept of value and trade.
I don’t want to get into the weeds on side details or a bulleted list of dates, but once upon a time the US dollar was backed – that is to say, its value was derived from – a quantity of gold bullion held, physically, by the United States Government. That’s why the legendary vault at Fort Knox exists. This was known as the “gold standard,” and for centuries was the basis of money everywhere – how much gold (and other precious metals like silver and copper) did the issuer of the money have on hand?
Moving off the gold standard unfortunately started making the picture of what money “is” less clear to the average person, because the dollar was no longer backed by a tangible object. “But,” you exclaim, “it must be backed by something!” You are both right, and wrong. An important part of the wrongness is the belief that “it must be backed by something real, tangible, and with uniquely and objectively identifiable intrinsic value.“
Modern currency is backed by “the full faith and credit” of the issuer. In the US (and with some variability in any other sovereign currency system) that amounts to our GDP (gross domestic product: the sum total of value of all the holdings, goods, services, labor force, etc. created or held by a nation during a given period; if no period is given this is typically one year) plus whatever value is attached to expectations of future stability and growth.
You’re not imagining things: this is a highly speculative and complicated series of educated guesses derived from abstruse calculations of arcane data to the point some would say it’s entirely made up
They wouldn’t be wrong, but you’re also getting out of economics and into metaphysics at that point because the intrinsic value of gold is also “made up,” in the sense that human beings designated it valuable due to its properties which are useful to humans, e.g. not being prone to deteriorating through oxidation the way iron is, being easy to alloy, and being both malleable and attractive enough to work into fine art including coinage. Best not to let yourself get too deep in the weeds on what’s “made up” when you’re talking money. (If you think coinage isn’t fine art, take a good look at a nice new one through a jeweler’s loupe sometime.)
The simple fact is, all modern money is created in this way: out of thin air, at will, by the owner of that currency denomination – US dollars, British pounds, Japanese Yen, etc. Nothing more than the individual integrity of the people running the systems stops any sovereign currency issuer from simply printing the money to pay off their debts.
What induces them to maintain integrity is the impact that would have on the value of their currency and the trust placed in them by international trading partners who would be loathe to exchange goods and services with a partner known for either refusing to pay their debts or intentionally doing so in such a way that the essential value of the debt is seriously lowered. If I agree to buy your EU beef for $10US when $1 = 1 euro, but then when I pay you off $1 = .5 euro because I (as the US) arbitrarily decided to double my dollar supply thereby devaluing each dollar by half but not changing the dollar amount of our contract, you’ve lost half the EU money you thought you were going to have even though you have the same amount of dollars you expected. That’s dumb business, nobody wants to risk that.
The Eurozone
A Different Feather Of Fish
The Eurozone is a bit of a strange duck that I frankly don’t have my head entirely around yet, but as nearly as I can tell for lay purposes one may think of the European Central Bank as being analogous to our Federal Reserve, with member EU states being similar to US states albeit with more sovereign power due to the EU being a confederation of previously existing nation-states rather than one large nation consisting of new subdivision states as US history imagines to be its own case. (In reality of course there were dozens of existing nation-states on the continent before Europeans arrived, and they were subjugated and dislocated by the Europeans for the sake of American expansion westward.)
“Germany” doesn’t print its own money but “Europe” does, and “Germany” is a participating constituent part of “Europe.” I frankly don’t know how this works out in the interplay of how “your taxpayer euros are spent” – in the US at the federal level that’s a null string because “your taxpayer dollars” are never “spent,” they’re destroyed. I assume the Eurozone has a similar overarching taxation system for the same purposes of pulling Euros back out of the system, but I don’t know how that breaks down into e.g. federal infrastructure funding in the Netherlands.
The Guardrails
Each sovereign system has its own checks and balances to forestall bad actors. In the US, for instance, Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution reads: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
For the record, yes this means the entire concept of a debt ceiling is unconstitutional the moment that ceiling attempts to deny the validity of a public debt, which it does the moment it refuses to account for and settle any given debt. As that is precisely the purpose of a “debt ceiling,” it simply can’t exist constitutionally, but it does because it was originally implemented in 1917 and we didn’t have the proper information and experience to say “hey wait a minute, isn’t this the whole reason we’ve got a set of rules about these things? These rules, right here, the ones you’re egregiously violating?” The purpose of the debt ceiling as conceived is entirely obsolete and shouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.
Additionally, it means all the games the Republicans play with refusing to sign off on the funding to pay the debt until they get the draconian social program cuts they want are also unconstitutional; they legally don’t have a chip on the felt. Yet this has been the operating dynamic of federal budget negotiations for at least half a century, long after the reasons for the original creation of a “debt ceiling” in 1917 were obsolete by our decoupling completely from gold in 1971 (Richard Nixon finalized what FDR started).
Thus the underlying purpose of this series: to help you understand the extent to which this entire “debt ceiling” argument is nonsense, but also to fill that vacuum created in your fact library by the removal of that nonsense with information that’s accurate and useful instead.
Also accurate and useful, ridding yourself of the notion that “central bankers” and “capitalists” are the same creatures. Believe it or not, the space most “central bankers” inhabit is at a computer staring at miles of data and doing their honest best to make sense of it, not some cigar-chomping back room where odious industrialists plot ways to rob people of their labor and freedom.
That’s not to say such rooms don’t exist, but that’s not generally where you find a central banker; you find them poring over spreadsheets trying to figure out exactly what percentage of the currency we’ve sent out needs to come back in order to avoid devaluation while also ensuring there’s enough money circulating for people to live and do business.
The influences of capitalism and corruption tend to be external; economists and macroeconomists (for the most part *cough* Friedman) love math and numbers and statistical trends, and tend to keep their ideology and work separated to avoid one unduly influencing the other. That’s not to say they don’t have beliefs, but like a doctor (a real one, not one in Florida) or journalist as a professional matter they must be able to set those beliefs aside and deal with manifest facts which contradict those beliefs, when such facts arise.
It’s a science, speculative and diaphanous as it may seem from the outside…and the numbers work the same regardless of whether the dollars are capitalist dollars or communist rubles or anything else; sovereign currencies have observable behavioral tendencies which are predictable and are only reliant on ideological influence to the extent that influencers motivated by ideology attempt to disrupt the existing “natural” tendencies of money flow.
This all adds up to a picture of modern economics in which a great deal of energy is expended determining just what the fair value of the “full faith and credit” of a nation really is, when denominated in currency, and those calculations, performed internally and reflecting among other things similar calculations based on known data relevant to other currencies from an “external” standpoint, constitute the guideposts for a central bank as to how much money they can safely create without risking devaluation (or having to raise taxes to avoid that risk) which functionally translates into inflation.
All of this, balanced against the behavior and predictability and stability of several dozen other currencies all denominating the same core “values” (e.g. “the consumer price of a loaf of bread”) in ways that are culturally localized.
It’s an act of juggling cats balanced on crystal wine glasses. A third of the cats are invisible and may be made of razor blades, a couple of them are marmosets, one appears to be a previously undocumented mating of a dachshund and a mountain goat, and you have an eyepatch on one side and the opposite hand tied behind your back.
That, my beloved assembled guests, is what we call “macroeconomics.”
In Part 3, we’ll talk more about that phrase “full faith and credit” and the nature of those cats!
Good morning folks it’s time again for the “Morning Me!” Let’s take a look around at what’s happening in JH’s world today…
Item: Prestidigitation: Brett Favre is catching headlines all over the place today for saying the country was in better shape under TFG.
Those headlines are conveniently crowding out the headlines about Brett Favre filing paperwork yesterday to be dismissed from the gigantic welfare fraud lawsuit he’s part of for taking millions of dollars intended to help needy families in exchange for speaking fees and other perks.
Guess what we’re not gonna be talking about today?
Item: Legendary professional wrestler Superstar Billy Graham passed away. It remains to be seen whether Jesse Ventura or Hulk Hogan will take the opportunity to also pass away and then claim they did it first. Without the Superstar, half the wrestling business would have never existed.
Item: the rest of this is pretty dark so here’s something upbeat to dull the edge. Since we were talking about prestidigitation above…here’s Randy Savage surprising you with a little magic from “the cream of the crop” in one of the all-time classic wrestling promos, this one from the lead-up to Wrestlemania III. Just watch it – and watch Savage artfully cover his own flubs without a hitch. There’s a reason I respect the hell out of old-school wrestlers, those cats would come out and cut these promos off the tops of their heads, maybe a little back-planning like the creamers here, and just GO, and I love that. From my own work I know that may not always be how you get the cleanest and shiniest cuts, but it is how you get to the real emotion you need to project for a quality performance…even if it’s something as “goofy” as a professional wrestling match.
Item: I’m thinking today about how this guy in NYC who murdered Jordan Neely on the subway has already raised $2+ million for his defense fund. I’m thinking about it because over on LinkedIn, I’m seeing a lot of things like people saying they find it “troubling” that this happens.
I find it troubling every time this happens, and it happens often one way or another. Here’s why it happens:
The simple reality is fascists, bigots, racists and other bullies support their heroes passionately, enthusiastically, and with LOTS of money, and “we” – “we” being “everyone who isn’t a fascist, bigot, racist, or bully” – don’t.
They send their kids deliberately to infiltate and take ownership of our systems and processes. We don’t.
They throw money at people who are out actually doing the things they want done, like murdering Black people and anti-capitalist/anti-fascist protesters. We don’t.
We refuse.
Our people – whatever the melanin content of their skin or inclinations of their sexuality or genetics of their gender – who are out doing it starve in the streets while being harangued online as “beggars” and “grifters” while we all sit around telling each other how smart and clever we are for getting on this hot new Doterra or Crossfit trend.
Our people have to beg for ramen on the internet and half the time can’t even get that.
Our people are left to couch surf and desperately beg for subsistence while also desperately begging us to pull our heads out of our asses.
Our people who are really doing the work get ignored while “Occupy Democrats” and “Worldstar Hip Hop” and “TMZ” rake in millions by appealing to our egos.
Until that changes, you’re gonna keep seeing this happen. Why wouldn’t it? It’s rewarding.
When someone like me – and I mean “like me,” not some prefab instapundit who made one viral tweet and immediately sold out to the DNC or who’s actually working FOR the DNC while pretending to be an “independent voice” like JoJoFromJerz or BrooklynDadDefiant, the only difference between them and Rittenhouse is the gun – makes $2.5 million dollars for saying that murdering black people and anti-fascists is wrong, and Kyle Rittenhouse needs a public defender because nobody cares to support a murderer, maybe we’ll be getting somewhere. Right now the evidence is clear: the fascists want to fash far more than the anti-fascists want them to stop.
That’s a big, big problem everywhere, and not just because I’m bitter and angry about the paltry rewards of a life of public service that *isn’t* prefabricated and based entirely on privilege. Until we’re willing to put as much time, energy, and money into doing right as the fascists are willing to put into rewarding wrong, they’re gonna keep winning.
I know that’s not a happy uplifting thought for your morning and I’m sorry for that, but it is a true thought and it ought to be motivating you and giving you strength of purpose and focus.
What can YOU do? Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse have no money…but they have no problem telling their friends to pitch in. Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse and others like him have no resources, but they spread every bit of related propaganda around like it was engraved on stone tablets and handed directly to Moses by God. The Rittenhouse supporters aren’t off in a little klatch somewhere arguing intently over whether the kid “deserves” support because he used a Bushmaster and a third of the people in the crowd prefer Remington. The terror funders aren’t worrying about whether Aunt Sally will be offended. The terror funders are THERE. FOR. IT.
And we…aren’t.
Fascism appeals to the inherently obedient and submissive. They do what they’re told and march in straight lines, and while I’m definitely one for doing what I want and marching how I want it’s undeniable that there are times when that rigid obedience and unquestioning fealty are an enormous tactical and strategic advantage. This is the problem of the left: the left is inherently disobedient and averse to being herded…which ironically makes us that much easier to herd when a bad actor comes along.
That’s why actual grifters like Matt “Being Liberal” Desmond, the “Occupy Democrats” Rivero brothers, and the collection of fraudulent astroturf faketivists collected under the “ReallyAmerican1” banner (itself a barely-disclosed account 100% owned and operated by the Democratic Party, and NOT the progressive wing!), among a host of others, are making millions of dollars off you while the real power of the left, the people with integrity and meaningful ideological commitment, ends up dropping off and having to go pick up a job flipping burgers or sweeping floors.
NOT murdering innocent people doesn’t even pay minimum wage, but killing just one homeless black guy or antifa protestor is worth more than I’ve made, in total, in my entire life.
Those are your “American Values.”
When we fix that problem maybe we’ll stop seeing bigots get away with murder.
Until the people who have the moral high ground decide it’s worth fighting to defend, we’ll keep losing.
In lighter news, I took most of yesterday offline to handle some meatspace business like cleaning my living space and getting some laundry done, a little light maintenance for my host.
As I write this, I frankly haven’t decided yet which of the several things on my plate I’m going to eat today, but it’ll be something. Probably get the second part of that National Debt piece up, I don’t want that to get cold before it’s done.
Beyond that I’ll probably spend the day creating project nodes and subcontent on JHUS. I feel like this last couple of weeks of frenetic construction activity has me getting a bit burned out on structure and meta-work, and I suspect but cannot currently confirm that the next few weeks will pivot back toward actual content, working up video and audio that I can maintain a regular schedule on, and getting a couple more regular content features rolled out. Then when I’ve got a routine set on that stuff so a five minute video isn’t an all-day project, I’ll get back to the meta stuff and build more on that, see what I can fit in. (By way of comparison, as of this moment I’ve got…45 minutes into this post, it’ll be 1:15 or so before I’m done, and I’m hoping to get this into A/V as well as text, regularly, soon…so that’s another hour or so after writing to record, edit, and process everything before posting. That’s too long – two hours a day just to say hello? So I’m working on ways to maximize efficiency on that whole process before I even start doing it, and then that work should translate pretty easily and quickly to other work.)
Sorry it wasn’t all bright and shiny today. I’m still in a fine mood, mental health is doing great other than worrying about money, and my workrate is still through the roof. I don’t know how long the tiger’s gonna run this time – at *some* point it’s a given that I’m going to hit a depression and things will slow down for a minute, that’s just the nature of my mental illness – but I’m going to hold on tight and ride that sucker until it drops, and right now it’s staying nice and steady, more so than probably at any time in my memory.
So let me shut up and get back to work. Love y’all, please don’t forget to throw some support my way if you can. Unlike Kyle Rittenhouse I don’t have people throwing millions of dollars at me.
Being a left-wing political writer you may wonder why you don’t see more from me about the “gun problem” in this country.
Classic WWF/WWE announce team Bobby “The Brain” Heenan and Gorilla Monsoon – probably the greatest unheralded comedy team in entertainment history, but that’s another article. Image: WWE.Com
In the pro-wrestling world there was a fella named Gorilla Monsoon, who went from being a pretty legendary “big man” wrestler in the 60’s and early 70’s to being one of the best known “straight man” voices in the business as an announcer for the then-WWF, most often with “color commentator” and “heel,” Bobby “The Brain” Heenan
I could and probably will write at least one and probably multiple articles about him in due time but what’s important here is that he was known for his little turns of phrase, like “they’re literally hanging from the rafters here in [venue/city] tonight!” when announcing live shows and pay-per-views, or “external occipital protuberance.” (Gorilla: “Looks like Big John Studd got the Hulkster right in the external occiptal protuberance…” Bobby “The Brain” Heenan: “Yeah and he got him right in the back of the head, too!”)
One phrase I’ve thought of as long as I can remember as a “Gorilla-ism” even though I’m quite certain it’s really not is the phrase “conspicuous by his/her/their absence.” “The Hulkster now in the ring with the Big Boss Man, and conspicuous by his absence is the big fella’s manager, Mouth of the South Jimmy Hart.”
One of the things that the careful observer might notice tends to be conspicuous by its absence in my work is a whole lot of talk about gun issues.
An Unspoken Agreement
I do talk about them. Just not often, relatively speaking. You’d think I would, huh? Being a leftie, quite the lil tree hugger and empath for looking all big and burly the way I do, you’d think that every time this happens I’d be right there, outraged and demanding to know why this keeps happening and why nobody’s fixing it.
Here’s why I’m not:
It’s a waste of time. I did it for decades, and I’m telling you: it’s a waste of time.
We know what needs to be done. A vast majority of Americans favor common-sense gun regulation to help mitigate two of the biggest sources of gun violence: impulse purchases made in the heat of anger or depression, and background checks to ensure we’re not selling guns to people who have shown in the past to be incompetent to be trusted with a deadly weapon one way or another.
We’ve been talking about it for my entire life and the pile of bodies just gets higher and younger. Enough talking.
We’ve been asking why for my entire life and the pile of bodies just gets higher and younger. Enough asking why.
Pictured: not a well-regulated militia. (Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com, with some artistic modification by JH)
We know why nothing’s being done: because the National Rifle Association, acting as the public relations and political lobbying arm of the gun manufacturing industry, has spent a hundred years deliberately warping the intent of the second amendment out of shape, stoking and helping to perpetuate all kinds of evil including racism, sexism, domestic violence, and especially toxic masculinity for their profit.
They pay politicians to write laws in their favor; they pay media companies to make movies that make guns look positive and strong and powerful.
None of this is a secret or a “conspiracy theory” or in any meaningful doubt; there’s a century of – ahem – smoking guns marking the trail.
Gun manufacturers have conspired for a century to constantly reinforce messaging that benefits their sales against the best interests of public safety and the operation of a truly free society.
They do enough of it directly and openly so they aren’t accused of being a secret cabal, mind you, but they do plenty of it in back-door style deals as well – think in terms of product placement in films, but this is as much “idea placement” as for any specific brand or item.
Sold, American!
Tie it to all the good old American values like rugged individualism and standing up for what’s right and of course subtextual racism and the reinforcement of paradigms and ways of thinking and behaving that benefit mostly exactly the kind of people who you’d think would definitely start pushing their way around if they had a gun in their hand. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do and so forth. (Jim Jeffries’ American accent in his bit about “protecting my family” is so perfectly the sound of that attitude…)
In this way they keep the general public from being too clear-eyed about where they got the idea that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” and other corrosive and demonstrably untrue ideas on which the industry has relied for their profit-making for over a century now…to the point that we literally have more guns than people.
I don’t talk about that much.
I don’t talk about it because I’m sick of talking about it. I’ve talked about it all my life, and we’ve spiraled into such madness with this I swear half the instapundits on the internet spend their days hoping for the next one so they can churn out some saccharine clickbait about the horror of it all and cash in on those dead bodies.
The staid speeches, the well-researched data, the well-rehearsed catchphrases and talking points…they don’t work. They don’t work because a lot of people are really not terribly bright…
It’s George Carlin, if I have to tell you the audio’s NSFW I genuinely have no idea how you found me to begin with.
…and fear is among the most basic and powerful human emotions there is. There’s always something to be afraid of, isn’t there? Wild animals, roving non-white people, the dark, your own shadow…it’s a terrifying world out there! Why a fella barely dares get a cup of coffee without being armed anymore!
We’re not going to change until we’re collectively more afraid of having guns than we are of not having them. That’s the bottom line.
Until then, all the talk is just traffic generation and marketing to appeal to various discernible groups of people and position one’s self as being among them. Another sorting chute in the never-ending corporate game of human Plinko.
It’s cheaper and more versatile than a sorting hat. Courtesy of CBS without endorsement or permission under 17 U.S. Code § 107
It’s talking heads making money for themselves, and for the most part I think fundamentally most of them don’t really care about any of it much beyond that.
Certainly nobody on the right does, but I have a hard time taking the left seriously on this too…and frankly, I’m just “American” enough myself that I’m not sure I’d want to see the levels of restriction that exist in some places, even knowing that due to mental illness including major depressive disorder and a long well-documented history of suicidal thoughts, if common-sense gun laws ever were enacted I’d likely be among the earliest groups of folks declared unfit to own one. I’m okay with that.
Getting To The Point
Frankly, though, I’m almost as sick of seeing the feeding frenzy of the pundit class every time a tragedy happens as I am of seeing tragedies related to guns on the news – more to the point, as sick as I am of gun tragedies happening.
There’s no reason for any of this madness to happen except that it’s profitable for the gun industry and we’ve ignored that for so long, in part because they convinced us to do so in ways we weren’t aware of, that we ended up letting them buy a significant portion of our government – in BOTH parties.
There’s no solution for it except us deciding that the lives of innocent people are worth more than the profits of gun manufacturers – yes, including the jobs they “create.”
We don’t want to face that honestly and deal with it honestly, and until we do rushing to be the first out of the gate with an overwrought think piece every time a school is shot up amounts to an attempt to pimp out the resulting pile of bodies just so you’ll take me seriously as a leftist or whatever. It’s gross and disgusting and it’s pandering to exactly the base and shallow human inclinations that we need to lose if we’re going to survive, and it’s nearly always done for profit.
No. If I’ve got something to say about it, I will – as I am here and now – and pandering is exactly the opposite of what I do so I don’t know why anyone would expect it on this issue. (NB: I’m burying it here so I can get an additional chuckle at the expense of people who don’t read the article, but I’ve shut all the ads off on this article precisely to avoid “making money off a tragedy.” I don’t think I can turn off the tip jar on a post-by-post basis.)
The Point
Look, I’m gonna make the point before I end up doing exactly what I said I wouldn’t.
I don’t see where there’s anything left to be said about any of this, except it’s all monstrous and horribly shameful, we created it ourselves because we let our thinking be guided by greed, fear, and selfishness, and the resulting ongoing trauma against our nation and especially our children will remain with us in the form of accumulating child corpses until we deal with that and start letting our thinking be guided by something better.
Either that or it’s time to just admit that we’re okay with a few thousand kids dying every year for our own “freedom.”
In 2022, according to the CDC, 3,597 children died by gunfire in the United States.
In 2023, those children and already probably a thousand more are conspicuous by their absence.
Since a little after Sandy Hook, when I realized that not even an elementary school full of corpses would be enough to slap the stupid out of the haploamorous contingent in this country, for the most part the gun debate has been conspicuous by its absence in my work.
Once in a while I get emotional and fire something off – to be clear, I’m not at all saying “I don’t care” – but generally I don’t talk about guns and gun control much – particularly in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting.
Students at memorial fence following shooting at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon May, 1998. Twenty-five years ago almost exactly from the date of this article. And it’s happening far more often now. Photo courtesy Ron Olsen (CC-BY-SA 4.0)
Until I see some evidence that anyone cares enough to do something REAL about it, the subject will remain largely conspicuous in my work by its absence because I won’t be part of the reason we’re secretly not doing as much as we could about it – I won’t partake in the “collateral benefit” by deliberately creating content to play to gun violence every time gun violence happens in this country. I won’t give myself a pathway to being in any way motivated in my thoughts on the matter and the expressions thereof by profit.
The reason for that – while acknowledging that I understand there are plenty of folks out there acting in good faith to do what they think is best to address the situation and I was right along with the crowd in this behavior for a long while before reconsidering my behavior – is that as far as I’m concerned the part of the cycle where everyone in my band of the spectrum lines up to spew impotent outrage is morally equivalent to ripping the bodies out of their coffins and dancing with them at the funerals, and I just can not find a reason to be involved in that.
Until I start seeing people care about all the conspicuous absences in their local elementary schools because of our negligence – Covid and guns, just in the last three and a half years, how many young lives have we just cast aside like so much used tissue in the relentless pursuit of gratifying our egos and turning a buck? and the evil bastards who do this are often the exact same people accusing women of “murdering children” when they terminate a pregnancy! – I feel strongly disinclined to take seriously any complaints about the absence of my voice in this debate.
There are enough voices in the debate for another thousand debates like it. Could stand a few conspicuous absences there.
I don’t need to add mine to the chorus, by and large – not in the least because when I do (as now) I want it to matter, and it won’t if it’s the same navel-gazing bullshit I and ten thousand other self-important twits have spewed out a thousand times each in the last ten years.
When the conscience of this nation is no longer conspicuous by its absence from gun control policy, when our children are no longer conspicuous by their absence from our lives after they’ve been stolen by the madness of unfettered capitalism and induced stupidity for profit in the form of a firearm, then perhaps we’ll have something worth talking about.
Until then, the discussion remains thus:
we’re out of our minds on the gun thing in this country
we don’t want to get in our minds about it because it’s profitable and the world is scary
until we do, we’ll continue sacrificing roughly ten kids per day and climbing to the gods of profit and machismo.
Until we face that reality head on, there’s just not much to be said that will add anything of value to the conversation, no matter how well-researched, eloquent, or well-intended.
Until we face ourselves and admit that on the subject of gun control we’re absolutely off the rails and need serious re-evaluation, the most conspicuous absence in the arguments will remain our collective conscience.
We – the people, the “left” – are stronger every day.
We have it right. We know – at least in broad general terms – what needs doing to create a smooth transition into the next chapter of human evolution, and we know how to do it. All we need now is more people tuned in and turned on, so to speak.
It is absolutely critical to this effort to break the hold panderers and grifters have over left wing discourse in this country. I’m talking about the clickbaiters who don’t really do anything but copy and paste other people’s tweets into their branded template and call themselves activists, Twitter insta-pundits whose only discernible contribution to the discourse is being able to write “fuck” a lot and direct it toward right-wing public figures (James “Sweary History” Fell excepted because that’s his gimmick and he’s written books and done other things and has an identity beyond his Twitter handle). Superfluous grifters. The kinds of drizzling puddles of humanity that charge you five hundred bucks to “engage” with you for four tweets. The kinds of self-proclaimed “liberal” and “leftist” and “progressive” “activists” who are so bad at what they do that they will unironically create a campaign shaming mental illness and playing on violent racist tropes to defeat a candidate that was a laughingstock in the first place.
Now people are catching up and catching on, and the time is (at least of those presented thus far) optimal to start pushing hard on this whole concept of media and information literacy, discernment of sources, knowing who’s getting paid by your social media activity and making sure they really are who they represent themselves to be.
These people and others of their same basic mentality and ethical vacuum have spent ridiculous amounts of energy trying to end progressive integrity completely, and they have failed. They have failed because they understand neither integrity nor progress. Fundamentally they want to make money, and the way they’ve chosen to do that is by pandering to the political biases of people who think of themselves as progressive. In doing so, they’ve cratered genuine leftist movement in this country and did a great deal to give us President Donald Trump by throwing their weight behind status-quo middle-path capitalism in the hopes of making political careers for themselves through sycophancy to entrenched power.
They hurt us, and they hurt our country, and they made fools of us, and they took millions of dollars from us.
Now it’s time to return the favor. Not by going after them personally (because that’s petty and weak), but by ending the whole series of logical breaks, ethical corner-cutting, and self-deception that empowered their grift in the first place.
We must stop taking our cues on the left from people who don’t care about what’s right but only about what’s profitable. It’s a conflict of interest; if all you care about is numbers, it doesn’t take long to start making sacrifices to integrity in order to chase them.
The folks who do this are a big part of why instead of looking for new progressive leadership so we can all have the lives we want, need, and deserve, we continue looking at the old pillars of the center-right capitalist wing of the DNC, which is the wing that controls most of the party, hoping that somehow THIS will be the time when capitalism-lite works.
The win condition of capitalism is fascism. It’s unavoidable, and it’s time to start crafting whatever we decide to call the thing that is post-capitalism.
These bad actors don’t want to move past capitalism because it’s the only reason they have any power in the first place and they know that they can’t survive on a level playing field where merit and integrity are more important than one’s ability to buy their way in.
They’re part of the reason we’re not moving forward like we should be, and it’s time to shed their anchoring weight from the evolution train.
We have the numbers and we have the ethical high ground. They’ve got money, and right now that’s an advantage. We live in a capitalist system and to some degree are forced by that to need money; that’s why I have a Patreon.
The only reason people like Omar Rivera (Occupy Democrats) and Matt Desmond (Being Liberal/AddictingInfo) and other grifters and panderers like them aren’t out here doing the same thing I do, asking directly for contributions to help them stay alive and able to produce work, is they lie through their teeth about what they’re doing (generally lies of omission; they just don’t mention it). They’re living on what they make online just like I do, I’m just honest about it. I say “hey I’m doing this work and need to survive.” They want to sell you branded beach towels – the illusion and presentation of an identity offered as a for-profit saccharine homoncular pretense of activism, intended primarily for consumption by that particular breed of human who values style and social validation over truth and accuracy and progress. I and others like me – writers and activists of integrity – are trying to eat, pay bills, and have the equipment to put our skills and talent to the best use to make the world better.
It’s the same thing all these people who do kickstarters for books and stuff are doing; trying to survive and pay the bills long enough to do what they believe they’re supposed to be doing. “Pay me, and I can write a novel.” It’s really not that complex or underhanded, until people like the Occupy Democrats and Being Liberals of the world get involved and try to turn it all into a grift, and they’re terrified you’ll notice that some of us aren’t doing that, so they work to take us out before you do notice and realize you’re being taken for a ride by them. Since they’re starting from a position of power and are willing to make compromises to core principles (if they’re even able to recognize a compromise when they see one), they naturally have the upper hand against the rest of us.
The behavior tends to be self-rewarding and self-perpetuating; it’s hard to lose money by pandering to people’s egos…and when money’s the point, any damage done to discourse or our overall political health, for instance by allowing critical messages of truth and progress to be dulled and deflected by those more interested in pleasing those holding power, is just another bullet point on the collateral damage list.
With friends like that, the US left definitely does not need enemies.
That’s why it’s so important that we, the people, get it together on an individual level and take it upon ourselves to seek true literacy with humility and an open mind. In particular we need to be very cautious about allowing the knee-jerk emotional reactions of our ego to lead us into ignoring realities that are unflattering or unpleasant.
That set of problems solves itself when people get too smart to fall for cheap appeals to ego and bias in the first place. That’s what I’ve been working to do for these last dozen years or so, beyond a broader lifetime of other activism.
That’s why I particularly scare them and why I draw so much heat from them: because that’s exactly what we’re making happen and I’m the face of that.
Thanks for continuing to energize and support me and us and what we do here. We’re right.
We are right.
We have the answers we need.
Now we just have to push past the bastards that don’t want anyone to hear them.
A tiny snippet of a whole lot of Mr. Desmond and his friends proving once again how much they don’t care what I have to say, I’m not relevant to anything or anyone, and there’s no way in the world they’d be the types to gang up and dogpile someone who criticized them genuinely and politely over a minor error in a “news” article…for now a dozen years and counting.
Curating all this old content has me thinking…gosh I did a lot of great work in 2011.
2011, when I had equipment and fairly stable housing and transportation, and also wasn’t working full time (was in school; still very much full time but way more flexible, and I could integrate a lot of the work you’re seeing here as material for my classwork). Almost like there’s a connection there…
If I was the conspiracy type I’d note that all of this was happening and moving forward pretty well until I ran into Mr. AddictingInfo and his friends in September of that year who continue to this minute to openly and publicly exhibit the very behavior I’ve been calling them out on for over a decade and they continue to insist they’re not engaging in, *even while they do it right in front of your eyeballs.* The contempt these people have for your intellect is astounding.
Not to belabor the point, I’m just looking at the material I was producing and the reactions it was getting and wondering what would’ve happened if once again the “cool kids” hadn’t decided I wasn’t allowed to be “one of us” because they know they look like the half-assed pikers they are by any meaningful measure in comparison. They know that my entire raison d’etre is to do my best to help as many people as I can understand where we are, how we got here, and how to get out of it, and that includes divesting them of their ill-gotten and broadly abused power over public discourse.
Thanks to all of you who read, comment, share, like, and contribute. This is unquestionably the most difficult period of my life, coming on the heels of a series of very difficult periods interspersed with just bare stability that consumed the time I’d have rather been creating content. I’ve taken some really major hits, and I wish I was all mister stiff upper lip and roll with the punches, but I’m kind of sick of normalizing that crap. My life sucks, any fault in that of my own ended a long time ago and I’ve worked hard to set right what I could and stop doing things that would need to be set right later. I’ve helped a lot of people. Some appreciated it, some didn’t. Some just appreciate what I do.
But there can be no question that the rabid dogpile response on YouTube validates everything I’ve been saying about these clowns, and they showed up precisely as expected.
“C’mon now, who do you think you are? Hah! Bless your soul… You really think you’re in control?”
Gnarls Barkley, “Crazy”
Sure, my life is really tough right now and I’m still not sure how I’m gonna fix it other than coming in to a LOT of money FAST. And I’m up against such BS; I had a major network admin tell me flat out that he could easily put me in front of Mackenzie Scott, but wouldn’t because I was linking to content on other platforms. Stupid little human crap like that for whatever reason just constantly floods my path, and I’ve been plowing through it like a North Dakota winter road crew for what seems like all my life, and now I’m finally just sick of all of it and not playing the game anymore…and that’s exactly what a whole lot of folks were hoping wouldn’t happen.
These people were betting I’d be long gone by now, and I’m not.
I’ve got my flaws. I’m about 60% nuts, really. Not in the sense of being genuinely unstable per se, I’m not that guy. I got way to close to BEING that guy a long time ago, and I put the brakes on that crap real hard. That’s not me.
But there’s this thing that so-called “normal” people have where they can tolerate being forced to exist in ways that are objectively intolerable. Our entire “way of doing things,” with money buying political power and the ability of a human being to survive and be their best without first committing half or more of their waking adult lives to generating profits for someone else in exchange for a tiny, tiny fraction of the value their work…those things are really insane.
Of course I’m aware that anyone who’s genuinely lost their minds tends to think they’re the ones who are sane and everything else is nuts. Trust me, it’s kept me up at night more than once. I defy you to suggest in any way that anything is working well and properly anywhere in the world right now for anyone but the wealthiest, and that there is a direct proportional relationship to the wealth controlled by a given individual and their sense that the world is currently well-ordered and sane.
Part of what’s nuts, and part of why I have kept circling back to Mr. Desmond and his abhorrent, ignorant business model over the years even as it has – to the great detriment of pretty much everyone but the people at the top, as usual, in this case the folks who are running these giant meme farms purporting to be liberal and progressive activists while the entire extent of both their activism and their expertise extends to reading the statistics at the bottom of every tweet, looking for keywords that resonate with the left, and pasting the popular ones into their branded template for distribution.
As far as I can tell not one of them has ever had a real job, but they’ll stand here all day telling you the journeyman tool and diemaker who’s been a musician for four and a half decades, put well over a million miles under his ass as a professional driver, spent years in desktop support and various network administration and database development roles, web design, media production, and a ton more is the fella who “refuse to work.”
People fall for that crap, and that’s nuts.
The people pushing it will push until their last breath to make you believe I’m the one who’s nuts for saying so.
The degree to which that small group of folks who doesn’t like me REALLY DOES NOT LIKE ME and will absolutely cross any boundary including trying to influence me to suicide, attempting to destroy me professionally, attacking my family, attacking my workplaces, trolling the social media of people who share my content in an effort to discourage that from happening (again, all of this happening in broad daylight while the people doing it tell you that you’re nuts for not believing them instead of your lying eyes), is beyond nuts.
I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I’m pretty broken and screwed up myself, but I seem to attract some real deep-core psychos, the types who will play out a game for fifteen or twenty years just to amuse themselves because they think they’re getting away with it. These twits at the big leftie pages are just one subset of a larger group of folks – still a tiny fraction of a minority of the people I engage with and talk to, mind you, but an incredibly loud and aggressive one – who fall into that “really does not like me” category, and near as I can tell the only legitimate complaint most of ’em have is either they don’t like my personality or I stopped pretending I was falling for their bullshit.
That’s pretty nuts.
Anyone telling you otherwise is not a reliable information source.
Anyone telling you the insane amount of time and energy I’ve had to spend dealing with all this nonsense over the years, including pervasive death threats, including hassling my parents when they were alive, threatening my kid when she was little, countless employers harassed, is somehow the reasonable and expected result of my unacceptably aberrant behavior is not only an unreliable information source, they’re a psychotic asshole and they need serious help.
The truth is we – you reading this and me writing it -have an incredible amount of power when we work together, and that terrifies the people who run the instapundit and bias-pandering clickbait ideology-for-profit accounts. When we work together, we can improve our collective information quality by improving our collective information literacy.
The way to stop falling for grifters is to understand how the grift works, so it works less effectively on you.
Now ask yourself this question:
Who’s the person you trust? The person who tells you that…or the person who spends a dozen years with all his friends ganged up to tell you the person who tells you that is the real grifter?
I don’t have exclusive command of THE REEL TRVTH or even “all the answers.” I’ve got a pretty decent dose of each, but I’m human and fallible.
What I do have is not just the iron-clad certainty but ironclad real-time evidence that these “leftist” heroes and “influencers” are mostly just a bunch of money-grubbing fascists selling you a cheap imitation of the principles and values you hold most dear. There’s a screenshot of it at the top of this post.
Everybody’s wrong sometimes. There’s nothing bad about that; we learn from being wrong, or should.
Often you can get a sense of what’s motivating a person or entity by observing how they behave when they’re caught being wrong.
A longtime friend and supporter showed me this article in which a recent meme from longtime clickbait/meme farm The Other 98 asserting off-hand that “Funny how we haven’t seen a single American mega church offer ANYTHING to the Ukrainians…” is entirely debunked as without factual basis.
Followup shows that the page didn’t pull the image but rather changed the description…which is only useful when people have shared the description and not just copied/pasted the image as is the case more often than not. They could have just as easily thrown a DEBUNKED stamp on the original and edited that into the original post while deleting the first image entirely, but they didn’t.
This is why you can’t just go sharing everything that confirms your biases. There’s nothing about the underlying values the meme ostensibly represents that’s wrong, it’s just that someone was in a bigger hurry to push people’s emotional buttons for easy traffic – 22K shares last I looked – than to get their facts straight.
Perhaps my failure to adopt that attitude even as all of social media fell into it is why I don’t have 5 million people following me rather than 5 thousand aside from the big page where I’m a co-admin, but I also really like knowing that nobody can credibly accuse me of putting my own advancement, comfort, or benefit over the principles I believe in and the messages I’m trying to get into the world.
Everybody gets it wrong sometimes, including me, and that’s okay. It’s what you do about it that matters. The right way to deal with this would have been to edit the post and replace the image with one showing clearly that it had been debunked.
As it happens, I’ve been through this precise situation myself, probably a decade or so ago; back then it wasn’t possible to change the image in a post after it was posted, all you could do is delete it and just deleting it wasn’t sufficient to notify people it wasn’t accurate. I created a new corrected image and linked it in the description of the old, with edited text making clear that the original image was inaccurate and should not be used. Back then that was about the best you could do; the tools have since evolved.
As a source of information, If performative ass-covering while still trying to reap the benefits of your error is your first instinct, it’s probably time to take a hard look in the mirror and ask yourself honestly what you’re really trying to do.
As an activist or activist organization it’s vital to keep your priorities straight and not do things like this, because every time you do you’re validating criticism from “the other side” that call you “fake news” or accuse you of “lying” or “misinformation” or “propaganda,” and not without solid merit to their argument. Journalism currently has a similar problem; sensationalism “puts asses in seats” but it’s not often accurate.
As a consumer of information it’s always imperative to make sure you’ve checked your facts – not just when something’s asserted that you don’t agree with anyway, but *even more so* when you do.
Understanding bias is a core component of information literacy, which is a critical life skill for the modern day and beyond. That very much begins with understanding our own biases, because those are the ones that are going to most often be used against us. This is something I’ve been teaching for a very long time, and is now one of the core concepts underpinning CUSTODE. Our vulnerability to being easily manipulated by mass media has far outpaced the growth of our ability to see through the malicious application of persuasive communication, and until we fix that none of the challenges we currently face will ever truly be resolved.
While I personally am not a Democrat and have some major problems with the party, as an independent leftist I find that to be a valid statement. I’m less inclined to “go team” and personality cultism than some – although I’d hardly be an admin of a fan page for Barack Obama if I thought he wasn’t worthy of the effort, I don’t endorse or promote anything I don’t believe in – but I don’t think in its context this image is out of place or unreasonable.
When you look at the numbers and what gets done and why, as a general rule the US does better with Democratic presidents, and ideally we’d have about a 16-year run of them with significant periods of legislative majority, while the GOP continues falling off the right end of the spectrum into flat-out Neo-fascism, the Dems continue to drift rightward, and eventually a third party rises from the left within the Democratic party to fill the “other major party” void left by the declining Republicans.
As one might expect with that sort of content in that sort of context, reaction was largely positive. There was one that caught my eye though, because it was pretty hard but not without significant merit and truth. I’ve no interest in bringing any heat on the commenter so I’ll leave their name out and not screenshot lest anyone think I’m encouraging some kind of argument with them, but the comment was thus:
The ONLY good thing about Democrats, is that they’re not Republicans. Literally it. All 3 of those men suck major donkey balls, they were just a hell of a lot better than the alternatives.
Facebook
I don’t feel as negatively as the commenter, but I also sure wish there wasn’t quite so much truth in this as there is.
What really stood out for me wasn’t the harsh criticism in the first part of the post, but rather the last phrase: “they were just a hell of a lot better than the alternatives.”
That really struck me, because that’s been the core decision-making guidance in presidential (and most congressional) elections in my lifetime.
This “best of a bad lot” game has been going on for several cycles now. I think we got fairly lucky with Obama, frankly, and I put him well above Clinton. (I’m not taking a position on Biden’s presidency as a whole until it’s over.) Any of them I’d take over any republican president in my lifetime, which would start with Nixon. Eisenhower was a different breed and I’d have to take a closer look at his policies to say how much I’d care for him versus say Clinton.
But generally in my lifetime it’s been “horrible” versus “a little less horrible,” often with so little difference “horrible” wins. When this is not the case, for profit media (“independent” or not) will work diligently to make it seem so, because underneath this whole process is a matter of conditioning us as a population to always accept “just a little better than the worst” as the only alternative to anything.
This is exactly why we end up with people like Reagan and the Bushes and McConnell and Trump and may all the gods I don’t believe in forbid whatever the GOP is queuing up to be even worse than that. We’re conditioned to not only accept that bold progressive change is impossible, but that it’s rather flighty to even suggest. Here, have a personable character who will do far less than they should. Wouldn’t you like to have a beer with them? How could you reject someone so friendly and nice? At least he’s not as bad as that OTHER one…
The Game
The first half of the game is first finding a truly odious candidate, then getting a candidate who’s just slightly different enough to be “better than THAT guy” and conditioning voters to accept that this is the best we can do because look at the alternative.
The second half is to limit the alternatives to only those candidates sufficiently friendly to existing holders of wealth and power.
We’re not allowed to have good alternatives, and when one arises – see e.g. Sanders in ’16 and ’20 – they’re excluded from the process by manipulation and artifice, usually with a big assist from the media driving narratives that deliberately – and let’s be clear, artificially – induce a sense of hopelessness and failure among those supporting the good alternative, and a wearing away of the will until you throw up your hands and go well I guess this is what we’ve got, because there literally are no other choices.
More Of The Same
Those same influences of media and commerce will then throw support behind saccharine facades of the good alternative, like Gabbard or Sinema or Manchin, and manipulate us into believing the artificial is genuine…just long enough to get them into office where they can screw things up and make a big mess and confuse the conversation, lather rinse repeat.
You can count on two hands, if that, the number of currently seated US federal legislators who aren’t to at least some degree putting up a front of populist nonsense and cheap sloganeering in the pretense of working “for the people” while as soon as the cameras are off they’re having $25K/plate fundraisers with industrial tycoons. Maybe your toes too, if I’m being optimistic.
Whatever one may think about any given President’s ideology or accomplishments, all of this seems like one damned strange way to have a free country to me, and it’s bothered me for decades.
We never should have been ON this handcart, and now nobody wants to hit the brakes because then they’d have to deal with themselves.
We’ve had warnings – loud, clear, lucid, consistent warnings from subject matter experts in every imaginable field -that this mess was coming for decades, and we ignored them all because they were uncomfortable, inconvenient, and unprofitable.
Now just look at what we’ve done with all the privilege and liberty we were born into. Corrosion, corruption, connivance, exploitation, greed, and way too many of us are STILL sitting here insisting “no wait, we don’t know FOR SURE where this handcart is headed, let’s keep going!”
Because they’ve got good seats in the handcart and they’re comfortable and they think if they stay real still and don’t upset the handcart, they’ll stay that way and by the time it gets to hell who cares they’ll be dead anyway.
That has to end.
The entire way we think about everything is a broken cobbled-together mish-mash of superstitions and emotional manipulation leveraged by the powerful against the powerless, all hiding behind the facades of good will and best wishes and thoughts and prayers. We are dragging around thousands of years of ridiculous social nonsense and mechanisms of oppression and abuse, and it’s time we faced ourselves and started letting them go.
That’s not a suggestion; it’s going to happen because the only other option is extinction. The question is whether we lean into it and grow and evolve, or whether we choose to fight back and try to cling to old systems of inequality and oppression because they benefit us materially, and find ourselves miserable and tied up for generations in decline and oppression as we teach ourselves over and over that the old ways simply don’t work anymore, to the extent that they ever did.
But for too many of us right now, it’s almost like watching hardcore addicts, people who are deep into like meth or crack or opiates. They always think they’re getting away with something, and if you call them out they’ll just stand there lying straight to your face about it until one way or the other you leave them alone about it.
Every one of us from the most powerful personalities in government and commerce to any one of the half-million or so people who go to sleep homeless every night in the United States knows that we have a serious problem of our world being largely controlled by and for narcissists, egomaniacs, and sociopaths.
In our earnest desire for fairness and equity, we allow ourselves to be painted into a corner where if we stand up against autocratic or totalitarian or fascist or otherwise oppressive and harmful ideologies, we’re accused of “intolerance” and shouted down as though that’s really a substantive point.
Worse, trapped in a fog of disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, propaganda, advertising, marketing that begins assaulting our senses nearly from the moment of birth and follows us all the way to the grave, we’re often easily misled by cults of personality and pandering to our biases and egos and fears, and that goes in any direction; it’s no more rational to have unquestioning fealty to Obama or Biden or Clinton than to have any seething hate for them.
(Ah, but what about the Trumps of the world? Their whole function is to lower the basement by several dozen levels so the next fascist who shows up with table manners and less than grotesque personality will seem admirably restrained and lucid by comparison…and the one just a tiny bit less odious than that one will seem nearly messianic by comparison to the “new low.”
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.)
By failing to stand up for justice and equality, allowing our systems and processes to be corrupted because we believed ourselves beneficiaries of the corruption, we have sent the message to the most powerful and malicious people in the world that they can get away with anything, and now that’s what they’re trying to do.
So while there’s nothing wrong with showing respect for leaders you admire, it’s also well worth noting that we are in no way headed in any right direction at present, nor have we been for a very long time now, and if we don’t get serious about fixing it right now a whole lot of us are going to get hurt as the whole mess collapses on top of all of us – and it will be all of us, this isn’t just a US or “western democracy” or “modern world” thing.
The very underpinnings of human liberty are at grave risk of disappearing entirely. While it’s in no way my intention to insult or criticize memes like this one or celebrations like President’s Day or any of the particular people in the image, if we’re truly going to honor and respect our humanity in the veneration of historical figures we absolutely must reject the idea that “not as bad as the worst,” is the best we can do.
