Everyone is as rotten as them, but too hypocritical to admit it

My Sunday movie was the documentary The Revolution Generation. It was released this year. It works through the theory that American history runs in 80 year cycles, that there is a big cataclysm about 80 years and that event brings out the heroes. So, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and WWII are each about 80 years apart. And it has been about 80 years since WWII. And Millennials are the ones coming into power. Millennials portrayed as lazy narcissists. Older generations are doing to Millennials what was done to them – told they’re not enough. A lot of negative stereotypes are thrown out there, likely because older people are afraid of the young power. But they’re organizing. They’re the voice of change. They have the new ideas. They’re living the issues. They’re demanding a seat at the table. They want action and willing to lead to get it. They’re a large generation and the most diverse. They believe who you choose to be is more important than skin color or gender or orientation. Millennials were shaped by 9/11. The message was You Are Not Safe. Part of the need for connection was satisfied through the internet, but that also brought a lot of depression as kids compared themselves to the idealized versions put forth by others. They were overmedicated. This generation has big college debt. 63% are unable to pay it. But a college education is almost required for a middle class life. 60% of them are in the gig economy and struggle to pay bills. They are becoming aware how screwed up the system is. The first election they could vote in was 2008 and that showed how powerful they could be. But then they experienced the Great Recession (which is was 80 years after the Great Depression). And they saw there was zero accountability to those who had done the damage. Pundits will say Occupy Wall Street failed. But Millennials saw it was undermined by mainstream media. Some say it was successful in explaining concept of the 99% against the 1%. In 2016 they saw Bernie Sanders was saying the things they wanted to hear. Everything they care about became political. At the Democratic convention Bernie endorsed Hillary Clinton and that felt like a betrayal. They wanted Bernie to run as an independent. But we have a two party system and Bernie knew he would have split the progressive vote. But Millennials were convinced not to care and enough sat out the election to make a difference. The problem of 3rd party candidates will be solved by ranked choice voting, where they have a chance. RCV is beginning to be used. In 2012 highly gerrymandered districts were used and in 2013 an important chunk of the Voting Rights Amendment was overturned. And protests continued. A primary example is Standing Rock. Young people were at the center of this one. Though that battle was lost it highlighted two things: It showed that corporate interests are not aligned with the public good. And it showed police were protecting the corporations. With climate change front and center the fight is between right and easy. We’re down to whether we’re willing to save our species. We have the solutions. Do we have the political will? The big event every 80 years has, so far, been a war. Institutions get torn down and rebuilt. But now a war can destroy all. Will leaders step forward to navigate through the crisis to prevent a war yet still make a sufficiently significant change to the system? A new organization, Unrig the System, has appeared. This one is a movement across politics. Its goal is to make politics more fair. I searched for that phrase online and got several hits, a Facebook page, a couple places hosting podcasts, and a conference. The supposedly Quiet Generation (the one before Boomers) actually wasn’t so quiet – they marched for the Civil Rights bills for the 1960s. One reason why they achieved that was they were after one thing – civil rights for those who aren’t white. The movement today can have a similar single focus to unrig the system. Because it is all politics. Everything is a policy decision, everything from the air we breathe to our water, to our wastes. A lot of Millennials had said they couldn’t run for elected office because they don’t have the money and who would give a kid enough money to run? But many found good hard work made up for a lack of money. And at least 30 Millennials joined Congress in 2018. One of those was Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. She ran to use politics to change policies and came up with the Green New Deal. Of course there was a Big Oil backlash. And AOC used that to highlight how the system is rigged. There is AOC and fellow members of The Squad in Congress. There is Greta Thunberg – though she is Gen Z, she is inspiring a lot of Millennials (and others) to take action. The leaders are there. The need creates the leaders and pulls out their good qualities. And this bunch is determined to have love as the focus. One of the voices of the movie said: Millennials are coming into power. We don’t need approval or permission to change our world. We only need each other. The hero of our generation is our generation. I’m sure a good part of why this movie was made was to tell older generations to get out of the way and another part was to tell the younger people to get into the fight. My little red car has been giving me concern for a while now. The cruise control stopped engaging before the pandemic, but wasn’t a big concern until my recent trip to Nashville. The air conditioner quit on the way home from that trip. And the starter has been taking more than one attempt to make the engine turn over – something that happened just after a new alternator was put in. By the time the cruise control quit the car was already 14 years old and over 190K miles. When the AC quit it had already topped 200K miles. I asked about the cost of repairs and checked an online site for the value of the car and repairs were higher. I could endure some warm August weather. And cranking the starter a few extra times wasn’t a big deal. So I made plans for seeing the Detroit Auto Show (on now) to see how soon I could get an electric car (not SUV) with sufficient range. I was becoming less sure my current car would last that long. Over the last week the number of attempts to start went from three to sixteen, then twenty. And last night I gave up after fifty. Fortunately, this was after my evening event. And there were friends waiting to see if I needed help. One friend gave me a ride home. Unfortunately, that means my car is sitting in a parking lot and not at home. It’s been a good car, lasting almost 17 years, and reasonably staying out of the repair shop during that time. Today I spent the day looking for a replacement. Online sites make that relatively easy. In addition to searching for available cars I can also check reliability data. The existing electric cars don’t have sufficient range, as I said. Also, getting a charger installed in my garage is going to take a while and I need a car now. So I’m considering a used hybrid, something that will get great gas mileage until an electric is available for me to buy. Since I worked at a car company for my career and bought the current car just before I retired, I had always bought new with the employee discount. This will be my first used car. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday. The trend in new cases per day is down, but only a bit. The peaks in the last several weeks are at 2699, 2654, 2660, 2282, and 2204. The number of deaths per day is still in the 12-20 range, as it has been since mid March. Biden said the pandemic is over. But 2200 new cases per day in Michigan does not look like this is over. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Daily Kos, had a few quotes about the stunt DeathSantis pulled flying migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. The first was a tweet by Brendan Nyhan, a poli sci professor at Dartmouth. It was interesting enough that I went to the full thread. Nyhan quoted Matt Glassman:

DeSantis and Abbott shipping migrants to other states might be good politics for them, but it also feels like the triumph of s---posting as a substitute for serious policy. It's not a viable immigration strategy. But in a world of s---posting, it might seem downright innovative.

Nyhan added:

The need to be seen publicly owning libs is so profound for ambitious pols in the GOP that we're seeing an escalatory dynamic in which the ante keeps being raised - dumping migrants in blue states, performatively arresting people who were told they could vote, etc. I worry that debt ceiling hostage-taking could go even further in the next Congress under these circumstances.

Nyhan quoted Greg Greene:

Here’s the deal: with no overhyped caravans at the border and with Republicans having lost the August news cycle, GOP officials and media want to knock Dems off-message by staging a caravan from within. It’s bait. Dem officials should exercise restraint.

Nyhan added the stunt is...

Intentionally creating a situation where there would be no support or resources for highly vulnerable people.

Back to the roundup, Dworkin quoted a tweet by Bob Smietana: “Southern governors sending migrants north face a crisis of faith.” That included a link to Religion News with the tag, “It’s getting harder for a politician to adhere to Christian morals and get elected president.” In the comments Denise Oliver Velez included a few political cartoons. Matt Wuerker has one titled Air Desantis which shows posters showing free flights to fabulous Martha’s Vineyard and migrants scrambling to the ladders over the US border wall. And DeathSantis said he wants to discourage migrants. Matt Davies of Newsday has a cartoon of migrants coming off the plane and being asked “From which cruel & despotic regimes are you fleeing?” A migrant replies, “Texas and Florida.” Dworkin included a tweet by Jenny Hunter about the recently averted rail strike:

I wrote with ⁦@TerriGerstein⁩ for ⁦@Slate⁩ about how railroad companies just dangled the economy over a balcony because they didn’t want to adopt humane leave and attendance policies.

In another pundit roundup Chitown Kev of Kos quoted Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times:

The conceit of this dehumanizing bit of political theater was that the liberal denizens of Martha’s Vineyard would reject the migrants out of hypocrisy, thus proving that Democrats aren’t actually interested in welcoming immigrants into their communities. To DeSantis and his amen corner, asylum seekers are disposable, and they believe that liberals will want to dispose of them too. What happened, instead, was that residents of Martha’s Vineyard rallied to provide food, shelter, clothing and services. The asylum seekers are now on their way to Cape Cod, to receive further assistance. The stunt failed to make its intended point.

It’s a case of a supremacist seeing the world only in terms of maintaining the social hierarchy and being surprised that others don’t see the world that way. Dartagnan of the Kos community started a post by asking wouldn't it be nice to know when your child was about to throw a temper tantrum?

Just imagine if you knew the tantrum was coming ahead of time, though. You could sit back and relax, even count down, 3-2-1, and when the whining started, you’d be totally prepared for it. Imagine you’re in the middle of doing something very important: you could look up at the clock and say to yourself, Okay, have to take a break now, tantrum coming up in a minute. Multiple Republican candidates for office have given us all a preview of their plans should they lose their elections on Nov. 8: They all intend to bawl “fraud,” as loudly and vehemently as their little lungs can manage. Their reasons are as murky as their (nonexistent) policy positions but they all—like the babies they’re emulating so well—seem to boil down to the fact that someone isn’t paying enough attention to them right now.

Dartagnan then discussed a report by Reid Epstein in the NYT listing a dozen Republican candidates for governor and senator who have already said they will cry fraud if the election doesn’t go their way. Which means they aren’t fit to be candidates and don’t deserve your vote. Though thanks for letting us know about your planned tantrum. In a Ukraine update posted last Saturday Mark Sumner of Kos wrote that as a “war correspondent” he’s got a really cushy job. He can work from his desk in America and report based on what he reads online. He’s thankful for his job for a couple reasons right now. First, last Friday was the Day of Remembrance of Ukrainian Journalists. Since the start of Russia’s invasion 39 have been killed. Second, now that Russia has pulled out of Izyum we saw, as we did when they pulled out of Bucha and many other cities and villages, Russia left behind war crimes, a fresh set of atrocities. In Izyum’s case it is 445 people buried in the forest. There is evidence of torture. Putin may think of them as statistics or pieces on a chessboard, but they were real people who did such things as celebrate Christmas last year. Weoropar tweeted a discussion of Russia’s definition of “hypocrisy” and “normal.”

The way they see it, a westerner, who is appalled by looting - would himself loot, if given the chance. Moreover, the Russians see themselves better than the westerners, since they at least openly admit they're rotten. That is one of the reasons behind Russian pride in atrocities. Being better than the West is another major part of Russian Worldview TM, but I'm not going into that topic right now. The key thought of this rant - the Russians want to prove to the rest of the world that everyone is as rotten as them, but too hypocritical to admit it.

Another case of supremacists not seeing that some people are not worried about their place in the hierarchy. On Tuesday evening Sumner reported on the news that Putin was about to give a big speech. But his appearance kept getting delayed. And eventually moved to Wednesday morning. But some people seem to know what is coming and it doesn’t sound good. Oligarchs seem aware of what it is because the Russian stock market dropped 9%. And men ages 18-64 are scrambling for airline tickets to anywhere out of the country and Googling how to escape Russia. In a Wednesday morning update Sumner reported Putin did give his big speech. Russian TV reserved three hours. Putin talked for ten minutes. Putin did the usual bit of blaming the west and repeating his goal of ridding the world of the “Nazi” regime in Kyiv. He lied about how well the invasion is going for Russia. He declared there will be elections in Russian held territory in Ukraine so they can be annexed. That way liberating them can be seen as an attack on Russia. Of course, most of the citizens in these areas will vote for “don’t kill me.” And the big news: He will be mobilizing 300,000 military reservists (the actual definition of “reservist” is whatever Putin and his goons decide it means). Sumner wrote, quoting numbers Putin spouted:

So … Russia has lost fewer than 6,000. Has killed 100,000. Killed 7,000 Ukrainians in the last three weeks. And is now calling up 300,000 to fight the half of the Ukrainian military that remains? It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s Russia.

Sumner noted these 300,000 troops won’t make Russia’s inability to do logistics any better. They won’t compensate for the weapons Russia no longer has the resources to make. And many of these new “contract” soldiers vow to refuse to fight or shoot their commanders. In the meantime flights leaving Russia have sold out and the airlines were ordered to not sell tickets to men age 18-65. And the traffic jam at the Finland border is now 35Km long – Finland may soon have a larger Russian army than Russia. And at the United Nations Biden said, “This war is about extinguishing Ukraine's right to exist as a state — plain and simple — and Ukraine's right to exist as a people. Whoever you are, wherever you live, whatever you believe, that should make your blood run cold.”