I held off as long as I could. Now let's get out there and shop our asses off, people. The planet's not gonna fuck up itself, y'know. We'll start with a nice assortment of ornaments for your Holiday Tree:
On a tip from my brother, I went over to Fandango to look at the trailer for a new movie called Spotlight. I clicked on the start arrow and ended up having to see 2 video ads before I got to the trailer. So, in order to watch the commercial for the movie - it's a commercial; I went in search of a commercial because I wanted to see a commercial. And as if that's not bad enough, I had to sit thru a coupla commercials I didn't wanna see before they'd let me see the commercial I did wanna see. I'm trying to decide if I'm a little bummed and/or aggravated at the extreme levels of monetization going on, or if I'm more than a little impressed that somebody's figured out just how captive we are to this kinda crap. Or maybe I'm just pissed that I'm willing to put up with the whole mess. My head hurts - I may start drinking early today.
For those of you scoring at home - or even if you're all by yourself - somebody's gotta be trying to keep track of all the shitty things Trump has said or done - things that so many of the Press Poodles tell us will blow him up and scatter his remains to the four winds. But then, somehow, he stays around because the "lefty librul lame-stream media" are unable to resist breaking away from any and all programming to make sure we all get to see Lil Donny doing whatever he does that will surely disgust all of us, while we are never quite disgusted enough to stop watching that crap which of course is why they keep showing us that crap.
There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that the cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different. This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety.
Ripping the scab off the big festering ulcer on the national ass - all of those being apt metaphors for the GOP, btw.
And oh yeah - ya gotta get all the way to 36:15 for the cool holiday surprise - for me anyway. But first, there's a bit of brilliant at about 9:00 when driftglass hits one out, talking about Matthew Dowd, using a font size metaphor.
This popped up quite a few places. Just need to get it in before I lose it.
I think it has to start taking it's toll after a while. Any attention is better than being ignored as far as Trump cares - he knows it's hard to find 'bad' publicity. But there's a point where you become Terminally Uncool. Like when Dick Nixon's handlers knew he needed something to help him "connect with the youngsters" in the late 60s, and so they invited Up With People to perform at The White House, and then at some rallies. Fuckin' disaster was all that was.
Here's a little taste (sorry). Although it does feature a very young Glenn Close - but don't listen to the whole thing. Seriously - it could give you diabetes. Don't do it:
Anyway, when people are laughing, and they're laughing not because you elicit some pathos, but because you're pathetic and they pity you - time to turn around and head back to the barn.
So - should we be afraid for ourselves? Or is it that we should be afraid of ourselves?
Isn't that pretty much what it comes down to though? Politicians in general (and Repubs mostly in particular) are eager to peddle the panic. They know how to play on our fears to keep us divided, and to use that division to get what their big money donors are paying them to get.
But over time, we become conditioned to the fear, which starts to drive a trend towards ideological purity, which always gets us out to the logical extreme in one big fuckin' hurry. ie: Everybody's a traitor to the cause except you and me, and I'm beginning to have my doubts about you.
We can have some fun pointing and laughing, but this shit gets real if we don't smarten up and stand in its way before it has a chance to reach critical mass.
And BTW - in case it's not obvious enough, lemme state the obvious for you - smart guys working for John Kasich put this together using Trump's nutty-tude to make Kasich look like something other than the radical god-knobbing authoritarian freak that he actually is. It's not like Kasich doesn't think very much along the same lines as Trump does, it's just that Kasich doesn't say that shit out loud.
And of course, that's kinda the problem - Trump gets a boatload of support for being "Anti-PC". But here's the word on that one, guys. It's Politically Incorrect to say certain things because they're shitty things to say. And since words comprise the expression of thought, PC becomes not much more than a general attempt to get you to stop thinking shitty thoughts about people.
Putting it another way - if you can learn not to talk stoopid, it'll help you learn how not to be stoopid, and then we can stop calling you stoopid, and then you can stop bitchin' about how everybody's always callin' ya stoopid. Deal?
And BTW also too - Since the "voting" in Ohio appears to be nearly as honest and forthright as it was in Noriega's Panama, I'll go out on a limb and say this: Assuming Kasich's still in this thing next March - and even if he's polling behind by 20+ points - he'll somehow manage to eke out a landslide upset. Just sayin' - again.
I guess my main problem now is deciding how to defend myself from accusations of peddling a little fear my-own-bad-self.
So there's this new study out of Yale, published in The Proceedings of the National Academies of Science that says Climate Change Denial is all about a Cash-For-Comments system used to manufacture an "opposing view". And what that allows is for the political operators to separate voters along imaginary ideological fault lines, which makes it easier to keep us bitching at each other rather than voting to send the Coin-Operated Politicians back home so they can open that shoe store their mom always wanted them to have - which would be a much closer career match for their skill sets while still meaning most of them would be vastly over-employed.
Ideological polarization around environmental issues—especially climate change—have increased in the last 20 years. This polarization has led to public uncertainty, and in some cases, policy stalemate. Much attention has been given to understanding individual attitudes, but much less to the larger organizational and financial roots of polarization. This gap is due to prior difficulties in gathering and analyzing quantitative data about these complex and furtive processes. This paper uses comprehensive text and network data to show how corporate funding influences the production and actual thematic content of polarization efforts. It highlights the important influence of private funding in public knowledge and politics, and provides researchers a methodological model for future studies that blend large-scale textual discourse with social networks.
Like I said - that's not something we didn't know. But I'll take it as a positive sign anyway, because while it's not likely to convince the hard core rubes, it's one more bullet point that rebuts the Both-Sides crap and might be useful convincing the Hipster-ish I'm-Too-Cool-To-Vote crowd to get up off their suspended-adolescence butts and realize they've got skin in this game whether they like it (or whether they even realize it) or not. hat tip = truthout
Charlie Pierce is good clear voice in a very dull crowd, and wins Best Blog Post today.
Being our semi-regular weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which, of course, is what the Penguins would have sung, had they recorded "Derp Angel."
We were roaming Iowa watching live politics all weekend, so we only caught a smidgen of a crumb of the Sunday Showz. Which is to say, we only caught a little, but we caught enough to hand the House Cup over to CBS, where John Dickerson continues to adjust the casters on the chair once occupied by former Angevin minstrel Bob Schieffer. After a pretty good bipartisan dose of the old boogedy-boogedy, Dickerson brought out the panel, and we heard this from Ruth Marcus, scourge of teenaged potty-mouths everywhere.
"This was a very ugly week for Republicans in terms of their response on refugees and I think it was something that was exacerbated by the failure of President Obama to explain to people that we weren't crazy to be nervous but to understand their nervousness and to explain it away."
Holy Third Way No Labels! If that isn't the perfect distillation of the vaporlock caused by Beltway conventional wisdom, I don't know what is. (It's even worse than the hairball Fournier coughed up on the same subject, over at the Overlook Hotel, where my man Chuck Todd always has been the caretaker.) Apparently, it either has escaped Ruth's notice, or she thinks it's impolite to mention, that the Republican party is completely out of its mind, and that its current front-runner, the Libidinous Visitor, is one step away from invading Ethiopia. How in Broder's name is the president in anyway responsible for the xenophobic rantings of a party gone mad? I know the president has mad Kenyan telepathic skillz, but what precisely would Ruth have him say? "Only worry a little, Americans. We are extremely unlikely to be overrun by exploding Syrian toddlers"? Jesus, these people…
Here's a tip, gang. Short of "I resign," there is nothing the president can say that will stop the Republicans from mongering fear and mongering war and just plain making stuff up. The people who believe this indigestible fried crud are going to believe it no matter what this president says or does. The level of anti-Islamic panic is going to remain the same because it is an election year, and because the Republican field is now led by a guy wrapping himself in out and out fascism, and doing it for laughs. And that's the double truth, Ruth.
