Category Archives: current events

Politics is personal

Politics is about power, who has it, who gets to hide behind it, who gets to use it for good, who gets to use it to punish people they hate. We have been living through an increasingly naked form of smash-mouth politics the last few decades, worldwide. Its foremost practitioner here threatens to “scorch the earth” he has already burned, salted and sprayed with poison, if the right of the minority to obstruct all legislation favored by the majority is threatened.

I came across an interesting, disturbing idea the other day, from the transcript of a Hidden Brain interview a friend sent me:

00:24:41]
When you refuse to apologize it actually makes you feel more empowered. That power and control seems to translate into greater feelings of self-worth.

[00:24:50]
And in some ways, this sounds to the inner dictator, when we apologize, in some ways we are disarming ourselves. And when we refuse to apologize, in some ways we are mounting a form of emotional self-defense.

source

Some sick shit, sure, this zero sum unapologetic win/lose worldview, but it does explain a lot about how political power works. You can start a war to preserve the right of your richest citizens to have slaves, a war you will eventually lose militarily, a loss you will then transform into a glorious Lost Cause, one that never had a thing to do with slavery, only rights, a moral position that allows you to loudly assert the very thing you went to war to defend: the right to treat our own precious n-words however way we goddamned please, thank you!

You lose an election decisively, but you do not accept the loss, you refuse to bow to the bipartisan consensus of every expert that you lost a fair election. It feels good, and empowering, never to apologize or admit you could ever be wrong, or, God forbid, lose. The Jews stole it from us, or millions of Mexican rapists, or Muslims, aided by powerful pedophiles, the Blacks, the Browns, the Yellows! The demonstrably false story about massive voting fraud that you keep telling, a story thrown out of countless courts for lack of evidence, is good enough to enrage your followers. More than good enough, after a $50,000,000 ad campaign and many incendiary speeches and tweets, some are willing to get violent to defend “their country” against the threat of hoards of lying, fraudulent, ignorant, smelly, disgusting, immoral people who are nothing like us.

Politics is always personal when it comes to reflexive reactions towards certain kinds of murderers. You have a young maniac the press calls “very religious” get a gun in Georgia the other day. To get the gun in Georgia all he had to do was show ID and say “kill… those whores make me want to f-f-f-f … have sex with ’em… Second Amendment!” and the gun was in his hands. A few hours later he made the rounds of a few massage parlors and shot eight people to death, a ninth person he shot escaped death by luck. Most of the people he murdered were Asian women. The authorities are still trying to “figure out” if this murder spree was a “hate crime” directed at the women because they were Asian. America wants to know, and the jury is still out — what was the intent of this enraged, “religious” white man in killing the women? What was actually in his twisted mind as he was spraying the bullets at these women will make a difference, for some reason, at his trial.

We argue over hate crimes, the definition of “hate” of “crime” of what actually makes a crime a hate crime, partisans focusing it within one frame or another. Can we really say that a police officer just doing his job, who handcuffs a suspect and kneels on his windpipe until the suspect is unable to keep pleading for his life “killed” the suspect? Kill implies an intent that the officer, well…

Let’s take a much simpler one: how about those brave Capitol Police officers who stood up to a violent, armed crowd that outnumbered them ten to one (injuring 134 of them)? The House voted almost unanimously yesterday to give them Congressional medals for their courage. Who were the twelve who voted against it? Trumpist all-stars like Louie Gohmert and Matt Gaetz, new Q-Anon it-girl Marjorie Taylor Green, provocative extremists only electable because they ran in partisan gerrymandered districts where their extremist views, supported by “dark money,” could not be challenged in a fair election. These twelve were apparently indignant that the bill to honor the cops with medals infuriatingly referred to the peaceful January 6 protest by white Christian patriots inside the Capitol, to gently but firmly disrupt the final certification of the stolen election by the traitor Mike Pence, as an “insurrection.” Making partisan sport with a tragedy, trying to score political points on the back of a dead police officer, as the goddamned divisive, racist n-word Democrats always do!

Not one Republican senator (or House member, for that matter), not the moderate Mitt Romney, not the despised Liz Cheney, not a single one of them, voted last week to give relief to struggling Americans in a nation devastated by a deadly, super-infectious pandemic, a hands-off federal response and the economic tsunami it caused. Not a single vote, for aid to hungry children, for mental health care, for medical care, for food, for vaccines, by the party whose base, and several of its rising stars in Congress, insist that powerful Democrats are child-molesting cannibals.

I say politics is personal and I will try to illustrate that idea with a personal example. My former friend Paul, is a very bright guy, a proficient maker of compelling legal arguments in federal court, a well-read man with a subtle mind. His oldest friend tells him that he has been hurt by him. Paul goes to work. Now watch the actual work, it is exactly how Republican/right-wing politics works today, particularly the irrefutable, indignant, absurd closing position that clinches the deal.

Did any of this really happen the way you said? What did I specifically do, I still don’t understand? I was trying to help, are you faulting me for that, for trying to help? I appreciate that you took hours to try to explain yourself, and I thank you for not attacking me, it was generous of you, but, if you wouldn’t mind, and I’m not going to go into any of what you said now, or ever, but can you explain it again, please, since I still don’t get exactly what I did that hurt you. I know I may seem obtuse, and perhaps shrieking like an angry schoolgirl, hanging up the phone and texting that I’m done being reamed by you may be something you’d expect an apology for, particularly from a grown man and old friend — but why? Is my waiting weeks to make any apology at all part of the reason you might be clinging to your anger so petulantly? Isn’t it possible that your anger is distorting your view of what actually happened? Who can ever really know what is in another person’s mind, even someone you’ve known for decades? We are all mysteries, even to ourselves… etc.

This is all standard stuff for a certain type trying to defend itself. But here is where the shit turns personal/political — how you stick the landing. When I finally reduce our conflict to one issue: you asked me what was wrong, I told you, you kept saying you didn’t understand, I explained again, when I directed your attention to how intolerable it is to me to have no response to things I directly raise in reply to your own questions, not only don’t you respond, you dispose of the entire controversy and perfectly stick the landing by saying “I’ve read and considered everything you said, searching in vain for a single clue what the fuck you are so fucking upset about.”

Anyone who has read even one of these posts knows what a provocatively insulting statement the assertion that I give no clue is. And, like the provocative Republican insistence that racism is non-existent, except in the minds of enraged, irrational, radical, violent, thuggish n-words, there can be only one reason to make this kind of reductive, zero sum statement — to win.

I don’t care about your supposed good will, the strength of the facts you put together, appeals to our better natures, our long friendship, your generosity in not making me feel like the ruthlessly bitter asshole I’ve arguably been, your constant attempts at reconciliation — you lose and I WIN. That’s how this story ends, asshole. You could not provide a single clue, not even a clue, about why you harbor this irrational rage toward me.

Paul’s pessimistic belief is that people cannot change, they obey their darker natures in the end. To believe otherwise makes you pathetically deluded. By finally getting me to step back from my vow of mildness to tell him to go fuck himself, he proves his point. I try to be mild, but at bottom, I am the same vicious fuck I always was. People cannot change, or learn to be less of an asshole. Game and match. Zero sum, I win.

For contrast to this style of point-scoring and power plays, and a look at the best of political persuasion, watch Senator Raphael Warnock’s magnificent speech in support of HR 1, the For the People Act, a bill that would make voting easier, more universal and less corruptible in our great experiment in democracy. The GOP has already announced they will filibuster it, try to prevent floor debate on the bill, as the 6-3 rightwing Supreme Court seems poised to uphold Arizona’s voter suppression laws that were twice found illegally discriminatory by the lower federal courts. I can only picture the response of the outraged patriots, it will be very similar, in its essential enraged incoherence, to my buddy Paul’s provocative conclusion that I can’t put a few thoughts together coherently.

Watch Warnock’s powerful moving, speech and see if you can find a single flaw in it:

Suggested talking points for Tucker and the outraged right:

It is not that we are racists, or that America has ever been racist, in any way, it’s just that if we don’t stop [n-words] and their ilk from voting in huge numbers, like they did recently in Georgia to steal the Senate, we would find ourselves out of power, living in a country where a majority, not our own, decides what rights and privileges WE have. If the shoe was on the other foot, if we got real political power after centuries of being as murderously fucked by you as you claim to have been by us, we’d be vindictive as hell, as you would have every right to be, if we’d done anything at all bad to you. We’d put our knees on your necks so hard you’d never even be able to say, “I can’t breathe.”

Senator Raphael Warnock’s perfect speech in support of the Right to Vote

Watch Senator Warnock’s powerful speech in support of (HR1) the For the People Act, a proposed law that would make voting easier and more universal, outlaw partisan and racial gerrymandering and ensure that political campaigns are less driven by “dark money”. A voting rights protection bill long overdue in our great experiment in democracy.

See if you can find a single flaw or misstep in Warnock’s presentation:

More proof of the already conclusively proved

The New York Times released this, eh, surprising news yesterday:

WASHINGTON — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized extensive efforts to hurt the candidacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the election last year, including by mounting covert operations to influence people close to President Donald J. Trump, according to a declassified intelligence report released on Tuesday…

…The reports, compiled by career officials, amounted to a repudiation of Mr. Trump, his allies and some of his top administration officials. They reaffirmed the intelligence agencies’ conclusions about Russia’s interference in 2016 on behalf of Mr. Trump and said that the Kremlin favored his re-election. And they categorically dismissed allegations of foreign-fed voter fraud, cast doubt on Republican accusations of Chinese intervention on behalf of Democrats and undermined claims that Mr. Trump and his allies had spread about the Biden family’s work in Ukraine.

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The line we often hear, about shady things done by powerful people, is that it’s not the crime itself, it’s the cover-up that gets you. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller wasn’t appointed because of well-founded suspicions that the Trump campaign had had strategic help from and over a hundred contacts with Putin’s agents during the lead-up to the 2016 election — he was appointed when Trump fired Jim Comey for not dropping the investigation into Trump’s former National Security Director Mike “Lock Her up” Flynn. Flynn had been reluctantly fired by Trump for lying about his own contacts with Russia, then Trump attempted to squash the investigation and gloated by immediately celebrating Comey’s firing with a bunch of Russians in the Oval Office. It all looked so openly corrupt that Robert Mueller had to be appointed.

Mueller, of course, wound up having to write an entire second volume on Trump’s repeated attempts to interfere with his investigation, cover up his attempts to cover up widespread contacts with Trump’s benefactor Vladimir Putin, instruct his people to stay strong and say nothing, his obstruction of justice. Mueller was forced to do this because Trump’s people lied to him over and over, people like Paul Manafort who Trump later pardoned for not “singing” like a “rat”. Mueller’s short summary of the Obstruction of Justice volume would have made an excellent article of impeachment, but Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic braintrust did not have the stomach for that fight, banking instead on American outrage about Trump’s attempt to shake down the new president of a country few had ever heard of.

One star of the new revelations about Putin’s attempts to sow discord and secure another four years as American president for his pliable friend is slippery Russian intel officer/spy Konstantin Kilimnik:

The report also named Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a former colleague of Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign manager Paul Manafort, as a Russian influence agent. Mr. Kilimnik took steps throughout the 2020 election cycle to hurt Mr. Biden and his candidacy, the report said, helping pushed a false narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, was responsible for interfering in American politics.

During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Manafort shared inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served, according to a bipartisan report last year by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“Kilimnik was back at it again, along with others like Derkach,” Mr. Schiff said. “And they had other conduits for their laundered misinformation, including people like Rudy Giuliani.”

Neither Mr. Giuliani nor his representatives returned a request for comment.

source

You know, this guy:

Kilimnik was mentioned hundreds of times in the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report about massive Russian interference in the 2016 election that came out in five volumes, the last of them well after Mueller’s discarded work was done. The Republican led committee documented meetings and constant communications between then Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort (Roger Stone’s former partner in political dirty tricks) and Kilimnik, the man the FBI is now seeking for Obstruction of Justice and Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice. They documented how Manafort had shared detailed polling data with Kilimnik, information that might have come into play when Trump’s surgically precise Electoral College victory was engineered. Though he lost he popular vote, he won every district he needed to win for his 78,000 vote Electoral College mandate.

The Republican led committee got much more detailed information on Trump’s collusion/coordination/close work with Russia than Mueller was able to find. And, because Americans are not sophisticated consumers of information, the Republicans on the committee publicly distanced themselves from their own findings, repeating the mantra that it was all a big nothing fabricated by vicious partisans who hated Trump, no matter how much so called evidence of this collusion they themselves had turned up.

Can anyone really be surprised about this “news” that Putin wanted his guy reelected in 2020? During the 2020 campaign Trump and Barr constantly echoed the incendiary and baseless Putin talking point about mail in voting fraud. Evidence? “It’s common sense,” snorted Barr on national TV, more than once. Draw a straight line from that lie about massive potential fraud by those who voted against Trump, through Trump’s constant carping about a rigged election, to his open attempts to sabotage the US mail system by having his megadonor dismantle hundreds of urban high speed mail sorting machines, remove mailboxes and slow down mail delivery by other shenanigans, through literally hundreds of baseless lawsuits to prevent voting or contest electoral losses, to the well-funded months’ long Stop the Steal publicity blitz, to the riot organized and launched to prevent the certification of the election results, to the screaming about the cancellation of Dr. Seuss and the snarling threats of “scorched earth” in the Senate — and… well, Putin’s laughing, anyway.

Maybe he’s right, comrades. This nation may be too fucking stupid and weak to remain a democracy.

NY Times: reeking pile of toxic excrement angrily threatens to stink even more

Or as the Grey Lady much more elegantly stated it:

McConnell Threatens Retaliation for Filibuster Change as Idea Gains Strength

To be a bit more blunt than the genteel journal of record, which reported the story, if a piece of shit could speak, it would say something pretty much like this:

In his comments, Mr. McConnell threatened that Republicans would turn the rules against Democrats and try to make it virtually impossible to do anything in the Senate if they proceeded with the change. He referred to the fact that the chamber operates under arcane rules often bypassed through what is known as a unanimous consent agreement where no senator objects. If Democrats plunged ahead to gut the filibuster, he warned, Republicans would deny consent even on the most mundane of matters, effectively bogging down the Senate.

“Let me say this very clearly for all 99 of my colleagues,” Mr. McConnell said. “Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin — can even begin — to imagine what a completely scorched earth Senate would look like — none. None of us have served one minute in a Senate that was completely drained of comity, and this is an institution that requires unanimous consent to turn the lights on before noon.”

Mr. McConnell, who noted that he had resisted aggressive demands by President Donald J. Trump to get rid of the filibuster and ram through Republicans’ agenda, said eliminating it would represent a transformative change in government and go far beyond what voters intended in electing Mr. Biden and the evenly divided Senate.

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If you read the article you will see that Dick Durbin, number two Democrat in the Senate, made a very coherent argument for changing the filibuster rules to prevent further McConnell/GOP obstruction. He pointed out that McConnell has used it more (and effortlessly, now that it requires only an emailed threat to filibuster rather than standing and speaking for hours to block debate) in recent years than it had ever been used. McConnell is a more prodigious filibusterer and debate killer than his forebear obstructionists, even at the height of the anti-Civil Rights, pro-lynching (and before that pro-slavery) filibusters.

Mr. Durbin noted that it was Mr. McConnell who institutionalized the use of the filibuster, which historically had been used rarely before the Kentuckian was in charge. Mr. Durbin said the procedural weapon was a particularly sore point for him, since it is has for two decades prevented Democrats from enacting the so-called Dream Act, a popular bipartisan bill that he wrote that would create a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as children. Though it has majority support, it has never been able to clear the 60-vote threshold.

“I brought it to the Senate floor on five different occasions, and on five different occasions, it was stopped by the filibuster,” Mr. Durbin said on Tuesday.

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McConnell also changed the filibuster rule under Trump so that it no longer applies to Supreme Court nominees, bringing us the unstoppable 50-48 Supreme Court vote for the immature and hostile Boof Kavanaugh (after a quick, sham background investigation by the FBI) and the historically hurried last minute appointment of ultra-conservative Christian cultist Amy Coney-Barrett 52-48.

In fairness to him, all Mitch has left (as he tries to get Kentucky law changed so a Republican can be appointed when he steps down) was a threat of rage like nobody has yet seen in America, even under the raging idiot who just left office after organizing and inciting a riot to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

Whatever you say, Mitch. Now somebody, please flush, would you? It stinks in there.

Worldview and World (part 2)

Yesterday was the one year anniversary of an early morning drug raid in Kentucky, using a warrant based on outdated intel, that resulted in the killing of an innocent 26 year-old EMT named Breonna Taylor in her own home. The police who broke down her door and began wildly firing into the apartment were not charged in her death, though they left her bleeding with 8 bullet wounds for twenty minutes before any medical efforts were taken to save her (depraved indifference?). As she lay dying they were busy arresting her boyfriend, who fired once at men who broke down the door — men all but one witness said never identified themselves as police. The boyfriend recently had felony charges against him dismissed, after only a year. Remember, this deadly military style assault was to enforce Prohibition, Louisville police were there to intercept illegal drugs, though none were found. Although no police were charged in Taylor’s killing, scores of protesters calling for accountability for the officers and an end to “no knock” warrants, were arrested for, essentially, felony protest. Fair is fair.

Hard as it is to believe, your worldview will determine how you see the facts of this awful case. A good percentage of the country sees this killing simply as an unavoidable tragedy, something that couldn’t have been helped. Some will argue that Taylor’s boyfriend should not have pulled out his licensed gun when he was abruptly woken by the sound of men breaking down the door. Once he fired into the leg of one of the men, whatever happened after that was coming to him. The same people will defend the Stand Your Ground laws that extend the Castle Doctrine (you may defend yourself with deadly force against a deadly threat in your home) to anywhere and anyone you fear might use deadly force against you. A black kid walking down a suburban Florida street is fair game to shoot, as we have learned, if you can prove he scared the shit out of you.

It sounds simplistic, I know, to insist on a premise like all communal hatred resulting in violence flows from the same source. Or making the obvious point about the central role early life experiences play in shaping how we see the world, for that matter. It is beyond dispute that how we see the world, our worldview, not only influences what we believe and how we act, it creates the world we live in, to a great extent. All simplistic and self-evident sounding, I know. but I hope my rambling here will shed some light for us, somehow.

Take every situation where an enraged mob goes after a certain group of people simply based on the other group’s ethnic, religious, racial or political identity and rains living hell down on them. Lately it’s angry American fools bashing elderly Asians, shoving them to the ground, slashing them with knives, because they blame all Asians for the “Wuhan Flu”, as our former president, a big fan of tough talk and violence of every kind, dubbed it. How about that Nobel Peace Prize winner, former political prisoner turned prime minister, Aung San Suu Kyi silent on the mass killings and forced evacuations of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims in her country? Two million Tutsis, slaughtered by hand, in a short, bloody span of time, by machete wielding Hutus, another tribal group. Every “ethnic” massacre is a variation on the same theme. The names change, the victims and perpetrators wear different hats, the methods of killing change, but it’s the same thing, every time. Ever hear of “necklacing?” Hell of a technique, Brownie:

Necklacing is the practice of extrajudicial summary execution and torture carried out by forcing a rubber tire filled with petrol around a victim’s chest and arms, and setting it on fire. The victim may take up to 20 minutes to die, suffering severe burns in the process.[1]

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How can one human “necklace” another human? Easy, apparently, given the right set of circumstances. For whatever reason, the mass killing of despised “others” is a regular feature of our common history anytime masses of desperate people get really enraged, particularly when they are encouraged in this violent group mania by their leaders. It’s always a very similar horror story, a few details changed.

I don’t know why the commonality of every instance of mass violence seems so hard to grasp, or why it doesn’t act as a kind of brake on these recurring slaughters. Every time I hear the next atrocity story it reminds me of the grappling in the media with the “question” of exactly why the insane guy with the automatic weapon went nuts and killed a bunch of strangers before blowing his own head off. It’s as if, perhaps this time, the insane “gunman” who went crazy and started massacring before he “turned the gun on himself” will be the first to have a brilliant, totally valid theory for his insanely violent act.

Seeing that horrific black and white clip of the guy in the cap dumping a load of jiggly, rubber human skeletons down a chute in the early 1940s did not instantly convince me of the commonality of all such massacres, (and we’ll stipulate that the Nazi death machine was unique in its scope, size and efficiency) but it had an effect on my thinking about the subject, my view of the world.

You see something like that as a child and it stays with you, changes the way you think about “solutions” that involve the mass torture and murder of our fellow homo sapiens. I think I would have felt the same way if the clip had been of charging Turks on horseback whipping wailing Armenian women, children and old people into a raging river to drown. How are those things different? How is either fundamentally different than a man with a gun and a badge nonchalantly kneeling on another man’s neck until the pleading, handcuffed man stops moving and then keeps his knee there until the man is dead? Each of these things is characterized by what the law, in an excellent phrase, calls “depraved indifference to human life.”

On a certain fundamental level, we are all taught to accept that war, and mass killing, are simply an unfortunate, but sometimes necessary, inevitable part of politics. A particularly muscular form of diplomacy, practiced at the behest of God’s imperfect but powerful vessels. The way we have been helping the Saudi royal family starve the people of Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, or our devastating blockade of Venezuela — a nation we are crippling economically during a deadly pandemic — just other, more coercive forms of diplomacy. Tally ho! These inferior people, given to a tyrannical form of government, or political beliefs we find repugnant, have simply got to learn to get with the program, we’ll gently starve them ’til they wise up!

Back to the personal, the place where “political” and “religious” beliefs, and “morality” are instilled. If your parent was humiliated as a child, as mine were, they will tend to see the world in a zero sum way. They can’t risk being humiliated any more, the possibility is too traumatic, and so they phrase every disagreement or conflict as a war that must be fought to the death. My father, as he was dying, said he always felt we could never have a real discussion of anything, he thought a fight was inevitable. He said that it had been his fault, because he lacked insight and saw everything in blazing black and white — a win-lose battle to the death. He felt every disagreement with his children inevitably led to a fight since he had never learned any other way, in spite of his education, sensitivity and group dynamic training, vast professional experience and highly developed mind.

In the end, as he was dying, it became important to him, as he reviewed his suddenly-ending life, to confront, out loud, for the first time, how crabbed and destructive his view of the world had been. It should have been as simple as “if you’re in pain, and come to me perplexed, let me listen patiently and try to help you instead of fighting you because I’m angry and afraid.” He realized that simple truth of being a decent human too late, as he apologized to me for the only time in his life. “I was wrong,” he said, also for the first time. Why did it take rapidly approaching death to bring these basic human realizations to him? Beats me. Tragic, truly. On the other hand, what a slippery gift he handed me right before he shuffled off and left me to close his dead eyelids with two fingers of my right hand.

There is really no risk to listening quietly to someone else’s pain, if you care about the person. It is often the only useful thing you can do for someone you care about when they are hurt, understanding how they feel. But to many people, the realm of feelings is always fraught and ready to burst into war. A war over who has the right to feel pain, how much pain is reasonable to feel, to express, how outrageous it is to pour out your troubles as though the person you are crying to doesn’t have even worse troubles! If you tell me I hurt you I am no friend if I say “that’s your problem, asshole.” There is a productive conversation, that starts with yielding to the other person’s right to be hurt, without fighting over how contemptible a worm he or she is to feel that way.

In the wake of my projectile vomiting after that searing Nazi footage from Let My People Go, my father was implacable. It was going to be a hard lesson to me. You see– you disobeyed good parental advice, your mother and I both begged you and advised you not to see what you can now never unsee, strictly for your own good, and now you want my pity because what I warned you about came sickeningly true? It’s good for you to remember next time, you contumacious little prick (yeah, look that up in that dictionary you like so much). And, by the way, seven is not too young to start acting like a man, particularly since you are so smart you don’t need anybody’s advice… (etc.)”

An understandable reaction, I understood it, even at the time. Still, not the reaction a child wants or needs. Understandable from a tit for tat perspective, but not from any other, really.

It is also tempting to repeat the treatment you experienced. This is a familiar tic of the victimized, do it to somebody else, as if abusing another victim will make you feel powerful enough to take your shame and hurt away. The way the more violent of the Ukrainians, recently starved en masse by an inhuman enemy, took it out on their own long-time, powerless, enemies when the opportunity to do so without repercussions presented itself.

I recall the vivid TED talk given by likeable neuroscientist Jim Fallon. He was a funny, mild-mannered expert in the configuration of the psychopath’s brain. He had his family tested at one point, and reviewing the brain scans, found one that was a classic psychopath’s brain. It was his own. He shrugged about it, even when his family and friends unanimously confirmed that he showed many traits of the psychopath. The fact that he didn’t flinch at the diagnosis proved that he had that moral nonchalance characteristic of the psychopath. He didn’t pretend to be upset. His point was that if someone with his brain configuration did not have their violence activated by experiencing or witnessing traumatic physical and psychological abuse during a certain early developmental window, they’d grow up to be people who lacked empathy, but who could also joke, be mild mannered, lead productive lives and never commit violence against anyone else.

Fascinating, if sometimes terribly dark, the way our views of the world are often formed by events early in life, before we know very much. I’ll hope to be on to cheerier subjects soon, boys and girls.

A Nazi’s Best Hope

A Nazi’s best hope is the same as a Ku Klux Klansman’s best hope. Finding individuals so moved by terror and rage that they will neither question nor shrink from doing whatever you convince them must be done, and rallying millions, if possible, around this righteous work. Not everyone can tie a man to a tree, bullwhip him, break his fingers and then take a blow torch to him. You have to be a certain kind of person to do that kind of work. There are many, however, who will stand by enthusiastically watching the torturer do his job, yelling encouragement, if they truly believe the person catching hell is some kind of devil. Some in the crowd might have to laugh a giddy, drunken laugh to choke down the inner revulsion it would be natural for them to feel, but they’ll be part of the mob that drags the man to the tree, they’ll talk about it with their buddies afterwards, the great thing that was done.

A Nazi’s best hope is convincing enough people, hearing about this lighting up of the night with the burnt flesh of another human, to feel the dead man “had it coming because he was evil.” That’s what propaganda is for. You need to convince enough people, usually not the best or the brightest, doesn’t matter, really, just make enough people willing to act believe, deep down, that they are the instrument of justice, the people singled out for torture deserve it. Once you have enough people on board, more respectable people will finance it, begin signing on for leadership positions, you’ll have all the funding and legitimacy you need. History proves that unscrupulous wealthy people who want unlimited power can always use a violent mob, as long as its violence can be directed toward the right enemies.

Who were the killers of my great-aunts and great-uncles, my mother’s many cousins? Neither Nazis nor klansman as such. They were a members of persecuted nationality who had the misfortune to live in the fertile breadbasket of Europe. They were fucked generation after generation, slaughtered and enslaved for hundreds of years by the Mongols, the Poles, the Russians, whoever had the more powerful military. Stalin, between 1932 and 1933, starved millions of them to death, in the Holodomor, the deadliest man-made famine in history. As many as four million Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death, by a totalitarian Communist madman, while their grain sat in huge piles, guarded by Stalin’s soldiers, waiting for Soviet authorities to take the grain back to the motherland to feed to their citizens [1]. Any hungry Ukrainian who moved toward these mountains of Ukrainian wheat was shot on the spot.

The Ukrainians who scrambled over the corpses of my people, after shooting them, had been arguably driven to their depravity by recent history (the mass starvation had been a decade earlier). The murderous Ukrainians who killed my family don’t get off the hook because so many of them had been murdered, of course (you know what they say about two wrongs…), but you can understand how the despised of the earth might feel like taking it out on a group even more despised, while getting pats on the back from those with the power to exterminate everybody in their path. Ukrainians who opposed the sort of thing that was done to my family, who took what history would regard as a more heroic stance, often found themselves hanging from trees, disemboweled, their children butchered. Makes you think.

Makes me think how often the party that is willing to employ ruthless terror, to lie, threaten, sponsor gruesome violence, often has the final word, at least for a time.

I think of this as I watch the increasingly dangerous American dance of division that has been escalating now for decades, the one funded by our most unscrupulous and well-born right-wing citizens, enlisting a vast, angry army of the easily duped. You can watch it playing out in real time, more and more insanely violent rhetoric and behavior increasingly normalized. You wonder, as a humanist, what is it with the the ubiquity of these Nazi/klan motherfuckers?

Good, constant advertising is the key. Keep the message simple, first of all. Liberty and freedom are the most important American values, everything else comes after that. Americans do not tolerate being coerced, ever, we fought a revolution and countless wars against tyranny of all forms. Tell me to do something I don’t want to, I’ll tell you about my freedom to tell you to shut the fuck up, and if you don’t shut up, I have my freedom to shoot you in your big mouth if you look like you pose any kind of threat to me, my family or my property. You see, that’s freedom and if you want to take it, come on and try. Want to try to make me wear a face mask during an infectious worldwide plague? We’ll see what the Second Amendment has to say about that!

You hear right wing blowhards echoing this very point daily, even after the violent right-wing assault on the Capitol. A defiant Madison Cawthorn stands up in Congress, after being elected in his carefully gerrymandered district, and trumpets this heroic rightwing trope, weeks after a violent, armed mob (arrested insurrectionists in the “peaceful” mob had enough ammunition to kill everyone in the Capitol several times over) took over the Capitol building disrupting the final certification of an election that wasn’t close, or, in their phrase, “stop the steal”. Bellicose, unrepentant, violent rhetoric, tough talk, is a proven winner for fundraising: Cawthorn, Taylor Greene, Hawley, Cruz, and other GOP tough guys are raking it in these days, based on their proud defense of violent extremism, even armed sedition, in defense of liberty, which is no vice, to some.

The so-called decisive victory of Joe Biden, and the narrow Senate majority by Democrats when they got that Black preacher and the Jewish journalist “elected” in the Georgia runoff? Obviously the result of stolen elections, it’s common sense. Besides, all those patriots were doing on January 6th when they overran the Capitol was spontaneously fighting this sickening injustice, in the name of freedom. They paraded through the halls of the Capitol because their freedom and liberty had been stolen from them. They didn’t do anything Jesus Christ Himself didn’t do when He finally had enough and threw the corrupt moneychangers out of the Temple.

This accursed pandemic has provided a kind of high octane fuel to this crazy upping the ante on anything that will up the stakes. We are socially disoriented, frightened, thrown out of normal social and recreational routines, our interactions limited, interpersonal skills frayed, we are all isolated and connected more and more to disembodied voices on the devices we carry with us all the time. Every few minutes we get a notification beep from some opinionated source we may have recently consulted.

Here’s a hot question for your favorite pundit: in light of increased vaccinations, is it reasonable for states to ban all scientific precautions proven to halt community spread? Well, that would depend on who y’all trust, wouldn’t it? Is it crazy or smart politics to weaponize prudent easy to follow precautions to slow the spread of a deadly disease before we actually achieve herd immunity? That would depend on who y’all trust, wouldn’t it?

Depending on what we prefer to hear, we may eagerly learn about more evidence that the former president and an organized group planned, funded, advertised for and incited the January 6th riot, while ordering federal troops to stand down for 3 hours and 19 minutes during the riot, imagining a kind of Alamo (nothing glorious about the original one staged by a bunch of violent American slavery advocates, go google that shit show…) that would galvanize their faithful to obey a higher law, perhaps creating a glorious pantheon of martyrs to rally around. Or, in the alternative, that the patriots who took the corrupt bull by the horns on January 6 were merely spontaneous heroes, acting courageously to prevent the fraud of millions of irrationally angry N-words.

Is there middle ground here? Not really. It was either a riot, an insurrection desperately launched by a powerful madman and his associates to retain power after losing an election by an indisputable margin or an outpouring of spontaneous American devotion to liberty proving that Jesus Christ and the White Race really are the masters of the greatest country in history and cucks who don’t believe that can just suck it.

A study came out Tuesday that concludes that while early in the pandemic the infection and death rates were much higher in Democratically run states (being on the coasts, more densely populated, more tourism, larger airports, more international travelers, etc.) than in less populous Republican ones, by July 4 (neat irony) Blue states had started to control the spread of the disease, while Red states took the lead in infections and death and have surpassed those infection and death rates since [2].

Or, depending on your source of trusted news, the “study” was fake and partisan, paid for by wealthy pedophile blood drinkers like Michael Bloomberg (it was by the “Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Medical University of South Carolina” — duh!) intent on destroying our freedom by convincing us to keep our distance from others, wash our hands and wear masks, depriving us of our God-given freedom to spread whatever invisible so-called disease we want to whoever we want. Who are goddamned child-raping, blood-swilling pedophiles to tell us what to do?

Or, as the governor of Texas might say: y’all hate our freedom. After he reopened the state for business, parties and everything else, no strings attached, his attorney general (the one who brought the Supreme Court lawsuit attempting to throw out millions of votes in states Trump “lost”– the deranged suit signed on to by other Republican attorneys general and members of Congress) is now threatening to sue the city of Austin for trying to mandate reasonable COVID safety precautions like mask wearing and social distancing.

A Nazi’s best bet? That a lie will prove more powerful than any fact anybody can prove with other facts. Once you’ve got that, the sky’s the limit, dream big, any horrible problem in the world, real or simply perceived, will suddenly have a final solution, inspired by the intoxicating liberty of absolute power.

Our best bet? Working together, paying close attention, using the tools we have to organize, make our voices heard, to make sure these autocratic anti-science, alternative reality trumpeting minoritarian motherfucker’s stay in their holes.

At the very least by putting the burden back on the 40 minority party members trying to block debate by making them actively hold the floor continuously in a traditional filibuster rather than forcing the majority to get to 60 by finding 10 votes among a solid block of craven conformists who will not even vote to condemn a president for organizing, funding and inciting a violent riot in their own house — a riot that saw chants to hang their Vice President, suddenly an enemy of their party leader.

That is, you return to the old filibuster rules if you can’t finally get two conservative “moderate” “centrists” in your own party to go along with killing that relic of slavery and white supremacy in the Senate. The filibuster was created by Senators and put into the Senate rules. It takes a 1 vote majority to change the prime tool of obstruction into something that allows legislative debate to take place and laws to be passed and sent to the president for his or her signature.

The anti-fascist party is likely to have only one shot at this preservation of democracy business. It’s going to be a short window. Then we get massive voter suppression in a majority of states, gerrymandered voting for state court judges, to guarantee party loyalists get elected in state as well as federal courts, and, The Thousand Year Reich.

[1]

The Ukrainian famine—known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”—by one estimate claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population. And, unlike other famines in history caused by blight or drought, this was caused when a dictator wanted both to replace Ukraine’s small farms with state-run collectives and punish independence-minded Ukrainians who posed a threat to his totalitarian authority.

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[2]

States with Democratic governors had the highest incidence and death rates from Covid-19 in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, but states with Republican governors surpassed those rates as the crisis dragged on, a study released Tuesday found.

“From March to early June, Republican-led states had lower Covid-19 incidence rates compared with Democratic-led states. On June 3, the association reversed, and Republican-led states had higher incidence,” the study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Medical University of South Carolina showed.

“For death rates, Republican-led states had lower rates early in the pandemic, but higher rates from July 4 through mid-December,” the study found.

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Centrist Democrat

What is “centrist” or “moderate” about a Democrat who believes Americans should not be guaranteed a living wage for full-time work? Every news outlet I’ve seen refers to conservative Democrat Joe Manchin (Trump won his state by 40 points in 2020, so there’s that) as moderate or centrist. According to Mr. Manchin $440 a week is more than fair pay for an unskilled worker, and, as you’ll hear reported everywhere, it is the position of a moderate centrist.

“Times that $400 by 50 weeks (we’ll give her two weeks vacation, unpaid) and that’s a nice, let’s see… $22,000. NOT BAD for someone without a high school diploma! A nice raise from her current $14,500! I’d like that kind of 30% raise myself!! And, yes, I know you can look on google and find out the median American income last year was around $34,000, but that’s factoring in all those folks making $14,500, so you can kind of throw out those numbers.”

What could be more moderate than that? Particularly when the left wing of your party keeps pointing out that adjusted for the cost of living, the federal minimum wage, (which hasn’t been raised since 2009, when it was increased by 70 cents an hour [1]) should be raised to an outrageous $24 an hour. So, radicals want $24. The president wants $15. The GOP presumably wants to keep it at $7.25. So a moderate centrist proposes a compromise of $11. You see?

I can understand FOX news calling Manchin a “centrist” and a “moderate” or a “voice of reason” since he’s basically a Republican in most things — but the NY Times, Washington Post, NPR, CNN, MSNBC? What the fuck? Call the thing what it is.

He’s from West Virginia, an impoverished state that voted for Trump by a 40% margin, even after his disastrous first term, a state that recently had a Ku Klux Klansman as one of its senators. He may be independent, he may be a maverick, he may be as politically shrewd as Mitch McConnell, it may be perfectly understandable that he is enjoying his sudden, outsized power and the way everybody is bowing down to him, but one thing he isn’t is a centrist or a moderate. Words fucking matter.

[1]

Check out this handy chart of the federal minimum wage (established under FDR in 1938) at the Department of Labor and see how it changed over the decades.

Moderates in America

Democratic senators like Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema are invariably called “moderates” for their stances on things like not increasing the federal minimum wage to a living wage and their vows to protect the filibuster, to preserve its “bipartisan” spirit. They are only “moderates” in a senate where half of the members reflexively refuse to debate anything at all proposed by the Democrat [sic] party.

They can be seen as moderates only in a world where not publicly voicing the idea that their fellow Democrats actually do like to have sex with children and drink their blood and that the rigged 2020 election was clearly stolen from the incumbent in a way too obvious to need any so-called “proof” counts as being “reasonable” and “moderate”.

It is the moderation of a wealthy person who believes that someone demanding $600 a week pay is a greedy, entitled, lazy fuck who will destroy the economy with unreasonably selfish demands.

The long-delayed COVID relief bill, The American Rescue Plan, is now finally going to be debated in the Senate, debated, after Democrats agreed to take the $15/hr federal minimum wage out of it, reduced proposed unemployment payments and Vice President Kamala Harris cast the 51st and deciding vote to HAVE A DEBATE on this crucial legislation, anxiously awaited by literally millions of suffering Americans. The Democratic “moderates,” with their indispensable votes, got on board, once the offensive living wage provision (an artificially low wage — though more than twice the current one — which would be phased in over four long years) was removed from legislation favored by more than 75% of Americans.

All fifty Republican Senators voted against debating this wildly popular, sorely overdue relief bill during a time of massive national suffering. The bipartisan party of Lincoln voted, in a unanimous block, to block debate on a relief bill needed by millions, measures favored by 77% of Americans including 60% of Republicans. They took this united stand because, according to their most vocal fringe, fundraising dynamos one and all, Biden, an illegitimate president, is fake — he pretends to want bipartisanism but look at how he’s already acting like a dictator, just like his N-word buddy the Muslim. If they are not obstructing passage of this legislation for that reason, it is for something equally compelling, I’m sure — like the absolute parliamentary right to obstruct a vote on virtually anything without any debate whatsoever.

The Senate Parliamentarian [1], who serves at the pleasure of the Senate Majority Leader (who appoints the parliamentarian) gave the “moderate” Democrats cover by ruling that the $15/hr. minimum wage is not properly within the ambit of a budget bill about to be passed by reconciliation (bypassing the 60 vote threshold imposed by the filibuster). The same parliamentarian had no problem ruling that a provision of Trump’s massive tax cut to the wealthy that allowed for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve [2] — clearly had to do with the budget and the economy and so could permissibly be passed by a simple majority.

Leaving aside the fact that Elizabeth MacDonough, our nation’s SIXTH Senate Parliamentarian (do the math), currently serves at the pleasure of Chuck Schumer– her decision is not binding. But abiding by her ruling on the minimum wage allows Manchin and Sinema, and any other “moderates” who find a $600 a week wage too extravagant for people who don’t deserve shit and don’t contribute a dime to their political campaigns, to sign on without abandoning their principles (for lack of a better word).

If moderates Manchin and Sinema won’t vote to get rid of the filibuster (and their votes would be needed overcome the 60 vote filibuster mountain to allow the Biden administration to pass anything at all), here are two ideas from a fine discussion by Norm Ornstein on ways to make the filibuster comport with the purpose Machin and Sinema both claim to support.

Ornstein makes the entirely reasonable point that if the minority party wants to obstruct a bill and prevent debate, it should carry the burden of taking strenuous action to do it, rather than forcing the majority to peel off ten votes from the minority (this could not even be done in the recent open and shut impeachment where numerous Republicans admitted they took refuge in a contrived procedural dodge to acquit their leader without actually ruling on the merits). Ornstein accepts the Manchin/Sinema rationale (for purposes of this argument, at least) that the original intent of the filibuster was not to protect slavery or block voting rights and other civil rights, but to increase bipartisanism in the Senate.

One way to restore the filibuster’s original intent would be requiring at least two-fifths of the full Senate, or 40 senators, to keep debating instead requiring 60 to end debate. The burden would fall to the minority, who’d have to be prepared for several votes, potentially over several days and nights, including weekends and all-night sessions, and if only once they couldn’t muster 40 — the equivalent of cloture — debate would end, making way for a vote on final passage of the bill in question.

If you find that too onerous, Democratic “moderates”, how about this?

Go back to the “present and voting” standard. 

A shift to three-fifths of the Senate “present and voting” would similarly require the minority to keep most of its members around the Senate when in session. If, for example, the issue in question were voting rights, a Senate deliberating on the floor, 24 hours a day for several days, would put a sharp spotlight on the issue, forcing Republicans to publicly justify opposition to legislation aimed at protecting the voting rights of minorities. Weekend Senate sessions would cause Republicans up for reelection in 2022 to remain in Washington instead of freeing them to go home to campaign. In a three-fifths present and voting scenario, if only 80 senators showed up, only 48 votes would be needed to get to cloture. Add to that a requirement that at all times, a member of the minority party would have to be on the floor, actually debating, and the burden would be even greater, while delivering what Manchin and Sinema say they want — more debate.

Fair enough for you, eh, moderates?

Presently, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, or anyone on his side of the aisle, merely has to have somebody send an email to the appropriate person announcing his party’s intention to filibuster and letting Democrats know they have to find ten brave GOP Senators willing to be censured by their party for consorting with the enemy. Then, the bill unrevivably dead before a word of debate in the Senate, they can go about their business, being bipartisan.

With the end, or reasonable limitation, of the filibuster, we might also be spared the sickening spectacle of yesterday’s late afternoon stunt by Ron Johnson, from Wisconsin, forcing clerks to read the 628 page American Rescue Plan bill aloud, over the course of ten hours, in a virtually empty Senate chamber, vacated but for a single Republican (to ensure the clerks’ compliance) and one Democrat (for some reason or another). Seriously? I wonder what the Parliamentarian would have ruled on the permissibility of that one.

[1]

The parliamentarian is appointed by and serves at the pleasure of the Senate Majority Leader. Traditionally, the parliamentarian is chosen from senior staff in the parliamentarian office, which helps ensure consistency in the application of the Senate’s complex rules.

Term length: Pleasure of the Senate Majority Leader

Constituting instrument: Standing Rules of the Senate


Parliamentarian of the United States Senate – Wikipedia

[2]

In January 2017, MacDonough controversially ruled that a provision in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 that would open the 1002 area of ANWR to oil and gas drilling, met the conditions of the Byrd Rule under budget reconciliation.[14]

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