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Thursday Night DL at D'railed
Submitted by Dan Henry on Thu, 05/23/2013 - 1:09am.
Scandal-monger’s Fatigue
 GOP and Dem budget plans: a comparison A week has passed, and there hasn’t been a new “scandal” invented by the right. They must be tuckered out. Maybe they’ve got a wicked case of scandal-monger’s fatigue. Strangely enough, of the three main “scandal” (IRS, Benghazi, and AP wiretapping), only the last one seems to be significant – and it’s getting the least attention. That’s doubly strange because the press is very upset about it. I wonder if the right isn’t too crazy about that “scandal” because they secretly like the authoritarian culture that allows wiretapping? Also, they’ve been conditioned by their propaganda machine to hate the “liberal” press anyway, and to think of them as traitors. So it’s hard for the right to get their teabaggers in an uproar over it. Special Notes
Anyway, the press is predicting a resurgence of the teabaggers. To paraphrase Twain: “The reports of their resurrection are being greatly exaggerated.” Personally, I predict that this uproar will die down as the public starts to understand just how big a nothing burger this IRS thing really is. They’ve already reached that conclusion about Benghazi. Maybe we can help them out. What’s the next “scandal” they can use? No fair blaming the Oklahoma tornado on him … they’re already trying that. How about extra-legal killing of Americans? Nah … that’s real and apparently uninteresting to the right. Tax evasion? Nope … they appreciate that. I give up. Scandal-mongering is harder than it looks. Cheers,
“I mean, here are a group of people who are admittedly racist, who are overtly political, who tried as best they can to harm President Obama in every way they can … They are the Taliban wing of American politics. We all ought to be a little worried about them.”
“It was obvious during the runup to the Iraq war that what was going on in the minds of many hawks – and not just the neocons – was not so much a deep desire to drop lots of bombs and kill lots of people (although they were OK with that) as a deep desire to be seen as people who were willing to Do What Has to be Done. Men who have never risked, well, anything relished the chance to look in the mirror and see Winston Churchill looking back. Actually, I suspect that even the torture thing had less to do with sadism than with the desire to look tough. And the austerian impulse is pretty much the same thing, except that in this case the mild-mannered pundits want to look in the mirror and see Paul Volcker.”
“It’s as if we took all the good ideas people had to help the economy and reduce the deficit and did the opposite. ”
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Thursday Night DL at D'railed
Submitted by Dan Henry on Thu, 05/16/2013 - 1:36am.
The AP’s Fast & Furious Report on the IRS’s Role in Benghazi
 Special Event: Don’t forget this Saturday morning is the Firework 5K Run! The run starts at 9am in Freeman Park (probably near the Veterans Memorial). And it is a benefit for CDG research. Please come out and support Hannah! A Whole ’Nother Special Event: And this Friday night it’s Roy Zimmerman! May 17th at 7pm at the Unitarian Church. The cost is $18, or whatever you feel you can afford. And I believe that Melanie Harby will be with him, too! (Facebook event notice here) This IRS thing seems to be a horrible case of Watergate-level politics (if you listen to some people), or just a confusing situation (if you listen to others). It’s hard to say if you’re not paying close attention. Special Notes
It seems like a lot of smoke with very little fire to me. Which means that we’ll be hearing about it for the next year. That should make me want to investigate all the details more fully, but I fear that here at the beginning of his second term, I have reached the end of my entire allotment of anti-Obama hysteria shits. I just don’t have a single one left to give. We should definitely discuss the topic tomorrow night. I want the benefit of the collective insights of all our members. Educate me. But the bigger question is whether the extremist right has reached some sort of critical mass when it comes to hysterical overreaction. I think they’ve realized that they weren’t being successful with just birtherism, or just Obamacare, or just czars, or just teleprompters. But now they’ve gotten a taste of success with Benghazi/IRS/Fast & Furious/AP combination. Perhaps what they’ll take away is that they have to have at least 4 scandals running in overdrive at all times. Perhaps that level of hysteria is enough to overwhelm our press to the point where debunking just has no effect anymore. It’s a scary thought. Cheers,
“You think you’re being persecuted? By whom? Jason Collins and the gays? Obama and the liberals? Jon Stewart and the Jews? Did ESPN hurt your feelings because they gave Jason Collins a couple days of attention when he came out as the first gay NBA player? After poor Tim Tebow got no press at all? Oh, wait. He did get press. Tebow got negative press? Well, not really. I’d say he got annoyed press. Tebow wasn’t the first Christian athlete, folks. In fact, there’s an entire Fellowship of Christian Athletes. And remember Kurt Warner? How about Joe Gibbs? Mariano Rivera? Derek Fisher? Or all the hundreds of athletes who thank God for their good fortune after a win? If Tebow did get negative press, it was because he acted like he was special, like he deserved attention for praying, like he was the only Christian on the field. And maybe also because he’s just not built for the NFL.”
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Thursday Night DL at D'railed
Submitted by Dan Henry on Thu, 05/09/2013 - 1:55am.
Symbolic Shibboleths
 The disgusting and criminal Sylvia Browne, praying on the gullible So they’re arguing over where to bury the older Boston Marathon bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. (I guess that’s a little better than arguing over where to bury the younger one.) None of the Boston cemetaries is excited about accepting his body. I don’t really blame them – they are just responding to the threat of what other fine Americans would do to their facilities if they did accept Tsarnaev, and I believe that they are right to fear that outcome. What is happening to Americans? When did we become so petty? And when did the mundane (burying a body) become so damn important that it has to become a stupid fucking problem? Special Notes
Both Benghazi and Fast & Furious are examples of symbolic hysteria. The right is more outraged that four diplomats in a war zone were killed than they are that 20 kids were murdered in a school. And Fast & Furious was necessitated by conservative policies, and the identical tactics were used under the Bush Administration. Yet somehow, false as they are, these issues have become shibboleths for the right. For awhile, Obama’s birth certificate was part of the conservative collection of symbolic issues (although many of the saner minds on the right seem to have recognized just how crazy that issue made them look). It seems that certain Americans have become slaves to the symbolic. I know we live in an age of social media, and that everything must be Twitterized and Facebook memed. But that’s not really what I’m talking about. I’m talking about taking a subject, either large or small, and making it symbolic of patriotism or national security or testicle size. Conservatives know that no matter how unlikely a particular obsession is, they are safe to pound any of these symbolic issues into the ground in any setting. Their own side will not object. The media will cover them with “balance” and “objectivity.” And they somehow think that rote repetition and vocal demonstrations by idiots in goofy hats with misspelled signs is enough to lend legitimacy to any issue. Another example would be how the GOP immediately demanded that the bombers be tried in military court rather than civil court. They know perfectly well that it isn’t a matter of safety, or competence. They know that we’ve done a much better job of trying terrorists in civilian courts than in military courts. But it’s all symbology with them. They really want to emphasize that there are ultimate evildoers that our normal institutions cannot deal with. It’s an approach that emphasizes the separateness of people – there are people that need to be tortured or locked away without trial (or drone-bombed in foreign countries). There are people who, even when dead, should be outcast. There are people so evil that we need an enhanced secret military/industry and special extra-legal rules to deal with them. It’s an authoritarian mindset, I think. The Obama Administration has upheld many of the same horrible national security practices instituted by the Bush Misadministration (including some that seem disappointingly similar to the examples above). For example, Obama is going heavy after Bradley Manning, and in a very secretive way. And the Obama Administration also went to court to defend the spying practices instituted by Bush. However, we lefties wouldn’t confuse those failures of Obama with liberal policies. That is the conservative side of our moderate, center-right President. And upholding certain unAmerican policies is not really the same thing as creating symbolic shibboleths from scratch. So the question is: are we on the left guilty of the same tactic? Do we go ballistic over symbolic issues, to the point where we collectively seem nuts? Was there anything similar during the Bush Administration? Come join the discussion tomorrow night and explore this topic. Just try not to mention how Bush planned 9/11. Cheers,
“If your ‘way of life’ involves handing deadly weapons to five-year olds, your way of life is completely screwed up and you should change it immediately because it is stupid and wrong. (And, again, also, too: goddammit, ‘learning to use and respect a gun’ means at least knowing that the fking thing is loaded when it’s sitting in the corner of the parlor like it’s a damn umbrella stand or something, and we should talk about that part, too.) It is not in any way ‘normal’ to hand a kindergartner a firearm. If a mother from the inner-city of, say, Philadelphia did that, and the kid subsequently shot his sister to death, Fox News never would stop yelling about the crisis in African American communities and the Culture Of Death, and rap music, too. If your culture is telling you that children who have only recently emerged from toddlerhood should have their own guns, then your culture is deadly and dangerous and that should concern you, too. If your culture demands that, in the face of a general national outrage over the killing of other children, your politics work to loosen the gun laws you have, as they apparently did in Kentucky, then your culture is making your politics stupid and wrong and you should change them, too. I do not have to understand these people any more, and it is way too early in the day to be drinking this much.”
“Republicans think racism is when white people lose privileges.”
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Thursday Night DL at D'railed
Submitted by Dan Henry on Thu, 05/02/2013 - 1:43am.
Switch / The House I Live In
 On May 2nd, Idahoans will come together for a day of giving to support the nonprofits in communities across our state. From those 24 hours a share of every dollar raised by Idaho nonprofits will be matched with funds from the Idaho Gives award pool. In addition, the top five organizations with the most unique donors (nonprofits are divided by size) will receive bonus grants of $3,000, $1,000, $500, $250, and $250, respectively. Some choices that would make me happy:
Of course, there are many other choices, and you should also definitely give your own preferences at least partial consideration in addition to my preferences. Last week was a big one for documentary viewing. On Saturday over in Boise, Hollis and I got to attend an ACLU-sponsored showing of Switch: A Community in Transition (trailer here). The movie was about the transition of the director, Brooks Nelson, who attended the screening and ran a discussion forum afterwards. Special Notes
As the documentary makes clear, when an individual transitions, it’s more of an unvailing – the person isn’t changing so much as revealing a more true version of him or herself. The real change is happening in the community around that person. What was even more interesting was that Nelson focused on his immediate community: his wife, and their circle of mostly butch lesbian friends, with a few gender-queer people. And they weren’t all completely happy with Brooks. It was a fascinating film, and well worth viewing (you can get a DVD at the link above). Then, Tuesday night, the Social Justice Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Church ran a great screening/panel discussion on The House I Live In – a terrific film about the failure of America’s war on drugs (trailer here). It was my first experience moderating, and it didn’t go too badly, I hope (although I might have been too free with my own opinions). The documentary highlights how our drug enforcement laws, police incentives, mandatory minimum sentencing, jail economies, etc., have merged to create a draconian system that neither works nor allows us to fix it. As David Simon says in the film, “What the drugs haven’t destroyed, the drug war has.” Watch it online here, or check the PBS schedule here. Cheers,
“Look, I lived through this. I’m not minimizing what these murderous idiots did up here and, as far as I’m concerned, the surviving brother can celebrate Arbor Day in Pelican Bay for the rest of his life. But every little detail that’s emerging about the brothers goes a long way toward defusing the OMIGOD MOOOOOSSSSLLIIIIIMMMMMM CALIPHATE JIHAD!!!! hysteria in certain precincts of the media. The history of this country, alas, is replete with bloodshed inflicted on the innocent by rage-blinded misfits. Some huge acts of mass murder inflicted by the angry and the lost have vanished from history almost entirely. (Google ‘Andrew Kehoe Bath Michigan’ some time.) The fact that we now have a frame made largely of unreasoning fear and reflexive xenophobia doesn’t change that. Losers can kill people as easily as winners can, and ennobling the actions of a couple of bloodthirsty square pegs by draping those actions with vast, geopolitical significance is a bigger disservice to their victims than laughing at the two of them is. Let them be ridiculed. Let them be tried. Let them be convicted. Let us then not hear of them again. But let them be ridiculed first. It’s healthy.”
“And the Iraq War was a disaster. We spent over $1 trillion. We lost thousands of lives. I had a son that served there. We lost thousands of U.S. lives, thousands of lives over in Iraq. And the Iraq War for at least 20 years is going to affect us. It’s already affecting our foreign policy in Syria. It’s caused the president to not say, well I don’t know if I can do this because of what happened in the Iraq War. It’s affected our domestic policy because the lack of funds, the lack of ability. And it polarized the country. And so I think we pause for a moment and say, yes he’s a good man.’ But in the end, the Iraq War was such a disastrous decision, it affected this country so dramatically.’ His tie to history is going to be completely tied to that.”
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Thursday Night DL at D'railed
Submitted by Dan Henry on Thu, 04/25/2013 - 4:37am.
Are Conspiracy Theories Harmless?
 Plan now to attend the annual Earth Day celebration on Saturday, April 27, at the Tautphaus Park Zoo and Hockey Shelter. Enjoy a day of live music, conservation education, games, crafts, and displays by local clubs and organizations. Zoo admission will be free for children aged 12 and under, with a paying adult and a can of food for the Idaho Falls Food Bank or one of the recyclable items (cell phones, printer ink cartridges, used coats, used books, used bikes, electronics, rechargeable and alkaline batteries, eyeglasses, crayons, stuffed animals). That’s this coming Saturday, April 27th, at Tautphaus Park. Hope for decent weather!  Movie Screening and Panel Discussion: The House I Live In! On Tuesday, April 30th, the UUCIF Social Justice Committee is sponsoring a free movie screening and panel discussion on the very important topic of America’s Drug War. The showing will take place at the Centre Twin Theater, and will include a distinguished panel, including Monica Hopkins, the Executive Director of the ACLU of Idaho. I will be moderating the event, but don’t let that hold you back. Here’s a description of the movie: As America remains embroiled in conflict overseas, a less visible war is taking place at home, costing countless lives, destroying families, and inflicting untold damage on future generations of Americans. Over forty years, the War on Drugs has accounted for more than 45 million arrests, made America the world’s largest jailer, and damaged poor communities at home and abroad. Yet for all that, drugs are cheaper, purer, and more available today than ever before. Filmed in more than twenty states, The House I Live In captures heart-wrenching stories from individuals at all levels of America’s War on Drugs. From the dealer to the grieving mother, the narcotics officer to the senator, the inmate to the federal judge, the film offers a penetrating look inside America’s longest war, offering a definitive portrait and revealing its profound human rights implications. While recognizing the seriousness of drug abuse as a matter of public health, the film investigates the tragic errors and shortcomings that have meant it is more often treated as a matter for law enforcement, creating a vast machine that feeds largely on America’s poor, and especially on minority communities. Beyond simple misguided policy, The House I Live In examines how political and economic corruption have fueled the war for forty years, despite persistent evidence of its moral, economic, and practical failures. Please join us for this very interesting topic. On May 2nd, Idahoans will come together for a day of giving to support the nonprofits in communities across our state. From those 24 hours a share of every dollar raised by Idaho nonprofits will be matched with funds from the Idaho Gives award pool. In addition, the top five organizations with the most unique donors (nonprofits are divided by size) will receive bonus grants of $3,000, $1,000, $500, $250, and $250, respectively. Some choices that would make me happy:
Of course, there are many other choices, and you should also definitely give your own preferences at least partial consideration in addition to my preferences. Lefty Conspiracy Theories I’ve learned a new and useful term from the Boston Marathon bombing. Stochastic terrorism: the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable. In other words, stochastic terrorism is what certain personalities are doing when they broadcast messages designed to spur unstable individuals into violent action against people or institutions they don’t like. Think of how Bill O’Reilly demonized Dr Tiller until a deranged anti-choice protester shot him in the head. Special Notes
I’ve been involved in a discussion with a good, smart, lefty friend on Facebook. He is also a 9/11 Truther, and is also postulating that the Boston Marathon bombing might have been staged for some unknown reason. I don’t know why he thinks that the government has a reason to either stage such events, or cover up their actual causes with stories about terrorists. I’m sure that you can think of a few possible movie scenarios. But I can’t get him to evaluate the relative uncertainties. He thinks that the two boys don’t really seem like plausible terrorists. But he has no problem accepting that thousands of government flunkies can keep a massive secret. He thinks that two security guys photographed on a street corner wearing black and carrying backpacks is highly suspect – yet some nebulous theories about some unnamed group profiting in some way from a terrorist activity is worth considering. Or an impression that officials in a very confusing and life-threatening event were less than confident and straight-forward during press conferences seems very fishy – but hundreds of Pulitzer-hungry journalists being unable to recognize the signs of a conspiracy makes reasonable sense. So he’s busy replacing an expected number of reasonable, plausible uncertainties with massive, implausible, and unnecessary uncertainties that he doesn’t bother evaluating. A couple of factual gaps in a huge story, a few understandable discrepancies in the sequence of events, and some minor but seemingly inexplicable contradictions end up being replaced by a massive convoluted plot with tremendous holes and almost no factual basis (because the conspiracy is so good at hiding the facts, naturally). I guess there’s evidence that the older Boston Marathon bomber was a fan of Alex Jones. Alex Jones is another guy who sees government conspiracies everywhere. He just asks questions, though. He doesn’t actually advocate directly for violence, but his followers do commit violence based on his skewed picture of the world. That’s stochastic terrorism. We have a thriving subculture of people with the vast intertubes for coordination and anonymity continually making veiled accusations that our government is responsible for evil and violence and murder. What happens? Eventually, the most unhinged of that subculture actually takes action – causing the violence, evil, and murder. Then the conspiracy subculture goes to work explaining how it’s the government committing the violence. So it is not an innocent activity to be fanning the flames of conspiracies. It is becoming an active pariticipant in stochastic terrorism. All because one has an urge to distrust the government. A healthy dose of skepticism is good. We shouldn’t just believe everything the government says. But the goal of that skepticism is to keep government functioning for our benefit. When people cross over into portraying the government as an evil empire staging fake terrorist events … that is harmful, not helpful. But, if you’re still interested in conspiracy theories, here’s a handy dandy visual flow-chart guide to help you along. Cheers,
“It returns us to the dark ages of human oppression, which America was founded to remove humanity from, and it is the whole point of the push for homosexual marriage and homosexual rights. The aim is not compassion for homosexuals, respect for homosexuals and all of this; the aim in the mind of these hardheaded, calculating, leftist, Communist, totalitarians is to destroy the family and to establish the notion that once you have seized power there is no limit whatsoever to what you can do. If you want to tolerate abuses then those abuses can be imposed upon the people. Once you establish that, the abuses are then not going to be confined to egregious outrages like this; those abuses are going to be committed against the whole society and they will in the end include the murder of the masses as has occurred in all Communist regimes that existed. That includes as well the expropriation of all property because if you don’t respect the primordial God-endowed belongings that are associated with family life then why on earth would you be constrained to respect any other form of human property claim.”
“You know it’s been cordial – but he lives in Washington and we live in Dallas. … You know, I just I don’t see him – much.”
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