Month: July 2020

 

From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

The First Amendment prohibition that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” must be understood in its full context. The Framers understood freedom of CONSCIENCE as the foundational principle, and used “freedom of religion” and “freedom of conscience” interchangeably. Not everyone believes in religion or God or prayer. The government’s purpose is to secure every individual’s unalienable right to freedom of conscience, be they religionists, theists, deists, agnostics, atheists, people of faith, people of reason, believers in God, many gods, or no god, believers in “Fathers in Heaven,” or no Heaven.

It’s true that, as the article observes, “prayer isn’t [necessarily] religion.” But it IS a belief. The following “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” means to be free of government coercion on behalf of anyone else’s beliefs. The government should never impose ANY belief system on anyone.

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From The Propaganda Professor:

Passive/ defensive denial is ignoring evidence about climate change or racism, etc. because they threaten your belief system. Proactive denial is making a deliberate effort to persuade other people to ignore such evidence.

If you want a good glimpse of denial in action, tune in to the Twitter feed of Dr. Kevin Kruse, professor of history at Princeton University. No, no, Professor Kruse himself isn’t the one guilty of denial; he’s incredibly well-informed and well-documented, and he has provided, in concise Twitter threads, some very substantial mini-courses in history that soundly shatter some of the revisionist myths. But the denial comes from his detractors who pop up in his feed and insist that, no matter what kind of sound documentation he presents, he’s wrong because he just is. Some of the attackers advise him to read a history book — apparently quite unaware they’re talking to a man who writes history books.

One of his most frequent attackers is right-wing pundit and former convict Dinesh D’Souza, who has written an embarrassingly inept revisionist book that tries to make the claim that fascism is a leftist movement. (It’s essentially a rehashed and watered down version of a similarly embarrassing book by Jonah Goldberg of National Review infamy.) That’s one of the tropes he keeps lobbing at Professor Kruse — another being that the Southern Strategy is a myth, and that the two major political parties are still essentially the same as they were 150 years ago. Professor Kruse has not only swatted down these false claims but absolutely crushed them with a mountain of irrefutable documentation. And yet, no matter how hard D’Souza gets slammed against the wall, he keeps coming back for more punishment. While he and his fans proclaim that he has “owned” Kruse.

As a rule of thumb, the more frequently someone denies something — particularly without being prompted– the more certain you can be that the allegation is true. (See: NO COLLUSION, NO COLLUSION, NO COLLUSION!!!) No matter how overwhelming the facts may seem to be, you can make them all vanish in a puff just by uttering the magic words “Wrong!” or “Bullshit!” or “Fake New!”. And of course it goes without saying that your denials carry much more weight and substance if you put them in ALL CAPS, WITH LOTS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!

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The outermost fringes of American right-wing militancy has something in common with early Christianity. They rely on codes.

Neo-Nazis are in a position to understand the below-ground messaging of my president and his supporters.

Continue reading “Trump and the Code of 1488”

• Frances Langum examines the Senator’s options as she watches Lindsey Graham wriggle around his blind support of all things Trump. Options? Seems there are none.
   
• So the evidence grows daily that Putin really did put a death bounty on the heads of American troops. My president insists it’s all a hoax, but more details come out to substantiate the kill payments. In Hackwhackers yet another detail: a key contact is identified, an Afghan middleman who helped make sure the right bounties were delivered after killings were verified.
   
• Cato’s Julian Sanchez observes the Trump-Putin-Bounty scandal and asks an obvious question. If Trump didn’t know about reports that Russians had put a bounty on the lives of American soldiers, and that’s why he did nothing about it, why has he done nothing since the rest of us began reading about it?
   
• In Scotties Toy Box, the third cartoon down makes the same point. The other graphics are worth extending the visit.
   
• In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson detects a pattern. Trump apologists are saying the president was not aware of the Russian bounty for the killing of each US soldier and was not aware earlier of the corona virus. Trump doesn’t like to read, so it won’t matter what’s found in the presidential daily briefings. Especial!y since…
   
  …everything that went wrong was all because of inadequate briefings by a negligent CIA analyst. The analyst downplayed the pandemic in January. Then, in February, she neglected to mention the Russian bounty at all. So my president had no responsibility for anything, right?
   
• Andy Borowitz summarizes the scattered confetti of desperate excuses put out by Trump defenders for my president’s ignorance: Trump did not read the bounty briefs because he was busy not reading the coronavirus briefs.

Continue reading “Graham Cracked, Bounty, Trump Briefs, Campaign, Texas Power, Technocrazy”

 

From The Journal of Improbable Research:

As if prepared for it all their lives, fans of horror fiction plunge now into a real pandemic. A new study looks at their psychological prospects.

“Pandemic Practice: Horror Fans and Morbidly Curious Individuals Are More Psychologically Resilient During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Coltan Scrivner [pictured here, stylistically], John Johnson, Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, and Mathias Clasen, PsyArXiv, 2020. (Thanks to Minna Lyons for bringing this to our attention.)

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From driftglass:

Bill Kristol: His Life and Times

So Trump hates Obama as hard as Kristol did, is as dedicated to gutting the Affordable Care Act as Kristol was and is far more obedient to the wishes and whims of Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s far right-wing Likud Party than any president in history, so what is Kristol so spun up about?

Well, it’s pretty simple. Kristol’s objections to Trump are almost entire based on Trump’s loutish manners.

You see, Kristol’s conservatism was always fascist at heart, but what he wanted was a genteel fascism led by a true Conservative hero like Mike Fucking Pence.

But instead he got Trump, who won the hearts of the racist white trash rabble (which Bill Kristol though he had locked down) by offering them the one thing Kristol never could: permission to be as Out and Proud with their depravity, bigotry and paranoia as they pleased.

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From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:

I’ve seen you defending nonsensical, panicked 911 calls on black people or gun-jittery, gun-wielding white people—suggesting some unrecorded threat or justifiable fear that makes it reasonable.

I’ve seen you jubilant at the prospect of millions of people losing healthcare: the sick and the already vulnerable, sexual assault victims, the mentally ill, women—simply because the name Obama is attached to such care.

I’ve noticed your conspicuous silence about families still separated at the border, about hundreds of people shut out of polling sites in Kentucky, bout legislative assaults on women’s autonomy over their own bodies, about the disproportionate effect of this pandemic on people of color, about a president’s supremacists tweets.

Honestly friend, it doesn’t seem that all lives really do matter to you.

It feels like your support for life is far more selective than that.

It seems like what matters to you—are straight, white, American, Republican, Christian lives; preferably those who live in your neighborhoods or attend your churches or seem the most like you. Everyone else seems like a threat or a problem or an afterthought.

All lives don’t seem to include immigrant lives, Latino lives, LGBTQ lives, Muslim lives, poor lives, Democrat lives, Atheist lives, women’s lives—and no, not black lives either.

And I want to be wrong about you.

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From John Scalzi at Whatever:

The GOP defection is real: At least for old establishment Republicans who did time in Washington, in this case, a bunch of Bush-years folks. I don’t think individually these sort of public defections matter that much, but what it is doing by aggregation is giving a whole bunch of GOP voters sick of Trump’s bullshit cover to step into a voting booth and vote for a Democrat just this once. Of course, it doesn’t solve the problem of the fact that the GOP base is filled with racist ignorants who want conspiracy theorists as their elected representatives. But, I guess, one problem at a time.

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From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

So I keep coming back to this:

1. It was in the PDB or briefed to him that he didn’t bother to read (haha, Trump “read”) or listen.
2. He knew and didn’t care because he wants to have a “good relationship” with a murderous autocrat.
3. The NSC/CIA deliberately kept it from him because the Intelligence Community though Trump would tip off Putin, again, like he did when he invited the Russian Ambassador into the oval office and revealed Israeli agents.

But the thing that really strikes me is that since this became public, instead of immediately acting on it, Lord Damp Nut played golf all weekend. He still has not acted on it, except to punch back at people talking about it.

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From PZ Myers:

The Republicans want to stop testing, because it reveals an increasing number of infected. Tracing? What’s that? There’s no serious investment of resources that we’d need to do thorough tracing. The President belittles the idea of wearing a mask, and refuses to wear one himself. Conservative citizens freak out at the idea of wearing a mask. Texans marched on their capitol under the banner of “Bar Lives Matter”, committing a double self-own: refusing to police their own behavior to limit the spread of a disease, and mocking a serious social justice movement. The United States of America is now the deadliest place to live and risk COVID-19 infection, and our numbers are rising. We are in big trouble, and way too many people are refusing to take it seriously, which means the trouble is only going to get worse.

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