Hammer Of The Blogs

I've enjoyed (most of) Michael Moore's schtick and work for decades, starting with Roger and Me, and undeniably powerful evisceration of corporate greed and lies. But his inane critiques at supposed "bubble" liberals have taken on the catechistic sheen of a mindless dogma, untroubled by critical thought or intellectual honesty.

There's no second-guessing Moore's unfortunate accuracy as a political prognosticator; he predicted Clownstick winning six months before it happened, when catfished pollsters and punch-drunk journamalists were veering between snickering at the folly and regaling the slow-motion collapse of his futile campaign. So much for the smart set, right?

But Moore has said his share of stupid, unhelpful shit as well. In Moore's view, liberals are in the bubble, as are New York and Hollywood. It's never the hallowed opioid havens of his sacred rust belt ghost towns that might need to listen to other people once in a while, or maybe get at least some of their "facts" from somewhere other than Fixed Noise and reality teevee.

No, it's always, always Moore's supposed ideological compadres that need to listen to....well, to be honest, I have no idea what precisely we're supposed to be hearing. Because countless journos have spelunked up 'murka's gaping asshole, vainly trying to get the perfect post-mortem from Real 'murkins. I've read far too many of them, and most of them make no sense at all (I just trust him), or rely on things we know to be flat-out lies (he's a great businessman with a history of turning things around).

Just as stupid is Moore's vapid assertion that liberals should watch Celebrity Apprentice and American Idol and The Bachelorette (as if, you know, none of them ever do). Leaving aside the momentary surprise that he left out Duck Dynasty and the various Real Housewives franchises, again I would ask Moore if he's ever suggested to "them" that they watch something that "we" supposedly all watch. I've never seen any of those shows, and I never will, though I am aware of them thanks to endless commercials and The Soup. Life's too short to actually sit through that mess.

If other people want to rot their brains on that shit, more power to them. But it adds nothing to the discussion, although it does explain the bizarre epistemology in play with that generalized demographic. They probably throw money they don't have at millionaire megachurches and televangelists, and trust the astrology section of their newspapers. Should we faithless heathens entreaty those ethereal demons as well?

Think about it, in the context of the five aforementioned shows, and how what those shows really entail dovetails with the electoral reasoning Moore implores us smug smarties to plug into, for some insane reason. Let's take those shows (are they still even on?) one at a time:

• Celebrity Apprentice:  Slightly well-known people, fallen on hard times, compete to start a fake business that they will never run, and are judged by a fake billionaire who pretends to fire them, one by one. Proceeds go to the Human Fund!
• American Idol:  Do they still do that thing in the first few weeks where they humiliate really untalented wannabes on-camera? Boy, that whole William Hung thing was just awesome, wasn't it? Good times. Aside from Carrie Underwood, have any of the finalists or winners really "made it", whatever "it" is these days?
• The Bachelorette:  I think I made the analogy at some point during the campaign that maintaining the belief that Clownstick is a good or even competent businessman is roughly equal to believing that the "winners" in these stupid hookup shows actually get married or even engaged. If I want to watch people fuck in a hot tub, I'll just go to XHamster or something. But Moore's ZOMG! She chose Thorn instead of Brick! fangirl gushing as a serious example of the sort of Real 'murkin decision-makin' that smug bubble-libruls must embrace is just embarrassing to read. Seriously, dude, take some testosterone supplements and eat a steak, before you find yourself on the same menstrual cycle as these suckers.
• Duck Dynasty:  Fake hillbillies who spout real jingoism. Their main selling point seems to be that they actually like each other and pray before dinner. [mimes jerkoff motion] Oh, and the patriarch has a side hustle going around to mega-churches and political campaigns spouting off about how fags are like dog-fuckers. He was at the Roy Moore rally the other night, so there's that.
• Real Housewives:  A bunch of botoxed, fake-tit cunts trying to out-cunt each other. Bitch I'll pull yo weave!

I've said it since the first season of Survivor, and my opinion has not changed one iota:  reality teevee is the most noxious, toxic spew to permeate the boob tube. It's ruined this country to an incalculable degree. It's certainly made some people visibly dumber, less lucid, less cognizant of the real world around them. It's (literally) mindless escapism, and nothing more. Your brain would be less polluted by watching keyboard-cat and log-fireplace videos all day.

What reality teevee does -- and again, though I really have never directly watched any of it, I've read reviews and critiques here and there over the years, been inundated with commercials and promos and news items about the various "winners" and "contestants", and hate-watched The Soup during the Joel McHale years, so I have a pretty good idea -- is culturally unhealthy and corrosive in the aggregate. It wallows primarily in these main traits:

• Cutthroat behavior and backstabbing.
• Public humiliation.
• Toxic behavior.

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect is the rather obvious issue that it's not any more real than professional wrestling. Everything is in fact scripted and scrupulously edited toward a pre-planned outcome. The whole thing is meticulously staged, if at times to conform to flash polls and the like. Many of the reality teevee fans I know personally seem to watch at least several of them, all the time. The "seasons" are scheduled so as to be constant; there is no "off-season" anymore for this sort of hastily-crafted discount programming.

Imagine letting this crap through your eyes and ears to steadily erode your cerebellum for going on two decades now. What do you think that does to your perception of "reality"? Throw in the more recent epistemological conveniences of social media, and you have a sizable contingent of addled people who are being poked with a culture-war stick. They can pick which "facts" and "reality" suit them best, and since they have eroded their capacity to discern or care what is empirically "true," they simply act on pure id and volition.

In fact, this is an ideal situation for them. As mentioned in a recent post, this is also a contingent that routinely fetishizes the symbols and ceremonies of "democracy" as they perceive it, but they are actively hostile toward the actual principles of democracy, especially free speech that they disagree with, especially when it comes from uppity black folks.

So it's dismaying to see Moore throw in with the tedious rube-whisperer lectures of the likes of Mudcat Saunders and Chris Arnade and such. It's a sucker's bet; either you take seriously the reasons and principles why you believe in and agree with conventionally "liberal" ideals, and you try to find ways to bring other reasonable people into the fold, or you don't.

Someone who addles their brain with reality teevee, watched Fixed Noise for their "information," and hasn't read a book in years, is not a serious person. At all. That doesn't mean you write them off completely, but it does mean you don't waste the effort of crafting a significant part of your party strategy around catering to their dipshit notions.

In 2008, Barack Obama won by the largest margin -- by far -- since Reagan in 1984. The Democrats took a supermajority in the Senate, and a considerable majority in the House. Did you see any "important" or "influential" conservative "thinkers" imploring the rubes to maybe take a look across the aisle and see why Obama won? Did any of them crank out any sort of Listen, Conservative jabber?

Even the current "heterodox" conservative writers who do lambaste the base, such as Kevin Williamson and J.D. Vance, are not encouraging those folks to listen to ideas from the "other side" in order to synthesize some sort of magical winning coalition that can actually get shit done. They're simply telling the goobers on their side to get their shit together and start taking responsibility for themselves. They sure as hell aren't telling them to watch The Wire and listen to Beyoncé.

Look. None of this is to say that all pop culture is shit, and all the people who enjoy it are stupid. The problem is Moore's thesis that centers the most vapid pop culture artifacts as some sort of barometer for understanding the mindset of the average American. And the sad fact is that if Moore is correct in that estimation, then we are waaayyyyy more fucked than we can possibly imagine.

Even Fredo Arbusto, bless his simian muzzle, wasn't this fucking stupid:

[Drumpf] had an opportunity at the start of his presidency to begin with a more or less clean slate with China, and he has now very likely frittered that away for nothing. At best, [Drumpf] has pointlessly antagonized Beijing in a way that will have lingering effects on his dealings with them for months and possibly years to come. At the very worst, his careless freelancing could produce a real crisis between China and Taiwan that could end up dragging in the U.S.

It's hard to conceive of any "stupider like a fox" reason to do something like this. Why would a brilliant bidnessman needlessly jeopardize his yuuuge bidness interests in another country, a vital trading partner? There is no percentage whatsoever -- strategically, geopolitically, financially -- in doing something like this.

This is not to say that there aren't issues that need to be worked out with the Chinese. They are building a deep-water fleet to secure their place as regional hegemon, the ultimate goal of which would probably be to control the Strait of Malacca (through which most of the world's oil travels). Additionally, they are building artificial islands near the Senkaku (aka Diaoyu) Islands, under and around which lie large deposits of oil and natural gas, in conflict with Japan. The violent thug that has taken over the Philippines is sucking up to the Chinese, which runs counter to our purported strategic interests.

Hell, it may be time to back away and concentrate on tilling our own field anyway. This century is likely going to gravitate toward the Indian Ocean nations anyway, based on demographics and yet another book our non-reader-in-thief will never read and wouldn't understand anyway.

The last time a preznit fucked the dog unnecessarily with China, a few months later 9/11 happened. Those two events are not directly connected, but if this regime got too much attention for the sheer incompetence and belligerence of its dopey figurehead, you wouldn't put it past them to cook up some false-flag event as a distraction. And it would work.

It's no surprise that Bo Dietl is an ignorant, jingoist asshole, but I didn't realize that he'd lost his fucking mind. Someone might want to tell Bo about decaf.

Also, too -- people are still listening to Don Imus? I mean, I guess Paul Harvey's audience needed somewhere to mosey off to after that clown bought the farm, but shit. I almost feel like we should all chip in and get these angry codgers the Murder She Wrote and Matlock box sets.

Folks of a certain age will recall Reagan's apocryphal Cadillac-driving "welfare queen." Turns out, not only did she actually exist, but welfare fraud was the least of her transgressions. Very long article, but well worth the read.

Holy shit. Something to think about next time a, um, gun-rights enthusiast starts in again about the encroaching power of the state. And hell, this ain't even the state, it's the city of Henderson, Nevada.

Seriously, look at the photo in the link, how many stormtroopers do you see on that man's porch? Was this another backyard terrorist? No, this guy refused their "request" to vacate his own home so that they [the cops] could set up shop and use his house to spy on a neighbor who was the subject of a domestic violence report.

So this is a thing in America now, that these pissant, jackbooted Barney Fifes get to push taxpayers around on DV disputes involving their fucking neighbors? Forget drones overflying and checking out your property (though that will be a thing as well), because you can skull-fuck America with your bullshit derivatives, but lord help you if Eric Holder sees that you grow a few plants to supplement your measly "legitimate" income.

I usually don't bother with the Alex Jones "they're coming to get you" sort of guff, but this is really a "what the fuck" sort of moment, that probably happens more often than we realize. Consider the balls it must take for the police force of a Vegas suburb of about a quarter-million people, to demand that a homeowner surrender his home because his next-door neighbor might be a wife-beater.

It is important not only that Anthony Mitchell be duly recompensed in his lawsuit, but that every single law-enforcement "professional" involved in this mess experience an immediate and drastic career change.

Not be an insensitive asshole (well, that's not true), but when your religious tradition involves closing a wound on a baby's penis by sucking it, and said tradition has been found to cause herpes, uh, it might be time to scrap said sacred gross act. Just a thought.

OK, Gilberto Valle is a disgusting bastard, and at the very least should not be a police officer. But you can read through the entire article, and still ot be completely sure of what exactly Valle is being charged with. (Conspiracy to commit kidnapping and murder, for the record.) If he had simply written a narrative around his sick fantasies, he'd either be a late-coming Hollywood torture-porn auteur, or a bestselling Kindle author.

This is not Minority Report, and we do not have people who can pre-cog with certainty the eventual commission of a crime, no matter how awful the potential. Without even any equipment being purchased, or any money to potential partners being exchanged, it's hard to justify completely wrecking someone's life -- and possibly putting them in prison for the rest of their life -- because of their twisted internet posts.

I'm not even going to invoke the slippery slope argument, but if you're going to bust Valle, then you need to bust everyone he talked to, everyone he "plotted" with, everyone lurking on these sick fetish sites. Which actually might not be a bad idea, not that they should be imprisoned for conspiracy for kidnapping or murder, but if a person or animal is being harmed for their "entertainment" purposes, then bust them for that.

This is a tough one. Valle's activities should make any decent person sick to their stomachs. But unless the participants in his fetish videos were actually harmed, he's not guilty of any crime, and it sets a dangerous precedent to prosecute him as such.

Bobo has some words of civility for all you kidz out there, and while he certainly has a point, I would submit that there's no percentage in dealing with your Akin/Mourdock breed of chumps politely, not to mention this horse's ass. Is there something in the water in Indiana or what? For every Dave Letterman or Kurt Vonnegut the state produces, there seem to be a half-dozen or so of halfwits like Steve Kruse.

At least California Republicans, bless their pointy little heads, know better than to waste the people's time on this sort of dipshittery. Sometimes I forget how blessed we are out here in Satan's Playground to not have snake-handlers in any positions of even nominal power, maybe a bible-thumping dog-catcher here or there, but that's about the extent of it.

There is a "school" of "thought" out there purporting to claim that illiterate Americans are illiterate because the tricky phonemes and orthographic irregularities of English are too difficult to master. I submit that perhaps it's because there are too many meddlesome morons infesting school boards and governing bodies, proposing to shove one parcel or another of religious claptrap down kids' throats. Instead of, you know, educating them.

Reason #590,785 why we can't have nice things, folks. Regardless, I submit that people who make a point of being jerkoffs do not deserve special -- or even common -- consideration. People like Steve Kruse or Todd Akin know exactly what they're doing, and deserve nothing beyond a swift and stern punch to the groin.

Even after giving it a couple days to sink in, words fail when it comes to last Friday's shooting. It's hard (for me, at least) to construct a coherent narrative that doesn't feel incomplete or even a bit opportunistic.

Mass murder and serial killing in particular tend to inspire questions of "why" and "how", and those pursuits always seem inadequate and pointless to me. As always, your mileage may vary. People process these things in their own way, whether with candlelight vigils, makeshift shrines, or attempts to comprehend the actions of incomprehensible people.

A few thoughts, many of them open-ended, keep cropping up throughout this national weekend of grief, take them for what you will:

• When we talk about "gun control" after these tragic events, we should not only be careful, but also precise about what that would and should look like, and what effect it would have had on the event in question. The guns Adam Lanza used were legally owned by his mother, and as she had no criminal history nor issues that would have come up in a background check, no proposed stricture or regulation would have prevented her from anything.
  
  Now, if you're talking a ban on "assault weapons", that too needs to be written with precision and common sense, so we're on the same page as far as weapons that can fire dozens of rounds per minute, and not bickering over bayonet lugs and collapsible stocks, pretending that Something Is Being Done.
  
  Doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be done, just with the understanding that there are 320 million people in the US, and probably just as many guns, and punishing the 99% of responsible gun owners for the actions of a deranged, infinitesimal slice is not only unfair, but may not even work.


• Gun-rights advocates, some bordering on the fanatical, have reflexively (as they always do after these events) suggested that if everyone were armed, these events would never occur, or at least be neutralized well before the body counts registered by "soft targets" such as schools. This is utterly ludicrous. Consider just two examples of countries where everyone is armed to the teeth:  Somalia. Afghanistan. How's that been going?


• It is easier in the US to acquire, own, and operate a gun than an automobile. Is that a good thing, or a bad thing, and why or why not?


• You can believe in the Second Amendment, and still believe that we need to find a way to prevent -- or at least reduce -- the ease with which deranged individuals can possess weapons of slaughter, and put them to use.


• The Founding Fathers could not have conceived of handguns with 30-round magazines, or fully automatic assault rifles with 90-round (or more) clips. Had they been able to envision such an enormous technological leap, might they have written the Second Amendment any differently?


• We grieve after every one of these tragedies, even as we lose count of them, they are so commonplace. Is it the cost of doing business? Is it the notion that they can all be prevented by arming (or disarming) everyone? Does anyone else find this cycle of public grief binging, purging, and forgetting even a little bit odd, and a lot useless, if nothing ultimately gets done about it?


• It's interesting, to say the least, that calls for arming teachers in classrooms are now coming from the same corners who routinely demonize any and all facets of said profession. Really, Mister Random Conservative, are you sure you want lazy pothead librul indoctrinators packing heat? Maybe a couple Paul Blart types at each school, patrolling the perimeter with a Segway and a Sig Sauer? At least it'll create some jobs, right?


• Before using Japan, Britain, and Switzerland as arguments for or against gun control, do keep in mind the significant cultural and geographic differences between those countries and America. And I do not mean "they're cultured and we're boors". It's a hell of a lot easier to enact control mechanisms on small island nations under constant surveillance, than a sprawling, teeming landmass. And Switzerland's vaunted mandatory militia, in which each household is required to keep an assault rifle, also has a proviso that ammunition is tightly regulated, registered in fact. Don't be surprised if any gun control proposals here lean in that direction. Or even simpler, mandating a limit on clip capacities. There is absolutely no logical reason you should be able to load a 30-round clip into a Glock handgun.


• Opportunism comes in many forms after these things. It can be anything from sanctimonious assholes suggesting that we're just not godly enough, to intrepid journamalists pulling up their grief-pimping slacks and pestering second-graders outside the school where their playmates just got mowed down. Honestly, I don't know how either of those two very real examples of humans can look at themselves in the mirror when they get home at night. Probably through the bottom of a vodka bottle.

It would be nice if there were easy proposals or solutions. There aren't. Having a more comprehensive mental health care system would be a great place to start, but committing people against their will who haven't actually done anything presents another set of challenges. I dunno what to do, and I'm not going to pretend I do know. The easy answer is to point out that, again, there are 320 million people, and by the law of averages, some of them are crazy to some degree.

Hopefully the rest of us can figure out a way to prevent those folks from accessing weapons of a level of destruction that would have been unimaginable a hundred or even fifty years ago.

Also, too.

Ed ably defenestrates yet another deserving moron, but to really appreciate the full measure of crazy, read the original post, and then, for an extra side order of crazy with extra crazy sauce and crazy bread, read the comments, as well as this profile, bearing in mind that this guy used to work for Ron Paul.

Of course, even the most Paultarded things I've seen since Gandalf the Cracker cast his weird isolationist spell over our nation's befuddled masses never quite approached this intellectual loogie:

Seccession of [sic; obviously he means "Secession or"] leave. I say we've got two to three years left before they start rounding up dissenters and sending us off to Nazi-style concentration camps. I've got a little more time, cause I live in Texas.

Arizona is a good place to be for now. But New York, Iowa, Michigan, Massachusetts, PA beware. You're vastly on the road to complete authoritarianism and statism. Grab your guns, protect what few things you have left. You're living in Nazi Germany circa 1933-34.

It goes on like that; Dondero later talks about "disowning" his brother and one of his sisters, "....the fucked up brother in Delaware, piece of shit, scumbag mother fucker who is a Democrat, and another sister in Philly who won't tell me, but I'm almost certain voted for Obama....They are dead to me now. And I will not under any circumstances attend their funerals in 30 or 40 years."

One can only assume that those hapless siblings are well relieved to be rid of this thing, instead of having to help change his poopy diaper every time an election doesn't go his way. Seriously, I think we can all recall the vicious, hyperbolic nature of the 2004 "election", culminating in election fraud normally observed by Jimmy Carter in, say, Guatemala.

Plenty of butthurt liberals were threatening to move to Canada (perhaps until they realized that it's harder than you think; there's more to it than packing a U-Haul and professing loyalty to William Shatner and Geddy Lee when you hit the border). Maybe a few got weird with their friends and family, exploiting rifts along pre-existing fault lines that all families have. Hell, maybe even a few of the more vituperative may have seriously prophesied that the Cheney regime would round them up and stick them in "Nazi-style concentration camps".

But I don't think any of those extreme butthurters were former staffers for a presidential primary candidate. Nor did they go into the extensive laundry list of "activist" ideas that Dondero claims, such as loudly berating EBT card users at the Wal-Mart check stand, just in case any are within earshot and are suitably shamed by his dissatisfaction.