The load-bearing superstructure of our society is abuse

I’ve heard of PolitiFact, an organization that rates political statements with a truth-o-meter that goes all the way from true and partly true on down to pants-on-fire. I hadn’t heard they do a lie of the year. I discovered that when their discussion of this year’s lie of the year was printed in the Detroit Free Press last Sunday. A sampling of previous lies of the year. 2009 – Death Panels. Sarah Palin was the first to make this claim of the Affordable Care Act. 2013 – President Obama claimed that through the Affordable Care Act “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” 2015 – Candidate nasty guy’s aggregate of statements while campaigning. 76% of them were rated mostly false, false, or pants-on-fire. 2018 – Online smears of the Parkland High School students. They suffered the trauma and deaths of a gunman in their school. Then, when they advocated for action, the smears began. Compared to this year the ones from prior years seem pretty tame. On, to 2020. Wouldn’t the lie of the year be a president who lost the election and insisted he had won get the top spot? It would if there wasn’t an even bigger lie. So the lie of the year for 2020 is: The coronavirus is no worse than the flu. What made this worse was the pile of lies that came along trying to assert the big lie or undermine aspects of the truth.

It was a symphony of counter narrative, and Trump was the conductor, if not the composer. The message: The threat to your health was overhyped to hurt the political fortunes of the president.

PolitiFact listed: * The claims that masks don’t work, that social distancing was a joke. * The claim of a death count much smaller than it really was. An example was the claim that if a person with diabetes died after being infected he died of diabetes. No, he also died of COVID and should be counted as such. * The claim that since the scene outside a hospital was quiet, the hospital must be lying about what is going on inside. * The claim that hospitals were declaring all deaths were because of COVID because doctors got more Medicare money that way. * The claims that hydroxychloroquine and bleach were effective treatments, a claim supported by “real” doctors. * The claim by the nasty guy, once he recovered from COVID through drugs most people can’t get, that there is nothing about the virus to fear. * Various claims about the vaccines: that it will also inject a microchip to track you, that it causes infertility, that many of the side effects are life-threatening, that the government will force people to take it. The whole pile – this and more – taken together, and because the virus and the economic shutdown affected everyone in the country, deserves to be called the lie of the year. A. R. Moxon tweeted a thread:

They're talking about a military coup right now and if it doesn't happen we're going to be told the best way to heal is pretending it never happened. This is how abuse works. 3,000 people are dying a day and after nearly a year of this Congress is releasing the barest fraction of the economic relief needed to keep people safe and only in exchange for the promise that we can't sue those who endangered the dead. This is how abuse works.

There were a few more statements similar to that, then:

The undergirding load-bearing superstructure upon which our entire society is built is abuse and enablement, and it's sick, and it has to stop. We need to stop this deadly unreasonable practice of expecting people to accept unacceptable things in order to be thought reasonable. In order to have healing, we first need to cleanse the wound. This healing needs rage. Rage, and consequence, and a real reckoning. Anything less is just pretending it didn't happen. It's how abuse works.

Then several statements similar to this:

They're going to tell you that your anger makes you just as bad as them, as if it's anger that is the problem, rather than the reason for the anger. It's appropriate to be angry when you're told that, because that is enablement. Enablement of abuse is abuse.

Then:

Your rage is yours, and it's appropriate, and it's necessary right now. The reason abusive enablers want it gone is simple: It's evidence. Abusive people and their enablers dislike evidence. Evidence leads to conviction. Conviction, to consequence. Reject the abusive notion that your anger is the problem, not the abuse that made your anger appropriate. Reject the enabling notion that abuse is an unfortunate necessity, changing it is unrealistic, and demanding better is immature or divisive. Refuse to pay the tax of abuse. They're going to tell you that your anger is causing the abuse: *Your anger demonizes abusers. *Your anger leaves no room for them to be redeemed. *Your anger makes abusers angry. *It's forcing them to be abusive. All this is how enablement of abuse works. Enablement is abuse.

What to do about it? Sometimes maintaining the existing order is abusive.

Sometimes, the only appropriate thing is to change the locks—whatever that might look like. Maybe changing the locks looks like this: Refusing complicity. Speaking up. Not letting people infer through your silence that you think their abusive beliefs are good and just and true, rather than unjust and harmful and abusive. Maybe it looks like this: Refusing debate with someone whose methods and purposes are abusive, simply on the grounds that their premises are abusive and harmful to others, and you will not lend unacceptable premises the respectability a debate provides.

And several similar statements. Bes has this in his Twitter bio: “Jeff Bezos gained $50k & 1 child died of hunger by the time you finished reading my bio.” A couple days ago as the virus relief package was being finalized, he tweeted:

here's a list of the wealthiest members of congress. i don't think these people have a right to tell you that $600 is enough

At the top of the list is Sen. Kellly Loeffler of Georgia with a net worth of $500 million. She’s in a runoff election in Georgia. At a distant second is Rep. Greg Gianforte of Montana with $135.7 million. His list has 35 names with the one at the bottom worth $8.8 million. This is data from 2018 and the numbers are likely higher. Charles Norman, while linking to an article in the Washington Post tweeted:

John Kelly is wrong. These were not good people. “The number of senior officials who quit on principle is close to zero. The number of former Cabinet officials who came forward during the impeachment to give testimony is zero.”

After the election and as the nasty guy was sending minions to file court cases in battleground states, Fox News participated by spreading the lies. One of them was that Smartmatic and Dominion voting machines gave extra votes to Joe Biden (though the real complaint was they were hard to hack to make black votes disappear). Hunter of Daily Kos reported that now Smartmatic and Dominion are preparing to sue Fox News for defamation. And they have a pretty solid case that what Fox News hosts said isn’t just freedom of speech. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Politico. The nasty guy has been recruiting Congressional supporters to muck up the Electoral College certification with objections when it gets to Congress in January. GOP leaders say the effort is doomed to fail. But …

The objections will also force Republicans in Congress to go on record voting to affirm Biden’s victory — acknowledging the outcome and likely inflaming Trump’s diehard supporters, a crucial GOP faction that has joined the president in denying the election results. Republican strategists and Trump allies inside and outside Washington said Trump’s core supporters will remember how their lawmakers vote on Jan. 6.

There are lots of fears the nasty guy won’t leave the White House. Here’s a tweet from Weijia Jiang, White House correspondent for CBS News, that might quiet some fears:

NEW: Despite Trump’s fight to stay, last night White House staff received a detailed email from his exec. office with directions on the departing process. Employees will start leaving the week of 01/04. Note addresses everything from cleaning microwaves to ethics debriefing. One more note: WH sources say senior staff isn’t even showing up anymore, one explanation for why Sidney Powell can come and go as she pleases. Some employees have already started other jobs. And if there was any illusion about a Hail Mary, last night’s email intercepted.

Before this year such a memo hasn’t been news.