Author Archives: oinsketta

MAGA Redeemers

What I feared would be in place for the 2020 elections may be ready to go in 2022, armed citizens enforcing the “Election Integrity” measures enacted in response to a sore loser’s repeated lies about election fraud.  The sore loser had Bagpiper Bill Barr, in the lead up to 2020, making repeated claims about the “obvious” potential for massive voter fraud, from mail-in and drop-box voting, before Barr told the sore loser, privately, amid dozens of voting fraud cases dismissed for lack of evidence, that DOJ investigations found no fraud anywhere on a scale that would have changed any election.  

The thing I worried about tin 2020 was intimidation of voters by armed goons at polling places and everywhere else.  It didn’t happen on a wide scale, thankfully, but these assholes have had two years to work out the kink in that plan of organizing an army of MAGA “poll watchers,” the army of armed loyalists MAGA man had called for before the 2020 election.   Here’s Heather Cox Richardson from last night’s Letter to an American:

Over the weekend, the Maricopa County Elections Department announced that two people, both armed and dressed in tactical gear, stationed themselves near a ballot drop box in Mesa, Arizona. They left when law enforcement officers arrived. At least two voters later filed complaints of voter intimidation, both complaining that they were filmed dropping off ballots. One complained of being accused of “being a mule,” a reference to people who are allegedly paid to gather ballots and stuff drop boxes for Democratic candidates.

Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates and Recorder Stephen Richer issued a statement: “We are deeply concerned about the safety of individuals who are exercising their constitutional right to vote and who are lawfully taking their early ballot to a drop box…. [V]igilantes outside Maricopa County’s drop boxes are not increasing election integrity. Instead they are leading to voter intimidation complaints.”

She then goes on to describe the Redeemers, violent racist motherfuckers in the former Confederacy who employed terrorism to rescue endangered White Women from the ravages of “Negro Rule”.   It started with the Ku Klux Klan, who killed an estimated 1,000 southerners before the 1868 election to ensure their cherished way of life would not be changed by voters, or based on the victors’ dictates after an unfairly won war.   The terrorism of the Klan was not enough to ensure the prewar status quo, rich whites organized to make sure to preach loudly, so that any changes would be rejected by the populace. They’d win if all their folks were riled up to go vote and they made it hard for the wrong people to vote.  They used now familiar MAGA arguments and displays to motivate their aggrieved base to vote their little hearts out.  Heather:

Black voting, they insisted, was “Socialism in South Carolina.”

In 1876, “Redeemers” set out to put an end to the southern governments that were elected in systems that allowed Black men to vote. “Rifle clubs” held contests outside Republican political rallies, “Red Shirts” marched with their guns in parades.

Their intimidation worked. Democrats took over the South and created a one-party system that lasted virtually unbroken until 1965. Without the oversight that a healthy multiparty system provides, southern governments became the corrupt tools of a few wealthy men, and the rest of the population fell into a poverty from which it could not escape until the federal government began to invest in the region in the 1930s.

The great triumph of Movement Conservatives in the 1980s was to convince Republican voters to ditch the ideology of their founding and instead embrace the ideology of the old Confederacy.

After World War II, the vast majority of Americans in both parties agreed that the government should protect equality before the law and promote equal access to resources. That system gave us highways, business regulation, world-class universities, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, clean air and water, labor protections, and a narrowing gap between rich and poor.

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/october-23-2022?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email


The former Confederacy, in many ways, and certainly in every way for Blacks, was run like a fascist state, in many cases also like a feudal state, ruled by a few wealthy white employers who made the law for everyone.  Heather then describes the effort, accelerated by the actor Ronald Reagan’s administration (1980), but starting right after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruled segregation in public schools illegal (and started the rise of private white schools, school vouchers, Betsey DeVos, etc), to return America to the good old days of the former Confederacy in the south, where one party ruled unmolested, making laws to ensure its one-party rule in perpetuity.   Making the Confederacy Great Again.

To paraphrase a giant, stinking, organge pile of scats:  We have to fight like hell, because if we don’t fight like hell, we’re not going to have a sometimes successful experiment in democracy anymore.

Stop Comparing Tragedies, dummy

Michael Rappaport makes an excellent point — we all have to stop comparing horrors. Suffering is not a goddamned competition.

The slave trade was murderous, it’s hard to imagine a worse life than being an American slave in 1850. The recent genocide of the Rohinga, last century’s slaughter of the Armenians, two holocausts among several. In between those genocides the Nazis built death camps, taking it to the next level.

Your new religious faith aside, Kan Ye, abortion clinics are not Auschwitz. And your self-avowed mental illness is not a defense for spreading insane hateful ideas, pant load.

NYTimes: How Disinformation Splintered and Became More Intractable

I’m going to wait to read this groundbreaking article in the New York Times, but I’m putting a gift link below for anyone who wants to read it. The finding that self-regulated social media, which runs most lucratively on the viral spread of things that piss people off, has somehow tribalized people by constantly confirming their faith in things that are manifestly untrue, seems like a tragically belated headline for the Gray Lady. But let’s give her the benefit of the doubt shall we? I’m sure their presentation of the weaponization of hateful conspiracies will be supremely well-balanced.

Here’s the sub- headline:

Ahead of the midterm elections, the proliferation of alternative social media sites has helped cement false and misleading information as a defining feature of American politics.

Oh boy…

The spread of Mr. Trump’s [stolen election] claim illustrates how, ahead of this year’s midterm elections, disinformation has metastasized since experts began raising alarms about the threat. Despite years of efforts by the media, by academics and even by social media companies themselves to address the problem, it is arguably more pervasive and widespread today.

“I think the problem is worse than it’s ever been, frankly,” said Nina Jankowicz, an expert on disinformation who briefly led an advisory board within the Department of Homeland Security dedicated to combating misinformation. The creation of the panel set off a furor, prompting her to resign and the group to be dismantled.

The creation of the panel set off a furor, prompting her to resign and the group to be dismantled.

More like the creation of a panel to combat right-wing disinformation set off the Führer. Death threats forced Jankowicz to resign, the threat of widespread violence by American lynch mobs caused the closure of the Homeland Security Department to combat disinformation. Come on, Gray Lady!

This is some alarming shit:

“We believe at Parler that it is up to the individual to decide what he or she thinks is the truth,” Amy Peikoff, the platform’s chief policy officer, said in an interview.

She argued that the problem with disinformation or conspiracy theories stemmed from the algorithms that platforms use to keep people glued online — not from the unfettered debate that sites like Parler foster.

On Monday, Parler announced that Kanye West had agreed in principle to purchase the platform, a deal that the rapper and fashion designer, now known as Ye, cast in political terms.

“In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial, we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves,” he said, according to the company’s statement.

God save us from bigoted assholes with mountains of fucking money.

How Disinformation Splintered and Became More Intractable https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/20/technology/disinformation-spread.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhlSFUZAybJUNMnqBqCgvfeh7A9nX74Ii-PTD9ezuMTRpOY4UrEaexje943lXy9deN2DYUOFrZ03_MNeAtkURWpqZ-J35hVeX9ro9jtGzM7hMOIAOwzrnrjZDPjbbYgmuzjsRzXOzToWrfNkiF0fHYTqppjc1Ct2XIK1_2FRrYzgo8iqK9nUpNqRj4AZz2Jvu3oC3h8P9aGahLc4momSr0TGGGTzZPHteV2IEgFAknGTXh__W4_9NpaXdoTN634JBQiE9HstQOz_tBYKWVEFaX2SF5BXw

Psych 101

Traumatic experiences in childhood often have long-term effects [1] on a person’s ability to trust, to form close bonds with others, to be honest. Let’s just apply a little psychology 101 to this needy disturbed, dangerous when wounded guy who’s constantly in the news.

His father was known to be a psychopath. He was a famously hard charging judgmental workaholic who parlayed millions of dollars in government grants and his own great business acumen, and willingness to take risks to keep and pass on every dollar of his money, into a billion dollar empire. The father had little use for his young fuck up son as he was grooming his charismatic oldest son to succeed him. Imagine the psychopathic father’s disappointment when he learned that his heir apparent was not a killer, didn’t have what it takes to take everything from everybody by constantly fighting to the death. So the much younger brother, an incorigible bully with limited smarts and very poor people skills, was eventually chosen and groomed to be a killer like Dad.

You don’t get much love from a psychopathic father, the best you get is approval when you carry out his orders. It’s a hard life for a sensitive young person.

When that sensitive young person was in his period of most intense need for his mother’s love and protection, before he was two, his cool, slightly distant and distracted mother became ill and was out of the house for many months, while her youngest son cried for her and got disgusted looks from psychopath dad when he got home from a long day of making the world in his image.

In other words, the time when this kid most needed love, understanding, appreciation and guidance, he was left alone and made to feel weak because of his whining. Is it hard to understand the kind of adult this hurt little boy would likely grow up into?

Imagine his relief a few years later when he got a younger brother, someone he could take out his frustrations on by tormenting every day. Kind of restored the little fucker’s belief in God.

Look at the rest of this now widely adored, widely despised, infamous, beleaguered rich reality TV star/F POTUS. You can draw a straight line from his early childhood injuries to his total war against anybody inclined in any way to contest his will.

And we are all, here in the United States and worldwide, much the poorer, and our lives much more precarious, than they were before this twisted creature came onto the world scene to prove to his psychopath daddy that he’s not a loser.

Winner!

[1]

Adverse Childhood Experiences, Part 23

Demons, fear and reflexive distrust

There are demons within us all, stirring terrors too formidable to face unless we’re forced to.  They are extremely painful to confront, even when we’re aided by somebody who has the skills and gentleness to help.  My father, a man with more demons than most, and better reason than most to host so many of the merciless little fuckers, always stressed that everybody has his demons and that it’s impossible to know what to make of someone else’s demons.  Never truer, in my experience, than with my father.   

Although, towards the end of his life I came to understand the source of some of my father’s major demons:  regular childhood face whippings from his mother, daily hunger, excruciating, humiliating poverty, illiterate, defeated-by-life father, low expectations from his extended family, a feeling of shame for being stupid because he couldn’t learn to read — they only figured out he was legally blind when he was about eight and the brand new New Deal made it possible for him to have his 20/400 vision corrected with glasses (he went on to get a graduate degree in history).   If that’s not enough childhood pain to support a thriving colony of demons, I can only imagine what the rest of the story was.  At the very end of his life, he still believed he’d been the dumbest Jewish kid in the haunted small town he grew up in, by far.

Our most ferocious demons make us rage sometimes.   If someone touches one accidentally WATCH THE FUCK OUT!   Often, after losing your cool and lashing out, you feel embarrassed, particularly if the people you care about are victims of your anger.   If one of your demons is shame, it is humiliating to acknowledge that you did something wrong and hurt somebody. You will have developed strategies to not feel the burning of deep shame.  Better to get angry again, indignant over and over, than to feel mortified that you’ve hurt someone you care about for a weak reason, or no reason you can talk about.

You stop trusting the person you hurt, if they won’t shut up about their need to talk about what the hell happened, their need to put everything on the table.  If everything is laid out clearly, your understandable human weakness is exposed.  Weakness may be understandable to others, but it’s intolerable to you, because your demons will immediately start painfully sodomizing you for being imperfect, weak, capable of hurting others who, sometimes, maddeningly, refuse to pretend they weren’t hurt. 

If you’re vulnerable to the need to be perfect,  you’re in for a lot more pain than the average schmuck who can forgive herself for sometimes acting badly.   We all sometimes act badly, no matter how diligently we try not to hurt people we care about. 

The only way back to mutual care is through making amends and forgiveness.  Forgiveness takes place after the hurt is acknowledged, it can’t happen in any meaningful way if the person asking for forgiveness insists the other person is a pussy who simply can’t put the past in the past and insists on bringing up a painful situation that nobody can do anything about because it’s in the past, duh!  

Many people find it impossible to forgive themselves.  The hurt we suffered at our own hands can only be forgiven by being honest and gentle with ourselves.   It works with the self the same way it does with others.  We truly didn’t mean to hurt ourselves, acknowledge the accident, cure it with taking better care never to hurt ourselves that way again.   This doesn’t mean shutting ourselves off from others, it means accepting they we’re humans who do stupid things sometimes and there is no point whipping ourselves over them, much better to learn important life lessons from mistakes and avoid repeating the same bad pattern.

When you hurt somebody, and they tell you they’re hurt, listen to them, do not allow a demon you can’t control to jump in and angrily cut them off.  Understand why they were hurt, empathize, assure them you will do your best to not do that to them again.  The same goes for when we act in a way that hurts ourselves.  Unless you do yourself the kindness of letting yourself off the hook for dumb mistakes, the hook gets sharper and sharper, sinks in deeper and deeper.  In the end, that hook is never coming out.

The alternative to making amends is that the truth of hurtful past events becomes poison to you, and the one you hurt.  A clear recitation of the thing you can’t talk about is seen as an aggressive, threatening frontal attack.  You marshal your armies, but they have very little to work with in defending something that can only be defended by spraying ordnance wildly.  You accuse, express distrust, and fear, sprinkle in some regret, quickly followed by more anger, and tell them how merciless they are.   Direct questions can be uncomfortable, an assault. What can you say to something like: was anything I said inaccurate, unfair, unkind?  All you can do is hurl something back “you’re unfair and mean!”  Sometimes we are at fault, and if we never yield, do the same thing over and over, fight responsibility and the idea that we can change our behavior in any meaningful way, that’s about it for that relationship.

There is no genius mediator, supremely skilled at her job, who can fix that distrust, denial, anger and inability to forgive yourself enough to reach compromise with people you love, in a single short session where everyone gets a chance to express how they were hurt and the mediator makes sure each one knows they’ve been heard.   At least, I can’t picture that kind of alchemist mediator.   If there’s only mutual hurt and distrust going in, how does the process have a chance to heal anything?