== Laugh… because it hurts ==
The Onion can make you cry, when the humor is so on-target.
Har! If only! We are counting on the Supreme Court to save us. Which means the superhero Anthony Kennedy.
Study Finds First Life Forms Migrated To Earth Via Interplanetary Land Bridge.
And (faux but accurate) quoth Paul Ryan: “This Shooting Isn’t About Gun Control We Refuse To Pass, It’s About Access To Mental Health Care We’re Continuing To Gut.”
And in what should have been satire… So it turns out the one thing that Fox-ists had that was factual, offering any evidence at all that the Obama Administration was out to get them, was a chimera, after all. After multiple investigations, inspectors found as many liberal-leaning groups were targeted for IRS attention as conservative ones. All the rest was paranoid fantasy, like black helicopters and lib’tards coming for yer guns.
== ...and hence, today's theme is... ==
Demand wagers! See the latest hysterical conspiracy theory, that this Saturday all the liberals will secretly, and in perfect-competent unison, pounce on all American conservatives, in a Night of the Long Knives. Say... wha...?
Demand wagers! See the latest hysterical conspiracy theory, that this Saturday all the liberals will secretly, and in perfect-competent unison, pounce on all American conservatives, in a Night of the Long Knives. Say... wha...?
There is only one way to defeat conspiracy-addict loons. Not one dire prediction about Obama's concentration camps for white people, run by UN black helicopters spraying alien-vegan contrail tofu while confiscating all the guns ever came true, even symbolically: hundreds of thousands of ravings! Sure, pointing that out only stokes their hatred of all facts and fact-people. But there is one method I've found: demand wagers! These confeds make bar-room bets all the time. It is the last place where they admit facts do matter.
"If you're so sure of your latest fantasy, and willing to torch the nation over your certainty, then put money down! Collect MY money when Alex Jones proves right! About anything. Ever!"
These good ol' boys have a name for a coward who yowls utter certainty, but shrinks back from putting money on it. And a worse name for someone who doesn't pay up.
Watch and laugh as your crazy uncle scuttles back and finds excuses. Oh sure, you won't make any money, but ... his wife is listening, quietly. And your aunt has a vote.
I'll get back to this theme, below... but first....
== Examples ==
Masha Gessen’s latest book about Vladimir Putin’s Russia: “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” is ambitious, timely, insightful and unsparing. See it reviewed in The Washington Post.
Trump To Values Voters: In America 'We Don't Worship Government, We Worship God'
Um, maybe. But when it comes to governance, you worship inherited plutocracy. No GOP policy doesn't serve the modern plantation lords.
What the founding fathers actually meant... An interesting, though certainly political, look at what gun laws were like in England and the American colonies and early in the republic. Claims of historical justification for “stand your ground” and open or concealed carry are, at-best, highly flawed.
Struggling to keep offering rationalizations for a shattering conservative alliance, the Worst Man in America keeps at it. “Democrats are the real abortion extremists.” Catering to the Confederate need for anecdotes and symbolism, and hatred of facts or statistics, George F. Will helps to maintain the outright lie that Democrats and liberals and leftists and all that mélange are as dogmatic, purist and crazy as conservatives have become. But he knows that’s not true. For every anecdotal far-lefty crazy (and I freely avow there are enough to leave a noxious stink) there are hundreds of moderate and reasonable American fact-loving pragmatists who know that protecting abortion rights should be accompanied by concerted efforts at education and health that will make abortion rare.
== Dares and wagers! ==
Okay so back to today's topic. Jiminy. Donald Trump raves about his “high IQ” 22 times. Please, oh I dare you to submit to a test set by neutral parties and not a sycophant. In fact, where is the Trump opponent who consistently maintains an “I dare you!” site?
Now let's try statistics and facts. Name for me one unambiguous statistical metric of U.S. national or economic or middle class or even military health that could be both attributed to GOP policies and that markedly improved across the spans of either Bush administration. One... at all. Nearly all such metrics plummeted - and steeply - across the span of both Bushite regimes.
More than half of such metrics improved - especially for the middle class, but also all economic measures and yes, military readiness - under Clinton and Obama. These are hard outcomes, not anecdotes, and outcomes should matter to pragmatic adults. Outcomes like small business startups, entrepreneurship and other health signs of capitalism that ALWAYS plummet under GOP rule. Also military readiness, which was 100% for all units under Clinton and plummeted to 0% under Bush and is now back above 50%.
Conservatives should care about all of those things. One sign of a rigid mind is to ignore facts and outcomes in favor of dogma.
As your first wager, demand that your crazy uncle name one exception. One fact using professions not warred upon by the Fox cult. A list that ranges from scientists, teachers, journalists, doctors, civil servants etc... now all the way to the FBI, Intelligence agencies and other "deep state" enemies of the confederacy, including the US military officer corps. Have him name one exception. Dare him to name one!
One. Even one. Just one.
== International ==
Reports The Guardian: “Saudi authorities have taken an “unprecedented” step to tackle Islamic extremism by setting up a council of scholars to vet religious teachings around the world.”
Yeah? I’ll believe it when your textbooks for children aren’t state secrets, because of all the “death to Jews and infidels” stuff therein. When the madrassas you finance around the world stop preaching hatred. When radicals like ISIS and Taliban stop importing Saudi textbooks for their own schools, scratching out and replacing just a few paragraphs here and there supporting the monarchy, but accepting the baseline Wahabbism as paramount. And when you stop waging war against America and its values through your well-paid shills and politicians on the US right.
Yeah? I’ll believe it when your textbooks for children aren’t state secrets, because of all the “death to Jews and infidels” stuff therein. When the madrassas you finance around the world stop preaching hatred. When radicals like ISIS and Taliban stop importing Saudi textbooks for their own schools, scratching out and replacing just a few paragraphs here and there supporting the monarchy, but accepting the baseline Wahabbism as paramount. And when you stop waging war against America and its values through your well-paid shills and politicians on the US right.
Putin says Americans should not disrespect Trump: "the president of the United States does not need any advice because one has to possess certain talent and go through this trial to be elected, even without having the experience of such big administrative work."
== The war on expertise and knowledge and facts ==
I'll repeat till I am blue in the face. This is the one issue they cannot evade! Their all out war on all folks who know stuff.
“There has always been a disturbing strand of anti-intellectualism in American life… but never has an occupant of the White House exhibited such a toxic mix of ignorance and mendacity, such lack of intellectual curiosity and disregard for rigorous analysis (despite his untested boast that his IQ is “one of the highest,” certainly higher than Obama’s and a host of other worthies’).” writes Ariel Dorfman in Trump's War on Knowledge.
“There has always been a disturbing strand of anti-intellectualism in American life… but never has an occupant of the White House exhibited such a toxic mix of ignorance and mendacity, such lack of intellectual curiosity and disregard for rigorous analysis (despite his untested boast that his IQ is “one of the highest,” certainly higher than Obama’s and a host of other worthies’).” writes Ariel Dorfman in Trump's War on Knowledge.
“The experts are terrible,” Donald Trump said during his campaign. “Look at the mess we’re in with all these experts that we have.” … except, that it’s another lie. Almost every measure of national and international health, peace, prosperity etc has improved and guess what, the folks who know stuff actually know stuff.
Yes, America’s lower middle class has felt things slip. But the villains are the Rupert Murdochs, Robert Mercers and Donald Trumps who are rebuilding feudalism. Read this article!
Then parse the right’s central mythos! It goes like this:
Then parse the right’s central mythos! It goes like this:
We all know that: "Just because someone is smart and knows a lot, that doesn't automatically make them wise."
But after 25 years of Fox hypnosis, this true statement has been twisted into something cancerous:
"Any and all people who are smart and know a lot, are therefore automatically unwise."
I am astonished it’s not been clearly and openly elucidated. The first statement is true. The second - jibbering loony - is now a core catechism of the confederacy.
== for more on the war against fact users... ==
See Tom Nichols: The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters.
== for more on the war against fact users... ==
See Tom Nichols: The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters.
Of course, blatantly, the average person who has studied earnestly and tried to understand is wiser (again, on AVERAGE) than those who deliberately chose to remain incurious and ignorant. When cornered, even the most vehement alt-righter admits that. But cornering them takes effort.
Hatred of universities and people with knowledge and skill now extends from the war on science to journalism, teaching, medicine, economics, civil servants… and lately the “deep state” conspiring villains of the FBI, the intelligence agencies and the U.S. military officer corps.
This bedlam serves one purpose, to discredit any “elites” who might stand in the way of a return to feudalism by the super rich, which was the pattern of 6000 years that America rebelled against. The Confederacy has always been a tool to restore feudalism. only this time it has done what it could not do in the 1860s. Taken Washington.
Trump is not the disease, he is a surface symptom.
Concluding this section… I wouldn’t put things the way my dear friend Harlan Ellison puts it, below. In fact, I never put things the way Harlan does. No adult would. But his brilliance is always at work:
“I have to admit to being an elitist, I'm sorry. You know, one of the few things you can be arrested for is being an elitist. You can run around the street saying God is dead, and people won't like you, but you're not going to be hated. You can preach the violent overthrow of McDonald's and you'll get away with it, but all you have to say is that, in fact, there are some people who are better than others, and it has nothing to do with race or ethnic background or color or anything like that. What it has to do with is who's got the brains.”
--Harlan Ellison
Just so we’re clear… The UK Brexit campaign was also a war on expertise.
== The Fact-Compiler ==
Plop your beloved confederate aunt and uncle down before a TV and have them sit through a complete Rachel Maddow segment. Promise you’ll sit through an equivalent amount of Hannity! And compare the ratio of lies. Pick and choose. Maddow is always cogent and fact-filled, but once a week or so, she absolutely kills. In this one (October 19) she connects the dots showing one reason why four American soldiers died in Niger, and why then the President strenuously ignored and then distracted from it. And yes, it is worse than Benghazi.
Only when Maddow calls the precipitating event "inexplicable," consider that most decisions made by this administration have an explicable root... orders from Moscow.
