T-Day Pix

Turkey Day

Low-stress and drama-free:



And remember - no such thing as a tasty turkey; that's why god gave us cranberry sauce, gravy and wine.

Yikes

So - should we be afraid for ourselves?   Or is it that we should be afraid of ourselves?

Isn't that pretty much what it comes down to though?  Politicians in general (and Repubs mostly in particular) are eager to peddle the panic.  They know how to play on our fears to keep us divided, and to use that division to get what their big money donors are paying them to get.  

But over time, we become conditioned to the fear, which starts to drive a trend towards ideological purity, which always gets us out to the logical extreme in one big fuckin' hurry.  ie: Everybody's a traitor to the cause except you and me, and I'm beginning to have my doubts about you.

We can have some fun pointing and laughing, but this shit gets real if we don't smarten up and stand in its way before it has a chance to reach critical mass.

And BTW - in case it's not obvious enough, lemme state the obvious for you - smart guys working for John Kasich put this together using Trump's nutty-tude to make Kasich look like something other than the radical god-knobbing authoritarian freak that he actually is.  It's not like Kasich doesn't think very much along the same lines as Trump does, it's just that Kasich doesn't say that shit out loud.

And of course, that's kinda the problem - Trump gets a boatload of support for being "Anti-PC".  But here's the word on that one, guys.  It's Politically Incorrect to say certain things because they're shitty things to say. And since words comprise the expression of thought, PC becomes not much more than a general attempt to get you to stop thinking shitty thoughts about people.  

Putting it another way - if you can learn not to talk stoopid, it'll help you learn how not to be stoopid, and then we can stop calling you stoopid, and then you can stop bitchin' about how everybody's always callin' ya stoopid.  Deal?  

And BTW also too - Since the "voting" in Ohio appears to be nearly as honest and forthright as it was in Noriega's Panama, I'll go out on a limb and say this: Assuming Kasich's still in this thing next March - and even if he's polling behind by 20+ points - he'll somehow manage to eke out a landslide upset.   Just sayin' - again.  

I guess my main problem now is deciding how to defend myself from accusations of peddling a little fear my-own-bad-self.

What We Already Knew

So there's this new study out of Yale, published in The Proceedings of the National Academies of Science that says Climate Change Denial is all about a Cash-For-Comments system used to manufacture an "opposing view".  

And what that allows is for the political operators to separate voters along imaginary ideological fault lines, which makes it easier to keep us bitching at each other rather than voting to send the Coin-Operated Politicians back home so they can open that shoe store their mom always wanted them to have - which would be a much closer career match for their skill sets while still meaning most of them would be vastly over-employed.

Ideological polarization around environmental issues—especially climate change—have increased in the last 20 years. This polarization has led to public uncertainty, and in some cases, policy stalemate. Much attention has been given to understanding individual attitudes, but much less to the larger organizational and financial roots of polarization. This gap is due to prior difficulties in gathering and analyzing quantitative data about these complex and furtive processes. This paper uses comprehensive text and network data to show how corporate funding influences the production and actual thematic content of polarization efforts. It highlights the important influence of private funding in public knowledge and politics, and provides researchers a methodological model for future studies that blend large-scale textual discourse with social networks.

Like I said - that's not something we didn't know.  But I'll take it as a positive sign anyway, because while it's not likely to convince the hard core rubes, it's one more bullet point that rebuts the Both-Sides crap and might be useful convincing the Hipster-ish I'm-Too-Cool-To-Vote crowd to get up off their suspended-adolescence butts and realize they've got skin in this game whether they like it (or whether they even realize it) or not.

hat tip = truthout

Another Winner

From Balloon Juice:

Betteridge's Law tells us to answer 'no' to any headline (or chyron or crawl) that editors and/or producers end with a question mark.

But a commenter on that post at Balloon Juice said it best, and so he has the winning intertoobz thingie (Amateur Division) for today:

"Donald Trump transzendiert die Wahrheit, wie Scheiße Sauberkeit transzendiert"

It's worth the trip over to Google Translate, BTW.

Today's Winner

Charlie Pierce is good clear voice in a very dull crowd, and wins Best Blog Post today.

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which, of course, is what the Penguins would have sung, had they recorded "Derp Angel."

We were roaming Iowa watching live politics all weekend, so we only caught a smidgen of a crumb of the Sunday Showz. Which is to say, we only caught a little, but we caught enough to hand the House Cup over to CBS, where John Dickerson continues to adjust the casters on the chair once occupied by former Angevin minstrel Bob Schieffer. After a pretty good bipartisan dose of the old boogedy-boogedy, Dickerson brought out the panel, and we heard this from Ruth Marcus, scourge of teenaged potty-mouths everywhere.

"This was a very ugly week for Republicans in terms of their response on refugees and I think it was something that was exacerbated by the failure of President Obama to explain to people that we weren't crazy to be nervous but to understand their nervousness and to explain it away."​

Holy Third Way No Labels! If that isn't the perfect distillation of the vaporlock caused by Beltway conventional wisdom, I don't know what is. (It's even worse than the hairball Fournier coughed up on the same subject, over at the Overlook Hotel, where my man Chuck Todd always has been the caretaker.) Apparently, it either has escaped Ruth's notice, or she thinks it's impolite to mention, that the Republican party is completely out of its mind, and that its current front-runner, the Libidinous Visitor, is one step away from invading Ethiopia. How in Broder's name is the president in anyway responsible for the xenophobic rantings of a party gone mad? I know the president has mad Kenyan telepathic skillz, but what precisely would Ruth have him say? "Only worry a little, Americans. We are extremely unlikely to be overrun by exploding Syrian toddlers"? Jesus, these people…

Here's a tip, gang. Short of "I resign," there is nothing the president can say that will stop the Republicans from mongering fear and mongering war and just plain making stuff up. The people who believe this indigestible fried crud are going to believe it no matter what this president says or does. The level of anti-Islamic panic is going to remain the same because it is an election year, and because the Republican field is now led by a guy wrapping himself in out and out fascism, and doing it for laughs. And that's the double truth, Ruth.

Music

I proclaim this to be Dylan Day.  No particular reason.  Just cuz.

Shelter From The Storm --Bob

Buckets Of Rain (cover) --Wendy Bucklew

Things Have Changed --Bob

I'll Be Your Baby Tonight (cover) --Nora Jones

To Ramona (cover) --The Flying Burrito Brothers

Most Of The Time --Bob

You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (cover) --Shawn Colvin

Some Pix

Let's Throw A Study Into It

Nobody west of about Cairo knows more than this guy - Juan Cole:

1. Terrorism or hirabah is forbidden in Islamic law, which groups it with brigandage, highway robbery and extortion rackets– any illicit use of fear and coercion in public spaces for money or power. The principle of forbidding the spreading of terror in the land is based on the Qur’an (Surah al-Ma’ida 5:33–34). Prominent [pdf] Muslim legal scholar Sherman Jackson writes, “The Spanish Maliki jurist Ibn `Abd al-Barr (d. 464/ 1070)) defines the agent of hiraba as ‘Anyone who disturbs free passage in the streets and renders them unsafe to travel, striving to spread corruption in the land by taking money, killing people or violating what God has made it unlawful to violate is guilty of hirabah . . .”

2. Terrorism is above all murder. Murder is strictly forbidden in the Qur’an. 5:53 says, “… whoso kills a soul, unless it be for murder or for wreaking corruption in the land, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind; and he who saves a life, it shall be as if he had given life to all mankind,” Qur’an 6:151 says, “and do not kill a soul that God has made sacrosanct, save lawfully.” (i.e. murder is forbidden but the death penalty imposed by the state for a crime is permitted).

The list has 10 items on it, and they all seem pretty clear.

But there's this weird thing going on right now.  The debate over what is or isn't Islam - or Christianity or any other religion - is starting to sound a lot like one giant logical fallacy of "No True Scotsman", with a dash of "False Equivalence".

ISIL is to Islam what the KKK is to Christianity.

Real Christians don't fire bomb Planned Parenthood Clinics, the same as Real Muslims don't hijack airplanes and crash them into American office buildings.

In the end, we're back arguing degrees of fucked-up-edness concerning the other guy's religion.  We're only saying this or that religious nonsense is less bad than this or that other religious nonsense.  --Update: It's all nonsense, and btw, it's not the same as having to choose the lesser of two evils.  Politics gets evil enough all by itself - we don't need the extra layers of bullshit that (really) only religion can bring.

Mostly, we gotta stop pretending that anybody's religion makes for good government.

Government is about law, and law is about what you can prove, out in the open, where everybody can see it.

Let's get the debate back where it belongs.

Getting It Right

I really dig this kinda shit even tho' it usually gives me something of a headache.

Mary Norris, aka The Comma Queen:

Watch this on The Scene.

My mnemonic is:

He = Who

Him = Whom

Key phrase: Err on the side of 'who' - it's better to be casual than it is to be super wrong.