Policy: drive liberals to anger, then mock them

My Sunday movie was Episode 1 of American Revolution by Ken Burns. I haven’t watched episodes 2-4 and probably won’t get to 5 and 6 unless I can find a way to stream them over the next several weeks. I’ll have to check whether PBS allows non-members to stream their shows. This episode covers 1754 to 1775. The story starts with the Seven Year War (French and Indian War) in 1754. It was actually a global war. These were George Washington’s first battles. He was part of the British military and those battles convinced him the British could be defeated. This was at a time the people still thought of themselves as British. The mainland (rather than the Caribbean) colonies were quite diverse. People came from various European countries in addition to England. There were also African slaves and indigenous people. How could such diversity be united into one country? The greater the percent of slaves in a colony, the more prosperous it was. Caribbean colonies were quite prosperous. New England colonies were not. England paid more attention to the Caribbean. Those who came to the American colonies were people who wanted their own plot of land. They did not want to work for the local aristocracy. There was a continuing demand for more land but the only available land was controlled by the natives. That meant violence. To reduce that violence Britain said no spreading beyond the Appalachian Mountains. Colonists said nope. Britain sent troops to enforce their edict. But the British government, having fought four wars (or maybe that was wars on four continents?), was deeply in debt. They decided the colonies should pay for the troops – the troops that prevented them from spreading west. Thus the Stamp Act. And that created the idea of no taxation without representation. Most of the episode is about the government in London enacting more ways to bring its colonies under control and the colonists rejecting them and becoming more united in their rejection. Then came Lexington and Concord, the first deaths, and the British retreat. Before then each colony had its own relationship with London, some rejecting the meddling and calling for defiance and others enjoying profitable relations they wanted to continue. But Lexington and Concord prompted a more unified view that the political links to England needed to be severed. I am impressed with the large range of artwork the series used to illustrate the scenes. Of course most of it I hadn’t seen before. I was amused at the painting of the young George Washington. I appreciate the show talked about the contradiction between colonists described themselves as slaves to England while having African slaves in their homes. I’ll have more to say about that when I finish the book I’m reading and about a third of the way through. When the nasty guy reclaimed the Oval Office Niece told me she wanted to get out of the country, though she doesn’t feel she is ready to support herself through such a drastic changes. Alix Breeden of Daily Kos reported:

A recent Gallup poll found that 40% of U.S. women aged 15 to 44 said that they would move to another country permanently if given the opportunity—a jump of 10% since 2014. This increase seems to be exclusive to the United States, with other countries reporting fairly consistent numbers between 20% and 30%.

The nasty guy in the Oval Office is not the only reason, though a big one. There is a general sense the US is becoming increasingly unfriendly to women, and has been since about 2016. In the last year both in Britain and Canada there has been an increase in the Americans applying for citizenship. Americans living outside considering renouncing citizenship has jumped from 30% to 49%. Reasons for the desire to leave are restrictions on abortion and reproductive rights, the cost of giving birth is going up (as health insurance is getting much more expensive), and masculinity is getting more toxic. Dan Gearino, in an article for Inside Climate News posted on Kos, reported there are some things people on the left and right agree on. One is a “skepticism of entrenched power and a desire to dismantle systems that they think have ceased to serve everyday people.” And that includes increasing distrust for data centers.

Much of the discussion is about data centers, which are often large developments used to support cloud computing or artificial intelligence. But the underlying issues are broader, touching on the power of tech companies. For people who live near proposed data centers, there is an additional sense of powerlessness, which Inside Climate News has documented across the country, including the backlash to a plan for a huge data center in Bessemer, Alabama. “It’s about big tech,” Olson said. “To steal Bernie’s words, [it’s about] these big tech oligarchs that are calling all the shots at every single level of government right now.”

Gearino included poll results showing that for most things more people (and in some areas many more people) believe AI makes things worse and not better. The problem could be lessened if those wanting to build data centers talk about local benefits. The locals already hear about the high use of water and the likelihood of electrical bills going up. Companies are not working to alleviate those concerns. As for the benefits, some experts ask are there any? As part of the series on Explaining the Right Oliver Willis of Kos discusses how Republicans became shameless hypocrites. An example of them being hypocrites goes back to the 1990s when Speaker Newt Gingrich was portraying Republicans as the party of “family values” during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal while Gingrich was cheating on his wife as she fought cancer and eventually married his mistress. Of course, there are a lot of more recent examples.

For years, conservatives have made the concept of “owning the libs” central to their political ideology. The idea is to engage in behavior and use rhetoric that supposedly makes liberals angry, driving them to exhibit this anger, which conservatives then mock. Even if their behavior doesn’t provoke a tantrum, conservatives have elevated this brand of mockery above nearly everything else, including policy and ideology. This has resulted in the right, including right-wing media like Fox News, becoming fixated on “culture war” issues.

Since Gingrich was “owning the libs” his own infidelity got a pass.

This creates a permission structure on the right where Republicans are allowed to be contradictory, as long as a liberal somewhere is purportedly mad about it. But this kind of posture has a limit.

The limit is that it works great with other Republicans or MAGAs. It doesn’t work for anyone else and voters who aren’t Republicans are quite willing to throw them out of office. Emily Singer of Kos lists reasons why Democrats won the shutdown. I’ll let you read her explanations. Democrats brought health care to the forefront. Polls showed voters blamed Republicans more than Democrats. The nasty guy’s approval fell dramatically, going from -12 to -16. The shutdown gave Democrats a ton of campaign material for next year’s midterms, such as the nasty guy’s Great Gatsby party, which widely polled as inappropriate spending. On Sunday’s All Things Considered on NPR host Sacha Pfeiffer and St. Louis Public Radio reporter Hiba Ahmad discussed the tornado that hit St. Louis last May and toured some of the damage that is still quite evident six months later. Then they turned it into a discussion of the nasty guy’s desire to turn FEMA over to the states. They talked to Mayor Cara Spencer, who summarized the reason to keep FEMA national:

My argument would be that, as a nation, we would be better off, more efficient and certainly more effective if we centralize and share the resources and expertise across the nation for very unusual events, rather than saddling every single municipal government to being able to respond to what may or may not happen in the lifetime of each of those cities.

The article mentions Enright Ave of St. Louis as one that was hit hard by the tornado. There were other places hit harder, but the article doesn’t explain their location. I went looking at Enright Ave. through Google Street View and found something fascinating. Start on the avenue just east of Union Blvd. Google Maps say they rolled down the street in May 2025. The houses look to be in great shape. Then take a step east and the images are of July 2025. A lot of homes are damaged – windows gone or boarded up, walls and roofs missing and some covered in blue tarps, stacks of salvaged bricks, and piles of trash. This allows a person to compare a few houses before and after and to see the destruction on down the street. I then wondered, did the Google Street View people do this intentionally? If so, thank you. Yeah, this is the view of the street in July, six to eight weeks after the tornado. The NPR article says the street isn’t much different six months later. And that’s because the nasty guy and his desire to oppress those not in his billionaire class.

You are going to lecture America about law and order?

The big story of the weekend and week is the protests in Los Angeles and the nasty guy’s oversize response. A Martínez of NPR spoke to Rep. Nanette Barragán, D-Los Angeles and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. I’m working from the news story corresponding to their discussion. Many immigrants look for day jobs at work sites outside of Home Depot. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided those sites. They were not targeting criminals, as the nasty guy said they were after. They were sweeping up friends and neighbors. The residents protested the ICE raids, which had detained more than 100 people. I’ll combine that with a discussion between Leila Fadel of NPR and Hina Shamsi, the ACLU's National Security Project director. Again, I’m working from the news article. Those demonstrators clashed with police. The nasty guy used the clashes as a reason to sign an order to deploy 2,000 National Guardsmen into the city. This was over the objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom. The deployment was to protect ICE agents from “violent mobs” who “fueled lawless chaos.” Shamsi discussed the authority for the nasty guy to give that order. His use of the National Guard in domestic situations are reserved for actual emergencies, such as an actual war or armed rebellion. That’s not what this is. Instead, this is a dangerous abuse of power. The memo didn’t place a geographic or time limit on the deployment. Shamsi sees this as the nasty guy writing himself a blank check to use the Guard in other place where people are using their free speech to protest dangerous ICE raids that are snatching neighbors. Handling protesting crowds are not what the federal troops are trained for. This is an escalating show of strength that could have deadly results. The legality of that memo will be tested in courts. Oliver Willis of Daily Kos added more. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said the chaos was provoked by the nasty guy. The raids caused fear and panic. Newsom said the state is suing the nasty guy. One reason for the raids is the ICE agents are pressured to get their arrest numbers up. The threats are coming from Stephen Miller, the nasty guy aide in charge of anti-immigrant policies. The effort is to report higher numbers for the fear factor, even if the numbers aren’t real. Willis wrote:

Trump wants an excuse to attack the left and continue to justify his anti-immigrant bigotry, so he will continue to escalate. And while things seem to finally be calming down in downtown LA, protests are expected in more than a dozen cities nationwide.

Emily Singer of Kos reported that 22 Democratic governors -- as in all of them but Newsom – signed on to a statement supporting Newsom’s position and condemning the nasty guy’s deployment of the National Guard to squash protests against ICE raids. The nasty guy falsely claimed the protests “constitute a form of rebellion” requiring a military response. But a National Guard presence only inflamed protests. Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona wrote on X:

Reminder just because Donald Trump wants to inflame tensions doesn’t mean you have to play along. Don’t loot, don’t assault police officers, protest peacefully. Trump and Miller will do this in every Blue city whenever they want to distract from something unpopular, like their Medicaid cuts.

Walter Einenkel of Kos wrote about Sen. Chris Murphy’s protest of the nasty guy’s actions. Murphy said this on MSNBC:

“Donald Trump only cares about protests when they're opposing him. Every single day we should be reminding the American public that there were protesters at the Capitol fighting for Donald Trump to install him in power permanently on January 6 of 2021, who beat the hell out of police officers with metal poles and tasers and are out on the street today,” he said. Murphy added that Trump’s unbalanced approach to power, sending in the National Guard despite state and local law enforcement’s objections, is “fundamentally undemocratic,” and a dangerous endorsement of violence. “The message is simply, if you're violent in service of a Republican cause, you'll get a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card. But if you're engaged in protest against the administration, well then we're sending in the National Guard,” he continued.

Willis reported that Tom Homan, the border czar said Gov. Newsom and Mayor Bass could be targeted for arrest if their actions hindered ICE. “It’s a felony to impede law enforcement doing their job.” Newsom responded, “Come and get me, tough guy. I don't give a damn. It won’t stop me from standing up for California.” When a news anchor asked Homan for comment he said, “I never threatened to arrest Gov. Newsom, so I’m not biting off of that, that reporter’s dishonest.” When the nasty guy was asked about what Homan first said he thought it was great. Einenkel reported on what the nasty guy said to reporters:

The people that are causing the problem are professional agitators. They're insurrectionist[s]. They're bad people. They should be in jail.

Einenkel wrote:

The hypocrisy of labeling protesters “insurrectionists” after pardoning more than 1,500 convicted ones earlier this year is breathtaking. Even more staggering is the continued insistence of right-wing hot air balloons like Trump that any large protests against his unpopular policies are somehow deep state-funded, fabricated operations.

A reminder that such hypocrisy is a display of their power – they can be highly hypocritical and we can’t do anything about it. Einenkel reported on House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ response to the nasty guy’s comment.

You know what he did on Day 1? He pardoned hundreds of violent felons who brutally beat police officers. That's the insurrection. The notion that Donald Trump and his minions—his sycophants here in the House of Representatives or in the Senate, who are nothing more than a reckless rubber stamp for Donald Trump's extreme agenda—are going to lecture America about issues of law and order? Get lost. We’re not feeling you at all. You have zero credibility on this issue.

Pedro Molina posted a cartoon on Kos. It shows several headlines – Economy in Danger, Plans to Cut Medicare, Putin Mocks Trump, Sky-Rocketing prices, ICE Abuses – all obscured by the smoke from a tear gas canister. Willis reported several instances of criminals who impersonated ICE agents. One zip tied the wrists of a legal immigrant and stole $1000 in cash. A pair in South Carolina harassed a Latino man by threatening to send him back to Mexico. A man in Florida harassed two Latino migrants by demanding they prove their immigration status. There are many more instances.

Criminal elements are taking advantage of Trump’s embrace of these authoritarian techniques in yet another way that crime is enabled by Trump’s actions. Instead of directing the government to fight crime in a traditional manner, Trump has pushed the false narrative that immigrant crime is more of a problem than homegrown threats. This pivot has provided the pretext ICE cosplayers need to rob more auto repair shops, harass innocent people, and continue terrorizing communities.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a couple quotes to pass on. First is from Steven Beschloss of America America who titled his piece Trump Wanted This Escalation:

Trump’s directive yesterday stated, “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” Note the words: “a form of rebellion.” And note the further escalation by Defense Secretary and Trump sycophant Pete Hegseth who posted this on social media: “The DeptofDefense is mobilizing the National Guard IMMEDIATELY to support federal law enforcement in Los Angeles. And, if violence continues, active duty Marines at Camp Pendleton will also be mobilized—they are on high alert.” ... Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ response to the federal actions: "These tactics sow terror in our communities and disrupt basic principles of safety in our city.”

Second, in a tweet Bill Kristol included a tweet by Terry Moran:

The thing about Stephen Miller is not that he is the brains behind Trumpism. Yes, he is one of the people who conceptualizes the impulses of the Trumpist movement and translates them into policy. But that’s not what’s interesting about Miller. It’s not his brains. It’s his bile. Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He’s a world-class hater. You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate. Trump is a world-class hater. But his hatred only a means to an end, and that end is his own glorification. That’s his spiritual nourishment.

In the comments exlrrp posted a meme showing a much younger nasty guy with Jeffrey Epstein and a woman with just enough clothes. The caption says, “Trump sent troops into L.A. to distract you from this.” Further down exlrrp posted this tweeted exchange:

Nasty guy: Low-selling author Isaac Marion wrote an “apocalyptic” novel that’s clearly an attack on me. Biased and very boring. Not a good writer! Isaac Marion: It’s more an attack on the selfishness and fear that poisons humanity, but sure, it can be about you if you want.

I highly doubt the nasty guy read Marion’s book. Also in the comments is a tweet by Sen. Scott Wiener:

Vance calls the LA protests an “invasion.” 4 min later, Miller calls it an “insurrection.” 29 min later, Hegseth threatens to send in Marines. It’s like clockwork. They’ve chomped at the bit for months for a pretext to declare martial law under pretext of insurrection/invasion.

Just below that is a tweet by Adam Cochran. It shows a news release from the Los Angeles Police Department. Cochran added:

Even the LAPD is saying the protests are peaceful and managed (i.e. it is not an uncontrolled insurrection requiring the National Guard). Do you know how f---ing out of line you have to be, to be so authoritarian that the LAPD is siding with the protesters?!

That’s followed by a tweet from Mohammad Safa:

If the United States saw what the United States is doing in the United States, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

A tweet from Mike Nellis:

They're so desperate to escalate the situation in Los Angeles, they're sharing video of a car burning from FIVE YEARS AGO.

And one just for fun: A cartoon by Wayno shows Mr. Spock on a desolate planet surface speaking into his communicator: “Mister Scott, I’ve fallen and I can’t beam up.” In a second pundit roundup Chitown Kev quoted Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times:

It’s important to understand that for this administration, protests needn’t be violent to be considered an illegitimate uprising. The presidential memorandum calling out the National Guard refers to both violent acts and any protests that “inhibit” law enforcement. That definition would seem to include peaceful demonstrations around the site of ICE raids. In May, for example, armed federal agents stormed two popular Italian restaurants in San Diego looking for undocumented workers; they handcuffed staff members and took four people into custody. As they did so, an outraged crowd gathered outside, chanting “shame” and for a time blocking the agents from leaving. Under Trump’s order, the military could target these people as insurrectionists. The administration, after all, has every reason to want to intimidate those who might take part in civil disobedience. Violent protests play into its hands; peaceful ones threaten the absurd narrative it’s trying to bludgeon America into accepting.

And Chris Geidner of LawDork:

One of Trump’s...favorite methods of addressing a perceived threat is to declare a problem and then over-respond to the problem he has invented, thus expanding the scale of the problem as part of his self-imagined creation. That, of course, is the reason why Trump is pretending that the National Guard is needed in Los Angeles. Say there’s a problem, create new rules or restrictions, and justify future escalations based on opposition to the new rules.

Mary Louise Kelly of NPR talked to colleague Lisa Hagen, who looked at pro-nasty guy media spaces to see how his supporters were talking about Los Angeles. Hagen said:

The two words I'm hearing the most are insurrection and invasion. There's been a lot of focus on images of demonstrators waving foreign flags.

About foreign flags, one conservative voice said, “This is what invading armies do.” Invasion and insurrection are two different things being blended together across conservative media. This could criminalize any protester, citizen or not. The nasty guy has long been using the word invasion. He first used it to describe asylum seekers and gangs. Now he’s broadening the term to include anyone here illegally. The Alien Enemies Act has already been invoked as justification to suspend due process for the Venezuelan immigrants accused of being gang members. The Insurrection Act may be invoked next. That “would allow the president to use the armed forces to take any measures he considers necessary to suppress an insurrection.” The problem is that the nasty guy is trying to claim that if he says it’s an insurrection he gets to use the Insurrection Act. Alas, both of those acts haven’t had a lot of legal testing. The conservative line used to be we don't hate immigrants. We just want them to come here legally. Voices are now saying, “ban all third-world immigration, legal or illegal.” Kos of Kos says the deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles is personal because the deployment includes his son. That son was called to help with the aftermath of the Altadena fire in January. Even after his official deployment ended he still helps out several times a week. As for the current activation Kos wrote:

You can’t imagine the rage I feel. Trump has spent his entire presidency railing against dissent. Now that he’s losing in Congress, in the courts, and in the court of public opinion, he’s escalating—using peaceful protests as a pretext for his dream of military dictatorship. In January, my son and his fellow first responders were welcomed by Southern Californians with food, gifts, and gratitude. Today, Trump is sending them into those same communities as symbols of repression. He’s destroyed the goodwill they built—and he doesn’t care. He wants confrontation. He wants escalation. He wants violence, because he thinks it gives him license to go even further.

The father is scared, but proud of his son. He’s also “burning with righteous fury.” In the comments Albanius quoted Malcom Nance and his Substack Special Intelligence, where he recommends, “strategic ridicule including dance parties, led by patriotic military veterans.” From Nance:

Right now, Trump’s narrative is that he is using tough, lethal armed soldiers and marines to snatch a city from foreign invaders. We must change that false narrative into harsh reality: A moron Presidrent and a drunk Secretary of Defense has taken good soldiers from training and has transformed them into a bunch of under equipped, under fed, hapless yutzes who have now been assigned to the stupidest duty in the world. The best way to do that is to utilize former military personnel and retired veterans to take to the front line in Los Angeles and form Dumb Deployment Intervention Platoons (DDIPs). These DDIPs will use tried and tested techniques honed over hundreds of years of American soldiering to mock stupid decisions on and off the battlefield. And this one is a doozy. Our DDIPs will also explain to the media just exactly how ridiculous and silly it was for Trump to order Marines to conduct an operational deployment to West Hollywood.

Dance party as resistance? I like that idea. In a third pundit roundup, this one by Dworkin, he included a tweet by G Elliott Morris:

Brand-new polling from YouGov out this morning finds Trump's actions re: LA underwater — and double-digit disapproval on sending in Marines. This should be a reality check for those people arguing the protests inherently help Trump bc his immigration approval # is positive.

And a tweet by Jon Favreau:

Every paragraph of this WSJ story is more shocking than the last: "Agents didn’t need to develop target lists of immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, a longstanding practice, Miller said. Instead, he directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away."

Alas, the part that X allows me to see does not include a link to the WSJ story. In a fourth pundit roundup Chitown Kev quoted Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic compared the nasty guy to the Bolsheviks and the Maoists. Here’s a bit:

Trump faces the same choice as his revolutionary predecessors: Give up—or radicalize. Find compromises—or polarize society further. Slow down—or use violence. Like his revolutionary predecessors, Trump has chosen radicalization and polarization, and he is openly seeking to provoke violence.

In the comments exlrrp posted a meme from Occupy Democrats: “Notice how it’s no longer ‘State’s Rights’ since Republicans control the federal government.” There are also two sets of cartoons about the comment about foreign flags. One shows a guy waving the Mexican flag and a bystander says, “We have to hire Mexicans to do the rioting Americans won’t do.” Other memes and cartoons note how many MAGA followers, especially during the Capitol attack, carried Confederate flags, which are not American flags. Another Occupy Democrats meme says, “So when a guy waves a Confederate flag to celebrate heritage it’s ok, but when a guy waves a Mexican flag to celebrate his heritage he’s an ‘insurrectionist?’ I’m going to start waving a Mexican flag to troll the snowflakes offended by it.” I like this one: rugbymom posted a few tweets under the heading, “Resistance takes many forms, including the supremely gloriously petty.” The tweets say, “At the Kennedy Center, half the theater just started clapping when a group of drag queens showed up to find their seats at opening night of Les Miserables, which Trump, Melania, Vance and their top allies have all come out to see.” I hope they waited until the nasty guy was seated. And lpeacock posted a tweet from BrooklynDad:

Good morning and Happy Thursday to everyone who appreciates the delicious irony of trump going to see Les Misérables at the Kennedy Center, a show about a country fighting a tyrannical king, and trump got his ass mercilessly BOOED.

Turtle on roller skates

This is post 5000! In the last fifteen years I’ve put up five thousand posts to this blog. I’ve written about a wide variety of topics over those 5000 posts, though there is one overarching theme. I call the blog Gay Crows Nest and say I’m looking at the culture from the gay perspective. However, the major theme is now about various groups and individuals who try to assert they are superior to others, causing oppression to those others, and the many ways the oppressed resist and build community instead. I poked at my calculator and see since I started blogging there have been about 5,500 days. That does not mean there were only 500 days in 15 years I did not blog – this year I’ll blog only 215 of 365 days, though that’s almost 6 Mb of writing. What it means is before the pandemic I tended to break up a day’s writing by major topic into separate posts with minor topics in one “tidbits” post – I don’t think I’ve used the “tidbits” flag since 2019. In 2009 I posted 459 times, a record I’ll probably never match. Since the pandemic started – and that first year I posted nearly every day (I didn’t have much else to do) – I changed my method, posting only once a day no matter how many topics were in the one post. And 2020 remains my year with the most writing, about 12.7 Mb in 333 posts. Today I went down to the Detroit Institute of Arts to see a couple of their temporary exhibits, then attend the Detroit Film Theater showing of the 2021-22 winners of the British Arrows. Yes, that means I spent money to sit through 75 minutes of the best British TV commercials. I watch very little American TV and I always mute the commercials. The winners of the Arrows are enjoyable because the British sense of humor is so different from ours and many of these little scenes are wildly imaginative. Many don’t give an indication of the corporate name or the product until the end. Some of them are for charities rather than companies. The Arrows have, of course, a website of the winners and I see the presentation in the theater didn’t include all of them. My favorites: A turtle roller skating through traffic turns out to be an advertisement for train travel. In the middle of a Medieval battle sequence and death scene is a guy in a bathrobe with an ironing board who keeps asking the scene to be replayed – an ad for the replay feature for Alexa/Amazon streaming. Four people surf the wind, gliding over the fields and through the forests, in an ad for Burberry. In a Starbucks commercial Gemma claims his real name of James. Sometime in the 9th Century a bunch of Danes ready to invade England are held up because their leader refuses to wear a helmet. Volvo said the ultimate safety test isn’t dropping their car from 100 feet, it’s transitioning to all electric as a response to climate change. Disabled athletes show how much determination they have to get into the Paralympics – they should have sports available to them because they are 15% of the world population, which is 1 billion people. Yesterday I wrote that I had read 45 books this year. Make it 46. I had started one with 230 pages that I thought would take a few days and into the new year. But this one is a graphic story, pages of cartoon style pictures and few words, and I finished in a day – not even staying up late. It is Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, a memoir. Maia was born female but definitely doesn’t feel female, yet doesn’t feel quite male either. Maia doesn’t like the nonbinary they/them pronouns so settled on e/em/eir – if e could work up the nerve to insist people actually use them. E took quite a while to figure out what eir identity is. As for orientation e settled on bisexual, though better yet, just leave sex out if it. It is quite a journey of self discovery. Yes, this is one of the books Republicans love to ban. In this case I see their point – a tiny bit. Kobabe includes images of menstrual blood (which for er includes a great deal more discomfort than the usual female), a dildo in a harness, and fantasies of two naked men. However, the need for this sort of book to be available to queer kids and the need for cisgender kids to understand what some of their peers are going through far outweighs any squeamishness some adults might have. I’m sure the kids are puzzled – you’re upset about images of that? Yeah, I know the real purpose of banning the book isn’t because of a few uncomfortable images, but to deny queer kids the understanding that what they are experiencing is just a small piece of the vast panoply of normal ways of being human, and thus oppressing them. Maia struggles for so long because e doesn’t know there are words for transgender and nonbinary, that such things exist. So buy the book, read it, and give it to the youth in your life. The news has been full of the big snowstorm that arrived just before Christmas and fouled air travel with thousands of flights canceled per day. Yes, the storm also snarled train, bus, and car travel (with dozens dying in Buffalo), but with a lot less consequence. In air travel, the worst is definitely Southwest Airlines who, a week later, is still stumbling around and canceling flights. There are now reports explaining why Southwest canceled nearly 16,000 flights over the week and will likely pass 18,000 flight before they’re back close to normal. Hunter of Daily Kos explained some of their problem is they don’t use the hub system of other airlines, instead they use a system with a web of routes and shorter flights. That means their planes and crew have a greater number of airports where they might be stuck. But the majority of the problem is that Southwest uses a scheduling system that’s 20 years old and crashed when overloaded. Wrote Hunter:

It's the central theme of capitalism, pandemic-era or not; if you design systems meant to squeeze maximum efficiency while spending the minimum possible on robustness, those systems will fail during unexpected stresses because that's what they're built to do.

The system is 20 years old because the board spent the money instead on paying shareholders. Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos reported the company spent $6 billion on stock buyback – and the only reason to do that is to boost stock price as a favor to investors. And that $6 billion did not go to upgrading the computer systems. Southwest gambled that they could get away with it, but lost the bet. Though maybe the company leadership will get away with it. Pennyfarthing quoted journalist Adam Johnson, writing on Stubstack, who wrote:

All of this is a toxic brew of mutual antagonism. “Customer satisfaction” is at a 17-year low, and the only human face people can take their frustration out on is a low-wage worker. Obviously there’s never an excuse to yell at anyone in customer service. The point is not a moral one—it’s that it's by design. Indeed, corporate executives very much want you to vent your frustration on their low-wage workers. This way you get the vague feeling of agency and control in a system designed to remove any and all forms of it. Southwest Airlines ticketing agents, cashiers at Nando’s Chicken, low-wage call center workers for Verizon overseas, become corporate sin eaters, absorbing all the frustration and anger brought about by our greasy, cost-cutting executives. Add to this the severe mental and physical harms—and death—laid at the feet of low wage workers during the pandemic, and our built-in system of mutual antagonism compounds dozens of other stressors. We are conditioned to get mad at the human face we see before us, the “representative” of the company who personally profits nothing from our purchase. We are conditioned to get mad at the waiter when our food is late (and penalize this “bad service” with a bad tip) when the vast majority of the time it’s due to understaffing by a cheapskate boss. We are conditioned to get upset with the enforcer of arbitrary rules at a hotel checkout, despite it not being their rule at all. We are conditioned to be hostile to the very people we should have the most solidarity with.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and a few Democratic members of Congress are investigating the situation and intend to force Southwest management to compensate stranded travelers for the useless tickets plus the meals and hotel stays customers had to pay for. I hope they can make it happen. Laura Clawson of Kos wrote about Republican hypocrisy. She listed several examples, such as Sen. Lindsay Graham saying abortion law should be left to the states and then later proposed a federal abortion ban. And of Republicans yelling about voter fraud while they’re the ones indicted for voter fraud. Clawson wrote:

If you think that consistency within any specific issue is desirable, or that doing a turnabout on one thing represents hypocrisy, all of these things look ragingly hypocritical. But that’s misunderstanding how the right-wing thinks. It’s actually really simple: The right-wing belief system is that if it benefits them, it’s good. If they want it, it’s right. If it helps them gain power, it’s proper. ... So rather than talking about these turnabouts as hypocrisy, we should be talking about how they show that Republicans don’t believe the rules should ever apply to them. How they’re rejecting any accountability for the powerful even as they insist on the most brutal forms of punishment for people without power. How all they care about is themselves and what benefits them right now, without any thought to anyone else or a future past their own most immediate ambitions.

Note: If it benefits them right now it is good, even if it contradicts what they said at any time before. That is similar to a way I wrote about before – the conservative position can be summarized: “I can tell you what to do. You can’t tell me what to do.” And all of that is about someone trying to justify why they should be above us in the social hierarchy and oppressing us as part of their justification.