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.
- Infidel753, with words and images, commemorates Trump times. Well done.
- We will all remember the Trump riot of January 6 as a historic attempt to destroy democracy in the United States. Green Eagle takes a look at what was supposed to be the revolutionary follow-up a week and a half later: the state-by-state Day of Rage that fizzled.
- You have to invest in an extra mouse click going through to YouTube to view, the news station being kind of jerks about reposting, but M. Bouffant at Web of Evil covers one more sad case of a Trumper who thought breaking through police lines into the Capitol building was kind of a fun mid-week excursion. Legal consequence? Oh come on!
- Sarah Cooper wonders how the confederacy was more successful than the proud boys without all the advantages.
- Frances Langum remembers 4 years back to the Women’s March on Washington. Included is a bit of contrast. Participants back then were diligent about following rules issued by authorities. Even yardsticks to hold banners were forbidden by police. Cardboard tubes were used instead.
Apparently those police rules were relaxed this year to allow poles, battering rams, firearms, other weapons, and materials to build gallows.
Well, in fairness, the administration did anticipate a far less dangerous crowd this time than the potential terrorists of four years ago with their insane demands for equal rights.
- MadMikesAmerica brings us a cartoon Donald Trump (is there any other sort?) with the boast about never starting a foreign war, and the obvious rejoinder.
- In Hackwhackers front pages from around the world carry headlines noting the contrast between the attempted overthrowing of democracy by Trump rioters and the triumph of democracy represented by the Biden inaugural.
- Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson quotes several Republican members of Congress from Wisconsin who asked Mike Pence to ignore certified electoral votes and deny votes cast for Joe Biden. That is something the Vice President would not have had the legal right to do. More important, it would have been real wrong. Says James, “It is going to be a long way back for the Republican Party to sanity.”
James, those words themselves are a significant beginning.
- PZ Myers loves watching QAnon implode, and laughs with joy until he considers the many sane folks who care for these lost souls and are in pain seeing loved ones devolve into madness.
- Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger takes a quick look at 440,000 American deaths and brings to us the bitter Republican regret.
- In Scotties Toy Box, we find the answer to that decades old question: does the government have the right to order parents to vaccinate kids? An apt analogy serves well.
- The Journal of Improbable Research discovers that resistance by fools to basic preventative measures like face masks and vaccines is not entirely a recent phenomenon. For more than 100 years after a definitive study in the mid-1700s many military bureaucrats still refused to believe lemon juice could prevent scurvy. Ill health and occasional death resulted, sort of like today.
- Andy Borowitz reports as Dr. Anthony Fauci, in a White House briefing, suddenly realizes that he can speak freely about science and succumbs to a Fauci-specific form of tourettes.
- At The Onion, the body of long missing Jeff Sessions has finally been found.
- @momwino98 reacts quite understandably to the goodbye of the last first lady.
- Vagabond Scholar brings us a 1965 analysis of voting rights by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the one southern leader who translated Dr. King’s words into today’s political action.
- In The Psy of Life, CalicoJack undertakes a three part dive into our bias-laden minds, proposing that the January 6 violent attempt to eradicate democracy in the US was part of a non-finished Civil War that still continues, that our legacy of religious freedom beginning with flight from persecution was not exactly a flight toward freedom for all, and that not every bias is conscious.
I have had some thoughts on that last point over the years.
- Conservative friends seem to begin with a premise. Anti-Black, anti-Brown racism may exist, but only in the remotest corners of this country, and everyone pretty much knows it. So anyone who points out racism pretty much has to be engaging in rhetorical dishonesty, using the charge merely as a verbal weapon, probably motivated by their own anti-White racism. No need to consider it further.
Imani Gandy at rewire news group begins with a real estate agent who flew on a private jet to Washington to help overthrow our democracy. The saga of Jenna Ryan is one just of many examples of racial disparity that make the conservative view less tenable. It must be nice, she says, to riot at the Capitol and not get shot. As she points out, White privilege is a helluva drug.
And there are less visible examples, those that are part of everyday life, those most Americans can deny because they don’t bother to notice.
This is not a new topic. Most who challenge common points of view cannot avoid putting us into a posture of angry defense. A very few can get us to nod and reconsider, perhaps even get a little mad in empathy.
Imani Gandy is worth a click, and a read, and thoughtful consideration.
- Reductress provides a few useful caveats with which to demonstrate empathy before defaming your friends behind their backs. Especially useful if you have conservative pals you no longer fear beginning this year.
– Podcasts –