Archive for the ‘Q-Anon’ Category
ELECTION NIGHT NIGHTMARE?
A friend sent me a video. Interesting video. It makes the case that we’ll see something truly horrifying on election night. It points out that Biden mail in votes are going to be likely double Trump’s mail in votes. According to their calculations, we might see Trump getting an overwhelming electoral college victory on election night from in person votes. And about ten days later as the mail in ballots are counted, Joe Biden becomes the winner.
I have no way of judging the accuracy of their calculations, so I have no idea how likely such a result is. It certainly seems plausible though, I can see no reason why it’s impossible. And then, we’d have a problem. The gentle reader gets one guess what the result of that would be. Yes, Trump would declare victory on election night and do everything in his power to cast doubt on the subsequent mail in ballots. It could get really ugly. Here’s the link to the video: The Terrifying Election Scenario That Could Rip America Apart.
And to make it even more fun, despite all his overblown fears of fraudulent votes, Trump asked his supporters in north Carolina to vote twice for him to “test the system.” That’s right, Trump urged his supporters to commit voter fraud to somehow prevent voter fraud? I’d say I’m not sure what he’s thinking, except I don’t think much thought goes into what Trump says. At least it gives ammo to the Democrats to demand scrupulously fair mail in vote counts. Still though, it’s throwing more gasoline on the dumpster fire the 2020 elections are shaping up to be.
2020 really highlights the transcendent archaic absurdity of America’s electoral system. In their efforts to set up a system that would prevent some populist from getting elected over the desires of the rich and powerful, the founding fathers set up a system that ultimately was incredibly undemocratic and easily manipulated by politicians. I mean gerrymandering was invented in 1812 for God’s sake, and the Constitution should immediately have been amended to prevent it. Nope, it’s still with us today, allowing political parties to get representation far beyond what their support warrants. And it’s gotten worse in recent decades as the GOP realized demographically they were more outvoted every year. If Trump wins in November despite losing the popular vote, that will mean three out of the last six presidential elections will have gone to the loser in the popular vote. All Republicans I might add. Yeah, some democracy.
A couple more notes in the margins. I’m a bit under the weather today. And the 2020 new normal baseline is frazzled, depressed, angry. Hoping it’s just allergies/air quality. I’d be really annoyed if I caught the Rona. So more Trump shenanigans: Trump orders review to defund NYC, other ‘anarchist’ cities. OK then. As I said in yesterday’s blog, the amount of civil unrest in the US right now is pretty modest. There’s no “cities under siege.” Anarchists are not flooding the streets, there’s not widespread rioting and looting. So this is just another of Trump’s attempts to claim liberals are the problem and he is the solution. It will play well with his base, and that’s all that matters to Trump.
In other Trump news (it is 2020) Trump claims that Americans who died in war are “losers and suckers.” My guess is that this isn’t going to help his popularity with veterans: Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’. It’s a depressing article. According to it Trump simply can’t understand why anyone would do anything that wasn’t out of self interest. His whole term in office certainly reflects that. I mean, that’s what con artists do, anything goes as long as they benefit. Trump University showed beyond any doubt he doesn’t care who he hurts as long as he benefits.
So I guess this to some extent explains the popularity of Q-Anon conspiracy theories among Trump supporters. Unable to admit that their beloved leader doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself and his family and cronies, why, Trump must be secretly engaged in a fight against terrible enemies of all that is right and good! Confirmation bias on steroids. The Q-anon movement is still growing, and sucking in other conspiracy minded folks: How Covid-19 myths are merging with the QAnon conspiracy theory.
What a time to be alive. Yeah, the election isn’t going to end well. Stay safe everyone. #StaytheFHome #WearaDamnMask #InsanusTempora
Copyright © 2020 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.
(Image: A Roman dodecahedron. Hundreds have been found. What is it for? No one knows. Just a reminder that no matter how much we think we understand, there are still things we don’t know. Even about ourselves. Seemed appropriate in these times, people are going to look back on 2020 America and wonder. Why didn’t they defend their country against Covid-19? It will be a mystery. I’m still mystified. Credit: Lokilech 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.)
DISTURBING IMAGE WARNING: Q-ANON TO TRUMP’S HAIL MARY ELECTION
Always something. A friend sent me something interesting. No, not the above, I don’t have any friends who would send me that. I sincerely hope. We’ll get back to it. He sent me a link about how the New Zealand Prime Minister had delayed their election because Covid-19 had broken out again. And no one was particularly upset by it. Then he wondered what would happen if Trump did the same, implying the Democrats would go berserk. Sigh.
The two situations aren’t comparable on multiple levels. What Adern did in New Zealand was completely legal. In a parliamentary government the party in power can call the next elections pretty much whenever they like, as long as they are held by a certain date. She consulted with the other parties and got their blessing, even though such was not required. It was a perfectly reasonable move, they had gotten their country rid of Covid-19 and now have every intention of wiping out the current outbreak, which is miniscule compared to America’s out of control pandemic. They are also reassessing everything in their response to see if mistakes were made and how they can prevent another outbreak. New Zealand is run by functioning adults in other words.
Trump does not have the legal authority to postpone the election. That requires an act of both houses of Congress. He could certainly ask them to, though seems unlikely they would give him his wish. He could try and order the election delayed anywise. The result would be chaos and outrage. Some governors might well comply, others might well not. God only knows how it would play out. What we do know is what happens on January 20th no matter who wins or even if there is an election. Trump and Pence’s terms end. If there is no legal electoral winner, then the presidency devolves through the presidential succession as specified by law. A lot of those people are also up for re-election, so who knows who would be sworn in. Great fodder for a political comedy here I suppose. Sort of a “King Ralph” situation where the dust settles and the assistant undersecretary of corn futures is sworn in as president.
It also really makes little sense for Trump to postpone the election. Even if it was put off by two months, it’s not like Covid-19 is just going to magically go away. I guess Trump would be doing so in hopes that it did just that or a cure/vaccine might be developed. A Hail Mary pass. We’ll see, I think a delayed election is unlikely. A confused, messed, controversial election, yeah, that is pretty likely.
My latest nightmare election fantasy is that Trump just barely ekes out an electoral college win, but with Biden not just getting a majority of the popular vote, he gets two or three times the popular vote that Trump got. A huge majority, but only losing because of massive voter suppression in various battleground states. And that would be a crisis. Again, no idea how that would play out, but it could easily get ugly. It would at the very least show what a hideous mess our purported democracy has become.
Another random thought. I’m thinking Covid-19 is going to be America’s Hongerwinter. The Hongerwinter was in Holland in the winter of 1944/45. It is to date the only famine that’s ever occurred in a developed country. Hitler’s Nazis stole all of Holland’s harvest in the fall of 1944. It did have some positives in that we learnt things. Because this happened in a developed country, scientists had a first hand chance to study the effects of famine on a population. A lot was learned, one little tidbit I thought was fascinating, Dutch babies were of course of much lower birth weight because their mothers were undernourished. Well, when the baby girls grew up and had babies of their own decades later … their babies were also underweight! Interesting, nu? Wiki covers it here.
No, I don’t think the US will see a famine. I hope not at least, but anything is possible these days. However, we are seeing the first time a pandemic is being allowed to run its course in a developed country. The national response has basically been non-existent, Trump made a lot of trivial gestures, claimed he’d saved millions of lives, and walked away. From the beginning he let the states handle it, and while some performed better than others, some states did nothing. And none have Covid-19 even remotely under control at this point. If one’s apartment is on fire, trying to put the fire out while fire is raging in all the other apartments in the building is going to be a daunting task. America is one giant lesson on how not to deal with a pandemic.
Since we’re gonna get to see just how a pandemic plays out in a population, scientists have an opportunity to study epidemiology in action. What we learn will no doubt help other countries understand Covid-19 better, and will likely save lives. So for once Americans are dying to save foreign lives. How selfless of us, the anti-maskers are actually altruists is disguise. Who knew?
OK, out of space to discuss my vote for Biden or the above meme. I’ll let the gentle reader ponder both for another day. Yes, I found an actual reason to vote for Biden, I haven’t joined the “anyone is better than Trump brigade.” Granted at this point I think a gerbil would do a better job than Trump, but that’s still not a reason to vote for it. You’d have to give me a reason to vote for that particular gerbil. I found a reason to vote for Biden.
Stay safe everyone, these are unsettled times. I hope they get better, I’m not holding my breath. Shares, likes, comments appreciated. #StaytheFHome #WearaDamnMask #MundiSolisOccasum
Copyright © 2020 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.
(Credit: As far as I know what’s indicated in the image. A friend sent the image to me, appears to be public domain, claimed as Fair Use under US Copyright Law. There’s some … disturbing … elements in the image. Future blog.)
AND A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM
That meme made me laugh. It’s getting harder to laugh these days. I was going to blog about my decision to vote for Biden, but as so often happens these days, other stuff came up. Watching all those movies in the 80s and 90s about a dystopian 21st century, from Mad Max to Blade Runner, I was so relieved that the 21st century in America was mostly the eighties with cooler gadgets. And now here we are, the country is going down the tubes. The weirdest thing about it, most people are still in denial about how bleak it is.
Moving right along, Trump’s reactions to the wildfires in California. In a nutshell he blamed them on poor forestry practices, not doing enough logging, and environmentalism. And that California had refused his “rake the leaves” advice for years, and he was thinking of cutting funding to them as a result of these fires. Ah, where to start? This is textbook narcissism; narcissists always victim blame and frame things so that they look good. Yeah, if they’d only followed Trump’s advice, everything would be fine. It’s also a stunningly childish argument for a man in his seventies.
Back in reality, California has a wildfire problem for a number of reasons. It’s always been prone to wildfires, in fact they are a natural part of the ecology there. Exacerbated by global warming, California has been getting hotter and drier. And the Smokey the Bear factor. For a hundred years America religiously put out fires as quickly as possible all over the west. Turns out this was a terrible mistake, the regular fires had kept the burnables to a minimum and prevented giant out of control fires. So yes, bad forestry practices contributed to this, but they ended decades ago. And lastly, too much poorly thought out development in fire prone areas. Maybe the state shares some blame for that, but sure as shit the environmentalists don’t. Lastly, very few of these fires are in logging areas, the idea that more logging would have prevented this is, well, a lie.
And in other weirdness, the current USPS situation. This summer Trump appointed a political donor and personal ally as Postmaster General, a man with exactly zero experience in running the USPS; in fact this is the first time in history that the Postmaster General wasn’t from the ranks of the USPS. The USPS is a key government service, it’s in fact the only government service mandated by the Constitution. It’s a service for all Americans. And as far as anyone can tell Mr Louis DeJoy is doing what he can to hamper the USPS in its duties. It’s caused some pretty ugly problems already. And Trump has all but admitted it’s all about making voting by mail difficult. This is something that we would normally think of as happening in a corrupt third world dictatorship. It’s like putting someone who has never served in charge of an army, simply because he’s got the right political connections. Yeah, that never turns out well.
Then the pardoning Susan B. Anthony thing. Trump wonders why it wasn’t done before. Um, because she would have rejected the pardon, the same way she rejected the crime she was accused of? A pardon implies the person being pardoned did something wrong, a charge Susan B Anthony would have disputed. She didn’t get a fair trial, so her conviction was bogus. If Trump had actually wanted to do the right thing, he would have voided her conviction, not pardoned her. On the one hand this is no big deal, on the other hand more evidence Trump is pandering for votes without any real understanding of the issues.
Lastly I read an interesting article about Q-Anon: ‘We Are Your Family Now’: What It’s Like to Lose a Loved One to QAnon. Not sure what to think. Sure sounding like Q-Anon is turning into a cult. The Minutemen or Tea Party never turned into cults. I know one fellow who lost his wife and kids to a cult, but it was a real cult, not an online one. Q-Anon doesn’t appear to even have a central leader or organization. It’s people who believe, apologies to future readers and sane people the world over, that a secret pedoplhile ring is trying to take over the world, and Trump is engaged in an epic secret battle to destroy it. And soon Trump will triumph, and something great will happen, and all sorts of monsters will be arrested. This sounds like bat-shit lunacy to me, convince me otherwise.
I guess in one sense it makes sense. Working Americans are hosed by the American system in myriad ways that appall the rest of the developed world. And the narrative they are fed (by both parties) to justify it all is one giant pile of steaming BS. On some level people get this, so they are vulnerable to anyone who claims to have an answer that explains it all. Q-Anoners are no longer victims of an oppressive system, they are heroes fighting for freedom!
Fun times ahead. Maybe tomorrow I will blog about why I am voting for Biden. Hint: It has nothing to do with Trump. Have a great weekend everyone, stay safe, stay sane. Or a reasonable approximation thereof. #StaytheFHome #WearaDamnMask #MundiSolisOccasum
Copyright © 2020 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.
(Image: Facebook post, used without permission, claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. Credit: Elizabeth Hackett.)
Doug's Darkworld 