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.

Everybody Complains About the Weather, But Nobody Does Anything About It

Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog has a nice rundown of the antics of one David Bossie, a lifelong conservatard ball-gargler whose current preoccupation is sucking on the preznitential cheeto, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

Now, a reasonable person might look at Steve's meticulously itemized list of Bossie's nefarious, ugly antics in the service of pure evil and say, This asshole's been doing what he does for twenty-five years now. That's terrible.

Not being a reasonable person, I look at that list and think, Why has that motherless fuck been allowed to get away with this bullshit for twenty-five fucking years? Is there no one in the Democratic Party that has the guts to cut this asshole's Achilles tendon, politically speaking?

Seriously. It just reminds me of all the stupid lurid "Klintoon Body Count" lists that circulated among the then-nascent freeper conspiratard crowd. You had to wonder, If the Clintons are such Mafia-style badass killers, why haven't they at least professionally ruined certifiable morons like Newt Gingrich or Ken Starr, or the rest of them? They don't seem very badass to me.

And it's the same with David Bossie or Dinesh D'Souza or any number of these dipshit rabble-rousers who, however intellectually inept and bankrupt they are as human beings, still serve as ideological rallying points and rainmakers for the Koch and Mercer types who really own this country. Why isn't there a party mechanism to go after these guys, so that every time they come out of the woodwork, there's someone right behind them to remind everyone that they're intellectual goat-fuckers?

These animals have done incalculable damage to the fabric of this nation over the last quarter-century, at the very least by giving voice to the choir of wingnut-welfare insanity that bought out the working rubes for a few shekels, and sold them down the river on a raft of cheap "culture warrior" bullshit and "fambly valyews" claptrap.

Maybe if the Tom Steyer types, who think their bien pensant drives to impeach the emperor have value, instead put some of their pelf into supporting some countervailing "think tanks" and other such generators of ideological propaganda, we might not find ourselves here wondering why card-carrying mouth-breathers like Bossie and D'Souza are still in business after all these years.

Failed State

In the seventy-two hours since 'murka sorta learned a bit about what a mentally-ill conspiracy troll Roseanne Barr really is (and her "Planet of the Apes" nonsense isn't even the third-worst thing she's said on her Twitter feed this week), several other things happened, all of them infinitely more important. I swear, it's true!

• A Harvard study conservatively estimates that the death toll from Hurricane Maria is more than fifty percent higher than that of 9/11. In response, the failing New York Times put that story on page A13, so as not to distract from the Roseanne hoof-clomping on the front page.
• A journalist critical of the emperor's daddy found himself in Putin's crosshairs. So the Ukrainian police, having gotten a heads-up on the assassination plot, helped him fake his death, and then helped him show up at a press conference the next day. Take a second and think about how amazing that is, as well as the obvious implications.
• Interpol, which is currently headed by a Russian internal-security specialist, attempted to arrest Bill Browder in Spain, for extradition to Russia, where he would certainly die. Fortunately, after bringing him in, the Spanish police released him. But shit is getting serious and weird on that whole story, as Browder is of course the Rosetta Stone to the whole Russia collusion narrative, if you dig back far enough.
• Princess Snowflake got thirteen trademarks awarded to her by the Chinese government, who just happen to have sunk half a billion dollars into Daddy's next building in Indonesia, and for whose security-violating tech company ZTE is going the extra mile to help. It's simply an amazing series of coincidences!
• The emperor has decided to start some weird trade war, with pretty much all of our allies, starting with steel and aluminum from Canada and Mexico and China, to proposing a ban on German luxury cars -- many of which, of course, are actually made in 'murka. It's as if he doesn't realize that Mercedes-Benz is the sponsor for the brand-new Atlanta Falcons football stadium.

And yet, chances are that you've seen at least ten or twenty times as many mentions to the other thing, either to the cultists' reaction to their slob goddess getting pushed off because her toxicity finally got bad for business, or to their renewed passion for librul scalps.

I like Sam Bee, but she obviously could not have picked a worse time to call Princess Snowflake the dreaded c-word. (A better c-word for Princess would have been "criminal". Just like dear ol' dud.) She only compounded the problem by apologizing. If there's one thing libruls should have learned from these toxic motherfuckers by now, it's never apologize. Double down, tell them to go fuck themselves, or just ignore them, but never ever apologize to them for anything. It's an admission of weakness, and they don't deserve the consideration in the first place. It's not as if such a thing would ever be reciprocated.

To put this as crudely as possible, Bee is going to get fired anyway, but now she first got on her knees for them, and let them blow a porn-size load in her face and hair. (I may be understating the case a bit.) Assuming TBS lets her have at least an episode or two before they pull the trigger on her (perhaps making it look like summer started, and they just opted not to renew), she should just do an entire episode on Princess' grifting, and her entire scumbag family using the office and residence of the chief executive as profit centers.

In the waning months of the Fredo Arbusto reign of error, this country had been taking on the classic signs and symptoms of a failing state. As the Dow plummeted and the banks went under, financial metrics (particularly debt-to-GDP ratio and insane financial leverage ratios) kept pointing toward doom. Obama tried his best to alleviate the situation, and was successful in some regard, but it would have taken at least a decade even with a cooperative congress. But things were at least sputtering in a generally forward direction.

Obviously, even that bit of incremental progress has been halted and reversed, and it's going to particularly affect all those rube farmers that voted for him because they wouldn't know a competent, honest bidnessman if they saw one. And it's going to be worse this time around, because in response to Preznit Chocolate Thunder, an entire industry of cultural grievance-stoking started and thrived and evolved, compounding the coming economic fuckery with a plurality of the public addled by fake news and ritualized performative outrage. That is a potent combination that will make even returning to the halcyon days of 2015 nearly impossible for the foreseeable future. And you know that the next iteration of these animals will be smoother, slicker, less obnoxious and boorish, but more adept with the dog-whistles and code words.

These people have weaponized the cultural grievance, put it into practice at the executive level. Picture any drunk at any barstool at any dive bar across the country, the dumber and drunker and dive-ier the better. How does such a person in such a place typically sound? At best, they're always right about everything, even though they're spouting nonsense, and they cannot be reasoned with. The bartender is just praying that the asshole will pass out or leave before he starts a fight or spills a full tumbler of well whiskey.

That's not only who we have in the White House, that's his staff, his supporters, his rabid retard fan-base that chants his empty slogans back to him, like the semi-trained pinnipeds they are. The sheer ugliness these mutants communicate with is bad enough, but the willful stupidity is what cinches it. They would have to work at getting up to a "deplorable" ranking; the vast majority are simply irredeemable.

And I hate to say it, and I am counting on the midterms to at least begin to pull us back from the brink, but these incomprehensibly stupid, worthless "cultural" arguments convince me more and more that the damage is done and the race is run. It doesn't matter if they die off, enough of them have adult children who have been raised and steeped in the nonsense, and are just as aggressively stupid as their parents. Eventually Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers will die, and not a moment too soon, but they all have adult kids who have been groomed to take over and keep the propaganda pumping.

It's turned a lot of people, who might otherwise be at least somewhat idealistic in nature, into nihilists. Part of me wants to watch those farmers lose their family farms when China breaks off a retaliatory tariff in their fat asses. Part of me wants to watch us stumble into another disastrous Middle East war, so gasoline goes to seven bucks a gallon. Part of me wants to watch Clownstick and his scum family continue to grift right out in the open, defying someone, anyone to do anything about it, just to expose the craven, gutless observers for what they are. Part of me wants to watch the bastards win again, overwhelmingly, so there's no mistaking where this country is at.

Again, did the election change this country into something vile and ugly, or was it there all along, just waiting to be unleashed? I think we're in the long, torturous process of finding that out right now.

Eventually these nihilism fugues run their course, and the numbers and logic kick back in, and the cycle renews. Most of it is because all the action is on one side of the table -- shit-for-brains struts and preens and rubs his insult-comic bullshit in everyone's faces, and his dipshit cultists repeat it verbatim, and the propaganda machine rolls on. And I want them to lose, badly, and to know that they caused their own misfortune. To know why they failed is vital to them ever having any hope of getting their heads out of their asses at any point.

Being a toxic, spiteful asshole should come with a karmic penalty sufficient to deter future such behavior. Unfortunately, life and the universe have never worked that way. Each of us, singly and collectively, has to decide if it's all worth it, if we even want "it" back, if Lady Liberty just turns out to be a rabid internet conspiracy troll with a dumb show that never should have been rebooted in the first place.

We are getting closer to finding out. Every election is billed as The Most Important Evar, but it's tough to deny that this time, it really might be that crucial. Not just because of the political aspects, but if we've decided to let the Bachelorette-huffing culture morons

Race to the Bottom

Looks like Roseanne finally stepped in it good and hard, or maybe ABC and Disney finally decided they'd had enough of her toxic schtick. She's been doing this sort of thing for some time, you know, skirting the edge of acceptability, as it were.

I gave up on the rebooted show after the doubleheader premiere, and have not bothered following it since then, but I do occasionally check out her Twitter feed. While her (obviously since erased) swipe at Valerie Jarrett was over the line, Roseanne has not been shy about approaching said line with more conspiracy-oriented stuff (which, of course is what the "Muslim Brotherhood" part of the Jarrett tweet was about, because Jarrett was born in Iran, you see).

There's always a good, principled debate to be had on the perennial subject of how far is too far, but the problem is that one side typically argues from the most intellectually dishonest standpoint imaginable. The conservative approach to pop culture or even the basic rules of comedy or music seem to revolve around the classic why can they call each other that and we can't call them that? sort of plaintive nonsense.

The idea that they are now held accountable for using that word in a public forum rankles them. They feel that they are entitled to dare the effete, officious gatekeepers of permitted public discourse, and when they are inevitably rebuffed, they'll waddle back under their rocks, asses on fire, squawking some rehearsed boilerplate about Harvey Weinstein.

But let's play devil's advocate for a moment. The Simpsons, for example, has made a cornerstone comedic staple of lampooning racial stereotypes, not just Apu but the Italian pizza guy and the pugilistic leprechaun and others. But those comedic tropes have always come buttressed with context and subtext, a sense of taking the piss out of those stereotypes in the end. Apu and Luigi interact perhaps as hyphenated Americans, but Americans who are trying to assimilate nonetheless.

But the Jarrett tweet cannot be contextualized or subtextualized. The "Planet of the Apes" crack is obvious as it is, so there's no need to parse that one. That's not a "taking the piss" reference. Making a joke, say, about Jarrett talking loudly in a movie theater, telling the character in the movie to get out the house!, that's something where black people might see that and take it as a harmless joke. But "monkey" jokes are as off-limits as the n-word itself, and someone who claims to have been a professional comedy person for decades shouldn't need to be told that.

It's the "Muslim Brotherhood" part that's more interesting. It encourages one to recall that that was in fact a rumor about Jarrett while she worked in the White House, and that it was part of a much larger and stupider conspiracy, one that Roseanne's own oompa-loompa hero began his storied political career with. Funny how this bullshit keeps coming up, and when they're called on it, they try to say that they're joking, or that they shouldn't be taken literally or seriously, or whatever Humpty Dumpty couch-fort bullshit they lamely try to hide behind.

This is not about free speech, not at all. This is about the world of commerce, and how employees interact within that realm. This is about a multi-national conglomerate with tentacles in everything, and that boycotting Disney would be almost too easy, especially when their brand new Star Wars movie already under-performed in its opening box office. It's also about taking a look at the things that these people say and do, and trying to imagine for a second what it must take to get your mind to work like that routinely.

Seriously. Few people even know who Valerie Jarrett is. But this is an important insight into how the minds of these people work -- Roseanne decided that this was something worth making a not-even-borderline crack about. And when you're done imagining the mindset of the person who operates that way, now imagine the mindset of the person who reads that and says to themselves, Now that's funny!. Their insatiable need to dehumanize their political opponents literally has no limit; even after they're gone from the political arena they are considered fair game for what are at best bizarre taunts.

So now Roseanne will become another self-styled First Amendment martyr, sacrificed on the altar of political correctness, to which reasonable people will respond, Tell it to Colin Kaepernick. Don't be at all surprised if Fox picks up the show to put it behind Crybaby Tim Allen's Last Man Standing. And of course Emperor (Putting the Me in Memorial Day) Snowflake will bring it up tonight in his totally legal and appropriate campaign rally. But in the end, it really is just a goddamned teevee show, and a mediocre one at that.

Motor Shitty Asshole

Imagine the whining from the conservatard claque if anyone -- anyone -- proposed shooting them during an interview. Well, no one listens to me, but uh, yeah, at what point do decent people hold worthless shitbags like Ted Nugent and Alex Jones accountable for this sort of thing?

Here's how it'll shake out:  there might be some sort of squawk of outrage, and Fuckface Nugent might mumble some sort of mealy-mouthed "I was only joking" sort of averral. Somebody else will do or say something stupid, and people will forget about it in a couple of weeks.

But here's the thing -- I don't know about you, but I've had my fill of these fucking people. All of them. The cliché they tell victims of domestic violence -- that people will treat you how you let them treat you -- is a hard truth. That other old wives' chestnut -- when someone tells you who they are, believe them -- is just as true.

Ted Nugent turns seventy in December, and it would be a fine thing if he keeled over into a wood chipper before then. Failing that, he has some concerts coming up, including one at the end of June less than a mile from where I was born. I will be contacting the club to ask them what they think about having someone who literally says "half of the government should be shot" performing at their establishment.

I would very much prefer to have Ted Nugent alive but with nowhere to play, nowhere to spew the vile nonsense he routinely does at his shows. It's probably too much to hope that he goes broke from lack of touring opportunities, but I sincerely hope that happens as well. He's a vile piece of shit, and the world will be a better place when he's dead and gone. In the meantime, our options in dealing with such people are ballots and wallets.

People -- including Bill Maher, who really oughta know better -- are complaining about the supposed "chilling effect" that David Hogg's boycott on Laura Ingraham's show has on free speech. In that particular example, they're not entirely wrong; Ingraham is at most a third-tier light on a network full of deserving douchebags. Frankly, the entire network should be boycotted, not just a particular performer (which is really all any of them are, trained monkeys).

But free speech does have a responsibility baked into it. The First Amendment merely says that the gubmint can't imprison you for speaking your mind, no matter how demented you are. But it certainly does not guarantee you or me or Rush Limbaugh or Ted Nugent a comfortable living doing so, especially when the person in question is saying things that are provably untrue, and/or incitements to violence. Arguing with such people is an exercise in futility. They are not there to debate the merits of this or that position. This is so obvious, it needn't be said. [And yet you did. -- Ed.]

I don't want Nugent or Jones arrested for the things they say; I want the people who sponsor and support them to pay a price for doing so. It should be unacceptable to decent people for someone to say that Democrats (or Republicans, for that matter) should be shot. It should be unacceptable to claim repeatedly that a classroom massacre of first-graders was a hoax, as Jones has infamously done.

Kevin Williamson's another one. You cannot expect immunity from doubling down on the unspeakably stupid notion that women who have abortions should be hanged. (Extra points for Williamson's particularly stupid mode of doubling down -- by insisting he meant future women who have abortions, not the ones who have already had them. Oh, well, of course. Carry on then. Sheesh.)

This sort of rhetorical bomb-throwing keeps these losers employed, and that's the part that has to be shut down. They can spout their vile fictions all they want, but they should not have the expectation of securing a grand paycheck for their nonsense. (Incidentally, this also applies to more polite idiots such as Bobo and MoDo. Seriously, I can't believe there is anyone out there that still reads either of those two dipshits.) Williamson's defenders act like Williamson is someone trying to start some sort of good-faith dialogue, as if he's an honest broker in all this. All you have to do is read Williamson's responses to the abortion question [Q.: Are you serious?  A:. Hell yes, I'm serious.] to know that.

This is not to say that Williamson should have been fired from The Atlantic before he even had a chance to start. In fact, it would have been better for the abortion debate at large for Williamson to elaborate on his (let's say) peculiar sensibilities on the issue. But that is a different matter than noting that neither Williamson nor his new employers should have been in the least surprised when a number of people (including, you may be surprised to find, quite a few vagina-owning humans) were instantly revolted at the thought of reading a publication that employed such a person.

That is the accountability of the free marketplace, unless of course you're the one being held financially accountable for writing stupid things, in which case it's just a witch hunt.

Usually when free speech is squelched, it's from the top down. None of us will ever know how many momentous stories have been buried over the years by news editors, who are usually company creatures above all else. When it starts coming up from the bottom, from the powerless, people who don't have money or assets or media companies to push everyone around with, you can tell it's effective when the pigs start squealing.

So let's make Nugent squeal. The guy's already a fucking turd of a human being -- got a blowjob from Courtney Love when she was twelve and he was nearly thirty, right about the time he "adopted" a seventeen-year-old girl in order to beat the Mann Act. Plus, he literally shit his pants to get out of Vietnam, which is not a crime in and of itself (on the off chance he had a moral objection to the war), but tends to undercut his usual phony-tough guy stance.

Fuck him. He doesn't have to be shot, or even go broke, but if we're truly tired of hearing from people like that motherless fuck, the least we can do is make sure he can't show his face among decent people anymore. Let him have the Traitor-Slaver-Loser flag bozos, collectively drunkening to the thousandth iteration of Wang Dang Sweet Poontang. Fools and their money are lucky enough to get together in the first place. But it's time to start pressuring the companies that sponsor this shit.

Social Justice Worriers

A thorough post-mortem analysis of the 2016 election will include the inevitable effects of reactionary sentiments, especially against putatively "progressive" causes that made the rounds in that year and the couple years preceding it. Some of this reactionarism certainly had its roots in racism, as the folks in the Black Lives Matter movement (insofar as it even qualifies as such) can attest.

Some of the working-class frustrations, whether real or cynically exploited by the Koch-Mercer-Murdoch axis of evil, had at least a strata of truth. Imagine someone out in the 'murka's vaunted heartland, town decimated by outsourcing, smart kids left and dumb ones stayed and impregnated each other, no prospects, no future, just the steady drip of generational dilapidation, punctuated by the occasional limp parade through town on the veterans' holidays, to remind of lost greatness and vigor. They've put up with this shit for some years, and are now watching those people riot, disrespect cops, and such like.

Now throw on immigrants collecting social services and squeezing out anchor babies, campus smart-asses jabbering about intersectional micro-grievances, and transvestites demanding restroom privileges, and Democratic politicians paying far more attention to such things than even mentioning (much less actually visiting and witnessing firsthand) the decaying Mayberries across the country. You can see where those folks might conclude that Something Had To Be Done, even if you completely disagree (as you should) that their chosen electoral action had any basis in operational reality.

In other words, people across the political spectrum can and should be able to see where people in many areas in the US might feel like their lives and communities are well and truly fucked, and their fat-cat pols are non-responsive. And yet they still should be able to see that electing a fake billionaire who apparently got a heart transplant from George Wallace might not be the solution to that set of problems.

It is perhaps the mark of a society that is collectively doing better than it thinks it is, when a sufficient number of people have the luxury to complain about micro-aggressions and triggering and the other inane jargon terms of the intersectional grievance claque. However, the corollary to that might be that you could say the same thing about a society that has the luxury of complaining about those complainers, especially when there are far worse challenges staring us all in the face.

There are the obvious big-picture transgressions:

• the piss-colored rosacea golem squatting in the people's house, profiteering illegally with impunity, sending his dipshit progeny to conduct sensitive high-level negotiations that hold countless lives in the balance;
• the steadily mounting evidence that a hostile foreign nation affected a US presidential election with the complicity of the victor and his campaign staff;
• a stolen SCOTUS seat;
• the Republican Party's rapid devolution into a proto-fascist enabling regime;
• the Democratic Party's typically dickless response -- these fuckers stole a Supreme Court seat and the election, and the only thing you assholes grandstand about is the so-called Dreamers?;
• the various cabinet ministers whose respective missions amount to killing off the agencies they have been appointed to oversee;
• the sizable minority that still supports such nonsense, directly counter to their own rational self-interest and that of the country they self-righteously claim to revere.

It is no exaggeration to say that it may take another full generation to come back from these things. Any and all of them are so much worse than whatever esoteric jabber some humanities major is concocting in their Wednesday empowerment group.

I've been rereading some of what I wrote in the immediate aftermath of the election, and one thing from then that certainly holds up is that the defiling of the Oval Office with the likes of Fuckface Von Clownstick really is the political equivalent of 9/11, in that it has literally changed how everyone, regardless of political persuasion, thinks and perceives pretty much everything in that arena.

The mainstream media have mostly relegated themselves to covering the daily follies and outrages, sputtering in impotent perplexity that he keeps getting away with it. But they still show up dutifully to be lied to by Baghdad Barb, who makes no effort to conceal her contempt for them. And rightly so -- they have forgotten what their real mission is, and so the majority show up like pathetic dogs, waiting to get their heads kicked in by their abusive owner. It's painful to watch. Everything changed, but they have not.

What does all this have to do with the SJW types? Not much, really, except to point out that most reasonable people can agree that the bumptious PC nonsense spewing forth from the campus crusaders is frustrating at best, but mostly eye-rolling and obnoxious. The paucity of critical thinking, the herd mentality of political correctness, the reflexive squelching of opposing views, all contribute to a stifled orthodoxy that, as most people outside academia can tell you, will be beaten out of them by the real world almost the instant they hit the street. Anybody working an honest job does not have time to parse the nuances of intersectionality.

No, the real world has much worse issues, many of which have been thrown in sharp relief by recent events. The Parkland school shooting in Florida is a prime example. It is a mundane, now routine observation that the US is the only nation on the planet where this sort of thing happens, much less happens on a frequent basis that we have all become accustomed to.

What compounds this gruesome calculus is that we are now also the only nation where the survivors of such events are routinely attacked, mocked, lied about, threatened. It was awful enough when that fat fuck Alex Jones disseminated the idea that the parents of the second-graders murdered in their classroom at Sandy Hook were "crisis actors," people brought forth to perpetuate a tragedy that never happened, in order to engage in the fruitless, endless quest for even modest gun control.

Now we are picking on teenagers who have had the temerity to stand up for themselves and speak their minds. About the mildest reproach I have seen toward these kids is the notion that since a handful of kids roughly the same age have gained some YouTube notoriety doing the "Tide Pod Challenge," that entire generation is therefore disqualified from even opining on the complexities of law-abidin' gun fetishists.

I would suggest that for the past several years, this whole goddamned nation has been participating in an ongoing Tide Pod Challenge, ever since the day that ridiculous asshole came down the escalator and tossed his piss-colored wig into the ring.

The Parkland survivors, most of them still (barely) too young to vote (but you can be assured that they will), provide some measure of hope beyond the gun control debate itself. They are proving first and foremost that we don't have to take shit from the right-wing nutjobs and their hired scum. They are demonstrating the hypocrisy of the bloodthirsty NRA and its shills, especially the loathsome Dana Loesch.

The NRA does not represent gun owners, it represents gun manufacturers, and Dana Loesch is a paid spokes-tool. This is something I have pointed out in one-on-one conversations with my gun-owning NRA friends -- they think they are customers, but they are the product. The NRA is basically a gigantic mailing list, a market for the NRA's true customers -- that is, the manufacturers -- since most guns are now purchased by people who already own guns. This is a very powerful statistic that underpins the entire problem, despite all the distracting rhetoric about "culture" and whatnot.

It should not be a terrible thing for a group of crime victims -- kids who watched their friends and classmates and teachers get murdered by a psychotic ex-classmate with an AR-15 -- to collectively observe that it should be at least somewhat challenging for such a person to have access to a military-grade weapon. In a country where schools are notoriously underfunded and teachers underpaid, it is retarded to insist that the best solution is to invest money into turning schools into fortified citadels, and teachers into trained killers.

But most of all, the hypocrisy of paid assholes such as Loesch excoriating victims as somehow insincere or financially goaded into the stance they've taken, well, that should be completely unacceptable. But in three short years, this orange animal and his dirtbag failsons and the paid cockroaches who enable and support him, they have turned this country on its collective head, practically eliminated our ability to process disgust and outrage at things that used to require very little time to arrive at that destination.

When and if the US climbs out of the abyss we have collectively thrust ourselves into, there will be a great many things that will need to be repaired. Almost certainly, the first thing that will need to be done is to formulate a highly specific set of protocols prohibiting the chief executive, and their family and staff, from personally enriching themselves through their elected office. A blind trust will be truly blind, not a wink and a nod to the aforementioned failsons minding daddy's grift machine while he pretends to be in charge. You can't just send your knockoff-handbag-peddling daughter to a geopolitical flashpoint to conduct highly sensitive strategic negotiations regarding a country with which we are still technically at war, because you're too fucking lazy to appoint a proper ambassador to the region.

But more intangibly, and hence more difficult to reclaim, will be our capacity for cynicism, and the ability to translate that into action. The sheer mendacity of every one of these fucking people is exhausting. This is beyond mere policy disagreements -- they are vile humans, every last one of them, and they have taken up actively against the interest of their own country. They are nothing short of traitors, and one hopes futilely that some sort of justice will eventually find some or most of them.

In the meantime, maybe we focus on that which is in front of us and actually threatens us all. Again, the campus crybabies will find out soon enough just how little use the real world has for their grievances of privilege. There are too many academic types on the opposing ideological side who have a vested interest in stoking those differences, otherwise they'd have nothing to write about, and then might be forced to ply an honest trade.

But we have kids dying, adults bullying the survivors, a claque of scummy oligarchs undermining the fundaments of the republic, and media monkeys who can't find their own assholes in a dark room with both hands an a flashlight. It is now more important than ever for us all to keep our eyes on the ball.

You'll Need More Snowflakes for That Avalanche

Any day these useless closet cases get outnumbered 2-1 is a good day. It's hard to get outraged when they are, as a heckler noted, "the Cleveland Browns of political movements." Still, one hopes at least that they finally receive an important message from the universe:  You are a bunch of fucking losers, each and every one of you. Shame on you. Go home and get some sleep, think about what you're doing with what passes for your lives.

And that's really all there is to them:  tubbies and morons who have already failed at life, bigly, and have nothing left but to occasionally take their armchair tough-guy static into the real world with some cosplay. They should go back to re-enacting WW2 and the Civil War as nazis and confederates. That's the best way for these chumps to work out their issues.

But, to return their favorite bullshit back on them, if they hate this country so much, why don't they get the fuck out already? It would be their fondest desire to start up Nazilvania or Kekistan or whatever, but good luck making a go of it when your main imports will be donuts and cheeseburgers, and the exports will be the choicest whines.

No Bubble! No Bubble! You're the Bubble!

I've enjoyed (most of) Michael Moore's schtick and work for decades, starting with Roger and Me, and undeniably powerful evisceration of corporate greed and lies. But his inane critiques at supposed "bubble" liberals have taken on the catechistic sheen of a mindless dogma, untroubled by critical thought or intellectual honesty.

There's no second-guessing Moore's unfortunate accuracy as a political prognosticator; he predicted Clownstick winning six months before it happened, when catfished pollsters and punch-drunk journamalists were veering between snickering at the folly and regaling the slow-motion collapse of his futile campaign. So much for the smart set, right?

But Moore has said his share of stupid, unhelpful shit as well. In Moore's view, liberals are in the bubble, as are New York and Hollywood. It's never the hallowed opioid havens of his sacred rust belt ghost towns that might need to listen to other people once in a while, or maybe get at least some of their "facts" from somewhere other than Fixed Noise and reality teevee.

No, it's always, always Moore's supposed ideological compadres that need to listen to....well, to be honest, I have no idea what precisely we're supposed to be hearing. Because countless journos have spelunked up 'murka's gaping asshole, vainly trying to get the perfect post-mortem from Real 'murkins. I've read far too many of them, and most of them make no sense at all (I just trust him), or rely on things we know to be flat-out lies (he's a great businessman with a history of turning things around).

Just as stupid is Moore's vapid assertion that liberals should watch Celebrity Apprentice and American Idol and The Bachelorette (as if, you know, none of them ever do). Leaving aside the momentary surprise that he left out Duck Dynasty and the various Real Housewives franchises, again I would ask Moore if he's ever suggested to "them" that they watch something that "we" supposedly all watch. I've never seen any of those shows, and I never will, though I am aware of them thanks to endless commercials and The Soup. Life's too short to actually sit through that mess.

If other people want to rot their brains on that shit, more power to them. But it adds nothing to the discussion, although it does explain the bizarre epistemology in play with that generalized demographic. They probably throw money they don't have at millionaire megachurches and televangelists, and trust the astrology section of their newspapers. Should we faithless heathens entreaty those ethereal demons as well?

Think about it, in the context of the five aforementioned shows, and how what those shows really entail dovetails with the electoral reasoning Moore implores us smug smarties to plug into, for some insane reason. Let's take those shows (are they still even on?) one at a time:

• Celebrity Apprentice:  Slightly well-known people, fallen on hard times, compete to start a fake business that they will never run, and are judged by a fake billionaire who pretends to fire them, one by one. Proceeds go to the Human Fund!
• American Idol:  Do they still do that thing in the first few weeks where they humiliate really untalented wannabes on-camera? Boy, that whole William Hung thing was just awesome, wasn't it? Good times. Aside from Carrie Underwood, have any of the finalists or winners really "made it", whatever "it" is these days?
• The Bachelorette:  I think I made the analogy at some point during the campaign that maintaining the belief that Clownstick is a good or even competent businessman is roughly equal to believing that the "winners" in these stupid hookup shows actually get married or even engaged. If I want to watch people fuck in a hot tub, I'll just go to XHamster or something. But Moore's ZOMG! She chose Thorn instead of Brick! fangirl gushing as a serious example of the sort of Real 'murkin decision-makin' that smug bubble-libruls must embrace is just embarrassing to read. Seriously, dude, take some testosterone supplements and eat a steak, before you find yourself on the same menstrual cycle as these suckers.
• Duck Dynasty:  Fake hillbillies who spout real jingoism. Their main selling point seems to be that they actually like each other and pray before dinner. [mimes jerkoff motion] Oh, and the patriarch has a side hustle going around to mega-churches and political campaigns spouting off about how fags are like dog-fuckers. He was at the Roy Moore rally the other night, so there's that.
• Real Housewives:  A bunch of botoxed, fake-tit cunts trying to out-cunt each other. Bitch I'll pull yo weave!

I've said it since the first season of Survivor, and my opinion has not changed one iota:  reality teevee is the most noxious, toxic spew to permeate the boob tube. It's ruined this country to an incalculable degree. It's certainly made some people visibly dumber, less lucid, less cognizant of the real world around them. It's (literally) mindless escapism, and nothing more. Your brain would be less polluted by watching keyboard-cat and log-fireplace videos all day.

What reality teevee does -- and again, though I really have never directly watched any of it, I've read reviews and critiques here and there over the years, been inundated with commercials and promos and news items about the various "winners" and "contestants", and hate-watched The Soup during the Joel McHale years, so I have a pretty good idea -- is culturally unhealthy and corrosive in the aggregate. It wallows primarily in these main traits:

• Cutthroat behavior and backstabbing.
• Public humiliation.
• Toxic behavior.

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect is the rather obvious issue that it's not any more real than professional wrestling. Everything is in fact scripted and scrupulously edited toward a pre-planned outcome. The whole thing is meticulously staged, if at times to conform to flash polls and the like. Many of the reality teevee fans I know personally seem to watch at least several of them, all the time. The "seasons" are scheduled so as to be constant; there is no "off-season" anymore for this sort of hastily-crafted discount programming.

Imagine letting this crap through your eyes and ears to steadily erode your cerebellum for going on two decades now. What do you think that does to your perception of "reality"? Throw in the more recent epistemological conveniences of social media, and you have a sizable contingent of addled people who are being poked with a culture-war stick. They can pick which "facts" and "reality" suit them best, and since they have eroded their capacity to discern or care what is empirically "true," they simply act on pure id and volition.

In fact, this is an ideal situation for them. As mentioned in a recent post, this is also a contingent that routinely fetishizes the symbols and ceremonies of "democracy" as they perceive it, but they are actively hostile toward the actual principles of democracy, especially free speech that they disagree with, especially when it comes from uppity black folks.

So it's dismaying to see Moore throw in with the tedious rube-whisperer lectures of the likes of Mudcat Saunders and Chris Arnade and such. It's a sucker's bet; either you take seriously the reasons and principles why you believe in and agree with conventionally "liberal" ideals, and you try to find ways to bring other reasonable people into the fold, or you don't.

Someone who addles their brain with reality teevee, watched Fixed Noise for their "information," and hasn't read a book in years, is not a serious person. At all. That doesn't mean you write them off completely, but it does mean you don't waste the effort of crafting a significant part of your party strategy around catering to their dipshit notions.

In 2008, Barack Obama won by the largest margin -- by far -- since Reagan in 1984. The Democrats took a supermajority in the Senate, and a considerable majority in the House. Did you see any "important" or "influential" conservative "thinkers" imploring the rubes to maybe take a look across the aisle and see why Obama won? Did any of them crank out any sort of Listen, Conservative jabber?

Even the current "heterodox" conservative writers who do lambaste the base, such as Kevin Williamson and J.D. Vance, are not encouraging those folks to listen to ideas from the "other side" in order to synthesize some sort of magical winning coalition that can actually get shit done. They're simply telling the goobers on their side to get their shit together and start taking responsibility for themselves. They sure as hell aren't telling them to watch The Wire and listen to Beyoncé.

Look. None of this is to say that all pop culture is shit, and all the people who enjoy it are stupid. The problem is Moore's thesis that centers the most vapid pop culture artifacts as some sort of barometer for understanding the mindset of the average American. And the sad fact is that if Moore is correct in that estimation, then we are waaayyyyy more fucked than we can possibly imagine.

Promises Made, Promises Kept

I don't know if Charlottesville will turn out to be the Fort Sumter of the current "cold civil war," as all the kids are calling it, but things seem to be heating up, slowly, surely, inexorably. The joke has been that maybe Clownstick ran over an old gypsy woman, and she cursed him to live out all his peanut-gallery tweets at Obama. The truth is that Yeats was a prophet, and we are all living out his warning. Clownstick may be Orangemandias, faded glory that never was in the first place, but the Pepe-the-Frog Jew-baiting douchebags are the falcon to his falconer.

These racist assholes and their racist bullshit are being normalized right in front of us. They are not bothering to conceal it at all, you have to give them that. David Duke is a loathsome tool, but when he's right, he's right:

“This represents a turning point for the people of this country. We are determined to take our country back,” Duke said. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.”

Yes indeedy. They got their panties all up in a wad every time the Black Lives Matter folks blocked traffic, but in the meantime, these small racist rallies have been going on all over the south, and you know what you have not heard of? Some random BLM activist pulling a Mr. Mercedes and running these losers down.

Provocateur

It's been an interesting week for poor Milo, no? Having not been familiar with him except by name, until his appearance last week on Bill Maher's show, I didn't really know what to expect. By the end of the segment, I guess it was mildly surprising how utterly fact-free and hacky the guy really is. I thought there'd be at least some nugget of principle, some vague core conviction of contrarianism or something.

But he's nothing but a confection of queer-lib schtick and bratty hair-pulling third-grader. He's basically a gay British Bart Simpson, minus the charm. Even Rush Limbaugh is entertaining on rare occasions. The idea that someone like Milo has any impact on the political world should give one an idea of how far gone we are. This is just "think of the stupidest thing you can, make something out of it, and do it in character."

True North

Jim at Stonekettle Station is absolutely correct, of course, that the idea of a nation having a "moral compass" is a canard, a logical fallacy, the usual steamy crock of conservabilly horseshit. (Kudos also to Jim for replying to an illiterate rube. That's more than I would have done; if they're not going to take the time to write coherently, I'll never find the time to engage them.)

But for the hell of it, let's say we take the rube's "morale [sic] compass" argument at face value. This is a common refrain amongst the oldsters who refuse to do the right thing and jettison themselves into the Arctic Ocean on an ice floe, and instead harangue the rest of us at how the country they thought they knew has "lost its way."

I say it's finally starting to find its way, in several important respects. There is massive work to be done still, to address the ravages of wealth inequality, of the ongoing dilapidation of the national infrastructure, of a nation run by rackets, and so on. But there are very important moral strides this nation has accomplished in my lifetime.

Blacks are still getting harassed and killed by law enforcement. But they have always been getting harassed and killed by law enforcement. The fact that you finally hear about it when it happens is, sadly and amazingly, a sign of moral progress, a clue that more and more people understand that it's going on and that it's wrong.

Same goes for bigotry toward gay people. They've always been picked on. But again, now you hear about it, now a substantial contingent of observers register their displeasure. Sometimes those folks get a bit carried away, inadvertently allowing small businesses speaking hypothetically to nail themselves to a Kickstarter cross, and cash in on cultural polarization. But the tide is turning all the same, too slowly for some, too quickly for others.

Over the years many folks, myself included, held out hope that the mossbacks would die off, and the kids, not having inherited their parents' prejudices, would be all right. I don't know if that's really the case; the older I get, the more I notice that stupid parents tend to produce stupid kids, who then turn into another generation of stupid adults.

The climate in general does seem to be getting uglier, more vitriolic. I didn't care for Bill Clinton for a lot of reasons, but that was a time where the opposition suddenly seemed to decide that there were no longer any boundaries, that any and all bullshit was fair game. Compared to how the current crowd treats and talks about Obama, that was nothing. The venomous, spiteful nature not only of Obama's political opposition, but the commentary at large, is amazing.

At least W gave his opponents plenty of things to hate about him, and they still did not react with quite this much vituperation. I honestly believe that if Obama said that water is wet or that the sun rises in the east, there would be some jabbering internuts claque to twitter hostile lunacies over it.

So perhaps, after all, there is something to this "moral compass" thing, just not what its author had intended. It never is, precisely because of the inherently biased nature of such observations.

The War of Art

[with regards to the terrific book]

Can't possibly agree more with these authors over the idea of an app that bowdlerizes e-books. I have been working on a couple of (I hope) creative writing projects here and there, and so I suppose I'd have some sort of dog in the fight should I decide to publish any of it. Even the small stuff I have published on Amazon, the annual blog roundups and Asshole compilations, it would be annoying to think that someone was reading them with one eye squinted, ever on alert for Those Terrible Words.

What a way to go through life, needing everything cleansed, sanitized for your protection. Life generates in the soil, and in art, the most interesting signs of life can be found in the things that take you out of your comfort zone, that provide at least a frisson of danger and menace, of unseemliness.

I can't begrudge an app maker his opportunity to turn a buck; I'm sure the people who buy and use the app to its full capacity will love their squeaky-clean reading experiences, as sparkly and dull as a mass-produced Kincade litho, the light beaming just so on the cobblestone, whilst the dappled waterfall courses just beyond, glistening in the sun, a unicorn astride a perfect rainbow at the edge of the image.

Obviously spectra shift; just as most professional Democrats now lionize the eminently moderate, reasonable conservatism of Ronald Reagan, simply because Reagan (like Nixon and Eisenhower) would have to run in that party these days, so too do artistic boundaries shift. Music and movies re-align much more quickly, of course, due to the ephemeral nature of those media and their promotional mechanisms, and also because Americans read less frequently, and less challenging material. (In the aggregate, of course -- I'm not talking about you, Gentle Reader!)

But the thing is, as Chuck Wendig (and go check out The Kick-Ass Writer if you're so inclined, good stuff throughout) points out, the problem with the pecksniffs is that they have somehow conflated profanity as being inversely (or at least obliquely) proportional to overall quality. And that's just not true, not in general anyway.

I should probably do a couple of different word counts here someday, when I have the time (which will be roughly the 12th of never; mark your calendars), both in total count and in the usage of (let's say) Carlin's seven words, plus any others I've conjured in my more inventive moments. The thing is, I (and I assume every other person who writes regularly, regardless of whether they are professional writers) strive to use words with intent. Whether the word is fork or friend or fuck, rest assured that while there may be a clunker or a forced one here or there, ninety-nine times out of a hundred it is placed with intent. This is true as much for "regular" words as for "profane" ones.

Profanity, the pecksniffs and bowdlerizers should understand, is useful in its emphasis and versatility, its immediacy and impact, its ineffable rhythm. I can describe a villainous person in a hundred words or more, beat around the bush, try to convey my perception, or I can cut to the chase and say this guy's a fucking asshole. Boom. Even your pearl-clutching Aunt Minnie knows by-gawd right away what that is all about. There is no misinterpretation possible. The intent is clear, as is the degree of intent.

Look. As a parent, I get it, to a certain extent. We try to strike a noble balance between protecting our kids from the ugly shit that a small but noisy chunk of humanity (or something perilously close) has to offer, and raising a sheltered veal that's unprepared for at least recognizing said ugliness when the time comes to fly from the nest.

And it's not like the Clean Reader folks are forcing anyone to buy their app, not like a fascist, theocratic state is forcing the peons to use the app. This is not Saudi Arabia, folks, despite what some of our fellow morlocks and their anointed dogsbodies might prefer.

But to me, redacting or changing the words of a writer, even an f-bomb, whether from Chuck Wendig, Stephen King, whoever -- that's a desecration. King's a great example, in fact; I've enjoyed his writing since I was in junior high school, and it would be hard to think of a modern contemporary writer who throws down the word fuck with more passion, precision, humor.

Certainly some writers, like hack comics, rely on it to a gratuitous extent. Changing one of King's fucks would be like removing a couple of key notes from, say, Clapton's Crossroads solo, or penciling a mustache on the Mona Lisa. Most of it's there, but something's off. Remember when they tried to syndicate The Sopranos on A&E? What a monkey-fuck that was.

Lesson:  If it ain't broke, don't fuck with it.

First World Problems

I guess this is a sign of just how far out of the loop I am on some things -- swear to the sanctified pasta soul of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I was entirely unaware of the phrase "trigger warning" until today. Frankly, I wouldn't mind being still unaware of its existence and use; it still makes very little sense, and I'll be goddamned if I can figure out what value it might add to the pursuit of an actual life.

Even though it's the norm rather than the exception, it never fails to amaze how many people act as if it's their inalienable right to spend their entire lives without ever being offended, without ever having to actually listen to someone with an opposing viewpoint. I don't mean the usual onstage back-and-forth jabber of talking points posturing as debate, but to actually listen, and disagree, and assess the situation afterward, and decide if that disagreement merits an equivalent response, or is something to vote against or write or speak out about.

Of course there are many things in this wicked world that all of us can and should speak up about when the opportunity arises. Societies where women are treated like property, bloggers are beaten in public, adulterers are stoned or beheaded, or any number of awful things going on right here at home.

It just seems odd that in a country whose economy is mostly rackets, whose criminal justice system is a cruel joke, and so on and so forth, that seemingly intelligent people would rather choose to police subtle grammatical inflections, bandying words such as "cisgendering" and "othering", words which have zero practical utility outside the walls of academia.

Maybe this ankle-biting type stuff is just what they think they can win, if only by attrition and the fact that most people will just back away slowly from some stranger trying to strong-arm them over their mansplaining. It's not that there isn't some truth to the complaints about the nature of the white male heteronormative power structure, it's that this sort of nanny-policing tends to have a polarizing effect -- it's only going to work on people who are inclined to agree with it in the first place, and will drive everyone else further away, because of its nagging nature.

But then, that's been true of political discourse in general for quite some time; when was the last time you heard of someone "converting" because of something they heard or read? Virtually every ex-lib-turned-con has some self-serving road-to-Damascus story about The Man over-taxing them, over-spending, letting criminals off, etc.; while people who change in the other direction do so because their job got outsourced around the world, they got shit-hammered into bankruptcy by a usurious medical bill, whatever.

In my first go-round in college, right out of high school back in the '80s, I found the campus political correctness folks to be somewhat annoying, but generally harmless, and more or less willing to stir the pot. Which should be the idea -- you come from where you're raised with a certain outlook, and go to a place where that outlook gets challenged, in good ways and not-so-good. Pure ideologues are the ones you need to watch out for; most sensible people are generally syncretic, whether or not they realize it.

Going back to grad school in my early 40s was the exact opposite for me -- since nearly everyone in our weekend-warrior MBA cohort was at least 30 and had some sort of career, they tended to be more conservative, with the couple of 20-somethings being even more conservative. But we all mutually understood, without having to explicitly say so, that it was okay to see the world and its issues differently from one another. We could engage in principled disagreements without having to worry about someone getting "offended". (Then again, while there were some women in the cohort, everyone was still part of the white heteronormative paradigm, so there's that.)

If the "microaggression" concern-trolling serves to at least create some small measure of awareness and tolerance on someone else's part, great. The more likely case is the kids get out into the real world and have to find a decent job or three in a depleted market, and realize that university is about the only place in the world where any of that stuff has any traction.

Tout Le Monde N'est Pas Charlie

If you run a blog, one geared primarily toward current events, it makes sense that when events occur, you jump on it with a quickness and register some sort of observational analysis, one that pinpoints your approval or disdain, ultimately. Counter-intuitively, I find myself more and more inclined to wait, to bide time, to consider as many elements, if not all "sides" of the event or argument. This is less a matter of some high-minded mission to craft the ineffable pronunciamento, and more of a recognition that, no matter how obvious something might appear at first, there is almost always more than initially meets the eye.

The initial base reaction to the mass murder of the Parisian satirists at Charlie Hebdo magazine is (and should be) revulsion. Brave stand, I know. Seems like an easy thing to condemn, like human trafficking, or animal cruelty. Setting aside the official iniquities of Balfour and Sykes-Picot and their policy heirs, ordinarily people have the right to be angry and disgusted not just at this massacre, but at other such horrors perpetrated, if by isolated cells of radicals, still radicals of a generally like-minded bent -- to kill, to destroy, to hurt and maim, not necessarily against "westerners," but against any and all people who are inconvenient to their murderous ends.

Run Silent, Run Deep

Let's take a breather from pontificating about the cop-shoot-unarmed-black-citizen (though if you're a white person firing a real gun and pointing it at cops, they'll find a way to bring you in unharmed), and throw in on this latest instance of The Most Transparent Administration Evah getting dissidents under its thumb.

In 2009, Barrett founded Project PM, “dedicated to investigating private government contractors working in the secretive fields of cybersecurity, intelligence, and surveillance.” He was particularly instrumental in using documents obtained by the hacktivist collective Anonymous to expose secret collaboration between the government and various contractors. The covert factions Barrett’s work threatened are powerful, and fought back. Two years ago, Barrett was arrested and threatened with 100 years in prison—yes, you read that correctly—allegedly for threatening an FBI agent, concealing evidence, and linking to a website that contained stolen credit card numbers.

....

Eventually, Barrett signed a plea deal on three of the lesser charges against him, the other charges were dropped, and the threatened sentence reduced from over a hundred to eight and a half years. His sentencing hearing has been repeatedly scheduled and then delayed, and is currently set for December 16.

More here. The sentencing has since been pushed back to January 22nd. Brown now faces 8½ years, rather than over 100, which is nice, except that's still a long time to spend in Club Fed. They'll fix his wagon, just like they fixed Jeremy Hammond's wagon, and maybe Michael Hastings. Gee, I wonder why Ed Snowden prefers to wait it out in Russia.

(Just to add to any possible conspiracy guy conjecture about Hastings' death, the linked article mentions how Hastings' Mercedes leaped the median on N. Highland just south of the Melrose intersection, into the palm trees. Here's what that looks like, courtesy of Google Maps:

I don't know which exact spot Hastings dies, but I know this area, have driven through it many, many times over the years, and it's nothing, it's cake as far as urban LA streets go. That's just a few hundred yards south of Melrose, here's another couple yards south:

So yeah, in an age where vehicle computers can be hacked, yeah, I'd say it's fairly hinky that a guy who followed a high-ranking general around a war zone suddenly loses his shit driving around a fairly sedentary Hollywood neighborhood. Maybe it's paranoid, maybe we can see what happens to people who get too inquisitive for their own good.)

I'm in the middle of reading Cory Doctorow's Information Doesn't Want to Be Free, which is quite good. So far, Doctorow describes the venal shenanigans perpetrated by tech mega-corps (cough Apple cough) in the name of "copyright" -- not only is it basically illegal to hack your iPhone and disable the tracking software on it (which is vulnerable to spyware and rootkit viruses, plus it tracks you), but the music you think you're purchasing outright from iTunes are merely "licensed"; you don't actually own them like you would a physical CD or vinyl record. Why? Because those physical objects can't be tracked the way an MP3 can. And life is too short to read and parse the EULA.

So that's the benign side of the matrix, what do you imagine the deep-state implications are, the level of collusion between government and private contractors. The whole reason government outsources everything from war to cybersecurity is because government is still at least theoretically accountable to its constituents (though in reality that's laughable), while a private contractor can cloak itself in proprietary "security" mumbo-jumbo, protected by rather liberally applied digital copyright laws, which go far beyond anything applying to dead-tech physical media.

Remember, this has largely taken place or accelerated under the supposed commie librul preznit; aside from maybe Rand Paul, what do you think it'd be like under any of the Republican goofballs? They'll leave your guns alone, but go overkill on hackers and dissidents.

Cross Purposes

I wasn't aware of this freaky asshole until just the other day, and right away you wish you didn't know about him. It's at least some consolation that his small congregation has lost more than 80% since 2007, so it's more like a black Westboro, an insular claque run by a closet-case nutjob and supported by family members and assorted dead-enders. The story and dynamic of James Manning and his silly circus draw some interesting parallels (at least to me) about cultural norms and expectations, and our responses to religiously inspired bouts of lunacy.

No doubt you are aware of the recent kerfuffle involving Bill Maher, Ben Affleck, and UC Berkeley. Maher had been invited to speak at Berkeley's December commencement, but was disinvited after he and Affleck (along with professional atheist author/provocateur Sam Harris) got into a shouting match over Islam on Maher's HBO show. The issue was that Maher had defamed Islam with his comments, which were certainly strident to say the least, and he got called out on it yet again just last week with Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal.

(Gratuitous sexist editorial note:  Rula Jebreal is smokin' hot, and really sharp, which of course just makes her hotter. I don't agree with every single thing she says, but good grief, she's beautiful. Even if she is married to a Goldman Sachs heir.)

It takes some unpacking, and perhaps some extra attention -- along with the acknowledgement that Maher, in his bluster, is broad-brushing a bit with his portrayals of Islamic fanatics -- but the fact is that the core of Maher's contention is correct:  Liberals (meaning Western liberals, Americans and Europeans) don't do a very good job of acknowledging and decrying not just the video atrocities of the fanatics, but of the day-to-day oppression people endure under putatively Islamic regimes.

One thing I think Westerners don't quite get about Islamic societies is how interwoven religion and culture are. The most-cited "big distinctions" between Christianity and Islam are that Islam has not had a Reformation or Enlightenment type of large-scale adjustment, nor does it have a centralized authority or hierarchy. On the one hand, that latter factor allows for more dissenting voices; on the other, it makes it tougher to crack down on the violent wingnuts that spring up. But the church-state separation that we take for granted -- even if it is with a wink and a nod in the south -- is practically non-existent in the belt of Islamic countries.

Stretching west to east from Morocco to Indonesia, it's not exactly a continuum or spectrum, but at least in those two bookend countries one finds a more secularized, even liberalized (compared to some of the more infamous countries in between) co-existence of religion and government. Even poor Tunisia recently had a step in the right direction, and Jordan has long been a bastion of moderation in a sea of fanaticism. And it's not as if the greed for oil in the west hasn't played a huge part in stoking said fanaticism. There are no clean hands here.

But liberals, whatever their ecumenical aspirations, need to more forcefully acknowledge that they would not want to be female in most of these countries, would not want to be gay in these places. The things they complain about the most when it comes to American Christian goofballs -- which, while annoyingly routine, are not quite normative -- are commonplace and worse in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan. Your average Duggar-smacking limo-lib would not last two weeks in Yemen, or any country whose official name begins with "The Islamic Republic of". Bokay? That's just how it is, and false pieties about cultural imperialism and such like don't change that fact.

Either you believe that women should be allowed to drive, or not have the shit beaten out of them for going to the store alone, or not be buried up to their waists and have rocks thrown at them until they die for "adultery," or that homosexuals shouldn't be hung by cables from cranes, or you don't believe those things. Or hell, just that women need to spend their entire adult lives sweltering in a fucking beekeeper suit, because it's the seventh century or something. That's the stuff that goes on and on, every goddamned day, whether it gets reported in the corporate media or not.

I refuse to acknowledge the feasibility of societies that repress their people in such ways for such picayune things. I'm not gonna pretend that it's not bullshit, that more generations of the people who live in those countries need to just wait it out, and hope that their great-great-grandchildren won't be butchered for throwing away a Qu'ran or teaching girls to read. If we call bullshit on our homegrown loons, we have to do the same with those abroad.

Don't get me wrong. I do not in any way wish to impose western values and mores upon any of these societies, beyond the universally obvious ones of basic human rights. Western societies certainly have their flaws to answer for, but violent over-reaction to nonsense is not one of them. We do not riot and kill people for writing books, not even shitty books. (I don't mean that The Satanic Verses is shitty, I mean that we have an overabundance of crap in general.)

As far as I'm concerned -- and I believe that Maher has made himself clear that this is where he's coming from on this -- is that to the extent one needs to voice their support or disapproval of various comings and goings and deeds of seven billion fools heading in almost as many directions, there should be some consistency as to what sort of things (that is, actions) one disapproves of or supports. Again, soon as you start parsing whether it's "one of ours" doing something awful as opposed to "them," you've lost the thread. It's the action that's horrible; frequently it's the person committing the deed as well, but the focus should be on the deed itself. The world never runs short of morons and assholes doing and saying stupid things, change the things and you hopefully change the people doing them. Eyes on the ball, son.

Nor would I advocate for a complete abolition of religion. Sure, there are countless examples of it poisoning the proverbial well, substituting for critical thought and motivating violent action. But there are just as many examples of it providing comfort and solace to the desperate and hopeless. The religion itself -- whether Islam, Christianity, Scientology, whatever -- is not the problem, the problem is absolutism, the problem is seriously thinking that violence is the best solution to transgressing that absolutism.

To be sure, I have given the cafeteria believers a hard time, but certainly a more syncretic belief system, however much "outside" the club rules, is preferable to the lunacy that pervades the Wahhabist strains of what was once a scientifically and intellectually innovative system of thought. And as Jebreal points out in the Salon interview, liberal Americans who support Israel (and I'd count myself in that group) also need to be critical of Zionist actions that oppress Palestinian lives heedlessly and needlessly. It is what it is, as the kids are fond of saying, but the corollary is that it usually doesn't have to be the way it is.

The truth is that the most virulent adherents of all three Abrahamic religions routinely excuse or ignore their transgressions and vicissitudes, and even their more moderate co-religionists will squint and wince rather than protest. So it is with any belief system, or more precisely, any power bloc. Because that's really all any religion is.

Which brings us back to "Pastor" Manning, and more specifically the anti-gay tirades that his church and other black churches have indulged in over the years, and encouraged their congregants to vote on. Considering that much of the anti-gay-marriage rhetoric in general has echoed the arguments fifty years ago against blacks and whites marrying, it would seem that black organizations and black individuals have perhaps an emphasized responsibility to speak out forcefully against such discrimination. And to their credit, the NAACP, other black organizations and politicians, and individuals black Americans have said exactly that.

But you're never going to get 100%, for a variety of reasons, just as you're never going to get 100% of Muslims around the world protesting the actions of ISIS, or the Saudis, or the Iranian mullahs, or whoever. They have lives to live, and sometimes the best they can do is just to stay out of it, and at least not even tacitly endorse it.

And the more we drone-bomb "terrorist" areas, without troubling ourselves much to ensure that everyone -- or even anyone -- hit by the strike is actually a threat to us or anyone else, the more we radicalize the Muslims in the area who are already on the fence, and the more we risk alienating the moderate Muslims who live and work in western countries.

But people of whatever race, religion, sexuality, etc., who profess to uphold liberal ideals of basic human rights and social justice, have a principled obligation to decry all of those things. Is it racially or culturally "insensitive" to insist that human beings should be treated well and as equally as possible, that treating women like farm animals and using gays as scapegoats is unnecessary and regressive? So be it.

As for the campus groups that tried to remove Maher, and have removed speakers such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, they need to keep in mind that freedom of speech is also a putatively liberal ideal, and that it is only important when it protects people we might not agree with. Intelligent adults should be able to hear things they don't agree with and take them into consideration, weigh them against their already-held principles. Only children and demagogues need to hear the soothing amen choir every single time.