Self-Cancelling

I suppose the big "news" of the day is the back-to-back resignations of Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, from the NY Times and New York Magazine respectively. I assume they are either going to join forces with their tiresome ankle-biting and start some sort of "you can't cancel me" online portal, just as soon as the Koch check clears, or they'll become full-time sidekicks on Bill Maher's Weekly Cancel Culture Zoom Meeting, since they basically alternate weeks there anyway.

Just as political junkies across the spectrum often forget that most people don't engage with that dismal subject to any great depth or breadth, so too do they forget that 95% of the public couldn't identify Weiss or Sully or Bobo or Modo or Peggy Noonan or whoever. Not only have I never had anyone ever ask me if I had read something any of the op-ed dupes had written, I would be hard-pressed to recall the last time -- or any time -- I had read anything from most of them that was at all interesting or insightful.

Most op-ed columnists at these "elite" publications envision a smart-set salon consisting of themselves and their peers and colleagues, exchanging witty bon mots over appletinis and cucumber-and-watercress sandwiches about the weasels who run the country. They are not talking to you, Tonstant Weader, they are talking to each other, posing and preening like fucking show cats, never actually saying anything interesting or challenging.

Since they have no real-world experience, they are acutely unaware of just how out-of-touch they are. The rabble in the street, with their pedestrian protests and quotidian concerns, occasionally make enough noise to be heard way up on the 23rd floor of the ivory tower, but it's an annoyance to Our Betters, who again have never held an actual job but have countless recommendations on how you should do yours.

This "cancel culture" bullshit is one of the more annoying catch-phrases from the past year or so, made all the more annoying as it gains currency among a certain type of schmuck. I think I've made myself pretty clear on the subject multiple times, so I won't belabor the issue here. I will say that I think it's pretty fucking rich that these sinecured crybabies have the stones to take to their elite gatekeeper platforms and whine over and over again about how mean Twitter is to them, how it's just like the French Revolution or Kristallnacht.

I mean, you do get how, if you're complaining about being silenced, but you're voicing those complaints in Harper's or the Times or National Review or whatever, it's literally the opposite of what you're saying. You know? Go to Bari Weiss' own website and check out her CV. She's been on The View, for fuck's sake. I've seen her on Maher's show at least a half-dozen times in the last couple years. She's been writing for the New York Fucking Times. Yeah, damn, real tumbrels and guillotines there.

As with any viral movement, there are excesses. I don't think a young person should be run out of her own family's business because someone dredged up some shit from eight years ago that she apologized for. I don't see the benefit in firing someone for being dumb enough to wear blackface at a Halloween party. Some of this is pre-emptive corporate ass-covering though, the HR department trying to get out in front of something they could probably just brass out for a couple weeks if they really wanted to. It's not like we have a memory or an attention span anymore.

Elite opinion-mongers are a different breed of cat, though. James Bennet got his ass fired because not only did he not see anything wrong with giving a reactionary politician a free soapbox and megaphone to propose using American military troops on street demonstrators, he inadvertently admitted that, as editor-in-chief, he hadn't even read the piece first. Bennet had to go because the Times knew it had fucked up, that its hackcess White House Tiger Beat coverage has already lost subscribers, and that people are losing patience with the Times' routine bad-faith both-siderism.

The "cancel culture" phrase is already worn out; a more accurate term would be "crybaby culture" or "consequence culture" or accountability culture. That's what this is really all about -- spoiled elites doing sloppy work, put off that the peons are insufficiently grateful for the road apples of wisdom that are generously plopped onto the pages of the corporate media's factories of consent.

Head Down, Move Forward

If you're tired of bearing witness to this sort of ongoing bullshit, you have but one option, and it's a horrendously slim chance at best:  vote.

And it's even worse than that, takes more effort:  vote every day, with your wallet as well as your ballot; pay attention to everything, so that you know what and who you're voting for, how people and organizations are interconnected, and frequently in cahoots.

Sounds like work. Even in the best of times, whenever those were, if they ever existed, being a citizen was always intended to be something of a job. To remain literate and engaged and critically thoughtful is an endless process, and in a society that has conditioned itself to be "productive" and "goal-oriented" when it's not also telling you to consume and don't ask too many questions, takes real time and effort and commitment.

It's going to be a steady, determined trudge, if it even gets accomplished at all. There's much more to it than merely getting rid of Trump and flipping the Senate. This will take a decade or maybe a full generation of committed effort, of not getting distracted or drawn into the weeds of sealions and culture warriors. Either you've had enough of this shit, or you haven't.

After the protests are over and people go home, the real work begins. Hopefully they haven't been randomly battered by bored and hostile jackboots seething in their secret police uniforms, just looking for a defenseless hippie to punch, since they don't go after people who can actually defend themselves.

Ask yourself what sort of person maces a sitting teenage girl, and then kicks her in the face, or shoves an elderly cancer patient into a sidewalk, cracking his skull, and just walks on by. Or pepper-sprays people randomly, for nothing more than exercising their rights to peacefully assemble and air their grievances.

Look, if your profession -- which has a lower casualty rate than farmers and roofers -- has you in such an eternal state of fearful over-vigilance, maybe it's time to look at other career options. A good plumber or electrician can make a shitload of money, and never have to worry about the next person they pull over being some MS-13 nothing-to-lose psychopath out of a Law & Order episode. I have a hell of a lot more respect for someone who knows their limitations and changes tack, over someone who doubles down on fear and force and cultural insularity, and takes out their frustrations on people who can't fight back and have no recourse to the law.

We can play the "not all cops / not all protesters" game all day, but only one of those groups gets away routinely with the indiscriminate use of excessive, deadly force on innocent people. Only one of those groups, when caught on video indisputably committing a horrible, violent crime, instantly gets the benefits of a powerful union backing him, and his colleagues across the country violently proclaiming their unwavering support for more damage to the civilians they are supposed to protect and serve. The individuals in one of those groups gets held accountable; the other group, not so much.

Some cities have tried to leaven the violent chaos by posting cutesy videos of their forces, in full riot gear, line dancing with the protesters or some such. In some cases, less than an hour after the performance, they're back to cracking skulls, caging groups of peaceful marchers so they can gas them some more.

Save the dance videos, guys. Just stop hurting harmless people. You keep hearing stories about looters, but there sure don't seem to be any videos of cops gang-tackling or baton-whipping them. It seems to be almost exclusively people trying to speak peacefully and reason with them, before a rubber bullet explodes their eyeball or they get maced or whatever. Takes a real tough guy to beat the shit out someone who can't or won't fight back.

So vote, and don't just blindly vote for Generic Democrat I Think I've Heard Of. Most major cities are run by Democratic mayors and Democratic councils and city officials, and they are clearly all terrified of these militarized vigilante gangs roaming their streets, abusing powerless civilians under the color of misused authoritah.

No, when it comes to city government, you need people who are going to offer two options to the corrupt edifice of urban law enforcement -- repair or replace. No more urban-warfare toys from the Army. No more "training" like you're going into the IDF to patrol the Gaza Strip. No more winking at associations with white-power or insurrectionist groups. No more "qualified immunity" bullshit. No more civil asset forfeiture giving law enforcement agencies a vested interest in busting certain entities. No more quietly brushing under the rug the myriad abuses that never quite make the national radar.

If there's one thing about the protests that I might mildly quibble with, it's the idea that this is all about racism. Certainly racism is a significant component of this, but the Minneapolis Police Department has had this problem for a while. But the cop that murdered Philando Castile was Latino. The cop that murdered Justine Damond -- a pretty white woman! -- was Somali.

Remember the murder of poor Daniel Shaver, made to crawl and beg for his life before a gutless piece of shit perforated him anyway? White cop, white victim, bullshit trial, full acquittal and the motherfucker had the gall to collect disability because he was traumatized by the act of unnecessarily humiliating and murdering an innocent man in a hotel hallway. So now that cop -- who even now is only thirty years old -- got "medically retired" with a pension of $2,500/month. You think the video of George Floyd's murder is tough to watch (and it is), go back and watch the video of Daniel Shaver's murder.

(I'd actually like to give Philip Brailsford the benefit of the doubt on the PTSD thing. I hope he is haunted terribly by the memory of what he did to Daniel Shaver that night. It would be the merest sliver of justice if, on a nightly basis, Brailsford had to fight for decent sleep, only to have his slumber intruded by the smoky tendrils of a hazy memory of that hallway, he and his partner screaming contradictory, impossible commands at a terrified, sobbing man who was just blowing off some steam after work and minding his own fucking business, before killing him for no goddamned reason other than to prove that they could. Whether Brailsford lives another five or fifty or a hundred years, hopefully every night's attempt at rest is interrupted and punctuated by that memory. He deserves at least that much.)

The point is this -- we should have been having this discussion a long time ago. It should not have taken an indisputably incriminating video taken by a frightened seventeen-year-old girl to get people talking about what we all already knew. I am not in the "abolish cops" camp; I know too many of them who are and have been good and decent people who genuinely want to help their communities and keep people safe. They do exist. Collections of anecdata are not dispositive evidence, but it's not nothing, either. I don't want to punish good people in the process of punishing bad people.

But now is the time for that majority of good cops to find ways to step up and be part of getting rid of the bastards and assholes who make them all look bad by association. If they choose not to, they may not like the outcome that a distressed, dispossessed, disempowered populace decides for them. Your little friendly-stormtrooper dance videos do not offset all the broken necks and broken lives over the years, and the nameless, identity-free prison screws and "bortac" hard-asses currently "guarding" the nation's monuments and the "bunker baby" chief executive, a cheap dime-store Ceausescu whose biggest fear has always been being held accountable for who and what he's been his entire life.

Just stop hurting the harmless, and start holding each other accountable for doing that. Those two things alone would resolve about eighty percent of this.

Organized Crime

Read this thread, and try to picture the fuckers doing this shit -- shoving old people to the asphalt, shooting teenage girls in the eye with rubber bullets, "lighting up" people for the high crime of sitting on their own front porch -- and tell me they're not thugs and bullies and cowards. Not all cops, nor even most of them, but those cops? Yeah.

Thugs. Bullies. Cowards.

Thugs.

Bullies.

Cowards.

Those guys are neither protecting nor serving. Maybe the protesters should have shown up with Meal Team Six cosplay gear and assault rifles, threatening to lynch their elected representatives. Instead they're completely unarmed, but daring to criticize the people who show no respect to them in the first place, and are beaten and shot. Blinding reporters, launching projectiles at citizens in their own homes, infiltrating crowds in order to agitate and escalate, and give their colleagues an excuse to whup some ass.

And it's no surprise or coincidence that many of the same people who supported the rights of heavily-armed slobs to threaten and terrorize because DURR MUH HAIRCUT are insisting that these protesters must do what they're told. Certain people have to obey and comply, even if they're protesting peacefully and avoiding confrontation. See how that works?

On the positive side, Dear Leader now has something other than photos of his eldest daughter to jerk off to, while he cowers in his bunker. Like all fake tough guys, he loves this shit -- makes him feel like a big man without actually having to do anything or endanger himself, just like his entire life.

The endorsement between him and the paramilitary thugs is mutual. He literally told them to get rough with suspects, and they literally cheered him at the prospect. That actually happened, and we all saw the video. Each gives -- no, encourages -- the other to indulge in their worst impulses, completely unrestrained, unconcerned about anyone else's rights, in a country that can't lecture the rest of the world often enough about how all its inhabitants are created equal.

We've all heard the anecdotes over the years about how the high-octane grifters in the financial suites go to watch movies like The Wolf of Wall Street or The Big Short, and inevitably side with the thieves and looters, the moral monsters. Consider that we are currently being run by the people who watched, say, the Star Wars movies, and sided with the Empire. I'm putting it into a pop-culture metaphor to make it slightly more palatable, but the point is dead serious. Consider the sort of person who looks at a clear moral example in a universally known entertainment commodity, still decides to align themselves with the unmistakable bad guys, and now give that person unlimited power.

As I've been saying recently, when people talk about "saving America," they need to really think in granular detail about all that. Save what, and for whom, and how? There's a lot more to all that than just getting rid of Trump and his vile lackeys in the Senate. That's just the absolute bare minimum to start on what will be a generational project. Drumming violent fascists and racists out of public service employment is going to take a concerted effort for a number of years. They're like cockroaches -- if you see one on your floor, there's probably a nest in the wall.

Urban police forces are making it clear to all of us, whether we live in the cities or not, that they intend to behave like occupying armies. This is not an issue of "training" -- this is their training. Too many of them have been looking forward to something like this, the chance to beat or kill a libturd or hippie, and too few of them have the courage to speak out or resist or even just find another line of work, to walk away from the prospect of murdering the citizens you're supposed to be protecting.

The "few bad apples" theory doesn't work if the supposed majority of good apples never make any effort to clean up the barrel.

Nothing will be done about any of this. Anyone still counting themselves a Republicon is all-in. They support fascism and authoritarianism, no matter how they might verbally demur or rationalize all this. They're good with it. This is what they want. Democrats, on the other hand, are terrified at the possibility of ever being seen as even a micron off-target with being "law and order" or whatever you want to call it. If we can't beat peaceful, unarmed protesters, how can we hold the line against MS-13? That sort of thing.

Bedbug

Bret Stephens, like many of his ilk on the NY Times' sorry excuse for an op-ed page, continues to find new and more efficient ways to demonstrate why, even on the occasions when that paper manages to not fuck something up, it's just not worth bothering with anymore. At all.

As long as they continue to provide sinecures to lazy thinkers and shitty writers such as Stephens (and Brooks, Dowd, Douthat, Friedman, and several of their primary political stenographers), life continues to be simply too short to wade into the muck. You know what they're gonna say, how they're gonna say it, etc.

There is literally no point in reading such a publication anymore. I couldn't care less about their 1619 project. There are countless academic texts out there covering the same ground, better and more thoroughly. Go to a fucking library once in a while.

By now, if you're in the mix, you already know the broad strokes:

• little-known associate professor at GW University refers to Stephens as a "bedbug" in a barely-read tweet;
• Stephens (who is so diligently hard-working, he apparently has time to Google himself for untoward references) happens across the post and summarily challenges Karpf to come to his (Stephens') house and call him that to his face, in front of his wife and children;
• tweet naturally blows up and goes viral because of Stephens' whining;
• Stephens contacts Karpf's boss and tries (unsuccessfully) to get Karpf fired;
• Stephens tops of a week of win with a column so infantile and self-regarding, in a rational universe it would be cause to inform Stephens of his new tax status, and send him on about his way finding honest work.

Bear in mind that just a couple months ago, Stephens had a column chastising people for using the term "concentration camps" to refer to the, you know, concentration camps where we are forcibly confining, under inhumane conditions, refugees seeking legal asylum. And back in 2013, when the Obama Administration was trying to craft the JCPOA to rein in Iran's nuclear ambitions peacefully, Stephens wrote a column comparing Obama to Neville Chamberlain. Civility, y'all! Stephens, who is after all Jewish and spent much of his childhood in Mexico City, should actually know better than most about the implications of the things he writes. But his schtick is that of paid contrarian, and as such, once bought he stays bought.

Believe it or not, this is not to lambaste Stephens in particular. Frankly, anyone still reading him or the aforementioned page-monkeys alongside him deserve precisely what they get -- a paucity of any fresh thought or analysis, just the same litany of rearranged buzzwords one would expect from someone whose prime motive in life is to get invited to the elite Hamptons soirees.

Imagine the sort of inherited-wealth douchebag who spends six figures on their wedding and their kids' preschools and all that, and still has the balls to act like they earned every penny, and you have an idea of who Stephens writes for and aspires to hang with and to be.

The people who really run the country and own the assets and the political process; the people who talk enormous amounts of shit about everything and everyone that even mildly affects their eternal goal of permanent excess; the people who routinely refer to the poor and working class as other species, insect and otherwise; the people who immediately get their panties in a wad and pitch a yuuuuge fucking fit the second anyone criticizes them for anything, no matter how accurately.

There are niches within each, of course, but whenever you subject yourself to the unnecessary pain of reading yet another screed from Stephens or Bobo or Modo or Douthat, that is the subtext of the essay, whatever the particular subject on a given day:  what does a wealthy, do-nothing swell with an unearned sense of entitlement want to hear? How can I affirm that person's sense of self-regard?

One of the most pernicious ways each of them operates -- and this is simply part of the process of being a Times columnist in the first place -- is to reiterate the tautology that simply being on the op-ed page confers automatic legitimacy, therefore not being on the op-ed page renders critics as automatically illegitimate, worthy of discussion only as a point of refutation, or -- in Karpf's case -- an unwashed, unpedigreed Other, whose impolitic words instantly conjure up visions of 1930s Germany or 1790s France.

Just in the past two weeks, not to mention the last several years, the chief executive of the United States of America has:

• offered to purchase the sovereign territory of an ally, and cancelled a diplomatic visit when the offer was rightly rebuffed;
• referred to himself with divinely-inspired nomenclature ("the chosen one") in reference to his role in an ongoing fiasco with our largest trading partner; if there were an instructional handbook for aspiring dictators, referring to oneself with religious titles would be on page one, right before "renaming the months of the year after one's family";
• "temporarily" shut down the FEC, by making it unable to fill a quorum, and thus carry out its duty of safeguarding elections and ensuring that campaigns abide by the law (that no one enforces anymore anyway);
• committed a securities violation, by falsely stating at last weekend's G7 meeting that China "had called" him, which on the following morning raised the market out of the 800-point funk he had sent it into the previous Friday;
• committed a national-security violation, by tweeting a classified photo from a spy satellite of a failed Iranian missile test, essentially showing the location of the satellite;
• threatened his departing personal assistant, who was fired for bragging that she has a closer relationship to Trump than his own daughters.

No doubt I'm forgetting a few; feel free to remind me in comments. But this is just from the last couple weeks, and August is supposed to be the slow season when everyone is on vacation.

And yet to grossly overpaid idiot gatekeepers such as Bret Stephens, the real problem is all these intolerant liberals, you see, all these would-be Goebbels and Robespierre types who are dehumanizing their political opponents with their rhetoric, and sharpening the guillotine blades. Never mind that the US government is literally dehumanizing people every goddamned day, literally sentencing sick people to die from treatable ailments. Never mind that real honest-to-jeebus white-power types routinely make rape and death threats to (usually female) bloggers and tweeters routinely.

Fuck that "bedbug" shit, there are serious people out there making real threats that have other real people looking over their shoulders every time they leave their houses. Stephens is just a spoiled crybaby who got pissy with an academic, because he was insufficiently deferential to Stephens' gatekeeping greatness.

While you're reading this, while Stephens is writing his next unreadable, bullshit-laden jeremiad, these things are happening. Right now. Oh, look, there goes another one, another scared child raped in a foster home or dropping dead in a hot desert camp. Careful with that guillotine, Robespierre!

As we've been saying in here for a very long time, well before the bewigged gastropod oozed its way into the spotlight, we have to decide what kind of country we're going to be. Either we're the kind of country that shits on immigrants from the "wrong" countries purely as a punitive measure, or we're not. Either we're the kind of country that keeps monstrous demagogues from derailing the nation's collective trajectory, or we just passively sit there and watch it happen. Gee, this sucks.

An integral part of all this can be summed up in the classic kids' nutrition phrase you are what you eat. The New York Times, from its political coverage to its op-ed columnists to its society pages, is a verbatim transcript of smooth-brained establishment elite bullshit. Just because there's occasionally a few kernels of corn here and there doesn't make it any more nutritious if you pick those out and eat them. They think their once-a-year deep-dive coverage on Trump's crooked past (that they could  and should have done ten or twenty years earlier) or some such makes up for the other 364 days of shameless hackcess journamalism and their day-care center of tiresome slop-ed failchildren.

The fact that a significant percentage of the Times' op-ed columnists spend a non-zero amount of time worrying about the tone and civility of a literally powerless opposition should tell you everything you need to know about them -- as thinkers, as writers, as human beings. The problem is not that AOC has effectively coined the term "concentration camps" for those places, the problem is that Bret Stephens, who has a prime spot for commentary and could literally write about any subject he chooses and get it into the national conversation, chooses to write about how unseemly that term is, rather than the operational reality of those places.

Maybe Stephens should go talk to his wife and kids face-to-face about that; if he doesn't have the guts, I'll be happy to drop by and do so, since he's tweeting out invites. I'll even bring a six-pack of whatever beverage he chooses. I won't even drop an f-bomb, I promise. It'll be civil.

So people either support this nonsense with their dollars and their eyeballs, or they don't, period. Even then, even if Stephens were to get even more butthurt and decide to pretend to go out and ply an honest trade, he'd just go and write an unreadable book about his imaginary travails shoveling coal for the nation's flagship newspaper for hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, going on teevee and complaining about his lot in life whenever he chooses to, and having to deal with all those pesky internet Robespierres. Three hundred padded pages of boo-fucking-hoo, and yet another boo-hoo media tour to push that turd good and hard. He's gonna get paid either way, and the Times would just replace him with another interchangeable bedbug. The cycle continues.

But the bottom line really is that the worst possible thing you can do to someone like Bret Stephens is to completely ignore him, and the people who bankroll his crybaby nonsense. So maybe let's all do that. It's not like anyone's going to miss out on anything worthwhile.

Silence of the Lames

Been meaning to get to this one for a couple weeks, but too much going on IRL lately:  Dave Cohen recently posted an interview with author Lionel Shriver, yet another ponderous screed about the supposed vicissitudes of "woke culture" which are apparently ushering our collective freeze-peach DOOM.

This seems to be a favorite axe to grind for many soi-disant civil libertarians of the internets, once again prioritizing their principled defense of mouthy assholes over, say, children being abused and dying in concentration camps, or a rapey slapdick desperately trying to derp his way into a war while he continues upending the nation's treasury into his own pockets. I guess we all have our pet peeves.

Rather than the "god-given right to monetize" trope that I've already taken apart multiple times, the problem here is more along the lines of vague over-exaggerations of the supposed effects of collective squelching of unorthodox opinions, as it were. Call it the "Tim Allen effect" -- the whiny plaints of "getting beaten up" and comparisons to Germany in the 1930s (the latter of which Tim Allen actually made on the Jimmy Kimmel Show a couple years back).

Not to be a pedantic literalist about things, but hopefully most of us can agree on the fundamental principle that especially when you're talking about free speech, words are important, the meanings that they convey are critical. So using phrases that imply threats or acts of actual violence to describe some random assholes complaining about you on social media are, let's say, incongruous.