Summer of Stupid

Because the US has a constant surplus of genuinely stupid, credulous dupes who rilly rilly care about shit, but simply cannot be bothered enough to find out whether it's even true or not, there is always a running narrative or several at any given moment that serve only to reinforce that basic concept.

Here are three such current notions, and why they're fucking dumb, as are their adherents:

1. Voting by mail is inherently fraudulent.
   Given that its biggest proponent has been voting by mail long before he threw his head-ferret into the political ring, this one shouldn't even need to be debunked. And yet, because there is a gross ratio of simpletons who perceive a linear correlation between repetition and veracity -- in other words, the more you repeat the lie, the more they buy it -- it needs to be debunked.
   
   So here's the thing:  it's not even worth bothering with trucking out the usual statistical data showing that fraud by mail ballot is almost literally (and is statistically) nonexistent. Instead, let's think for a hot second about the mechanics of the mail-ballot process. Preznit Genius Q. Dealmaker would have his fan-club of shitheads and suckers believe that anyone could simply run down to Kinko's with their absentee ballot, and run off infinity copies, and pass them off as "real" (i.e., fraudulent) votes.
   
   Okay. Go ahead and try it. (Especially you Trumptards out there -- I fucking encourage you to try it, because it'll be a complete waste of your disability check.) Take your mail-in ballot and run off, say, a thousand copies. If you're feeling extra ambitious, make it a million copies. The folks at the copy shop will looove you.
   
   So. You've made your hundreds or thousands of copies of your ballot, right? Now you take them home, and spend x number of hours filling them all out, meticulously, methodically, consistently. You are gonna TURN THIS ELECTION ROUND, Y'ALL. Why doesn't everyone on the mail-in scam do this? you ask yourself. How the fuck did I get to be so much smarter than everyone else?
   
   Then, as you finish filling out ballot #9,999 or the ten thousand you made with your crafty little scheme, you notice a small but important detail -- the ballot registry number. You see, whether you vote in person or by mail, you have to register, and when you do that, the county verifies your residence -- to prevent duplication, you see -- and assigns you a number on the county roster. Since your "ballots" are all copies, it's all the same number, ten thousand times.
   
   Which means that once the county sees your ballot -- any one of the ten thousand or so you paid money to copy, and spent time to fill out, they check you off on the county roster. You voted, it's done. You can send the entire stack in if it floats your boat, but they will throw it all away -- but not before, if they're worth half a shit at their job, coming after you and slapping you with a fat fine for voter fraud.
   
   It's a concentric ring of increasingly stupid and obvious lies -- not only does Dear Leader and his entire claque vote by mail, and not only is fraud statistically nonexistent by mail-in ballots, it is mechanically and procedurally impossible to do so to any meaningful degree. You have to literally have no earthly clue how the process works -- like, at all -- to buy this one.


2. Statues and monuments are intended to be educational tools.
   This one is just too easy. No doubt you have seen by now some tedious version of the usual Facebook uncle YEW CAIN'T TAKE ARRR HISSTRY nonsense, as a response to the wave of statue-toppling going on right now.
   
   So go ahead and think for a second how much you know about American history -- or any history -- and how much of that knowledge was gleaned from looking at statues or monuments.
   
   Those cultural objects, whatever their values, are not intended to educate, but commemorate -- and in the case of the participation trophies cluttering the south, intimidate. That is not a "modern" "liberal" interpretation, four or five generations removed from the installation of such things, it was explicitly stated as such at the time. It was part of the benediction and investiture of those abominations.
   
   Consider:  what other country in the world insists on keeping monuments to people who took up arms against their own country and lost badly, names military bases after traitors and losers? Name one other country that honors enemy combatants. Go ahead, we'll wait.
   
   And yet, I'll wager that the average German knows a hell of a lot more about the Nazi regime than the average southerner knows about the confederate regime. No one "learns" anything of value from a statue or monument, even if it's of Abraham Lincoln or Albert Einstein. At best you get a plaque with fifty or a hundred words containing some decontextualized specifics about the honoree.
   
   But if you wanted to learn something about Einstein or Lincoln, if you wanted to get educated about the "history" of the confederacy and its participants and adherents, you'd read a fucking book. They still have those, you know. The library in your town is still free. I'll bet they have at least one book about Jeff Davis or Bobby Lee or Albert Pike, or whichever scumbag traitor shitbird they tore down today.
   
   The people who claim that participation trophies are the best -- or even a good, or marginally reliable -- source of information or "history" are participating in a mass self-delusion, a sort of line-dancing of evasion. They don't know the history, and don't want to know. They want to pretend that all interpretations are equally valid, even the empirically false ones, even the versions based on pure hatred and blatant racism, and they want you to join them in that pretense.
   
   They don't want to keep slave-owner statues and plantation "tours" because those things present a more complete picture of a complex time. They want to keep those things because they validate a vision and a goal of returning to a time where certain people ruled the roost, and everyone else knew their place.
   
   But let's call the lie for what it really is -- nobody ever came away from a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest or whatever traitor-slaver dirtbag you prefer, knowing more useful information about that person and the context and time they operated in, than they did before they stepped up to the plaque and moved their lips to the inscription.


3. Impeachment is a waste of time if you know you can't win.
   In the interest of fairness, and mostly because these people piss me off as much as confederate apologists piss me off, let's take a look at a rather stout beam of current liberal and Democratic orthodoxy.
   
   Now, if you are not too distracted by the homilies of inept confederate sculpture, you may have seen in the onrushing torrent of political coverage that since his sham impeachment trial a few months ago, the chief executive has continued to act in ways that not only countermand and subvert the national interest, but are blatantly illegal and unconstitutional.
   
   It turns out also that the current attorney general, a self-proclaimed culture paladin whose own father was the very same pederast headmaster who hired one Jeffrey Epstein, has openly played an active role in purging the ranks of the "Justice" Department, squashing inconvenient investigations, and generally making no secret of his goal of completing the job of turning this country into a fully fledged banana republic.
   
   The logical and moral thing to do would be for the House of Representatives (pay particular attention to the last word of that name) to use every tool at their disposal to investigate these ongoing misdeeds, with the goal of prosecuting and trying them in public, for the benefit of same. Beyond simply prosecuting and punishing these crimes as such, the ancillary goals would be to make it as inconvenient as possible for the criminals to continue their activities, as well as make it clear to them that their actions will not go without a response.
   
   Since the impeachment farce, which showed beyond all doubt that the Republicon senators have been irretrievably corrupted and must be voted out of office as soon as possible, the Democratic response to further calls for investigation and prosecution have been met with limp responses of "wait till November," as if people will actually get the chance to cast a vote and get it counted without undue interference.
   
   (Turns out there is no need to concoct a baroque scheme to mass-copy mail-in ballots, or bus in illegals from Massachusetts across the New Hampshire border. All you need to do is have vested financial interest with the companies that produce electronic voting machines for contentious states, and then make sure that the secretaries of state in those places can be bought. See the great state of Georgia for the most egregious example, but Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, and others are all following suit in various ways.)
   
   Of course a second impeachment of Trump, or a first impeachment of Barr, will end in acquittal by the Senate. So what? Do it anyway. Do it because it's your fucking job. See, there already was an election mandating the investigation of corruption. That was that "blue wave" of 2018, remember? You're representatives, and now it is time to represent. You really may not have another shot at this.
   
   Either the law means something, or it doesn't. Either corruption is something that should be called out and publicly shamed for what it is at every opportunity and every occurrence, or not. There is a disagreement on what "failure" means in this context. It does not mean trying and not succeeding in conviction, it means not trying at all, which is much more empowering and validating to the criminals than putting up a good fight and maybe not getting across the finish line.
   
   Look at how federal prosecutors have used creative tactics to secure convictions against mobsters over the years, from Al Capone to John Gotti. It frequently takes years, and multiple tries, and even questionable methods sometimes. But persistence is key, and while the odds may be slim, they're always better than pre-emptively giving up.
   
   Even the political aspect of trying makes more sense. The Democrats' problem typically is finding ways to inspire passion and action in its ranks. Who the fuck is inspired by yeah, we know they're guilty as hell, but let's wait six months and see if we're still allowed to vote?
   
   We voted, assholes, and it was clear at the time what we were voting for. So do it, not with narrowly-drawn articles that a chimp could scramble out of, but with a barrage of throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks charges. Hammer them for fucking jaywalking. Hammer them for being assholes. Hammer them because you don't like the color of their suits. Whatever.
   
   It's truly sad that a moral abomination of a political party has such a handle on marketing its horrific policies, but a lot of that boils down to passion. They may be nuts, they may be assholes, but they're all-in on those things. They don't second-guess, they don't worry about facts, or what works. They investigated the Benghazi nothingburger nine times, and when they still came up flat, they trotted it out at their convention to whip up the rubes. It was bullshit, but it worked where they needed it to work.
   
   What might it be like if the Democrats understood the gunfight for what it was, and finally dropped their Spork of Decorum™ and picked up a fucking MAC-10 and went to town?