Excellent point about “social media” amplifying a few angry idiots into a scary army spoiling for civil war

Sekhnet cracked me up the other day, it was really the best laugh I’ve had in a long time. She told me she didn’t know what is wrong with her increasingly right-wing friend who was getting weirder and weirder. She told me she’d sent him something and got a very weird response. This is what she sent him.

Cohen makes an excellent point about the right demanding that everybody obey their morality because they are right and those who disagree are evil. Fair enough, the Supreme Court did it to a disgusting extent this term (with more big bombs in waiting for next term), extremists always do this when they have the power.

But Megan McArdle, writing in the Washington Post, makes an even better point. Before the anonymizing anger megaphone of “social media”, a worked up ignorant asshole could be tolerated by his or her family, who would quietly roll their eyes to each other and let hateful views slip by without a fight. On social media every one of these trolls now has a giant megaphone. Get a few thousand of them worked up about something, and it immediately looks like civil war is afoot. In this case, a small army of isolated, angry assholes on Twitter make it seem like there is a nationwide “right-wing boycott” of a restaurant chain for adding an item to its menu that they somehow find offensive, which it clearly is not.

Read McArdle’s great take, “Cracker Barrel leaders understand an often-forgotten truth of the internet.” I found it smart and reassuring.

https://wapo.st/3BXr7p5

Gazpacho thugs attack innocent man’s home!

There are at least two sides to every story, as we know. And, in fairness, the search warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago yesterday has no known connection to any attempt by anyone to overturn any election anywhere. If you think all of this completely coincidental “destruction of crucial evidence,” by Secret Service, by the never confirmed acting heads of the Department of Homeland Security, by the winking slightly partisan Inspector General of DHS, by the Department of Defense, by White House log keepers, in any way justifies government agents searching an ex-president’s home, and even his safe, you need to hear a complete defense for why that FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was, to some, much worse than the so-called riot on January 6th and all the alleged plans appurtenant thereto. Here we go, my best attempt to distill the story as told in defense of the man whose home was searched:

In an unprecedented attack, not seen since Nazi Germany, the private home of an innocent man was overrun by agents of a hostile political party! It was a private home. There was no justification for a partisan storming of the man’s house. The man had already been completely acquitted and exonerated of all charges at two previous trials, which were brought only to hurt him because his enemies knew he was actually right. He was totally exonerated both times. There was never any evidence against him, certainly not at either purely political “trial” and there is no evidence now, and no evidence was ever destroyed and nobody ever lied on his behalf in a court of law or anywhere else (and Stone and Manafort were both pardoned and whatever they were accused of or convicted for never happened, smart ass). He himself also never lied, in the true harmful sense of the word, but those who hate him, and by extension all good legacy Americans, constantly lie, in the most evil and destructive way!

There will be revenge for this deplorable gazpacho attack, we’re taking names and kicking asses because we are not idiots and we’re justifiably angry as hell. Long live our holy party and our righteous cause! Fuck communism!

Here’s a much more intellectual version, for your consideration.

An op ed in today’s Washington Bezos, entitled  “Trump should make the search warrant public”  (https://wapo.st/3SDW9bx) begins:

There is little doubt that the residence and offices of a former president can be subjected to lawful searches and seizures. Anyone doubting this should read the opinion of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in 2020’s Trump v. Vance as well as the concurrence by Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh.

In that case, a New York state grand jury subpoena had been served on the president’s longtime accounting firm for the president’s papers. The Vance opinions review all the relevant precedents involving Thomas Jefferson, Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton. The justices, including the dissenters, agreed that not all criminal subpoenas of a sitting president were barred. “On that point the Court is unanimous,” the chief justice concluded.

If a sitting president is in some circumstances subject to criminal subpoenas from state officials, a former president can most certainly be subjected to criminal process by federal agents. This has never happened before, but as with all things Trump, the past is no guide to the present.

shortly afterwards, the legal analysis takes a sudden turn, with an announcement of what one side

rightly believes:

Most Republicans rightly believe that Trump has been unfairly targeted by civil servants motivated by partisanship going back years, long before his stunning election in 2016 and certainly thereafter. The “Steele dossier,” now thoroughly discredited, the charges of collusion with Russia debunked by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, and the allegations of obstruction of justice dismissed as insubstantial by Attorney General William P. Barr all helped create an automatic suspicion on the right of this latest search.

punchline:


Opinion by Hugh Hewit

Hugh Hewitt is a nationally syndicated radio host on the Salem Radio Network. He is also a professor at Chapman University School of Law, where he has taught constitutional law since 1996. 

Aha! Colleague (former) of onetime dean of Chapman, John Eastman, Esq. (dismissed by Chapman after his central role in January 6 plan became public.)

Now go back and read the news reports, you’ll have a better perspective, having heard another side of the story.

Grey Lady, doing it as only she can

It’s not that a Democratically controlled Congress reversed a 14% tax slash for the wealthiest tax paying corporations, imposed by McConnell and Trump, by recocilation in 2017 when they reduced the top corporate tax rate fom 35% to 21% as part of a generous tax gift to the wealthiest among us.

What we learn here, from the vaunted Grey Lady, is that in making it unlawful for billion dollar businesses to not pay 15% in tax (in a nation where many of them currently, legally pay 0%) — well, here’s the inimitable fucking New York Times

Get it?

Two excellent rules about life to consider

From my friend’s therapist, Dr. John House.

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

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

Life is more about emotion than logic sometimes

The sphere of human affairs that is influenced by facts, cause and effect, logic and well-argued, more or less persuasive positions, is like the visible part of an iceberg.

Invisible in the water is the far greater bulk of the iceberg, the visible part being only a small fraction of the iceberg. Emotion in human affairs is like all the stuff below the water line and plays a gigantic role in keeping the whole thing afloat and upright. We may not be able to see that vast bulk without an underwater camera, but without that giant underwater part, there’s no iceberg. No living, sentient head without the much larger, deeply feeling body to carry it.

It’s the same way with our emotions, they carry us. And when they’re inflamed, no amount of logic alone can touch them, let alone soothe them.

The seemingly logical question needed to solve a conflict “what do you need from me? how can I heip?” cannot be asked or answered by someone whose emotions are clenched in childhood terror. They’re simply impossible questions to form when we are upset that somebody seems angry at us.

Filibuster again protects democracy

Yesterday, after the Senate parliamentarian did her thing, it was put to a vote whether private insurance companies would also be required to cap insulin payments at $35 a month (and presumably lose a mountain of money). 43 Republicans voted no, effectively a filibuster.

When the entire Inflation Reduction Act, the skinny, almost unrecognizable, reconciliation-ready version of Build Back Better ( filibustered quite effectively with the assistance of two rogue Democrats), came up for a vote, those same seven bipartisan Republican senators voted with the other 43 against the entire bill. That’s called party discipline and loyalty to an angry base.

So we wound up with a fraction of what the vast majority of Americans actually want, but it is much better than zilch. Until we can fix it, that’s democracy in the age of Koch, Trump, Barr and the likes of Ginni Thomas and friends like Mark Meadows and fervent midievalist [1] Snarlin’ Sam Alito.

That said, congratulations to us all and to this poor, magnificent earth we have long been such negligent stewards of.

[1] To save you a click on Google: One who sympathizes with the spirit and principles of the middle ages: often with the sense of one who is antiquated or behind the times.

How do I make it stop?

When you are in a brutal conflict that will not stop, when every move anybody makes (or doesn’t make) to try to solve it twists the knot tighter and tighter, and the standoff seems increasingly hopeless, how do you begin to resolve a mutually painful and desperate impasse?

Fuck if I know, though one thing I’ve learned is that no solution to any painful interpersonal battle comes from the application of logic. I’ve also learned that Reason, once everybody’s pain is inflamed, is sometimes entirely irrelevant.

Paradoxically, the more reason is on your side, sometimes, the harder the other party, now accused of being unreasonable on top of everything else, will have to resist and the worse it will go for you, for everyone.

Sometimes you will turn an emotional corner for reasons you can’t completely understand in that moment but your emotions will tell you something true and important that you need to do immediately and you can do that, and sometimes that may help.

It will certainly help more than being stuck on the senselessness of placing all blame on one person, alone responsible for putting a world of trauma on loved ones. The exact reason for your emotional pivot may be revealed to you afterwards, if you puzzle over it long enough, though that reason also doesn’t matter.

Fucking humans, man, no wonder this planet is always at war.