In search of a workable liberal logic!

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2021

Sonny and Loreen call C-Span: We're constantly struck by the problems our liberal tribe encounters as we try to create a workable liberal logic.

Consider a letter in today's New York Times. The writer is discussing the role the mainstream press should play at this perilous time.

The letter refers to this recent column by Ross Douthat. For us, it was the rarest of such columns, in that 1) we could understand what Douthat was saying, and 2) we agreed with his general view.

For now, let's focus on the logic of today's letter. Here it is, in full:

To the Editor:

Ross Douthat says the primary mission of the press is to provide an accurate description of reality, to be truthful and neutral. But being “neutral,” especially in today’s political climate, can result in inaccurate descriptions of reality and in untruths.

At present, the extreme segment of the Republican Party has an enormous influence and is an existential threat to our democracy. The extreme segment of the Democratic Party has far less influence and so, regardless of what you think of its ideas, does not pose the same threat to our democratic way of life. A false equivalency in coverage provides an untruthful and unrealistic picture of current affairs.

I’m sick and tired of hearing from acquaintances and others that politicians and political parties are “all the same.” They are not. It’s dangerous for the press to be “neutral” rather than truthful and realistic.

That's the full text of the letter. We can't help noticing this:

We agree with the general view described in the letter's first sentence. We agree that providing "an accurate description of reality" is the press corps' principal task.

That has long been a widely held view. Our question would be this:

How do we get, in the space of one paragraph, from "an accurate description of reality" to "a false equivalency in coverage?" How does being accurate (and "truthful") lead us to being false?

The writer believes that our current "politicians and political parties" are not "all the same." More specifically (but also somewhat fuzzily), he believes the current Republican Party presents "an existential threat to our democracy" while the current Democratic Party does not. 

Presumably, he's referring to Donald J. Trump and Trumpism, and to the apparent craziness which often resides in such parts.

Our question, again, would be this:

If Trumpism is full of wild misstatements—modern liberals, and mainstream journalists, prefer to describe such misstatements as "lies"—how would "an accurate description of reality" lead to "a false equivalency?" Why wouldn't "an accurate description of reality" lead instead to a mainstream journalism which featured endless examples of Trump's wild misstatements, with few or no corresponding reports about such behavior by Democrats?

In fact, that's what mainstream journalism has largely looked like in the past five or six years. Our press has been full of such reports about Trump. He still received 74 million votes in last year's election.

Back to our basic question! How does the letter writer move so quickly from "accurate / truthful" to "false?" He gets there because of a third word he attributes to Douthat—that third world being "neutral."

According to the letter writer, Douthat wants the press to be accurate and to be truthful—but also to be neutral. That third word leads the writer to picture a "false equivalency," in which journalists pretend that the two parties are just alike.

Douthat does refer to "neutrality" three times in his column. But when he does, he's imagining circumstances in which journalists decide that they shouldn't be truthful and accurate—that they should refuse to report the shortcomings of Trump's opponents, to the extent that such shortcomings exist. 

Should journalists behave that way? Especially if we're facing an existential threat, that is a matter of judgment. 

In his column, Douthat says that abandonment of "neutrality" tends to be counterproductive, and we tend to agree. 

That said, the letter writer, perhaps understandably, is in a state of high tribal dudgeon. Along the way, it seems to us that his logic is rather unclear.

Such lapses of logic tend to be general over the liberal world. We note a similar lapse today in Jesse Wegman's new column

Oddly, Wegman seems to think that the purpose of fact-checking is to persuade Trumpian propagandists—in effect, GOP "party leaders"—to stop making wild misstatements.

Wegman says he's come to see that this will never happen. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that the more useful purpose of fact-checking is to peel away a segment of the Trump-voting "rank and file." 

(This will be most likely to happen if the fact-checking is presented in a respectful, empathic way.)

Douthat's column is in part a response to Professor Jay Rosen. We were struck by a bogus idea which seemed to suffuse Rosen's half of this subsequent colloquy with Douthat. That's the idea that the mainstream press can somehow control what the electorate thinks. 

In the face of the power of the pro-Trump press, the mainstream press corps can't necessarily do that! Rosen finally notes this fact very late in his piece, but that false assumption seems to drive his perfectly understandable sense of frustration every step of the way.

We liberals are having a very hard time constructing a liberal logic. We sometimes seem to think there's some magical way that we, or the mainstream press, can somehow gain control of the political situation.

Especially given our lack of perfect insight, that's magical thinking—a dream.

Our giant nation is splitting in two, and one of those two tribes reviles us. In order to understand why that is, consider the first two phone calls this morning to C-Span's Washington Journal:

SONNY FROM MISSOURI: Hi, good morning! I have been listening to all kinds of news from all over the world. I do not just listen to Fox or CNN. So people who tell the truth—[indecipherable name], Dr. Lee Merritt, Peter McCullough—these people tell the truth. Everyone else is essentially lying. You know that omicron is weaker than all the other variants, even though it is more transmissible. But the original coronavirus is only .03 mortality rate. This is all brainwashing. Arrest Fauci, save Infowars! Alex Jones was right!

LOREEN FROM CALIFORNIA: Good morning! I would just like to say that every American that is not vaccinated is being very un-American, and they're scum as far as I am concerned.

Loreen stopped talking at that point. Jesse asked follow-up questions. 

"There is no reason why coronavirus should be running rampant in this country," Loreen told Jesse at one point. "It's all because of these Trumpers that are throwing a tantrum because Donald Trump lost and he didn't get credit for the virus."

For the record, Sonny and Loreen aren't part of the mainstream press corps. That said, these first two calls help explain the phenomenon which Professor Rosen, at least to our ear, hasn't quite come to terms with.

Dear Blue People, listen up! Their sons and their daughters are beyond our command! We can't fact-check their claims and call them names and command them to vote as we tell them.

In our view, the mainstream press corps should be truthful and accurate. In terms of its basic reporting, it should also be "neutral," at least in the way Douthat described.

Also this:

We liberals should learn to stop loathing The Others in the ways we so plainly do and pretty much always have. 

We're not inclined to agree with Sonny's assessments. But he may be the guy who will stop his car and help you change your flat tire next week. He very well may be the person who will stop and help you do that.

A giant society can only function based on comity and consent. In the end, a giant society can only function on a sense of shared values and sentiment, on shared respect and some sense of joint purpose. 

Fact-checking can't force The Others to see things the (admittedly perfect) way we do. That's simply not how "the beloved community" or the human race actually works!

There but for fortune: "Sonny lives on a farm / In a wide-open space?" 

That's the story Mary Black told—though also, of course, Sonny's mother, on the album A Woman's Heart.

To check your capacity for pure human feeling, we'll invite you to just click here. It seems to us that we liberals can boost our logic and our empathy. 


78 comments:

  1. "In search of a workable liberal logic!"

    Heh, that's a good one, dear Bob. Thanks for the laughs.

    As always, thanks for documenting this miniscule portion of the recent liberal atrocities...

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  2. Douthat is anything but neutral.

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  3. A conservative blogger says

    "we have gone from liberal media bias in the early years of the 21st century to the open warfare on conservatism that we see today.,,,Basically, complaining about media bias today is like being a soldier in an ancient army, seeing a phalanx of enemy soldiers lined up across a field, preparing to advance, and saying 'Those guys are biased against us!'”

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/12/from-media-bias-to-outright-partisanship.php

    I agree with him.

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    1. Me too.

      You can’t reason with people who think Donald Trump is a monster and that his supporters are too. You can’t. You have to do give-and-take with people who are still open to the concept of politics as a matter of negotiation They’re plenty of folks who still hold that view. Who knows how long that will last.

      It’s nice to see one media member who understands that what Margaret Sullivan and company want is something that will fundamentally change the media forever. In my opinion, it will do more than that. It will be The Plague in every sense that Camus meant.

      Douthat is smarter than the usual media member, but is still off-base in that he’s unaware that it’s already a done-deal with his guild, as illustrated in his own thinking.

      The Pandora’s Box has been opened. Douthat and his colleagues are involved in the first step of the slide downward. They’re debating how tyrannical they’re willing to become and why it’s so necessary to be that way.

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    2. Disintegration of the establishment media is only a symptom of a much bigger crisis, though. Crisis of the western liberal order. It's run its course.

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    3. Mao, I would have dismissed your statement a year ago, but I see videos on Twitter of what is happening on the streets of Europe to lockdown protesters.

      It’s no wonder the U.S. news media won’t cover it.

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    4. Correction. That should be 4 decades too late.

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    5. Lockdown protests? Meh. What about, say, gilets jaunes in France? Every week for 3 years, 3 million people participating.

      Globalization is killing the west. Can't compete with people on the other side of the planet willing to do the same work for 50 cents/hour.

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    6. Shouldn’t you give Nixon some credit?

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    7. Nixon was a piker.
      Reagan (and G.H.W. Bush) made bigotry politically acceptable again.

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    8. It’s always been socially acceptable in some circles via means such as this:

      https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/us/harvard-admissions-act-sat.amp.html

      Bye-bye to do many Asians.

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    9. Checkout David and Cece trying to gaslight us into thinking Republicans aren't fascists.
      Bless their hearts.

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    10. Accusing all Republicans of being fascists gives Democrats a great excuse not to critically look at or improve their own party. And you can see the results of it, or lack thereof

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    11. “ You can’t reason with people who think Donald Trump is a monster and that his supporters are too. You can’t.”

      Look in the mirror, Cecelia. What comes from Fox News and other right wing media is practically 24/7 that liberals are evil monsters. So please. Spare us the giant hypocrisy. Please?

      And besides, you’re on a blog that routinely called Trump an insane nutcase, a narcissistic sociopath. That’s close to calling him a “monster.”

      And please explain how Trump isn’t a monster. A pathological liar, grifting off the public dime, fleecing his followers, using his powers corruptly.

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    12. mh - you are completely avoiding the substance of this blog post, the two New York Times columns and the comments by David and Cecilia. It would be more interesting if you directly addressed the substance of the issue.

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    13. Anonymouse 6:38pm, I’m afraid that would involve mh having to actually read the entire blog and so notice what compromises the blogger is willing…or unwilling..to make in the service of “saving the country”.

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    14. You have to do give-and-take with people who are still open to the concept of politics as a matter of negotiation

      Cecelia, you're fucking nuts. The republican party treats compromise as a dirty word. You want to laugh? Paul Ryan and John Boehner were "RINOS" who were run out of town on a rail. Mitch Mcconnell is hated in the fever swamps of right wing hate radio. Not a single republican Senator will vote for voting rights legislation. Your party is fascist, anti-democratic and authoritarian. And I see no evidence of the existence of any of these mythical characters you describe in your party. None.

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    15. Anonymouse 7:07pm, I wasn’t describing political party politics. I was describing reasonable and sane citizens who are likely on the verge of extinction.

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    16. It's very simple. If you question the moral greatness of Hillary Clinton and the DNC democratic establishment in any way whatsoever, you are a bigoted fascist.

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    17. reasonable and sane citizens

      hahaha, you mean like you and David and Mao?

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    18. You, Cecelia? Really? Well, let's return to Ruby Freeman again. Tell us what was so "terrible" about what was done to her. Tell us who instigated it. Who picked her out of a video because she was black and put a target on her back? The guy you voted for twice? The sore losing piece of shit who tried to orchestrate a coup on our presidential election? The guy who is personally running around the country and driving any reasonable sane republican out of your party? And the guy you will happily vote for again if the opportunity arose? You, Cecelia? Hahaha!! That's a good one.

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    19. People are driven to vote for Trump because they cannot stand what the left has become.

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    20. Which is a party that ignores the problems of class power and exploitation that are at the heart of capitalist social relations.

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    21. Anonymouse 7:53pm, why is that anonymices never notice that they sound like Commissioner Dreyfus?

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    22. In 25 words of less, tell us who you think Dreyfus was. No Wikipedia -- just your own words.

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    23. People are driven to vote for Trump because he tells them they are winners when they are actually piece of shit losers. Especially Cecelia.

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    24. 8:00,
      Ni**a lovers?

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    25. No, elitist race baiters who use accusations of bigotry to ignore and hide any conversations of class struggle and who controls the economy and how the social surplus is distributed.

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    26. Proud Boys are interested in social surplus? Who knew?

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    27. HAHAHAHAHA!! Good one!!

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    28. Put the Democrats are anything but nigger lovers. The black working class has not had a raise in a generation and Democrats don't say one word about it.

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    29. When did you first start noticing that the whole was against you, David? Come, stretch out on my couch and tell me all about your terrible trials and tribulations in this mean country.

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    30. People are driven to vote for Trump because they cannot stand what the left has become.

      Exactly. Digby has explained it as succinctly as possible here:

      "I won’t go into all the studies which show that this is not the reason those voters have rejected the Democratic Party. They reject the Democrats is because they are hostile to the people who make up the Democratic coalition: people of color, feminists, LGBT folks, immigrants, city people in general. That is a very difficult problem since these rural voters require that politicians crudely insult the Democratic base in order to win their favor and that is a zero sum game."

      Exactly.

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    31. Anonymouse 6:59pm, that’s what it is.

      For sure.

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    32. The proof is in the pudding. LGBT, people of color, feminists from the working class have not had a raise in decades, often they are stuck in an endless cycle of unfair debt and professionally they are on a treadmill to nowhere and they know it. Yet the Democratic Party has no meaningful propositions to help them and fatuous, lazy bloggers like Digby never ever even bring this situation up. To them, these groups of people are pawns to play in order to score political points.

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    33. Yet the Democratic Party has no meaningful propositions to help them...

      Right, it makes you wonder what Digby's end game is here. That's why "people of color" need to wise up and stop supporting the party that is trying to protect their right to vote and move to the party that is working tirelessly to gerrymander and suppress their democratic political franchise out of existence.

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    34. So insane. The Democratic party is fighting for their right ... to vote for the Democratic party! Fighting for the right to take part and exist fairly in the economy, well, forget about it.

      People, not yourself of course, yet, but people can see that Democratic elites are simply using blacks, feminists and gays to divide.

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    35. Bwahahaha! Thanks, Ivan, for the view from the Russian Troll Farm.

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    36. That's your best response? So, in other words, you've lost this debate.

      Wake up man.

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    37. (these obvious shortcomings and structural corruption of the Democratic party does not mean that the GOP is the answer, BTW)

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    38. Speaking of ... new Matt Taibbi article just came in my inbox:

      "“Liz and I talk about it all the time,” said Reverend William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign, referring to his co-chair Liz Theoharis. “They want you to fight for voting rights over here [he pointed right] and fight for living wages over there [he pointed left]. That’s the Washington Two-Step. It’s a way of siloing issues so they can divide the fight.”

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    39. It is indeed outrageous that dead people's inalienable right to vote for the slaveholders' party is still disputed. By bigots and WHITE SUPREMACISTS.

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    40. It's amusing how Taibbi new fanboyz are now all Trumpists and racists. His gibberish sells well with the fascists.

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    41. How charming. Oxygen-deprived faucists hate the fascists living inside their heads.

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    42. Like I said, it's very simple. If you question the moral greatness of Hillary Clinton and the DNC democratic establishment or their courtesans in the media in any way whatsoever, you are a bigoted fascist. Just please, God forbid, at any and all cost never ever ever bring up class disparity issues.

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    43. 1108 is so quick to call everyone racists, bigots, fascists and trolls. Addressing the actual substance of what Taibbi wrote, not so much. God forbid.

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    44. Do you have the name of the Republican voter who gives a shit about what Taibni wrote?

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    45. Berto/mh/Corby: you've lost this one. The Democratic establishment that you adore and their ass kissing, low IQ blogs that you turn to religiously both exist to divide us and keep us divided so class issues are never discussed and addressed. When presented with this reality all you have are name-calling ad hominems - more dividing. It's all you know. You have no answer to the charge therefore you don't give one. I don't blame you. You're only a pawn in their game. Have a good sunday.

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    46. Is that first name No, last name Body, or is it all one name, like Cher or Madonna?

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    47. So Republican voters were so concerned about the economy, they voted for a guy who stiffs his contractors because he has financial leverage over them.
      TDH readers: feel free to pull 1:04’s other finger.

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    48. When you ain't got nothin, you go nothin to lose.

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    49. 1:04,
      Which would you like us to forget more, the standing ovation Republican voters gave Trump when he gave the Establishment elites a HUGE tax break, or the way they tried to overthrow the Capitol when black votes counted in an election?

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    50. I would like you to remember that the Democratic party is not meaningfully addressing class and income disparity issues and that you routinely act like a total fool.

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    51. I like the Clintons, “moral greatness” was hardly the way I thought about them. The “libertarian” who agues Trump is not a monster possesses zero moral or any other variety of common sense.

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    52. @6:29

      Did poverty go up or down under Trump? Hint: it didn't go down.

      Did the wealth gap increase or decrease under Trump? Hint: it widened as the rich got richer and poor got poorer.

      What happened to all economic indicators except the stock market under Trump? Hint: nothing good, even before covid.

      How many jobs were created under Trump? Fewer than under Democrats, including Biden, who has created more jobs than any recent president (including Reagan).

      When economic measures show that income disparity issues routinely get better under Democrats than under Republicans, why are these trolls working so hard to convince liberal voters that the Democrats do not have their interests at heart? Hint: Can you say "propaganda"?

      There is a reason that progressives are Democrats, no matter how hard they work to pull the party toward their positions on issues. It is because the right is worse.

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    53. I would like you to remember that the Democratic party is not meaningfully addressing class and income disparity issues and that you routinely act like a total fool.

      The first major piece of legislation President Biden signed was the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
      It had to go through budget reconciliation process because not a single fucking republican senator would support the bill. Final passage in the House was by a vote of 220-211, not a single fucking republican congressman voted for it. Not one.

      I won't go into the details of everything in the legislation targeted directly at the average American working family.

      The ACA signed by President Obama also had to go through the budget reconciliation process because not a single fucking republican would support it. Not one.

      The Dems aren't perfect and there is a lot to criticize, but we have a binary system.

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    54. "American Rescue Plan Act of 2021"

      ARPA, because MAGA was already taken?

      Why not For Everything Good And Against Everything Evil Act, dear dembot?

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    55. Mao,
      Because that would show the Democratic Party's intolerance of Right-wing ideology.

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    56. 6:29,
      Just because you don't like the Democratic Party, doesn't mean the Republican Party's only ideology isn't bigotry.

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    57. Anyone who isn't a bigot, or isn't perfectly fine with bigotry, left the Republican Party more than two decades ago.

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  4. "At present, the extreme segment of the Republican Party has an enormous influence and is an existential threat to our democracy. The extreme segment of the Democratic Party has far less influence and so, regardless of what you think of its ideas, does not pose the same threat to our democratic way of life. A false equivalency in coverage provides an untruthful and unrealistic picture of current affairs."

    This letter writer is arguing that neutrality may result in a false equivalency that undermines accuracy and portrayal of reality. Somerby does his bait and shift by conflating neutrality with accuracy, when the letter writer is arguing that these are not the same and that neutral will not necessarily lead to an accurate, real portrayal of facts.

    For example, when the press tried to be neutral in treating Hillary and Trump as if they were both entitled to their points of view, when Trump was lying but Hillary was not, that is being even-handed (neutral) but it is not being accurate and not presenting reality for readers. There have been many instances where dealing with a Trump wrong-doing meant digging up some trivial (not at all equivalent) flaw on Hillary's part and then presenting them as if they were the same. It would be like comparing Trump's big lie that he won the 2020 election as if it were the same as Gore's minor misstatement about being instrumental in starting the internet. The press did this kind of thing repeatedly and it presented a false reality to readers, out of the desire to appear neutral, when it distorts accuracy to pretend that both candidates are the same when it came to lying, for example. They were not.

    Somerby confuses this issue by assuming that if the press is neutral, then it will present an accurate picture of reality, but Somerby ignores the letter writer's point that being neutral cannot mean being equal-handed without majorly distorting reality. Unfortunately, that is what the press did do, and it distorted the truth and hurt Hillary in 2016.

    Liberals have learned this lesson. Somerby doesn't appear to have, since he mistakes this letter writer's point and argues as if neutrality would always produce accuracy, when there is no evidence that is true.

    And this is why Somerby is so pleasing to the trolls. He argues important points using conservative logic, pretending that Aristotle would be pleased with him, when anyone with half a brain knows that Somerby is basically dishonest in his arguments.

    What is wrong with neutrality? Nothing, as long as it doesn't start with the assumption that both candidates are equal, when they patently are not. Somerby won't acknowledge that Trump is a huge liar, so that should tell you why his remarks today are full of shit.

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    1. Anonymouse 5:37pm, Somerby’s point was that contrary to the letter writer’s argument, Douthat never used the concept of neutrality in the context that the letter writer (and now you) have claimed.

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    2. 5:37

      You are the troll. Do you even know what troll means? How are you not the troll?

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    3. That reminded me of this.

      THIS, baby.

      https://abigailshrier.substack.com/p/what-i-told-the-students-of-princeton

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    4. When good people cannot go along with your ideas, it is time to stop and evaluate your positions. The woman in this article seems to wear the criticism she receives as a badge of honor, instead of a wake-up call that she has gone seriously astray.

      Somerby talks about the inability of two sides to understand each other. I do not understand how conservatives can persist in beliefs that seem evil to me. Cecelia's responses here are another example of that. She is just a messed up person without a single clue about how wrong-headed she is.

      It doesn't matter whether she is a troll or for real, what she says here is not just deplorable, it is despicable. Somerby's pleas for empathy for people like her seem to call for us to abandon important values and I will not do that.

      In Colorado, people have signs on their lawns imploring each other to treat others with kindness. My daughter once asked me why people needed signs to tell them to do what should be done without prompting. That is how integral kindness should be. I just cannot see an ounce of kindness in Cecelia or most conservatives, and it saddens me that such people are walking around interacting with others. And they don't even care about what they lack, about how they make the world a worse place for evertyone else.

      That's why I can empathize with the despair that Somerby sometimes expresses, but I totally disagree with him about why the country is failing. Cecelia and her ilk are the problem, not liberals and not logic. Lack of heart.

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    5. Anonymouse 11:55pm, you may want policies that you think are helpful to others, but there’s nothing otherwise discernible of you being a kind person or even fairly a fairly reasonable one.

      As to kindness, at least not from the vantage point of a blog board.

      As to you being reasonable and being adept in reasoning, it is obvious that you are not.

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    6. It's easy to discern, by the fact that 11:55pm isn't a Right-winger.

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    7. Exactly. To anonymices pigeonholing and discerning are synonymous.

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  5. .. and mainstream journalists, prefer to describe such misstatements as "lies"—how would ..

    And here we see TDH engaging in the very behavior Rosen is talking about. They are fucking lies. No doubt about.

    But the New York Times went the entire four years of that monster's term too fucking scared to call that shitstain a liar. They broke their thesaurus trying every possible alternate description and euphemism in the English language instead of speaking in plain neutral and truthful terms.

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    1. "you don't have to overstate what you actually know to devastate Donald J. Trump. You don't have to say he has "lied" to challenge the dangerous craziness which is involved in his endless stream of bogus, ridiculous statements."

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  6. Last week, the New York Times Opinion columnist Ross Douthat pushed back on media critics like the N.Y.U. associate professor Jay Rosen. Jay asserts that the press should strive to be “pro-truth, pro-voting, anti-racist, and aggressively pro-democracy.”

    Ross disagrees, claiming that such a stance could feed more polarization.

    Bwahaha, and TDH is supporting Cardinal Ross Douthat and criticizing Jay Rosen, long term professor of journalism at NYU.

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  7. Somerby talks today about "liberal logic."

    There isn't one logic for liberals and a different logic for conservatives. Logic is logic.

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  8. "Trump has released a statement today that starts off by saying “All the Democrats want to do is put people in jail.”

    Oddly, Somerby has been saying the same thing, about liberals and specifically, Rachel Maddow.

    How can this be a liberal blog when the person who writes it, and claims to be liberal himself, so often says the same things as Trump and his minions, and those at Fox News?

    Today, Somerby argues that liberals and conservatives believe different things. Why then does Somerby keep saying the same things as conservatives? Anyone with an ounce of logic would consider this phenomenon very odd.

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  9. Oddly enough, there are also liberals who live on farms and in rural areas. Somerby's idea that it takes empathy to understand farm life is ridiculous. He himself doesn't live on a farm or anywhere near it, and he didn't grow up on any farm. His co-opting of a folk song about a farm boy is offensive, once again. There is nothing inherent to farm life that would make someone a Trump voter, mask resister or any other kind of idiot.

    However, lack of education, isolation from diversity found in larger cities, lack of perspective on other people's problems and feeling threatened by change and progress, can all make someone attracted to Trump. But that doesn't automatically come with working on a farm instead of in a factory.

    In the absence of liberal commenters, these blog comments descend into chaotic nonsense. But one really cannot begrudge those who have lives beyond this blog.

    I wish Somerby would stop lying about liberals.

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  10. Meanwhile, this is the stupidity Somerby tries to defend:

    "A Florida man who was kicked off of a United Airlines flight for wearing a woman’s thong as a facemask reportedly said he did so in protest of the airline’s mask mandate and also compared himself to Rosa Parks.

    Adam Jenne of Cape Coral argues that he was in compliance with the mask mandate, as the red women’s panties covered both his nose and mouth, but staff on his Dec. 15 flight from Ft. Lauderdale to Washington, D.C. apparently didn’t agree.

    In a video recorded by a passenger, a flight attendant tells Jenne he needs to leave the airplane. When Jenne asks why the attendant tells him it’s because he is “not in mask compliance”. Jenne is wearing the underwear on his face during the entire interaction and leaves the plane without an altercation after being asked."

    At least he exited the plane without having to be arrested.

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  11. Pastor Bob, who has now signed off on the most freakish Holocaust trivialization, is preaching to a pretty empty choir. It’s sad to imagine who his benefactors are now. Back to worrying about Trump being called a lair again? Anything but looking at the stories of the day at this point.

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