Saturday, March 16, 2024

To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies

I saw the play Beautiful Thing at the Ringwald last evening. It was, alas, not the great production like I had experienced at the Ringwald before. Part of it is the Ringwald’s new location. They gave up a space with perhaps a hundred seats and moved into a community room with 40 seats at Affirmations, the LGBTQ community center in Ferndale. I’m sure this is a big win for Affirmations. The directors of the Ringwald are a gay couple, so their types of plays fit well with Affirmations. Part of it is the Ringwald box office (a woman standing at a desk) didn’t know what to do with the cash I handed her and one saw the program by scanning a QR code with their phone (I rarely take my phone with me). And part of it is the play. The story takes place mostly in the common yard of three adjacent row houses in London. Jamie is 15 and lives in the right house with his mother Sondra and her boyfriend Tony, only a dozen years older than Jamie. In the middle house lives Leah (I think that’s her name, I don’t have a program to check) who lives with her mother, whom we never see. Leah is about the same age as Jamie and has some sort of medical condition (the show opens with Leah filling a pill reminder) that keeps her out of school. In the left house is Ste (short for Steven), also 15, who lives with his father and brother (occasionally heard, but not seen). Dysfunctional families all around. Ste’s dad is violent, so Ste frequently sleeps in Jamie’s bed. At first, sleep is the operative word. But soon they realize they’re attracted to each other. Then they, especially Ste, are terrified of their parents finding out. I think the acting was decent. But the production had me thinking it was the quality of a college production, not a professional theater. I wonder if my displeasure was because there was too much focus on Leah and her issues and that prevented a fuller exploration and resolution of the relationship between Jamie and Ste. The show plays weekends through the end of the month. I finished the book Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler. This is the sequel to her book Parable of the Sower, which I wrote about back in November. In the first book Lauren, a black girl, grew up in a walled community, not because she was rich, but because the surrounding Los Angeles area was quite dangerous. While there she started developing the philosophy of Earthseed. Then disaster struck. She fled with a few survivors and walked north, gathering a community around her for protection as she went. The first book ended as they reached land in northern California owned by the man who became her husband. At the start of the second book, five years later in the year 2032, her community has established Acorn, where they live according to the ways of Earthseed. Running for president that year is Andrew Steele Jarrett, a pastor who is preaching (all his campaign speeches are really sermons) that America is in such a bad position because the country has turned its back on God. We’ve met this type in real life. In describing his campaign Lauren actually uses the phrase “Make America Great Again.” That’s a lot of foresight for a book published in 1998. Jarrett becomes president because so many people think the country needs a strongman to put things rights. Voters don’t realize he has his own view of what putting right means. Shortly after taking office Jarrett establishes the Christian American Church. A few months after that some of Jarrett’s goons invade Acorn because Earthseed is definitely not Christian, so must be heathen and residents need to be educated in proper Christian theology. That’s another way of saying the invaders are using God as a cover for inflicting their cruelty. What they do is illegal, but there is no one to stop them. Jarrett disavows connection to the goons, but doesn’t condemn them. Those that survive the invasion are enslaved and their children taken to be raised by proper Christian families. That includes Lauren’s two month old daughter. The rest of the book is about Lauren surviving slavery, trying to find her daughter, and trying to come up with a way of spreading her Earthseed philosophy. The title comes from the book of Matthew in the Bible. I’ll summarize: Just before a business man leaves on a trip he gives one servant five talents, another two, and another one. The servant given five earns five more. The one given two earns two more. The one given a single talent hides it so it isn’t stolen yet doesn’t earn even interest. When the business man returns he praises the efforts of those who now have ten and four talents. But he is quite angry with the servant who does nothing with the one talent. Scholars say the story works well both with talent referring to a unit of money and with our modern definition of a skill which a person does well. In that second meaning we each have things we are good at. We must develop them and use them for the community. In the context of the book Lauren’s talent is this philosophy she assembled and feels she must spread to the wider world. I like the Earthseed philosophy, at least the verses that are in the book. The basic idea is that change happens and one must figure out how to manage the change and perhaps direct it. At the top of her verses are: God is Change. One is changed by God and one can change God. There is also a Destiny that humanity must spread to the stars. Here’s another verse that is in the book just before Acorn is attacked. I think is quite appropriate for our election year.
Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.
Back in November I wrote about the first book:
Butler said she had taken the condition of the country in the early 1990s and projected the prevailing forces out to their logical end. She then set the story in ... 2024. As in next [now this] year. At the time it was published critics declared it to be farfetched, especially in such a short timeline. They said civilization can’t collapse that quickly. More recent critics, with the benefit of 25 years of history, said: Oh, that’s how.
Our own nasty guy isn’t a Christian (or at least is quite bad at following Christian principles). Otherwise he is quite similar to Jarrett. But the nasty guy has Christian Nationalist friends who are like Jarrett. For example... Last Tuesday Hunter of Daily Kos wrote about Russell Vought. He was budget director under the nasty guy and current president of the Center for Renewing America, pushing for the adoption of Christian Nationalism. He also has an advisory role in Project 2025 being developed by the Heritage Foundation as a guide on how the next Republican president can become dictator. Bucks County Beacon journalist Jennifer Cohn uncovered documents from CRA claiming to be a draft Statement of Christian Nationalism & the Gospel. Hunter summarized:
The self-described Christian nationalists defining the term don’t envision some ambiguous version of "religious freedoms" that need to be protected. Instead, they are demanding our nation's government be torn down and replaced with a version in which their preferred "Church" will ordain public servants who will enforce Christian theocratic law and "squelch" any Americans who engage in "disobedience" against their plan, which is written in plain English. It's a plan for violence-minded theocratic rule that’s little different from the one Iranians are victims of. It also mirrors what conservative religious extremists have long frothed about as the supposed future non-Christian Americans have been trying to bring about, simply by existing.
These are the people near the nasty guy who say, if reelected, he has full authority to shape the government in their vision. Republicans are enthusiastically endorsing it. Yeah, all that sounds like Andrew Steele Jarrett. Last Monday Mark Sumner of Kos posted what looks to be the start of a regular series of “stories to know.” One of these stories is the one by the Bucks County Beacon with the implied question of why isn’t the rest of the news media ignoring this story. It should be on page one! Another story Sumner mentioned is from Talking Points Memo and is about the Society for American Civic Renewal that is not secret in their discussion of a “national divorce” also known as a second Civil War. No surprise they have strong opinions on race and sexual orientation. And we can easily guess what those opinions are. A third story to mention is about something Liz Cheney and the nasty guy agree, amazing as that sounds. They agree that the current Republican Party belongs to the nasty guy and those he pushes out will need a new party. Thom Hartmann of the Kos community started a post with a serious question by comedian Noel Casler:
How come everything the Republican Party stands for involves other people dying?
Hartmann then listed 27 thing that are worse in Republican controlled states. The list includes spousal abuse, obesity, smoking, teen pregnancy, abortion, bankruptcies and poverty, homicide, infant mortality, divorce, contaminated water, opiate addiction and deaths, unskilled workers, wealth inequality, homelessness, unemployment, and people on disability.
Is there something in the GOP’s core beliefs and strategies that just inevitably leads to these outcomes? It turns out that’s very much the case: these terrible outcomes are the direct result of policies promoting greed and racism that the GOP has been using for forty+ years to get access to billions of dollars and win elections. Using racism as a political strategy while promoting and defending the greed of oligarchs always leads to widespread poverty, pollution, ignorance, and death regardless of the nation it’s done in. We’ve seen it over and over again around the world: it’s happening today in India, The Philippines, Brazil, Russia, and Hungary, for example. And the GOP has spent the past 40+ years marinating itself in both.
Hartmann then gave a history, going back 60 years, back to presidential candidate Barry Goldwater refusing to support the Civil Rights Act. Then came Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Add to that using abortion as a campaign issue in the 1980s as the Republican Party began to combine with religious conservatives. Then came demonization of liberals, and attacks on science and on public education. The other big thread in this history was Reagan’s embrace of oligarchs – him giving them tax cuts, them giving him donations now called “free speech.”
The result of this whole sad history is that Red states have been turned into sacrifice zones for Reagan’s racial and religious bigotry and the neoliberal raise-up-the-rich and crap-on-unions economic policies he inflicted on America.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

They can’t stomach the implications of their own beliefs

Happy Pi Day! Today’s date (in America) is 3.14. Back in February I wrote Republicans absolutely would give a microphone to Robert Hur, the special counsel that added a bit about Biden’s age and memory into his explanation on why he wasn’t charging Biden for keeping official documents (which Biden promptly returned when they were found). A couple days ago that mic was given to Hur. And it didn’t go as well as Republicans wanted. Alas, in my regular sources I can’t find a decent summary article. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported that the House Judiciary Committee is realizing their previous methods of attacking Biden aren’t going to work. But that doesn’t mean they’ll stop trying. They are looking for other routes of attack. I had written that Republicans don’t seem to mind that their donations to the RNC and the nasty guy campaign are being diverted to pay the nasty guy’s legal bills. Sumner reported that a Civiqs poll puts numbers to that statement:
Fielded March 9-12, the poll finds that 63% of Republican voters say either that they want the RNC to cover Trump’s legal bills, or that they don’t care if it does. Only 26% of Republican voters oppose using the national party’s funds to cover the cost of Trump’s legal tab.
The poll shows 81% of Democrats disapprove of the RNC covering those legal bills. Sumner says we should be pleased with it.
If whatever cash the RNC can collect is going to Trump, then it’s not going to Republican candidates trying to gain an edge in the Senate. It’s not going to Republican members in the House, every one of whom has to defend their seat this fall. And it’s not going to races for governors, state attorneys general, state legislators, local officials, or judges. The consequence of having an authoritarian party ruled over by a single corrupt family at the behest of a single corrupt candidate is that all the money goes to one person. Trump is a money pit that the RNC can feed but never satisfy. Everyone else will go hungry. Republicans say they are okay with that. Democrats should be too.
Joan McCarter of Kos reported:
The blockbuster news Tuesday was Republican Rep. Ken Buck’s surprise announcement that he can’t bear to stick it out until November and is resigning next week. “It is the worst year of the nine years and three months that I’ve been in Congress and having talked to former members, it’s the worst year in 40, 50 years to be in Congress,” Buck told CNN. The Colorado conservative had already announced that this would be his last term in office, but now he’s decided he can’t tolerate any more. “This place has just devolved into this bickering and nonsense and not really doing the job for the American people,” he added. Buck had a parting shot for Johnson, just to keep him looking over his shoulder. “I think it’s the next three people that leave that they’re going to be worried about,” he told Axios on Tuesday.
Pat Byrnes posted a cartoon of a bunch of elephants in a conference room and one saying:
We have to shut it down. Every day the government is running, it is clearer we have no idea how to run it.
Hunter of Kos reported on another Civiqs poll, this one was asking about whether in-vitro fertilization should be banned. Overall only 6% of voters say IVF should be illegal. Even among Republicans only 11% say it should be illegal. This is not an issue people are “divided” over, as the far right insists. In looking at a couple more questions in the poll Hunter wrote:
And that’s the central problem with the Republican Party's extreme stance on when "life" supposedly begins. You can get almost (but not quite) half of Republican voters to parrot that hard-right line and say a clump of cells not even differentiated enough to have a single nerve or organ constitutes a "child." Only 20% of Republican voters oppose legal protections for IVF patients and providers. That's the difference between an ideological stance and a real-world one: The majority of Republican voters can’t stomach the implications of their own beliefs. Not if it means losing fertility treatments.
Charles Jay of the Kos community reported that a settlement has been reached in the lawsuit brought against Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. The law hasn’t been overturned, which will take more legal work and more time. The settlement will give some relief in the meantime. The law now applies only to some types of classroom instruction. Kids can talk about being LGBTQ and about their LGBTQ parents. Books can return to the library. Anti-bullying training can refer to gay kids. Classroom lessons that tangentially talk about LGBTQ kids is OK. I think what that leaves is such things as a teacher saying this is what homosexuality is. The tide is turning. The enthusiasm of anti-LGBTQ seems to be waning at least in Florida, now that DeathSantis is out of the presidential race. (Hmm.) A sign of low enthusiasm is the Florida legislature adjourned last Friday and left 21 of 22 anti-LGBTQ bills behind, effectively killing them. It’s been about a month since I’ve thought to look for threads by Michael Harriot on Threadreader. In this first thread he talks about becoming a “diversity” hire. Maybe that’s not the right word because he was hired to write for the Amber Ruffin Show where Ruffin is black and the writing room was majority black. Maybe it is the right word. That writing room was in sharp contrast to the usual writing rooms in Hollywood that are mostly to all white. My reason for including this is Harriot included a six minute video of the first thing he wrote for Ruffin. It’s an explanation of why home ownership is rigged against black people. That comes from the “redlining” instituted in a law enacted in the Great Depression to help white people buy houses. It didn’t specifically exclude black people, but it did exclude the areas, colored red on maps, that were majority black. That legacy lives on. The video is a good explanation. In a second thread Harriot poses a Black History Month challenge. Who are three people responsible for saving the most lives in history? Of course, Harriot names three black people who saved millions, maybe a half billion. The first is Henrietta Lacks. Cells from her were harvested without her consent. But the cells (alas not Henrietta) have proved to be immortal and have provided a standard way to test advancements in treating and preventing polio, AIDS, Parkinson’s, COVID, and many other maladies. The second is Dr. Charles Drew, who created the process for collecting and storing blood plasma. He also created the blood bank. He was appointed to lead the Red Cross Blood for Britain project during WWII. The third is Onesimus, an enslaved person, who brought the idea of vaccines to America. That prompted Dr. Edward Jenner to use the cowpox as a smallpox vaccine. Though some states had bans on vaccine mandates, George Washington required his troops to be inoculated, first in Morristown and then in Valley Forge. That was important to winning the Revolutionary War. No Onesimus? Maybe no America. The third thread is about black people and education. Europe was in the Dark Ages at the same time as the Islamic Golden Age. One important tenant of the time was sharing information. That meant information was not for just the privileged. And that meant everyone should be educated. That was helped by Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, head librarian at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. He authored one of the most important books ever, the “al-Kitāb al-Mukhtaṣar fī Ḥisāb al-Jabr wal-Muqābalah.” That got shortened as “Al-Jabr” and we now know it as algebra. By the time the slave trade began Islam, and the idea that all should be educated, had spread across the northern half of Africa.
Although we talk about the spread of Christianity, up to 40% of enslaved Africans came from predominately Muslim parts of West Africa, where education & knowledge were not restricted by wealth & class like in Europe. But because literate slaves were considered dangerous, reading & writing were FORBIDDEN, many enslaved people had to hide their knowledge.
Onesimus (see above) was an enslaved literate Muslim. Since Europeans tended to think education was for the aristocrats, literacy in the American South was quite low. Harriot doesn’t say it, but I wonder if many slaves off the boats were better educated than their masters. So it’s not surprising that by 1740 there were laws that slaves were not to be taught how to read or write and that writing by slaves was banned. Also banned was math. Harriot then looks at a modern math problem. Pundits have talked about the difference black people voting for the nasty guy will have. Yeah, that’s not going to happen. Do a bit of math. All those extra black votes would have made no difference in the nasty guy losing in 2020. So why are there so many stories about the difference the black vote would make when there are so many more white people? Or as Harriot put it:
Why aren't there any stories about how WHITE PEOPLE KEEP WHITE PEOPLEING?
Perhaps it is because about three-quarters of journalists are white? A bit of fun: Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos included, as a brief sanity break, a two minute video of the Boston Typewriter Orchestra.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Affection for dictators

My Sunday viewing was the Oscar Awards. It was an enjoyable evening and most of the relevant details are available elsewhere. I will mention that for the best leading and supporting (or is it “featured”?) actors and actresses previous winners came out to give tributes to the nominees. Some were rather touching. But in doing it that way I didn’t see moments of the nominees’ actual work. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported the nasty guy has completed his takeover of the Republican National Committee. His choices for co-chairs have been installed and work is commencing on turning the RNC into a subsidiary of the nasty guy’s campaign. Good luck if you’re a Republican and were hoping for some campaign cash from the national party. Sumner also reported that the RNC fired about 60 staff members, an “absolute bloodbath.” There are some strange things about this move. First, this “seems insane” to drop that number of people in an election season. Second...
As Politico makes clear, this isn’t just a matter of moving out staff aligned to a previous candidate—Trump was the previous candidate. Trump has essentially been at the top of the Republican Party ticket for around eight years, meaning that the staff at the RNC was already heavily aligned with him.
The new RNC chairs say donors will have no problem funneling money through the RNC directly into the nasty guy’s legal bills. But small donors are showing signs of “donor fatigue.” And the big donors are undecided about whether they want to support him.
This is more about dissolving the remaining walls between the party and Trump. It’s about making clear that there is no difference between being a Republican and being a blind follower of Trump. And there’s certainly no difference between donating to the Republican Party, and donating directly to Trump.
Another thought: Were 60 people let go because the previous chair was bad at fundraising and there just wasn’t the money to pay for them all? Hunter of Kos noted the nasty guy almost has (and since Hunter wrote, does have) enough delegates to win the nomination.
It was always going to end up that way, of course. Polling has long shown that the majority of the Republican base—the very white, very angry, very racist, very conservative Republican base—would be choosing the Republican who plotted out a very real, if very stupid, attempt to topple the United States government over any of the also-rans who offered themselves up as alternatives. ... What that means is that at this point, we can do away with three years of caveats and take it as a confirmed fact. When Republican voters in 14 of 15 states on Tuesday went to vote for who they believed best represented their party and should run the whole of government, they chose the man who launched the most consequential insurrection against the government since the Civil War. Because that is who they are, and we all ought to be very damn tired of anyone who claims otherwise.
Sumner wrote about the nasty guy’s affection for dictators. Hungarian authoritarian Viktor Orbán went to visit Mar-a-Lago this past Friday. Afterward Orbán explained out loud what everyone assumed was the nasty guy’s plan to end the war in Ukraine:
"He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war,” said Orbán. “That is why the war will end.” In other words, Orbán and Trump are promising to starve Ukraine of any ability to defend itself, ensuring that a democratic nation of nearly 37 million (as of 2023) people falls to an authoritarian dictatorship. "It is obvious that Ukraine cannot stand on its own feet," Orbán said on Hungary's M1 TV. “If the Americans don't give money and weapons, along with the Europeans, then the war is over. And if the Americans don't give money, the Europeans alone are unable to finance this war. And then the war is over." For Orbán, Putin, and Trump, this is a good thing.
Sumner went on to explain how such a dictator in Europe isn’t a controversy, at least in some minds:
“He’s a non-controversial figure because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it,” said Trump.
Then Sumner listed some of the praise the nasty guy has for Putin, Xi, and Kim. Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed what the nasty guy’s plan for Ukraine, said out loud by Orbán, means to the wider world. That bit about, “And then the war is over.” No, it won’t be. The war in Ukraine will not be a stalemate. Remember the horror of learning about the 37,000 people massacred in Bucha? Imagine that played out at least 100 times across Ukraine. Then consider millions of Ukrainians fleeing into the rest of Europe. The EU won’t be able to handle the crowds of refugees. The burden will assist the rise of far right pro-Russia parties in the hopes of placating it (which never works). Russia will turn its war effort to the rest of Europe, made weaker by America withdrawing from NATO. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia don’t want to return to Soviet control but would struggle to forestall Russian attacks. Along with Finland they are contemplating mining their eastern borders, because Russia used that effectively in Ukraine. The rest of Europe would significantly increase their defense spending in a return to a perpetual state of almost-war, similar to the Cold War. That’s as Russia has increased its own defense spending in preparation for a perpetual war. Putin has no opposition to tell him that’s a bad idea. Putin would also support more terrorists around the world. Also, China and North Korea are watching to see if America turns its back, allowing them no opposition to their own plans for conquest. Tyrants win across the world. And with the nasty guy’s affection of tyrants he’ll see that as a good thing. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev had a few quotes worth sharing. Heather Digby Parton of Salon wrote:
The truth is that Orbán may need Trump more than Trump needs Orbán. He's isolated in Europe and in order to fulfill his larger agenda he needs a friend in the White House, and Joe Biden will not be that.
Orbán may be in need because his party is in turmoil, he’s the pariah of Europe, and there are cracks in his support.
If Trump wins all that changes. Orbán sees his friendship with Trump and Putin puts him right at the center of a major new alliance and it's not at all an unreasonable assumption.
Kev quoted Zack Montellaro of Politico who wrote about a vulnerable target of AI deep fakes. That’s election workers. They’re still broadly trusted, but not well known in their communities. “A well-executed fake of them could be highly dangerous but hard to counter.” Secretaries of State are aware of this possibility and are working scenarios into their training. Down in the comments are a couple good cartoons. One from John Deering shows Biden playing checkers with the nasty guy. Biden says, “King me.” A cartoon by Pat Bagley plays on a famous line from the movie Jaws: “We’re going to need a bigger boat!” This time the boat is “local news” and the shark is “Misinformation.”