It’s all perfectly normal, folks

An openly corrupt former president (“how can he be corrupt, he did it all openly and honestly?”) moves to have the judge overseeing his federal trial in D.C. removed. What are his grounds? Plenty. She’s a woman of color, they all hate Trump, the Black ones are particularly nasty. She’s a woman, and you know how disgusting they are and how many irrationally hate Trump. She was appointed by an illegitimate president who forced patriots to organize the Birther movement. Trump was a top Birther. Therefore, she’s prejudiced against the MAGA martyr. All of this, to a solid 30% of the country makes perfect sense. How can he get a fair trial from someone he didn’t appoint?

Meanwhile, Florida man DeathSantis removes a Black female state’s attorney (Florida’s only) who was elected with 66% of the vote. Presumably she was critical of the enraged little fascist puke. Perfectly normal for anyone with the power to crush an opponent to do so, no matter what the grounds. The new normal that the Koch network has been pushing for for decades.

Also in Florida, the judge appointed by Trump after he lost re-election, the one who was overruled by a conservative appeals court and found to have abused her discretion, and made fatal mistakes of law in her over-reach to help her boss, continues doing her inexperienced best to help her benefactor Trumpie. Serious prosecutors wait for another fatal abuse of discretion before raising a challenge about the conflict of interest and appearance of impropriety (abusing her discretion and violating the law to help the plaintiff in the legally incoherent Trump v US) Aileen Cannon has repeatedly shown. The conflict is between her sworn duty to uphold the law, and fairly apply legal rules to the proceeding, and her loyalty to the former president who demands special treatment. That this Federalist Society star is perhaps the most inexperienced judge on the federal bench, having done only four trials and making serious mistakes in at least one of them, has nothing to do with anything.

And all of this, you know, is as normal as a good old-fashioned American lynching.

Here is the great Vandana Shiva with a few words about our normal world, where it is fitting and proper for five individuals to have more wealth than 50% of humanity combined.

The Great Dictator

Nowadays, for anyone who wants just to write, and forget about having millions of readers, someone who just needs to write everyday and make that writing accessible to others, this is a golden age.

Any schmuck with a smartphone and an app can sit in a recliner and make like the great dictator. I talk to this phone the way Adolf Hitler talked to loyal halfwit Rudolph Hess, who transcribed Hitler’s incoherent gibberish in a way that was also completely unreadable.

This phone allows me to go back and make any number of editorial improvements with the keyboard. The result is prose of the highest quality that I am capable of producing.

In this chair, pontificating, I am the great dictator, literally. I dictate these words into my telephone. I will then take the Rudolph Hess-like transcribed gibberish and render it back into the English that I spoke into the phone.

It’s a refinement that, sadly, Adolf Hitler could not avail himself of there in Landesdown prison when he produced his masterwork “My seven years of struggle against the lying, filthy Jews, Communists, homosexuals, and other inhuman, maggot enemies who stabbed the victorious German army in the back!!!!” [1]

That dramatic Hitlerian title was later prudently shortened to Mein Kampf (My struggle). Picture being the editor trying to argue with fucking Hitler.

Hitlerious, no?

[1] Wikipedia corrects my recollection:

Hitler originally wanted to call his forthcoming book Viereinhalb Jahre (des Kampfes) gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit (Four and a Half Years [of Struggle] Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice).[8] Max Amann, head of the Franz Eher Verlag and Hitler’s publisher, is said to have suggested[9] the much shorter “Mein Kampf” (“My Struggle”).

Trauma and immature parents

I’ve got to keep writing the same idea until I get it into a gentle enough form that it might be heard and considered. My credulous former friends are just what they are, there is no reaching those who uncritically embrace hateful lies, angrily close their minds, or what’s left of their minds.

I’m trying to reach a young man who is living in hell, the identical hell I escaped decades ago only by the best of luck. He is living with parents who had no hesitation to fly into a rage at a hurt old friend, arguably their closest, and embark on a deliberate campaign of lies, to destroy my good name among our fellows, when I needed to talk through a conflict with them. This poor guy is their oldest son.

Trauma, observes Bessel van der Kolk, is when we are not seen or known. When a child is upset, and parents look away, wait for the bad mood to pass, will not yield in any way, there is your basic recipe for trauma.

No reason can explain why the kid is acting this way, no explanation or understanding is possible, the crying simply must stop. Parents act this way only if they suffered similar abandonment when they needed to be comforted as infants.

An inconsolably crying child presents a challenge to every kind of parent. Emotionally immature parents, who have been damaged by the same kind emotional distancing when they were crying children in need of comfort, feel embarrassed at their helplessness. It makes them look terrible in public, too, not being able to control their child. The upset child is now assaulting the immature parent’s image as a great parent. The situation instantly becomes about the parent’s feelings, not the child’s.

It can take you decades, if ever, to recognize a basic fact about your childhood. Your strong-willed parent, who can neither be wrong nor apologize, may turn out, when you add up years of evidence, to be a bully. Bullies are created by abuse that damages them to the point they lash out at others whenever they feel threatened.

A bully is, obviously, not a good parent, they are too hurt themselves to help anyone else in trouble. They will do terrible damage they can never acknowledge or take responsibility for.

The best you can hope for, if you do enough hard work and have enough help and luck to untangle complicated emotions, is a deathbed reconciliation with the bully, full of regrets as they are about to leave this world.

I had a deathbed reconciliation with my father, a raging, frightened bully. I felt it was a beautiful mutual gift at the time, a blessing, but his “I wish we could have had this kind of talk fifteen years ago, but I was too fucked up” is about the most poignant line I can imagine a dying father saying to his son. That I can’t cry about it to this day is one of those mysteries of being a male in our toxic society, but the line is no less tragic.

If your parent is still angry at their own mother or father, in adulthood, chances are they will not be able to give you the kind of nurturing they never experienced. They will demand obedience in all circumstances and blame you as defiant and irrationally angry if you show any hesitation or resentment.

Parents who need to be right will not tolerate that kind of behavior for a minute, it will enrage them. The child learns early to avoid this rage any way they can. In the end, expressing true feelings becomes futile.

The damage is done, congratulations, the bullying parent insists they are fully justified, and now your challenge begins. You will be second-guessing your true emotions for the rest of your life, trying to avoid conflict. You may be subject to episodes of mania, rage or depression. Strictly speaking, it’s not your damaged parents’ fault, but that’s cold comfort, I assure you.

What emotionally immature parents teach their children

I pose the following for the consideration of the brother of a young man who is suffering from an episode of depression. His father believes the condition is purely the bad luck of genetics, unrelated to any environmental factors (like competitive, judgmental parents who can never be wrong) and apparently beyond the reach of human intervention. This belief is preferred to understanding that a child judged by emotionally immature parents since birth, love conditioned on not making problems, will often grow up with certain morbid sensitivities.

Consider what your parents are teaching you and your suffering brother.

In every conflict, your parents are absolutely right, and blameless, no matter what actually took place.

The world is zero-sum, black and white, without nuance or the possibility of compromise.

Anyone who challenges our need to be right, defies our family. Defiance is a capital offense.

Defamation is permissible, if the stubbornly defiant party keeps insisting on “fairness” and “compromise.”

Being raised by immature assholes is a heavy burden on the soul. It will take years, with insight and luck, to begin to emerge from the endless layers of manure that have been heaped on you since before you had any inkling of what manure is. Immature parents have every opportunity, during the years you are a helpless infant, to do infinite harm to your brand new soul. As children, they may have had it even worse than what they are doing to you, but still.

Consider, my friend, if these lessons have anything to do with a good life or are only iron guidelines required by rigid people who can never be wrong.

Nice indictment

Technical problems (internet and phone service dead for a couple of days, thanks T-Mobile) prevented posting this the other day, but here you are.

The second federal indictment against Donald Trump contained many familiar elements: the continuing lies (which are not charged, so goodbye first amendment defenses) that were weaponized to fuel a conspiracy to deprive millions of voters of their right to vote and have that vote counted, as a hoard descended to violently take the Capitol, some intent on hanging Mike Pence, others calling for Pelosi, the now familiar horror of that day only happened because of lies the US does not contest Trump had every right to peddle. The lies are not the issue, the far-reaching conspiracy to use those lies to illegally cling to power is. There’s some good new stuff in the indictment. Here are a few:

With respect to the persistent false claim regarding State Farm Arena, on December 8, the Senior
Campaign Advisor wrote in an email, “When our research and campaign legal team can’t back up
any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we’re 0-32 on our  cases. I’ll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.”

And, the old chestnut, the perfect call to Georgia’s Brad Rafesnsberger:

The Defendant said that he needed to “find” 11,780 votes, and insinuated that the Georgia Secretary of State and his Counsel could be subject to criminal prosecution if they failed to find election fraud as he demanded, stating, “And you are going to find that they are-which is totally illegal- it’s, it’s, it’s more illegal for you than it is for them because you know what they did and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal, you know, that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to [the Georgia Secretary of State’s Counsel], your lawyer.” 

Ouch

Co-conspirator 4 is apparently Jeffery Clarke, American Eichmann. 2 is Eastman, 1 is Rudy,

The Deputy White House Counsel reiterated
to Co-Conspirator 4 that there had not been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that
if the Defendant remained in office nonetheless, there would be “riots in every major city in the
United States.” Conspirator 4 responded, “Well, [Deputy White House Counsel], that’s why
there’s an Insurrection Act.”

I was gratified to see one of my favorite lines from Trumpie’s pep talk at the Ellipse right before he sent his angry mob off to peacefully protest the steal of the election.

The Defendant also said that regular rules no longer applied, stating, “And fraud breaks up everything, doesn’t it? When you catch somebody in a. fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules.” 

Finally, after exhorting that ”we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” the Defendant directed the people in front of him to head to the Capitol, suggested he was going with them, and told them to give Members of Congress “the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”

Then there’s this curious bit where the quote could only have come from one of the most spineless homophobes in government, the man with the fly on his head during the Vice Presidential debate with Kamala Harris:

On January 1, the Defendant called the Vice President and berated him because he had learned that the Vice President had opposed a lawsuit seeking a judicial decision that, at the certification, the Vice President had the authority to reject or return votes to the states under the Constitution. The Vice President responded that he thought there was no constitutional basis for such authority and that it was improper. In response, the Defendant told the Vice President, “You’re too honest.” Within hours of the conversation, the Defendant reminded his supporters to meet in Washington before the certification proceeding, tweeting, “The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C., will take place at 11.00 A.M. on January 6th. Locational. details to follow. StopTheSteal!”

read the whole thing