Month: May 2019

 
From driftglass:

It did not go well.

“Fear stokes anger, which then stokes more fear.” — David Brooks, the Faith and Humility reporter for the Acela Corridor Pantograph

“Fear is the path to the dark side…fear leads to anger…anger leads to hate…hate leads to suffering.” — Yoda, The Phantom Menace

Because Mr. Brooks doesn’t fear privation of any kind — because in his rarefied world of extraordinary privilege the idea of starvation, or homelessness, or losing his job, or losing his health insurance, or losing his country are completely alien to him — for him, the idea of “fear” itself exists only as a free-floating abstraction.

For Mr. Brooks, fear is not a key survival-emotion honed by millions of years of human evolution, but an entity unto itself. Like the glowing, red alien flashlight-special-effect thingy in Star Trek’s Day of the Dove — a malevolent spirit which hovers above all of us, making us fight for no good reason but its amusement.

Mr. Brooks makes this breathtakingly stupid claim for the same reason Mr. Brooks makes all of his breathtakingly stupid claims: because Mr. Brooks has spent the last 15 years relentlessly clawing his way up to the exalted position of the Pope of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It. And as the Pope of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It, Mr. Brooks is driven with the implacable zeal of a fanatic to false-equivalence the shit out of every issue, under all circumstance, in every venue he has available.

In this case, that means using his New York Times column to indiscriminately bulldoze everyone’s fears — legitimate or real — down to the same level of folly.

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From Tommy Christopher:

Trump Pick Stephen Moore Makes Unbelievably Cringeworthy Defense of His Racist Obama Joke

“By the way, did you see, there’s that great cartoon going along?” Moore said. “A New York Times headline: ‘First Thing Donald Trump Does as President Is Kick a Black Family Out of Public Housing,’ and it has Obama leaving the White House. I mean, I just love that one. Just a great one.”

In an excerpt from an upcoming episode of PBS’ Firing Line with Margaret Hoover, Hoover asked Moore about the joke, and after playing the clip for him, let Moore perform the news equivalent of an extended sad trombone.

“So, you know, that is a joke that I always made about, you know, Obama lives in, you know, the president lives in public housing,” Moore began, deploying the solid strategy of defending a racist joke by saying you make that racist joke all the time.

“But I didn’t mean it like a black person did,” Moore continued, despite the fact that the joke literally says “kick a black family out of public housing.”

“I just meant that, you know, you know, being in the White House, you know, for example, when I was working with a lot of women in families who were involved in the education voucher program, you know, here in DC, and people would say, well, you know, and these were blacks who would say, you know, why does Barack Obama get to send his kids to any school that he wants to and we can’t?”

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From Dave Dubya:

Third parties and voters choosing not to participate in elections

I get it. People get frustrated. We seem to have two kinds of candidates, disappointing and horrible.

It should be obvious that the most horrible are always Republicans. As I’ve repeatedly emphasized, the Republican Party is at war with representative democracy, which means they want to suppress voters and voting rights.

The more people who turn out to vote, the more Republicans lose.

The Right has made this tactic abundantly clear.

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From The Journal of Improbable Research:

The 30+ years since the launch of Super Mario Bros. have given ample opportunity for scholars to study the game’s possible influences in academia and society at large.

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

New NJ Beekeeper Regs Show Why Government Should Focus on Punishing the Guilty, Not Regulating the Innocent.

Certainly, everyone has a right not to be harmed (or their property) by neighboring operations, based on the principal of property rights. But neither should a person be interfered with by government for engaging in legal activities on his own property that harms no one else. Why punish the innocent?

And that’s the dirty little secret of government regulation; the punishing of the innocent for the wrongdoing of the guilty. A good poster child for this premise is Sarbanes-Oxley, the giant financial regulatory bill passed after the 1999-2000 Enron accounting scandals. Enron, Worldcom, and a few other companies defrauded investors—and were prosecuted under pre-existing laws. Yet Congress and President Bush passed Sarbanes-Oxley, allegedly to “prevent” future fraud but which in reality burdened the thousands of companies that didn’t cook the books with new regulations—in effect, punishing the innocent many for the wrongdoing of the few.

We see this pattern time and again. Somebody does something wrong, and regulations reign down on an entire industry or sector.

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