Results Matter

We're constantly being bitched at about how the results of what we're trying to accomplish are always a lot more important than just trying to do whatever it is we're trying to do.

OK - so this...

...has been going on for quite a while, and since abortion is still a major bugaboo for you Xianists, I'm just wondering - if prayer works, how come it ain't working for you guys?  Are you doing it wrong?

BTW - this seems like a reasonable response:

And actually, any response that isn't just automatically caving in and blindly ceding the "moral high ground" would be OK with me.  Cuz, y'know what - if the Rubes are always praying for Jesus to end abortion, and abortion just keeps rollin' on, don't we have to stop and at least consider that maybe Jesus is Pro Choice?

Hunting Season

The hacking cough and the stinging eyes of an allergic reaction to leaf mold; the clogged and overflowing rain gutters due to 3 days of drizzle; the joy of being awakened just before dawn by the dulcet tones of gunfire in the woods behind my house.  Ah yes - these are but a few of the glories of Autumn in central Virginia.

Let's be careful out there.

Listen To Charlie

Logical fallacy is the bread-n-butter of American Media.  Almost everything that goes out on TV & Radio, or into what's left of the Dead Tree Publications business is going to include some level of "Yeah but the Democrats" and "Both sides do it" and "It has to be all and only this way or all and only that other way".  

Wanna know where all that False Equivalence and False Dichotomy shit gets us?

Here's Charlie Pierce to 'splain some of it to us:

What we had in the AIDS epidemic was political opportunism married to what became obvious ignorance. What we are seeing now, promulgated by a conservative bubble machine that has built a self-sustaining universe around itself, is political opportunism married to an active campaign of disinformation. This is a terrible thing. The people making a profit out of it are people who are too lazy to mug old ladies or swindle the blind. The people making a profit out of it are people without consciences, people who are as free of patriotism as they are free of the inconveniences of having a soul. These are dangerous people, and it's far past time for the honorable people in my profession to stop treating them like the worthless hacks they are. They are no longer cute. They are no longer funny. They are no longer the respectable "other side" of some fanciful imaginary political debate. They are dangerous propagandists. They are peddling poisonous lies and putting people's lives at risk. Every journalist who treats them as anything else, and every politician who treats them as anything else, are actively abetting evil.

Take, for example, Laura Ingraham, who cashes a very nice check from ABC News in addition to her day job as a radio flamethrower. Ingraham has begun to traffic in "alternative" theories about Ebola, treating a virus as though it were another vote to suppress or immigrant to bash, and lending her microphone to fringe nitwits because panic is profitable, and because almost everything, even a rare disease, is worth throwing at a president you don't like.

Like the man said - the earth is a roughly spherical body that turns on its axis about once per day and orbits the local mid-sized star about once every 365 days, and while you're entitled to believe otherwise, your opinions to the contrary don't mean diddly-shit.

--and--

The country simply cannot go on this way, with one of our two political parties completely insane, and with a counter-cultural universe that claims the right to promulgate its own science as equal to the science produced by actual scientists, and with this dangerous lunacy treated as legitimate by powerful people who ought to know better. As I once wrote, it doesn't matter how many people vote for the anti-gravity party, you still can't flap your arms and fly to the moon. A dangerous disease is not a matter of debate. Your profitable fantasy and the reality of the disease do not deserve an equal place in the discussion of what we as a society will do about the disease. The response is going to have to be precise and empirical. It is going to have to be impatient with cant, and immune to the delusions on which demented ideology feeds.

It's kinda important to believe as many true things as possible, and to not believe as many false things as possible; and so it's really really really important to be able to tell the difference.

Listen to driftglass and BlueGal every Friday, and almost every time, you'll get a decent reminder on how to spot the "both sides" crap.

If It's Not About Football

One of my basic themes is "It's not about what they tell us it's about".

Things change, and that's a necessary thing - not necessarily a good thing, but a necessary thing nonetheless.  And it seems to me that we've changed our way into some weird place where we think we have it all figured out - eg: with computerized automation, we can build things to an amazing degree of accuracy, within tolerances that we only dreamed about 35 years ago.  Productivity is thru the roof and the costs of production are so low, we can afford to waste billions of dollars shipping goods from cheap-labor countries to low-price consumers and still turn record-breaking profits, etc etc etc.

And yet, with all our big-brain accomplishments, it would appear the world around us insists on going up in flames anyway, as we sit and wonder what we're doing wrong.  Which led me on a typically circuitous path to remembering the scene from North Dallas Forty (the book, which was pretty good; not the movie, which was bloody fucking awful) where the D Lineman finally goes off on one of the coaches, saying "Whenever we say it's a game, you call it a business; and whenever we call it a business, you say it's just a game."

So, maybe we could take a look at the NFL as an example of our obsession with a kind of robotic pursuit of smash-fitting people into a marketing department's spreadsheet model of perfection -  per Steve Almond:

What kept me hooked was the limbic tingle familiar to any football fan, the sense that I was watching an event that mattered. The speed and scale of the game, the noise of the crowd, the grandiloquent narration and caffeinated camera angles—all these signaled a heightened quality of attention. The players dashed about, their bodies lit in a kind of bright funnel of consequence.

There are all sorts of laudable reasons people watch sports, and football in particular. We wish to reconnect to the unscripted physical pleasures of childhood. We wish for moral structure in a world that feels chaotic, a chance to scratch the inborn itch for tribal affiliation. Sports allow men, in particular, a common language by which to converse.

When we root for a team, the conscious desire is to see them win, to bask in reflected glory. But the unconscious function of fandom is, I think, just the opposite. It’s a form of surrender to our essential helplessness in the universal order. In an age of scientific assurance, people still yearn for spiritual struggle. Fandom allows us to fire our faith in the forge of loss. Because our teams inevitably do lose. And this experience forms the bedrock of our identification.

Backing a team helps Americans, in particular, contend with the unease of living in the most competitive society on earth, a society in which we’re socialized to feel like losers.

That’s the special sauce that capitalism puts on the burgers. It’s how you turn citizens into efficient workers and consumers. You convince them that they are forever falling behind.

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Meet The New GOP

Repubs love to pretend they've been listening to us and that they want very much to be the Big Tent Party.  Except it's bullshit.  And at the risk of sounding way too centrist, I can say the Dems aren't much better...but there it is: "The Dems aren't much better".  Right.  The Dems aren't much better, but they are better.  A little, anyway - and that's kinda the whole fucking point, ain't it?  To look at it from as many angles as possible and then to make some kind of value judgment, in order to decide which buncha gumbahs, goobers or goat-ropers we want runnin' the joint for us?

So, hey - great work on the whole re-branding thing, guys, but there's not much in the way of improvement when I look at your "Platform" - which of course sounds cool if you just read the bullet points.  But when you open it up, it's still nothing but Anti-Gay, Anti-Woman, Anti-Poor, Anti-Middle Class, Anti-School, Anti-Healthcare, Anti-Immigrant, at the same time being all Yay God, Yay Pentagon Boondoggle, Yay MegaCorp, Yay 1955, blah blah fucking blah.

Jesus, I get sick o' this shit.

The Magic Button

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Todays' Ad

Ya wanna fuck up your own car and/or your own life, OK.  But it's not just you.  How come the rest of us have to risk our lives and our property and pay more for our insurance just because you can't figure out that you're not entitled to do whatever the fuck you want while everybody else gets to accommodate your spoiled little 1st world princeling ass?

Following The Money

Together, Charles and David Koch control one of the world's largest fortunes, which they are using to buy up our political system. But what they don't want you to know is how they made all that money

By Tim Dickinson | September 24, 2014

The enormity of the Koch fortune is no mystery. Brothers Charles and David are each worth more than $40 billion. The electoral influence of the Koch brothers is similarly well-chronicled. The Kochs are our homegrown oligarchs; they've cornered the market on Republican politics and are nakedly attempting to buy Congress and the White House. Their political network helped finance the Tea Party and powers today's GOP. Koch-affiliated organizations raised some $400 million during the 2012 election, and aim to spend another $290 million to elect Republicans in this year's midterms. So far in this cycle, Koch-backed entities have bought 44,000 political ads to boost Republican efforts to take back the Senate.

Read more: Rolling Stone Magazine Online - Politics 

--and then--

Koch Industries Responds to Rolling Stone – And We Answer Back

"Koch Facts" calls our story "dishonest and misleading." A point-by-point rebuttal.

By Tim Dickinson | September 29, 2014

Koch Industries has written a lengthy response to our feature story on the company in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. In tweets the company apparently paid to promote, Koch bills this write-up as a "point-by-point response to Rolling Stone writer Tim Dickinson's dishonest and misleading story." The salient feature of Koch's response is that the company does not argue the core facts of our 9,000-word expose. Instead, Koch targets the messenger. Koch's top target here is not even Rolling Stone, but me, Tim Dickinson.

I find it, frankly, amusing that a company that has been convicted of six felonies and numerous misdemeanors; paid out tens of millions of dollars in fines; traded with Iran, and been so reckless in its business practices that two innocent teenagers ended up dead, attempts to impugn my integrity, and on the basis of my association with Mother Jones — where I worked as an editor in the late 1990s and early 2000s, on a team that was twice nominated and once awarded a National Magazine Award for General Excellence.

Koch, in particular, takes umbrage with my reporting practices.

Read more: Koch Boys Respond

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