Yow

Painful.

Makes me nostalgic for Dick Nixon, and Up With People.

Oy.

A Parallel

Meet the "New Right"

same as the old right.

Project 2025 in a nutshell:

"We must secure the existence of our people

and a future for white children"

La Claque

France election: How the far-right lost

• Marine Le Pen's RN comes third in parliamentary election
• She had predicted it would win and form government
• Opponents united to keep far-right out of power
• Party leaders, supporters say its time will come soon

PARIS, July 7 (Reuters) - The champagne was on ice at the far-right National Rally's (RN) headquarters, but the celebratory mood swiftly turned to disbelief when the first projected results from Sunday's parliamentary election appeared on TV screens.

For days, Marine Le Pen had confidently predicted that her party would triumph with an outright majority and her protege Jordan Bardella would be prime minister. Instead, the National Rally was on course to come third, behind a left-wing alliance and President Emmanuel Macron's centrist bloc.

It was undone to a large extent by tactical dealmaking between centrist and leftist opponents, who pulled more than 200 candidates from three-way races to avoid splitting the anti-RN vote.
The projected result brought to a shuddering halt what had appeared to be the far right's relentless rise in France, carefully engineered by Le Pen who had sough to clean up her party's image and tap the grievances of voters angry over living costs, strained public services, and immigration.

To be sure, Le Pen and her party have suffered disappointment before, most recently her 2022 defeat to Macron in the presidential election, and have managed to bounce back more strongly than before.

But for now, the outcome was a bitter pill to swallow.

"The results are disappointing and they don't represent what French people want," said Jocelyn Cousin, 18, who had come to party HQ expecting a victory party.

The RN's momentum had appeared unstoppable after it trounced the centrists in European elections in early June and came first, ahead of the hastily assembled leftist New Popular Front, in the first round of the parliamentary vote on June 30.

Le Pen and Bardella attributed their party's setback on Sunday to the what Bardella called the "disgraceful alliance" the anti-RN forces, who he said had caricatured the party and disrespected its voters.

But IPSOS pollster Brice Teinturier pointed to the RN's own shortcomings, including revelations before the run-off that several of its candidates had expressed xenophobic views, raising questions over whether the party had really ditched its more toxic past.
"What happened is also that RN candidates themselves showed in this campaign that they either were not ready or had in their ranks candidates that are antisemitic, xenophobic or homophobic," Teinturier told France 2 television.

'TIDE IS RISING'

Florent de Kersauson, an RN candidate in Brittany in western France, acknowledged the fallout had been damaging. But he also said voters may have felt the party was arrogant in predicting an absolute majority.

"I thought it was strange that they said that," said Kersauson, who lost his race against a pro-Macron candidate. "It seemed like something that was very hard to achieve."
Bardella and Le Pen strove to put a brave face on their result. The party had increased its share of seats in the National Assembly to a record high, they noted, vowing to keep fighting until they won power.

"The tide is rising, but it didn't rise quite high enough this time," said Le Pen, who is likely to mount her fourth presidential campaign in 2027. "Our victory has merely been delayed."
That was also the feeling among many of the supporters gathered at party HQ in Paris.
"I see our victory coming. People are going to understand that the National Rally is not so horrible. I believe it will happen in 2027. I have a lot of hope and I'll continue to fight," said Elea da Cunha, 17.

Frederic-Pierre Vos, a close associate of Le Pen and former RN party lawyer elected in a constituency north of Paris, said the hung parliament thrown up by the election would mean an ungovernable France, providing fresh opportunities for RN in 2027.

Yet despite the party's fighting talk, Sunday's outcome was a clear setback.

Business newspaper Les Echos ran a front page showing a grim-faced Bardella with the headline "la claque" or "the slap".

Foreign Affairs

Falun Gong

• It's my contention that all authoritarian regimes are, by their nature, Right Wing.
• It's my contention that there's no such thing as a Left Wing authoritarian regime.

The Chinese Communist Party has been authoritarian and autocratic from the beginning.

Falun Gong is no different, it's just that they grew out of the old ways of the Chinese imperial dynasties, with some perverse, monstrously affectatious element of "spirituality" attached to it, in an attempt to give itself some kind of gravitas or credibility.

So yeah - they're pitted against each other - both wanting supreme power over people.

And Falun Gong is no more "religious" than the American evangelicals. It's politics, just as religion has always been politics.

And every business, every church, every political organization needs PR.

BTW, I told ya BKjr is a fuckin' loon.

Today's Today

On this date in 2021,

the world celebrated a milestone of freedom

when Rush Limbaugh croaked.

may he rot in hell

cuz fuck that guy

Today's Wingnut

via Right Wing Watch, Nick Fuentes:

This is the self-parody they warned us about 30+ years ago as the Shock Jock thing was proliferating, and starting to devolve into a competition to see who could say the most disgusting thing on the air, and stay on the air.

It's less encumbered now because once they've built their audience, they don't have to worry about much. FCC rules mean nothing online, of course, and YouTube, Instagram, et al, will tolerate an awful lot before shutting them down - partly because the big platforms are operating under the same Moral Neutrality as the worst of the hate-speakers.

If it pays, it stays. The market is everything.

This particular clown may not actually hold the stupid "opinions" he spouts, but it doesn't matter. It's just business to him - it's about nothing but the views and the visits - cutting thru the clutter, and cashing in on the economies of scale. 

The problem is there are vast numbers of people who will take this shit to heart, and some who will act on it.

"The Fisher King" comes to mind.

or

"A Face In The Crowd"

or

"Talk Radio"

Today's Tweet

Trying to defend the indefensible.

Charlie Kirk is telling us that 10-year-old brown kids at Robb Elementary School are the same as Russians invading Ukraine.

If the guns in Uvalde are the same as the guns in Ukraine, then the reason for the guns in Ukraine is the same as the reason for the guns in Uvalde.

Because it's not a big leap to tie this crap together with the rhetorical imagery coming from "the right".

ie: "we're being invaded by brown people at our southern border."

This is what a "conservative" "thought" "leader" sounds like on the Republican side.

If guns were evil, why did DC approve sending $40 billion worth to Ukraine?

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) May 27, 2022

Today's Wingnut

Note the thinly-veiled Stochastic Terrorism.

Ms Hamm invokes protection from the angels. And she cleverly couches it in terms of "both sides", saying she wants the angels to protect her opponents as well.

The problem here is that way too many true believers are willing to convince themselves that they are mere tools of god - that they're fully sanctioned to do some shitty thing or another because they were called by god to do it. They see themselves as the angels sent by god, was acting through Rachel Hamm.

So there's a fair probability that she's calling on "patriots" to intimidate people, and to steal ballots that might be "improperly marked" and blah blah blah.

That's how this shit works.

"Will no one rid me of the meddlesome priest!?!"

Right Wing Watch:

Today's Wingnut

Nick Fuentes again. It's hard to take this asshat seriously because I have to think nobody actually believes the way this clown says he believes.

He's just pretending because this is his formula - it's what sells, and that's how he pays his mortgage.

But the point is that Fuentes doesn't have to believe the way he says he believes - there are literally millions of rubes out there who take this shit to heart, and will act on it once they're well-enough conditioned.

We saw how this can play out Jan6. So we have to take it all very seriously.

Right Wing Watch:

It's A Setup

I realize all this is starting to sound a little Q-ish, but sometimes, paranoia is not an unreasonable thing.

Don't look for peace and tranquility in the months ahead. 

I think AstroTurf goons fully intend to disrupt everything in a continuation of a Brown-Shirt style campaign to destabilize democracies.

There are likely good reasons we've seen the Flu Trux Klan rallies here and in Canada and in Europe, while there's been nothing at the US/Mexico border.

I think the instigators (and the participants) are actively avoiding making common cause with any brown people because this ain't about justice or freedom or anything good for anyone but the Daddy Staters, and it's hard to maintain any traction with the rubes if you suddenly go all inclusive and woke and shit.

The "conservative" brand is all about exclusivity and elimination.

What do Republicans and Right-Wingers hate most?

1. Being called racist

2. Brown people

This Wacky World

Another indication that Cult45 is nine kinds of fucked up: The Germans are pushing back against the US ambassador because he's just a little too Right-Wing for them.

There's a silly irony in that, but there's also a very serious reality - nobody's gonna know more about how to spot a Nazi douche nozzle than the Germans.

NPR:

Richard Grenell has been the U.S. ambassador to Germany for barely a month, but already politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are demanding he be recalled.

The uproar is over Grenell's recent comments on Twitter and the right-wing Breitbart news site in support of Europe's conservative politicians who he said are making gains against the political establishment. German and U.S. politicians charge that the remarks could amount to meddling in Germany's political affairs.

Our State Department, meanwhile, is defending Grenell with the usual "Hey, c'mon, he's entitled to an opinion".

Aye, there's the rub.

Ambassadors are representatives of POTUS. Grenell wouldn't be there if he wasn't in line with 45*, and that puts him in line with Putin, and that puts him in line with the Daddy State Plutocracy bullshit being pimped around the world.

Today's Wingnut

Well, that's a little scary.

Today's Tweet

Trump’s rigged election conspiracies are the product of years of conservative "voter fraud" fear-mongering and it threatens our democracy: pic.twitter.com/LeZqtJXvUR

— Media Matters (@mmfa) October 26, 2016

Turns Out She Was Right

Olbermann fills in your scorecard:

Today's Wingnut

They don't come any slimier than Alex Jones.

And y'know, Alex - your obsessing about Rubio's obsessing about Trump (and other stuff too) seems to indicate a certain particularly obsessive thing that might say a helluva lot more about your pathology than anybody else's.

Jesus Schwartz, dude.  How is anybody supposed to keep up with any of this double flip with a full-twisting backward takeoff whatever the fuck?

Say What Now?

Megyn Kelly:

“There are very few companies in America, whether they’re public or private, in which if you sic 40 FBI agents on the company and review every email and every document and every communication between employees, you won’t find any racist emails."

So practically every company in America 1) employs a buncha racist assholes, and 2) has no particular policy against sending racist asshole emails &/or chooses to do nothing about the racist assholes who work for them.

And that proves the cops and the courts in Ferguson MO can't possibly be racist?  Can you say "Tu Quoque"?  How 'bout "Bandwagon"?

One other little thingie, Ms Kelly - the DoJ report did not "completely clear Darren Willson".  The conclusion was that they didn't find enough to go after a Federal Indictment against him. There's quite a difference there - and you know it.

A 2-Fer Update

I'm just kinda still following the Ferguson thing, so I'm really glad somebody's keeping an eye on the shit-flingers.

First, this is NOT a picture of Darren Wilson:

It's a picture of a moto-x-er named Jim McNeil who crashed his bike in 2006:

OK - 2nd, again via Little Green Footballs:

CLAYTON • As a child, Michael Brown was never found delinquent of the juvenile equivalents of Missouri’s most serious felony charges and was not facing any at the time he died, a court official said Wednesday.

The Post-Dispatch filed a petition Aug. 22 asking a judge in the St. Louis County Family Court to open any juvenile records on Brown, the unarmed 18-year-old shot to death last month by a Ferguson police officer. A conservative blogger from California had separately requested the records be opened.

Police had said earlier that Brown had no adult criminal record.

The petitions went to a hearing Tuesday with St. Louis County Family Court Judge Ellen Levy Siwak, who took the case under advisement.

But disclosures during and after the hearing on Tuesday put to rest claims by blogger Charles C. Johnson and others that Brown was facing a murder charge at the time he was shot to death.

Cynthia Harcourt, a lawyer for St. Louis County Juvenile Officer Kip Seely, noted that some juvenile records and proceedings are open to the public: those that concern crimes that would be Class A or B felonies if a juvenile had been charged as an adult. But there were none for Brown.

Mike Brown is dead for some pretty fucked up reasons.  And now we know we can't just comfortably rationalize it away by swallowing the bullshit smear that he was a thug so he prob'ly had it comin' sooner or later anyway, and then pretending we're not racist assholes for thinking that way.

Refuge For The Scoundrel

These jackwads are always peddling this standard-issue bullshit as they try to inoculate themselves against the logical and obvious conclusion that they're the fucking problem in the first fucking place.

"...wrapped in the flag, waving a bible..."



--and--



Somebody needs to explain this one thing to me - I need to know what exactly the difference is between these guys:

...and these guys:

How do I differentiate between this guy

...and this guy?

"But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word 'Fascism' and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty." --Sinclair Lewis

With all the overblown hyperventilation, you'd think this is about something other than simply pulling down your idea of tyranny and replacing it with my idea of tyranny.

Rejecting the process of gaining power thru force of arms and arbitrary terrorism is supposed to be what it means when we talk about American Exceptionalism.

Buncha fuckin' jagoffs.

A Little De-Programming, Please

From the film's website

As filmmaker, Jen Senko, tries to understand the transformation of her father from a non political, life-long Democrat to an angry, Right-Wing fanatic, she uncovers the forces behind the media that changed him completely: a plan by Roger Ailes under Nixon for a media takeover by the GOP, The Powell Memo urging business leaders to influence institutions of public opinion, especially the universities, the media and the courts, and under Reagan, the dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine.

Holy Crap

I had no idea this thing still existed.

On "Age of the Earth":

See also Counterexamples to an Old Earth.

The Age of the Earth has been a matter of interest to humans for millennia. The subject is still debated today, particularly between young-Earth scientists, who believe that the Earth is only approximately 6,000-10,000 (8 × 103 ± 25%) years old, and most scientific organisations who believe that Earth is approximately 4.54 billion years (4.54 × 109 ± 1%).[1][1] The scientific evidence points to a young age of the earth and the universe, and the biblical creation organization Creation Ministries International published an article entitled 101 evidences for a young age of the earth and the universe, which further argues for the young age of the Earth.

Old Earth advocates rely on one flawed assumption to the exclusion of other evidence, similar to how an investigator may mistakenly rely on one eyewitness's opinion to the exclusion of all else. In fact, eyewitness testimony is proven to be less reliable to than other indicators, just as the assumption by Old Earth proponents that the rate of radioactive decay has always been constant is flawed. In fact, a large number of physical processes, such as neutron capture and fluctuations in solar radiation, can affect the rate of radioactive decay of elements in the Earth's crust and render radioactive dating measurements unreliable with errors up to 5%, depending upon the specific methods used.[2] Even so, such an error will not cause a calculation of the age of the Earth based on radiometric dating to be off by up to five orders of magnitude.

A test to quantify openmindedness:

1. Do you resist admitting the possibility that a conservative approach to education is far more effective for students than a liberal one?
2. If it were proven to your satisfaction that some idea you've been using to bolster a political argument was false, would you keep using that idea in your argument?
3. Do you resist admitting that something you accepted for over a decade is, in fact, completely false?
4. Do you resist the possibility that Hollywood values result in significant harm for those who believe in them, and to innocent bystanders?
5. Do you think it is impossible that increased gun ownership reduces the rate of crime?
6. When President Ronald Reagan told Mr. Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, would you have thought that it was politically impossible for the Berlin Wall to be torn down?
7. Did you think, or still think, that the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") is impossible?
8. Do you think that it is impossible that the Shroud of Turin is authentic?
9. Do you think that there must be a purely material-based explanation (such as magnetism) for remarkable homing and migration behavior of birds and butterflies?
10. Do you think that it is impossible for the speed of light in the Earth's atmosphere to have been measurably different in the past?
11. Do you think that it is impossible to measure openmindedness?
12. Do you think that evolution[2] must have occurred?
13. Do you think that is impossible for the power of 2 in Newtonian gravity, whereby the gravitational force is proportional to 1/r2, to be more precise with an exponent that is slightly different from 2, such as a gravitational force proportional to 1/r2.00000001?
14. Do you resist admitting that some things taught to you in school are completely false, and even known to be false by some responsible for the material?
15. Do you deny that some widely required theories of science, such as the theory of evolution, may actually impede the progress of science?[3]
16. Do you deny that the imposition of socialism and same-sex marriage on a nation could harm its competitiveness at international events like the Olympics?
17. Do you refuse to consider the possibility that "experts" may not have all the answers, and that the best of the public may have valuable insights to which experts are blind?
18. Do you think that if you read parts of the Bible years ago as a child, you can claim to "have read the Bible" and that you have no reason to read it regularly now?
19. Do you believe that because the Earth's orbit and rotation are what they are now, they are guaranteed to remain stable for billions of years?
20. Do you refuse to consider the possibility that Hebrews might have been authored by Jesus?

The above questions can be asked, and one's closed-mindedness can be scored based on how often they answered "yes" above. Answering more than half as "yes" reflects acute closed-mindedness.

That's what passes for intellectual inquiry and insight from our friends way over there on the far end of the spectrum - except I get a bad feeling sometimes that maybe it's not considered all that far out.  When I talk to some people, they seem to accept this nonsense; or at least have it in their minds that this is nothing more than a difference of opinion.  And the main problem I have with that thinking is that an awful lot of  "conservatives" are not willing to leave it as a matter of differing opinions - they're actively seeking to turn this shit into law.  And the people who shrug and give me the standard "comme ci, comme ça" response are the ones doing nothing to counteract it.