PROPAGANDA, INCOMPETENCE, ERROR: Could Donald J. Trump win re-election?

THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 2020

Is our tribe even dumber than theirs?:
Could Donald Trump get re-elected?

We've started to think that he actually could! Or at least, we've started to think that it might seem that he's been re-elected after the votes are finally counted, few as those votes may be.

In part, we say that because Trump seems to be (successfully?) shutting the post office down, a move which will make us a western province of Belarus. But we also say that because of the dumbness which now suffuses the culture, especially that afflicting our own failing anti-Trump tribe.

How dumb is the dumbness now afflicting our anti-Trump tribes? In truth, the cluelessness Over Here is vast, and it seems to be growing.

Our sachems wander about in a fog, often a fog of tribal correctness. For one tiny example—a tiny example affecting nothing—consider the first two paragraphs of a book review in today's New York Times:
SZALAI (8/13/20): There’s a curious new refrain on the right the repurposing of an old slogan from their opponents in the abortion fight to explain why people shouldn’t have to wear masks during a pandemic. “I thought it was my body, my choice!” the young Trump supporter Charlie Kirk recently declared on his podcast, a few days before an 80-year-old mentor of his died of complications from Covid-19.

Those making this defiant act of appropriation seem to believe that it’s rhetorically formidable, cleverly deploying mask-wearing feminists’ words against them. But if you think about it for even a millisecond, the whole gambit falls apart. The new champions of bodily autonomy aren’t saying that women have any right to the phrase in its original context—only that men worried about looking “unmanly” in masks do. The anti-maskers are clinging to an argument that they insist is bogus. It’s a half-witted attempt at a classic reductio ad absurdum that’s oblivious to its own absurdity.
It's hard to get dumber than that. In this case, we refer to the dumbness of the Times reviewer, not to the manifest dumbness of the young, super-dumb Charlie Kirk.

In fairness, Charlie Kirk, age 26, is dumb as a rock or a stone. He's the kind of roboticized true-believer widely found Over There, in tribal tents "on the right."

That said, it's easy enough to understand what dumbbells like Kirk are actually saying when they compare liberal views about mask-wearing to liberal views about abortion rights. What the youngster is saying is this:

He's saying that we pro-choice liberals are big hypocrites because we favor choice in the one area but not in the other. This is a blindingly stupid position, but in these increasingly stupid times, it scores big points Over There.

Kirk is so churlish, and so dumb, that he's willing to advance that position. Unfortunately, after decades of devolution in our nation's upper-end culture, the Times reviewer is so dumb that she doesn't understand that this is what Kirk is saying.

Monumentally over-thinking the matter, she turns Kirk's puerile charge of liberal hypocrisy into a claim of male privilege. In doing so, she's slavishly working from tribal script in a way which is every bit as robotic and dumb as Kirk's original gambit.

"How did things ever get so far?" Don Corleone once masterfully asked. When it comes to the growing dumbness in the anti-Trump world, top anthropologists insist that our tribal dumbness simply reflects the way our human brains have always been wired.

"Human functioning has always devolved, in exactly these ways, at times of high tribal conflict," these experts despondently say. "You can ignore that reviewer's degrees. This was simply the fate of the species."

Can it possibly be that our liberal sachems are now as dumb as theirs? Late last night, we saw top anthropologists making that claim:

"Follow the flap about Tucker Carlson," these despondent top experts now said.

The experts referred to Carlson's recent failure to pronounce Kamala Harris' first name correctly. This has become a major flap. Here's how the whole thing went down:

On Tuesday evening, Carlson opened his show with a 12-minute monologue in which he harshly criticized Harris, who Joe Biden had picked for VP. That said, he harshly criticized Biden too. Here's the way he started:
CARLSON (8/11/20): We will admit we did not see this coming. In fact, just last night on this show, we told you that Susan Rice was likely to get that job.

Rice is a hardened partisan, but she's not stupid. And more to the point, Rice has sincere beliefs, whether you like them or not, and we don't.

But Kamala Harris is the opposite of that.
Harris may be the single most transactional human being in America. There are time-share salesmen you would trust more than Kamala Harris. You can find payday lenders who are more sincere.

So it seemed inconceivable, given his current state, Joe Biden would choose someone so transparently one-dimensional as Kamala Harris, someone as empty as he is. It would be the first entirely hollow presidential ticket in American history, and we thought it could never happen.

But it is; they're doing it anyway. Biden-Harris, that's what they're going with. And the choice tells you a lot about the current state of the Democratic Party.
Carlson continued on from there, harshly criticizing Harris. Some of his claims struck us as flatly false, others as grossly misleading.

Was Carlson saying these things because Harris is a woman? In fairness, you can see that he said that Biden was just as bad as Harris. He also said that Rice is smart and sincere in her beliefs.

Meanwhile, his general claim—his claim about Harris' lack of sincere beliefs—isn't entirely crazy. She ran a woeful primary campaign, though our sachems will no longer speak with any clarity about her various acts of bad faith.

Carlson said Rice does have sincere beliefs, but that Harris doesn't. Beyond that, he had said that Harris was a favorite of Wall Street, and that she had been chosen for that very reason.

After a dozen minutes of this, he introduced Democratic veteran Richard Goodstein to offer rebuttal—and there was a lot to rebut. As an example of what we mean, Carlson brought Goodstein on with this question:
CARLSON: Richard, I always preface my questions to you by saying I don't want to be mean. But how can someone who said she believes that Joe Biden committed sexual assault against various women serve as his running mate? Sincere question.
The question may have been sincere, but its premise was bogus. As far as we know, Harris has never said that she believes that Biden committed sexual assault against any woman, let alone against several.

As far as we know, only Tara Reade has ever made that type of claim against Biden. In the past several months, our team has sidled away from Reade under cover of pandemic, with no one asking our tribal professors why they insisted, right off the bat, that Reade's claim should be believed.

There was a great deal for Goodstein to rebut that night. As we watched the program live, we wondered what he would say in response to that introduction.

By now, the whole world knows what Goodstein said. He proceeded to tell Carlson that he'd been mispronouncing Harris' first name all through his monologue.

For the record, Carlson had been pronouncing the nominee's name as if it rhymes with "Pamela." Just for the record, that's the way Biden pronounced it, quite a few times, at the next day's kick-off event.

That's the way a lot of people have been pronouncing Harris' name! Judging from the one paragraph Harris devotes to this topic in her 2019 memoir, people have pronounced her name that way all through the course of her life.

It's always a good idea to know how to pronounce someone's name. Having made that obvious point, we'll also say this:

Listening to Carlson and Goodstein live, we were instantly amazed, yet not amazed, by how weak Goodstein's effort was. It sounded like he was scolding Carlson, "and your fellow hosts on Fox," for having pronounced the name wrong.

Carlson noted, several times, that his mispronunciation has been unintentional. As we watched, it seemed to us that Goodstein went on and on with this opening pose. As he did, we thought back to sacred Nietzsche.

Nietzsche said that this is the way the weak once managed to conquer the strong. In effect, he said that Christian ethics had just been a big guilt trip—a way to shame the powerful out of "glorying in the pride of their strength" and taking full advantage of their power.

That's what we heard Goodstein doing as he began to speak. He was dodging the bogus but very sharp claim with which he'd been confronted. He was playing the tired old race-and-sex guilt trip card instead.

We'll have to admit that there was some justice in the way Carlson responded. He'd already said, in his monologue, that any criticism of Harris would now be treated as an act of race/gender disrespect.

Carlson had already made that (fairly obvious) prediction. Now, here was Goodstein, possibly seeming to do just what Carlson had said.

We thought Goodstein's opening play was just amazingly weak. In the subsequent 36 hours, we were saddened to see the way our hapless tribe has gloried in this dispute.

Our pundits are working very hard to guilt trip Carlson for his pronunciation error. We're playing it as a race and sex thing because, just to be honest, this is the only play our dumb and utterly useless tribe seems to know at this point.

According to Nietzsche, this is what the weak will try to do to the strong. In this case, though, will it work?

In this case, the strong are shutting the post office down. They're closing down voting locations.

They're stressing, and sometimes misstating, the errors the bureaucracies make—and new errors seem to appear every day.

While the strong are doing that, we're talking about bullshit like this. Needless to say, we're sifting the facts of the case to make it seem like this was some sort of gender offense.

The strong are closing the post office down. Over Here, in our tents, the weak are doing this.

We've begun to think that the strong may win. The haplessness of our pitiful tribe has allowed such results again and again down through the past many years.

Tomorrow: Recalling Nagasaki?

75 comments:

  1. "But we also say that because of the dumbness which now suffuses the culture, especially that afflicting our own failing anti-Trump tribe."

    Our "failing anti-Trump tribe" is dumber than the Q-Anon believers? I don't think so.

    ReplyDelete
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  2. "Monumentally over-thinking the matter, she turns Kirk's puerile charge of liberal hypocrisy into a claim of male privilege."

    It isn't actually a claim of male privilege, says Somerby, she has just turned it into one.

    And Somerby dismisses this as "dumb" because women have nothing to say about what is and isn't an example of male privilege. Somerby doesn't even consider the merits of her assertion. He just dismisses it as script. And this, concerning an argument about women's health.

    But he is very open-minded about male assertions of various sorts. He even searches and finds something to agree with in Tucker Carlson's anti-Harris rant. Why is he even watching that guy? No liberal would. But Somerby has been praising Fox lately, because it has different sources of criticism against the left than he can invent on his own.

    It doesn't surprise me in the least that someone like Somerby, who cannot listen to a woman's ideas but urges us all to listen to The Other, has no female life partner and reportedly a troubled relationship with his mother. His opinions about Harris have zero credibility under such circumstances, nor his opinions about female reporters, female professors and now, female political candidates.

    If you are wondering what sexism is, here is Exhibit 1, a guy who professes to be liberal but won't listen to women's ideas about what is and isn't sexist.

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    1. TDH listens to Carlson so I don't have to.

      TDH urges us not to blindly label everyone we disagree with as The Other.

      How do you know Somerby has no female life partner? If you're right, how do you know that he desires a female life partner?

      It doesn't surprise me in the least that you dis Somerby because he "reportedly" had a troubled relationship with his mother. It was Somerby himself who reported this, saying that his mother had disowned him. What more do you know about this that's relevant?

      I suppose credibility is in the mind's eye of the reader, but TDH has credibility for me when he says about Carlson's attacks on Harris that "Some of his claims struck us as flatly false, others as grossly misleading." YMMV.

      Please explain how the dumb-as-a-rock assertion that mask wearing is a matter of bodily autonomy is a matter of "male privilege." How does the sex of the claimant have anything to do with the claim? Compare and contrast to the claim that men have the right to interfere with a woman's Constitutional right. Show your work.

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    2. You ask for an explanation, but it is right there in the quoted material:

      "The new champions of bodily autonomy aren’t saying that women have any right to the phrase in its original context—only that men worried about looking “unmanly” in masks do."

      The author is saying that the man making that argument has not admitted the right of women to exercise autonomy over their own bodies. He is only using that as a way of asserting his own autonomy. That is what makes this male privilege. He is clinging to his right to tell women what they may and may not do, while using their argument as justification for his own autonomy.

      This is about the man's argument, not constitutional rights, his assertion of his own privilege to both decide what is allowed for women and to control his own mask wearing. That is male privilege.

      It doesn't surprise me that neither you nor Somerby seem to get this.

      Apparently, your failure to understand makes other people dumb as rocks. The world must seem that way to you guys -- anything confusing is someone else's fault. That's kind of an example of male privilege too. Women are a bit more inclined to blame themselves for not understanding something. But it is fully consistent with your belief that if you disagree with someone then they are the ones who are wrong (which you call incorrect, even with respect to matters of opinion).

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    3. Sorry, but you get an F on your assignment. At this point you're failing the course.

      The author is saying that the man making that argument has not admitted the right of women to exercise autonomy over their own bodies.

      Yes, and how is that relevant? What the man has not admitted is that woman have reproductive rights. In practice, this amounts to men making laws to take away a woman's fundamental right. And I've already pointed out that this is obviously a stance based on sexism. I'd go even farther to maintain it's based on misogyny.

      But the new argument isn't the one the man isn't making; it's one he is, namely that mask requirements interfere with bodily autonomy. That's wrong on the facts, and it also employs a faulty analogy. But what it isn't is sexist, and I note your complete failure to address that point.

      It doesn't surprise me that you don't seem to get this. Also noted: your sexist criticism that your failure to reason is somehow the result of my male privilege.

      When your opinions are based on your inability to read for comprehension, understand basic facts, and employ proper logic, then your opinions are open to criticism. You're still welcome to them, of course, but the fact that they're opinion doesn't immunize you.

      Delete
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  3. Somerby finds Richard Goodstein’s rebuttal to Carlson weak and ineffective.

    Gee...can’t imagine why Carlson would invite Richard Goodstein to come on his show. Such a mystery.

    An enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a Somerby shit sandwich.

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  4. "Our pundits are working very hard to guilt trip Carlson for his pronunciation error. "

    Mispronouncing a candidate's name is a longstanding way of expressing disapproval for a candidate. It goes back to the deliberate mispronunciation of Ronald Reagan's name by liberals in the 1980's. Perhaps it goes back further. A variant is the distortion of the candidate's name, as in Killary or Drumpf. It is done on purpose and that purpose is to show disrespect. Pretending it was an innocent error is a wink and a nod to that disrespect, as when Obama gave Hillary the finger (in conjunction with words to that effect) while supposedly just innocently scratching his nose with his middle finger.

    But Somerby gives Carlson the benefit of the doubt. Why? Is Somerby such a naive fool that he doesn't recognize what is happening? I am disinclined to give Somerby any benefit of doubt and I believe he is giving tacit support to Carlson's disrespect of Harris. I think it gives him a little thrill up his leg when someone disses a powerful woman and gets away with it. Because Somerby quite obviously dislikes women, doesn't understand them and has no sympathy for their situation in life. Unlike most liberals, he does not support women's issues and he is not going to get behind Harris. He perhaps thinks it is safe to join conservatives in their disrespect of women in general and Harris specifically, because she and Biden are likely to win, but that isn't a safe bet (as we saw in 2016) and not one that any liberal would make. But we all know what Somerby is now, don't we?

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    1. The other day you posted a comment so unexpectedly cogent that I remarked on it. And here you're back to your old level of Corby dumb. So disappointing.

      Calling Hillary Clinton Killary or calling Donald Trump Drumpf aren't examples of mispronouncing names. They're deliberate childish plays on words, here to call Clinton a murderer and to make Trump sound foreign. TDH gives Carlson the benefit of the doubt because many people, including Biden apparently, give the wrong stress to Harris' first name, and the wrong stress in this case produces no pejorative connotations. Now, of course, it's only polite to call someone by the name they favor, and if Tucker Carlson continues to mispronounce Harris' first name, then we can conclude that he's being a jerk.

      Of course, you're "disinclined" to give TDH the benefit of any doubt because you refuse to see past your prejudice against him. You think it gives TDH a "thrill ... when someone disses a powerful woman," but your thrill detection is just more of your pathetic mind reading.

      Don't get me wrong. Carlson did actually dis Harris, but what TDH actually says is that "Some of his [Carlson's] claims struck us as flatly false, others as grossly misleading."

      Also, you have to be as dumb as a ball peen hammer to think that "Obama gave Hillary the finger (in conjunction with words to that effect)" when at a campaign rally in 2008, Obama scratched his cheek with his middle finger. When you flip someone off, you display the upraised digit to them. If they're not present, you do so while addressing them in absentia. The accompanying words are either "fuck you" or some pungent insult. Here's what Obama was saying:

      Senator Clinton was in her element. She was taking every opportunity to, you know, to get a dig in. But that's all right. (Emphasis mine.)

      Now, is your ignorant claim anything "any liberal would make"?

      You may think "we all know what Somerby is," but in fact "we" don't. You only think you know. But by now, we all know how you roll, don't we?

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    2. You haven't spent enough time around young people to understand that they do give the finger that way, as a clandestine deniable act.

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    3. I'm in quarantine, so I don't spend time around anyone. But I'm willing to take your word for it that "young people" -- by which I assume you mean sniggering adolescents -- make rude gestures in a "clandestine deniable" way. After all, I was a sniggering adolescent once, back before there was electric light.

      But Obama wasn't a "young person" except in comparison to the Presidential candidates we have now. He was 47 at the time at the time of the event. And nothing he did could have been described as clandestine. He was giving a public and televised speech.

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  5. "We're playing it as a race and sex thing because, just to be honest, this is the only play our dumb and utterly useless tribe seems to know at this point."

    This remark is funny because attacking Harris based on race and sex also seems to be the only play conservatives know at this point. I suppose they'll get around to attacking her for her immigrant parents soon. And they are already attacking her for being too radical (which should please progressives). Don't they know any other plays?

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    1. Agree with 12:56.

      It is the main play Trump is using.

      The stories in the mainstream press decrying sexism, the statement from Maria Theresa Kumar that Somerby printed yesterday: these are all a prediction (correct as it turns out) about the types of attacks Trump will use, but they are also warnings, I think, to the mainstream press not to pull the kinds of sexist attacks they pulled against Hillary.

      Why Somerby sees this as a bad thing is anyone’s guess.

      It shows that there are journalists who are willing to call out the press for these things now, whereas before, there was silence, a situation for which Somerby himself faulted the media.

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    2. Here are two of the attacks Trump made on Harris yesterday that are gendered but not obviously so. He called her "nasty" and three times called her "disrespectful."

      Disrespectful refers to "knowing your place" and showing proper deference to others. This is gendered and racial because both women and black people are part of an underclass that is expected to be subservient.

      Nasty has a sexual overtone when applied to a woman. It paints her as violating "good girl" behavior by being inappropriately sexual. It refers to lack of purity, which is expected of women but not men. The tone of voice that Trump uses when he says that word leaves little doubt how he means it. The behavior that earns this as a pejorative label for women is considered normal for men.

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    3. Even if "nasty" only meant mean and spiteful, there are different expectations for women than for men. Women are supposed to be kind and nurturing. There isn't the same expectation for men. So a nasty woman is violating gender norms, whereas a nasty man is not.

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  6. "The strong are closing the post office down."

    The corrupt are closing the post office down. FTFSomerby

    The new Trump-appointed head of the postal service is an investor in a competitor mail service that would benefit from its closing. Why doesn't Somerby know this? Too much time watching Fox perhaps.

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  7. Just a side note: the Carlson video that Somerby links to is only 10:57 in length, and does not contain the appearance by Goodstein.

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  8. "According to Nietzsche..."

    Who quotes Nietzsche? Teenage boys with angst who are soon to be prey to alt-Right recruiters. They think about life in terms of the weak and the strong (of course, wishing they were stronger but feeling weak).

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  9. Why is Somerby working so hard to portray the left as weak? We won the popular vote by 3.3+ million strong, we are raising a lot of money, ahead in all polls, took back the House and are on track to take the Senate. Trump and the Republicans are in disarray. How then are we the weak ones?

    Who benefits if Somerby convinces us that we are weak? Russia? Trump? Bernie? Or maybe Somerby is feeling weak and projecting his own feelings onto us. But I really think he has been name-calling the left daily for a long time now, and he is doing this to undermine liberals, funded by either the RNC or Russia (perhaps filtered through a front organization). Why else would someone work so hard to achieve a goal that benefits only our enemies? Sowing dissension is the Russian/Conservative goal. I think he only manages to attract trolls and generate some semi-interesting discussions, but why is a supposed liberal doing this shit?

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    1. Somerby objects whenever someone tries to advance the interests of constituents of the left-coalition. He doesn't like talk about race, gender, immigrant status, religion (anti-semitism for example) and he never talks about economic issues at all. He talks about stats, whines about NAEP scores, and tries to undermine our faith in liberal news sources. He is against whatever measures liberals favor to achieve social justice, and he is opposed to female and minority candidates. And he says it is all because he dislikes scripts and tribes (ie normal human behavior). He is truly an asshole (note, I am not agreeing that he is any kind of contrarian, he is simply a jerk).

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    2. How then are we the weak ones?

      We're weak when our logic is bad and our arguments faulty. You can be this kind of weak and still win elections. See the Republican Pary.

      Who benefits if Somerby convinces us that we are weak?

      We will if abandon weak arguments for strong.

      Why else would someone work so hard to achieve a goal that benefits only our enemies?

      Why else would you work so hard to achieve a goal of undermining someone who's warning you about a danger?

      [H]e is ... funded by either the RNC or Russia

      Put up or shut up already. You think the RNC or Russia cares about a blog nobody reads?

      I've learned from a commenter here that every rightwing accusation is a confession. Perhaps you're the one funded by the RNC or Russia.

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    3. While we’re on conspiracy theories, let me float the idea that Mao is paid by Soros. I mean, his comments are so mind-numbingly buffoonish that they are having the effect of driving people away from Trump towards Biden.

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    4. Deadrat, I do not agree with your idea that Somerby is only talking about weakness and strength with respect to logic and arguments. There is too much other rambling garbage in his posts for that to be true.

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    5. Agree with not mh. It seems Somerby is talking about weak/strong arguments, then he says “the strong are shutting the post office down.”

      The strong are...the Trump Administration. And they don’t have a strong argument.

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  10. "In part, we say that because Trump seems to be (successfully?) shutting the post office down, a move which will make us a western province of Belarus."

    Boohoo, dear Bob. Lol. Thanks for the laughs.

    You forgot to complain that The Dark Lord Putin is controlling all the US mail now.

    ...and about your famous Fascist Putsch that's happening any day now. Unless I stopped reading too early.

    ...and are you still waiting for that Mr Trump's Horrible War, together with future anthropologists living the cave inside your zombiefied head?

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    1. Looks like Mao slept in today.

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    2. Nothing says "anti-establishment" like voter suppression. LOL

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  11. "In fairness, Charlie Kirk, age 26, is dumb as a rock or a stone."

    I have no idea whether Mr Kirk is dumb or intelligent; refusal to wear a useless mask seems to indicate the latter. But he certainly can't be as dumb as any liberal out there. Not even close, dear Bob.

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  12. "The strong are closing the post office down. Over Here, in our tents, the weak are doing this."

    Does Somerby think that Congress is doing nothing about this? Does he think there are no lawsuits?

    What does Somerby think the protests have been about? What does he think it means when people talk about disenfranchisement?

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    1. To be fair, he spends most of his time watching Tucker Carlson, or focusing on identity politics stories in the newspaper, so he isn’t exposed to much of anything else.

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    2. Right. CNN's website (our tribe) had the Post Office story right on the top as one of the three main stories. They had nothing on the Carlson nonsense. CNN is the biggest news site on the web. They have 120 million unique visitors a month, that's 20 million more than the NYT site.

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  13. This expresses how I feel about Kamala Harris and why we are strong, not weak as Somerby claims:

    https://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2020/08/kamala-harris-will-hurt-trump-and-pence.html

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    1. Agreed, and if we look at what happened in 2016, the Harris pick looks like the smartest move Biden could have made. The last time (and only time) a POC was on a Democratic national ticket, they got their highest percentage of the vote in any election since 1964. That's right--a black man performed better electorally than the previous eight white Dem nominees for President.

      What happened in 2016 that makes the Harris pick a winner? A vital and stupidly unreported thing happened in the 2016 election. Hillary got a total of 2.4 million fewer votes by Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics than Obama got in 2012. It was this, caused in part by successful voter suppression and voter purging of minority voters by Republican governors in key swing states, that cost Hillary the election. If having a POC on the ticket can gain back even half of those votes, Biden will win back the "blue wall" states and maybe even win Florida and Arizona.

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    2. Obama's election was seen as historic. I wish Hillary's election had been seen that way too, but the nation wasn't ready for a female president. It was this way with the vote too. Black males got the vote much earlier than women did.

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    3. Don't worry Corby, Nikki Haley will be prez in 2024 thanks to the Dems inability to change their platform and policies to adjust to the fallout of free trade and its effect on voters. And their overall cluelessness and superciliousness.

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    4. Can't wait to pretend Nikki Haley will change the Republican platform and policies to adjust to the fallout of free trade and its effect on voters.

      Also, if Nikki Haley had wheels instead of legs, she'd be car.

      Delete
  14. “Nietzsche said that this is the way the weak once managed to conquer the strong. In effect, he said that Christian ethics had just been a big guilt trip—a way to shame the powerful out of "glorying in the pride of their strength" and taking full advantage of their power.”

    Please elaborate, Bob.

    What do “weak” and “strong” mean to you, and what do you think Nietzsche meant by them? Is Nietzsche defending the “strong” here?

    If I told you that Hitler was an admirer of Nietzsche, would that cast this in a different light?

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    1. If I told you that Hitler founded Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH, would that cast your car-buying decisions in a different light?

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    2. Oh. Is your name Bob? Do tell.

      Delete
    3. Ok. I reckon “Bob” will never respond to my sincere question.

      I am asking if Nietzsche is making some defense of naked power. Does he mean that moral criticisms are “weak” and unjustified? That the “strong” (Kim Jong-Un, Erdogan, Lukaschenko, Hitler, etc) should be allowed to “glory” in their power? Would that have included Hitler if Nietzsche had lived long enough?

      And how does this relate to 21st century USA?

      (You really are a pain in the ass to have a conversation with.)

      Delete
    4. mh, I'll assume you're talking to me, although it's hard to tell. Why would you think that I'm Bob or representing myself as such?

      I don't know whether "Bob" will respond to your oh-so-sincere questions. I doubt Somerby will, because I don't think he reads his comment section. Why would he?

      That said, I'm not sure I understand the Nietzsche reference either. Who are the weak and who are the strong in this instance? And what kind of dumb would it take to believe you could make Tucker Carlson guilty?

      So it probably wouldn't take much to convince me that TDH is confused about Nietzsche. It would, however, take more than citing Hitler's admiration.

      You really are a pain in the ass to have a conversation with.

      I think that may be the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me in this comment section. Outside this comment section too, come to think of it.

      Delete
    5. I'll have to check the archives, but didn't somebody say deadrat was the Left-wing version of Mao? If so, that's the nicest thing anyone ever said about deadrat.

      Delete
    6. Sure, check the archives, but remember that there's nothing so stupid posted in comments here that an Anonymous Ignoramus like you hasn't said something dumber.

      Delete
  15. From Daily Kos:

    "Black Women’s Equal Pay Day falls on August 13 this year. That’s the day when, starting on January 1, 2019, Black women have finally been paid what white men were paid in 2019 alone. Equal Pay Day, the day observing this marker for women overall in the U.S., fell on March 31 this year, while Latina Equal Pay Day won’t come until November.

    It takes us this long to get to Black Women’s Equal Pay Day because Black women make just 62 cents for every dollar paid to white men, a gross disparity that will cost the average Black woman more than $20,000 a year and nearly $950,000 in her lifetime, and one that isn’t going away anytime soon. “Indeed, from 1967 to 2018, the most recent year for which data are available, the wage gap for Black women narrowed by just 19 cents,” the National Women’s Law Center’s Jasmine Tucker reports. The coronavirus crisis is not helping."

    ReplyDelete
  16. “Is our tribe even dumber than theirs?”

    In politics, the prime measure of dumbness is losing elections. We were. Losing the 2016 election is proof, but we may not be now. We may have wised up enough. We did win some very important elections in 2018. The three most important were the governorships in the three former blue wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. If our tribe shows up in those states in 2020 as they did in 2018, Trump is doomed. The Dems won the national House vote by an 8.4% margin. Current polls show that margin has held steady around that level and now stands at 7.0%. Experts say Biden may need to win by 3.5-4.0% in the popular to win the Electoral College. His margin is 7.5%, down a couple of points from a few weeks ago, but still good.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. How can anyone write confidently about what will happen in 2020 without taking into account the actions of Russia?

      Delete
    2. Why weren't the Russians able to throw all the important 2018 elections that I just mentioned to the Republicans? Those three governorships were vital to Trump's reelection. Maybe they're not the infallible superhumans that paranoids such as yourself think they are.

      Delete
    3. Same with 2016. Did Russia interfere with the House and Senate victories? No one says a thing about that. Anyone who brings up the "actions of Russia" in the context of elections is a fool and a sucker who has been duped by propaganda. Especially at this late date!! Lord almighty. "The actions of Russia".

      To quote Julian Assange "The United States political culture has gone mad."

      https://youtu.be/lNdG6iE4a84?t=662

      Delete
    4. The idea that it would take a foreign power to get the Republican base fired-up about voting for a guy who wore his bigotry on his sleeve, is a one of the stupider ideas you'll hear this century.

      Delete
  17. The "My body" trope is wrong. I wear a mask mostly to protect others. I might be asymptomatically infected. The mask not about MY body. It's about the bodies of people around me. Also, the mask about deterring the spread.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "My body" trope is neither right or wrong, dear David. It's just trolling. Not bad, decent trolling.

      Why you wear a mask is irrelevant; you can wear whatever you want for whatever reason. What the man is saying is that you shouldn't be forcing others to wear it.

      You could recommend others to wear a mask, of course. That's fine.

      Delete
    2. Mao - I think you should force others to wear a mask, because their masks protect me.

      Delete
    3. Pseudolibertarians are resisting mask wearing on grounds that it constrains their freedom. Yet the entire concept of liberty lies in the Non-Aggression Principle, the equivalent of the Silver Rule: do not harm others; they in turn should not harm you. Even more insulting is the demand by pseudolibertarians that Costco should banned from forcing customers to wear mask — but libertarianism allows you to set the rules on your own property. Costco should be able to force visitors to wear pink shirts and purple glasses if they wished.

      Note that by infecting another person you are not infecting just another person. You are infecting many many more and causing systemic risk.

      https://bit.ly/2Y1pz8C

      Delete
    4. Dear David, you're joking, right? You have to be.

      Delete
    5. Libertarians? Their is no such thing. They've all been replaced by Fortune 1000 executives begging Daddy government to bail them out.

      Delete
    6. Mao/dupe/idiot - Let us say (to simplify) that masks reduce both transmission and reception to p. What effect on the R0(that is, the rate of spreading of the infection)?

      Simply the naive approach (used by the CDC/WHO bureaucrats and other imbeciles) is to say if masks reduce the transmission probability to ¼, one would think it would then drop from, say R0= 5, to R0=1 ¼. Yuuge, but there is better.

      For one should count both sides. Under our simplification, with p=1/4 we get R0'= p² R0 . The drop in R becomes 93.75%! You divide R by 16! Even with masks working at 50% we get a 75% drop in R0.

      Delete
  18. "As far as we know, only Tara Reade has ever made that type of claim against Biden."

    Here, dear Bob, for your information:
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/does-anyone-else-find-ironic

    "On top of that, Biden has been accused by several other women of incredibly inappropriate behavior, bordering on the absurd.

    Lucy Flores, for example, said that Biden– while he was still Vice President– came up behind her, put his hands on her shoulders, inhaled the scent of her hair, and then slowly kissed the back of her head.

    Eva Murry said that Joe Biden complimented the size of her breasts when she was just 14 years old back in 2008: “Fourteen? You’re very well endowed for 14.”

    There was also the 13-year old daughter of Senator Chris Coons; at Coons’ swearing-in ceremony in 2015, Biden was filmed pulling himself closer to her, gently grabbing her arm and moving his lips towards her head.

    When he leaned in to kiss her forehead, she tried squirming away, looking extremely uncomfortable… at which point her mom had to politely intervene.

    I mean, these stories are pretty much endless. At a minimum it’s seriously creepy.
    "

    And I believe (please correct me, dear Bob, if I'm wrong) that nowadays touching and kissing is categorized (especially by your zombie cult) as 'sexual assault'.

    Tsk. And what's good for the goose is good for the gander, nicht wahr?

    And, by the way, what Tara Reade alleged is not 'sexual assault'. It's rape.



    "As far as we know, Harris has never said that she believes that Biden committed sexual assault against any woman..."

    Oh dear. You're now behaving just like the goebbelsian clowns you like to criticize, dear Bob. "As far as we know"? So, go check, dear Bob. Google it. It's not hard.

    What you'll find is that even your liberal-zombie "fact checkers" admit that "Harris said "I believe them," in reference to four women who had by then accused Biden of inappropriate touching."

    And again: "inappropriate touching" is in the category of 'unwanted sexual contact', and therefore, especially in your cult's dogma, of 'sexual assault'.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This isn't going to stick, Mao.

      Most women don't like being touched in public by someone other than family members, but it isn't sexual assault when a man (or woman) is a bit too handsy. And for all of the shrugging away, Biden's touching isn't the same as the butt pinching and groping that Franken was accused of. Nothing sexual about it, just proprietary and patronizing. But no one is going to choose Trump over Biden because of Biden's behavior because Trump is so much worse. Even Republican women can see that.

      Further, women weren't born yesterday. These kinds of complaints coming from trolls and conservatives are going to sound exactly as hypocritical as you are. No one thinks you genuinely care about how men touch women. No one thinks Republicans care. They elected the pussy-grabber in chief.

      Delete
    2. You are not fooling anyone, dear dembot.

      If a woman complained about unwanted touchings, then it was a sexual assault. That is your zombie cult's standard. Live by it.

      Delete
    3. Mao wants proof of Biden's sexual assault before he votes for him.
      Bipartisanship!

      Delete
  19. https://www.self.com/story/sexual-assault-definition#:~:text=For%20example%2C%20she%20says%2C%20sexual,govern%20different%20forms%20of%20sexual

    However, the legal definition varies depending on which state you’re in, and can even be different depending on where you were when the assault happened, Emily Austin, director of advocacy services for California Coalition Against Sexual Assault, tells SELF. For example, she says, sexual assault on college campuses in California means a sex act that occurred without affirmative consent (which is described as active, voluntary participation), while California criminal law defines rape as nonconsensual sexual intercourse, and other laws govern different forms of sexual assault beyond intercourse.

    Touching someone's shoulders while posing for a photo doesn't constitute a sex act. Biden has denied the claims of the woman accusing him of groping her. Because of her unreliability, investigations suggest that her accusations are false.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Today (8/13) the Republicans are calling her Kamala Mattress because of her very early relationship with Willie Smith (Mayor of San Francisco), which broke up long before she ran for elected office. The implication is that she slept her way to the her current position, which is ridiculous and something that only gets said about women (and people would only care about in a female candidate). There is a different standard for men and romantic relationships, perhaps partly because women don't typically have the power to help them get ahead.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Willie Brown. It says something about her though doesn't it? She dated Wille Brown.

      Delete
    2. I give up. What does it say about her?

      Delete
    3. Note that it didn't take 24 hours for the first Harris birther to emerge, arguing that KH is not a natural born citizen because her parents weren't citizens. That ticks off the xenophobia box. We already have racism (per Tucker Carlson, her selection is illegal because she's black or only black people were considered or something) and sexism (as Corby noted). So we've got the Republican trifecta.

      Delete
    4. Note that it didn't take 24 hours for the first Harris birther to emerge, arguing that KH is not a natural born citizen because her parents weren't citizens. That ticks off the xenophobia box. We already have racism (per Tucker Carlson, her selection is illegal because she's black or only black people were considered or something) and sexism (as Corby noted). So we've got the Republican trifecta.

      Delete
    5. Well ... she ain't messin' with no broke niggas.

      Delete
    6. Birther?
      Meh.
      The rule that you can't be born in a foreign country to run for President of the United States is an old, antiquated rule from a time when people might have had a problem if foreign governments influenced the President.

      Delete
    7. Meh? What does that mean? It's still a rule, but one that doesn't apply to Harris, who was born in the US.

      Delete
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