Accidental Historian

Everything Old...

This is an old piece from the Washington Monthly.  In fact, it's a piece from 2008.  But it's new to me and that's why I want it to be new to you.  Read it.  It's fascinating.

The thing that drew me wasn't the A Plot, which is a truly interesting story of a bunch of Baltimore criminals trying to daffiest defense of all time.  The B Plot is what got my attention, specifically the way that the B Plot was the history of the Sovereign Citizens movement.  It pulls a lot of threads together, even to the point of the cranks who think that the layout of Washington D.C. is a secret message from the Masons.

Read it.  It's kind of long, but it's illuminating in that it ties Reconstruction and Jim Crow and the Posse Commitatus movement together.  It's also illuminating in how it explains the rise of militias and how ol' Sheriff Joe out in Maricopa County thinks that he can arrest the President and all the county sheriffs who think they can stop the feds from taking away their guns.

Mostly it's interesting in the way that everything old is new again. [Via]

For the Record...

This might be my official all-time favorite picture.  I'm thinking of making it my banner picture thingy on Facebook.

Remember

Go vote.  Or, y'know, don't.  Like I have a shit to give about what you do.



Also, I'd like to draw your attention to what might be the most cogent analysis of American electoral politics in 2012.

We get set free in waves again
We're saved again
But no one rises up
And no one wises up
We get set free in waves again
Jesus saves again
We get set free in waves

...

Your flags are waved
But nobody's saved
The spiraling rate
The sovereign state
Our Superman
He says that, "Yes we can."
But we're grains of sand
We get set free in waves again
--Local H, "Waves Again"

Quite frankly, I find that little couplet, "Our Superman/He says that, "Yes we can," to be the most damning pair of lines in the entirety of Hallelujah! I'm a Bum.  So much of that album is built around bashing the Republicans, Fox News, and the whole right-wing noise machine that simply slipping that reference in works beautifully to say, "Yeah, you fuckers do it, too," to the Democrats.

Either way, I've spent the last month or so listening to Hallelujah! I'm a Bum and Green Day's American Idiot to the exclusion of almost all else, save stuff that's on my various randomized players.

This morning I rode into work listening to Harry Connick, Jr.'s She.  Our long, national nightmare is nearly over.  Now we've got at least 6 to 18 months before the next long, national nightmare begins.

This is America in 2012.  Hoo-fucking-rah.

Once again, John Scalzi does his thing.  Warning, it's pretty trigger-y.

Now, remember how I said the thing I really like about raping a woman is the control it gives me over her? Well, getting a woman pregnant is even better. Because long after I’m gone, she still has to deal with me and what I’ve done to her. She has to deal with what’s happening to her body. She has to deal with doctor visits. She has to deal with the choice whether to have an abortion or not — which means she has to deal with everyone in the country, including you, having an opinion about it and giving her crap about it. And if she does have an abortion, she has to deal with all the hassle of that, too, because folks like you, of course, have gone out of your way to make it a hassle, which I appreciate. Thank you.

On another note, I saw a quick headline yesterday that said a poll indicated Romney had erased Obama's seemingly insurmountable lead among women.  Now, I'm a regular over at FiveThirtyEight and I know all there is to know about why following individual polls is stupid.  But I'm baffled at the notion that women, who have consistently and historically voted for Democrats through the past several cycles and also voted heavily for Obama to the tune of 56-43 in 2008, would be evenly going for Romney.  A double-digit lead to a virtual tie is pretty hard to explain.

No one who I usually look to is discussing it, though, and I are confuzzled.

I'm beginning to suspect there's a methodology issue, though.  Quinnipiac put out an Ohio poll that has Obama seemingly up 16 with women, 56-40, with early voting women voting Obama at a 59-35 clip.  PPP shows Obama up 54-44 in Colorado, 51-45 in what appears to be a combined Iowa/Wisconsin poll, and 53-43 in North Carolina.  Also, he's up 57-41 in Virginia.  That is, admittedly, a small sample size.  Moreover, PPP showed Obama up 54-42 with women in results released on 10/24, which would be almost exactly in line with the metrics from 2008.

Yeah, this is cherry-picking, but I'm lazy and the PPP polls are all in one place so I can look at them.  Until Nate Silver and/or Nate Cohn (or, as I like to call them, "the Nates") write up something to explain what the fuck happened there, I'll just sit here, secure in the fact that I already voted, and be slightly confuzzled.

We're Screwed

This would be hilarious if it weren't a combination of sad and horrifying.  Basically, it's delicious bacon in the middle of a sandwich made of moldy bread and shit:

The film is the work of Joel Gilbert, whose previous claims include having tracked down Elvis Presley in the witness protection program and discovering that Paul McCartney is in fact dead.

If you can't trust the guy who found out that Elvis is alive and Paul McCartney isn't, who can you trust?

Local H and the Disposable Album

It’s hard to write about music without sounding like a pretentious blowhard or an idiotic simpleton.  It’s weird, really.  I can read Lawrence Weschler’s discussions of visual art all day with the full understanding that discussions of things like human perception with Robert Irwin and David Hockney are, by their very nature, pretentious blowhard territory.  I don’t feel like a jackass for reading that, though.  I do, however, feel like a jackass when I read shit like this (which, really, pisses me off as much as anything because in the first paragraph he proves he knows fuck-all about what he's talking about by name-dropping Temple of the Dog as a super band.  Temple was only a superband in retrospect when a bunch of record executives were trying to make an extra buck off of the explosion of the Seattle sound and, specifically, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam).  But I highly doubt it would it be better if the guy just said, say, “New music good.  You listen.”[1]

Given that, let’s talk about music.

I’m a child of the ‘90s.  That means that I have a certain level of baggage when it comes to discussing albums.  One of the big problems now is that nobody is making albums anymore.  We’ve moved past the idea of albums to $.99 downloads on iTunes and shit.  This saddens me, as I remember the joy of cracking open a CD case, sticking it in the player, and discovering music on my old RCA boombox.  That’s why I still care about things like the album of the year.  It’s also, I suppose, why I listen mostly to independent music.  Mainstream music doesn’t really seem to give a shit about the craftsmanship of an album anymore.

I suppose, though, that, mainstream music hasn’t really ever cared.  The album as a thing was really only an artifact of that brief period from the ‘70s through the ‘90s when songs were four or five minutes long and the main technology was either a chunk of vinyl or a CD.  Even in the ‘50s and ‘60s I’m given to understand the primary way music was transmitted was through the 45, from which piece of technology we get the terms “single” and “B-Side.”

When I was growing up the single made no sense.  It cost pretty much the same amount of money to buy an album as it did to buy a single, especially since the single was usually some sort of crazy German import with three songs and who the fuck really cared about that sort of thing?[2]  So I spent my formative years buying albums pretty much exclusively.[3]  Those albums, for the record, are pretty much the expected ‘90s albums: Counting Crows, Oasis, Pearl Jam, Our Lady Peace, Candlebox, etc.  Of course, I also still have a whole bunch of CDs with exactly one good track designed to sneak a $15 disc into my pocket for a buck worth of good music.  I know disappointment, but I also know the joy of a good album.

The two big ones, though, are Soundgarden’s Superunknown and Local H’s Pack Up the Cats.  Those will always be albums 1 and 2 on my list of all-time greatest albums.  No questions can be asked, no quarter given.  I used to have a rule, in fact, that if I started playing one of those albums there was absolutely no way I could stop or pause before every last second of every song had played.  This is how one properly respects an album, after all.

As such, you’d think that I’d have been excited about the news that Local H was releasing a new album last Tuesday.  You’d especially think that since in 2008 I was there for two nights of the Seven Night Stand, mostly because I couldn’t afford more, and those specific nights were for Pack Up the Cats and the release of 12 Angry Months.  You might think that because I have enjoyed the hell out of Scott Lucas’s side project, Scott Lucas & the Married Men.

You’d be wrong.  See, I knew the exact wrong things about the new album, Hallelujah! I’m a Bum.  The first thing was that it was going to be political in nature.  The second was that Scott really wanted it to come out before the election because it’s an album about the politics we have right now, in 2012.[4]  I have to say that I’m all 2012 in politics-ed out.

Still, I got the new Local H album.  On Friday.  I skipped Tuesday’s release show, even though I love CD release shows.  I was at the 12 Angry Months CD release show.  I was at the Lovehammers’ Heavy Crown release show.  I’ll be at the Lovehammers’ CD release show in December.

The problem is that I’d gotten the standard press.  Scott Lucas had something to say and, according to him, it would piss off people on both sides of the red/blue divide.  I’m tired of being pissed off.  I mean, seriously.  I’m a politics wonk even though I don’t want to be most of the time and I’ve been pissed off since some time in 2010.  I believe that time was “November.”

Still, thanks to the magic of Amazon’s Cloud Player, I was able to buy Hallelujah! I’m a Bum and listen on Friday.  This was also my first experience with Cloud Player and, let me tell you, it's great but also not that great.  I mean, I’m sold on the whole idea of the Cloud Player.  I think it’s fantastic.  I’m also reasonably certain it’s not designed to use with albums, because, holy hell, Local H put out an album last Tuesday.

Hallelujah! I’m a Bum reminds me of nothing so much as Pack Up the Cats.  In fact, if we take Local H’s albums from As Good As Dead on we can tease out a few strings.

First of all, there’s a four-word theme.  As Good As Dead.  Pack Up the Cats.  Here Comes the Zoo.  Whatever Happened to PJ Soles?[5]  Hallelujah! I’m a Bum.  Even George Lassos the Moon with the Married Men follows the pattern.

Second, there’s the cyclical nature of things.  As Good As Dead starts with “Manifest Density Pt. 1” and ends with “Manifest Density Pt. 2.”  Here Comes the Zoo ends with a 20 minute coda that repeats every song on the album in some form.  Whatever Happened to PJ Soles? goes from “Where Are They Now?” to “Halcyon Days (Where Were You Then?).”  The very last guitar riff in 12 Angry Months is the same exact guitar riff that starts the album.  Hallelujah! I’m a Bum starts with “Waves” and ends with “Waves Again.”  The latter uses the same musical structure as the former.

“Waves” is, in fact, the thesis statement of the entire project. “We get set free in waves again/We’re saved again/But no one rises up/And no one wises up/We get set free in waves again/Jesus saves again/We get set free in waves/We get set free in waves.”  This is American politics.  It makes me sad.  I think Scott thinks I should be angry, but what the fuck can I do about it?

Really, Hallelujah! is a depressing album.  I don’t know any other way to describe it.  Part of the problem, I think, is that Scott really does want it to piss off both sides but he and I are in more-or-less complete agreement on everything.  The Republicans suck.  The Democrats won’t actually save us.  So what are we going to do about it?  Everyone is going to wait for salvation and won’t rise up.  That sucks.

As far as craftsmanship goes, though, Hallelujah! is amazing.  As I’ve said, it reminds me of nothing so much as Pack Up the Cats.  It also makes me hate Amazon’s Cloud Player even though I really, really like Amazon’s Cloud Player.

See, the problem is that Hallelujah! doesn’t so much have disparate tracks.  Everything blends.  When listening to the album in any format but the Cloud Player I have no idea when one song leads to another.  In the Cloud Player there’s this obvious gap between songs.  It’s really disconcerting and it takes away from the moment.

Either way, I’ve talked about Hallelujah! a lot.  I don’t feel like I’ve made any actual useful statements about it, though.  I’m okay with that…

No, seriously.  Here’s the thing: it’s a problematic album.  The main comparisons I want to use are Pack Up the Cats and 12 Angry Months, one of which is my second-favorite album of all time, the other of which is pretty much amazeballs.  I can’t feel that way about Hallelujah!, however.  It’s too much an artifact of this exact point in American history and, specifically, a specific opinion of American politics.

The album includes samples of Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin, and Mitt Romney speeches.  The song “Here Comes ‘Ol Laptop” is a direct call-out of people who sit on their computers and attempt to be moderates engaging in false equivalencies.  It’s hard to talk about that sort of thing, though, as it’s only obvious in “Here Comes Ol’ Laptop,” “Look Who’s Walking on Four Legs Again,” “Limit Your Change,” “Feed a Fever,” and “Paddy Considine.”  That’s five of seventeen tracks.  But those five tracks pretty much inform the entire damn thing.

Also, too, this album is relentlessly Chicago.  It uses the automated announcements on the Blue Line more than anything else as atmospherics and interstitials.  For all I know that might be more distracting to someone who’s never ridden the L than a random bit of Sarah Palin saying something stupid.

Right now my big question is whether or not anything can stack up against Sons of Bill’s Sirens in 2012.  Hallelujah! I’m a Bum most certainly can.

This, however, is what creates my dilemma.  It might not be possible to be neutral on a moving Blue Line train, but it is possible to be ambivalent.  Hallelujah! is very much like Pack Up the Cats in that it's almost impossible to not listen to the entire album.  The lack of stopping points is both its great strength and weakness.  I can't actually pick a song I like best as of yet.  I can, however, say I like the flow.

Scott Lucas does something he's done many times in the past on this album: he splices in not-music to cut and separate.  In Pack Up the Cats he used answering machine messages and whistling.  In Here Comes the Zoo he used all kinds of ambient noises.  It worked to great effect in Pack Up the Cats because the not-music was on the same beat with and part of the actual songs.  It was actually somewhat distracting on Here Comes the Zoo, since the ambient noises replaced or uprooted the music.  With Hallelujah! he gets back to the Pack Up the Cats style, interspersing sounds of the Blue Line all over the place and even tossing in a conversation about the Chicago cold that links "Blue Line" to "Another February."

This gives the album a definite weight of place and could, on some level, make it a definitive Chicago album.  Rattling trains, the bong-bong of the opening door, the stop announcement, the complaints about the cold are distinct and genuine moments of Chicago-ness.  When combined with the despair and determination of "Blue Line" and "Another February" they pretty much explain what it's like to mark time in Chicago, especially for those who are down on their luck and not getting any help.  That can exist as a proper political statement all on its own.

It's also a reminder that Scott Lucas is, undeniably, an artist.  Hallelujah! is a piece of musical craftsmanship and it's a definite step forward in those terms.  I don't compare it to Pack Up the Cats to say that Lucas is stuck in the same place he was 14 years ago so much as I do to point out that he works on a theme and everything he's been doing is a successively more realized interpretation of an idea or even an ideal of music.  It's really the same exercise he's been running through all the great Local H albums: a sort of anger and despair coupled with the gritty determination to see things through and the realization that everything just comes back around in the end.

As Good As Dead, Pack Up the Cats, and 12 Angry Months were intensely personal albums and that is what gave them their permanent universal appeal.  Hallelujah! I'm a Bum is an intensely political album.  That's really where it stumbles.  I can understand the addition of the Blue Line and the conversation with the bum.  It's the bit where all of the sudden Bill O'Reilly is telling me to shut up, Mitt Romney is reminding me that he likes being able to fire people, and Sarah Palin is wishing Ronald Reagan a happy birthday that get in the way and make this an album that will ultimately be an artifact of a very specific time.

That makes the album disposable.  Is it worth listening to now?  Absolutely.  Will it be worth listening to fourteen years from now?  Probably.  It will be weird to listen to once we've moved past the Tea Party's shenanigans and Sarah Palin's nothing but an occasional bar trivia question.  This, I suppose, is the problem of art.  Something that requires immediacy in both time and place can only be properly appreciated in that time and place.

It's sad, too.  Generally when I think of disposable music I think of bubble gum pop by a succession of interchangeable bottle blondes or newspaper advertisment boy bands.  I think of canned beats and dumbed-down lyrics.  I don't think of intensely crafted music made by someone who has been creating classic albums for nearly two decades.

But that's where I am with Hallelujah! I'm a Bum.  I love it.  I also don't really much care for it.  I think its almost fully realized ambitions absolutely blow its intent out of the water, but that intent will ultimately drag those ambitions right back down into the deep.

----------------------

[1]I was on record several years ago as saying I hated Chuck Klosterman.  I’ve been forced to totally re-think that stance, as I’ve realized he does a fantastically good job of writing about something that’s inherently difficult to write about without, y’know, being a jackass.  I actually like Klosterman these days.  It’s kinda weird.

[2]The internet, of course, has made that sort of thing not only accessible, but also desirable.

[3]Really, this is one of those weird places where I could go off on a random-ass tangent about tradition and technology and “this is why we do things.”  That weird interplay between LPs and EPs that carried over into CDs for no damn good reason is kind of interesting.  Albums are between 60 and 70 minutes because of that even though they could be, theoretically, infinitely long by now.

[4]Okay, I knew four things, the fourth being “Another February” was an awesome fucking song.

[5]This, of course, requires taking “PJ Soles” as a single word.  I’m okay with that.

The Great National 9/11 Circle Jerk

So, the best thing about 9/11 is that I get to wake up in the morning, check Facebook, and immediately know that I have no need to get on Facebook for the rest of the day.

This year I'm engaging in a sort of passive experiment.  I'm going to count the number of times I see 9/11 referred to on Facebook.  I'm going to count the number of times I hear 9/11 referred to by people in the real world.  The score, as of 9 AM, is 4-0.  To be fair, I haven't checked Facebook since about ten after seven.

It's sad, too.  I actually started reading Fred Clark's bit on 9/11 and briefly felt bad that I was being so damn cynical about the whole thing.  I still remember how I felt on that day and for the few weeks afterwards.  I still remember realizing that 9/11 was my generation's JFK assassination or Pearl Harbor.  Those were moments of shock and dread that crystallized a nation and lived forever on in the memories of those who witnessed them.

Instead, though, 9/11 has become my generation's USS Maine: an event hyped up beyond all proportions and used to justify expansionist foreign adventures.[1]

The worst thing about the conflation of the 9/11 generation and the Facebook generation is that the entire act of remembrance is insipid and disposable.  People will change their profile pics to an American flag, put up a status that says, "Never forget," and then won't talk about it again for another 364 days.

The only people who will talk about it between now and next September 11th will be politicians and pundits using it as a mere talking point that can mean anything and everything they want it to mean.  This is possible precisely because 9/11 has become a cheap, insipid, disposable memory, suitable only for Facebook and Twitter and quickly supplanted by the true currency of the Internet: cat videos.  We haven't invested any real cultural meaning in 9/11, we've simply always been told that we can't forget 9/11.  Memory held for its own sake, without meaning or context or purpose is simply a memory that can be manipulated and added to any narrative anyone cares to choose.

Charlie Pierce, as usual, puts it best:

According to the good folks at Public Policy Polling — and why they asked this question, I never will know — 15 percent of registered Republicans in Ohio think Willard Romney deserves more credit for killing Osama bin Laden than does the president. Another 47 percent aren't really sure who does. In North Carolina, 29 percent of them give the credit to Romney while a whopping 56 percent of them find it too difficult to answer the question of whether the credit should go to the guy who actually gave the order, or to the guy who forgot to mention the troops in his acceptance speech not long ago.

Happy 9/11, America!

If we needed any more evidence that the atrocities perpetrated by Osama bin Laden 11 years ago have been transformed into simply another mudball in our national political mudfight, that poll pretty much seals the deal for you. It's more than ignorance. It's more than being misinformed. (I don't know of a single commentator, not even the wingiest of wingnut public-access trolls, who's credited Romney with being involved in the raid into Pakistan.) This is simple reflexive tribalism — Democrat bad, Republican, good. Also, too.

It's strange how on 9/11 the words, "Never forget," really mean, "I don't remember."

--------------------

[1]The parallels here are both false and correct.  There was no foul play whatsoever in the explosion of the USS Maine, whereas there was most definitely foul play on 9/11.  However, much like the USS Maine was used as a flimsy justification for an already desired attack on Spain and pumped up by a government and media working in concert, it's not exactly unfair to say that Iraq was the government and media working in concert to hype up an already desired attack against a nation that had fuck-all to do with 9/11.

The lesson, as always, is that everything old is new again and the American people are easily led around by the nose.

Group Dynamics, Part 2

So…group dynamics.  I decided to launch in to a discussion because a lot of the big things I’m paying attention these days kind of hinge on my observations of how groups form.  Atheism+ was a big catalyst.  It should surprise absolutely no one that politics is another.  I’ve become something of a politics wonk these days, complete with a collection of strongly-held beliefs.[1]  As such, we’re gonna talk about politics.  Hooray, us!

Oh, actually, before I begin, a bit of housekeeping: in the comments on the last post Janet asked why I consider age an issue of proximity rather than identity.  The short answer is, “I dunno, seemed like a good idea at the time.”  The long answer is more of a feeling I get when thinking about age.  See, no one chooses to be 30 years-old.  All 30 year-olds, however, are largely grouped together.  This actually makes a certain amount of sense, I think, since everyone within five years of me grew up largely with the same influences and experiences.  I can talk about, say, Saved By the Bell to my peer group and they get it.  We all hit puberty thanks to Kelly Kapowski, basically.  A fifty year-old won’t get it.  A teenager won’t, either.

There are some things where age is actually a better demonstration of commonality than geographic location, too.  This is largely a factor of mass media and communication and probably an artifact of the last half of the 20th Century going forward.  To take the obvious example, I grew up with The Simpsons and so did pretty much everyone else in my age range.  I can use The Simpsons as a sort of lingua franca to engage with people from all over the United States and all over the English-speaking world.  Yes, older people watched it and now it’s been around long enough that younger people have grown up with it, too, but it’s a key point of commonality for my generation.

In short, I don’t really feel that I identify as a 31 year-old male.  There are, however, a bunch of things that I identify with because of my age that I share on a deeper level with people between, say, 25 and 37 than I would with someone younger or older than that.

Okay, then, back to politics.

I pretty much see American politics as primarily a fight between Team Red and Team Blue.  This, I think, is a genuine failure of the American winner-take-all electoral system.  See, it’s been this way since the very beginning.

The second President of the United States was John Adams.  He was a Federalist and terrified of what would happen if the Democratic-Republicans took over the country in 1800.  As such, he passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were really four different acts.  The two biggies for the purpose of this discussion were the Naturalization Act, which increased the period of citizenship from a 3 year notice and 5 year residence to a 5 year notice and 14 year residence, and the Sedition Act, which made it illegal to say anything against the government or its officials.  The Naturalization Act was supposed to be for national security purposes, but was really an attempt to keep naturalized citizens from voting for the Democratic-Republicans.

If these sound familiar, well, America has a rich and disturbing history of hypocrisy.  We’re supposedly a nation of immigrants and a great melting pot that also turns on immigrants and non-whites in general at the first possible opportunity.  Other than a brief stretch in the 1870s it was impossible for blacks to become naturalized until 1952.  The Chinese, well, the Chinese got the short end of the stick time and again.  And the whole thing where criticizing the Bush Administration was considered treason?  Yeah, that goes back to the Sedition Act.[2]  Also HUAC and probably a bunch of other things I can’t remember or don’t know about.

The guy the Alien and Sedition Acts was directed at must have been dangerous, right?  One of the Founding Fathers was prepared to drive a dagger into the very heart of the American experiment barely a decade after the Constitution was written, so it must have been to fight a deep, existential threat.  It’s fortunate, then, that John Adams won the election of 1800 to defeat potential Democratic-Republican President Skeletor von Hitler, a/k/a Snooki Zuckerberg.

Wait, what’s that?  He lost.  Well, fuck, I guess that’s why America sucks.  The third President must have been…Thomas Jefferson?  The guy who wrote the goddamn Declaration of Independence?  That Thomas Jefferson?[3]

Anyway, the election of 1800 was, by all accounts, a vicious campaign filled with the surrogates of two of the Founding Fathers slinging as much shit at each other as possible.  Knowing this, I have a hard time engaging in the Founding Father worship so prevalent in the American people.  I actually pretty much think that the Founding Fathers were douchebags.[4]  I also think that they were forward-thinking revolutionaries who wrote an amazing-for-its-time, but ultimately heavily flawed, document.

That’s the true legacy we received from the Founding Fathers.  Most voters pull the lever for the Republican or Democratic candidate not because they’ve thought through the issues, but because they know that their guy is the good guy and the other guy is the bad guy.  It doesn’t matter if the good guy is John Adams or the bad guy is Barack Obama.[5]  That’s not a good reason to vote for the leader of the country.

So everyone knows that the Republicans cynically misrepresented Obama’s, “You didn’t build that,” line to create a totally disingenuous campaign.  This cynical misrepresentation goes far enough that it was an entire day at the Republican National Convention.  It’s unconscionable, right?

Well, has anyone on the Blue Team actually listened to Romney’s, “Corporations are people,” line in context?  Take a look:



If you actually listen past the first line and the boos, and consider that it was originally a quick answer to a shouted question from the crowd, Romney’s point was that corporations are made up of people and that the money made by corporations ends up in the hands of people.

From here you could have an actual conversation.  It would probably be pretty much be the same crap we’ve got now, where it’s Reaganomics v. an increase in the top marginal tax rate for people earning more than $250,000/year and we’d probably still be stuck where we are.

However, Romney’s comments basically got conflated with the Citizens United decision that for corporations money = speech and that corporations should have First Amendment rights just like people.  Or that’s how I seem to recall that whole thing going.  It’s still so far outside the realm of sane jurisprudence that my mind boggles at the whole thing.

For the record, every single time I hear someone level that attack at Romney, including Elizabeth Warren doing it at the DNC, I get slightly annoyed.  But it’s going to keep happening, because, dammit, somebody’s got to score points for the Blue Team.

Oh, and, seriously, the only reason I’m going with that example is because I can’t talk about the use of the words “socialist” and “fascist” in American dialog without going in to a frothing rage.  I also can’t help but remember that there were a lot of people about this time four years ago claiming that Gee Dubs wasn’t going to leave the White House when his time was up.  Basically, the reason we can’t have nice things in America is because most of the electorate on both sides of the aisle is made up of fucktards.  But, thanks to the internet, they pretty much make that obvious.  I’ve had a better time of it since I realized that anyone who spells America as Amerika or AmeriKKKa can be safely ignored.  They might be Blue Team and I might be somewhat aligned with the goals of Blue Team, but, seriously, fuck that person.

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[1]While many of my beliefs are in line with the Democratic Party’s platform, I do not consider myself a Democrat.  I consider myself an independent progessive who will vote anti-Republican as a tie-breaking decision since, holy shit, the Republican Party as it’s currently comprised scares the crap out of me.  I would really like to live in a world where the opposition to Barack Obama is pointing out that he’s mushy on issues like civil liberties and torture, rather than calling him a Kenyan Muslim atheist White House usurping baby eater.  Call me crazy.

And, y’know, “We need to vet the Democratic candidate for President,” is pretty goddamn weak sauce when he’s the fucking incumbent.

[2]The Obama Administration hasn’t been so great on civil liberties, either.  We were promised the most transparent presidency ever, but Obama and his DOJ seem to have state secrets Tourettes, claiming that every fucking thing is a state secret no matter how stupid.  Oh, and try not to be a whistleblower, either, since you’ll get your ass in a vise if you try it.

[3]Jefferson’s overall positions are interesting to consider in light of modern American politics.  He was an anti-Federalist, which means that he didn’t like the idea of a strong Federal government, preferring to have most power devolve to the several states instead.  This tracks well with modern Republican thinking.  He also was not a big fan of a powerful military, because, y’know, a strong federal army is just asking for trouble.  This tracks well with, well, basically no one in modern America.  However, it’s the antithesis of modern Republican thinking, as demonstrated by that bit where Paul Ryan wants to give the military more money than the Joint Chiefs asked for.

Jefferson also proposed nullification and anonymously advocated secession for Kentucky over the issue of nullification over the Alien and Sedition Acts.  This pretty much puts him in line with John C Calhoun and South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis and, later, the Confederacy.  Also, too, the Great, Semi-Independent Republic of Texas’s own Chief Head of Hair, Rick Perry.  However, we act like there were only two nullification issues and one laughable attempt by Rick Perry.  There were, in fact, eight total antebellum issues where nullification was a thing, including Jefferson’s original case with Kentucky.  The first involved Kentucky, the second involved New England’s opposition to the Embargo Act of 1807 and subsequent serious consideration of secession followed by a separate peace with England in the War of 1812, the third was from Virginia in reaction to federal judicial review of criminal cases, the fourth was an attempt to illegally tax the Bank of the United States by the State of Ohio, and the fifth came from Georgia because they thought the feds weren’t being nearly mean enough to the Cherokees.  Then came the Nullification Crisis, followed by various Northern states’ attempts to nullify the laws of the Fugitive Slave Acts.

Post-Civil War nullification issues were generally attempts by states to override Federal equal treatment laws.  But there’s absolutely no historical reason to think that state’s rights are exclusively an issue of racism and discrimination.  And all of that is thanks to Thomas Jefferson.

Come to think of it, maybe John Adams was on to something…

[4]Seriously.  John Adams was kind of a dick.  Thomas Jefferson, like many of the others, was a slave holder and a genuine racist.  Benjamin Franklin was an arrogant womanizer.  The big argument in the writing of the Constitution wasn’t whether the slaves should be freed, but how many should be counted in the census to divvy up the seats in the House of Representatives.  They genuinely thought that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote.  They were, in short, the elite, out of touch men of their age.  And their age was filled with douchebags.

[5]Again, I think that there are a bunch of people running for office as Republicans that could be genuinely considered bad guys.  You couldn’t pay me enough to vote for Romney and Ryan.  I feel the same way about pretty much everyone in the Tea Party.  By the same token, I don’t think that the Tea Party in specific or the Republican Party in general is entirely filled with racist freaks who only want to get rid of the uppity black usurper.  There are plenty of racist freaks in the ranks of the right, but there are also a lot of people who are just Red Team players and there are still old-school conservatives who still feel they should stick around.  Also, too, there are the cynical operators who are just manipulating the whole thing for their own gain.

There’s also a great Daily Show bit from last week that pretty much puts to rest the idea that there are only fuzzy inclusive folks on the Blue Team:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Hope and Change 2 - The Party of Inclusion
www.thedailyshow.com
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Hate to Harsh Your Buzz, Folks

So this happened last night:



It was profoundly weird, mildly uncomfortable, has become the talk of the internets, and has already spawned at least one meme:




Early returns have determined that this will be the enduring image of the 2012 RNC.  It's got everything: a crazy old man rambling incoherently, cognitive dissonance up the ass, and a bunch of smiling and clapping white people.  Apparently Clint Eastwood is going to single-handedly sink Mitt Romney's chance for the Presidency.

Anyone who thinks that is so far up their own ass that they probably can't sit down without breaking their neck.  I'm sorry, that's just the way it is.  Do you know why?

The vast majority of people in this country won't vote because of anything that happened at either campaign.  Most people lack the fucks to give about such things.  They won't even know that Clint Eastwood spoke at the 2012 RNC, let alone that he argued with a chair, nor will they know that he lost.

You know what most saw?  An anchor on their local news saying, "Clint Eastwood spoke at tonight's Republican National Convention," followed by a five-second clip of one of the more lucid things he said or possibly that goofy call and response with, "Go ahead, make my day," at the end.

Then they'll see the baseball scores or the local weather or an adorable cat who befriended a local boy with leukemia.

This, by the way, is one of the many, many reasons we can't have nice things.

Although this, right here, is pretty much the best response possible:

PZ Myers Thinks I'm Stupid

No, really, it's true.  Well, PZ doesn't think that I, specifically, am stupid.  He just thinks that anyone who thinks like I do is stupid.  That means there's a fairly decent chance that PZ Myers thinks that you are stupid, theoretical person reading this post.  It's all because the atheist blogosphere is getting into a big ol' hubbub about what they're calling Atheism+, which is basically the Coke Zero of movement atheism.  It's an attempt to say that atheism needs to be about social justice and political change and all kinds of other, basically secular humanist stuff.

I, personally, think Atheism+ is a horseshit-filled load of buzzword bingo, and exactly on the level of the question I intend to start asking myself from here on out: What Would Luis Aparicio Do?

But, hey, you want to know why PZ Myers thinks I'm stupid.  He did a summation post yesterday of a discussion on Atheism+ and answered this particular question:

Im in that awkward position where i do agree with most of the values and dislike the misogynist idiots but see no value or reason to mix atheism and the other values. For me atheism just is the simple disbelief and my political values stand apart from it.

For those who are wondering, I, too, am in that "awkward position."  I, however, don't think it's awkward.  I grew up Evangelical, after all, where the only question that mattered to anyone was, "What church do you go to?"  I find religious belief, or lack thereof, the least interesting aspect of a human being.  It's a potential complicating factor, yes, but I'm also about as likely to decide not to date a Cubs fan as I am a Catholic.  It really depends on how much of their life they devote to that particular fandom.

Anyway, here's the first paragraph of PZ's two paragraph response:

Now you see, that’s just stupid. There are lots of atheists who take this blinkered stance that atheism is just one specific idea about rejecting god-belief, and it has absolutely no philosophical foundation and should have no political or social consequences. And that’s nonsense. This commenter is deluding himself as thoroughly as any god-walloper.

How many logical fallacies can dance on the head of a pin?  I'm seeing a straw man and a poisoning the well fallacy in this response.  Atheism is actually just rejection of belief in god, nothing more and nothing less.  I highly doubt anybody would say, however, that it exists in a vacuum and doesn't influence anybody else's thoughts.  However, to say, "I don't believe in god, therefore I believe that I shouldn't vote Republican," is, in a word, fuck stupid.

The problem here is that PZ exhibits the exact same problem the people I used to go to church exhibit.  He is arguing that because he is an atheist and he also believes X, then it logically follows that his belief in X is informed by his atheism.  This makes a great deal of sense in some cases, e.g., "I am an atheist, therefore I do not believe the Bible is the divinely-inspired word of god."  It makes absolutely no sense in other cases, e.g., "I am an atheist, therefore I think dulce de leche ice cream is delicious."

Gender equality, gay marriage, and politics are somewhere in the middle of this particular spectrum.  Atheism can have an influence on the thought process, but it won't necessarily and, even if it does, it won't necessarily have a key influence.  This is really just an attempt to set atheism as a mirror to religion, because there are those who argue that relgious belief should be the key (only, in some cases) arbiter and/or justification of any sort of decision.

It's a black-and-white, staring into the abyss sort of worldview.  PZ and his fellow travelers see the religious as a dangerous force and atheism in some form -- specifically, their preferred form -- as the necessary and obvious counterforce.  Ergo, if the relgious are out arguing that good Christians need to do A, then the atheists should be gathering together to do Opposite Of A.  To do otherwise is stupid, even if whatever that action otherwise is happens to be something that undermines A or is, in fact Opposite Of A, but justified through some lens other than atheism.

The only way this worldview works is if every single Christian is, as PZ imagines, focused solely on being the exact sort of Christian that PZ imagines they are.  That Christian, for the record, is the Pat Robertson/Jerry Falwell/Tim LaHaye Evangelical Christian that PZ, conveniently, sees himself fighting against tooth and nail.

Either way, here's the second half of his response:

If there is no god, if religion is a sham, that has significant consequences for how we should structure our society. You could argue over how we should shape our culture — a libertarian atheist would lean much more towards a Darwinian view, for instance, than I would — but to pretend that atheism is just an abstraction floating in the academic ether is silly.

Y'know, for a guy who claims there's no such thing as an atheist religion, atheist dogma, or an atheist Pope, PZ sure seems to spend a lot of time fighting to keep the troops in line and marching in the direction that he dictates...

Either way, I've got a lot more bouncing around in my head on the utter silliness that is Atheism+ and how it's all part of a profoundly weird worldview that I recognize immediately from my time as an Evangelical.  Maybe, if you're lucky, I'll even write about it one of these days...