So I said... #18 for April 15-21

Another more-or-less weekly compilation of comment replies and random thoughts posted on other sites, this one covering April 15 to April 21.

Two notes on style: As always, at the top of each item I try to include some context, at least enough to make it clear what I'm responding to. If I need to add context here to what I originally said, it will be in square brackets ([ ]) in italics.

Also, both relies to my comments and my replies to other comments on the same original post (if you follow that) are grouped together. 

With that said, let's get to it. And oh yeah, comments and reactions are always welcome.

== 

2026-04-15
[Re a WaPo op-ed on a proposal in Connecticut to limit/regulate self-service grocery checkouts.] 

It is, of course, not surprising that a newspaper with an openly declared editorial bias in favor of "the free market" - that is, favoring corporations over the public and the bosses over workers - would carry something from "a newsletter on the consequences of overregulation" without a whisper of a concern about the consequences of under-regulation.

But as to the particular case, I refuse to use the self-checkouts on principle because I am aware of how they are marketed to the corporations.

Simply put, the pitch is that the company can boast about "service" and "speed" and "convenience" while the real impact is to get customers to do more of the work so the company can hire fewer workers. The net effect is that they are job-killers, especially of the sort of entry-level jobs long lauded by corporate America as a "way into the job market" for the young and those lacking specialized skills.
So limit them. Regulate them. It's probably unrealistic, but I'd say get rid of them as not only imposing costs on the jobs market (meaning our neighbors) but because those costs are unnecessary, recalling how long and how well we got along without them.
In the meantime, I'll deal with the "slowness" and "inconvenience" of waiting in a grocery store line. So should you.
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2026-04-15
[“So should you?” Wow, talk about sanctimonious.]

1. There is nothing either smug or condescending about my statement. There are occasions where the wider impacts of our choices makes YMMV inadequate as a response. I say this is one. (If you want to mentally add "unless limited by physical inability/disability" to my closing, go ahead.)

2. Attempting to wave off my argument with a dismissive sneer is not a rebuttal.
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2026-04-15
[Let the businesses run themselves and legislature keep your nose out if what they’re doing isn't illegal.]

Did it ever occur to you that everything is legal until it's not? "Don't act unless it's illegal" would have blocked every law ever passed anywhere. Say what you will about this proposal, but the principle you're applying needs much better definition.
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2026-04-15
[proposal of 8 regular checkout lanes per 4 self-checkouts required 4 cashiers on duty at all times regardless of traffic; cashiers are "jobs for buggy whip makers."]

Just for clarity, as I read this, a store with (for example) eight self-checkouts would not have to have four cashiers always on duty at a register regardless of traffic but rather that it would have to have a minimum of four such lanes that could be staffed if traffic called for it.

If it did intend what you say, I'd agree that was silly. But I strongly suspect, indeed expect, it does not but was if anything (and assuming there is an issue) the result of sloppy language that could easily be corrected by amendment.

As for the rest, as the AI-driven self-checkout wonderworld you image for grocery stores inevitably starts to spread to the rest of retail, I'd advise you to be careful what you wish for.

==

2026-04-15
[WaPo article: SCOTUS making religion outweigh all other considerations; here, allowing exemptions from public school vaccination requirements.]

I will say this and only this: We told you so. 

If you're surprised by any of this: You were warned.

If you say "I didn't know," you just weren't paying attention.

And most particularly if you say anything like "I voted for Trump, but I didn't vote for that," yes you did. It's on you. Because we told you so. You were warned. And you just wouldn't listen.
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2026-04-15
[Atheists have worst of it. Discrimination not only tolerated, celebrated; have to follow ALL laws, can't pick/choose."]

In at least some ways, the legal question about atheists has already been answered. In US v. Seeger (1965), SCOTUS ruled that conscientious objector status under the draft was available to non-theists if they had beliefs that if I recall the term correctly "occupied the same position" in their life as a traditional religion would. In Welsh v. US (1970), the Court expanded that to make explicit that those beliefs need not be religious or called such, that a personal moral code would suffice.

In short, if you had a set of core beliefs that would guide your judgment in the same way traditional religious principles (supposedly) did, you were eligible for CO status. (It was still tough to get for anyone not a member of a traditional "peace church," but you were eligible.)

It'd be very interesting to see someone pursue a demand for an exemption from some civic duty on the grounds of their atheist beliefs being as valid as those of right-wing Xians to see if the Court would be true to its declared principles. The downside is I'm afraid such a suit would be successful, ripping out another support from the already-rickety concept of community responsibility. 

==

2026-04-15
[re article on decision of MT SupCt state constitution provided broad protection for trans rights, wondered if GOPpers in Congress would try to pass law overruling it.]

The "supremacy clause" in the Constitution says federal law can (depending on the particulars) override state law and the same is generally true about state versus local law - but here we're not talking about a state law but a state constitution and federal law cannot override that. And as I think the article notes, the guiding principle is that your rights within a given state are protected to the extent guaranteed by the state or federal constitution, whichever is greater.

This is why the efforts of The Orange Overlord and RFK "My father would be ashamed of me" Jr. to cripple trans health care have revolved not around outright bans but through threats to cut off various sources of funding, i.e., banning it through fiscal blackmail, making such care inaccessible, even though not technically illegal.

==

2026-04-16
[oral arguments on CO SupCt case ordering reopening of trans health care clinic noted trial court sympathetic to the plaintiffs, denied relief for fear of potential reactions from feds re hospital financing.]

District Court [trial] Judge Ericka F.H. Englert was wrong. She was not being asked to "call the bluff of the federal government." She was being asked to rule in accordance with the Colorado constitution without relying on speculation of what actions the feds might take outside the court system.

And, oh yeah, there is no federal law involved here. Neither an Executive Order nor an agency declaration is a law.

It's an indication of how far were have come towards authoritarianism that even a state judge is treating whatever foams out of the mouths of RFK "My dad would be ashamed of me" Jr. and hydroxychloroquine fan Mehmet "I really am from" Oz as instantly becoming law.

==

2026-04-17
[DOJ demanding Reddit turn over personal info re user who criticized ICE]

"Be careful what you say" is exactly what we should not do. Be honest, yes. Be truthful, yes. If you are asserting particular facts (as opposed to expressing opinion), be correct or at least have a reasonable basis to believe you are correct. (In other words, don't just make crap up. There are more than enough hard facts to suffice.) In any event, do not engage in the self-censorship of "be careful." Rather, be defiant.

As for this particular case, the latest news I can find is that John Doe is going to file a motion to quash the subpoena. Personally, I would think the absence of any legitimate law enforcement purpose would suffice, but we'll have to keep watching.

==

2026-04-18
[comment on YT vid: "I never imagined I'd see the rise of the 4th Reich in this country." response: because people "got complacent," ignored warning signs. then: "not that simple; super rich have been undermining the system."]

"It's not that simple" is a truism, but we should never forget that it implicitly acknowledges that the original assertion [i.e., that people got complacent] is indeed part of the cause. Shifting blame does not absolve us of our responsibility as citizens.

==

2026-04-18
[meme cited CNN story to say 62M cishet men "attend" "online rape academy" re sex with women either drunk, drugged, or asleep]

First, I found the link to the original CNN article. I also found an analysis by Snopes.

(The link is to a re-posting because Snopes.com is now behind a paywall.)

The criticism Snopes had is that the “62 million” figure is an estimate of the total traffic to the entire website over that month, which safely does not consist of 62 million individual cishet men going once each.

And please don’t anyone try to claim I’m downplaying or minimizing the horror here. It’s rather my conviction that when what you can prove is bad enough, exaggeration only invites dismissal.

Footnote: What was not clear from either the CNN article or Snopes was if the whole site is the sort of stuff that is the topic here or is it a pornsite where that is one part.

So I bit the bullet and went there.

It is indeed a site with what I suppose would be the usual range of material; I didn't even find a link on the main page to "sleep" content, although I may well have missed it or it might be deliberately buried. (The main page being as far as I went.)
 
I think this reinforces my concern about exaggeration. You never want to be in a position where your argument leans on a number where a more accurate figure could generate the response "Actually, it's only such-and-so," thereby trying to dismiss your entire argument even if the "only" number is more than enough to make the point.

==

2026-04-18
[re-post opened "Republicans just introduced a bill to force doctors [to] build a government list of trans people."]

Links, dammit! What GOPpers? Where? This reads like it’s referring to a state-level proposal in which case “where” matters in terms of resistance.

Certainly it is painfully obvious to anyone who looks that the ultimate goal is to wipe trans folks from society altogether, to drive them so far into the closet that they couldn’t even find the door even with a flashlight. But while resistance is rooted in awareness, it requires actionable knowledge to bloom.

[Posts and memes with no source provided is an on-going complaint of mine.]

==

2026-04-18
So the real estate salesman who became The Orange Overlord convincing people to vote for him on a promise of “no more wars” is now saying the federal government “can’t take care of day care ... Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.”

Why? “We’re fighting wars.”

So everything that doesn't involve being ever-more ready to kill ever-more people has to be up to individual states.

I'd say "Any questions?" but if at this point you still have any, it's too late for you.

==

2026-04-18
[Re why some folks don't realize are trans until well into adulthood.]

I thank you for this even though as a cis male I have little to add to the conversation.

I do have one passing observation: When folks say "I always knew," I don't think they're saying they had "independently formulate[d] an entirely different theory of gender" but rather that looking back later, they "always knew" that things just felt, well, wrong; not that they always knew "I'm really a boy" or "really a girl," but that what was expected of them didn't fit somehow.

Thanks for adding to my understanding, including to some degree of myself.

==

2026-04-19
[Re April 17 The Fucking News.]

This certainly up to your usual standard. (How's THAT for a politician's answer?)

However, the phrase "will 'restore the GOLD STANDARD OF SCIENCE at the CDC'" sent a little shiver through me.

"Gold standard" is a term used regularly in trying to deny gender-affirming care on the grounds that the evidence is "low quality" - most commonly by people who don't know the first thing about the scale or what it's for. 

The term "gold standard" in this context is usually taken to mean blind randomized controlled studies. The problem is that a great deal of modern medicine is not based on such studies but on observational studies, i.e., "what has been tried, what worked, what didn't," which are by definition lower quality.

What's more, it is sometimes impossible to do those kinds of controlled studies in an ethical manner. Consider puberty blockers and hormone therapy. It's well-established that they work and how they work. Doing such a study today would mean denying people needed medication, giving people undesired medication, or both.

And blind? How is a young person to not know if they are or are not going through puberty? If they are or aren't experiencing the effects of prescribed hormones?

Hearing The Orange Overlord reference "the GOLD STANDARD OF SCIENCE" in the context of the CDC does not give hope; it gives me pause. We need to watch this space.

==

2026-04-19
[Oligarch Watch: AI cos push use chatbots for guidance on personal health care.]

I thought this might be worthy of inclusion. Back in November I took a YouGov survey related to public perceptions about the use of AI in healthcare. Three of the questions asked for general responses rather than picking from among multiple choices. This is quoting my responses.

Q: What ethical considerations are most important to think about when adding AI tools to healthcare?
I was told by my surgeon some years ago “You treat the patient, not the X-ray.” The more we use AI, the more that adage is reversed. During my recent hospitalization my PCP came by on their rounds, during which they displayed not through words but tone and demeanor a genuine personal concern for my health, something of which AI is incapable of expressing or feeling, at best offering instead merely an algorithmically-driven facade of concern, a programmed pretense, which well could be likened to the comforting reassurances of the scammer.

Q: What is your overall impression of AI in healthcare?
Not ready for prime time. For now, it’s a bandwagon promising what it can’t (and perhaps never will) deliver, driven less by public health than by the profit-driven preferences of the corporate spectrum of health care (i.e., hospitals and the insurance industry) who pursue a goal of “efficiency” (read as “fewer employees”) and would, as I suggested earlier, “treat the X-ray, not the patient,” with us coming to exist less as patients than as datasets.

Q: Is there anything else about AI in healthcare that you would like to share with us?
AI is good for, indeed excellent at, analyzing large amounts of data, producing results that can be viewed and considered mathematically because that’s what they are - mathematical derivations from mathematical data. But healthcare in general and medicine within that reach involves more than mere data but also includes personalities and foibles and trust and other human interactions along with unavoidable judgment calls driven by such non-mathematical considerations, all of which are beyond its capabilities. Which makes the use of chat boxes by consumers for health information advice fraught with risk and worse as shown by recent suits against various companies whose chat boxes are accused of having encouraged teenager users to commit suicide. AI simply is not up the task to which the health care industry is trying to set it in pursuit of profit.

==

2026-04-20
[Open ended YouGov poll Q: "How do you feel about the use of AI in making movies?"]

I can see its use as a tool in areas such as special effects in ways similar to how previous technologies have been used to make them more realistic. Beyond such areas, that is, where it functions as an improved version of already-existing tools employed under the same sorts of conditions, direction, and control as those, I would strongly prefer it was not used at all.

==

2026-04-21
[Ruling en banc, 5th CCoA upheld TX law requiring 10 Commandments in every classroom.]

Wait wait wait.

"They compared it to the Pledge of Allegiance - which is also religious, with its “one Nation, under God” line - to argue that students aren’t forced to say it."

Did they actually say the part about the Pledge being religious? You say they made the comparison but don't present it as a quote, so it's not clear.

Because if they did, I clearly recall a SCOTUS decision that said the Pledge was NOT religious and "under God" was a mere "civic exercise" which had at most a "tinge" of religion - which was why having to say it did not intrude on the rights of atheists.

In either event, I have to say I disagree on one point: The majority was not "delusional." That knew damn well what they were doing and they did it consciously and deliberately.
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2026-04-21
[SCOTUS will deny cert, and it will stand.]
Just to make it clear, it will stand in the 5th Circuit, nowhere else. However, the danger there is that it will serve as precedent for other circuits to consider. So either it will spread to significant parts of the country or at some point there will be a split in circuits, at which point SCOTUS would feel entirely justified in stepping in, even feeling obligated to.

So I said... for January 26 - February 13

Another collection of comments on various topics at various sites, with context added as needed to make sense of what was said.

2026-01-26
The White House gangsters, including Greg Bovine (not a typo) and Kristi No-one, have made much of the claim that Alex Pretti was not carrying ID while armed, which meant, they claim, he was breaking the law and that somehow proved he intended to “slaughter” the DHS thugs and deserved to be shot down.

YouTuber Jesse Dollemore bothered to look up the actual law. It turns out the penalty is a max fine of $25 and if you later show the court or the arresting officer your ID plus permit it goes away.

Truly a major crime worthy of instant death.

==

2026-01-27
So the face of The Orange Overlord’s repression regime in Minnesota is going to go from Greg Bovine (not a typo) to Tom Homan, well-named because he’s almost human.

Color me unimpressed.

==

2026-01-27
According to journalist Ron Filipkowski, John Fetterman says he’d like to see DHS funding separated from the mini-bus and voted on separately. But it it’s not (and it won’t be), he’ll vote for the full bill anyway. He ended by saying he’s “committed to being a voice of reason and common sense.”

A worthwhile goal. I hope someday he achieves it.

==

2026-01-29
[Background: Julia Serano did a video essay on “marked” vs. “unmarked” (that is, “othered”) people]

I watched the essay with appreciation. Thank you for doing it. I gave a little fist pump when you referred to part of being “unmarked” is not just what others think about you, it’s what they don’t think about you - having made the same point a couple of years ago in discussing white privilege.

Related to that is the idea that if you are “marked” and in some way misbehave, it’s taken as “that’s what ‘those people’ do” - but if you are “unmarked,” it becomes “that’s what that one individual does.”

Again, thanks for the essay.

==

2026-01-30
[A collection of 47 groups - including faux-Christian ministries, anti-choice twits, and state-based far-right outfits - have started something they’re calling the “Greater Than” campaign to push for overturning Obergefell based on the vacuous claim that children of same-sex parents have been “failed” by marriage equality.]

So I just checked out their website and three things struck me:
One: The first person they picture and quote is Charlie Kirk and they quote Barack Obama as if he is a supporter.

Two:  There is no hint they oppose divorce, which would be required to be consistent with "mother and father are never optional, they are essential." (Then again, when has ethical or logical consistency ever been a requirement for this crowd?)

Three: They equate children's "needs, rights, safety, [and] development" with no same-sex parents without a word about prenatal care, WIC, SNAP,  health care, educational and housing programs, the list would be quite long. (Repeat previous parenthetical.)

Conclusion: Exactly what you'd expect. A concoction of bigots, bozos, and buffoons united in their homophobic paranoia.

==

2026-01-30
[A poll cited by Erin Reed says voters prefer Democrats to GOPpers on trans issues, suggesting there is no need for Dems to shy away from defending trans rights. An objection was raised that trans issues rank low on lists of voter concerns, so extremists dominate on the issue.]
The answer, then, is to be loud. To show it matters to (the generic) you.

Political parties don't just look for voters, they look for motivated voters, not only because they're a source for campaign volunteers but more importantly because they're the ones most likely to turn out if they think the party is on their side and also are the ones most likely to say "the hell with it" and not vote at all if they think you're not.

That "extremely radical vocal minority" you cite fits that description: loud and motivated. So should we.
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2026-01-30
[In response to a different person’s comment on the same poll.]

I expect the coming campaigns to be even more vicious than those to date and the wave of continuously more evil legislation to continue - in spite of the diminishing returns in elections.

Why? Because the most fanatical among the reactionaries know, they can't NOT know - that they are in the long run losing. They'll even say it; their constant desperate whining about the approaching collapse of civilization unless unless unless - it's not just posturing, it's a primal scream and they will fight to hold off the denouement as long as they can.

But at the same time, the rest of the right wing knows that's the only thing they've got. They are so far underwater that they have already essentially surrendered the House and are getting twitchy about the Senate. They can't hope to run and win on issues that people care most about and they know it, so they have to exploit our all-too common discomfort about anything elated to sex to arouse fear and then ride a social panic.

Combine the most fanatical with the merely ordinarily fanatical and you've got a recipe for a very very bad several months.

==

2026-01-31
[A post with a link I failed to record described anti-trans legislation as genocide.]

A bit under three years ago I compared what the right wing wants to do to trans folks with an oubliette (from the French oublier, “to forget”), a type of Medieval prison cell in which people would be stuffed and then, well, forgotten.

That’s what the right wing wants to do to trans people in this country. Not physically, at least not yet, but legally, socially, politically, psychologically, wants them to be disappeared and forgotten as if they simply do not exist, do not have the right to exist, do not even have the right to say "I exist."

I didn't use the word "genocide," but damn, it fits.

=

2026-01-31
CBS network news just this moment, on its Sunday evening broadcast, referred without comment to the new DHS policy that its agents can enter private homes without a judicial warrant.

NO THEY CAN’T! PERIOD TRIPLE-EXCLAMATION POINT ALL CAPS!!!

The masked thugs are claiming an administrative warrant is sufficient. T’S NOT! End of argument.  But I guarantee you there will be more smashed-in doors as a result.

Why why WHY do our major “news” media treat any claims to powers and authorities claimed by The Orange Overlord and his Brownshirted underlings as if they actually had them? Cowardice? Sloppiness? Incompetence? Indifference?

It really doesn’t matter. It’s just another example of how we are uninformed, misinformed, and malinformed by corporate media.

==

2026-01-31
[The following involves an exchange with another commenter. As always in such cases, I have edited their remarks to the points to which I was responding. If you suspect I may be being unfair, I urge you to check out the unedited exchange, which can be found at this link.

It began with a comment that defended the arrest of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort by citing 1 Corinthians 3:17: “If anybody should destroy the temple of God, God will destroy that person, because God’s temple is holy; and you are that temple.”]

I think I'm going to remember that quote. The next time some transphobe wants to deny needed health care to a trans person, I will tell them that they are destroying the temple of God.

As for its use here, I recall the line from "Pilgrims Progress" that says "The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose."
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2026-02-01
[Reply: “Let’s be clear about targets and responsibility. I quoted Scripture to talk about physical intrusion into holy space and natural law fundaments of the Western legal tradition.” He also laid healthcare issues faced by trans folks on insurance companies, not the laws.]

Macbeth may have been referring to life, but he could just have well meant your argument.

So let's skip the attempts to change the subject (to "Who is REALLY to blame for trans people being denied care: profit-mongering insurance companies or the right-wing fundamentalist Christian Bible-thumpers behind the drives to legislate trans folks out of existence?") and get back to the point.

That point being that you quoted the Bible - you know, that book that "has been debated for two thousand years" without even reaching a consensus as to what should be included in it but with a plethora of sects claiming their particular interpretation of their preferred translation is THE TRUTH - as expressing "natural law" and therefore as the foundation of common law and the Constitution.

Which says at minimum that you don't understand the concept of natural law while indicting strongly that you would have our secular laws be "Bible-based," thereby rejecting the very Constitution you claim as backing - all in service of justifying the arrest of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort in contravention of the social contract that allows journalists to bear witness to and report on events.

That contention is given weight by you choice of of closing [Bible] quote [about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah], which bears no connection to anything certainly I and as far as I know anyone else has said but seems to be just a random rant threatening divine retribution for, well, for something from your imagination but not for anything here.

And since you brought up Sodom and Gomorrah, I'll reply with Ezekiel 16:49 (NIV): “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy."

I believe I've given you as much time as you deserve. Last licks are yours if you want them.
-
Except for this, which I separate to a reply to myself because it's more of a sidebar than part of the actual argument.

Would your contention that Lemon was an "appendage of the protest mob, an added feature ... part and parcel of the intimidation" and therefore deserves punishment be the same if the site had been, say, the HQ of one of those insurance companies you consider "the real enemy of trans people in health-care disputes?"

If yes, your argument about "sacred spaces" goes out the window.

If no, should it be assumed that you would likewise demand punishment for ICE or CBP agents who entered a "sacred space" to arrest a so-called "illegal immigrant?" (Note that the answer "yes, with the permission of those in charge of that space" by definition gives those same authorities the power to absolutely bar entry.)

Finally, who and what gets to define what is a "sacred space?" Does it include all Christian (including Catholic) sects? Does it include synagogues, mosques, Native American sacred lands, various shrines around the world where entry is only by permission? And note that using "a house of God" as a reference point only throws you back onto the already-rejected "'cause the Bible says so."
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2026-02-02
[I got a reply but it didn’t address the first question and the answer to second was "societies define what is sacred."]

I said I wouldn't reply and it's taking considerable will to keep to that, but I can't resist noting your statement "The moment you redefine reporters as 'appendages' of a mob, you’ve justified the baton," etc.
That "redefinition" of Don Lemon was yours. No one else's. By your own words you have "justified the baton, the cuff, and the cell - forever."

And "societies" don't define sacred spaces - the dominant forces in a society do. Consider as illustration the cavalier treatment still accorded to sacred spaces of Native Americans.

One of the roles of government is - or, rather, should be - to protect the rights of those lacking the economic, social, or political power to protect them on their own. Which will of necessity at times involve a use of state power in a way that inconveniences the powerful or privileged.

==

2026-02-01
[Still defending Lemon’s arrest, this same person in a different thread cited Owen Shroyer, who pled guilty to trespass on 1/6 and was sentenced to 6 months: “He never entered the Capitol; he was there as a journalist” so Lemon deserved the same.]

I looked up Shroyer.

First, by trespassing he violated an earlier agreement he made after he disrupted an impeachment hearing.

He made speeches endorsing the claim the election was stolen.

On Jan 5, he put out a video saying "Are we just going to sit here or are we going to actually do something about this?”

On Jan 6, he joined a crowd in shouting "We aren’t going to accept it."

While he could have had some claim to being a journalist (even if it was for Infowars), the fact is, he was not there as a journalist. He was there as an advocate and a participant.

Equating the two cases - Lemon and Shroyer - is flatly false.

==

2026-02-05
["If you can't see a trans person without sexualizing the, that's your sin."]
Geez, how long have I been saying this? So much of the bigotry and social panic about trans folks is driven by our cultural discomfort with, our cultural immaturity about, anything in any way related to sex and for the transphobes, it’s all about sex. They can’t look at, hear about, or even consider a trans person without thinking about “how they ‘do it’” and “what’s in their pants” and desperately needing to reject the guilty fantasies such thoughts arouse.

==

2026-02-06
[In reacting to TOO's saying he'll release the money for a major NJ-NY project if Penn Station and Dulles Airport are renamed for him.]

He is acting like an Egyptian pharaoh, building monuments to make himself appear greater than all who came before and so in a sense immortal. He should check out the poem "Ozymandias."

==

2026-02-08

It's not proper to dismiss Niemöller as an antisemite; his story is much more complex than the single label.

He did indeed embrace that sort of presumptive antisemitism with which we are still afflicted but was even worse then - but he came to regret it and alter his views (while in a concentration camp for being insufficiently pro-Hitler) and the poem was intended not just as a warning but to express his own guilt and shame for his own silence in the face of oppression of others.

==

2026-02-10
From the Meidas Touch "Today in Politics" for Feb. 10 we learn that Binance now holds 87% of the total circulating supply of a stablecoin issued by a crypto outfit affiliated with the Trump family. That's a $4.7 billion investment. The partnership comes after Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao in Oct 2025.

The degree of corruption in this administration is truly phenomenal, phenomenal to the point that I just can't keep track of it.

If there is someone who is trying, please point me in their direction!

==

2026-02-10
[Idaho is considering the harshest anti-trans bill yet, making bathroom bans apply everywhere with violations for a 2nd offense a felony punishable by 5 years.]

I'd push back on one point or perhaps more on how a point is expressed. I'd say Idaho doesn't want to run trans folks out of the state. They're quite willing for you to be there - so long as you remain completely invisible.

So long as they can tell themselves you don't exist.

So long as they can smugly declare "there ain't none of that stuff here, not like [insert preferred locale for sneers]."

So long as you commit emotional suicide and live so locked in the closet that you can't see the handle.

There was a time, not that long ago in historical terms, when being gay or lesbian was "the love that dare not say its name." Now we might say the goal here is "the self that dare not admit it breathes."

I know it's small comfort, but know both that you are not alone and that the bigots and haters are so intent on their attacks because they know - they can't not know - that history says they are losing and, like King Canute in the popular version of the story, it will wash over them.

In the meantime, keep fighting and take care of yourself whatever way seems best to you.

==

2026-02-12
[A coalition of religious organizations has filed suit in federal court charging that TOO's "Religious Liberty Commission" violates federal law.]

According to the World Religion Database at Boston University, the world's five largest religious traditions by number of adherents in 2020 were, in order, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, agnosticism, and Buddhism.

Meanwhile, according to a 2023 The Economist/YouGov poll, the top five in the US are Christianity, "nothing in particular," atheist, agnostic, and Mormon.

I'm sure Trump's "Religious Liberty Commission" of 13 Xian nationalists and one Conservative Jew can be trusted to take a truly unbiased approach to the issue of religious freedom in the world.
-
2026-12
[Reply: I'm not sure about Hinduism, but Christianity, Islam and Buddhism all have multiple divisions, so lumping them together isn't really valid. Perhaps all the animist religions should be combined as well.]

That's how they were grouped in the source, apparently by general overall theology. The list also grouped "Chinese folk religions" and "ethnic or tribal religions (mostly in Africa)" seemingly in the same manner.

OTOH, decided by sects, according to the same source the top five are Sunni, Roman Catholicism, agnosticism, Protestantism, and Chinese folk religions (note the last is still a grouping).

Either way, it makes the same point: A panel of 13 Xian nationalists and one Conservative Jew cannot be trusted to approach world religious freedom on an unbiased basis.

Just as a footnote and not relevant to the issue at hand, I'll note that if we were to combine all the animist beliefs based on the single commonality of everything having a spiritual essence, to be consistent we'd have to combine all theistic beliefs as well, based on the single commonality of believing in a god or gods, which I'm not sure would yield a useful category.

==

2026-02-12
So in "a deliberate act of erasure," the administration of The Orange Overlord has removed the rainbow Pride flag from the Stonewall Monument, having already removed the Trans Pride and the Progress Pride flags.

Hey, all you "LGB without the T" dunderheads: We told you so! We told you that you would be the next target. DO YOU GET IT YET?

==

2026-02-13
[A post wrote about US weapons used by the IDF in Gaza.]

Damn. I don't get shaken easily but I should have taken your advice about skipping the section about the, let's call it "the mist."

The thing is, I already knew about thermal bombs. I already knew what they do, I knew about the effects and what they're used for. I even already had a decent sense of just how they do it even if I couldn't lay out the chemical reactions involved.

Even so, I didn't catch on until you actually said "Israel used thermal bombs" - and oh god I sat with my head in my hands for what must have been 30 seconds before I could carry on to read the rest.

Unconscionable. Just unconscionable.

It's time.

I've been saying for a few months now that yes, it is time for civil disobedience but I kept getting told "after the election" or "after this Congressional vote" or "after" this or that or the other. But always after.

 

So I was heartened and moved by Robert Reich's declaration at the close of this video, when after referencing MLK Jr.'s campaigns, he said "It is time again for civil disobedience, an upheaval across this land."

 

Because yes, it is.

That doesn't mean we stop what we're already doing. So, yes, by all means lobby Congress. Yes, organize for and support progressive candidates in the primaries and the general. But we should be ready, we should be organizing, for more. To do more than lobbying, to go beyond protest¹ to an aggressive (in the social and political senses, not the physical) campaign of active nonviolent civil disobedience, to find the power of, as a '60s quote put it, "doing 'No,'" of stepping beyond "you should not" to "I will stand in your way," a category in which I include among the rest of the tactics a general strike.

My own organizing skills fall woefully short of the level needed to put together such a campaign, so all I can do is plead, argue, and hope. But I genuinely look to see one arise and to which I will pledge, to paraphrase a rather well-known document, my life, my (such as it is) fortune, and my sacred honor.

Footnote: Another response to the same video wrote of using CD "protect your communities." I replied in agreement: 

It is indeed time for organized civil disobedience. "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security" - Declaration of Independence.

While I don't think any of us are talking about overthrowing the government, I think we are talking about, if you will, "overthrowing" certain select parts of it.

 

¹I almost used the adjective "mere" here but there is nothing "mere" about either street protest or individual acts of conscience.
 

A step toward the nightmare

I have several times referred to ICE and DHS agents as "Tonton Macoute wannabes." For those who don't know and don't want to have to look it up, the Tonton Macoute or just Macoute was a vicious "secret" police and paramilitary force who reported directly to Haitian dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. (I put "secret" in quotes because there was nothing secret about them; everyone knew damned well who they were.)

It was regarded as among the most brutal such forces in the entire world and its criminality extended beyond suppressing any and all opposition: Its members were effectively a law unto themselves, able to steal, murder, torture, and rape as they pleased both because resisting or objecting was a death sentence and Duvalier didn't give a damn as long as he was in his palace and the grift kept rolling.

Well, it appears our own masked secret police is a step closer to achieving its dream.

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon has decided not to investigate Jonathan Ross, the ICE good who murdered repeat murdered Renee Good.

Not only will he not be prosecuted, not only will he not even be charged, he will not even be investigated. The regime can't even be bothered to, indeed refuses to, look at what happened because they are terrified of the meaning of what they would see, what they already have seen, what they already know. Better to evade the knowledge he would be - and through that their embrace of thuggery would be - convicted. Better to pretend it didn't happen the way they know it did, better to smear accuse and blame and investigate the victim (Renee Good - say her name) on some impossibly vague charge of being "involved with the activist groups that have been protesting Trump’s immigration agenda," better to try to turn "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances" into "domestic terrorism."

Better to put Ross - whose name, interestingly, is pretty much absent from news coverage, where he is just "the ICE agent" - beyond the law, the better to ignore what he represents, let him be answerable, it seems, only to the Orange Overlord - who, like Duvalier, just doesn't give a damn as long as he is in his palace and the grift keeps rolling.

And the ghost of Papa Doc smiles "Now you're getting it."

Sometimes pushback works

Nice to know some people still believe freedom of expression does not require universality of opinion.

The board of the Adelaide [Australia] Festival runs as part of the overall event Adelaide Writers Week, the nation’s largest free literary festival .

On January 8 the board announced that they had disinvited Australian-Palestinian writer Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah from the event. They cited “her previous statements" and the "cultural sensitivities“ surrounding the antisemitic mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach - even as they admitted her writings don't “have any connection with the tragedy.”

They didn’t cite any specific statements by Abdel-Fatah, but we can safely assume they are to referring to her support for Palestinian rights and her denunciation of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, especially given that her exclusion came as the result of lobbying by the Jewish Community Council for South Australia and South Australia state premier Peter Malinauskus.

The upshot? By January 13, 180 speakers - amounting to about 70% of those invited - had withdrawn as had some sponsors of the event, the Festival’s director had quit, the whole event had been canceled, remaining board members were to resign, and the future of the wider Adelaide Festival was in question.

There is to be a new board, hoping to keep the wider festival, now in its 40th year and a major draw for the state of South Australia, going.

Footnote: The statement announcing the cancellation offered Abdel-Fattah a non-apology apology referring not to the actual decision but only to “how the decision was represented” while claiming "this is not about identity or dissent."

Yeah, sure. Whadevah you say, Mac.

Speaking of Kirk

What follows is rather meandering and I probably should go to bed and do it tomorrow, but I'm worried I would cool off to much by then. So with that warning and the understanding that I may feel compelled to edit this later to straighten out spaghetti syntax, I'll proceed.

When anybody among the wingnuts of the right says anything about "free speech," you can be pretty damn sure that they mean free speech for them but not for anyone else.

If it wasn't already obvious, the wave of firings, suspensions, and other penalties we've seen imposed on workers for failing to react in a MAGA-approved manner to the killing of the sexist, racist, xenophobic, trans-hater that was Charlie Kirk drove home the point.

Well, here's another example: Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau is urging people to respond to Kirk's killing by reporting to the State Department people "who glorify violence and hatred" so officials can "undertake appropriate action." What constitutes such “action” is left unsaid along with how far it can and will extend.

Why is that concerning? For one, the meaning of "people" is curiously limited to "immigrants and foreign visitors." That could be taken as an admission they can't touch US citizens, except that stripping citizens of their passports is already under discussion, the DOJ is "is aggressively prioritizing efforts" to denaturalize citizens, and there is the on-going effort to repeal birthright citizenship - so that admission-that's-not-an-admission is at best cold comfort and the phrase "can't touch US citizens" must be modified with "yet."

For another, while the meaning of "people" is curiously limited, the meaning of "glorify" is curiously broad, embracing "praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event," none of which need describe anything approaching "glorify." "I'm glad he's dead" isn't "glorifying" the murder, "he made his name spewing hatred so we can't be surprised if he generated a hateful response" certainly doesn't, and "I guess if he'd used a hammer instead of a rifle it would've been okay," while crude, likewise doesn't make the cut.

The real point, however, is that none of that matters even if any of it actually did "glorify" the murder because all of it fits quite comfortably under the banner of the "FREE SPEECH!" the reactionaries will screech at the least challenge to their vile and often enough violent rhetoric. Because that human right does not rise or fall depending on citizenship or even legality of residency. It is a right, not a privilege to be dispensed to a favored few.

But not as far as the right wing is concerned, oh no. Note that Landau's whole premise by definition excludes anyone who has used Kirk's death to issue calls, no matter how violent, for "war" against those in any way on the left, regardless of their status as "immigrant or foreign visitor" or citizen. As long as it is said in praise of Kirk, it's fine.

Well, sauce for the goose and all that and if anyone objects to you having excoriated Charlie Kirk in death for the execrable person he was in life they should just be told "It's free speech. Do you believe in it or don't you?"

Silent encroachment

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." - James Madison, June 1778

 

Here is something on-going which has gotten not near enough attention even as people are kinda sorta aware of it in particular circumstances.

 

We are facing a new wave of bills and lawsuits designed to limit and repress First Amendment rights to free speech and public assembly.

 

People are aware, I expect, of moves to restrict (properly read as drive out of existence) campus protest against the genocide in Gaza and/or support of Palestinian rights. But that is not the intended end. Just like sports and bathroom bans are not the actual goal of the transphobes and transmisiacs but are just the "foot on the door," the "camel's nose," to much more far-reaching ends, so are these laws and regulations.

 

The Guardian offered a brief rundown a few weeks ago, declaring

[a]nti-protest bills that seek to expand criminal punishments for constitutionally protected peaceful protests ... have spiked since Trump’s inauguration.

Forty-one new anti-protest bills across 22 states have been introduced since the start of the year ... according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) tracker.

This year’s tally includes 32 bills across 16 states since Trump returned to the White House, with five federal bills targeting college students, anti-war protesters and climate activists with harsh prison sentences and hefty fines.

 For example, the Safe and Secure Transportation of American Energy act would make it a federal felony punishable by 20 years in prison to “disrupt” planned or operational gas pipelines – without defining what constitutes "disruption," meaning it even could be applied to a lawsuit challenging a pipeline's permit. Similar bills based on model legislation crafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) already have been enacted in 22 states.

 

Social movements, the Guardian notes, usually generate attempts at repression. Repressive anti-protest laws proliferated in the wake of the 2016 Standing Rock protests. Protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd resulted in 52 such laws being introduced across 35 states. One federal bill then was the Unmasking Antifa Act, potentially criminalizing wearing a mask during a protest. This March, the virtually-identical Unmasking Hamas Act would make wearing a mask or other disguise while protesting in an “intimidating” or “oppressive” way punishable by 15 years in prison - while not defining either “oppressive” or “disguise.”

 

So understand: Protests about Gaza are not the cause; they are just the latest excuse. In the words of AJenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU,

“These state bills and Trump’s crackdown on protected political speech are intended to scare people away from protesting or, worse, criminalize the exercise of constitutional rights.” 

And there is Jay Saper, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, who said

“Make no mistake, this is not about Jewish safety. This is about advancing an authoritarian agenda to clamp down on dissent.”

That is the goal.

 

And not just the legislatures and the executive, the courts get used as well. The latest attacks on protest also include expanding civil penalties and expanding causes for individual action - a means of allowing repressive suits to be filed by individuals rather than government agencies. Such suits, which can tie up activists in expensive and bankrupting litigation for years, often take the form of a SLAPP* (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), used by the fossil fuel industry, wealthy individuals, and politicians to silence critics and suppress protest movements. For example,

[i]n Minnesota, a new bill seeks to create civil and criminal liability for funders and supporters of protesters who peacefully demonstrate on pipeline or other utility property. In Ohio, legislators are considering whether participants of noisy or disruptive but non-violent protests – as well as people and organizations who support them – could face expensive lawsuits.`

Three other states – Alaska, Wisconsin, Illinois – are considering new or harsher civil penalties for protesters.

The good news here is that most of these bills fail to pass or never make it out of committee in the first place. The bad news is that any of them at all pass, especially when any one of them applied with hostile intent - which is the point of them - can do significant damage to our right to protest.

On Monday[, April 7,] in Washington DC, a non-violent climate protester was convicted on felony charges of conspiracy against the United States and property damage for putting washable finger paint on the protective case of the Little Dancer statue in the National Gallery. Timothy Martin, who faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count, will be sentenced in August.

Years in prison and a bankrupting fine for "conspiracy" and "damage" that wasn't even to the statue and could be cleared up with a wet cloth. Intimidation into utter silence. That what all this is about.

And don't you ever forget it.

 

*From April 5, 2013: A SLAPP is a lawsuit is intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their opposition. That is, the suers don't really expect to win the suit. What they want to do is to drain their opponents either financially, emotionally, or better yet both, so the opponents are exhausted and just give up.

They were popular among corporations from the 70s to the 90s, particularly when they were leveled against individuals or "kitchen table" groups that were using regulatory proceedings and hearings to oppose some plan of some corporation. The price for dropping such suits - which were patently frivolous, as they often claimed that by criticizing the company's proposal you were by definition "defaming it" and "causing it to suffer financial loss" - the price for dropping the suits was usually dropping out of the regulatory process and letting the company's proposal proceed unopposed. These suits lost a lot of their luster when their targets who were in a position to fight them began to file what became known as SLAPP-backs, where the roles were switched and the corporation went from plaintiff to defendant.

 

For more on SLAPP-backs, go here. 

Free Speech: $35,000 and up

A GOPper in the Florida Senate by the name of Jason Brodeur has introduced a bill, SB1780, "that would deal a devastating blow to freedom of speech in the Sunshine State" in the words of The New Republic.

The bill would make calling someone a racist, sexist, homophobe, or transphobe "defamation per se," that is, by definition, making them grounds for a civil suit of "at least" $35,000 plus attorney's fees and court costs. At the same time, it would restrict defenses available to the target of such a suit by, for example, limiting who could be considered a "public figure" and making it easier to find "actual malice" in the accusation.

In the case of a transphobic or homophobic bigot, as Erin Reed noted, it's even worse.

The bill says that in cases of "sexual orientation or gender identity," a person can't defend themselves against a suit by "citing a plaintiff’s constitutionally protected religious expression or scientific beliefs" (lines 135-145). What that means, in practical reality, is that truth is no defense.

Bigot: "Homosexuals should be killed!"
You: "You're a bigot."
Bigot: "I'm suing you for defamation."
You: "But it's true! You are a bigot!"
Bigot: "Doesn't matter, that's my 'constitutionally protected religious expression.' Pay up."

Upon reading about this bill, I fantasized about someone saying this during debate:

"If it please the Chair, I rise to propose a friendly amendment to my esteemed colleague's bill, one to which I'm sure he'll agree as it pursues the same object of his own. The amendment would add to his list of terms to be presumptively defamatory accusations of 'groomer' and 'pedophile' plus claims of connections to 'the deep state,' in each case whether directed at an individual, group, or organization. I will yield to Mr. Broder for his response."

It wouldn't be accepted, of course, but it would serve to make the actual purpose of the bill even clearer than it already was.

One other thing: The bill is almost a carbon copy of one introduced last session, which died in committee. Hopefully this one will meet the same fate.

But if this did pass and was challenged in court, don't be surprised if the defense included claiming there is no First Amendment issue because the accusations aren't banned, the state is doing nothing to impede your speech, it's merely a matter of defining the legal meaning of certain terms. If the response is that there's a penalty for using those terms, the comeback would be "Maybe so, but the state isn't the one imposing the penalty, so nothing to do with us."

This style of argument - don't actually do it, just enable others to sue over it and so impose self-censorship - is central to the "Don't Say Gay" bill and Florida has become saturated with it even though the roots, if I recall correctly, lie in a Texas bill about abortion.

063 The Erickson Report for October 6 to 19, Page 1: Correction regarding school book bans

We start with a correction: Last time in discussing the increasing banning of books in schools, I twice said that PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans listed 650 unique titles that had been banned from schools over the past school year.

What I meant to say in each occasion was sixteen hundred fifty unique titles - not 650, one thousand 650.

It is worth adding here that according to a recent CBS News poll, over 80% of Americans hold that books should not be banned from schools for discussing race, criticizing US history, including the history of slavery, or  holding political ideas they disagree with.

The poll found wide agreement across party lines, between white and blacks, and between parents and the wider public.

So remember two things: One, this is all, yet again, the work of a small, fractious, but loud minority using hyperbolic lies and manufactured outrage in defense of white supremicist refusal to admit the reality of racism and to protect bigotry against the rights, even the existence, of LGBTQ+ youth.

And two, underlying it all is the intent to undermine and delegitimize public schools as an institution, part of the long-standing drive by the reactionary right to strip away a right to, eliminate the very concept of, a public education and return education to a prerogative of the powerful with the rest of us knowing only enough to serve our place in the social hierarchy.

063 The Erickson Report for October 6 to 19

 

063 The Erickson Report for October 6 to 19

Sources:

Correction regarding school book bans
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2022/09/062-erickson-report-for-september-22-to.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/book-bans-opinion-poll-2022-02-22/
https://hartmannreport.com/p/americans-used-to-understand-public
https://www.floridapolicy.org/posts/floridas-hidden-voucher-expansion-over-1-billion-from-public-schools-to-fund-private-education

Follow Up on the shooting of Shireen Abu Akleh
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2022/05/054-erickson-report-for-may-19-to-june-1.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2022/06/055-erickson-report-for-june-2-to-15.html
https://theintercept.com/2022/09/20/shireen-abu-akleh-killing-israel/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXjVDKILC3s
https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/06/1121252
https://theintercept.com/2021/11/29/boycott-film-bds-israel-palestine/
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/anti-bds-legislation
https://theintercept.com/2022/09/22/rashida-tlaib-israel-adl/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmZ0ZFgYWf8
https://bit.ly/3xMztNc
https://bit.ly/3dxZyJn
https://bit.ly/3r0OXcG
https://bit.ly/3C3Zlqr

False claims about the future of Social Security
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/search/label/Social%20Security
https://www.gobankingrates.com/retirement/social-security/debt-free-future-biggest-problems-facing-social-security/

Brief comments on Iran and Ukraine
https://www.reuters.com/site-search/?query=iran&date=past_month&offset=0
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/analysis-braced-to-crush-unrest-irans-rulers-heed-lessons-of-shahs-fall-analysts/ar-AA12FAAb
https://ajmuste.org/aj_mustes-life-of-activism

062 The Erickson Report for September 22 to October 5

 

 

062 The Erickson Report for September 22 to October 5

School book bans
https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor-books-in-schools/
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/education/article/banned-books-in-Texas-school-districts-database-17359043.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/education/article/Texas-book-bans-driven-by-GOP-pressure-not-parents-17362170.php
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/31/2119964/-Republicans-sue-to-force-school-district-private-bookseller-Barnes-Noble-to-remove-two-books

Clowns
https://www.aol.com/news/massachusetts-gop-voters-size-trump-041243830-093431758.html
=
https://www.qsaltlake.com/news/2018/07/26/star-parker/
https://www.rawstory.com/women-not-controlling-their-bodies/

Outrages
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/09/12/disgusting-starbucks-help-its-workers-student-debt-unless-theyre-union
https://www.forbes.com/profile/howard-schultz/?sh=41d3889052c6
https://perfectunion.us/exclusive-starbucks-hit-with-charges-over-sweeping-illegal-union-busting-scheme/
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/05/04/smells-illegal-starbucks-ceo-says-unionized-workers-will-be-excluded-wage-hikes
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/06/15/disgusting-starbucks-threatens-trans-health-benefits-union-celebrates-150-wins
=
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/09/08/abhorrent-and-anti-democratic-outrage-dnc-panel-blocks-vote-dark-money-ban
https://theintercept.com/2022/09/14/dnc-overrule-convention-bylaws/

Climate change
https://www.juancole.com/2022/08/pakistan-emergency-biblical.html
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3192559/typhoon-muifa-lashes-eastern-china-forcing-16-million-people
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/16/coastal-alaska-storm-surge-flooding-winds/

061 The Erickson Report for September 8 to 21

 

The Erickson Report for September 8 to 21

Good News

    - "Angels" protect lgbtq+ celebrants

    - Federal court blocks part of Florida's "Stop WOKE Act"

    - 9th Circuit Court upholds ban on "conversion therapy" for minors

 

Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages

    - Clown: Carroll Independent School District

    - Clown: Rep. Mike Johnson

    - Outrage: Mississippi to take student debt relief as income

 

RIP

    - Mikhail Gorbachev

    - Barbara Ehrenreich

 

Some observations on the war in Ukraine

039 The Erickson Report, June 17

 

The Erickson Report, June 17

Good News
   - SCOTUS dismisses Obamacare suit
   - Title IX applies to LGBTQ youth
   - Reality Winner moved to halfway house
Update on Israel-Palestine
Afghanistan becoming new drone war
Biden pushes federal death sentence
Mass news media misinforms
Clown Award: Rep. Louis Gohmert
Goodbye for now

37.5 - On the nature of capitalism

On the nature of capitalism

I have talked a pretty good number of times about the economy, most recently on how decades of economic stress without gain were for too many among us the crowbar that was used to pry open the restraints they had on their bigotry because blaming those weaker than you is always easier than blaming those more powerful.

But the real issue, of course, and one that I have not addressed often or deeply enough, is the nature of that economy. So without getting into a long dissertation, herewith are three good examples of the nature of our capitalist economy.

Verizon has a program called LTE in Rural America, which relies on a partnership between Verizon and small rural carriers who lease Verizon spectrum in order to build their own networks.

1. In October, Verizon dumped 8500 customers in that program on the grounds that, quoting the company, they "use a substantial amount of data while roaming on other providers' networks and the roaming costs generated by these lines exceed what these consumers pay us each month."

Those customers are spread across rural areas in 13 states.

In other words, it's "We make money on this program but not on every single individual person in it so screw them - you don't make us money, the hell with you."

2. As a reminder of who has to be taken care of first, Bank of America downgraded the stock of the chain restaurant Chipoltle from "neutral" to "underperform" on the grounds of, in the bank's analyst's words, an inability "to get labor below 27 percent of sales." In other words, they're downgrading Chipoltle's prospects on the grounds that the company pays its employees too much.

3. Executives from Papa John's, the official pizza company of the NFL, are blaming player protests for a decline in the league's TV ratings and thus, they claim, for a decline in the company's pizza sales. Company founder and CEO John Schnatter said "We are disappointed the NFL and its leadership did not resolve this," that is, did not "nip this in the bud," a year and a half ago.

In other words, the NFL should have clamped down on a peaceful, nonviolent, and legal use of 1st amendment rights to protest an obvious injustice because the corporation's pizza sales are more important.

31.2 - Outrage of the Week: threats to the rights of assembly and free press

Outrage of the Week: threats to the rights of assembly and free press

The Good News, unhappily, leads directly to the Outrage of the Week.

Our First Amendment rights, our rights to protest, are under attack. As protests increased and continued, so too did the efforts to shut them down entirely or at least scare people off from taking part.

This spring's state legislative sessions have seen at least 30 bills introduced across 20 states either to limit the right of public protest, to increase punishments for civil disobedience, or both, doing so by measures such as, for example, banning wearing of masks, by declaring some areas "critical infrastructure" forever off-limits to protest, or by changing a charge of blocking a highway from a misdemeanor to a felony. Bills in two states - South Dakota and Tennessee - even proposed to protect drivers who run over protesters blocking streets.

A particular danger lies in use of mass arrests and charges without probable cause.

Back on October 1, 2011, during the Occupy protests, 700 people were peacefully marching across the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. Police had closed the bridge to vehicular traffic and began walking in the roadway. Protesters, reasonably assuming the police were trying to have the march get over the bridge as quickly and efficiently as possible, followed them into the street - only to have the police stop the march, trap the group from behind, and arrest all 700.

Police claim they told the marchers to stay out of the roadway but there is no way anyone other than those at the very front of the crowd could even have heard them; even assuming police did make such an announcement, those further back could not possibly have known about it. No matter - mass arrest, all guilty of "blocking traffic" - even though there was, again, no traffic to block.

A suit arose, Garcia v. Bloomberg. The Supreme Court recently refused to hear the protestors' appeal of their loss at the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. By doing so, the courts have legitimized mass arrests without proper warning and without giving people an opportunity to disperse.

It gets worse:

On January 20, Inauguration Day, police in Washington, DC followed, by their own account, a group of about a couple hundred protesters for about one-half hour. During that time, there were a few people in the group who broke windows. Instead of going in and arresting the people they had probable cause to arrest (because they had observed those people committing a crime), the police waited and then trapped 200 people with police netting, sweeping up demonstrators, journalists covering the event, and even some passers-by, anyone who happened to be there at that moment. Again, a mass arrest without warning, without an opportunity to disperse, and without probable cause to believe most of those arrested had committed any crime.

But those people - all 214 of them - were charged with a crime: felony rioting, which carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison. In April, additional charges of property destruction, inciting or urging to riot, and conspiracy to riot, with penalties of up to 75 years in prison, were added.

While some of those arrested have cut plea bargains, many of the cases are still pending, including against at least one of the journalists - who, remember were there doing their job as reporters.

But here is the point: To indict and try someone, it takes, or at least is supposed to take, probable cause directed to that individual, not some unnamed someone. If these arrests are allowed to stand, if this is accepted by the courts, it means that if you are are at a demonstration, no matter how peaceful and legal, and someone in that group commits some illegal act - breaks a window, say - you and everyone else there could be charged with that crime or, even more likely, conspiracy to commit that crime with no need on the part of police or prosecutors to be able to say you did anything wrongful at all. Guilt - criminal guilt - by association in the purest form, a tool to suppress public protest at its most blatant..

The potential chilling effect on the right to protest is hard to overstate. The potential chilling effect on the right of a free press to cover such protests, when journalists may be held to be participants simply by being present, may be less immediately obvious but just as serious.

Because there is more: On July 25, a group of about 95 disabled people disrupted the vote in the Senate on the motion to proceed to debate about a health insurance bill - the debate that came to nothing - by shouting "Kill the Bill, Don't kill us" and "Shame!"

Capitol police dragged them from the gallery into the hall - the Senate chambers being a First-Amendment-free zone - and then blocked the media from covering the arrests, demanding there be no photographs and no videos and in fact ordering reporters present to delete those they had taken. Why? Because, get this now, "It's a crime scene." And if that makes you go "So what." it should.

In the eyes of the Capitol police, they have the power to say "You will not cover this protest. You will make no record of the protesters. You will make no record of their arrest." Which bluntly is one short step away from being able to say "This event did not happen."

Meanwhile, Jeff "I'm not a racist, really, really!" Sessions darkly intones about press subpoenas and how press freedom "is not unlimited."

No one ever said it was, of course, although it is also true that Thomas Jefferson said - and this is a real quote, not one of those fake ones that keep circulating - "were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

The truth is, we are much more threatened by the power of the government to restrict and conceal than we are by the power of protesters and the press to resist and reveal. And as those threats to our rights increase, so does the outrage.

What's Left #31

What's Left
for the week of August 11 - 17, 2017

This week:

Good News: protest and resistance continue
https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/erica-chenoweth/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.98de205445f8
https://sites.google.com/view/crowdcountingconsortium/home
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/26/1684152/-Public-protests-soared-higher-in-June-than-in-any-month-since-the-January-Women-s-Marches
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/07/25/more-people-protested-in-june-in-the-u-s-than-in-any-month-since-the-january-womens-marches/?utm_term=.91ed65d4c3f7

Outrage of the Week: threats to the rights of assembly and free press
https://www.environews.tv/051017-aclu-reveals-bills-20-states-aiming-criminalize-peaceful-protest-state-list/
http://fair.org/home/theres-an-effort-around-the-country-to-curtail-peoples-fundamental-1st-amendment-rights/
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2017-06-19/supreme-court-wont-touch-legality-of-mass-arrests-without-warning
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2017-06-09/journalist-arrested-during-trump-inauguration-arraigned-on-new-felonies-carrying-decades-in-jail
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/26/1684110/-Salon-Capitol-Police-Forced-Journos-to-Delete-Footage-of-AHCA-Protesters
https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/07/25/capitol-hill-staff-prevent-journalists-reporting-health-care-protesters/217376
https://twitter.com/ABC/status/893492385094615041
http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/1289

Noting August 6 and 9: the start of the nuclear weapons age
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2015/08/2156-70th-anniversary-of-bombings-of.html
(See that post for a full list of sources)

26.1 - The rightwing blames the progressive left for the shooting in Alexandria (as predicted)

The rightwing blames the progressive left for the shooting in Alexandria (as predicted)

I told you, I told you, I told you!

I told you this is what was going to happen.

Last week, I only mentioned the mass shooting in Alexandria briefly because news of it had come only shortly before I did the show and there was no time to gather information. But I did say something and I am going to quote what I said in full and word for word. This was it:

You undoubtedly know about the gunman who shot up a group of Republican lawmakers who were practicing for an annual charity baseball game, wounding House Majority Whip Steve Scalise - who at last report is in critical condition - and at least four others before being killed.

You also have undoubtedly heard about how the shooter, one James Hodgkinson, was some real liberal and a Bernie Sanders supporter.

So I want this noted, For the Record: I predict that you will not find one single GOPper, one single wingnut, one single person on the entire right half of the US political spectrum who will describe this guy as what they always describe right-wing shooters as, "a lone wacko," and that instead they will claim he is "emblematic of the violence of the left."

That's what I told you would happen and that is exactly what has happened. The right wing, demonstrating its typical total lack of self-awareness and conscience, rose as one to blame it all on "the liberals."

I'm going to go through a list because you need to understand how wide and how unified this vilification is. And remember, this is not an historical compilation. These all came in the last week in response to the Alexandria shooting.

Rush Limbaugh said "the average, base Democrat voter" is "getting more and more fringe and imbalanced; they openly promote violence," before labeling Hodgkinson "a mainstream Democrat voter."

Lifezette, the website of Laura Ingraham, declared that the "American Left demonizes and dehumanizes conservatives."

The Daily Caller called the shooting part of "an escalating pattern of violence and intimidation against Republicans," who are constantly on "the receiving end of violence and intimidation" - because they, of course, are always the victims. Always.

William Jacobson of the rightwing blog Legal Insurrection wrote that "the entire concept of 'The Resistance' invokes violence" and "the window for violence has been moved from the radical fringes to the mere left."

Rightwing radio host Bill Mitchell tweeted that "The Left in this country is ushering in a new #CultureOfViolence where violent hate is the new normal."

Newt Gingrich called the shooting "part of a pattern" of left behavior.

Alt-right troll Nick Short claimed that"Alexandria comes from the incitement by the Left and the media" and thatsaying "people will die" as a result of losing health coverage - which is literally true and there are studies finding that anywhere from 18,000 to 45,000 Americans die every year from inadequate access to health care - but speaking that literal truth is to Nick Short "an incitement to violence."

And indeed, political cartoonist Mike Lester directly connected Hodgkinson to that, directly connected his murderous rampage to those people saying folks will die if they lose their health coverage.

Alex Jones of InfoWars claimed that Democrats have been "calling for Trump's death" and for his supporters to be attacked."

Sean Hannity blamed the shooting on "left-wing hate that is being spewed" by "liberals all across the country" who are "glorifying violence."

Far-right operative and bizzaro-conspiracy-monger Roger Stone said the shooting was the result of hate generated by the media and egged on by "LibDems."

National Review claimed "the American Left has embraced political violence and 'anarcho-tyranny,'" whatever that's supposed to mean.

Harlan Hill, a rightwing political consultant, said tough criticism of TheRump, even if accurate, such as calling him "dangerous," is "a passive justification for the kind of violence we saw."

When they get to more specific targets, the wingnuts got positively loopy, dumping the blame in the lap of whoever the particular wingnut is obsessed with: Among those blamed were Snoop Dogg, Barack Obama, Madonna, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Kathy Griffin, Sen. Tim Kaine, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the media, and the investigation into TheRump's ties to Russia.

That's by no means all, but it should be enough.

Note well: Not one of these people said anything about "lone wacko," about there being no meaning beyond the individual tragedy and how dare you even suggest it had something to do with political rhetoric. Not one of them said any of the things they always say when it's a rightwing shooter.

In fact, Limbaugh went out of his to way specifically say that Hodgkinson is not "a Looney Tune kook burger."

Well, right now federal officials are now characterizing Hodgkinson as a desperate man who was unemployed, running out of money, taking prescription drugs, having anger issues, and in a troubled marriage and that he was "struggling in all kinds of different ways." They also described the shooting as more of a spontaneous event.

And other reports note that Hodgkinson has one other issue that research suggests connects almost all mass shooters: a history of - in his case alleged - domestic violence.

James Hodgkinson

But none of that will matter. I guarantee you none of that will matter. The right wing will still insist on the collective guilt of the entire left, still insist there is blood on the hands of every American in or out of government, in or out of the Democratic party, who dares to question the bigotry, the selfishness, the greed, the destructiveness, of the right. Because those of the right wing have no conscience and they do not care about truth. They only care about power.

And again, note well: Unlike the lies promulgated by the right in their attempts to "prove" the inherent violence of the left, the examples I have cited were not plucked out of the depths of some comment stream, were not authored by someone you never heard of before and very likely will never hear of again. These are leading voices of the American right wing, some of them with mass audiences.

And what makes it all worse is that all too often what is screeched in the dank halls of the right-wing echo chamber soon enough becomes spoken aloud in the mainstream media.

For example, the Kansas City Star said the shooting "highlights [a] disturbing increase in left-wing violence" but couldn't find space to mention any examples.

CNN's national security analyst, Peter Bergen, described what he called "the return of leftist terrorism," claiming some sort of link with some poorly-described examples involving the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers from 50 years ago.

But for some, even that was too vague and for them the question quickly became resolved to "How much blame does Bernie Sanders bear?"

In an interview with Jane Sanders, Bernie Sanders' wife, to discuss the shooting, Wolf Blitzer demanded to know if Sanders "went too far" when he called TheRump "the worst and most dangerous president" the US has ever had, as if that was a cause of the attack.

And the New York Times, well, the New York Times had a big long article in which it did its best to blame Bernie Sanders without admitting that it was doing it.

It referred to Hodgkinson as a "test for the movement" and an "opportunity for the senator's fans to consider their message," which of course assumes that said "message" is an incitement to murder.

The paper admits that "Sanders has advocated a peaceful political revolution," but then immediately goes on to say that "long before the shooting, some of his supporters had earned a belligerent reputation" and that the shooting "put a new spotlight on the rage buried in some corners of the progressive left."

This is, the article intoned, "a moment for liberals to figure out how to balance anger at Mr. Trump with inciting violence" - which, again, assumes that "inciting violence" is what progressives have been doing.

The whole thing was thick with innuendo. Here's an example, quoted directly from the article:

On Tuesday, Mr. Hodgkinson posted a cartoon on Facebook explaining "How does a bill work?" "That's an easy one, Billy," the cartoon reads. "Corporations write the bill and then bribe Congress until it becomes law."

"That's Exactly How It Works. ...." Mr. Hodgkinson wrote.

That is not far from Mr. Sanders's own message.

This is insane.
 
Shaun King, a syndicated columnist with the NY Daily News, said it well:

To this very day I work directly with several dozen progressive grassroots organizations fighting for real change in this country. I've attended and hosted and contributed to hundreds of meetings with these organizations. Not once, publicly or privately, did a single person in a single meeting I was a part of ever suggest, explicitly or implicitly, that someone should go do what James Hodgkinson did today. Period.

The blaming, the finger-pointing, the accusations, he didn't use the word, but I will: It's all lies. Lies intended to secure and advance a reactionary right-wing agenda.

Understand: I do believe words can have an impact. I do believe we need to accept responsibility for the meaning of what we say, of the terms we use, of the ideas we express. I do believe we have to be aware of how our words can sound and of the fact that, as I have often said in the past, in communication what you say is not as important as what the other person hears.

What I deny is that the words, the terms, the ideas, of the progressive left have been or are provoking or inciting violence, especially murderous violence. Oh yes, I'm sure if you dig into the bowels of Twitter you can find individual examples of expressions of heinous thoughts or heinous images, and the right wing will search out those isolated examples buried in the mass like some political version of Where's Waldo and then take those isolated examples and claim that the ill behavior or immoral assertion of that one or those few describes the entire progressive movement. And that is, again, a lie. A deliberate lie.

In fact, if you want to see incitement to violence, if you want to see the impacts of incitement, the effects of incitement, the left is not the place to look.

Remember when Ted Nugent called Barack Obama "a subhuman mongrel" who should "suck on my machine gun," called Hillary Clinton a "worthless bitch," and said both deserve to be hanged?

Was any of that incitement?

How about when Bill O'Reilley spent week after week attacking abortion provider Dr. George Tiller as "Tiller the baby killer" until Tiller actually was murdered? Was that incitement?

What about Byron Williams and his failed plot to shoot people at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU, where Williams explicitly identified Glenn Beck and Alex Jones as what prompted him to act?

What about Robert Dear, who killed three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado based on what he heard from Limbaugh and Jones and O'Reilly and the like?

Oh, and what about the guy who shot up a family pizzeria in Washington DC after Alex Jones wanted his audience to investigate the child sex-trafficking ring that Hillary Clinton was supposedly operating out of the building's basement?

Was any of that incitement?

And what of His Orangeness himself? At a campaign rally last August, Donald TheRump suggested that "the Second Amendment people" could maybe deal with Hillary Clinton if she were elected. Was that incitement? Did that go "too far?" Did that have to be "considered?"

At another rally, after being told by security that someone might be planning to throw tomatoes at him, TheRump, who openly yearned for the days when protesters would be carried out on stretchers, told the crowd to "knock the crap out of them. I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees." Was that incitement?

And of course there were the celebrations of sexual assault and the denunciations of refugees, of Muslims, of Mexicans, and others. Was any of that incitement?

To the right wing, the answer in each case is "no." None of that was an incitement to violence. None of that "went too far." None of that "message" needed to be "considered."

Despite the fact that the Southern Poverty Law Center documented almost 900 reports of harassment and intimidation in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, with many of those involving people invoking TheRump's name during the assaults, none of it, they insist, was an incitement

Despite the fact that the Anti-Defamation League reported that anti-Semitic incidents in the US jumped 86 percent in the first quarter of 2017 and there has been a surge in violent attacks on Indian Americans and Sikhs, frequently by people thinking they were Muslims or Arabs, none of it, they insist, was an incitement. None of it.

Even as the hate crimes continue, even to torching the memorial to a victim of a previous hate crime. Nope, none of it has a single blessed little thing to do with anything the right said, even when repeated over and over by its loudest voices.

Even when Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, said in response to the Alexandria shooting that we are seeing "The first skirmishes of a second American civil war" - saying that's not metaphorical but "an objective statement of the reality in America" - even that is not an incitement to violence in the eyes of the right.

The hard truth here is that for the right wing, this actually has nothing to do with incitement, it has nothing to do with safety, nothing to do with cooling the rhetoric, and sure as hell has nothing to do with "civility."

It has to do with trying to emotional manipulate and intimidate the left, trying to exploit our natural tendency to pay attention to the impacts of what we do, to worry about unintended effects of what we say, our natural tendency to care about others and our effects on them, to exploit that to make us so hesitant to criticize, so reluctant to run even the hypothetical risk of "going too far," so timorous in our words and deeds, that we offer no effective resistance to their reactionary agenda that would undo moe than a century of progress to serve the desires of a selfish elite.

But the right should know now: We will not be silenced. We will be nonviolent, but we will be aggressive. We will be honest, but we - sometimes - will be rude and crude. We will be understanding - but we will not back down. You wingnuts seem to actually want a second civil war, with all the blood and death that implies. We want the next - and notice I say next because there have been several - the next American revolution, with all the growth and progress that implies. And we will not be turned around by your lies about us.