Archive for the ‘Cancel Culture’ Category
TEN WAYS WE’RE EFFED
I’ve had a hard time blogging recently. Writer’s block. Stress in my personal life is one reason. Not helping. That’s just the background noise though. No, the real reason is more general. I’m extremely pessimistic about the state of the world, and the state of the USA in particular. In many senses I’ve always been a doomsday prophet, but the 21st century has moved into a whole new universe compared to my worrying about nuclear war in my younger days. So how do I write about this? Ten reasons I’m pessimistic about now. Who knows, hopefully this will be cathartic:
- The rich keep getting richer and more powerful. The upward transfer of wealth in America and the world accelerated under Covid. In other words, price gouging is at the heart of the global economic system. What are people going to do when the last dollar in America is in some rich person’s or corporation’s offshore account?
- The Cold War continues. The Cold War was stupid proganda to justify endless American war making and war spending from the beginning. The new Cold War is even crazier. China isn’t trying to take over the world, Russia isn’t trying to destroy the west.
- The War on Terror was a colossal fail. By every metric the War on Terror has massively increased global terrorism. War is the least effective way to fight terrorism. And yet here we are, bombs away, with nary a hint of protest.
- We forgot the lessons of Vietnam. This is a codicil to number 3: Opinion | The Pentagon Papers’ Lessons Went Unlearned – The New York …
- Science denial is rampant. This is bizarre. When I was a kid and young person most people understood that science and reason were the shiznit. Now actual supposed adults in positions of power embrace voodoo nonsense … and they get more popular. Go figure.
- The Christian right wants to seize power. A third of the country wants America to be forced to live under their Old Testament take on reality.
- The GOP’s massive ongoing voter suppression, protest suppression, history suppression, and rights suppression campaign (abortion and LGTB rights.) The actual cancel culture.
- No independent media. When I was young the mainstream media was independent, even if they did try to influence politics. Not anymore.
- Climate change. It’s real, humans are causing it, efforts to mitigate it are still “too little, too late.” Fossil fuels are the most profitable extractive industry ever, but the costs are wrecking our world.
- AI, homemade doomsday devices, etc. In my lifetime (knock on wood) there are any number of potential technological advances that could lead to doomsday. It’s my answer to the Fermi Paradox, our form of life is ultimately self destructive, an evolutionary dead end.
And I’m sure I missed a few. The continued glorification of the Confederacy and white washing of American history. UFOs. Nearly half of Americans believe dinosaurs still exist. Yeah, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we are about to slide into some Golden Age. Snort. Biden will be the Pertinax of our time more likely. (Pertinax was a sane senator who became Caesar after the death of a crazy Caesar. His reign only lasted three months before the corrupt praetorian guard murdered him.)
On the plus side, a lady I like called me “Sweetie” today. Objectively there is no future relationship, but it made this lonely old guy feel good. Have a great week everyone. #getvaccienatedcovid19 #FelesRegula
Copyright © 2021 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.
(Image: Found somewhere, possibly Public Domain, claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law.)
TRUMP’S EASTER CRAZINESS, AT LEAST HE AND HIS FOLLOWERS ARE CONSISTENT
The above was Trump’s pre Easter message. Let’s see, where to start? Um, over 60 lawsuits filed by Trump etc contesting the election got exactly nowhere in court, including plenty ruled on by Trump appointed (!) judges. So the idea (fantasy really) that the election was rigged causing Trump to lose is, well, not true. What the old folks call a lie. Pretty sure Trump believes it, what is it called when someone believes their own lie? Starts with ‘D.’ Doesn’t matter how many people believe it or are angry about a lie, it’s still a lie. I’m assuming he is referring to the Democrats as “radical left crazies.” No Mr Trump, the vast majority of them are about as radical left as Eisenhower or Nixon. And they’re no more crazy than Trump’s followers. As for facts coming out, none so far, but I will be happy to revisit the issue if they ever do. I won’t be holding my breath though.
He reiterated it on Easter: “Happy Easter to ALL,” Trump said, “including the Radical Left CRAZIES who rigged our Presidential Election, and want to destroy our Country!” Well, at least he wished the Democrats a Happy Easter. He added that the Democrats desire to destroy the country. I know of no Democrat who wants to destroy the country. Oh well, when you have no ideas, no policies, no philosophy; name calling and fear mongering is all that’s left.
Trump isn’t alone in his delusion, the Pillow Guy is confident his documentary and lawsuit will do the trick: Right Wing Watch on Twitter: “”That miracle is coming,” declares Mike Lindell, confident that his new documentary and lawsuit will overturn the 2020 election and have Trump back in the White House by August. Just goes to show that being rich and being smart are not necessarily correlated, for those that missed the fact that Trump does not appear to be the brightest candle on the cake either. Sticking to one’s guns is one thing, but this ship has already sunk.
Some of Trump’s followers don’t think a lawsuit and documentary are going to do the trick. Nope, gonna be a military coup that returns Trump to power: When Will the Military Intervene? Basically this guy’s theory is based on a series of dreams he had. Yes, his invisible superfriend visited him in his sleep and told him that the military will return Trump to power. Snort. The Pentagon just loves a draft evading coward who refers to veterans as suckers and losers. I wonder if he was using one of the Pillow Guy’s pillows? Maybe everyone who sleeps on one gets weird dreams and delusions?
Turns out Texas’s power problems weren’t caused by green energy after all. OK, only uncritical Fox News viewers thought that, the cause was unregulated power companies not wanting to spend a dime on being prepared for bad weather. Deregulation in other words. That doesn’t work for QAnon theorists though. Oh no. It was Biden and China, the Chinese paid him billions of dollars to test their “new weather weapons” on Texas. Whatever’s in those pillows, it’s getting stronger apparently.
Apparently a number of Christian prophets predicted Trump would win reelection. And for some, that’s all the proof they need that the election was stolen. That’s right gentle reader, since people claiming to speak for an invisible superfriend in the sky all said Trump was going to win, why God’s will was thwarted. Does Trump really understand just how bat shit crazy many of his followers are? That was a rhetorical question of course, Trump’s right there with them.
In today’s ‘cancel culture’ news it turns out that Georgia passing a horrifying voter suppression law has consequences. Major League Baseball is pulling their All Star game out of Atlanta. Predictably enough: Republican threatens MLB after Trump Jr goes nuts about the All-Star Game and Laura Ingraham and National Review’s Pathetic Defenses of Georgia’s Voter-Suppression Law. Basically Georgia is disenfranchising huge numbers of voters to prevent microscopic amounts of voter fraud. As I said before, making it harder for people to vote isn’t fighting voter fraud, it’s making it harder for people to vote. Why would the Republicans do that? (Another rhetorical question.)
Lastly, this article nicely covers the absurdity of the Republican claims about ‘cancel culture’: Cancel culture isn’t about denying freedom of speech, it’s about consequences. Basically white Christian America spent hundreds of years cancelling (often violently) anyone who didn’t meekly mimic their Christofascist world view, and those times are changing. It’s not ‘cancel culture’ it’s a nation growing up. Some of us at least. The ones still worshiping their old testament invisible superfriend, not so much.
Stay safe everyone. Tomorrow I’ll pick on Democrats and liberals, I wouldn’t want to be accused of bias. #StaytheFHome #WearaDamnMask #FelesRegula #dearMoonCrew
Copyright © 2021 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.
(Image: Trump’s public statements are Public Domain under US copyright law. At least as far as quoting them goes.)
THE EVANGELICAL RIGHT AND THE GOP, THE REAL CANCEL CULTURE
So much in the news about the left’s so called “cancel culture.” Much hue and cry about it from the right. What, exactly, is the left cancelling? I’m not exactly sure, the examples in the news are generally trivial, misrepresented, or both. A few old books that no one reads anymore are pulled from publication? A few people who have said horrible things have lost their jobs? I guess some speakers have been discouraged from speaking at some colleges? How, exactly, is this impacting the lives of people on the right? As far as I can see, other than being outraged by what Fox news and others tell them, it doesn’t seem to affect the average American in any way. It’s like the so-called “war on Christmas,” there’s no there, there. Americans remain completely free to celebrate Christmas any way they like.
On the other hand, there are things the religious right is working assiduously to cancel. They want to cancel about a million marriages for starters. They want to wreak havoc in a million households, imagine being married, and the government simply outlawing your marriage. To say that would impact people’s lives negatively is an understatement. I don’t see anyone on the left calling for conservatives marriages to be annulled, let alone actively pursuing that goal in the courts.
The evangelical right not only wants to cancel women’s access to health care, they are doing a good job of it. And doing a good job of it by closing down Planned Parenthoods’, appealing to the Supreme Court: Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, 573 U.S. 682 (2014,) and fighting against birth control and sex education. Yes, they want to cancel the very things that prevent abortions, so this isn’t about saving babies, it’s about cancelling lifestyles they don’t approve of. Hell, rafts of bills designed to prevent women from accessing health care, sex education, and birth control are passed by the GOP regularly.
And of course they want to cancel transgender people. They did manage to cancel them in the military, though Biden has reversed that. They have done everything they can to prevent them accessing health care, participating in society, etc. The fact that transgendered people have always existed and always will exist because human’s biological gender/sexuality exists over a broad spectrum doesn’t matter to the evangelical right. Male/female dichotomy, heteronormality all the way for them.
Hell, not just women having their access to health care cancelled. The evangelical right wants to give health care providers the right to refuse to treat people because they don’t want to treat certain people whose lifestyles/identities they don’t approve of. Imagine telling firemen they could refuse to fight a fire if they didn’t like something about the owners/occupants of a building. Again, no one on the left has proposed anything like this, let alone made it central to their political philosophy.
Speaking of political, they also want to cancel people’s right to vote. The GOP has been passing “New Jim Crow” laws for decades now, bills designed to make it harder for poor and black people to vote. Or democracy itself in the case of rampant GOP gerrymandering. And lately it’s getting worse, a law has been proposed in Arizona to allow the legislature to simply overturn the people’s vote for president! All in the name of fighting non-existent widespread voter fraud. And if there was widespread voter fraud, making it harder for people to vote isn’t fighting it, it’s making it harder for people to vote. There is no logical connection here.
Still, America is a country where huge numbers of people accept that killing 200,000 old men, women, and children “saved lives.” No one has ever explained to me how that works without the use of magical thinking. Moving right along, some on the right have followed this type of thinking to its “logical” conclusion, and simply want to cancel Americans who disagree with them. Yes, they are making the case that Biden voters “aren’t real Americans.” New Claremont essay reveals how Republicans are rejecting America:
“Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term,”Glenn Ellmers, the essay’s author, writes. “They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.”
So many things sick and wrong with that sort of thinking, I don’t know where to start. Crazy times. Have a safe Easter Weekend everyone, celebrate it (or not,) as you want. It’s still a free country. Sort of. #StaytheFHome #WearaDamnMask #FelesRegula #dearMoonCrew
Copyright © 2021 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.
(Image: A forest in Indonesia cancelled by a volcano, public domain image from Wikipedia. I hope it doesn’t come to that in America, literally or metaphorically.)
AMERICA, HISTORY, VIOLENCE, TRUMP
I realized today that I am suffering from symptoms of anxiety. Not terribly surprising,Covid is still raging, the worst American mass death event of my life, and I’ve been socially isolated for a year. That’s going to be stressful. And my father just died. And not only died, but died of Covid. I know I’ve written about how Covid was going to kill people we knew, but I wasn’t prepared for it to hit so close to home. Couldn’t have been prepared actually, the death of a loved one will always hurt, but some deaths are worse than others. This one will always hurt, I lost my dad in the pandemic. Words I never dreamt I would say.
There’s one other thing though. Bear with me, going to try to tie some things together. A huge source of the anxiety I realize is due to the Capitol Riot. This was an unprecedented American historical event, like 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, no one really saw it coming.* That’s not really what’s bothering me though. That I could deal with … if the national response to it had been, well, rational. IE: This was Trump’s doing, and it’s unacceptable. Like how most of England responded to Guy Fawkes attempt to blow up the King and Parliament.
No, that’s not how Trump supporters responded to the Capitol Riot. Broadly speaking they responded in two ways. Denial and rationalization. Trump supporters either denied Trump caused the riot, it was some sort of Antifa/Democrat false flag operation; or it was a justified response to the “Voter fraud cost Trump the election” lie. While there are some voices of reason among the Republicans, a very solid majority is, well, believing the lie. Living in a fantasy world. Seceding from reality as it were.
And this isn’t new, this is where I am stepping back and looking at the bigger picture. How to say this? White America is a nation almost unequaled in its staggering propensity to justify violence that preserved its white ruling class superiority. And the Capitol Riot was an extension of the same, it’s not some distant historical aberration, this attitude exists with us today. “Everything’s fine, America is great, any problems are caused by minorities themselves or leftists.”
Mass shootings for example. America has a horrible problem with mass shootings, no other developed country has anything like it. And when one of them does have a mass shooting, they do everything they can to prevent another, usually with great success. In America, people pretend it didn’t happen, or pretend it was unavoidable. The right’s response to America’s horrible gun violence problem is pretty much the same as its response to the Capitol Riot.
And it goes all the way back. America’s founding fathers set up a system where white property owning males reigned supreme. Race riots and native genocide were a huge part of American history, not to mention lynchings. The freaking Civil War, the greatest mass death event in US history, was fought because a certain subset of white Americans wanted to own human beings as property.
And they haven’t given up yet. The Confederates called the Civil War “The War of Northern Aggression” and that mindset is still driving Trump supporters. No, progressives don’t want to cancel them. They don’t want them to feel guilty for the crimes of their ancestors. They don’t want to outlaw Christianity or install a communist government. We just want them to acknowledge that there were terrible things in American history, and we can do better.
Did that make any sense? I’m frightened and anxious because we went through the looking glass the past few months. This isn’t Birtherism or Russiagate nonsense, Trump supporters are now living in an alternate reality. Trump is their messiah, and he tells them what is real. This scares the f–k out of me. Nixon or Reagan don’t hold a candle to this sort of devotion. There’s never been anything like this in my life before, and as a student of history, Trumps are few and far between.
Usually they’re smarter though. What a sheetshow. Stay safe everyone, still crazy times everywhere. Covid is in fact real. #StaytheFHome #WearaDamnMask #FelesRegula
*If on January 5 one predicted “Trump will incite a mob tomorrow, and they will overrun the Capitol building in an attempt to overturn the election,” one would not have been taken seriously.
Copyright © 2021 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.
(Image: Public domain Snappygoat image.)
NUMBAT THURSDAY
That’s a numbat. I had never heard of numbats before. It’s now my new favorite animal. Like many Australian animals, the numbat looks as if it was designed by a committee. In this case a committee of eight year olds. And in this case, the end result works. It looks cute, determined, and inquisitive at the same time. A cross between a fox and a chipmunk. And now that I have brought numbats to the attention of the world, can a Disney movie starring one be far behind? And if so, this blogger will gladly provide the voice for said numbat hero.
Yes, I’m very tired. Four ten plus hour days on limited sleep will do that to a person. Still, I promised my faithful readers a blog every weeknight, so I will persevere. Thursday was going to be a history post, but not much happened on February 11 in history. Not terribly surprising, history is mostly wars and such, and until recently, wars tended to be something conducted during the summer in the northern hemisphere. There was the carnival tragedy of 1823, sheesh, 100 or so young lads killed in a crush. One of the last battles as the Japanese closed in on Singapore in 1942, resulting in the first crushing victory of an Asian army over a European army in 400 years (so they don’t teach this one in British schools no doubt.) February 11, 1979 is the traditional date of the Iranian revolution, the one that toppled the ruthless US installed dictator. The latter part not taught in US schools I suspect, in fact last time I checked the CIA’s official history of Iran starts in … drum roll … 1979. And of course February 11, 1812 is the traditional date for the beginning of gerrymandering (and the end of representative democracy) in the US. That one’s too depressing for words. So no history post tonight, but on the plus side, history will still be there next Thursday! Stuff that’s already happened is reliable that way. (Well, not always.)
So a few interesting links as I stumble exhausted through the rest of tonight’s post: Here’s the real reason Republicans are obsessed with hating Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In short, half of white Americans live in a fantasy world where whites are a discriminated against minority now. In other words, the only real contact half of white Americans have with minorities is what they see on Fox News etc, otherwise they couldn’t believe transcendent absurdities like this. The article puts it all together and into perspective nicely. Yes, very depressing.
John Pavlowitz has a nice take on “Cancel Culture,” the current right wing (fantasy) outrage de jure: The Cancel Culture is Just Adult Accountability. He’s right on target as is usually the case, “Cancel Culture” is just the current version of the “War on Christmas,” the evangelical fantasy that Christianity is somehow under attack in the US. Playing the victim is pretty much all the evangelical right has these days, and the ‘Mandalorian’ actress played it to the hilt, among other offensive posts, claiming that Trump supporters in the US face the same persecution that Jews faced in Nazi Germany. Right. A few other takes on the situation, and the evangelicals’ screams of outrage: ‘Mandalorian’ actress axed over divisive social media posts and Gina Carano’s Mandalorian exit proves ‘cancel culture’ doesn’t exist – despite what her fans say.
Running out of steam here. One last article. Yes, Trump’s abysmal response to Covid really did kill several hundred thousand Americans: US could have averted 40% of Covid deaths, says panel examining Trump’s policies. Sigh. This was apparent to anyone not living in Trumptopia in March when his Covid response essentially boiled down to “It’s all going to magically go away by Easter!” He was the worst president in American history just by that standard alone, no other president’s flaming incompetence and denial killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. But just like America by so many objective standards has the worst health care in the developed world, the people living in Trumptopia are blind to it, because their leaders and media tell them it isn’t so. It’s a cult who think their beliefs give them magical power and/or that God will deliver them from their supposed enemies and restore them to their imagined past glories. Trump’s response to Covid was like Hitler’s “no retreat” order in Russia, why, if people just have the willpower, they can accomplish anything!
It’s never worked before in history, because reality trumps fantasy every time. Magical thinking sure has caused a lot of death, destruction, and sorrow though, and I fear we’re not out of the woods yet. Still, what a time to be alive in America watching and chronicling it all. Stay safe and warm everyone. Comments, shares, likes, patrons, and donations appreciated. (Thanks for the gloves Lars, they’re wonderful, pics to follow.) And if the gentle reader doesn’t want to support me, well, maybe they’ll help save the numbat: Project Numbat. #StaytheFHome #WearaDamnMask #FelesRegula
Copyright © 2021 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.
(Image: Numbat in Perth Zoo. Credit: Martin Pot. Image used legally: Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.)
Doug's Darkworld 