Category Archives: History and Politics

Fair vs. Corrupt

Every child believes deeply in fairness, until the world teaches it otherwise, the kid begins picking a side in every fight and fairness becomes secondary to her team prevailing. Unfairness is universally painful, being treated unfairly hurts everybody it happens to. We all like to think we’re fair, it is a synonym for reasonable, but the fact is that adults can be fair or unfair, recognize the importance of rules to ensure fairness or defy any norm that allows any outcome they don’t want.

A reasonable person listens to a story with an open mind (to the extent possible) and assesses it as likely or unlikely based on experience and knowledge. The purely transactional listener evaluates a story based solely on how well it advances the interests he wants to advance. The mercenary listener is looking for an angle, a simple transaction, not complicated by the merits of the case, the evidence presented or that abstract quality of fairness, only how it increases advantage and enhances the desired bottom line. You have either a fairness based vision of justice, or a might makes right mentality.

You treat everyone as equal under the law or, under might makes right, you treat your friends as above the law, exempt from all legal coercion, and demand that anyone who opposes your desires be subject to the harshest of laws available (and not ruling out extra-judicial forms of discipline, which are always on the table). While you are in charge your friends and supporters don’t have to worry about any law that will stop them from acting on their strong feelings. As long as they are vocally loyal to you, you will protect them, until it is transactionally advantageous to cut them off. Because what the fuck is Fair anyway?

You can weigh the arguments on the actual facts of the case or you can weigh the arguments and frame them cleverly, to reach the desired outcome. The second way is the way of the zealot, the partisan, the political activist, the way of the Federalist Society.

The stench coming off the McConnell/Trump Supreme Court today is a reminder of how crucial nonpartisan elections are for democracy. How it is crucial to elect a few more Democratic senators, to prevent two from vetoing filibuster reform to get election and voting rights laws passed.

Norms, it turns out, don’t restrain zealots and extremists who believe only in power, and in using power to retain power (the updated definition of “conservative”). Laws can ensure a certain measure of justice, but only if they are always enforced. Selective enforcement, and the outcomes of court challenges often hinging on which party has more money to spend on an army of top lawyers, ensures rule by the most corrupt. Which, as any eight year-old will tell you, is completely unfair.

Neoliberalism 101 (redux)

Here is a great primer on the once fringe economic and political theory called neoliberalism. It is a wild variation on the old laissez-faire philosophy of capitalism, based on the well-worn theory that the Invisible Hand of the Free Market is wiser, more fair and infinitely more flexible than any government regulation could ever be. Neoliberalism has done as much as any political force to bring the world to the brink of global authoritarianism. This podcast does a great job laying neoliberalism out clearly.

Throughline: Capitalism: What Makes Us Free? (2021) https://play.podtrac.com/npr-510333/edge1.pod.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/throughline/2022/04/20220407_throughline_neoliberalism_with_ads_kd_040722.mp3?awCollectionId=510333&awEpisodeId=1091050251&orgId=1&topicId=1136&d=3038&p=510333&story=1091050251&t=podcast&e=1091050251&size=48612502&ft=pod&f=510333

The personal roots of “political” rage

When you feel helpless, are in need of the consoling connection to others that all living creatures require, a common response to this desperation is anger.  You derive energy and a feeling of righteousness from galvanizing your hurt into rage.  You can also turn anger on yourself, blaming yourself for feeling helpless, hopeless, weak, abandoned and so forth, but this self-directed rage inflicts even more damage than what has already been done to you.   Turning the anger outward requires only a good story, a good enough story (it can actually be a completely incoherent story), to let you know who is to blame for the pain you are in.   Once you can ascribe blame you’re on your way.

Today’s radical right wing has become expert in keeping the rage turned up all the time.   You feel fucked?   We’ll tell you why — it’s that senile puppet Joe Biden’s fucking fault, like it was Obama’s before him, and fucking Clinton’s before that.   The only time you were watched over tenderly in recent memory, these extremists preach, was under Donald Trump and Dick Cheney.   Radical antidemocratic oligarchs like Charles Koch have no hesitation to use any tactic that works to convince millions that large societal problems aren’t being solved, not because of the zero sum divisive political warfare he has been relentlessly waging for decades, and the lawmaking gridlock their obstructionist tactics have caused, no! — it’s the fault of the fucking communists who have taken over one of the major political parties in the country!   

I suspect that every person susceptible to this “argument” — that everything was, more or less, perfect until these “woke” libtard cucks took over the party of our enemies and are constantly acting like “snowflake” victims, cynically exploiting “identity politics,” to win rigged elections that always favor majoritarian tyranny — has personal reason to be angry.  Focusing the free floating personal anger and anxiety on enemies, who can be blamed, hated and, in a perfect world, publicly executed, is the genius of the radical right, has been all throughout history.  It exploits the feeling of justice we have every time we put a bully on his ass.

On a personal level we can often see the roots of rage quite clearly.   An abusive parent, insisting they never abused anyone.  A rape that nobody in the legal system, unfortunately, is going to be able to do anything about.  That one day hesitation to report the crime proved fatal to the legal case against the rapist fuck.   Indigestible things happen to us sometimes, and those things are food for anger, which, like water, can take on any shape, fit any container perfectly, and is always flowing.   The ratings king of rage, the guy with the puckered brow who just keeps asking innocently leading questions of his gigantic audience, Tucker Carlson, has only recently revealed the partial roots of his always boiling, though jovially presented, “just asking” anger.

For many years, Tucker Carlson was tight-lipped about the rupture [with his mother]. In a New Yorker profile in 2017, not long after his show debuted, he described his mother’s departure as a “totally bizarre situation — which I never talk about, because it was actually not really part of my life at all.” But as controversy and criticism engulfed his show, Mr. Carlson began to describe his early life in darker tones, painting the California of his youth as a countercultural dystopia and his mother as abusive and erratic.

In 2019, speaking on a podcast with the right-leaning comedian Adam Carolla, Mr. Carlson said his mother had forced drugs on her children. “She was like, doing real drugs around us when we were little, and getting us to do it, and just like being a nut case,” Mr. Carlson said. By his account, his mother made clear to her two young sons that she had little affection for them. “When you realize your own mother doesn’t like you, when she says that, it’s like, oh gosh,” he told Mr. Carolla, adding that he “felt all kinds of rage about it.”

All kinds of rage, you know.  Many different forms of rage.  Rage rages, it’s all it can do.  It may rage quietly or loudly, but everything it does is in the service of keeping the righteous feeling of being totally fucking right pumping away.   And, as everybody knows, there are few feelings to equal the satisfaction of knowing that you are totally fucking right and justified, in anything you do to bring justice to the vicious fucks you blame for hurting you.

Homerun by Heather

Out of hope, democracy fan? Are you buying the doom for electoral democracy pushed by all mass media? Not so fast, here’s historian Heather Cox Richardson, describing democracy’s response to a past moment of oppressive American oligarchy during a previous gilded age, hitting another one into the bleachers. As she often does.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-30-2022?r=74gv9&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Dred Scott, y’all, the law of the land, 1857 style

Chief Justice Roger Taney bluntly and maliciously described their status in the 1857 Dred Scott decision:

“[Black people] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.”

Lying for the truth is no lie!

The idiot chorus continues, the insistence that any lie told to protect the higher truth is made of God’s own breath.   It is like comparing a fart to the breath of an angel.  I’m sure there are bad breathed angels dancing on the heads of pins in some pious person’s imagination, but you get my point, I think.  A lie is not a lie, people tell themselves, if you actually believe it’s true and tell it with no intent to lie, since you honestly believe it is not a lie.  This is the madness we are up against as a species, as a planet.

Certainty, for many people, is preferable to the sometimes terrible challenge of uncertainty.   What is certain is only your eventual death, but let’s put that depressing one aside.   The world is a raging mess, give me THE REASON.   You want one?  I have a pretty good single cause theory: the incomprehensible greed and egotism of our “greatest citizens” and the way they use vast, often inherited, wealth to set up influential “think tanks” and hire genius advertisers to shape public opinion and buy the laws that help them indulge their mad greed and acquire a million times more than any hundred humans need while a third of humanity is hungry, living without sanitary facilities of any kind, dying in droves every day of poverty-related illness.  

More commonly the reason given to the masses is a devilish Other, all-powerful and supremely destructive.   In one African country an ethnic group was described as parasitic insects, rodents, scum.  You want to feel better?   Take machetes and hack them to little pieces, everything will be good when they are all dead.  To Nazis it’s Jews, and Blacks, and Poles, and Gypsies, and Communists, and Homosexuals, and all inhuman enemies of Nazism.   Explains everything, all our problems, you know, that we have these subhumans sabotaging everything we do!

How do you make people hate others that they’ve never met?  Make up the ugliest lies you can think of, things that would enrage anyone and repeat them on an endless loop.   Take a page from Mr. Putin, whose enemies are always publicly accused of being pedophiles.  Tom Hanks and his degenerate liberal friends?   Well, they have these parties, as reported by the anonymous Q, who cannot be doubted, since he/she/it, being a very well-connected insider (and possibly even Russian speaking), knows things we don’t know, where these fake, smiling, insanely rich, sick bastards have group sex with children and babies.  Disgusting and evil as that is, it gets worse, much worse, somehow.  They slash these babies and lap up their blood.  THEY DRINK THE BLOOD OF THE BABIES THEY RAPE — AND EAT THEM!   To get eternal youth and power, despicable and deserving of no less than the same in return.

The calculus, I suppose, goes like this: our party has been taken over by a compulsively lying opportunist who is also very charismatic to our base and our most amazing fundraiser– and who most of the base consider a very honest, no bullshit kind of guy. So, if we lie about a many armed attack on the results of an election whose result we hate, culminating in a riot to stop the certification of and overturn that election, that gouged out police eyes and sent 140 to the hospital with grievous injuries, while threatening the lives of the lawmakers inside, and the other side is doing everything possible to expose our obstruction of their investigation, we are only doing so because WE HONESTLY BELIEVE WE ARE NOT LYING!   If we believe we’re not lying, lawyers tell us, then we lack the intent to lie, no mens rea so therefore we are not lying.  And if we are, so what?!   We will lie to cover past lies, of course, because we now believe those lies are true, we honestly believe the lie we are telling now cancels out the other lie that we now know was a lie.  When I told you I was lying, cracked Elvis Costello, I might have been lying.

Look, clearly, there is no political price to be paid for lying your ass off.  Lindsey Graham defended McConnell blocking Obama’s Supreme Court nominee for almost a year, because of the upcoming presidential election, in order to preserve the right of the People to decide who serves on our highest court.   He said it was a righteous decision he would stand behind if Republicans controlled the White House and Senate and invited them to play the tape of him if he ever changed his mind.   He supported the confirmation of the last of three Federalist Society nominees as votes were being counted in the 2020 election.  The tape of him from 2016 was played.   Everyone on the right laughed, it was pretty funny, the brazenness of it, really triggered the damned libtards!   He announced from the floor of the Senate, after Trump’s January 6 riot, that it had been a wild ride but that he was done with Trump.  Very soon afterwards he realized the taste of Trump’s ass was too irresistible, and announced that Trump was, as always, the future of the Republican Party.  Who can really say which contradictory statement of the cagey single white male from South Carolina was the lie?  And those lies are harmless compared to more recently revealed ones.  That’s why Republicans as a party now refuse to take oaths to tell the truth, if there is no legally binding promise not to lie there is no perjury!

Lying in defense of lies is no vice, after all, if you’re on the side of the goddamned angels and you truly hate evil.   USA!   USA!!!

Remember, if you believe it’s true it can’t be a lie!

This foolish idea is more prevalent than it seems. You can tell a story in a way that leaves out a few important details, minimizes cause and effect, casts hero and villain in a dramatic light that makes each one the perfection of their type. If others believe the story, that’s what actually happened, for those who believe.

Examples are virtually endless. In the age of Trump, an ocean of steroids has been poured over this human trait until now any lie you like can be spun into the highest truth. Believe it. And if you believe it, it is no lie.

From Heather

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-25-2022?r=74gv9&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

FOX, of course, focuses on Hunter Biden, because, you know, even though Volodymyr Zelensky wouldn’t admit it, or even pretend to, Hunter bin Biden is a much worse and more dangerous person than the Tea Party vote fraudster Mark Meadows who was promoted to replace South Carolina Tea Party star, Office of Budget Management director and chief of staff Ambassador Mick Mulvaney as Trump’s final White House body man and gunsel, and made a few small mistakes like anyone could have.

Friends lie to protect their friends

A certain type of friend believes that it is always right to lie, if your friend needs you to lie. To such friends, a friend who won’t lie for a friend is no better than a fucking rat. And a judgmental fucking hypocrite rat, at that.

Back a decade or two, an elected official being caught in a lie was a shameful thing that often damaged or even ended a political career. Today public lying is interpreted transactionally, how much damage will this particular lie do to the liar in the polls, how much trouble will it make with the powers that be? One former president, pressed by an all-powerful Independent Counsel and sweated by ambitious partisans like young Boof Kavanaugh, was even impeached for lying under oath trying to cover up personal sexual misdeeds. “The US can’t have a president who is a liar!” was the pious sentiment of the elected moralists who drew up articles of impeachment against him.

Being caught in a lie was a fairly serious impediment to political ambition at one time. There was, at the very least, a steep price to pay for being caught in a lie. Clinton was publicly humiliated, graphic details of his sexual kinks were put on the internet by the Independent Counsel, he lost his law license, paid some big fines. Until a new ethic took hold in our national politics: there is nothing wrong with lying if you are a good person only lying to protect friends and to fight evil! It is the logical extension of the old Libertarian battle cry of 1964 “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice”.

The extreme moral relativism of this transactional defense of the right to lie to protect friends, or profits, or a higher truth, or whatever the lie is intended to do, is in some ways like the oath of Omerta that made men in the Mafia must take. No matter what, I will not rat on anyone in my family. I prefer death to the dishonor of incriminating an associate. The current over-the-top cast of quid pro quo/transactional liars and obstructionists, clearly prefer a pardon from their co-conspirator to death, and as for dishonor, that’s a game for chumps and losers only. Anyone stupid enough to admit anything, no matter how strong the proof of the case against them, well, fuck them.

With unlimited lies now being permissible, to defend decency, to cover up embarrassing or incriminating evidence or, sometimes, even to glorify Jesus Christ Himself, there is no reason not to lie. What you don’t admit can rarely be used against you in court. Dubya Bush’s Attorney General, Antonio Gonzalez, when pressed by a subcommittee on suspicious details of the sudden mass firing of DOJ officials, claimed over and over not to recall anything about the purge he had supervised. As Jon Stewart pointed out at the time, Gonzalez preferred being seen as a pinhead who could not remember anything at all to saying anything that might be politically impolitic, or used to get to the sordid truth of the politically motivated firings at DOJ.

Within twenty years politically motivated purges of public officials seen as insufficiently loyal to the president, and the routine firing of agency investigators, or any other appointed public official who spoke words offensive to the thin-skinned Unitary Executive, became the norm in one party. Today it is smart to lie, until the authorities are actually able to lock you up after proving to a jury that you lied to conceal crimes.

Democrats and Republicans both lie, of course. Only one party has made belief in an outlandish lie, in a series of aggravating fictions, articles of faith. Expressing loyalty to this ridiculous lie (down ticket Republicans all won fair and square, only Trump, at the top of that same ballot, was cheated, nationwide) is a prerequisite for receiving Republican campaign money and a party endorsement. If the leader constantly lies, and his lackeys all have to indignantly back him up with lies of their own or get publicly fired and humiliated, here’s what you get (this is from an excellent March 2021 podcast):

Notice that Trump’s post-election lie about massive mail-in voting fraud in 2020 goes back to his paranoid fantasy about how he was fraudulently denied the full measure of his historic landslide victory in his 2016 election and then spent four years in hell over it. In hell! SO UNFAIR! It was so unfair that even Bill Barr, America’s Hermann Goering, felt obliged to investigate, breaking 150 years of DOJ precedent, so he could tell the president that the massive mail-in voting fraud they had both publicly predicted in the lead up to the election was bullshit, that there was no evidence for it, that the infinitesimal amount of fraud found would not change any result anywhere.

Fuck Barr. On to Plan B, Sidney Powell, My Pillow Guy, Flynn, Rudy, DOJ stooge Jeff Clarke, Cruz, Hawley, Brooks, Jordan, Biggs, Gaetz, Gohmert, Gosar and company, bring on Bannon and Kerick, let Cruz start John Eastman’s Green Bay Sweep, baby! We got the troops ready to activate, inside and outside the Capitol, with tactical support from FOX, Newsmax and OANN, to snatch victory from the jaws of massive organized bipartisan pedophile fraud! Jews will not replace us, yo!