Politics Speak

In case you ever wondered about "Tortured Logic":

Is there any other group these days that’s more unfairly maligned than white supremacists? We joke, of course, but that seems to be the argument that former Trump delegate and prominent white nationalist William Johnson made recently in an interview with Buzzfeed.

Specifically, Johnson talked about his harrowing but short-lived experience of being selected as a California delegate for Donald Trump at this year’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Although the Trump campaign quickly moved to distance itself from Johnson after his racist views had been revealed, Johnson had initially held out hope that he’d be embraced so that he could practice his brand of white nationalism in the open and without fear of stigma.

“I was naive,” Johnson told Buzzfeed. “I thought, Gee, I could participate in the electoral process just like everybody else. I thought I could participate and be productive and be a good example for the community and help promote my candidate, but that was not the case.”

Of course, the best way he could be a good example to the community is to not be a white nationalist, but this doesn’t seem to have dawned upon him.

Vince Foster
 "Pocahontas"
I love our veterans, but I don't love 'em enough not to lie to them about that fund-raiser
Fuck AGW and Climate Change
Fuck NATO
Birth certificate
Nukes for everybody
No brown people allowed
Put women in jail for having abortions
Those generals will waterboard people if I tell 'em to, or I'll get generals who will

and on and on and on.

With every new little bit of Stoopid, Trump builds up the DumFuck Coalition by collecting another few voters who reject Intellect and Clear Thought, and believe Outrageous Bullshit is the new Truth-Telling.

And btw - Over-Promise and Under-Deliver is how Donald Trump has always done things. Very little of what he says he'll do is what he'll actually do.  When you go to collect on what you think he owes you, he'll offer "pennies-on-the-dollar", and tell you it's because one of your friends - somebody else who's in on the deal - is fucking you over.

The man has no soul and no honor.

Today's Tweet

If a President Trump visited Hiroshima...

"I like people who weren't vaporized..."#NeverTrump pic.twitter.com/whItm52MsF

— Groucho2.0 (@georgefenneman) May 26, 2016

Today's Quote

Dunning-Kruger strikes again.

This is pretty close to a much broader charge of False Consciousness, but we gotta be able to address it - we can't fix it if we don't know there's something wrong with it.

We all have pockets of incompetence; we're all susceptible to the effects of Dunning-Kruger.

What we have to do is go outside our own spheres of delusion (ie: talk to other humans), test our thinking against what others are thinking, establish some kind of baseline parameters of fact, and then get to an understanding that the more we learn, the more we realize how little we actually know.

(that "baseline parameters of fact" thing is where we seem to get kinda hung up)

hat tip = FB friend LM-M

It's Personal

On a certain level, I think I may not give half-a-fuck who wins the election as long as somebody can do something to fix this shit right here:

40 bucks a pound?  You can buy a brand new full-sized SUV for about $10 a pound.  

TEN FUCKING DOLLARS!

What the fuck is up with pine nuts?

It's A Wonderment

(at about 5:10 when Bloody Bill Kristol spouts off about how nobody trusts Trump or Hillary, Brazile nails it):

"...we have to get over the fact that we won't have a lotta love in this campaign."

I'm anything but a Donna Brazile fan, but that right there is fucking genius - get the fuck over it, kids.

The rest of it is more of the same old crap about Both Sides, and everybody's awful, and there's no reason anybody would wanna vote for any of these jokers, and gee whiz, I wonder why we can't get Americans to show up on Election Day. Which of course is what makes the Donna Brazile thing so sparkly, and why she doesn't get to talk about it much on the air.  She came a little too close to calling the Horse Race Bullshit for what it is.

And also too - is there really any reason to keep Cokie Roberts around - for anything?  I haven't heard her express a cogent thought that isn't basically "Yeah, but the Democrats..." for a dozen years or more (thanks, driftglass).  Does she have somebody's grandkids tied up in her basement or something? Fuck me, lady - enough. You're done. Time for you to be the Grande Dame of the Georgetown Cocktail Circuit full-time or whatever, but please just go the fuck away already.

Not that I feel strongly about it or nuthin'.

Thinkin' Music

Steve Kimock

w/ Bobby Vega (bass), Leslie Mendelson & John Kimock (drums)

"Careless Love"
"Tongue N' Groove"
"Surely This Day"

Today's Tweet

Twitter buddy Inigo Montoya asks:

Is US broadcast media going for a Guinness Book World Record in covering a single story nonstop indefinitely to infinity and beyond? #trump

— inigo montoya (@alphagalz) May 23, 2016

Media analysts and various consultants discovered in the 90s that while approval ratings for broadcasters went straight into the shitter when they ran stories about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinski, the number of viewers tuning in to see those stories went in exactly the opposite direction. 

We love to hate ourselves for loving to watch such hateful shit in such a Stockholm Syndrome-y way.  This is USAmerica Incorporated - it's just something we do.

What's Wrong Here?

Steven Rosenfeld interviewing David Cay Johnston over at AlterNet:

“Imagine that you are a mortgage lender. Are you going to lend people money for 30 years if they don’t have the security of employment?” Johnston said, offering an example of how the successful push by the technology sector to undermine and overturn the labor laws created during the New Deal are tilting too far toward piecemeal purveyors and will create new instability.

“People are working without salary, benefits, and the stability to buy a house and raise a family,” he said, saying that the blame can be placed at the foot of high-tech lobbyists who have donated to congressional campaigns and federal officeholders who subsequently loosened federal laws to their benefit.

Meanwhile, according to Pew’s New Digital Economy report, 61 percent of Americans have never heard of “crowdfunding,” 73 percent are not familiar with the “sharing economy,” and 89 percent have never heard of the “gig economy.”

The big picture painted by Johnston, who is a registered Republican but schooled in the belief that business prospers when wages and benefits are reliable and income is spent locally, was the fundamentals of middle-class stability are being further eroded by a new technology-based oligarchy. Despite all the hip apps and marketing, gig economy profits are only going to executives while the jobs offered are intrinsically unstable, fiscally unpredictable and most of the risk and expense are placed on contract workers.

 But not to worry, Oligarchs - the great American Intellect Deficit is forever on your side:

Meanwhile, according to Pew’s New Digital Economy report, 61 percent of Americans have never heard of “crowdfunding,” 73 percent are not familiar with the “sharing economy,” and 89 percent have never heard of the “gig economy.”

 

Today's Pix

Today's Quote

"Love me or hate me, both are in my favor. If you love me, I will always be in your heart. If you hate me, I'll still be in your head."

--Wm Shakespeare