As bad as it is already - and it's going to get worse the longer Northam delays his departure - one of the worrisome aspects is that it's giving the Press Poodles a chance to smash-fit it into their bullshit False Equivalence narrative.
Northam controversy threatens to complicate Democrats’ bid to draw sharp contrast with Trump, GOP on race The headline is all that's needed for people to stay comfortably numb and disengaged - sitting conveniently paralyzed in the middle. As Northam defied a nationwide chorus of fellow Democrats calling for him to resign on Sunday, party activists and officials struggled to move past the growing controversy. “Without question, the longer he stays in, the more of a distraction it becomes and that’s not good for Democrats,” said Gilda Cobb-Hunter, the president of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators and a veteran South Carolina Democrat. Buried 9 paragraphs deep: Democrats argued Sunday that the Northam episode has also highlighted an important difference between the two parties. They argued that their swift and widespread calls for Northam to step down stand in contrast with the way Republicans have handled recent racial controversies in their own ranks.
Shouldn't the media's job include a way for us to keep score on this shit?
Just to show - Russians ain't all bad - or weren't anyway - once upon a time.
I leave you with Tolstoy, who reminds us so eloquently that sometimes lifting others up requires getting off of their backs. The defense rests. pic.twitter.com/QC6vXeUG6I
Safe to say, the comedy shows are practicing most of the the good journalism. Good acting is a lie truthfully told, and good comedy always has truth at its core. Notice how truth is what drives the art, even as art creates its illusions in an effort to reflect the truth back to us. Now think about how "conservatives" are always talkin' shit about what artists are doing.
When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatise those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.
Gov Ralph Northam (D-VA) will have to resign. Stay tuned for all hell breaking loose if he doesn't.
The statement:
And I don't really care about all the tearing at clothing and the gnashing of teeth going on in the halls of power as the operatives try to position things in a way that minimizes the damage and squares things up with blah blah blah. Stop it. Just stop that shit. Northam fucked up. 35 years ago - when he was 24 years old. I fucked up in somewhat the same way. A lot of us fucked up like that. We told and retold "black jokes", and laughed our asses off, and we tho't using the N-Word meant we were "just keepin' it real". We believed we weren't being the racist assholes we were actually being. "It was just a joke". All of that is by way of explanation and not excuse. Because there is no excuse, because there can be no excuse. I can say oops, and try to do better, but I'm not the Governor. I'm not the guy everybody has to be able to count on not to be that racist asshole - and not to have been a racist asshole - and at least to have not covered up being that racist asshole. Seriously - when do these "political smart guys" finally learn that it's the cover up that comes back to fuck 'em? The feeling of betrayal will never go away. Some will artificially nurture it as a useful political weapon, but for the people who matter - the people who believe public service is an honorable thing - they won't forget or forgive. And they shouldn't. Northam is done. And I think we'll be OK with Justin Fairfax.
Seems like a great way to start Black History Month.
O, let America be America again— The land that never has been yet— and yet must be —
the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine — the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME — who made America, whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, whose hand at the foundry,
whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. He moved to New York City as a young man, where he made his career.
He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. He famously wrote about the period that "the negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue".
There can be no debate without a reliable partner. Remember this as we try to navigate the political bullshit being foist on us by Daddy State Plutocrats. Via YouTube Jill Bearup with a nice roundup of Logical Fallacies:
0:33 Fallacy of Composition
0:42 Fallacy of Division
0:52 The Gambler's Fallacy
1:00 Tu Quoque (Who Are You To Talk?)
1:19 Strawman
1:32 Ad hominem
1:49 Genetic Fallacy
1:56 Fallacious Appeal To Authority
2:15 Red Herring
2:34 Appeal to Emotion
2:48 Appeal to Popularity (Bandwagon)
2:52 Appeal to Tradition
2:56 Appeal to Nature
3:04 Appeal to Ignorance
3:16 Begging the Question
3:32 Equivocation
3:50 False Dichotomy (Black or White)
4:00 Middle Ground Fallacy
4:09 Decision Point Fallacy (Sorites Paradox)
4:29 Slippery Slope Fallacy
4:46 Hasty Generalisations (Anecdotes)
5:05 Faulty Analogy
5:14 Burden of Proof
5:43 Affirming the Consequent
6:10 Denying the Antecedent
6:22 Moving the Goalposts
6:35 False Cause (and Texas Sharpshooter)
6:54 Loaded Question
7:01 No True Scotsman
7:10 Personal Incredulity
7:18 The Fallacy Fallacy
Not content with billions of dollars in profits from the potent painkiller OxyContin, its maker explored expanding into an “attractive market” fueled by the drug’s popularity — treatment of opioid addiction, according to previously secret passages in a court document filed by the state of Massachusetts.
In internal correspondence beginning in 2014, Purdue Pharma executives discussed how the sale of opioids and the treatment of opioid addiction are “naturally linked” and that the company should expand across “the pain and addiction spectrum,” according to redacted sections of the lawsuit by the Massachusetts attorney general. A member of the billionaire Sackler family, which founded and controls the privately held company, joined in those discussions and urged staff in an email to give “immediate attention” to this business opportunity, the complaint alleges.
ProPublica reviewed the scores of redacted paragraphs in Massachusetts’ 274-page civil complaint against Purdue, eight Sackler family members, company directors and current and former executives, which alleges that they created the opioid epidemic through illegal deceit. These passages remain blacked out at the company’s request after the rest of the complaint was made public on Jan. 15. A Massachusetts Superior Court judge on Monday ordered that the entire document be released, but the judge gave Purdue until Friday to seek a further stay of the ruling.
The short-hand version of Mike's General Theory of Economics (and at the risk of indulging myself in at least a couple of Logical Fallacies):
I'm a capitalist because god is a capitalist.
Capitalism is the closest approximation of "the natural order of things".
To survive, I have to take in a number of calories sufficient to fuel the work necessary to find my next meal.
I should also try to put aside a little something for that rainy day when no matter how much work I do, I get nothing.
But here comes the first part of the greater truth that the Radical Libertarians always ignore in their attempts to rationalize their shitty behavior, which are driven by their equally shitty attitudes:
God also gave me a pancreas to make sure my blood sugar level - boosted by those calories I'm taking in - is regulated. Sugar is a good thing, but without a well-timed little blast of insulin it's going to kill me. Sugar's good. Insulin's good. Too much of either sugar or insulin - and I fuckin' die.
And god provided me with a nice big brain so I can recognize the absolute need for that regulation - the need for balance - along with the need to incorporate that awareness into whatever philosophies or ideologies I might come up with.
Which leads to a second part: We're not the same as all those other life forms (that pesky big brain thing again). An adult male bear will kill and eat the cubs of another bear as part of his effort to mate with a female and get his genes into the next generation of bears. That's the natural order of things - for bears.
The natural order of things is brutal. And while it seems cruel, without the necessary self-awareness, it's just how that part of the universe works.
But humans are self-aware, and because of that self-awareness, we have to know that emulating certain animal behavior is a conscious decision, and so it can be rightly identified as cruelty.
We should try to make more of an effort to be a little smarter than the average bear.
