Internet Freedom

Lee Camp

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.

Welfare Cowboy Update

This just in from DumFux News - all the latest on Cliven Bundy!!!!

New Show

This past Sunday, HBO premiered John Oliver's Last Week Tonight, and I managed to miss it.

YouTube won't let me embed the video, but click here and watch the whole thing.

Here's a screen cap (for reasons unknown even to me):

Another Milestone

Well not quite yet.

Next year will be the 70th anniversary of Nuclear Weapons.  Woohoo.

Here's a cool little animation by Isao Hashimoto that's just scary as fuck:

Post What Now?

Can we dispense with this bullshit about Post-Racial America now please?

  Clippers Owner Donald Sterling to GF - Don't Bring Black People to My Games, Including Magic Johnson
  - Watch More
  Celebrity Videos
  or
  Subscribe

The Best Of Hitch

10 Commandments --Christopher Hitchens

It Won't Stick

Here's Cliven Bundy trying to remind everybody that DumFux News is really in near-perfect agreement with everything he had to say "about the negro":



It's almost impossible for anybody not to know something about what's been happening with ol' Clive by now, and I'm not here to tutor you.  So if you can't keep up, take notes.  And if you're still a little confused, then you're prob'ly gonna be better off in some other class.

Now that I've weeded out the slackers and alienated most everybody else in my vast audience of ones and twos, let's get on with it:  Bundy obviously saw his opportunity to dance in the spotlight and he was determined to do it.  We saw video of him being all folksie and shucks-ma'am.  And we saw him galloping up that little hill with the stars-n-stripes.  And there he was speechifyin' at a podium festooned in red white and blue bunting, flanked by militia members looking all stern and cool and macho as they (almost literally) fondled each others' metal penises etc etc etc.

But then it all went to shit when Bundy took that next fateful step - which everybody "on the left" knew he'd take eventually, btw.  And suddenly, there's Bundy trying hard not to acknowledge that his 15 minutes were up about 20 minutes ago.

So anyway - two things:

1) DumFux News is in full retreat / damage control mode - disavowing him like he was Jim Phelps and the cassette tape's already self-destructing, while Bundy refuses to play along.

2) If history is any guide at all, the gurus at GOP and DumFux News will Etch-A-Sketch the fuck outa this little episode, and in a month or two the bubble-dwellers will be thinking it's all back to "normal" - like none of this ever happened.

The good news may well turn out to be that this has an effect on the big squishy middle.  

Bunches of people vote more or less according to "the fashionable trend".  They don't pay much attention to politics, and they don't know much about positions or policy, even tho' they have a general philosophy in mind and they tend to vote in a certain way.  These are the ones who get really uncomfortable in any discussion where they have to go beyond their usual centrist platitudes.  They haven't spent any real time or effort reading or listening or watching - they leaf thru People and Cosmo and USA Today, and they just kinda pick up a general attitude; they seem to get their political views by some kind of Social Osmosis.

It's not so much that they want to vote for somebody they think will best represent their interests (figuring that out requires work, which requires time, which a lot of people just don't have).  It's more like they only want to avoid being made fun of if they ever reveal who they voted for.

Sean Hannity isn't running away from Cliven Bundy because Bundy's a racist asshole.  

Hannity's running away from Bundy because Hannity's a craven political panderer who knows he has to un-couple Bundy from the GOP's candidates - in a big fuckin' hurry.

Here's what the symbology was supposed to be:  Every vote for a GOP candidate is a vote for freedom-loving patriots in The Real America® (roll the footage of Bundy waving the flag - what, you tho't video like that happened by accident?).

But here's what it is now:  Every vote for a GOP candidate is a vote for inveterate racist fuckheads like The Welfare Cowboy (roll the sound clip of "...about the negro").

When the thing kinda boils down to people thinking "you vote for the guy who's most like you", you're not gonna want people thinking you voted for the GOP because that makes them think you're an inveterate racist fuckhead like Clive Bundy.

Let' see if the Dems can make it stick.

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.

Survivorship Bias

Try to focus on whatever killed the dead guy, not on what didn't kill the survivor.

"A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight" --Daniel Kahneman

From the podcast of You Are Not So Smart:

"Despite how it may seem, success boils down to serially avoiding catastrophic failure while routinely absorbing manageable damage."