I’m looking at ghosts and empties

13 08 2013

So I was reading FrontPage. . .

. . .no, no, not what you think. I wasn’t juicing on the rightist crazy: I clicked over from Sullivan to read a rightist critique of a BOLSHEVIKS-IN-THE-BATHROOM!!!!! history of FDR, Truman, and WWII.

And then, as long as I was there—hey, it’s been years since I last stopped by—I thought I’d amble through the comments.

Oh my.

Which led me to wonder: Are there leftist crazy sites similar to those on the right? Something akin to Free Republic or FrontPage or organizations like American Family Association?

I mean, there must be—not because of any both-sides-do-it horseshit, but because political-crazy is a general affliction, and thus can infect anyone who sups from the political stew.

(And note I’m not talking about sites which go all-in in their criticisms of the other side: scorched-earth polemics aren’t necessarily nutty—although I think an inability to think in whispers or pauses might predispose one to the political-crazy.)

I’ve certainly seen individual commenters offer up leftist gibberish, but I don’t know how much purchase they have on the pink side of the spectrum. And conspiracists tend to get shut down pretty damned quickly. dismissed for their lack of reason and evidence, at least on the leftist sites I do read. In any case, the nutter and gibberers tend to write in the comments, not under the masthead.

The one group I can think of that might have some kind of wider play are the anti-vaxxers and anti-med-establishment folk; this movement isn’t really right or left, but it certainly has plenty of people who might otherwise fit within a left/liberal worldview.

But other than that? I dunno—I really don’t. But they gotta be out there, right? Er, left? Grr, correct? Correct.

You know what I mean.


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I see danger come

12 08 2013

If you’re unwilling to allow the police to detain young black and brown men for being young black and brown men then you make “our city a more dangerous place.”

And if you’re unwilling to allow the state to confine men away from any human contact for years at a time, then you apparently want convicts “to restore their ability to terrorize fellow prisoners, prison staff and communities throughout California.”

An open society needs effective enforcement of the law and allows that those who break the law be separated from society.

There must be some way to accomplish both without disregarding the rights of the free members of that society or disregarding the humanity of its imprisoned members.

Those who believe we cannot? You got it: fear-mongering authoritarian rat-bastards.


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12 08 2013

What Charlie Pierce said:

Over on CBS, former Toussaint L’Ouverture embed Bob Schieffer talked a lot of NSA with a lot of people whose careers depended on the surveillance state, but managed to keep his show blessedly free of fringe congresscritters. But General Michael Hayden admitted that he got a little a’skeer’ed a couple of weeks ago when democracy threatened to break out in the House over the NSA programs.

GENERAL MICHAEL HAYDEN: You’re referring to the vote, on a twelve-vote margin a couple of weeks back. Bob, that wasn’t— that wasn’t regular order. That wasn’t thoughtful procedure. Let me be a little critical here, all right. That looked a lot like mob action. I mean people acting out of emotion with a false sense of urgency, and with a great deal of misinformation.

I’m not great fan of the House Of Representatives as it is presently constituted. There’s far too much Gohmertian nonsense for my taste, but when a career spook starts talking about a perfectly legitimate legislative process as a “mob action,” I find that I have better things to be nervous about than Steve King.

And need I point out the General Fear-Mongerer had no problem with “emotion” and “a great deal of misinformation” in the passage of the PATRIOT Act, nor with “a false sense of urgency” in the run-up to the Iraq War?

Rat bastard in a uniform.


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And if you complain once more

12 08 2013

Ahhh, irony.

Remember Citizens United? No, not the Supreme Court case that led to the tsunami of unregulated cash into elections (that would be Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission); no, this would be the group conservative political group which produced Hillary: The Movie, which dispute over its airing led to that Supreme Court decision.

Guess who supported that decision?

Guess who’s now whining about a planned NBC/Fox Hillary biopic?

Rat bastards, every last one of them, and the fact that mainstream television journalists are letting themselves get played by these whingeing little candy-ass conservatives. . . should lead thinking folk everywhere to follow the example of our northern SCTV brethren and toss their tubes out the window.


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I hate the asshole I’ve become

9 08 2013

No, wait, this guy probably doesn’t even know he’s an asshole:

In a video of the event posted by ThinkProgress, the freshman Republican [Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.)] said he was in Crystal City, Va., buying groceries in a nice but crowded store when he noticed something strange.

“Every lane was open and it was backed up and I noticed everybody was giving that card,” Mullin said, apparently referring to the electronic benefit transfer cards most states use to distribute food stamps. “They had these huge baskets, and I realized it was the first of the month.”

In Virginia, food stamp benefits are automatically deposited on the first of the month for anyone whose case number ends in zero, one, two or three.

“But then I’m looking over, and there’s a couple beside me,” Mullin continued. “This guy was built like a brick house. I mean he had muscles all over him. He was in a little tank top and pair of shorts and really nice Nike shoes. And she was standing there, and she was all in shape and she looked like she had just come from a fitness program. She was in the spandex, and you know, they were both physically fit. And they go up in front of me and they pay with that card.”

Mullin knew what he’d witnessed. “Fraud,” he said. “Absolute 100 percent, all of it is fraud. There’s fraud all through that.”

That’s right, because if you’re poor you must wear rags and have your bones poking through your skin.

Also, no one who’s ever not been poor becomes poor, so there’s no way that those people could have bought that stuff when they weren’t poor.

Nor did they get them as gifts, or at an outlet, or from a clothing give-away.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be acceptable for that couple to have purchased that stuff because, goddammit, poverty sucks and once in a while you just want something, anything, nice to remind yourself that you’re not worthless and deserve to live as a human being.

No, if you’re poor, you must visibly suffer in every way.

So that the not-poor can feel righteous in their generosity.


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Bang bang

9 08 2013

I have no idea what happened.

My back was to the stove and I heard this BANG! I finished what I was doing, then turned around to see this:

023

It kept making cracking noises, and I’d swear that I saw a few cracks form as I watched it. I did, carefully, pick up the lid: the glass didn’t scatter.

Kinda bummed about it—I use that pot a lot, and I like a glass lid—but I have to admit, it also looks cool.

And that the glass, shattered, nonetheless remains intact within the ring? Very cool.


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Nothing to hide, believe what I say

8 08 2013

What a shocker: “protester” is an undercover cop.

This should surprise exactly no one.

Police forces-have a long and dishonorable history of infiltration of and provocation among organized protest groups—never mind the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and assembly. Those tasked to “protect and serve” forget that protesters, too, deserve protection and service.

Anyway, given that long history of surveillance and disruption, the best course for any protest organization is to be open and public as possible: hide nothing, publicize everything.

There may be bits that it makes sense to keep under wraps for tactical reasons—the location of a pop-up protest, for example, might be texted to members at the last minute—and those involved in present-day sanctuary movements of whatever sort have good reason for discretion, but on the whole, if the purpose is to raise public consciousness, change public opinion, or call for new/different laws, then the best bet is to embrace one’s status as a public entity and throw everything into the open.

Will this prevent police surveillance? Almost certainly not. But it will both eliminate the need to waste any time worrying about who among the crowd might be a cop and inoculate the group against claims of criminality.

(Of course, there are protesters who embrace criminality as the best/only way to undermine/overthrow the whole shebang, so, yeah, secrecy might be the best bet for them. It will also, in combination with the criminality which requires it, curb their effectiveness in under-/over- mining/throwing.)

This, for example, is the wrong attitude to take:

[United Students Against Sweatshop protester] Shishido Strain says his run-ins with Rizzi have already made him wary of strangers who want to get involved in fights for workers’ rights.

“I have personally become much more cautious with people who express support for us at actions and others who express an interest in joining our actions, if I do not know them already,” he says.

I  get why Strain is concerned, but if your group has any sway whatsoever, it’d be so much easier simply to assume cops are present, and move on. Don’t let ’em distract you, don’t let ’em limit your efforts to reach out.

Open subversion: it’s the better way.

~~~

None of this is to say that cops shouldn’t be sued each and every time they infringe upon the Constitutional rights of protesters. You can be open without being a sap.


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Special, special, what do you get?

4 08 2013

Pressed on the topic of Hitler, Borges said that “of course I hate and loathe him. His anti-Semitism was very foolish.” This is hard to read because, although we should know better, it’s difficult to stop ourselves expecting wisdom from a person who happens to be a genius.

—Mark O’Connell

I used to believe that talented people were better people.

I wouldn’t have put it that way, back then, don’t know that I even knew I believed this, but I almost certainly did. If you were talented you were special, and if you were special, you were special all the way through.

I think this bias cuts through our celebrity culture, such that fame itself is a signifier of specialness. We want to meet, become friends with these celebrities, hoping that by virtue of being picked by someone special, we’ll become special ourselves.

I don’t want to push that too hard, not least because there’s also a knowingness about this desire, and jokes about “My boyfriend George Clooney” poke holes in the whole cloth of celebrity-dom. Still, why else would any of us who are not-famous and not-friends of the famous care enough about them to make them famous unless we though there was something more to them than [what led them to] the fame itself?

Anyway, it was well into adulthood before I even became aware of this equation, and while I’ve pretty much disabuse myself of the notion, those times that I have met famous folk (mostly actors, mostly while working at Big & National Bookstore), I’ve had to remind myself that they are just folks.

Yes, just-folks with name recognition, just-folks with talent, but when not on stage or in front of a camera, just folks, full stop.

Still, it must be said: I don’t tell my friends when I meet non-famous just-folks.


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Give me the gun

4 08 2013

Yet another article about yet another shitty government official and in the comments, the usual:

Yeah, we should totally give up our guns to these tyrants!

Okay, yeah, comments (often a cesspool, not representative, blah blah), but this sentiment is so commonly expressed in the comments that someone less obsessed with gun regs/rights (take yer pick) is likely simply to skip past them.

I, for example, usually skip past.

But today a new thought hit: Guns are a simple answer to a tough problem.

I’m a good-government type of gal, but any leftist who isn’t at least skeptical of governmental power isn’t doing it right. I like big, messy, pluralist, complicated societies, and the only way to live well in a big, messy, pluralist, complicated societies is to establish some kind of rule of law to navigate those messes and complications.  And if that law is to have a chance at approaching justice, good government is required.

But it’s also manifestly the case that government isn’t always good, that law falls short of justice, and sometimes you really do have to defend yourself by any means necessary.

Thus, while it’s easy for me to roll my eyes at so-called gun-nuts, there is some small part of me that gets some small part of their agenda. There’s a lot I don’t get and a lot I don’t agree with, but the notion that the government is not always to be trusted. . . ?

Anyway, trying to wrest good government out of bad is hard, hard work, rarely straightforward, and almost always takes too long. And even if you think you’ll fail, you have to believe enough in the worth of good government to try.

Not everyone believes this, of course, which is why some prefer the quick recourse to weaponry. But there may be others who are driven less by animus against the government (or the big messy society which requires it) than a frustration that the Right and the Good are just so goddamned obvious and just as goddamned obviously never to be achieved by standard operating procedures, that the best way to the Right and the Good is to blow a hole through those SOPs.

Thus, the gun: It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s done.

~~~

h/t: Brad DeLong


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Thinking like the sea

4 08 2013

Good gifs are amusing for about as long as they last, which, all things considered, ain’t bad.

This also means they’re highly disposable: you want a quick hit, and that’s it.

Still, string a bunch of them together under a common theme, and, well, they can take on a kind of extended absurdity—as with Research in Progress.

As with all absurdity, you gotta be able to giggle at how fucked we are.

~~~

h/t Eszter Hargittai, Crooked Timber


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