Category Archives: current events

Lisa Murkowski for president

Today’s profile in spinelessness goes to Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski who voted “yea” effectively casting the deciding vote for The Act [1], a bill she said repeatedly she didn’t support. A senator who raised his fist to an insurrectionist mob, Josh Hawley, can be counted on to sincerely express grave concerns about the serious damage a bill will do to working poor people in his state and then follow his conscience and vote to pass the bill, but Murkowski, it seemed (until today), still wanted to be seen as a person of independent judgment, integrity and good character. A sturdy spined, independent woman, like the senator from Maine, one of three Republicans who voted to kill the killer bill. Thank you, Susan Collins, 75% of our nation — and a legitimately frightened world — is grateful for your reality-affirming vote. As for Ms. Murkowski, read the transcript of her incredibly idiotic answer (and confession) to the accusation that she’d sold out the country for a deal that helps her state.

After she cast what amounts to the deciding vote (a vote any one of the remaining 50 Republicans could have made, of course, Lyin’ Ted, Lindsey, Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, Joni Ernst) in favor of a brutally unfair budget that punishes the poor and vulnerable to enrich the already obscenely rich, she was asked by NBC reporter Ryan Nobles what her response was to senator Rand Paul’s statement that she’d bailed out Alaska at the expense of the country:

“Oh my God… (then there was a long silence, and a long glare from Murkowski, then the reporter clarified that Paul had said that, repeated it, and asked for her response) …

“… my response is… I have an obligation to the people of the state of Alaska and I live up to that every single day. I fight for my state’s interests and I make sure that Alaskans are understood. I work hard to take care of the state that has more unique … situations … more unique people, and it’s just different. And so, when people suggest that federal dollars go to one of our fifty states in a quote “bail out”, I find that offensive. I advocated for my state’s interests, I will continue to do that and I make no excuses for doing that.

“Do I like this bill? No, because I tried to take care of my state but I know, I know that in many parts of the country there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill. I don’t like that. I don’t like… the fact… that we moved to an artificial deadline, an artificial time line to produce something to meet a deadline, rather than to actually try to produce the best bill for the country. But when I saw the direction it was going, you can either say ‘I don’t like it’ and not try to help my state, or you can roll up your sleeves… [and lick the Leader’s ‘ring’, as required, and get the best possible deal in exchange for my vote]”

“Do I like this bill? No, because I tried to take care of my state but I know, I know that in many parts of the country there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill. I don’t like that.”

“In many parts of the country there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill.”

And Lisa Murkowski doesn’t like that, not at all. Also, she didn’t like the artificial emergency and the pressure to pass the bill before the Fourth of July, didn’t like any of that at all. There hadn’t been time to fully debate the bill and make the best amendments to it, or even to read the final version in full. She didn’t like that. At the same time, when the moment came, she rightfully considered only the best quid pro quo she could get to make sure Alaskans, unique among the citizens of all fifty states, were not among those Americans who were “not going to be advantaged by this bill.”

”But when I saw the direction it was going, you can either say ‘I don’t like it’ and not try to help my state, or you can roll up your sleeves… [and obey the Leader’s will, as required]”

No, Lisa. You roll up your sleeves, vote “nay” and get back to work drafting a better bill if you believe millions of Americans will “not be advantaged by” a viciously cruel bill. All it would have taken to defeat “the direction it was going” was to say no to the naked quid pro quo (which you admitted to in your answer, fool) and vote to return the bill for further revision.

Imagine a person as dumb as a pile of shit. Ask it to respond to a critical comment about how it made a special deal that sold out the American people. I expect its answer would be something like “Oh my God … of course I made a special deal that sold out the American people, because I work for Alaska, which is unique, and not like the rest of those Americans who are, unfortunately, not going to be advantaged by this bill.”

Hard to ignore the smell of the thing as it gives its idiotic response.

It’s now time to call Congress members as this highly toxic shit sandwich heads back to the House and root for the dysfunction of the slim MAGA House majority and the political genius of one of Trump’s most loyal and delusional lackeys, MAGA Mike Johnson. I’ve got to write a letter to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, waiting to respond at a time and place of his choosing, tomorrow, remind me.

[1] Chuck Schumer officially got the name of the One Big, Beautiful Bill, an abomination and obscenity by any name, changed, to The Act. Small, symbolic victory, I suppose.

Echoes of a horrifying chapter of history

I recently watched an excellent documentary, Facing Tyranny, on PBS [1], about one of my heroes, Hannah Arendt. Arendt was a brilliant, fearless thinker and writer who was universally attacked for her frankness and irony in assessing Adolf Eichmann’s actual role in the industrialized mass murder of European Jewry (amidst the mass murder, and general slaughter, of tens of millions of others).

Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt’s account of the Eichmann trial, a masterpiece, was condemned and dismissed by critics from every part of the political spectrum. Arendt commented that she understood, in hindsight, that her ironic tone about Nazi horrors (and Jewish complicity in some cases) that the public was just confronting graphically for the first time, may have led to much of the criticism. The public, she now understood, had not been ready for her ironic tone in laying out such horrors. She took a drag on her cigarette, and said “if I had it to do over again, I’d have done it the same way.” My hero.

In a traumatized society obedient to the will of a madman, where führerwortes haben gesetzeskraft (the Leader’s word has the force of law) and every one of Hitler’s brain farts immediately became the law of Germany, an unquestioningly obedient, ambitious government worker like Eichmann was completely unremarkable.

Arendt noted that Eichmann’s inability to speak with any degree of coherence, outside of defending his duty to obey the laws foaming out of the Leader’s rabid mouth, reflected his inability to think. Remove critical thinking and every monster you can imagine springs to life. Society can then be dominated by the indecent, monstrous will of unreasoning, calculating, all-powerful psychopaths.

The evil done by these evil fucks is rendered banal by the lack of thought with which they commit unspeakable atrocities and their absence of awareness and conscience as they commit their, now legal, even praiseworthy, crimes. A guy like Eichmann, Arendt noted, was simply an efficient, hard-working, unthinking member of a bureaucratic lynch mob, not the demonic architect of mass murder the Israeli prosecutor made him out to be. People tried to rough Arendt up over that banality of evil idea. Good luck, I say, take a glance around Congress.

The Senate is currently debating a big, sadistic, hideously “beautiful” bill (beautiful only for our 801 billionaires, their cumulative $6,500,000,000,000 and their corporate alter egos) that will pay for the billionaires’ massive tax cuts by removing health care from millions of working, elderly and disabled Americans and starving poor children by the millions while closing rural hospitals and nursing homes, increasing taxes on the lowest earners by an audacious 73% as it drastically cuts taxes on the wealthiest, while giving fossil fuel climate deniers (currently already subsidized $700,000,000,000 annually) infinitely more profit by squashing cheaper, sustainable American renewable energy and allowing Koch and friends to drastically raise energy prices nationwide. Oh yeah, and since the BBB will “pay for itself” by cutting the social safety net half of Americans rely on, we also need to raise the debt ceiling by $5,000,000,000,000.

There is so much ugliness in the Big Beautiful Bill (example of Orwell’s Newspeak [2], like “Truth Social”) it’s impossible to know or itemize all of it. Why would a faithful follower of Jesus Christ want to see millions of American children and old people go to bed hungry, lose health care, die unnecessary deaths in the richest country in the world? How would Jesus feel about giving more to the already obscenely rich while the poor, and their children, are immiserated further? Christian MAGA supporters will not ever confront this clear moral question, which their MAGA pastors and ministers will proactively protect them from ever asking.

Remember, MAGA would not be in power without the organized support of millions of Evangelical Christians and radically reactionary Catholics (think Bill Barr, Leonard Leo, Sammy the Bull Alito, Clarence and Ginny Thomas). How did those two groups of Christians do in Germany during the rise of the New York Times’ Mr. Hitler?

I stumbled on a Chris Hedges video discussing the work of Eric Voegelin, who studied the Nazi era (after running for his life from the Nazis in 1938) and made certain chilling connections, which are summarized in this bit from a search for Voegelin’s Hitler and the Germans.

Responding to publications on National Socialist Germany, Eric Voegelin [in Hilter and the Germans] discusses the historian Percy Schramm’s “Anatomy of a Dictator,” along with studies of the churches and the legal profession. His inquiry uncovers a historiography that was substantially unhistoric: a German Evangelical Church that misinterpreted the Gospel, a German Catholic Church that denied universal humanity, and a legal process enmeshed in criminal homicide.

a German Evangelical Church that misinterpreted the Gospel, a German Catholic Church that denied universal humanity, and a legal process enmeshed in criminal homicide.

Here we have an American Evangelical Church whose leaders embrace a radically strange interpretation of the teachings of their Savior in flagrant conflict with those teachings, a radicalized American Catholic Church whose political leadership denies the humanity of girls and women who are rape victims (in the name of protecting the sacred fetus of the rapist), and a legal profession that… well, in Germany the doctors were the first professional group to voluntarily Nazify — being an “Aryan” and Nazi party membership were required to practice medicine in Hitler’s Germany — and, most certainly, the fucking lawyers were the second professional group to become loyal Hitlerites.

The horror, the horror. Makes me want to holler.

[1] Public Broadcasting, of course, is a deadly enemy to Trumpworld. How dare they make documentaries about radical left antisemitic Jews like Hannah Arendt? They harm innocent young white Christian children by recounting tired stories of so-called racism, slavery, and centuries of terrorism against Blacks. They don’t hate and reject gay people, as Jesus urged every Christian to do. They oppose book banning, book burning, they challenge propaganda itself sometimes! DEFUND PBS! (But watch the Arendt documentary first).

[2] In 1984, Orwell introduced the concept of Newspeak, a controlled language designed to eliminate any possibility of rebellious thoughts. By systematically reducing vocabulary, the ruling Party ensured that individuals could not even conceive of dissent, let alone articulate it. Words like “doubleplusgood” replaced more complex expressions, stripping language of nuance and ambiguity.

Newspeak operates on the principle that if certain words do not exist, the concepts they represent cannot be thought about. The language was deliberately constructed to remove any potential for subversive thought, thereby eliminating free will at the linguistic level. The ultimate goal? To make independent thinking impossible by restructuring language to serve only the Party’s ideological needs. By shrinking the range of thought through a diminishing vocabulary, Orwell emphasized how linguistic engineering could erode cognitive freedom. source

Election (fraud) Denial

Trump and the rightwing propaganda machine have done such a good, proactive, preemptive job of accusing Democrats of the crimes they themselves commit (weaponizing the DOJ, partisan hack activist judges, etc.) that it’s unthinkable for a Democrat to point out how fossil fuel billionaire Koch and Co. (with the help of Putin, Musk, Thiel, et al) almost certainly rigged the mathematically impossible 2024 election results.

These super-wealthy fascists were undoubtedly aided by harsh voter suppression laws in many states, (brought to you by a lying John Roberts/Federalist Society/Kochtopus 5-4 decision overruling a 98-0 Senate reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act).  Questioning the legitimacy of Trump’s highly improbable “mandate” (he won every swing state, a rare feat, even states otherwise swept by Democrats, with virtually identical margins, just out of automatic recount range, flipping 88 strategic counties blue to red while none flipped the other way) would make the Democrats look like whining, pouting, evidence-denying, democracy rejecting “election deniers” like Kari Lake, Trump and co.   

I find this short series very convincing, but then again, I can’t find an explanation for the 20,000,000 vote drop off in mail-in ballots (after mail-in voting increased in the 8 straight elections), except as the nefarious plan of a shameless, pugnacious Trump megadonor postmaster who retired, job done, shortly after the election.   

Let me know what you think, and share this with your group, see what they think.

Emil Bove III

Emil Bove, former Trump criminal lawyer [1], is on Trump’s short list to replace Samuel Alito, once Bove has been appointed to, and served briefly on, the federal appeals court. Bove was the acting head of the DOJ who dismissed the Eric Adams indictment and sought to keep the charges hanging over Adams’ head by dismissing the case “without prejudice” (meaning, he could prosecute at will in the future). Bove was doing this to advance Trump/Miller’s draconian deportation program by ensuring that NYC mayor Adams allowed ICE to operate freely in NYC, something Adams agreed to as part of a quid pro quo to escape prosecution for a variety of felonies.

Bove was outraged at the suggestion of a quid pro quo, as he told the judge. He also told the judge that even it was a quid pro quo, the judge still couldn’t stop DOJ from dismissing the case. Of course, after the quid pro quo was announced by Bove, U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon and six other federal prosecutors resigned in protest. Four deputy mayors in Adams’ administration also resigned.

Bove sent a lawyer to federal court in Maryland to stonewall the judge (one of the many currently sued on Trump’s behalf by rabid AG Pam Bondi’s DOJ) in the Abrego Garcia abduction/rendition to El Salvador prison for terrorists case. Erez Reuveni, experienced, recently promoted DOJ lawyer, who had argued Trump’s cases zealously in the Orange Polyp’s first term, was, as his duty to the Constitution required, candid with the court.

That attorney, former DOJ assistant director in the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation, Erez Reuveni, (I applauded the candor he was fired for at the time) is now a whistleblower, issuing a detailed warning about the corrupt orders he was given (lie to the court) by Bove, supremely loyal Nazi fuck and former Trump criminal lawyer that Trump is trying to ram on to the federal appeals court.

Bove stonewalled Congress the other day as he claimed not to recall telling Reuveni and a room full of DOJ lawyers to be ready to say “fuck you” to federal judges. “I don’t recall” said Bove, any time he was pressed, as every one of these carefully coached creeps does when a truthful answer would tank their nomination.

Reuveni’s whistleblower complaint begins:

Between March 14, 2025, and April 5, 2025, Mr. Reuveni, almost immediately after receiving notice of his promotion to serve as Acting Deputy Director of OIL, became aware of the plans of DOJ leadership to resist court orders that would impede potentially illegal efforts to deport noncitizens, and further became aware of the details to execute those plans. source

Here’s the money shot, the scene Bove claims not to recall:

Like so many other Trump Derangement Syndrome leftie commie fascist weirdos, anyone in MAGA world who does not line up to loyally do whatever they are asked, fired DOJ attorney Erez Reuveni was at one time, not long ago, a warrior for the mad president. Check this out.

It is a reasonable question to ask of Bove, if you have so little recall of what you said as acting head of the DOJ, since you can’t remember what every other lawyer in that suddenly silent room heard you say, should you be a fucking judge in the first place, you lying sack of sanctimonious shit?

And, since we live in a world of wrap around propaganda, here’s Rupert Murdoch, doing his part.  Language matters. Trump “reveals”…

[1] Wikipedia: In September 2023, he became a partner at Blanche Law, a law firm founded by Todd Blanche. Days later, Bove joined Donald Trump‘s criminal defense team.[12] In the state court criminal trial of Trump in New York, he was second chair to Blanche on Trump’s defense team.[18][19] Bove represented Trump in the federal classified documents and election obstruction cases.[20]

Government is not a fucking business

Try for a moment to forget that we are currently being bombarded by actual tax-payer funded advertisements made by sitting federal officials (Gabbard, Bondi, et al), shameless loyalists gushing over the great accomplishments of their Dear Leader. Robert Reich breaks down the simplistic, criminally cynical far-right claim that the government (whose purpose in a democracy is to promote the welfare of all citizens) must be run like a corporation (a judicially created “person”, a psychopath of eternal life with only one goal — monetary profit).

These Nazi fucks (right-wing billionaires and their “apolitical” corporate allies), if their claim is to be believed, and they are consistent, would consider it prudent for a democratic government to declare bankruptcy, like any other failing business, if democratic government faces the fate of the rest of Trump’s highly successful business ventures.

If I’m lying may my golden Trump sneakers get lost in the mail, like my ballot, my Trump bible, $Trump crypto, Trump NFTs and gold sprayed (in America) Trump phone, proudly made in the American minds of MAGA (all products are made in USA, even if “physically” made in China). USA! USA!!! We’re not a laughingstock anymore! We’re a great brand.

Timely message from a vampire

How did I start getting messages from the keepers of this creepy bastard’s eternal image as a great statesman?

I picture Roger Stone and the rest of these unrepentant Nazi bastards, recycling the meaningless platitudes of this lawless asshole who they all think got screwed by libtard cucks, if only they’d had FOX at that time, the Federalist Society, The Council for National Policy, all the so-called think tanks and all the rest of the accursed Kochtopus network. What a pack of  reactionary, revisionist psychos.

Narcissistic rage as government policy equals fascism

Everything you learn about the personality type that must see themselves as perfect, can never be wrong, perceives all criticism as enraging defiance, an attack that must be met with crushing force, is seen in the leaders of fascist regimes and the culture of those regimes. It’s uncanny how the politics of fascism mirrors the personality disorder of those who can never be wrong and are always 100% right to rage.

The malignant narcissist, or the psychopath, (neither defined in the American Psychiatric Association’s vast catalogue of mental and emotional disorders, the DSM) always stands on their right to express full-on rage, angrily posing as the persecuted victim as they act to extract maximum punishment of those who defy their will. This is psychopathy 101. Never wrong, no consideration for anyone but themselves, no capacity for remorse.

Listen to this illuminating short clip from psychiatrist Russell Razzaque:

We can understand that people who behave abusively, sadistically, are deeply damaged by their past shame and humiliation. They are compelled to seek power, to rigidly control other people in order to feel safe. The childish dream of every one of these broken creatures is to project super strength and enjoy unlimited praise and admiration. You can feel sorry for them, on one level, though they quickly lose the right to that sympathy when they begin aggressively offloading their heavy shame onto the world around them, demand obedience to their whims and start building concentration camps for their enemies.

You lose all sympathy the first time you are vicious to someone who has no power to stop you from being vicious toward them. Note the way this administration is using the continual public spectacle of mistreating the most vulnerable among us, including law-abiding asylum seekers detained for deportation after coming to court and having their cases “dismissed”. Notice the violent attempt to cow the public by manhandling, handcuffing and detaining of peaceful protesters, elected “Democrat” officials, a union leader, often without an arrest or any charges being brought.

Despicable, insane, evil, even if also mentally ill. Jesus Christ is weeping at this Nazi shit being done in his name by followers who would drag him by a chain behind a truck until he was dead. Well, at least Hitler is having a mirthless, Hiterlian laugh, in the smoking section of the hot place.

Well said, David Corn!

Understand the nature of what we are all witnessing.  American fascists, who can smell the unlimited power they’ve been lusting after for decades, are driving toward totalitarianism as fast, and recklessly, as they can. And they’re doing it in the open, using all of the same techniques any Nazi type regime uses to seize and consolidate unchallengeable power. Here’s a short summary of their terror campaign of performatively brutalizing their political opponents who stand up for the due process rights of everyone on American soil.

First we have masked, ID-less feds rough up a few Black elected Democrats on public property, arrest the Black Congresswoman who is in the middle of the scrum with masked federal officers and charge her with a 17-year felony (even though the Black mayor they unlawfully arrested was never charged with any crime.) Then we rough up a Democratic Senator named Alex Padilla, trying to humiliate him by forcing him to the ground and handcuffing him, without charges and without consequence (so far). Next we throw a New York Jew, an elected NYC official and a leading Democratic mayoral candidate, against the wall of a federal building in New York City, handcuff him, seize his cell phone and detain him for three and a half hours but press no charges.  Pretty soon all this shit is normal, as the regime claims to be violently fighting “the weaponization of law enforcement.” Nazi fucks. Be careful out there, friends.

Great, important bit of reporting on Trump’s 2024 “mandate”

If you believe that the vastly unpopular, eternally angry, distracted, greedy, “transactional”, lying, increasingly deranged 47th president happened to win every swing state (a rare feat in any presidential election), by virtually identical margins (all just above the recount margin) and that the 20,000,000 ballot decline in mail-in ballots, (the first time the number hasn’t increased since 2008), had nothing to do with Trump megadonor/postmaster DeJoy’s refusal to segregate mail-in ballots or postmark them when they arrived, voter suppression laws in every red state, single drop boxes in counties of millions of voters, fake drop boxes, Russian bomb threats to Democratic precincts on Election Day, had nothing to do with Trump’s narrow victory in 2024, then the piece linked below probably won’t interest you.

To anyone who finds the narrow victory of a convicted felon (who escaped two other massive felony convictions — one for treason, under the Espionage Act, the other for a long campaign of fraud and inciting a riot to overturn election results — thanks to partisan judges he appointed), given carte blanche by an activist, partisan 6-3 Supreme Court stocked with members of a far-right judicial fraternity serving the interests of the top 0.2%, a bit suspicious, the factors laid out in this article will be of great interest to you — and hopefully lead AGs in those swing states to open investigations.

source

The failure to question so many suspicious factors in the first presidential election following an attempted coup by the winning candidate, including multiple frauds (fake electors, illegal pressure campaigns to state officials to change votes, tampering with voting machines, defaming election workers, etc.) and a violent insurrection at the Capitol, led by the former and current president, leaving aside Palantir and Musk, and their sophisticated data mining and influence operations that make Cambridge Analytica’s Brexit techniques look primitive, results in blaming the Democrats for a failed campaign, blaming Joe Biden’s slowness to step aside, blaming democracy itself for giving us a dangerous maniac president we can’t deny won fairly.

The endlessly corrupt Trump’s years of angrily lying about a “rigged”, “stolen” 2020 election, and making acceptance of that lie a condition for serving as a Republican official, have silenced anyone in his party, the corporate media, and virtually all of the Democratic party, from expressing reasonable suspicions or making charges related to what appears to be an energetically “engineered” election result. Critics probably fear appearing as delusional as sore losers like Trump, Kari Lake and the fully pardoned J6 rioters. Say what you like about their despicable techniques, but Nazis are always good at cowing opponents, especially if there are billions in corporate profits and fundraising involved.

Comment and response

In our age of the internet in your pocket, personally selected content (based on our harvested, analyzed online and conversational preferences) clamoring for our attention, when most of us are staring at smart phone and computer screens many hours a day, comment exchanges sometimes take on the aspect of a real conversation.  

You can read long comment threads under many YouTube videos, on Substack and everywhere else online and the back and forth is sometimes a great discussion, adding depth, appreciation and interesting background that the original video or piece didn’t include.  Those discussions enhance the original, make it more meaningful.   It is impressive how well-informed on certain subjects some people are. Many people are moved to write detailed comments on posts and interact in extended, informative back and forths with other commenters.  We’re living in a digital age of instant digital comment and response, at a time when face to face social interaction is in decline.

An honest talk about a compelling topic is always a great thing.  The alternative to commenting is not commenting, which the large majority of people do most of the time when it comes to online reading or viewing.   A reader’s silence has no inherent meaning, the significance of silence can only be seen in context.   Silence as the answer to a question directed at someone has a much different meaning than silence as the natural tendency of most readers after reading something.    On the other hand, “no comment” as the final comment on something of concern, has an unmistakably critical ring.

I very rarely get comments on this blahg or even a like or dislike (I don’t use ‘social media’ outside of this).  I write here frequently as part of a daily writing practice and a way of keeping track of my thoughts, events, interesting things I’ve read or seen, music, moods, ideas, a recipe.  If at some point I recall a great lecture I heard about how  Adverse Childhood Experiences [1] can cause harmful changes in the actual DNA of the grown up version of that child, I will have posted about it here and be able to easily find it to send to the person I was talking to about it. I will be able to quickly locate Steven Zipperstein’s brilliant Pogrom, for example, Shoshana Zuboff’s genius mapping of the terra incognita of the Age of Surveillance Capitalism that has swallowed and digested us all  is here.

I sometimes think of this enlightening and obvious NY Times headline I took a screen shot of at some point, a year or two after the worst of the recent mass death event, the Covid-19 pandemic. It explains a lot.

Many of those infected with Covid-19 that the virus did not kill are suffering the long-term effects of the disease, effects still not completely understood by science. Millions have also been broken in various ways by the terrifying prolonged traumatic experience of a highly contagious, international mass death spreading invisibly throughout human populations everywhere. Recall how frightful the early days of the outbreak were, before the vaccine, before we knew how to protect ourselves and each other, and how much insane behavior occurred, particularly here, in the United States, where our death toll, because of this insanity, was the largest of any nation, and close to the top of the per capita Covid-19 death list worldwide [2]. Imagine the effect on young children and adolescents, a mental health crisis rarely acknowledged, let alone addressed. Suck it up, you insane little bastards!

The human race, across the globe, has been recently mass traumatized by the pandemic and the effects are demonstrated in mass behavior worldwide. We have all been traumatized by it, few have escaped the effects of this long communal terror and all of the other strong feelings this terror evoked. When people are freaked out, people we don’t like can quickly take on the aspect of monsters, inhuman in their greed, stupidity, anger, sorrow, hypocrisy, whatever it is that distorts them into purely destructive beings without any redeeming feature.

I got a rare comment the other day, to my post about Kristi Noem’s lying about Senator Padilla being wrestled to the ground because he was “lunging at” her and hadn’t identified himself as a Senator (he had). In the course of it I wrote, describing the selective, irrational, often counter-factual, lying arguments of MAGA officials: This is a basic principle of all psychopaths: win the argument by removing context, deprive the other person of their right to do anything.

I had a long comment applauding this essential bit of truth and then running with it. The comment quoted numerous writers and thinkers I’d never heard of and included a link to a post written by someone who’d sent a critical comment to the British Medical Journal that the BMJ had declined to publish. Clicking the link to a blahg and starting to read the unpublished comment, it made sense that a scientific journal would decline to publish it, but official science’s refusal to publish it was cited as proof of science’s complicity in the worldwide conspiracy of deadly psychopaths. The comment continued into vaccine skepticism (with quotes and links) and conspiracy theories based on the coordinated actions of a worldwide cabal of undisclosed psychopaths.

I don’t dispute that many, probably most, CEOs, the leaders of the American Psychiatric Association, the far-right political activist billionaires who have waged a long war against “majoritarian tyranny” and the “administrative state”, those who embrace obvious lies for political advantage (99% of Republicans in Congress) are likely psychopaths, or, pragmatically obedient to psychopaths. That’s a different belief than, say, the antinatalist position that since we are not asked to consent to our own births (a tricky proposition, as even antinatalists must concede) that we are born involuntarily, into a life of pain, which gives us a moral obligation to liberate others about to be born without any choice in the matter [3].

The online world is an impossibly massive psychic battleground where intelligent, useful theories and idiotic and destructive ones are given equal weight by tens of millions worldwide, depending on how they hit individuals emotionally. Content moderation is something we routinely do in our daily lives, such as when confronted by advocates of the theory that powerful blood-drinking child raping cannibals like Tom Hanks control the liberal elites and the Deep State that persecutes White Christian Men.

For years YouTube posted links under sketchy videos, alerting viewers that the content contradicted known facts and should be viewed in that light. The owners of youTube have recently agreed with Trump/Musk/Thiel (three famous, extremely powerful psychopaths) that content moderation should be relaxed. You will, presumably, no longer have a corrective link under a January 6 riot video purporting to show that every rioter was a liberal, communist, FBI provocateur or Antifa supporter dressed as MAGA nation, that MAGA was completely peaceful and engaged only in “legitimate political discourse” and that all of the 1,600 rioters pardoned by Trump are owed large settlements for wrongful prosecutions and convictions. Same for the insane RFK Jr.’s claims about medicine, vaccines, toxic water, government bureaucracy, science, research, cancer, child malnutrition, etc.

As a matter of kindness and respect I wanted to post the guy’s long, gnarly, problematic comment and reply sympathetically to what I agreed with. As a matter of online responsibility, I couldn’t figure out how to do it without a bit of content moderation, which I would have applied to the sections about Covid, vaccines and so on. In the end, I’ll never know if the long, detailed comment was from a person or generated by AI (it was suspicious to me that there was no link or identifying information about the person making the comment, which was forwarded to me by WordPress).

We humans are really on our own out here.

[1] Apparently the CDC website/DOGE bots have not gone over and combed out this page, last updated 10-4-24. I suspect the current boss, floridly insane former long-time heroin addict Robert F. Kennedy Jr., will make short work of this webpage, if it ever comes to his attention. Here’s a screenshot for posterity:

[2]. (From Wikipedia)

State and local responses to the pandemic during the public health emergency included the requirement to wear a face mask in specified situations (mask mandates), prohibition and cancellation of large-scale gatherings (including festivals and sporting events), stay-at-home orders, and school closures.[29] Disproportionate numbers of cases were observed among Black and Latino populations,[30][31][32] as well as elevated levels of vaccine hesitancy,[33][34] and there was a sharp increase in reported incidents of xenophobia and racism against Asian Americans.[35][36] Clusters of infections and deaths occurred in many areas.[b]The COVID-19 pandemic also saw the emergence of misinformation and conspiracy theories,[39] and highlighted weaknesses in the U.S. public health system.[17][40][41]

In the United States, there have been 103,436,829[3] confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 1,193,165[3] confirmed deaths, the most of any country, and the 17th highest per capita worldwide.[42] The COVID-19 pandemic ranks as the deadliest disaster in the country’s history.[43] It was the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2020, behind heart disease and cancer.[44] From 2019 to 2020, U.S. life expectancy dropped by three years for Hispanic and Latino Americans, 2.9 years for African Americans, and 1.2 years for White Americans.[45] In 2021, U.S. deaths due to COVID-19 rose,[46] and life expectancy fell.[47]

[3] Antinatalism or anti-natalism is the philosophical value judgment that procreation is unethical or unjustifiable. Antinatalists thus argue that humans should abstain from making children. Some antinatalists consider coming into existence to always be a serious harm. Wikipedia