FairAndUNbalanced.com

 

From Imani Gandy at Rewire News Group:

SB 9 will make an already difficult situation even more difficult for pregnant people in Kentucky during a particularly painful time.

So what exactly is the Born Alive law? It is a fear-mongering and myth-making law based on the lie that abortion providers are somehow aborting newborns with regularity. (Aborting a newborn is called murder or infanticide where I’m from.)

It is utter propaganda as well as a blatant attempt for Republican legislators to control how and when physicians provide care, as Calla Hales previously wrote for Rewire News Group:

These bills are worded very intentionally, with the aim to further the false narrative that abortions regularly occur immediately before or, according to [Trump], at the time of birth. While it should be apparent, it is still necessary to point out that any intentional action to end the life of an infant is already illegal.

Kentucky’s SB 9 requires a physician performing an abortion to take all medically appropriate and reasonable steps to preserve the life and health of a “born alive” infant.

But here’s the thing: ABORTION PROVIDERS ALREADY DO THAT.

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From Glenn R. Geist MadMikesAmerica:

Of course, you might write off my increasing distress at the increasing infantilism of Americans to my increasing age, but might I be forgiven if I think that the longer I read and listen and experience, the more discriminating I become? Or you might just join the commercially supported mockery of all that challenges our main national product. We don’t make all that steel anymore, but we make advertising. we make noise. Older people? Hahaha!

And if some visitors from another planet were to judge us by what is coming over the air, you might forgive them for seeing a species with little purpose beyond constant wild, antic, vulgar, and corybantic gyration with little purpose. Turn on the tube and you’ll see people dancing around with diabetes and jubilating a host of moderate to severe alphabet soup diseases. Even those with metastatic cancer seem to be having a better time than I am having to watch endless ads or watching someone singing the anthem while dressed in a deflated balloon.

Look, nobody is disgusted by American History more than I am. I see ritual patriotism as just another fraud and hypocritical lie. but if we are to have an anthem, please can it be an anthem? Can we set it to a ragtime beat and still call in an anthem? There is no officially designated arrangement after all. Can we paint the White House blue? There’s no law against it!

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From PZ Myers:

Some on the right are now aware that it was a bad idea to stage an attempted conservative revolution with a bumbling incompetent as a figurehead leading a mob of stupid mooks. Oops. We need to step back. We need to recalculate. We need to look around for better role models. We need a guy who represents true conservative values.

So over on The American Conservative, Michael Warren Davis (he has a book coming out from Regnery so you know exactly how he thinks) has found his hero. It’s Antonio Salazar, the authoritarian dictator of Portugal for 36 years. He was definitely an intelligent person, he oversaw many improvements in Portuguese life, and he definitely made the nation more stable…by ending all political dissent, staging nothing but sham elections, and ruling as an autocrat. If stability is a conservative ideal, he certainly represented that while he was alive. Unfortunately, once he was dead the Portuguese people had the Carnation Revolution in 1974 to enact civil rights and free elections, which was kind of a repudiation of the Salazar situation. So stability for as long as the strong man has his fist clenched, but once it relaxes in death, upheaval.

He also had some strong views: he opposed fascism, and maintained Portugal’s neutrality in WWII, in spite of sharing a lot of ideals with Nazi Germany (“Deus, Pátria e Família”, “God, Fatherland, and Family”, which sounds awfully familiar). He also opposed socialism, communism, and democracy, though, so that’s a bit of a mixed bag.

On the American Conservative, they’re waiting for our Salazar. Trump wasn’t it. In an essay full of praise for a dictator, Davis concludes that we just need a benevolent autocrat.

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

It turns out I underestimated the consequences of the COVID-19 precedent. A “racial equity crisis?” The racism of the “Anti-Racist” movement has reached the top of the American government. If you can look at statistical disparities based on racial groups as a “crisis,” what can’t be deemed a “crisis” justifying the next authoritarian wave by whomever happens to be in the White House at the time?

Trump was accused of pushing America toward more authoritarianism. There’s truth in that. He did. But his authoritarianism was more bluster than real. Trump’s authoritarianism is non-ideological power-lust. That’s dictatorial, for sure. Now, under Biden, we are going to see what real authoritarianism looks like, Biden style. It’s much more dangerous, because the Democratic Party’s authoritarianism is ideologically driven.

Ideology tends to be all-encompassing. Thus, an ideology (or philosophy) rooted in individualism leads in the direction of a fully free society, and the United States of America. A collectivist ideology leads to the totalitarian state, and the likes of the Soviet Union. Whereas an authoritarian like Trump tends to want to force his will on things that interests him, limiting its scope, an statist ideology tends to lead to totalitarianism.

And the Democratic Left’s is a statist ideology, specifically collectivist, which goes way beyond Trumpism. Statist ideology leads not just to authoritarianism but to totalitarianism, as Italian Facism, Nazism, Communism, and theocracy do. The Biden Administration won’t end in totalitarianism. But that’s its orientation, because it’s socialism, by design. Whereas Trump-style authoritarianism is simply bullying people, socialism is subordination of all individual affairs to state authority.

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From Nan’s Notebook:

What is “free will”? Psychology Today describes it thus:

Free will is the idea that humans have the ability to make their own choices and determine their own fates.

It follows up with this question:

Is a person’s will free, or are people’s lives in fact shaped by powers outside of their control?

Personally, I lean towards the second part of the above question –that we are influenced by things outside of our control– and I explain why below. I’ve shared my perspective on a couple of blogs and the responses have been … well, interesting.

Here are my thoughts …

All we have is NOW. The past is gone; the future has not yet arrived. We cannot change what has already happened any more than we can control what will come. We can learn from the past and use this knowledge in an attempt to modify our future, but essentially, we have no control over even the next second. It is only in our minds that either has substance.

Thus, in essence, we are simply pawns of time.

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From Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

What criminal acts of a president would warrant removal, if sedition is not enough? Does he have to be caught, on camera, handing over state secrets to the Russians? Strangling his wife in the Lincoln Bedroom? Raping the vice-president’s dog?

If sending a mouth-foaming mob to the Capitol to kill the vice-president and to prevent the certification of an election isn’t enough to warrant removal, then the impeachment provision of the Constitution, as it applies to presidents, is a dead letter.

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From @itsalwayscraig. Do run this with sound, if you can:

Excellent

— Burr Deming (@BurrLand01) January 23, 2021

• nojo reacts to the change of administrations with a very quick expression of exuberance. No words, just joy.
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce reacts, less cynically than he expected, to the inauguration not so much in inspiration as in relief.
   
• At The Moderate Voice Hart Williams wants the same unity hoped for by President Biden, but is a captive to realism. He is wary of false kumbaya.
   
• News Corpse contrasts the Biden inaugural with Fox coverage of the Biden inaugural.
   
• Since President Biden issued an order mandating that a protective mask must be worn by all people at all times on all federal properties, why did the President take his off during a presentation at the Lincoln Memorial? Fox pushes the gotcha question and pushes it hard. Tommy Christopher looks at the question and the executive order and discovers that there is no gotcha in the question after all.
   
• Ant Farmer’s Almanac points out that Joe Biden takes office as America’s oldest President, continuing a run of two other firsts by Obama and Trump.
   
• Conservative Unabashedly American Darrell Michaels is my valued long time friend. Darrell doesn’t like Donald Trump and never has. But he greatly admires his wonderful accomplishments as president. Well, nobody’s perfect.
   
• With a dissenting opinion, Jonathan Bernstein reviews the honest part of Trump’s continuous campaign. “He ran on a platform of bigotry, ignorance and contempt for truth and democracy” and that was his presidency.
   
• driftglass takes on a conservative critique of my ex-president that lapses into blame on all of us for Trumpism. He chastises the January 6 Trump-rioters who tried to overthrow our government, referring to them with a horribly perjoritive phrase: “a group of the least serious citizens among us.” Yeah, that was what was wrong with those killers. They were unserious.
   
  Understatement as a rhetorical device works best when it is intended.
   
  The conservative critique includes the warning that the serious crime of seriousness-deficiency spans the political spectrum. So both-siderism becomes all-siderism.
   
  driftglass takes a chainsaw to that entire chain of logic: Beginning with the description “unserious” as insufficiently serious.

Continue reading “Biden, Unity, Fox, Trump, TrumpRiot, QAnon, COVID, Antivax, Fauci, Racism”

 

 

 

Fauci moods: Biden briefings vs. Trump briefings pic.twitter.com/rNS6sIu9ZF

— The Recount (@therecount) January 21, 2021

 

From John Scalzi at Whatever:

First and always, a liar.

Then a con man, a thief, and a grifter. A man who never saw a venture he couldn’t make fail, which is why he was always starting new ones: It was easier to jump to a new ship than stay with the sinking one. A cad, a harasser, allegedly a rapist. He treated women like they were disposable vessels for anxious manhood and was loved by the “family values” contingent for it, because they see women the same way he does. A racist, a bigot, a white supremacist. He saw neo-nazis march in Charlottesville and some part of his brain knew then that he had found his shock troops for an insurrection. A bully, a boaster, a braggart. He looked up to the worst leaders in the world because he wanted what they had: To be unquestioned, feared, and obeyed.

A bad man, a bad human, a bad person. And a bad president.

Not just bad, of course: In fact, the worst. A recitation of his moral failures and actual probable crimes would have us here all day, so let’s pick just one: 400,000 dead, so far, from COVID during his presidency. He is not responsible for the virus. He is responsible for denying its seriousness; for choosing to downplay it because he thought it would make him look bad; for making something as simple and useful as wearing a mask a political issue; for bungling a national response to it and then the distribution of medical supplies and, later, vaccines; for spreading misinformation and lies about it; for, fundamentally, not caring about his fellow Americans, and viewing the pandemic through the lens of him, not us. Hundreds of thousands of Americans who are now dead would be alive under a better president. Their deaths are on his hands, and he simply doesn’t care. He never will.

If there is a silver lining to any of this, it is that he was never popular, never the choice of the majority of Americans. He lost the popular vote in 2016; his electoral win came from razor-thin margins in a few states. This was enough to legitimately make him president, thanks to an electoral system rooted in having to accommodate slaveholders, which still disadvantages the descendants of the slaves. But he was never the people’s choice. He knew it and it rankled him.

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