eVille Times

Nov 17, 2016

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'

Nov 16, 2016

The Truth About Post-Truth

MTV Politics

FACEBOOK’S FAKE-NEWS PROBLEM AND THE RISE OF THE POSTMODERN RIGHT

Is anyone surprised that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't feel responsible? One of the luxuries of power in Silicon Valley is the luxury to deny that your power exists. It wasn't you, it was the algorithm. Facebook may have swallowed traditional media (on purpose), massively destabilized journalism (by accident), and facilitated the spread of misinformation on a colossal scale in the run-up to an election that was won by Donald Trump (ha! whoops). But that wasn't Facebook's fault! It was the user base, or else it was the platform, or else it was the nature of sharing in our increasingly connected world. It was whatever impersonal phrase will absolve Zuckerberg's bland, drowsy appetite from blame for unsettling the things it consumes. In this way, the god-emperors of our smartphones form an instructive contrast with our president-elect: They are anti-charismatic. Unlike Trump, the agents of disruption would rather not be seen as disruptors. In the sharing economy, nothing gets distributed like guilt.

The argument that Facebook has no editorial responsibility for the content it shows its users is fatuous, because it rests on a definition of "editorial" that confuses an intention with a behavior. Editing isn't a motive. It is something you do, not something you mean. If I publish a list of five articles, the order in which I arrange them is an editorial choice, whether I think of it that way or not. Facebook's algorithm, which promotes some links over others and controls which links appear to which users, likewise reflects a series of editorial choices, and it is itself a bad choice, because it turns over the architecture of American information to a system that is infinitely scammable. I have my own issues with the New York Times, but when your all-powerful social network accidentally replaces newspapers with a cartel of Macedonian teens generating fake pro-Trump stories for money, then friend, you have made a mistake. It is time to consider pivoting toward a new vertical in the contrition space.

Knife Fight

I don't much like the way Rachel tells her stories, but dang, this one's pretty worth it.

And if I may be indulged for a brief momentito - what was all that about draining the swamp? That Trump Bunch is a fucking swamp.

A New Era Dawns

BBC News

Oxford Dictionaries has declared "post-truth" as its 2016 international word of the year, reflecting what it called a "highly-charged" political 12 months.

It is defined as an adjective relating to circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals.

Its selection follows June's Brexit vote and the US presidential election.

Oxford Dictionaries' Casper Grathwohl said post-truth could become "one of the defining words of our time".

Post-truth, which has become associated with the phrase "post-truth politics", was chosen ahead of other political terms, including "Brexiteer" and "alt-right" from a shortlist selected to reflect the social, cultural, political, economic and technological trends and events of the year.

Spotting the false thingie

Remember all the stuff we learned in US History way back in high school? Stuff like Yellow Journalism?

Some of y'all are too young to have had that chance because we stopped teaching the good "liberal" stuff quite a while ago, and of course, some of us are too old, and I guess we forgot too much and now here we are again.

Nov 1888

New Keith

Season 2 - The Resistance

Watch this video on The Scene.

Today's Quote

"Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly, and focused on happier things than 'politics'. They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren't nice people? Resistors."

--Noami Shulman

Stop Making It Normal

On the Know-Nothing language: "What's with this I've-Never-Met-The-Guy defense? I never met John Wilkes Booth, but I let his past work inform my opinion of him."

Today's Tweet

Having no sense of irony (and having abandoned all regard for the perspectives of history), the Trumpkinites see this as a perfectly accurate representation of recent events.

Wrong. pic.twitter.com/KcTTLjrsfN
— Tomthunkit™ (@TomthunkitsMind) November 16, 2016

Upside down and backwards as usual.

Nov 15, 2016

A Man For All Seasons

Sir Thomas More was not quite the cool guy Robert Bolt wrote him up to be, but the point Paul Schofield's character makes is absolutely the essence of what we're supposed to be about here in USAmerica Inc.

We'll see what we see, but I'm not holding out any great hope for Donald Trump to be any kind of statesman.

Dueling Narratives

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone:

Trump made idiots of us all. From the end of primary season onward, I felt sure Trump was en route to ruining, perhaps forever, the Republican Party as a force in modern American life. Now the Republicans are more dominant than ever, and it is the Democratic Party that is shattered and faces an uncertain future.

And they deserve it. The Democratic Party's failure to keep Donald Trump out of the White House in 2016 will go down as one of the all-time examples of insular arrogance. The party not only spent most of the past two years ignoring the warning signs of the Trump rebellion, but vilifying anyone who tried to point them out. It denounced all rumors of its creeping unpopularity as vulgar lies and bullied anyone who dared question its campaign strategy by calling them racists, sexists and agents of Vladimir Putin's Russia.

But the party's willful blindness symbolized a similar arrogance across the American intellectual elite. Trump's election was a true rebellion, directed at anyone perceived to be part of "the establishment." The target group included political leaders, bankers, industrialists, academics, Hollywood actors, and, of course, the media. And we all closed our eyes to what we didn't want to see.

Kurt Eichenwald, Newsweek:

On Friday, I almost assaulted a fan of my work. I was in the Philadelphia International Airport, and a man who recognized me from one of my appearances on a television news show approached. He thanked me for the investigative reporting I had done about Donald Trump before the election, expressed his outrage that the Republican nominee had won and then told me quite gruffly, “Get back to work.” Something about his arrogance struck me, so I asked, “Who did you vote for?”

He replied, “Well, Stein, but—” I interrupted him and said, “You’re lucky it’s illegal for me to punch you in the face.” Then, after telling him to have sex with himself—but with a much cruder term—I turned and walked away.

A certain kind of liberal makes me sick. These people traffic in false equivalencies, always pretending that both nominees are the same, justifying their apathy and not voting or preening about their narcissistic purity as they cast their ballot for a person they know cannot win. I have no problem with anyone who voted for Trump, because they wanted a Trump presidency. I have an enormous problem with anyone who voted for Trump or Stein or Johnson—or who didn’t vote at all—and who now expresses horror about the outcome of this election. If you don’t like the consequences of your own actions, shut the hell up.

And now, South Park explains the Liberal Elite:

Knowledge, and the ability to demonstrate that knowledge, is considered snobbish. A willingness to take an active (or activist) position on any issue requiring others to change their thinking and/or their behavior is "Elitist" and will not be tolerated by ~~the rubes~~ Real Americans.

"We demand you make it better - at the expense of people who aren't us"

Ah Ha

Charlie Pierce always refers to Reince Priebus as "Obvious Anagram Reince Priebus", and all I could ever got was "Rubes Epic Rein". That's pretty close, but not quite as satisfying as the one Samantha Bee came up with.

BTW - If you haven't already, start listening for the standard "Know Nothing" signals. There's a really good one from Paul Ryan in this clip at about 2:10 when Sam goes to the CNN bit. And it continues with Newt saying he's never even heard of The Alt-Right.