Didn't Intend To Post This Till I Saw The Video

I HAPPENED ACROSS this 2011 video from the Canadian Fifth Estate program newly posted on Youtube.  It's about an aspiring serial killer who tried to kill one person he lured to a garage he rented through an online dating app, only to have the guy escape but who then killed another man he lured there the same way a week later.  

He was led to try to live out his his fantasy through his obsession with the cable-TV series Dexter.   Luckily for everyone except his victims,  the man he murdered had done what the first one hadn't, he'd shared the details of his anticipated blind date with friends, including the directions he'd been given to the location of their meeting, at that same garage.   As one of the detectives who solved the case said,  if the victim hadn't done that they likely wouldn't have caught him as quickly as they did.  No doubt he'd have been encouraged to try to live out the cable-TV fantasy of becoming a successful serial killer.   

Watching it reminded me of this piece I wrote almost nineteen years ago.  I know I said that the last rerun was the other day but we've still got one more day before Labor day so I'm going to repost that piece.   No one has yet addressed what I brought up then, which concentrated on the lurid and putrid cable TV "true crime" series that lovingly went over the details of how horrific crimes were committed and how the police caught the killers - no doubt instructing the would-be murderers hiding in the audience share how they might do it and get away with it.   I doubt any writer, director or producer of such entertainment much bothered to wonder about the instructional nature of their videos,  and if they didn't you can be sure that the executives putting it on didn't care about that.   No doubt they'd be happy to have those look at it as a how-to show up in the numbers they could show the advertisers.    If someone sued them I'm sure the "civil liberties" lawyers and the scumbags on the Supreme Court would say that all of that was beside the point due to the First Amendment.   I know their moves and know that they're all goddamned liars and frauds. *

Note:  I was still using a pseudonym online back then.  

Saturday, October 07, 2006

The Murderers Hiding In The Audience Share

Posted by olvlzl

In the news coverage of the murders of the school girls in Pennsylvania there was talk about the similarities between the actions of the murderer and those of the man who took hostages and murdered a school girl in Colorado the week before. One report I heard went into quite a lot of detail about the similarities, a lot more detail than could have been useful to their audience. They’ve got to fill those 24 hours with something. I guess. But, considering what they were saying about copy-cat crime, you would think that it might have occurred to them that a particular segment of their audience might have found their descriptions very useful. I wonder why none of them seemed to think it was possible that some murderer of the near or distant future might have found their information quite instructive.

What is the use of crime reporting? It shouldn’t be useful for the trial, that’s certainly not the role of reporters but of police and prosecutors. Nancy Grace might be confused about that but real reporters shouldn’t be. Ideally jurors wouldn’t have heard any news reporting that could prejudice their decision about the evidence presented in trial. The right to a fair trial, both for the accused and the public, is clearly more important than whatever right the casual observer has to know most of the details as soon as possible.

There is some public interest served in reporting some facts of these crimes. The public needs to know that crimes are being committed and the nature of those crimes especially if the criminal is still at large. But there is a level of detail that goes past what is needed and risks becoming prurient or even dangerous.

Most people can listen to the sordid details and speculations generated by the cabloids with only their character damaged but pretending they are the only ones who could be listening is willful ignorance. The old justification for allowing pornography was true, most people who consume it don’t imitate it. But a study of the effects on the general population wouldn’t show much that was useful. It is the people who do commit horrible crimes who need to be studied. Where did they get the ideas for their crimes, especially those that don’t seem to be original ideas. What is the copy-cat effect of the crime shows on TV?

Is there a significant effect? Are there people susceptible to imitating the crimes spelled out in such loving detail on A&E and Discovery? On the cabloid news stations? And if there is an effect proven beyond a preponderance of the evidence what use should be made of that fact? I don’t know.

But since they are the ones who are always talking about copy-cat murderers don’t they have a responsibility to take that into account when they are structuring their dramatic recitations of these crimes? They certainly do write the shows for dramatic effect, to follow a saleable narrative. Can they make them profitable and responsible at the same time? Maybe they need to look for a good model of responsible reporting. They won’t find much of that on American TV outside of Bill Moyers.

*  Anticipating the "First Amendmenty" types response to this I looked to see if there had been other admirers of Dexter who had killed and found this list at Wikipedia, with links.  Notice that the case in the video is among those listed. 

Association with real crimes

Several comparisons and connections to the TV show and its protagonist have been drawn during criminal prosecutions. In 2009, 17-year-old Andrew Conley said the show inspired him to strangle his ten-year-old brother.[46] In an affidavit filed in Ohio County court, in Indiana, police said Conley confessed that he "watches a show called Dexter on Showtime, about a serial killer, and he stated, 'I feel just like him.'"[47]

In Spain, on July 25, 2009, a man and his girlfriend killed his brother and pregnant partner. The man owned the complete Dexter series DVD collection and the methods used to avoid leaving blood traces were inspired by the show.[48]

On November 4, 2010, in Sweden, a 21-year-old woman known as Dexter-mördaren ("The Dexter killer") or Dexter-kvinnan ("The Dexter woman") killed her 49-year-old father by stabbing him in the heart.[49] During questioning, the woman compared herself to Dexter Morgan, and a picture of the character would appear on her phone when her father called her. In July 2011, she was sentenced to seven years in prison.[50]

In Norway, Shamrez Khan hired Håvard Nyfløt to kill Faiza Ashraf. Nyfløt claimed that Dexter inspired him, and he wanted to kill Khan in front of Faiza, similar to the television series, to "stop evil".[51]

Association was established between Mark Twitchell, of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, during his first-degree murder trial, and the character of Dexter Morgan. After weeks of testimony and gruesome evidence presented in court, Twitchell was found guilty of the planned and deliberate murder of 38-year-old Johnny Altinger on April 12, 2011.[52]

British teenager Steven Miles, 17, was sentenced to 25 years in prison on October 2, 2014, for stabbing and dismembering his girlfriend Elizabeth Rose Thomas, 17, in Oxted, Surrey. Police discovered Thomas' body on January 24, 2014, and determined the cause of death to be a stab wound to the back. Miles was arrested on suspicion of murder. Miles pled guilty to the crime on September 9. According to Surrey Police, Miles had dismembered Thomas' body following her death, wrapping up limbs in plastic wrap, and had attempted to clean up the crime scene before he was found by a family member. Miles had been reported to be obsessed with the television series Dexter. Miles reportedly had an alter ego named Ed, whom Miles claims made him carry out the murder.[53][54][55]

On January 11, 2022, in New Orleans, Louisiana, 34-year-old Benjamin Beale was arrested after police discovered a decapitated body inside a freezer in a painted bus.[56] The body was confirmed, over a week later, to be that of Julia Dardar, a missing mother of two children.[57] Investigators soon discovered a Dexter profile painting with guns and knives.[58]

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Chloé Hung - Three Women Of Swatow

 

Three Women Of Swatow

When Mother accidentally kills her husband, three generations of women must come together to solve a bloody situation. This darkly comedic play takes a look at the legacy of abuse, the power of family, and how to prevent the resurrection of a headless chicken.

This play has an interesting history,  it was all set to be given a theatrical production when Covid closed the theater,  the CBC's PlayMe gave it a "cleaned up" production apparently with the playwright's approval which is what this is.  

It's pretty darkly humorous.  Maybe it's even more so for a vegan after being a vegetarian for more than half a century. 

America, Are You Really OK With Letting Them Get Your Children Killed For Their Profit?

IF YOU DON'T SUPPORT GUN CONTROL IN 2025 YOU ARE IN FAVOR OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS. PERIOD.  And it is clear that the majority on the Supreme Court do favor school shootings, all of the Republican-fascist party does in both federal and state governments.   If they didn't favor them they'd have done something effective to stop them and they haven't even gone through the fucking motions of doing that, they've floated the slogans made for them to float by the gun industry. 

It's been twenty-six years and counting since the Columbine school shooting and every year has more of them, going from high schools and college level to elementary and kindergartens.  The Republican-fascists have not only done nothing, the Supreme Court under Republican-fascist majorities have made things far worse.

They are joined by a few rural Democrats and Independents.  

They clearly are in favor of school shootings over doing anything to stop school shootings.  That is the truth that the goddamned American free-press doesn't tell because it's been a useful tool to gull low-information voters and gun nutter yahoos, the kind who see the TV drama way of tidy, audience satisfying endings with some actor playing a courageous guy with a gun ending things and they figure that's how things happen in real life.   The media clearly favors school shootings instead of something to be done about it because the Republican-fascist party keeps them from having to pay taxes on their seven, eight, and more incomes.

Well, I'm not going to lie about that because children keep getting killed in the United States under the law as it is and is allowed to stay now.  That law made far worse than before the Heller Decision  - May Scalia be burning in hell as I write this - under the most corrupt Chief Justice in the history of the corrupt Supreme Court,  John Roberts.  

America's financial elite, the Northern financial elite as well as the slave power, have corrupted this country since the start.  Mass media and certainly the legal racket are in on that now.   They have always gotten lots of us killed and maimed,  that's a good part of the real as opposed to phony-mythologized history of this country.  I'm not lying about that anymore and I will make it my business to tell that forbidden truth continually as long as the status quo stands.  

America, they're killing your children,  are you really OK with that?   You seem to be, so far. 

Kurt Rosenwinkel & Gerald Clayton

 

00:00 Pensativa

12:46 Openhanded Reach

Two of the best living musicians.  

CARLA BLEY Band - I´m A Mineralist , Live at Livehouse Nacht, 1980

 

Carla Bley was writing some of the best music and also some of the funniest songs written in the 20th and early 21st centuries.  And what a great band she put together for that tour. 

I'm Told I "Don't Understand' American Football

WHAT IN MY description of the glacial pace of an American football game wasn't an actual description of how it is played?  Leaving aside, for a second, the violence,  there is the interminable delays as a bunch of referees decide what just happened (often with screaming fits by players and coaches which figure into the lengths of such delays),  the players huddling to talk about what they're going to do, which takes time,  both sides lining up and waiting for the bashing into each other to start,  the twenty to thirty seconds that they actually "play" the game,  often a false start as a referee notes someone broke the rules even before they resumed, etc.    

I understand that in a typical game of three or more hours less than a twenty minutes of it is actually playing the game.   Here's a description I found online in less than twenty seconds:

The NFL’s popularity is all the more remarkable when you inspect the fare it has to offer each week on television. An average professional football game lasts 3 hours and 12 minutes, but if you tally up the time when the ball is actually in play, the action amounts to a mere 11 minutes.

It's a sport for the attention deficient, the TV addled, the drunk, the not too bright, etc.  And that's before you get to the murder and mayhem and intentional brain injury.   I will, for this post at least, not go far into the clear homoerotic elements of American football and the fact that many if not most of those straight guys who get all warm and obsessed with it are in denial that that's what they're watching.  I remember about two decades ago pointing that out on one of the liberalish blogs I frequented and one of the guys there said that I had to stop because he was about to puke, clearly realizing that I'd just forced him to face what he watched it for.  

AND I'M ENTIRELY JUSTIFIED TO CALL THAT BRAIN INJURY INTENTIONAL BECAUSE ANYTHING YOU DO KNOWING THE CONSEQUENCES OF DOING IT INCLUDE SERIOUS BRAIN INJURY IN ALMOST ALL OF THE PLAYERS MEANS THAT THAT BRAIN INJURY IS INTENTIONALLY CAUSED.   It's exactly the same case with the epidemic of school shootings in relation to the American Supreme Court, the Congress, the president, state governments, local governments DOING NOT A SINGLE THING TO ACTUALLY PREVENT THOSE SCHOOL SHOOTING BY BANNING THE GUNS AND THE GUN OWNERSHIP THAT IS THE INTRINSIC ASPECT OF THAT SHOOTING THAT CAN BE CONTROLLED AS MOST MORE CIVILIZED COUNTRIES HAVE PROVEN BY THEIR OWN LAWS AND THE RESULTANT RELATIVE RARITY OF SUCH MASS MURDERS IN THOSE COUNTRIES.   THEY APPROVE OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS.  IF THEY DIDN'T THEY'D DO WHAT WOULD STOP THEM AND THEY WON'T.   And you do, too. 

I don't know if anyone has speculated or researched the possibility that Little Bobby Kennedy may have suffered early head trauma from his families' famous football games but, along with his history of drug use and the general debility that being a life long liar-lawyer causes,  it might help explain not only his derangement but, also, why he's such a total asshole now. 

I mention that because you might want to copy this paper The First Concussion Crisis: Head Injury and Evidence in Early American Football to see not only has the deadly effects of American football been known of since the early years when the rich boys at the elite universities and colleges were inventing the putrid game,  but that it has been being covered up by the American elite for that entire time, too.   You might want to copy it, as I have, before Little Bobby takes down the NIH because its publications may impact his future earning potential when he goes back to ambulance chasing at his ambulance chasing law firm.  Knowing most people don't follow up on links to papers,  I'll give you the abstract:

In the early 21st century, sports concussion has become a prominent public health problem, popularly labeled “The Concussion Crisis.” Football-related concussion contributes much of the epidemiological burden and inspires much of the public awareness. Though often cast as a recent phenomenon, the crisis in fact began more than a century ago, as concussions were identified among footballers in the game’s first decades. This early concussion crisis subsided—allowing the problem to proliferate—because work was done by football’s supporters to reshape public acceptance of risk. They appealed to an American culture that permitted violence, shifted attention to reforms addressing more visible injuries, and legitimized football within morally reputable institutions. Meanwhile, changing demands on the medical profession made practitioners reluctant to take a definitive stance. Drawing on scientific journals, public newspapers, and personal letters of players and coaches, this history of the early crisis raises critical questions about solutions being negotiated at present.

Of that note these sentences:

This early concussion crisis subsided—allowing the problem to proliferate—because work was done by football’s supporters to reshape public acceptance of risk. They appealed to an American culture that permitted violence, shifted attention to reforms addressing more visible injuries, and legitimized football within morally reputable institutions. 

I have frequently commented on the emetic character of the pure, 100% high fructose corn syrup sentimentalism and pseudo-morality that surrounds American football.  It's one of the foremost monuments of complete PR bullshit that we have. he role that a sales job was behind that denial of the actual character and consequences of American football, appealing to the worst of American's and, human beings, actually, character flaws was a big part in peddling the violent, vulgar, corrupt game as something of transcendent moral value.    It's 100% a PR con job.   I will state that the fact that America's Catholic colleges and universities adopted it and made it one of the foremost public faces of some of its most eminent schools speaks to the moral corruption that was endemic in the institutional Church during that period and persisting until today.   That such institutions as Notre Dame University wouldn't dare drop football because they know there would be a revolt by the paying alumni that would seriously impact their endowment is an exposure of that continued moral corruption right there in the very heart of the institutional Church. 

And I have not commented much on the actual character of many if not most players of American football, their rates of involvement in crimes,  rape among the most obvious of those, but also violence,  intimidation, threatening, violent tantrums, property destruction, . . .  It seemed to me even back when I was in high school that the 100% white-male football team were about the only organized gang of thugs in town.   While some of them were OK, most of them were complete assholes.   Assholes who in many of the cases I know from living in the same town I grew up in, became sleazy businessmen and not infrequently spouse battering assholes who frequently became quite obese.   That's the kind of "character" that football builds in a majority of the cases I've observed. 

So,  "V,"  as you can see,  I do understand American football.   Just not what you saps who bought the PR and deny why you want to watch big-ass guys in spandex grappling and slamming each other to the ground, crouching in unmistakable gay-porn poses - and that's not to mention the explicitly and unacknowledged sexual vocabulary of football commentary - would claim as "an understanding" of the game.   I seem to understand it a lot better than you do, or, indeed, most of its fans other than some gay men who are honest as to why they watch it.    I think they're morally depraved, too, by the way, but because of the violence, not because they acknowledge the sexual content of it.   I generally don't much talk to them, at least not during the football season.   Football is bad for gay men's character.  

CARLA BLEY Band - Wrong Key Donkey , Live at Livehouse Nacht, 1980

CARLA BLEY Band - Wrong Key Donkey , Live at Livehouse Nacht, Koln, Germany, 1980

Featuring:

Carla Bley - organ, piano

Michael Mantler - trumpet

Carlos Ward - reeds

Gary Valente - trombone

Vincent Chancey - french horn

Gary Windo - reeds

Earl McIntyre - tuba, bass trombone

Steve Swallow - bass

Arturo O'Farrill - piano, organ

D. Sharpe - drums

I'm Sure Susan Collins Is Concerned As J.D. Vance Pretends To Pray About It But

IF YOU DON'T 

SUPPORT

GUN CONTROL 

IN 2025

 

YOU ARE IN FAVOR 

OF

SCHOOL SHOOTINGS.

PERIOD.

Try Again Next Tuesday Simps

I KNEW that dissing jocks would get the pasty-old-white-couch-potato and resident half-wit at Duncan Black's idea of an Athenaeum in a swivet.   He claims his daddy played football at A&M and he's got some serious daddy issues, though it could just be he's a devoted practitioner of maintaining the conventional point of view.   It was his job for most of his life to repeat the conventional POV.  

Is there any serious case to be made that jocks don't tend to be right-wing which, in itself, is a symptom of selfishness, self-obsession, greed and bigotry?   Especially the ones who make a lot of money before they largely blow it on self-indulgence. Their fan base tends that way, too.  And I doubt there was ever a person who taught in high school or college who didn't encounter the anti-intellectualism that sports encourages.   While there are, of course, exceptions to those rules of thumb, they are notable because they are exceptions.  And it has always been thus.  

As for Simps,  other than him being an odd case of a kid vicariously living through their daddy instead of the typical other way round (the tales of the Little League father-coaches from hell I have heard!) I doubt he follows any sports at all.  Me,  I kind of like the idea of adult baseball as long as they don't take it seriously,  especially the ones who play by old rules in old fashioned uniforms that leave a little to the imagination.   And I've known a lot of Womens' softball players - there are lots of Lesbians who do, that sterotype is true in my experience - and they tend to be a hoot.  Just as long as they don't expect me to take it seriously we can get along just fine.  

American football is depraved, the most violent sport outside of boxing and the most boring.  You'd have to be seriously stupid or drunk to stand watching them standing around trying to decide what just happened,  standing around talking, lining up, over and over again so they can smash into each other for twenty seconds over and over again. . .  I'd rather watch the wall for two hours, it's less mind obliterating.  And it's not a breeding ground of fascism.   And no commercials. 

As to sports being good for your health, last time I saw my class mates, it was the ones in band who hadn't gotten dangerously fat and the jocks who either had or were dead from it.   I wonder if anyone has done a statistical analysis of that,  comparing the non-jocks to the jocks for health and lifespan.  

America's White Male Crime Wave - The White Supremacist Sent Me Some Hate Mail Last Night

FROM TWO POSTS about school shootings and mass shootings . 

First from Statita

Shootings according to gender of the shooters. 

Since 1982, an astonishing 149 mass shootings have been carried out in the United States by male shooters. In contrast, only four mass shootings (defined by the source as a single attack in a public place in which four or more victims were killed) have been carried out by women.

Gun ownership in the U.S.

Possession of firearms in the United States is protected by the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution and has been a defining aspect of American civil liberties since the writing of the Bill of Rights. It is estimated that the United States has the highest rate of civilian-owned firearms in the world, and Americans continually poll against handgun restrictions.

Shootings according to the race of the shooters from this paper:

White individuals in the United States (US) have historically had disproportionate access to firearms. The real-life availability of firearms, including those most lethal, may still be greater among White populations, manifesting in the number of victims in shootings. We compared the severity of US mass public shootings since Columbine by race and/or ethnicity of the perpetrator using The Violence Project Database of Mass Shooters, assessing fatalities (minimum four), total victims, type, and legal status of guns used. We used data visualization and Quasi-Poisson regression of victims minus four – accounting for truncation at 4 fatalities – to assess fatality and total victim rates comparing Non-Hispanic (NH) White with NH Black shooters, using winsorization to account for outlier bias from the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. In 104 total mass public shootings until summer 2021, NH White shooters had higher median fatalities (6 [IQR 5–9] versus 5 [IQR 4–6]) and total victims (9 [IQR 6–19] versus 7 [IQR 5–12]) per incident. Confidence intervals of NH Black versus NH White fatalities rate ratios (RR) ranged from 0.17–1.15, and of total victim RRs from 0.15–1.04. White shooters were overrepresented in mass public shootings with the most victims, typically involving legally owned assault rifles. To better understand the consequences when firearms are readily available, including assault rifles, we need a database of all US gun violence. Our assessment of total victims beyond fatalities emphasizes the large number of US gun violence survivors and the need to understand their experiences to capture the full impact of gun violence.

Looks like America's got a really bad white male problem.  I'll bet if they filtered the statistics to check for whether or not those guys identified their sexuality they'd largely be straight and I'd bet that if you did an economic analysis they'd largely be middle-class or above - those guns tend to be pretty expensive. 

But Hollywood won't reflect that as they promote racism and racist fear.  

Don't Know How I Completely Missed The Death Of The Timeless Sheila Jordan

She was 96 and sang her last performance last Valentines Day, the same day she released her last album,  Portrait Now.  And unlike most of those who are still repeating themselves into  their 70s and 80s,  she was still very much worth listening to, making it new every time. 

She was a great artist.  The kind of person you get so used to just being there you can't imagine she isn't performing somewhere.    

CNN Has The Vestigial White Brains Behind The Biggest Loser Lecturing Black People On Slavery

I WAS UNAWARE that someone named Jillian Michaels existed though I may have seen her on the bogus vehicle for pushing products,  The Doctors.  When I was taking care of my mother in the last years of her life she watched the piece of trash until it got to be too obvious garbage for her to tolerate.   Our mother had worked in hospitals in Boston and elsewhere early in her life and she had an over-reverent view of that profession though she knew when someone was trying to sell products, not evidenced science.   As an aside, I read that "The Doctors" was produced by "Dr. Phil" the phony TV shrink and Trumpian-fascist - Oprah has a lot to answer for. 

Anyway,  Jillian Michaels is apparently a figure in the TV fitness industry who - on the basis of having absolutely no expertise in anything much other than getting her white self on TV - was on one of CNN's food-fight shows to blather about her support of Trump suppressing the unpleasant truth about slavery in the United States at the Smithsonian.   The skank proved immediately that she may have absorbed some Republican-fascist-white-supremacist talking points but she really is as stupid as your typical white jockette.*   There's a clip on this video by Jamelle Bouie of her spouting off in this video where he demolishes the white-supremacist talking points she echoed from her empty head.

Here's my comment that I posted partway through his erudite presentation.   He did get there as I should have had every confidence that someone as intelligent and knowledgeable as he is, would. 

He could have gone a lot farther than he did in his comments, he could have mentioned how completely the slave-power dominated the Supreme Court and presidency before Lincoln, how the 3/5ths provision matched with the disenfranchisement of those People so enumerated for representation stole that extra influence for the white enslavers and those who profited from slavery. 

As to CNN,  I wish that disastrous experiment which the entirely regrettable 24-7 "news" format had closed decades ago.  I can't see that it serves any purpose other than to give air-heads like Jillian Michaels and so many others air-time to spout their stupidity.   I mean, she's not even a phys-ed teacher, she kinda played one on TV.   

*  If I had the time I'd make a list of jocks and jockettes who are prominent in the Republican-fascist-Trumpzi world.  Off hand, there seem to be a lot of them.   Sports most builds bad character.   Selfish-egomaniacs who are greedy and who have little use for the truth.   

Trump Doesn't Just Cave He "Cries Like A Little Girl" When The Real Tough Guys Push Him Around

 This one explains a lot more about it than the banker calling him "TACO."  

New York Mobsters Son Drops Bomb On Trump

How I Went Too Far For The Bill Moyers Site - Last Summer Rerun As An Answer - Hate Mail

 

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

How I Went Too Far For Bill Moyers' Site

I have been trying to leave a comment at that  Neal Gabler piece I posted about at Moyers and Co. since comments were reopened but they have been rejected by the moderator.  Here's my comment I tried to post this morning.

We live in The Age of Lies, in which the truth went from being reality to it being relative to it being optional and now it's seen as irrelevant. And that is largely due to the electronic media and the string of legal decisions starting with the Sullivan Decision that made it impossible for politicians to sue the media when it lied about them. The permission given in that most clueless of decisions by a liberal court was taken by the corporate media which already dominated the collective attention span of the United States to propagandize them for their own benefit. That permission grew and was more skilfully exploited by the oligarchs which have arisen to lie about, almost exclusively liberal politicians and potential politicians so they would lose elections. The fifty three years of the regime of freedom of the lie which the courts and the legal theories of highly placed lawyers working for the media has seen the fatal wounding of democracy. Now we see it might have actually killed it off. And when I turn on NPR or I see CBS I see they are normalizing what Trump's thugs are doing in tearing apart egalitarian democracy and a decent society.

The media, freed to lie by that interpretation of the First Amendment is what got us here. There won't be any restoration of democracy until the reality that the electronic mass media isn't like 18th century print media is accepted as a hard and mandatory reality that democracy either adapts to or it will die by a media which will like in service of oligarchy. Our legal system refuses to take that reality into account, the media certainly doesn't want it to. The Free Press, freed to lie will destroy democracy, not serve it. That would seem to be about as close to a law of nature on this issue as you're going to find.

You will excuse me if I'm far less worried about journalists who work for the media which has gotten us here than I am the people who are the victims of what they produced.

Here are some of the comments which have made it through moderation at Moyers and co.

HelpSaveMaryland • an hour ago
What utter leftist BS. The GOP defeated Dems at the national, state and local levels across the country. Now that is true diversity. Time to get America back on track. Trump 2016!

TNO  David • 15 hours ago
"It all started when Wallmart .... and when Sam Walton died ..."

In all your vast research, did you come upon the fact that HRC sat on Wallmart's board for years? Hmmm...

Wonder if she was on the board when Sam died? Any bets? Anybody, anybody? The answer is YES! She was on the board when they made that horrible decision. Guess what? It was HER IDEA!

Wanna know how she described it? "I moved the board forward during my tenure." I guess moving forward means ruining it. Typical Clinton Style.

Pull your head out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05...
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lotusgdess  TNO • 7 hours ago

Hillary joined the Walmart board so she could have some input into issues such as promotions for women and other worker issues. So stop distorting the truth like the right wing always does. You people think like Joseph Goebbels. Just keep telling the Big Lie enough and the masses will believe it. Well the masses are asses.

Seedee Vee  David • 2 days ago
It's not anger that made 60 million people vote against a war mongering Harpy. It was self preservation.
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Sam  Seedee Vee • a day ago
he LOST the popular vote, never forget that. The majority of humans in the US who voted voted for Clinton, voted AGAINST hatred, and all the things he stands for.
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Seedee Vee  Sam • a day ago
Dig out, Buddy. The winner - by a vast amount - was None Of The Above.

What percentage of eligible voters voted for Hillary?
Nowhere near 50%, was it?

Who is going to live in the White House in 2017?
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David  Seedee Vee • 21 hours ago
Are you brain dead Seedee Vee or whoever you are. Clinton WON the majority of the vote nearly a million votes. Here again the facts being twisted to suit your own agenda,
telling lies like Trump. When is it going to stop, it won't stop until people start putting people like you in your place that are literally just sitting there lying through your teeth.
And stgp using clang, it only shows your lower IQ and intelligence and education.
What are you a 14 or 15 years been brain washed by your brain dead parents.


BleedsBlue365 • 21 hours ago
He won't last. ISIS will take him out sooner rather than later, if we are lucky.

Seedee Vee  David • 21 hours ago
I can't show you all of the dead bodies because I am neither a funeral home director, a war crimes investigator nor your mommy proving to you that there are no monsters under your bed.

The Clintons are monsters and the World is very lucky to not have them and their sycophants in power for at least the next 4 years.


At least until Chelsea buys her seat in Congress.

Phil W • 5 hours ago

So we should have voted with the communist billionaire, Soros, and voted for an extremely corrupt Hillary? You nominated a horrible candidate. It's the DNC's fault they lost.

I have to say, I'm not entirely surprised that my heresy against the fundamentalism of the free speech industry is considered beyond the pale while that kind of stuff is within it. 

Note from 2025:  Risking tempting fate,  I'm feeling better so I expect to start writing new material again. 

Ten Years And Not An Answer To These Ideology Obliterating Questions - A late summer rerun with a bit of editing.

I'm posting another summer rerun which has an interesting comment thread on it.  It's been ten years since I challenged the materialists to answer these questions which,  I hold even more so today,  defeat their materialist-atheist ideology.   

Note that you can find the blog brawl that this caused at the link, I think it's worth reading through.   "Tlaz" was and maybe still is one of the Eschaton blog rats,  she never engaged honestly in any argument I ever had with her and didn't risk coming here unlike a couple of her buddies.   I often brawled with "JR" who also went by the name "Freki" and unlike most of them,  I actually had some respect for her intelligence, though not always her honesty.  "Skeptic tank" was and, for all I know, is still an ass.  One who apparently had a career in university-based science. 

Materialism in any form I've thought out can't account for our most basic and secure of experiences, our own experience of our own conscious existence.   Without an answer to these questions,  their materialist basis of consciousness just simply can't work.   I will note that this is also a problem for most of the so-called sciences that allegedly deal with minds, individually, in groups and in societies, because science can only deal with such things as material objects and that simply doesn't work.  

If any materialist-atheist of the scientistic kind wants to take on those questions posed here, for about the nineth month running that year,  try your best.  I deal with a couple of the more intelligent - well "JR" was more intelligent than your average blog-rat atheist "Skeptic-Tank" wasn't - which only shows that they inserted words and not ideas into the discussion.  The claim that "DNA" or "natural selection" was an answer to it is exactly the kind of thing that I'm familiar with in your typical atheist discourse but, as you present the problem with it - it only forces the observation that all they've done is take the problem it is for "brain-only" models of consciousness and handed it over to the even less obviously capable "DNA" or "natural selection" without answering the questions.   I've found that that is not only typical of blog-atheists, it's typical of materialist ideology universally.   

Maybe you'll find it as fun as I did to re-read this. 

Friday, September 18, 2015

An Open Challenge To Materialists Since April And Counting

All ideas are preceded by mind; they have mind as their chief; they are mind-made. If one speaks or acts with an evil mind, pain follows him just as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the cart.

Dharmapada, verse 1.1 

I am pretty tired and won't be writing anything new today. [Note from 2025, it was allergy season then, too.]  I will, though, remind everyone of my open challenge for materialists, the "brain-only" type to clear up a problem with their model of the mind as the epiphenomenon of physical structures in the brain, the "real" things, physical objects and structures that are the ideas our minds contain and work with.  

If that is the case:

- How does it know it needs to make a new physical structure to BE the basis of a new idea? 

- How does the brain know what to make for a new idea before that idea exists in the brain to tell it what to make?   

- How does it know how to make the physical embodiment of just the right idea without that idea already being in our head?  

- How does it know it has made the right idea or, if it makes the wrong structure to be that idea?

- How does it know that that idea, which is, then, in the brain is the wrong idea since the "right idea" isn't in there but the wrong one is? 

All that is at stake in this is the entire edifice of materialism because it it can't account for our minds it has to fall.  For materialism, and with it almost all of what most people hold as atheism, to stand they have to explain how our brains could do what they so obviously wouldn't know how to do if the "brain-only" model of the mind is real.  

The only mechanism I can think of that could save the "brain-only" model is for there to be some form of psychic information that could tell the brain what to make, since the idea isn't, physically in the brain.  But, then, the idea would be real in a non-physical form and that would, as well, invalidate materialism.  

Update:  If Her Coprophagous Highness, Tlaz, would like to answer the challenge I promise to post her attempt with commentary.   

When Thiel's Bitch Vance Is President He'll Be A Less Druggy Musk - Things We Need To Know

 

Tabloid Culture That Produced Trump As A New York City Phenomenon Was More Than Matched By What The Cabloids Did To The US

But Hollywood is what sold us America's Hitler. 

STILL ILL so here is another video I watched which was enlightening in a totally different way from the last one posted.  Of all the Youtube Legal AF programs, I prefer the one with Sean Wilentz and Sidney Blumenthal.  It didn't occur to me till this morning that that could be because of all of them, they're not lawyers.  

This discussion with Jonathan Mahler about how New York City in the 70s to today produced Donald Trump is full of reminders and the kind of insights that come from the honest study of history.   It was, in fact, the tabloid culture of New York, which I would say has to include the New York Times as well as the little papers, is what taught the crafty but vapid, sly but stupid and, most of all privileged straight, white, affluent Trump how to turn his criminal sleaze,  his real-estate wealth, into the kind of celebrity and power that became the stock in trade of not only that city but the national media which followed it into the cesspool that America has become largely due to the mass media.  

I do think that concentrating on the moribund ink on cheap paper media -which was admittedly important in the period and was the spear point in dragging us into the sewer - is a mistake because if that was important electronic media, hate-talk radio and cabloid news - which were also getting going in the biggest way at the same time - has been far far more important.   

The time period that they concentrate on, from about 1980 on, is notably the exact same period that produced several phenomena, most notably the Hollywood B list actor Ronald Reagan's presidency.   It should not be forgotten that his presidency, following on the Nixon-Ford presidency with the relatively clean Jimmy Carter presidency as a brief intermission produced what was, till Bush II and Trump the most criminal administration in American history with the most members of it convicted of felonies while in office.    Like Trump as a politician,  Trump is a product of the American free press,  certainly the entertainment division of it but also the "news" division of it.   Trump is a media phenomenon far more so than he is a product of the organized-crime saturated NYC real estate world.   And as such he is a direct product of the libertarian Supreme Court rulings flowing from the Warren Court's disastrous interpretation of the First Amendment.  

I think the location of the media that produced Trump as a political figure being located in New York City is largely incidental to his national presence,  though it's certain that a figure like Trump in most other cities would never have gotten the attention from that media as he got as a product of that stupendously corrupt, celebrity and pop-kulcha infested city.   Trump as a national figure is far, far more due to Hollywood than he is New York.   And most of all he is a product of the fact that our indigenous form of fascism,  white supremacy, was also ascendant at the same time.   

Stacey Abrams, in that last video I posted,  mentioned the role that "white evangelicals" played in the destruction of Jimmy Carter's administration,  certainly meaning the Arlington Virginia based Jerry Falwell and the other racially motivated TV hallelujah peddlers who the media also started promoting as "Christianity" largely through cable TV in the same period.  And,  I will say as a positive fact, for largely the same reason,  that they were a useful weapon to destroy a Democratic president and attack any Democrats who endangered their owners wealth.    That was certainly something taken up by the NYC based media but it didn't start there.   They used "reborn Christians" to bring down probably the most Christian president in American history in favor of the adulterous, divorced, remarried, and corrupt Reagan.   The combination has given us today what would once have been considered a bizarre phenomenon of "white evangelicals" supporting the very thing that they were alleged to oppose the most,  a sex criminal,  Antichrist,  given to serial blasphemy and self-worship, a crook and cheat, someone who has repeatedly and publicly broken every single commandment,  including murder, now.   And someone who has done in the most extreme possible way what the very same white-supremacist "evangelicals" railed about for generations,  sending federal troops in to take over against the objections of state and local governments.  In every way Trump exposes both the "trad-Catholics" (I won't go into that here) and the Protestant "white-evangelicals" as pseudo-Christianity,  but what the media has promoted as being "Christianity" for the past half century - I say due largely to the real thing being no more congenial to their wealth than the presidency of the moderate Democrat Jimmy Carter was. 

I think the areligious media culture of the US, many of its major figures certainly hostile to Christianity has made common cause with "evangelical" Antichristianity and it was certainly helped along in the effects that has had in American life and politics by those on the alleged left who shared the media figures' disdain for religion with an overt hatred of Christianity.  The role that the American "left" has played in the rise of Republican-fascists - never forget the role the Green Party and Ralph Nader played in the election of Bush II and Trump I and others in the sandbagging of Biden - is a minor but important part in this.  The American left - largely college credentialed in its most public face - has been incredibly stupid, that is if what they claim to want in government is what they actually find most important.  And I doubt that they do, certainly not as compared to their self-satisfying conceit    They've got more in common with Trump than they'd ever want to contemplate of have a thought criminal bring up. 

---------------

Someone asked what I was sick with.  It's allergy season, goldenrod and ragweed, etc. I always get a bad cold during allergy season and I don't work as well through it as I used to.   So, sorry, nothing fatal except being over 70.  Which is fatal enough to be getting on with. 

Keep Getting Sick This Year - This Made Me Feel Better This Morning

Hadn't known that Stacey Abrams has a podcast.   I listened to the one posted three days ago and it faces the hard issues we're facing but her conversation with Bishop William Barber and Fr Greg Boyle feels like a health tonic.  I'm a subscriber now. 

Christian nationalism is an extremist, anti-democratic ideology rooted in the belief that the United States should be a nation for Christians to the exclusion of all others. In modern times, the Trump administration and its Republican allies have wielded this ideology as a weapon to divide Americans and implement an agenda via plans like the infamous Project 2025 that eviscerates the rights of immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community, questions the rights of women to vote, restores a freedom to discriminate against others and targets reproductive rights. This week, in response to a listener question asking what Christian nationalism has to do with the central tenets of Christianity, Stacey shares her own experience as a progressive, democratic Christian, pulling back the curtain on a core truth: the malice and hatred preached by right-wing religious leaders who shape our politics has nothing to do with Jesus’s actual teachings. She’s joined by Bishop William Barber, president of Repairers of the Breach, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, and professor at Yale Divinity School and Father Greg Boyle, Jesuit priest, founder of Homeboy Industries, and author. Together, they break down the threat Christian nationalism poses to democracy and show how faith, at its best, can be a powerful force for justice and progress. This inspiring conversation has so much to offer all our listeners, whether they come from a Christian background, some other faith background, or no faith at all.

Never Thought I'd Say Something Like This

but I'd give twenty dollars to a go-fund-me for Hunter Biden to force Melania and Trump to be deposed in her threatened lawsuit against him.   I can't say I have had an extremely high opinion of Hunter in the past but if he carries through on this suit and forces them to tell about their past in regard to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell he'd be a hero to me in that regard. 

Do it, Hunter. 

I've Got To Make It A Rule

to turn off Toby Laboutillier before he gets to the pop hits of 1965.   It seems to be the year that pop music in the US took a real nosedive.   I mean, "Hang on Sloopy?"   "We Got To Ge Out Of This Place?"  "Summer Nights?"  "Where The Action Is?"  "Who'll Be The Next In Line?"  

Geesh!  It's almost enough to make me want to hear The Association.  

Save me

Big Mama Thornton - Hound Dog and Down Home Shakedown

It's time to rip up the Code of Liberal Ethics - Hurray For Gavin Newsom

THE FIRST THING in the first blog post I ever posted at 9:45 AM EDT on May 13th, 2006 * started this way:

To start with, there are two things about the Code of Liberal Ethics that bother me. One, that we are supposed to be entirely fair to everyone and especially in instances when that would put us at a disadvantage, will be dealt with later. The one I will deal with first is the assumption that liberals must get it right every time, not only right but correct. That liberals and leftists, such as myself, must be purer than pure or relegated to the tip, is something I'd better address right now in this first post.

Yesterday a Democratic Politician, for the first time of any significance, took a step out of the worse than futile, prissy,  sanctimonious, liberalishy-laywerly scrupulosity that sacrifices everything,  democracy and millions of lives to, as I heard one of the MSNBC type lawyers piously say it "the rules, the norms and the manuals."   I'm talking, of course, of Gavin Newsom's plan to put it to the highest authority in any government,  The Voters, to override the liberally-lawyerly reform to prevent that ubiquitous anti-democracy practice under our corrupt system, partisan gerrymandering which Republican-fascists never put into effect in the states they control, so as to rig the Republican minority into a majority in the House of Representatives.    In doing so he not only FACES REALITY INSTEAD OF THE PIOUS CORRUPTION OF HEAD-IN-THE-SANDS THEORETICAL IDEALISM,  HE DID SO IN A WAY THAT MAKES IT WHAT REPUBLICANS NEVER WILL MAKE IT WHEN IT'S NOT A SURE THING FOR THEM,  A CHOICE OF THE VOTERS.

The corruption of the Federal system,  dreamed up largely by John Adams, even more so than that baked-in corruption I noted in a post the other day,  by rigging House districts began as soon as elections under the Constitution were held.  The "Gerry" in gerrymander is Elbrige Gerry, one of the founders,  VP under Madison and one of the drafters of the so-called Bill of Rights who rigged the Massachusetts Senate districts to keep his party in control of the Massachusetts Senate.   A practice that has proved popular with incumbents bent on holding on to their seats but has been extremely popular with America's indigenous fascists, the white supremacists, both as the slave-power and today as Republican-fascists as a way to thwart equality and, so, any legitimate government in the United States.  When I read that on Gerry's death John Adams praised him as an unusually moral politician it did a lot to open up my eyes, not about Gerry, but the real character of John Adams.   And it wasn't in his favor. 

I remember when the idea of "making things fair" through taking redistricting out of the hands of the so obviously interested politicians in state legislatures took hold in response to the scandal of ubiquitous gerrymandering to give more power to a party whose policies and actions in government were unpopular.    As I recall it, it was one of those schemes dreamed up by politician-lawyers and the lawyerly types who tend to get control of so-called civil society non-profits.   And it would have been a nice idea if it wasn't an idea guaranteed to never be put into effect by Republican-fascists in enough places to ensure that the anti-People, pro-billionaire-millionaire-white supremacist party would control things.   Democrats in reliably Democratic majority places should always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS BE SUSPICIOUS OF "REFORMS" THAT THEY KNOW WILL NEVER BE PUT INTO EFFECT IN PLACES LIKE TEXAS or other white-supremacist majority states.   Facing reality even when that means you don't adopt the piously advocated, purity asserted plans of the scrupulous and, especially, lawyerly should be the universal rule, the norm and even written in the manuals of Democratic Party politics.  

Maine has suffered enormously through the idiotic scrupulosity of such "liberals" of the past and today., most of those I know of by name,  yes, lawyers.   But the United States as a whole has been put in danger by them.   It's time to rip up the Code of Liberal Ethics and fight fascism without two hands tied behind our backs.   I say any "reform" commission that ends up with the House in the hands of the Republican-fascists is no reform, it's sheer idiocy.   I wonder if the reason Newsome is willing to do that is that he isn't a lawyer,  a profession that, despite what you see in TV and movie fiction,  makes big money through cowardice and surrender to evil    I wonder if the reason that the governor of the third largest state,  Kathy Hochul hasn't proposed that is because she's a lawyer. 

I will pray every day that if Democrats win back control of the government that they don't let the lawyers talk them out of really, really taking power and doing what's necessary to defeat Republican-fascism, that they do what the lawyer and law school teacher Obama never would have done and which Joe Biden should have certainly known he had to do - BREAK THE RULES, THE NORMS AND WHAT IT SAID IN THE MANUALS BECAUSE EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY ARE THE ONLY LEGITIMATE THINGS IN GOVERNING.   As I've mentioned, my nightmare is that the next Democratic president will appoint another Merrick Garland who cares more about keeping his own lily white hands clean and not the breath of scandal away from his name,  a goddamned "institutionalist" who cares more about the "DoJ" than he does democracy as Attorney General.  And if that's not enough to keep me awake at night, the lawyers in the Senate and House will be there to surrender egalitarian democracy to the jaws of Republican-fascism.   And then there's the Republican-fascist stacked judiciary.   We need a rule-breaker, even more so a norms-breaker and someone who will order the manuals be rewritten to take reality and hard experience into account.   If Gavin Newsom is that person,  I now have fewer doubts than I did the day before yesterday.   He did so as Mayor of San Francisco when he started issuing same-sex marriage licenses before the country, temporarily, caught up to him.   I have some deep disagreements with him, none more so than over the homeless but I think he'd try to do something more effective to house them than the alternatives would.    If he became the nominee, his first wife, the psycho-fascist Kimberly Gilfoyle would be a problem.   But so far he's looking like our best chance to save democracy.  

*   I remember what motivated me to finally post something on that blog I'd set up but hadn't posted to was hearing the smarmy Scott Simon on NPR's Weekend Edition scolding about some Democrat not rolling over backward to be fair to some Republican-fascist, otherwise I'd have dealt with the first one first.   I loathe Scott Simon.  

Are RFK jr. And His Sleazy Colleagues Chasing Another Ambulance?

AS SOON AS I HEARD LITTLE BOBBY say:

Nobody blamed The New York Times for spreading that disinformation that football can cause injuries.

to deflect his role in motivating the guy who murdered a cop as he shot hundreds of rounds at the CDC campus the other day, the first thing I thought is what a massive fucking liar that scumbag lawyer was.  Have I mentioned that Little Bobby Kennedy is one of the things that definitively put me off of that scumbag profession?   I mean in the last several days?   

If there's one thing that is known about football without any possible question of it being a fact IT IS THAT IT CAUSES INJURIES.   The first recorded deaths FROM INJURIES WHILE PLAYING THE GAME date from the earliest years of the game in the late 19th century.   Teddy Roosevelt named a commission during his administration to address the massive number of deaths from the game.  Though I am within my rights, due to what the lying scumbag said to include that,  I assume the scumbag lying lawyer was denying the clear fact that among those injuries are long term and often fatal brain injuries - another fact as clear as any about the favorite sport of his family.  It was one of the things that drove poor Ted's first wife to drugs and mental illness that the assholes in that family made fun of her during their famous touch football games.   

But, of course, that fucking liar of a lawyer, with all of the arrogance of the worst of his kind lies about vaccines and, as we found during the questioning of him during his confirmation hearing  the scumbag lawyer liar intends to keep on profiting perhaps in the tens of millions of dollars off of his anti-vaxx ambulance chasing which he is currently providing with lies for the courtroom about the safety and efficacy of vaccines.  

So,  I have to wonder if he and his fellow scumbag liar lawyer colleagues are hoping to cash in on defending football whether professionally or at the college or high-school or even pee-wee levels as they are sued by those that industry feeds off of.  

The Trump regime is full to the top of scumbags but Kennedy is in a class of his own both trading off of his family name but far worse than that in what he's doing which has the potential to, over time, get millions killed.   And I have ever confidence that he's planning in his worm rotted brain, to profit off of it. 

I hate that guy and I'm not ashamed to admit it. 

Update:  The college-credentialed "r" word journalist and resident wit at Duncan's idea of an athenaeum and Little Bobby level liar wants to post a comment that's especially stupid even for him.   If someone other than him begs me to post it,  I will and I will answer it.   He's at the Pee Wee Herman level of stupidity without the late Paul Ruben's talent or intelligence.   Writing pop reviews for an ad flyer must have been close to the minimal requirements to be an American journalist in the age of the Sullivan decision.   I haven't considered that decision as the reason that American journalism, briefly and in part once somewhat better than the Hearst-Pulitzer period has gone even stupider than it traditionally had been but it may not be just a coincidence that it happened in the same timeline as that decision brought us to fascism. 

Israel Is a Genocidal Apartheid State - Hate Mail

Katie Halper,  Dr. Feroze Sidwha and Dr. Mark Perlmutter talk about just a few of the atrocities the so-called "IDF" have committed in Gaza and the Israeli government supports in the West Bank, including the IDF burying Palestinian children alive.   

Katie Halper says that opposing Zionism is a mitzvah.   I don't have the right to say that but I would say it's a mortal sin for a Christian to not oppose "Christian" Zionism.   

Back in 2006 when I first wrote about the disaster that Israel is, in reality,  I made a prediction that I think is coming true:

Their alliance with fundamentalist “christians” should be all the evidence you need of their stupidity if not duplicity. End timers have only two uses for Jews, especially Israelis. Jews are either to be converted to “christianity”, perhaps by force eventually, or they are extras waiting to die in their pre-enactment battle fantasies based on the Book of Revelations. As the events around Lebanon this month show, the fundamentalist ghouls can hardly wait for the real slaughter to begin. Their script calls for Israelis to die in the millions.

Failing the fundamentalists’ favorite wish, Americans of future times will grow weary of supporting Israel if it is engaged in endless wars, endless conflicts and, especially, if idiocy on the level of this war in Lebanon continues. A constantly attacked Israel will become increasingly militarized and isolated and paranoid. With that will come the destruction of democracy. A nationalistic, perhaps theocratic and despotic Israel is certainly nothing that the vast, vast majority of Israelis or Americans want to see. If someone can convince me that isn’t where it is headed I’d really really like to believe otherwise.

I have every confidence that these ideas have been thought about in Israel. I can’t believe anything I’m writing here hasn’t been more fully considered there where investigating every contingency is a matter of life and death.

I was clearly wrong about a majority of Israelis not wanting that because it was in their hands and no one elses to keep that from happening and they haven't. 

Elsewhere at that time I said in all sincerity that I would be in favor of admitting Israelis who hadn't committed war crimes into the US as full citizens.   At the time I believed I was talking about the large majority of Israelis who were innocent of the crimes of the Israeli government.   Now I'm pretty certain that it would be a minority of Israelis who didn't have blood on their hands.   Which is sad but, especially if the poll are right, is true.   I would not want any former members of the IDF here, we've got more than enough home grown fascists already.  I'm less willing to pretend that Israel deserves the benefit of any doubt,  they'd already lost the right to that by 1980. 

Summer Rerun Brokeback Mountain, Good Story, Meh! Movie, Great Opera Has It Really Been 20 Years Since The Movie?

Note:   Hearing it was the 20th anniversary of the release of that horse opera I went back to see what I'd written about it.  Here's something I think is worth going over again.   You might want to read the brawl at the original posting which featured mostly the superior observations of RMJ and the opposite from you know who and one of his side-kicks and with minimal content from me.   I found it interesting  

Friday, November 18, 2016

I've Never Heard Liberals Say "Mansion Trash" or "Penthouse Trash" The People Who Really Gave Us Trump

I suspect that, unlike most of the people who throw around the term "trailer trash" and who use that form of housing as a term of disparagement, I've known a lot of people who lived in trailers.  Most of them are quite decent people who have that most unforgivable of conditions even among the allegedly liberal, being poor*.

Having gone to college, knowing lots of college faculty, having spent time among the Ivy League class of people, I also have had a chance to see the clean, well coiffed and manicured wealthy up close and in their element and. as well, the academic and intellectual class.   I will say that they've got nothing on the people who live in trailers by way of trashy behavior.  If anything, more of the people I've known who live in trailers have higher morals than the wealthy and well-educated, a number of them have more sense, as well.

I can't talk about this without again bringing up the main character in Brokeback Mountain, Ennis Del Mar and that Annie Proulx not only put him, that most sympathetic of tragic figures among the liberal elite, in a trailer,   And the admirable Ms. Proulx, not only put him in a dilapidated trailer, she made him what would be considered "trailer trash" from the start, having him urinate in the sink.   I doubt anyone I know who lives in a trailer does that, though almost every man I've known who lives in a trailer has a wife who wouldn't put up with that.

But urinating in a sink, if it's your sink and no one else uses it, is a crime against your own sanitation, it isn't rank amorality and moral depravity of the kind our elites envelop the world in.   Reading about how Charles Kushner, Ivanka Trumps father in law father got back at his own sister and brother-in-law for turning states witness against him.

Now he has stepped down as chairman of his company. His days as a political force both nationally and in New Jersey are over. Saddest of all, he has shattered his once close-knit family. The days when the Kushner clan—Charles and his three siblings and all their spouses and kids and grandkids—would travel to Miami together for Passover are long gone. He and his older brother, Murray, have not spoken in more than two years as a result of a bitter lawsuit over money Murray believed Charles owed him from deals they had done together—a lawsuit that Charles Kushner’s supporters claim opened the door for the U.S. Attorney’s investigation into his campaign-finance activities.

And, of course, to add to the horror, the federal witnesses he had attempted to retaliate against were his sister and brother-in-law, who were cooperating with that same investigation. Kushner paid a prostitute $10,000 to lure his brother-in-law to a motel room at the Red Bull Inn in Bridgewater to have sex with him. A hidden camera recorded the activity, and Kushner sent the lurid tape to his sister, making sure the tape arrived on the day of a family party.

As he sat in his office less than 24 hours after his guilty plea, the phone rang. The caller couldn’t have been more unexpected—it was Governor Jim McGreevey. Though Kushner had given the governor more than $1.5 million for his two races and was instrumental in his rise to power, the two had barely spoken in months.

I don't know anyone who lives in a trailer who has ever done anything worse than these guys and their tale of trashiness could be met with equally trashy stories from the millionaire and billionaire class thousands of times.  You wonder why liberals don't put the blame for the creation and election of Trump where it really belongs, with this class of trash.  Could it be because their alleged liberalism is a manifestation of upper class snobbery far more than any real devotion to economic justice?  Could it be because it's far less risky to kick down than up?   Or could it be that they're really just not liberal?

The rich class, beyond any doubt, contains a far, far higher percentage of people who engage in the trashiest of behavior than the poorer class, yet it's poor people who are blanketed with the behavior of the worst of them.  Rich people hire lawyers and lobbyists and buy politicians and judges to make their trashiest behavior legal and allowed, they get praise for it in the well paid media, staffed by rich people - look at Trump.   A real difference in what gets called "liberal" and what gets called "conservative" in the United States, Britain and elsewhere is in which poor people are the objects of their scorn and hatred.   Conservatives in the United States focus theirs on Black People, Latinos, and others while treating poor whites as stupid people who can be manipulated into a resource, acting as their tools.  Alleged liberals, those people who are always congratulating themselves on their brilliance,  aid them by heaping scorn and derision on poor white people while sentimentalizing the poverty of Black People and Latinos.    The liberal supported American media has been part of the right-wing's gaming of the stupidity and hypocrisy of alleged liberals to their political and, so, financial advantage.  In this, the biggest dopes of all have been liberals of the type who have not learned a single thing in the past half-century of what happens when they play along with this.

As I said, to the fury of several people, after watching them for more than half a century, secular liberals are about the stupidest political identity, the kind who can go on with a rotten and stupidly self-defeating habit as it fails and fails again and again. They really are stupider than the Sneetches in Dr. Suess's story.  They learned from getting cheated through their own stupidity.  I see little sign that many liberals have or will.

I put any hope for liberalism learning and not acting so stupidly on those who put egalitarian democracy and justice before their own preening self-congratulation.  The kind of people who wouldn't think in terms like "trailer trash" or find it fun to say it because they know it is wrong and the don't want to hurt people.

*  I used to wonder what the difference between living in a trailer was and living in one of the "tiny houses" that may still be a fad among such wealthy people.   I suspect the difference is in the price per square foot.  When I first started reading about the "tiny house movement" my first thought was of small houses that would be good for poor people to live in, then I saw the bijoux boxes that, somehow, seem to get bigger and bigger in the "tiny house movement" little custom made mansions that have more to do with Thomas Jefferson's useless garden folly than with Thoreau's cabin or the Mad Houser's outlaw huts for the destitute.   I can't think of anything more trashy than some of the Faberge class tiny houses I've seen.  They turn my stomach in a way that reading about Ennis Del Mar pissing in his sink doesn't.

Update:  An example is demanded.  Well, here's what the oh, so amusing Rude Pundit had to say recently.

My friend Duke from West Virginia said something that had crossed my mind but had shoved aside as bitterness: "Fuck the white working class. Obama gave them health insurance and a chance to get new jobs and they hated him. Fuck them." 

Without thinking, I immediately agreed, and as soon as I did, it made total sense. "You're right. Democrats need to abandon the white working class." By "abandon," I mean not trying to desperately court the votes of people who always vote against their best interests and against those who are trying to help them. See, Democrats don't have a working class white people problem. Working class white people have the problem. When you vote against those who are trying to help you for the very people who have harmed you, then you are not dealing with rational thought.

Yeah, that's patronizing and elitist. But nearly half of the voters in a presidential election chose the man who regularly lied to them. So you'll have to forget it if you want me to romanticize and normalize their ignorance.

By the way, that ignorance is a product of years of Republican fuckery at the local level to assure them that they do not get educated. That long game has finally paid off big time.

Just who does he think has benefited from large numbers of the white underclass believing this is how liberals think about them for most of the past fifty years?   And why does a smart guy like him figure that pattern won't continue?

Poor white people will make common cause with poor Black People and poor Latinos before such liberals give up their preening conceit.

Update 2:  I've pointed out who voted for Trump, white people in our age group whose median income is about $72,000 a year.  Higher in income and older and whiter than those who voted for Hillary Clinton.   If you want to blame anyone for electing Trump, Simps, it's more likely to be people who were grooving with you in college than not.

Update 2025:  You don't have to take my word for it,  you can hear and watch the opera.   Annie Proulx did a really, surprisingly good job with the libretto, which is a far different thing from writing a prose story.   I have no doubt at all that of all his many works this is the one work of Charles Wuorinen that will enter into the repertoire.   If he has "a" masterpiece  this is it.