Monthly Archives: October 2022

“Biden rethinking relationship with Saudi Arabia”

I don’t know what the most sickening aspect of this Washington Post headline is.

That the psychopathic young acting monarch of this medieval theocracy, a ruthless billionaire who murdered a critical journalist and had him dismembered, is cutting the oil supply to help his suck up friend Jared Kushner’s father-in-law claw his way back to power to avoid prosecution for multiple felonies?

That our great, exceptional country, a beacon of democracy and freedom to other countries, is hostage to a family of torturing medieval billionaire sheikhs who seem to have a chokehold on the world’s oil supply and can dictate prices at will? We’re beginning to reexamine our relationship with the House of Saud? Beginning?

Well, better late than never, I suppose.

If you read the article you’ll notice that only Democrats seem to be critical of dictatorial crown pronce MBS, the Reformer, and his current plan to drive up prices at the American oil pumps to help American right wing extremists and his embattled buddy Vladimir Putin, who never helped Trump in any way, I mean, why would he, I mean, why wouldn’t he? Now support for beleagured, innocent Putin is a touchstone for Republicans.

Only Democrats seem to give a damn about this axis of theocracy, repression and evil. Talk about a marriage of convenience made in hell… I can picture these implacable religious fanatics meeting again in the new Crusade, and they won’t be smiling at each other, or handing each other two billion dollar checks…

https://wapo.st/3rO5XDC

Follow-up to a month of no reply

Since silence can be for many reasons, and is construed differently by different people, please let me know what your silence means.

If you simply don’t know what to say, let me know. This leaves open the possibility of future communications from me.

If your silence means “fuck off!” let me know. It is the courteous and considerate thing to do, you fucking fuck.

A philosophical nature

If you wonder why things are the way they are, how flagrant injustice can flourish, how devoutly religious people following saintly martyrs can condemn countless children to lives of misery, commit atrocities in the name of their all-merciful God, you may have a philosophical nature.   I was always this way, and it was largely because I grew up in a family home with three other intelligent people where life made little sense.   When I left home I found myself studying philosophy in college, (psychology would have been a logical choice, too, I suppose, but it always struck me as a bit crazy, like so many drawn to study it).   While interesting to me at the time, reading and discussing the philosophical opinions of mostly dead white men now feels like an empty pursuit.  

The way it was taught, every philosophical position that was not your rare original thought was part of a school, a tradition.  Like any other field where leaders codify their views and their followers fight to defend their turf, there were schools of thought and even the occasional original thought could always be subsumed under one or another.  “Oh, so you’re making an existentialist argument, then,” a philosophy professor might ask.   Here I cite R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural for my final answer “existentialism my ass!”9

This categorizing and hierarchy-making is how humans have always worked.   Wise apes (homo sapiens) understand the world, a place of unfathomable complication, through simplification.   The ultimate simplifier is faith.  If you have faith, if your life is based in faith, that’s the only argument you will ever need.   How do you know that?  I have faith.  Faith, in fact, is the greatest grace that a human can have, it relieves all doubt, all torment, prevents bad thoughts and leads you, after your bodily life is done, to a heaven of unimaginable glory. 

The only problem with that, as far as I can see, is that you may have faith in a total crock of shit.  A deadly crock of shit, sometimes.  Millions had faith in Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Jerry Falwell, our current strong man wannabe, F POTUS.

Let’s leave politics out of this, though.  If you have faith you consider yourself blessed to have the answer to every perplexing question we humans face —  “I believe!”   As in law, philosophers always wind up distinguishing between one thing and another.   If you say “I believe!” as you are rescuing hostages from sadists, giving food to the hungry, teaching the poor a skill that will allow them to feed and clothe their family, comforting the miserable, I say AMEN.  If you believe that whatever you do, even things that will haunt you years later (like machine gunning hundreds into open graves), is for a higher good because you have faith, I say BAH.   Any lynch mob is animated by the belief, somehow, that they are doing the right thing.  They almost never are.

Faith is generally seen as in opposition to Reason.  Reason is the use of evidence, in light of experience to solve idemtifiable problems. Using Reason, as humans began to do during the Renaissance after centuries of “monkish ignorance and superstition” (Thomas Jefferson) civilizations began to look back to the long suppressed teachings and arts of ancient heathens.   This Age of Reason led  — for better and for worse — to science, world exploration, philosophies based on empirical truth instead of dogma enforced by God-sanctioned violence.   The Age of Enlightenment was a blip on the screen of human progress and may be at an end in our lifetimes, as the light of Reason winks out on all of us amid the righteus force of otherworldly true believers, ready to kill and die before they will submit to ungodly heathens, humanists, those who steer through life arrogantly using their facility to reason rather than the divine gift of faith.

Once again, I have taken a high-minded position, stating the obvious and coming down on the side of so-called decency and humanistic common sense while dismissing the undeniably true faith of millions of god-fearing people.  I am a self-righteous prick and you have every right to treat me as such.  Do it with evidence, though, not faith.

The necessity to lie

There are some relationships that can only be maintained by agreeing to lie, omit, reframe, delete, deny, pretend.  I mean ones where this agreement is a prerequisite for the relationship itself.  I have been forced to oblige in some cases, with my father and a few other close family members. 

It was always hard for me, but it is unsustainable now, the requirement that I continue to suppress my true feelings to maintain the illusion of love.  Maybe it’s my artistic fucking temperament, I don’t know.  Understanding my feelings and dealing with them is of supreme importance to my life.  My health suffers, my sleep turns unrestful, if the requirement of a relationship is pretending that I’m wrong to feel whatever it is I am feeling, no matter how precisely and reasonably I can describe those feelings.  

Beyond that, we all know in our hearts that a feeling itself cannot be wrong.  It is truly what we feel, whether we deny it or embrace it.  We may feel hurt based on a misunderstanding sometimes, and it’s always a relief to work that out afterwards when it happens that way, but the hurt we felt is just as real, even after we understand we felt that way based on an incomplete understanding.  The feeling itself often disappears once we learn more about why we felt hurt.  A mistaken feeling can be neutralized by the truth, a beautiful thing.

Pain, unbearable, terrifying pain, causes people to lie.  I understand that.  Shame and humiliation cause people to blame others for their pain.  I’ve seen it up close, when I was too hurt to see anything else.  It is a bad place to be. Doing it reflexively is a childish way to live

To me, reducing the world to this flat, dry, one choice right or wrong place is a kind of death.   My father stated it succinctly and poignantly, hours before he died “if only I hadn’t seen the world as black and white, winners vs. losers.  I think now of how much richer my life would have been if I’d allowed myself to see all the colors, all the nuance of this beautiful world.”   The poor guy was dead a few hours after expressing this.  More tragic words are hard for me to conjure at the moment.

The personal, of course, is also political.  If you defer to tyrannical demands in your personal life — act like you were never hurt, no matter what — you will be apt to do the same when it comes to political choices.  You compensate by pretending to be the hardest hard-ass in the world.  You accept one lie and the next, and feel righteous in your anger, blaming others for complicated mutual dilemmas.  You can wear a red baseball cap and passionately claim that the elected president is a fraud, an imposter, a lying puppet of some sick, dangerous people.  And your life is great, because you’re not a fucking loser.

The demand that you deny your own feelings launches you directly into an incoherent, intellectually indefensible world.  Everything becomes a reflex to deny, oppose, prevail.   Accede to this demand, accepting as true the opposite of what you deeply feel, and you cease to exist as an agent of your own heart.  You were hurt?  YOU WERE NOT! You are confused?   NO, YOU ARE NOT.  You feel misunderstood?   NO, YOU DO NOT.  In the end everything you feel is reframed to something else, all problems are yours alone and can only be resolved by pretending they’ll resolve themselves if you ignore them.  Does it make sense?  Who cares?  

To which an artistic, self-expressing fuck like me can only say “fuck that.”   It is no way to live.  You can do it short term, to weather some emergency, maybe, but as a long-term plan for love or friendship, it sucks its own crusty ass. 

What history remembers, and why

The incomparable Heather Cox Richardson, doing what she does best:

On October 8, 1871, dry conditions and strong winds drove deadly fires through the Midwest. The Peshtigo Fire in northeastern Wisconsin and parts of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula burned more than 1.2 million acres and 17 towns, claiming between 1,500 and 2,500 lives. The Great Chicago Fire burned 3.3 square miles of the city, destroying the wooden structures that made up the relatively new town, killed about 300 people, and left more than 100,000 people homeless.

The Peshtigo Fire is the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history.

The Chicago Fire is the one people remember.

The difference is in part because Chicago was a city, of course, easy for newspapers to cover, while the Pestigo fire killed people in lumber camps and small towns. But the Great Chicago Fire also told a political story that fit into an emerging narrative about the danger of organized labor.

It was not clear, coming out of the Civil War, how Republicans would stand with regard to workers. After all, the U.S. government had fought the war to protect the right of every man to enjoy the fruits of his own labor. But immediately after the war, workers had started organizing to demand adjustments to the wartime financial policies that favored men with money. By 1866 the Democratic Party had begun to listen to them, and leaders called for rewriting the terms of the Civil War debt, which had been generous to investors in the days when they were a risky investment. After the war, with the U.S. secure, the calculations changed, and Democrats charged that investors had gotten too good a deal.

Republicans were horrified at the idea of changing the terms of a debt already incurred, and added to the Fourteenth Amendment the clause saying, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

They were also concerned when more than 60,000 people came together in August 1866 to launch the National Labor Union, calling for the government to level the playing field between workers and their employers. They asked for an eight-hour day, an end to monopolies, and cooperation between Black and white workers. In 1867, in what was almost certainly a misquoted comment, stories spread that Republican lawmaker Benjamin Franklin Wade of Ohio had told an audience in Kansas that “property is not equally divided, and a more equal distribution of capital must be wrought out.”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-8-2022?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

MAGA = Nazi

Friends have long chided me for saying the rabid, lying, authoritarian fact-deniers of the current Republican party are Nazis.  “Everything reminds you of Hitler!  Everyone’s a Nazi to you,” they often say.   Well, not everything.   But every lying sociopath who mobilizes the visceral hatreds of millions for his own self-serving ends, and is indifferent to mass suffering and countless deaths, tends to remind me of old Herr Hitler.  Every faithful follower of a lying sociopath, while also a victim of that leader, is a fucking Nazi.

I know a lot about Nazis, their motivations, techniques and ultimate aims, having studied them for years in class and in my reading.  Many of the top Nazis were very much like our Kevin McCarthy, Mitch, Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco, Perjury Taylor Green, Clarence and Ginni Thomas, people without any real core beliefs about anything but power.  Power is an end to itself to ambitious people and as Robert Caro pointed out in his excellent essay on power (sadly available only through Bezos’s paid service…) you can judge what a person believed the whole time they were climbing to power (Caro says “cloiming” in his  wonderful NY accent) by what they do once they have it.   

Like, in the case of our radicalized, lockstep Republicans, shutting down a government they controlled to pressure the country into submitting to something the vast majority didn’t want.   Like repeating angry, divisive lies disproved over and over again to mobilize the rage of their aggrieved base.  Like pointing a loaded gun at the Capitol and pulling the trigger to prevent the peaceful transition of power.   Like many ugly things they have shown no hesitation whatsoever to do.  Amid the silence of the Republican “moderates”, as afraid to speak the truth as the many in government who are already hounded by literal lynch mobs, who live in fear of stochastic, lone wolf terrorism from people goaded to deadly violence by insane lies spread by our own home grown white nationalist reality TV avatar of totalitarianism and those who march behind him.

Let’s just recap the latest united stand these Nazi motherfuckers continue to take behind anything that will hurt the Democrats chances, based on their actual successes, of keeping the House and gaining an actual, useable majority in the Senate.  As Jared’s pal MBS in Saudi Arabia squeezes the world oil supply to drive up inflation and hurt that communist dupe Biden and his radical socialist party in the approaching election.

Fucking F POTUS has, not surprisingly, continued to lie about the documents he stole from the government when he was dragged kicking and sulking from the White House.   He lied over and over, as he did to Mueller, about cooperating with the government.  Recall that his new AG Bagpiper Barr emphasized on live TV that his boy had cooperated fully with Mueller’s investigation, although Trump did not cooperate with the fake witch hunt at all, in fact, only obstructed it.  As to that obstruction, Mueller wrote that while he could not charge Trumpie while in office, he also could not exonerate him for obstructing his investigation.  It was, according to Eagle Scout Mueller, a matter for Congress, the DOJ and the courts, once POTUS was F POTUS.  About those stolen documents:

We were cooperating fully.  We didn’t lie, we never lied, we never lie.  The DOJ lies, to help Biden. We turned over everything.  They planted shit.  I declassified the shit before they could plant it.  I’m the rubber you’re the glue, scumbag.  We did nothing wrong.  We own those papers, and even if we don’t, we still do.  No backsies.  Finders keepers, losers weepers.  Executive Privilege, Attorney/Client Privilege, White Wealth Delay Tactic Privilege, Fuck your Mother Privilege.  Muhammed Bin Salman, one of the best people, a reformer, a visionary, gave Jared two billion as a small downpayment on what some of my documents are worth to him.   Putin, fine man, also, great customer.  What, am I not supposed to make money?  Jared and Ivanka made over $600,000,000 while public servants on the government payroll.  What am I, chopped liver?  I get to make money, too.   I’ve got mad bills to pay.

Anyone who thinks F POTUS would not sell top secret documents, has not already monetized those valuable papers he stole going on two years ago, probably also believes there are two parties who both do good things and bad things, who are roughly equivalent and equally corrupted by the big money donors.  Leaving the corrupting big money donors aside (and the legal unlimited use of dark money was a GOP initiative and great game-changing achievement that gave us MAGA), one party is trying its best to serve the needs of the vast majority of Americans.  The other is, I’m sad to say, the Nazi party, its only platform regaining unchallengeable power, behind an infallible, though often irrational, leader.  It is that stark, boys and girls.

The argument against the increasingly clear MAGA = Nazi argument:  Trump built not one single death camp!  Only one person that we know of was executed by federal agents who shot him on sight and claimed they were there to arrest him and that he resisted (that one unarmed antifa guy outside of Portland)!   Trump and Barr only executed one severely mentally ill prisoner on federal death row, and the bitch deserved it, no matter how extensive her daily cocktail of psychoactive drugs!  His government passed no law directly against the fucking so-called minorities, unless you consider the many new, restrictive voting laws in states where MAGA controls the legislatures.  There is no plan to invalidate future elections, unless you consider all the purity-tested MAGA election deniers who are campaigning on the promise to invalidate, as fraudulent, any election won by a non MAGA candidate.  Unless you consider the 6-3 MAGA Supreme Court poised to rule on a carefully constructed case designed to give a fig leaf of “originalism” to the pulled-out-of-somebody’s-ass “theory” of the Independent State Legislature, the most powerful sovereign bodies in America, whose actions are unreviewable by any court anywhere once SCOTUS bangs its 6-3 gavel.

Hitler had more time to make his mark on history.  It took him over a year in power before The Night of the Long Knives when he executed untrusted allies and hated enemies all over Germany.  It took five years before Kristalnacht, the Nazis’ first organized nationwide pogrom against Jews.  It was only after that he began secretly gassing “useless eaters” whose “lives were unworthy of life” in mental hospitals.  Six, almost seven years before he began the war of national self-defense the Jews forced him to wage to rescue the Aryans from destruction.   He hired violent criminals to oversee his war against partisans and Jews in countries he overran, and they did atrocious things, but it was eight long years before he started the mechanized mass murder machine in earnest and initiated that crowning Nazi achievement — historically efficient genocide.

So, F POTUS simply has not had time, in just one term, to make this country into Charles Koch’s wet dream (Koch’s dad built the oil refinery that produced the high octane fuel for the Nazi luftwaffe).   A country where the super rich can do whatever they want, in the name of liberty and freedom from majoritarian tyranny and government coercion, while everyone else is forced to do whatever they can to stay alive, subject to the whims of the best among us, guys like Koch, Murdoch, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates, et al.   Not all Nazis, perhaps, but the next best thing — the biggest beneficiaries of a Nazi social structure.  In that society, if you are not one of the condemned classes, you go along to get along, privileges protected as long as you play ball, take your windfall profits and stay quiet on “social issues”.  It’s been that way since the first tough guy imposed his will on a tribe of half apes thousands of years ago.  It was that way during all twelve years of the Thousand Year Reich.

Vote like your democracy depends on it, because it does.   I’m writing postcards to “swing voters” in Pennsylvania.  Contact tinicumtogether@gmail.com to get some postcards and a succinct script to write on ’em.  Take action, no matter how small it may seem, elections can turn on very few votes in a given precinct or district.   Any good history of the Nazi era will convince you that we are way, way too close to it happening here to fall into enervated depression about it.  Take action, friends.   Otherwise, see you at one of the MAGA camps, coming soon to an anarchist jurisdiction near you, if the Nazis take over.

Good line, Biden

Heather Cox Richardson ended today’s Letter from an American with this snappy retort from far left radical socialist Joe Biden:

Today Biden named the Republicans who voted against the infrastructure law and then asked for money. Biden said, “I was surprised to see so many socialists in the Republican caucus.”

Pathos

The last surviving friendship from my childhood, dating back to when we were best friends at eight, is no more.   Both old friends are still alive, but one is too, what used to be called neurotic, to remain friends with the other.  There were specific issues that became unbearable to me, a series of unsuccessful attempts over the course of a few years to talk them through, and hurt, mutual silence for several years after that.   The most terrible death is the stubborn death in life of a once close relationship while both parties and their loved ones are alive for the shimmering moment we are given to breathe here.

Thinking about this estrangement, and my old friend’s basic decency and true inability to see his own role in angry conflict (he fancies himself so gentle, reasonable, meek) I decided to call and break the ice.  I sent him a text.   He wrote back that he was delighted to hear from me and it was only a few days before he was able to clear a 45 minute block on his busy schedule for us to talk.

During our talk I told him of a friend’s psychiatrist’s indisputable insight that our lives take place in a vast school where we either learn or don’t move out of sometimes crippling childhood pain.   Here are a few of his rules:

12. A lesson is repeated until it is learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.

13. People always do the best they can. If they are doing poorly, it is because they have not learned the lessons that will enable them to do better.


14. If you forget what you have learned, a refresher course will be presented to you.   You will take it.

15. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

One lesson I learned, I said, is that unless a friendship ends in violent, damaging attacks, it can probably be resumed.   My friendship with this guy ended in more or less mutual mildness.  Though we were both hurt and angry at each other, neither of us mauled the other at the end.  This, I told my old friend, was an encouraging sign going forward.  He agreed, told me he had to go, but that next time he’d tell me the revelations he’d had since last we talked.  I told him I looked forward to it.

We spoke once again, briefly, a month or so later.  He had no idea what revelations he could have been talking about, but it was great to be talking to each other again.  Last I heard from him.  

He has taken spiritual refuge with the Chabad community where the rabbi is wise and compassionate.   He prays every morning and studies the holy books.  I guess it didn’t occur to him that we should speak during the ten days of making amends when Jews are supposed to try to heal all past hurts and move forward in a better way.   True, I could have called him, but the idea of how hard it would have been to schedule must have made me put it off, especially while I am trying to save another old friendship that is not doing very well on its respirator.

Amicus brief from The Onion — America’s finest news source

A guy posted a harshly satirical, arguably not very funny, send up of his local police force on Facebook, a post he later took down.   He was arrested and locked up, later released, the charges dropped.  He sued the police department in federal court for retaliatory arrest in violation of his First Amendment right to say pretty much anything he fucking chooses.  Key to his suit is that parody, even if it is crap, even if it is disgusting, fly-covered crap with no redeeming value as humor, has long been protected by the Supreme Court.  The amateur parodist lost and appealed. 

The appellate court ruled, with the arrogance of those defending the absolute prerogatives of law enforcement no matter what (except when they are libtard cucks protecting an illegitimate Congress)  “There’s no recognized right to be free from a retaliatory arrest that is supported by probable cause.” The appeal is now under review as a possible Supreme Court case.  The Onion weighed in with probably the best amicus brief ever written.

The entire brief, which begins with The Onion’s origin story as a humble paper in 1756 growing to the world’s most influential website with 4.3 trillion daily visitors and 350,000 employees, is on the Supreme Court website.  It is brilliant, funny, cutting, mocking and so sensible it will bring tears to your eyes for several reasons.  It is the most readable and entertaining legal filling you will ever encounter.   https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242292/20221003125252896_35295545_1-22.10.03%20-%20Novak-Parma%20-%20Onion%20Amicus%20Brief.pdf

Here are a few of their more serious points.

Parodists can take apart an authoritarian’s cult of personality, point out the rhetorical tricks that politicians use to mislead their constituents, and even undercut a government institution’s real-world attempts at propaganda. Farah, 736 F.3d at 536 (noting that the point of parody is to “censure the vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings of an individual or society”) (cleaned up). . .

. . . see also Golb v. Att’y Gen. of N.Y., 870 F.3d 89, 102 (2d Cir. 2017) (“[A] parody enjoys First Amendment protection notwithstanding that not everybody will get the joke.”). 

And the “reasonable reader” is “ ‘no dullard. He or she does not represent the lowest common denominator, but reasonable intelligence and learning. He or she can tell the difference between satire and sincerity.’ ” New Times, Inc. v. Isaacks, 146 S.W.3d 144, 157 (Tex. 2004) (quoting Patrick v. Sup. Ct., 27 Cal. Rptr. 2d 883, 887 (Ct. App. 1994)). “Nor is the reasonable person some totally humorless drudge who cannot perceive the presence of subtle invective.” Patrick, 27 Cal. Rptr. 2d at 887. Instead, the reasonable reader’s perspective “is more informed by an assessment of her well-considered view than by her immediate yet transitory reaction,” particularly “in light of the special characteristics of satire,” which leverage that transitory reaction for rhetorical effect. Farah, 736 F.3d at 536. 

The clincher, for me, subtle and sweet, is citing, toward the end, the powerful appellate court judge, Alex Kozinski, who was Boof Kavanaugh’s rabbi, steered him to his Supreme Court clerkship and maintained a listserve of pornographic jokes for his clerks and former clerks that he (and Boof) denied the existence of.  Kozinski later resigned from the federal bench for unrelated reasons (accusations from many women of gross sexual harassment, unwanted touching and forcible kissing).

“ ‘[T]he last thing we need, the last thing the First Amendment will tolerate, is a law that lets public figures keep people from mocking them.’ ” Cardtoons, L.C. v. Major League Baseball Players Ass’n, 95 F.3d 959, 972–73 (10th Cir. 1996) (quoting White v. Samsung Elecs. Am., Inc., 989 F.2d 1512, 1519 (9th Cir. 1993) (Kozinski, J., dissenting)). 

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/federal-judge-alex-kozinski-steps-down-after-accusations-of-sexual-misconduct