New Age Of Fear

Be sure to get a good daily dose of driftglass 

An Un-Joke

John of Patmos (writing Revelation): 

Lord, the End Times will be signaled by trumpets?

God: 

No - Trump/Pence

John: 

Oh, right - Trumpets

God: 

Fine - whatever - they'll know.

hat tip = Jay Smooth

Today's Tweet

Spot on description of the Trump admin by @RyanLizza.

Kakistocracy: a government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens. pic.twitter.com/1JSCUdMQUJ

— Michael Skolnik (@MichaelSkolnik) November 16, 2016

How We Got Here

A shortish interview with Paul Horner, Facebook Fake News Impressario, by Caitlin Dewey at WaPo

WaPo: You’ve been writing fake news for a while now — you’re kind of like the OG Facebook news hoaxer. Well, I’d call it hoaxing or fake news. You’d call it parody or satire. How is that scene different now than it was three or five years ago? Why did something like your story about Obama invalidating the election results (almost 250,000 Facebook shares, as of this writing) go so viral?

Horner: Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.

 I was wrong when I said this is the Era Of Post-Trust.  Actually, I was wrong not to include the part that says this is the Era Of Poe's Law.

"...without a clear indicator of the author's intent, parodies of extreme views will be mistaken by some readers or viewers as sincere expressions of the parodied views."

Mr Horner again:

My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.

You know this shit ain't normal - push back against it.

A Short Mainfesto

Eric Berg

Don't Get Over It

Eugene Robinson via The Oregonian:

WASHINGTON -- The people chose Hillary Clinton. But it's the electoral vote that counts, not the popular vote, so Donald Trump will be president. And no, I'm not over it.

No one should be over it. No one should pretend that Trump will be a normal president. No one should forget the bigotry and racism of his campaign, the naked appeals to white grievance, the stigmatizing of Mexicans and Muslims. No one should forget the jaw-dropping ignorance he showed about government policy both foreign and domestic. No one should forget the vile misogyny. No one should forget the mendacity, the vulgarity, the ugliness, the insanity. None of this must ever be normalized in our politics.

And don't make it normal.

 

Stop Pretending

Watch this video on The Scene.

Rhinoceritis

Via my Facebook pal Bill D:

NYT:

It is an epidemic of “rhinoceritis.” Almost everyone succumbs: those who admire the brute force of the rhinos, those who didn’t believe the sightings to begin with, those who initially found them alarming. One character, Dudard, declares, “If you’re going to criticize, it’s better to do so from the inside.” And so he willingly undergoes the metamorphosis, and there’s no way back for him. The final holdouts from this mass capitulation are Berenger and Daisy, his co-worker.

Eugène Ionesco was French-Romanian. He wrote “Rhinoceros” in 1958 as a response to totalitarian movements in Europe, but he was influenced specifically by his experience of fascism in Romania in the 1930s. Ionesco wanted to know why so many people give in to these poisonous ideologies. How could so many get it so wrong? The play, an absurd farce, was one way he grappled with this problem.

This shit is not normal.  Fight back.

 

Grab Your Wallet

Paraphrasing Harry Truman:

"Anybody who leaves office with more money than he started with is a crook."

The boycott thing is on.

Make a call
Send an email
Get this thing goin'

Today's Pix