Wednesday, March 30, 2022

Wednesday, February 16, 2022

River Lethe's Best Music of (mostly) 2021

Well, it's been awhile since I've done this. I've been co-opted by kids and politics the past few years. I can say I am no longer a tastemaker, and it wasn't until the end of 2021 that I actively started looking for new music again. So, with that said, here is what I liked from 2021, along with a few other things that I missed since the last music list.

21 Pilots - Scaled and Icy

Brandi Carlile - In These Silent Days

Mastodon - Hushed and Grim

Every Time I Die - Radical

Converge and Chelsea Wolfe - Bloodmoon: I

Julien Baker - Little Oblivions

Phoebe Bridgers - Punisher

Run the Jewels - RTJ4

Deafheaven - Infinte Granite

Genghis Tron - Dream Weapon

Black Crown Initiate - Violent Portraits of Doomed Escape (2020)

Svart Crown - Wolves Among the Ashes (2020)

Ageless Oblivion - Suspended Between Earth and Sky

Glass Animals - Dreamland (2020)

Missio - Can You Feel the Sun (2020)

Monday, December 6, 2021

It Wasn't a Hoax

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/trump-russia-senate-intelligence-report/620815/

It Wasn’t a Hoax

People with scant illusions about Trump are volunteering to help him execute one of his Big Lies.

Donald Trump in silhouette, backlit by a single circle of light
Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty

About the author: David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020). In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

If Donald Trump had been supported only by people who affirmatively liked him, his attack on American democracy would never have gotten as far as it did.

Instead, at almost every turn, Trump was helped by people who had little liking for him as a human being or politician, but assessed that he could be useful for purposes of their own. The latest example: the suddenly red-hot media campaign to endorse Trump’s fantasy that he was the victim of a “Russia hoax.”

The usual suspects in the pro-Trump media ecosystem will of course endorse and repeat everything Trump says, no matter how outlandish. But it’s not pro-Trumpers who are leading the latest round of Trump-Russia denialism. This newest round of excuse-making is being sounded from more respectable quarters, in many cases by people distinguished as Trump critics. With Trump out of office—at least for the time being—they now feel free to subordinate their past concerns about him to other private quarrels with the FBI or mainstream media institutions. On high-subscription Substacks, on popular podcasts, even from within prestige media institutions, people with scant illusions about Trump the man and president are nonetheless volunteering to help him execute one of his Big Lies.

The factual record on Trump-Russia has been set forth most authoritatively by the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina. I’ll reduce the complex details to a very few agreed upon by virtually everybody outside the core Trump-propaganda group.

  1. Dating back to at least 2006, Trump and his companies did tens of millions of dollars of business with Russian individuals and other buyers whose profiles raised the possibility of money laundering. More than one-fifth of all the condominiums sold by Trump over his career were purchased in all-cash transactions by shell companies, a 2018 BuzzFeed News investigation found.
  2. In 2013, Trump’s pursuit of Russian business intensified. That year, he staged the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Around that time, Trump opened discussions on the construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow, from which he hoped to earn “hundreds of millions of dollars, if the project advanced to completion,” in the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
  3. Trump continued to pursue the Tower deal for a year after he declared himself a candidate for president. “By early November 2015, Trump and a Russia-based developer signed a Letter of Intent laying out the main terms of a licensing deal,” the Senate Intelligence Committee found. Trump’s representatives directly lobbied aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin in January 2016. Yet repeatedly during the 2016 campaign, Trump falsely stated that he had no business with Russia—perhaps most notably in his second presidential debate against Hillary Clinton, in October 2016.
  4. Early in 2016, President Putin ordered an influence operation to “harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.” Again, that’s from the Senate Intelligence Committee report.
  5. The Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos “likely learned about the Russian active measures campaign as early as April 2016,” the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote. In May 2016, Papadopoulos indiscreetly talked with Alexander Downer, then the Australian high commissioner to the United Kingdom, about Russia’s plot to intervene in the U.S. election to hurt Clinton and help Trump. Downer described the conversation in a report to his government. By long-standing agreement, Australia shares intelligence with the U.S. government. It was Papadopoulos’s blurt to Downer that set in motion the FBI investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, a revelation authoritatively reported more than three years ago.
  6. In June 2016, the Trump campaign received a request for a meeting from a Russian lawyer offering harmful information on Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump Jr. and other senior Trump advisers accepted the meeting. The Trump team did not obtain the dirt they’d hoped for. But the very fact of the meeting confirmed to the Russian side the Trump campaign’s eagerness to accept Russian assistance. Shortly after, Trump delivered his “Russia, if you’re listening” invitation at his last press conference of the campaign.
  7. WikiLeaks released two big caches of hacked Democratic emails in July and October 2016. In the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee: “WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian intelligence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort.”
  8. Through its ally Roger Stone, the Trump campaign team assiduously tried to communicate with WikiLeaks. Before the second WikiLeaks release, “Trump and the Campaign believed that Stone had inside information and expressed satisfaction that Stone’s information suggested more releases would be forthcoming,” according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. In late summer and early fall 2016, Stone repeatedly predicted that WikiLeaks would publish an “October surprise” that would harm the Clinton campaign.
  9. At the same time as it welcomed Russian help, the Trump campaign denied and covered up Russian involvement: “The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort,” the Intelligence Committee found.
  10. In March 2016, the Trump campaign accepted the unpaid services of Paul Manafort, deeply beholden to deeply shady Russian business and political figures. “On numerous occasions, Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information” with a man the Intelligence Committee identified as a Russian intelligence officer. “Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services … represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” the committee found. Through 2016, the Russian state launched a massive Facebook disinformation program that aligned with the Trump campaign strategy.
  11. At crucial moments in the 2016 election, Trump publicly took positions that broke with past Republican policy and served no apparent domestic political purpose, but that supported Putin’s foreign-policy goals: scoffing at NATO support for Estonia, denigrating allies such as Germany, and endorsing Britain’s exit from the European Union.
  12. Throughout the 2016 election and after, people close to Trump got themselves into serious legal and political trouble by lying to the public, to Congress, and even to the FBI about their Russian connections.

All of these are facts that would be agreed upon even by the latter-day “Russia hoax” revisionists and, for that matter, anybody this side of Breitbart or One America News Network.

The confirmed Trump-Russia record leaves many mysteries and uncertainties unresolved. Even now, the U.S. public still does not have a full and final picture of his business dealings with Russia before and even during his presidency.

The confirmed record may not add up to a criminal conspiracy either, not as that concept is defined by U.S. law. Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team stated that they could not prove any such conspiracy. But the confirmed record suggests an impressive record of cooperation toward a common aim—even if the terms of the cooperation were not directly communicated by one party to the other.

Since Donald Trump declared for president in 2015, it’s seldom been possible to get to the bottom of one scandal before Trump distracts attention with a bigger and worse scandal. For more than a year, the United States has been convulsed by Trump’s frontal assault on election integrity and the peaceful transfer of power. He has, one by one, eliminated from politics Republicans who upheld the rule of law, and urged their replacement by stooges who repeat his Big Lie. Republican candidates for office talk more and more explicitly about taking power by violence if necessary. These dark threats have understandably overwhelmed the effort to fill in the blanks of the Trump-Russia scandal of yesteryear.

Christopher Steele was a former British intelligence officer working for a firm that was hired first by anti-Trump Republicans, then by Democrats, to collect opposition research on Trump’s Russia connections. As his dossier circulated behind the scenes, experts on Russian disinformation warned of its dubious reliability. But it found an audience anyway within parts of the U.S. government and U.S. law enforcement, and in January 2017, BuzzFeed published it.

That decision was strenuously criticized by many. As our David Graham wrote then, “the reporter’s job is not to simply dump as much information as possible into the public domain … It is to gather information, sift through it, and determine what is true and what is not.” The veteran Russia correspondent David Satter warned in National Review that the dossier’s more lurid allegations reminded him of “the work of the ‘novelists’ in the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) whose job it is to come up with stories to discredit individuals without much regard for plausibility.” (Satter wrote the definitive account of FSB involvement in the 2000 apartment bombings that helped bring to power Vladimir Putin, and was booted from Russia in 2014 by the Putin regime for his reporting.)

The Steele dossier undertook to answer the question “What the hell is going on with Trump and Russia?” The Senate Intelligence Committee found that the FBI investigation gave the Steele dossier “unjustified credence.” But the disintegration of the dossier’s answers has not silenced the power of its question.

It was to silence that question that the outgoing Trump administration appointed a special counsel of its own to investigate its investigators. John Durham has now issued three indictments, all for lying to the FBI about various aspects of the Steele dossier. None of these indictments vindicates Trump’s claims in any way. It remains fact that Russian hackers and spies helped his campaign. It remains fact that the Trump campaign welcomed the help. It remains fact that Trump’s campaign chairman sought to share proprietary campaign information with a person whom the Senate report identified as a “Russian intelligence officer.” It remains fact that Trump hoped to score a huge payday in Russia even as he ran for president. It remains fact that Trump and those around him lied, and lied, and lied again about their connections to Russia.

Outright pro-Trump people remain deeply invested in those lies. But Trump’s media effort has often relied heavily on people who are not pro-him, but anti-anti-him. And the secret to successful anti-anti-Trumping has always been to fasten onto side issues and “whatabouts.”

Anti-anti-Trump journalists want to use the Steele controversy to score points off politicians and media institutions that they dislike. But as media malpractice goes, credulous reliance upon the Steele dossier is just a speck compared with—for example—the willingness of the top-rated shows on Fox News to promote the fantasy that the Democratic Party hacked itself, then murdered a staffer named Seth Rich to cover up the self-hack. (Some versions of this false claim include suggesting that Rich himself committed the crime.) Fox News ultimately settled with Rich’s family for an undisclosed sum even as the Fox host who had done most to promote the false story insisted on his radio show that he had retracted nothing. The story was crazy and cruel. But the story protected Trump, and that was proof enough for a media organization much more powerful than any of those that accepted the Steele dossier.

Not every journalist has to work on every story. Smaller abuses and lesser failures also demand attention alongside the greater abuses and larger failures. But if you choose, as a journalist or a consumer of journalism, to focus on smaller issues, you need to retain your perspective about what is bigger and what is smaller.

So by all means, follow the trail on Steele. But be mindful that much of that trail was prepared by people who want to misdirect and mislead. Take care how far you step along that trail. Be alert to how the twists of the trail block your view of the surrounding landscape. Otherwise, you may discover too late that you have also been misdirected and misled, and that in setting out to explore a small truth, you have become a participant in the selling of a greater lie.

David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020). In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

Wednesday, January 6, 2021

What can I even say about today?

We have two years to get some things done now. But while we do, we will be fending off fact-free fascists that want to rule through might. The events of today will pass, and those on the far right will have a really hard time of it. But when you have family members that want to defend the fucking Proud Boys, I'm not sure where that leaves us. There really is a divide, and we are going to lose people over this.

For those in the back: If you support the sedition and treason that is happening today from Trump and his supporters, you do not love Democracy, the Constitution or this country.

I'd like to hope that this is just the last gasp of insanity before reality finally sets in for these people, but we could be in for a rough ride. Make no mistake though, these people will not take this country from us, and they will not change the history to support their narrative. They will be looked upon as a blemish on this great nation.

And with this day behind us, let's hope we can move forward again.

Friday, December 4, 2020

Rebecca Solnit: On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway

https:/lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-on-not-meeting-nazis-halfway/?fbclid=IwAR1PSDrRi30YOhDtX_H5yYYExm-UcWfadD_qEmsCZM2X38wjnqtjvwpawXY

When Trump won the 2016 election—while losing the popular vote—the New York Times seemed obsessed with running features about what Trump voters were feeling and thinking. These pieces treated them as both an exotic species and people it was our job to understand, understand being that word that means both to comprehend and to grant some sort of indulgence to. Now that Trump has lost the 2020 election, the Los Angeles Times has given their editorial page over to letters from Trump voters, who had exactly the sort of predictable things to say we have been hearing for far more than four years, thanks to the New York Times and what came to seem like about 11,000 other news outlets hanging on the every word of every white supremacist they could convince to go on the record.

 

The letters editor headed this section with, “In my decade editing this page, there has never been a period when quarreling readers have seemed so implacably at odds with each other, as if they get their facts and values from different universes. As one small attempt to bridge the divide, we are providing today a page full of letters from Trump supporters.” The implication is the usual one: we—urban multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian America—need to spend more time understanding MAGA America. The demands do not go the other way. Fox and Ted Cruz and the Federalist have not chastised their audiences, I feel pretty confident, with urgings to enter into discourse with, say, Black Lives Matter activists, rabbis, imams, abortion providers, undocumented valedictorians, or tenured lesbians. When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. We are told to consider this bipartisanship, but the very word means both sides abandon their partisanship, and Mitch McConnell and company have absolutely no interest in doing that.

 

Paul Waldman wrote a valuable column in the Washington Post a few years ago, in which he pointed out that this discord is valuable fuel to right-wing operatives: “The assumption is that if Democrats simply choose to deploy this powerful tool of respect, then minds will be changed and votes will follow. This belief, widespread though it may be, is stunningly naive.” He notes that the sense of being disrespected “doesn’t come from the policies advocated by the Democratic Party, and it doesn’t come from the things Democratic politicians say. Where does it come from? An entire industry that’s devoted to convincing white people that liberal elitists look down on them. The right has a gigantic media apparatus that is devoted to convincing people that liberals disrespect them, plus a political party whose leaders all understand that that idea is key to their political project and so join in the chorus at every opportunity.”

 

There’s also often a devil’s bargain buried in all this, that you flatter and, yeah, respect these white people who think this country is theirs by throwing other people under the bus—by disrespecting immigrants and queer people and feminists and their rights and views. And you reinforce that constituency’s sense that they matter more than other people when you pander like this, and pretty much all the problems we’ve faced over the past four years, to say nothing of the last five hundred, come from this sense of white people being more important than nonwhites, Christians than non-Christians, native-born than immigrant, male than female, straight than queer, cis-gender than trans.

 

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito just complained that “you can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman. Now it’s considered bigotry.” This is a standard complaint of the right: the real victim is the racist who has been called a racist, not the victim of his racism, the real oppression is to be impeded in your freedom to oppress. And of course Alito is disingenuous; you can say that stuff against marriage equality (and he did). Then other people can call you a bigot, because they get to have opinions too, but in his scheme such dissent is intolerable, which is fun coming from a member of the party whose devotees wore “fuck your feelings” shirts at its rallies and popularized the term “snowflake.”

 

Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?

 

I think our side, if you’ll forgive my ongoing shorthand and binary logic, has something to offer everyone and we can and must win in the long run by offering it, and offering it via better stories and better means to make those stories reach everyone. We actually want to see everyone have a living wage, access to healthcare, and lives unburdened by medical, student, and housing debt. We want this to be a thriving planet when the babies born this year turn 80 in 2100. But the recommended compromise means abandoning and diluting our stories, not fortifying and improving them (and finding ways for them to actually reach the rest of America, rather than having them warped or shut out altogether). I’ve spent much of my adult life watching politicians like Bill Clinton and, at times, Barack Obama sell out their own side to placate the other, with dismal results, and I pray that times have changed enough that Joe Biden will not do it all over again.

 

Among the other problems with the LA Times’s editor’s statement is that one side has a lot of things that do not deserve to be called facts, and their values are too often advocacy for harming many of us on the other side. Not to pick on one news outlet: Sunday, the Washington Post ran a front-page sub-head about the #millionMAGAmarch that read “On stark display in the nation’s capital were two irreconcilable versions of America, each refusing to accept what the other considered to be undeniable fact.” Except that one side did have actual facts, notably that Donald J. Trump lost the election, and the other had hot and steamy delusions.

 

I can comprehend, and do, that lots of people don’t believe climate change is real, but is there some great benefit in me listening, again, to those who refuse to listen to the global community of scientists and see the evidence before our eyes? A lot of why the right doesn’t “understand” climate change is that climate change tells us everything is connected, everything we do has far-reaching repercussions, and we’re responsible for the whole, a message at odds with their idealization of a version of freedom that smells a lot like disconnection and irresponsibility. But also climate denial is the result of fossil fuel companies and the politicians they bought spreading propaganda and lies for profit, and I understand that better than the people who believe it. If half of us believe the earth is flat, we do not make peace by settling on it being halfway between round and flat. Those of us who know it’s round will not recruit them through compromise. We all know that you do better bringing people out of delusion by being kind and inviting than by mocking them, but that’s inviting them to come over, which is not the same thing as heading in their direction.

 

The editor spoke of facts, and he spoke of values. In the past four years too many members of the right have been emboldened to carry out those values as violence. One of the t-shirts at the #millionMAGAmarch this weekend: “Pinochet did nothing wrong.” Except stage a coup, torture and disappear tens of thousands of Chileans, and violate laws and rights. A right-wing conspiracy to overthrow the Michigan government and kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer was recently uncovered, racists shot some Black Lives Matter protestors and plowed their cars into a lot of protests this summer. The El Paso anti-immigrant massacre was only a year ago; the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre two years ago, the Charlottesville white-supremacist rally in which Heather Heyer was killed three years ago (and of course there have been innumerable smaller incidents all along). Do we need to bridge the divide between Nazis and non-Nazis? Because part of the problem is that we have an appeasement economy, a system that is supposed to be greased by being nice to the other side.

 

Appeasement didn’t work in the 1930s and it won’t work now. That doesn’t mean that people have to be angry or hate back or hostile, but it does mean they have to stand on principle and defend what’s under attack. There are situations in which there is no common ground worth standing on, let alone hiking over to. If Nazis wanted to reach out and find common ground and understand us, they probably would not have had that tiki-torch parade full of white men bellowing “Jews will not replace us” and, also, they would not be Nazis. Being Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes is all part of a project of refusing to understand as part of refusing to respect. It is a minority position but by granting it deference we give it, over and over, the power of a majority position.

 

In fact the whole Republican Party, since long before Trump, has committed itself to the antidemocratic project of trying to create a narrower electorate rather than win a wider vote. They have invested in voter suppression as a key tactic to win, and the votes they try to suppress are those of Black voters and other voters of color. That is a brutally corrupt refusal to allow those citizens the rights guaranteed to them by law. Having failed to prevent enough Black people from voting in the recent election, they are striving mightily to discard their votes after the fact. What do you do with people who think they matter more than other people? Catering to them reinforces that belief, that they are central to the nation’s life, they are more important, and their views must prevail. Deference to intolerance feeds intolerance.

 

Years ago the linguist George Lakoff wrote that Democrats operate as kindly nurturance-oriented mothers to the citizenry, Republicans as stern discipline-oriented fathers. But the relationship between the two parties is a marriage, between an overly deferential wife and an overbearing and often abusive husband (think of how we got our last two Supreme Court justices and failed to get Merrick Garland). The Hill just ran a headline that declared “GOP Senators say that a Warren nomination would divide Republicans.” I am pretty sure they didn’t run headlines that said, “Democratic Senators say a Pompeo (or Bolton or Perdue or Sessions) nomination would divide Democrats.” I grew up in an era where wives who were beaten were expected to do more to soothe their husbands and not challenge them, and this carries on as the degrading politics of our abusive national marriage.

 

Some of us don’t know how to win. Others can’t believe they ever lost or will lose or should, and their intransigence constitutes a kind of threat. That’s why the victors of the recent election are being told in countless ways to go grovel before the losers. This unilateral surrender is how misogyny and racism are baked into a lot of liberal and centrist as well as right-wing positions, this idea that some people need to be flattered and buffered even when they are harming the people who are supposed to do the flattering and buffering, even when they are the minority, even when they’re breaking the law or lost the election. Lakoff didn’t quite get to the point of saying that this nation lives in a household full of what domestic abuse advocates call coercive control, in which one partner’s threats, intimidations, devaluations, and general shouting down control the other.

 

This is what marriages were before feminism, with the abused wife urged to placate and soothe the furious husband. Feminism is good for everything, and it’s a good model for seeing that this is both outrageous and a recipe for failure. It didn’t work in marriages, and it never was the abused partner’s job to prevent the abuse by surrendering ground and rights and voice. It is not working as national policy either. Now is an excellent time to stand on principle and defend what we value, and I believe it’s a winning strategy too, or at least brings us closer to winning than surrender does. Also, it’s worth repeating, we won, and being gracious in victory is still being victorious.


Thursday, November 19, 2020

Checking In, Week 3

Well, things have calmed down (not really any less crazy, just quieter). It's nice to think of a world where we don't really have to think about Trump much longer and we can start to solve actual problems, like the pandemic response. I'm curious to see what the right-wingers say after we are still talking about the virus for the next several months--at that point, it should be clear that we didn't make it up to hurt Trump, because we will still all be dealing with it after January and into the next year.

I've had a couple of thoughts relevant to the right wing bubble this week. Mainly because I still know people that back the current admin and enablers. One is about risk perception, and the other is about what the First Amendment actually means. They both are tied to our ideas of freedom.

I bring up risk because it seems to contrast in the people who don't believe in the danger of the virus and people that do. It's a spectrum, and some people are probably overly risk averse, while too many others, unfortunately, seem to engage in risky behavior that right now is endangering everyone. Many people's version of American freedom is selfish. Freedom to do as they please, and not be constrained by someone else's idea of restraint. Great risk takers often succeed in life, but often after failing numerous times. We need some of these risk takers for business, innovation, science and art. But for some areas, the risk taking affects other people, and those are the times where moral dilemmas develop. People I know that are extreme risk takers, to me exhibit a lack of caring about other people. Not that they don't care at all about others, but they definitely do not think about the consequences of their actions long term. Great artists are often insufferable people that ultimately sacrifice their good relationships in order to create. We have a large section of our culture that doesn't think long term. They claim to be good people, but don't really place the well being of others above their own interests.

Our culture also has a large misunderstanding about what Freedom of Speech actually is. Many people think it just means that you are free to say anything you want. While this is true, there are also conditionals. Is is not freedom from the consequences of your speech. And it also doesn't apply if it's not from the government. I am under no obligation as an individual to let you say anything. I can scream over you if I want (it might make me an asshole, but I'm free to do that, along with having to accept the consequences of my own behavior). I am certainly not under any obligation to let you say what you want without rebuttal or difference of opinion. Right now, people on the right are trying to act like their freedom of speech is being repressed (both in simply expressing their opinions and also the movement of so-called religious freedom). The thing about freedom within the First Amendment (and in general really), is that there are TWO types. Freedom TO do something, and freedom FROM something. The current war the left and right are fighting, I think boils down to this. The right wants the freedom to do what they want, but don't see how their freedom to do some things (like hate speech, discrimination and oppressions based on their beliefs) come into conflict with others' right to be free from discrimination and oppression, or the freedom to simply live their life unmolested. The "freedom" to not get vaccinated or wear a goddamn mask, tramples on others' right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Because we are in a social contract. I know it is scary when something appears like mob justice. Part of that is the price we pay where we live in a society where, in general, the majority rules. And a lot of it is simply overblown. It's hard for me to feel sympathy to comedians and right wing people complaining about political correctness and cancel culture, when then enact policies that are actually oppressing and harming people.

I'm starting to digress, so let me return to freedom of speech. Being fact-checked is not a violation of freedom of speech, nor are you being oppressed. Trying to protect minority groups from faith-based discrimination is not a violation of your freedom either. You are under no obligation to personally engage in behavior your find unacceptable, but if you have a business or job that supplies goods or services to the general public, you aren't being oppressed when you are expected to deliver those goods and services to the general public. Especially if you hold a State or Federal job. Your religious beliefs are irrelevant to anyone but yourself. You want things to change? Change hearts and minds, like we are trying to do. When you try to do it through force, willful ignorance and just belligerence, you seem like a fascist and an asshole, and will be treated as such. And that isn't oppressing you either; it's just a consequence of your actions.

So run off to Parler if you want. Get your feelings hurt over being called out on your willful ignorance and your "alternative facts". You'll get over it. You'll be back. Or you will simply be left behind.

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Checking In, part 2

Media outlets have now called the race for Biden, though no votes have been certified yet. It looks like we will be rid of Trump, though some seats were lost in the House (still hold the majority), and the Senate looks to be determined by runoffs in Georgia in January. In the meantime, Trump and his followers are continuing to undermine the election process and are doing so with their usual false narrative in place of facts. And large portions of the American populace are eating it up. This, I think, is what was unsettling me a week ago.

Instead of a complete repudiation of Trumpism, we just barely won. That means there is still a lot of work to do. People have become so insulated in their own bubbles, and now the Trumpers are going to further retreat in their own microcosm. It had already begun prior to the election. Even Fox News had become too critical for some, and they started seeking out even more conservative outlets to join the ranks of Breitbart and the like. OAN is on the rise. And now, we have huge shifts of the alt-right (and make no mistake, they are not Republicans or conservatives; they are a dangerous fringe that has become way too large and influential) from Facebook and Twitter to Parler and MeWe. Ironically, to their own version of a safe space. An echo chamber where QAnon will breed, unchecked along with disinformation. It's a confusion of believing that Free Speech means anything goes without consequences (like simply being called out or disagreed with). For people that seem to want to protest against political correctness, they seem to have awfully thin skin. And they are not afraid to try to make their fantasy a reality (like the nonsense the President is currently trying to pull regarding false accusations of voting fraud; the only documented fraud so far has been on their side).

Epistemology is the study of knowledge; an offshoot of philosophy that talks about what knowledge is and how we know what we know. If you'll allow me to oversimplify, I still believe in objective truth, in that most questions can at least theoretically be confirmed or denied; and if they can't then they are either unknowable or currently beyond our capability for reason or science to determine. Ethics often falls into this greyer area, but even most major religions usually agree on the basics.

So here's what is concerning me now. Disinformation spreads so quickly. Large numbers of people do not have the skill or the desire to seek out information, to fact check, to think logically. We have the technology to produce Deep Fakes, where even video can be manipulated to show something altered from the truth. We now have all of these people with their reprehensible beliefs retreating back into the shadows and forming organized coalitions to confirm each others' bias even more. Opinions are held as equally important as facts. Beliefs overtake knowledge, even that of experts. How are we going to determine the truth going forward? How are we going to sort through the noise to get factual information? How are we going to convince our loved ones that they are on a strange and dangerous path? Why are they clinging to Pizzagate, QAnon, the Deep State, crazy "experts" that talk about demons and angels? And if they have fully retreated into the shadows, how will we know what they are up to? I don't really want to subject myself to these ramblings that resemble severe mental illness, but they are dangerous. They are armed, and angry and full of hate and misinformation.

I still believe we need to work on ourselves to figure out how to change hearts and minds, but we also have to be ready for conflict. This is not a call to arms; it's just some food for thought and a warning. We have to keep our eyes open to what they are thinking and saying and doing. Hopefully, we can get some policies in place that will quell the anger and disenfranchisement they feel. To disarm the beast through met needs before violence occurs. Getting rid of Trump is not enough. Something has awoken; something that used to walk in darkness has been roaming around in the daylight. It's not some supernatural beast, it is simply the worst aspects of humanity. This isn't over. It is just beginning.

So, yes, this went to a dark place. Because it is a glimpse into my fear, my uneasiness. Let me end though, by reiterating that I still believe in us. I still believe in justice. I still believe in our country. We will get through this. But it is not time to rest. We won a battle, but the fight for our nation's soul still continues. Be strong. Try to be kind.

Wednesday, November 4, 2020

Checking in

Well, it's the day after election day. 2020 has obviously been a monster in so many ways. We still don't know the full outcome of the election, and likely won't for perhaps a few days, maybe longer. It's not over, and I am trying to remain hopeful. I still think it's likely Biden will win, but the Senate takeover is less certain. The Blue Wave either didn't really happen, or it was met with an almost equal Red Wave. And that's disappointing, to put it mildly. I know people are really struggling with this. It's similar to 2004 and 2016 in a lot of ways, and the feelings are similar as well. How can so many people support these people after all we've seen and heard?

Pollsters and both parties are currently unable to understand what is going on with the current electorate psychologically, especially on opposing sides. That is what might be troubling me the most. If we don't understand how we got here, how can we begin to fix it? Avoid it from happening again?

I've been struggling with this is a philosophical way lately. If you know me, you know my first degree is in philosophy, and I have a great interest in it, particularly in moral philosophy. For most of my life, I have prescribed to the Hobbesian concept that humans are animals that will tear each other apart if given the opportunity. That is our natural state. But ethics and the social contract is where much of our evolution now takes place. Lately, partly brought on by age and having kids (I don't really know why?), I have been questioning whether we really are savages. I still believe ethics occupies that realm of "potential", but have been more hopeful about humankind's ability to rise above that preconceived nature.

Now, yet again, I question my new-found hopefulness. What are we? What is going on here? Our "side" is not winning hearts and minds. At least not enough. Why? That's the biggest question I think we need to be considering. Why is what is so self-evident to us not so to others? Is it really as simple as 40%-ish of our entire country doesn't realize we can rise above our animal state? That our ethics and social contract entails working together for a common betterment? Yes, there are racists, misogynists, bigots, homophobes, transphobes, xenophobes, neo nazis and fascists. But I just don't know that I'm ready to accept that almost half the country are those things. Even if they are, until an actual, physical revolution occurs, the path is still to change hearts and minds (and hopefully before it comes to that).

I'm not in a place yet where I can begin to tell anyone how we do this. Win hearts and minds. All I can say right now, while bouncing between sadness, fear and anger, I am still not willing to give up on hope. We find our people and we start to take stock of what matters to us. We are what stands in the way of greed and selfishness and oppression, so we cannot give up on that. I know we are all tired from what this year, these past few years have thrown at us. We long for something to let up. To return to normal. Exhaustion comes in many forms, but like the pandemic, these stressors are not likely to disappear any time soon. Even if the political landscape changed in the way we wanted, it still wouldn't just erase the parts we don't like.

So maybe the first hearts and minds we need to change are our own. Thich Naht Hanh says that suffering comes from the disconnect between what is and what we think ought to be. So the role of morality (to turn things into what we think they ought to be) is by definition, wrought with suffering. My people, it is time to put the oxygen masks around our own mouths first. We must take care of ourselves to get through this, and then we can begin to try to once again take care of others. To have the strength to remember hope, and to gain the ability to change hearts and minds.

Right now, in this moment, I feel the hope and strength necessary to deliver this message. Later, I may not. So this is a thing we can do for each other. I hope that this gives at least some comfort to anyone that is feeling anxiety about where we are. I do believe we can get through this, no matter what happens. And if nothing else, remember this quote from Patton Oswalt that his late wife used to tell him: It's chaos. Be kind.

Thursday, February 20, 2020

Corporations receiving US subsidies

https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/top-100-parents

RankParentSubsidy Valuesort iconNumber of Awards
1Boeing$14,908,500,7351,449
2General Motors$6,873,943,055734
3Intel$5,992,621,396142
4Alcoa$5,805,167,889176
5Foxconn Technology Group (Hon Hai Precision Industry Company)$4,825,691,16872
6Ford Motor$4,328,501,671583
7NRG Energy$3,900,376,199275
8Cheniere Energy$3,864,202,23924
9Sempra Energy$3,361,530,95839
10NextEra Energy$2,697,269,35261
11Southern Company$2,533,816,774101
12Tesla Motors$2,441,582,590112
13Iberdrola$2,287,629,113107
14Amazon.com$2,287,574,819202
15Fiat Chrysler Automobiles$2,196,662,312203
16General Electric$2,103,493,5611,930
17Nike$2,094,781,049124
18Mubadala Investment Company$2,035,262,37153
19Summit Power$1,979,911,3718
20Venture Global LNG$1,869,575,0002
21General Atomics$1,852,433,143343
22Sasol$1,851,232,18068
23Nissan$1,826,106,41582
24Cerner$1,822,536,29635
25Royal Dutch Shell$1,795,683,725126
26Lockheed Martin$1,722,330,660937
27Berkshire Hathaway$1,716,186,754797
28IBM Corp.$1,692,290,571487
29Dow Inc.$1,598,981,545625
30SCS Energy$1,590,807,7859
31JPMorgan Chase$1,579,880,6171,085
32Energy Transfer$1,415,135,74569
33Northrop Grumman$1,276,747,990451
34ArcelorMittal$1,251,572,16178
35United Technologies$1,247,982,4061,251
36Duke Energy$1,243,735,74858
37Continental AG$1,234,592,09387
38Walt Disney$1,180,896,180174
39Archer Daniels Midland$1,178,754,3201,086
40Jefferies Financial Group$1,120,662,49727
41Abengoa$1,082,520,58361
42Volkswagen$1,071,478,31173
43Exxon Mobil$1,015,682,466136
44Toyota$998,386,939165
45Forest City Enterprises$984,244,83779
46Exelon$936,629,37484
47Valero Energy$921,967,565157
48Mazda Toyota Manufacturing, U.S.A., Inc.$900,000,0001
49Comcast$896,011,755233
50Pyramid Companies$887,944,84269
51Alphabet Inc.$882,966,35051
52Air Products & Chemicals$881,810,290244
53Delta Air Lines$878,127,08122
54Bayer$836,033,262187
55Apple Inc.$820,690,82624
56Brookfield Asset Management$818,014,584133
57CF Industries$810,715,94559
58SunEdison$803,513,344114
59Goldman Sachs$796,696,599246
60OGE Energy$795,624,58810
61E.ON$793,913,15932
62Texas Instruments$791,974,64357
63Nucor$761,737,180119
64NuScale Power$755,327,31125
65Triple Five Worldwide$748,000,0004
66AES Corp.$746,436,07378
67Daimler$734,272,908142
68EDF-Electricite de France$733,941,55056
69EDP-Energias de Portugal$733,555,38313
70Johnson Controls$728,713,090152
71LG$706,586,50742
72Battelle$702,413,98630
73Bank of America$689,530,980892
74American Electric Power$687,832,36968
75Michelin$674,756,21281
76Verizon Communications$674,490,850296
77Sagamore Development$660,000,0001
78Caithness Energy$653,769,41123
79Dominion Energy$639,237,17661
80Ameren$618,093,39811
81Bedrock Detroit$618,000,0001
82General Dynamics$606,070,421337
83FedEx$598,690,645501
84Mayo Clinic$587,888,7818
85Wells Fargo$580,703,961438
86AT&T$580,593,897435
87Microsoft$579,237,29572
88Invenergy$573,139,53521
89Sears$572,269,11177
90Clean Coal Power Operations$550,000,0001
90Sematech$550,000,0003
91SkyWest$547,095,291279
92Scripps Research Institute$545,000,0001
93Dell Technologies$541,217,623181
94Siemens$530,377,483449
95Edison International$527,175,01241
96Honeywell International$519,941,926701
97Raytheon$519,684,831291
98Koch Industries$511,186,137351
99Citigroup$504,768,056859