A new year open thread

by

by liberal japonicus

A bit of Japanese culture for y’all. As you approach the end of the year, when you realize that you will only meet them in January rather than in the days remaining in December, you say ‘Yoi otoshi wo [omukae* kudasai]’ which roughly translates as ‘have a good new year’. And when you meet them after Jan 1st, you say ‘[Shinnen] Akemashite omedeto gozaimasu’, which is ‘opening of the new year, congratulations’.

The thing that gets me is that you are only supposed to say those things one time, so you’ve got to remember who you said it to. Obviously, in these masked, online times, that’s totally screwed up for me.

Japan also has a tradition of bonnenkai (literally ‘forget the year party’) and shinnenkai. Ironically, my year in Korea added a third year of these gatherings missed by me.

Anyway, a thread to describe what you do for new year.

[*ed: thanks for the correction in the comments]

192 thoughts on “A new year open thread”

  1. There are those who are energized by being out, surrounded by other people — whether they know any of those others or not. For them, a New Year’s Eve mob scene is wonderful, and I know they really missed last year.
    But for me, being in a crowd takes energy — even if I’m not interacting with anybody else. So my New Year’s Eve has long been: stay home; maybe watch a fireworks show on TV, but likely not even that. (As a bonus, that avoids the drunk drivers who turn out for the festivities.)

  2. @LJ–
    I assume that if you forget, and say them more than once, then, seppuku?
    There’s a Dinosaur Comics where T-Rex is planning to leave town forever because he accidentally asked someone the same polite question twice in the same brief exchange, but in my pre-new-year’s fatigue I can’t find it.
    Happy New Year to all! This will make about my 16th year of visiting ObWi, however desultorily.

  3. I assume that if you forget, and say them more than once, then, seppuku?
    Almost, but not quite. What amazes me about this country is how it can induce such feelings of guilt over social rituals.

  4. My wife and I joined a friend for oysters, artisanal cheeses, smoked salmon, and champagne.
    What can I say, I am a cartoon of a coastal elitist.
    This AM we slept in, then before breakfast I put some peanuts out for the squirrels and corbids, and some seed for the ground feeders. I’m beginning to bond with the squirrels, they follow me around now like tiny loyal dogs.
    Later today we bring roast pork to our former next-door neighbors, who moved into senior housing last year.
    Then I’ll probably do some chores and take a nap.
    Happy New Year, everyone. My wishes are for the best, my expectations are for same old same old.
    Onward and upward.

  6. I was alone, but skyping with sibs and friends also alone, and watching Jools Holland’s Hootenanny. I ate a duck breast and broccolini, and drank half of a decent bottle of champagne (I’ll have the rest later). I’ve never liked new year’s eve parties, so none of this was any hardship.

  7. secession seems ridiculous to me – state borders don’t separate Democrats from Republicans, nor liberals from conservatives. it’s not a north/south problem. it’s not a coast / landlubber problem.

  8. What gets me is that the civil war we had was over millions of people being slaves … f**king slavery! What’s this one supposed to be about? A bunch of made-up bullsh*t and some real but overhyped issues that are the usual matters of disagreement in functioning democracies? It’s a manufactured casus belli.

  9. the civil war we had was over millions of people being slaves … f**king slavery! What’s this one supposed to be about?
    To an enormous extent, judging from the flags they fly, this one appears to involve the same viewpoint trying to take a mulligan.
    This time gets characterized as urban vs rural. But that was actually equally true last time, too. And it turned out that the winners could get along economically without the losers far better than the losers could get along without the winners. Probably be the same this time, too.

  10. And this morning, we watched the Rose Parade on TV. My wife grew up in Pasadena (about 2 blocks from the Rose Bowl, actually). So in past years, we would go out the evening before, stand on the front lawn, and watch the floats inch up the hill from the pavillions where they are built to the staging area where the parade starts. A far better, and closer, look at them than you get attending the parade itself.
    Since her parents are gone, we don’t go down most years. But I remember.

  11. Yesterday we Zoomed with friends who have relocated from the OC to the PNW. Then we ate a lot of tapas and drank, played some co-op video games, and watched a movie until midnight.
    Today we are cooking food out of the Dungeons & Dragons cookbook we got for Christmas before our first D&D session of 2022 (again on Zoom).
    I’m not going to engage in secession talk today. I want the year to start with positive narratives that imagine paths to solutions. That’s why my teaching and my leisure time have both migrated firmly into speculative fiction mode. I live in the hope that our utopian narratives stage an epistemological rupture and spill over this dark timeline like a salve.

  12. A new one this year. Yesterday afternoon I got a New Year’s Eve Day A/V connection from the granddaughters*. After watching them elbow each other trying to hog the camera — “Girls! Try standing farther back” got no traction — I’m spending the afternoon thinking about the best way to deal with the problem. Take away the “local” view so they can’t see themselves? Add a second camera? Add an entire second A/V unit? Well, I told my daughter that it would be a work in progress.
    * The multimedia over internet protocol toy technology I built 27+ years ago.

  13. Michael, I’m so glad to hear that your day held leisure to talk with family. The reports out of Colorado yesterday were every bit as bad as we had around here during the summer.

  14. I hope all of you enjoy a healthy and fulfilling 2022.
    Oysters and champagne are my go-to meal; I could easily live on that diet.
    Since the Boulder Colorado area fires just north of me … Michael Cain is closer, not sure about nous ….. were mentioned, I thought I’d post these articles with photos of the devastation, but also to show how weather conditions along the Front Range, and of course the mountains just to the west, can turn on a dime:
    The inferno:
    https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2021/12/31/1069492029/photos-colorado-wildfires
    The aftermath:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK63zjsBl7Q&t=6s
    The home Paul Campos of LGM recently moved from is now gone; the folks who bought recently moved from California.
    Overnight snow and freezing temperatures moved in. This morning, same place:
    https://www.npr.org/2022/01/01/1069639530/colorado-wildfire-missing
    No deaths reported yet. Two people are missing, and if that is all, we are very lucky.

  15. I’ve been watching the fires in Boulder County with the horror of recognition. We haven’t lived there since we moved to Irvine, CA in 2004 for my grad school, but the area that burned was very familiar. We hiked the trails in the wild area devastated by the fires dozens of times and the area that was evacuated literally stopped across the street from where our apartment was located on the south edge of Boulder.
    It’s a wound mostly to nostalgia, but I still feel the loss.

  17. I was in no way in the way of that fire (central Denver) and no sweat on knowing where all of us are geographically, wj.
    Other dangers, yeah, but later on that.

  18. Like nous, I’ve done a lot of tramping and hiking in the fire area.
    There’s a wonderful bread bakery in Louisville, Co, whose suburbs burned, that I visit every couple of months, and a long-time guitar store too that from all reports survived.
    Superior, another Front Range Olde Town, directly across a six lane highway, the main thoroughfare between Denver and Boulder, which the fire jumped with no sweat, got the worst of it.
    There are wonderful canyons cutting into the foothills and pine forests directly to the west that survived, I’m presuming, given the maps.
    I hike there often.

  19. Michael, I’m so glad to hear that your day held leisure to talk with family. The reports out of Colorado yesterday were every bit as bad as we had around here during the summer.
    We’re all 50 miles to the north, so it was never going to be more than smoke on the horizon for us. In some ways the fire was a freaky confluence. Six wet months early in the year so the grasses grew tall and thick, six months with basically no precipitation so it was tinder dry, an unusually (but not horribly so) high wind day, and an ignition source in exactly the wrong place. The ignition source probably won’t be settled for days/weeks. Right now, I’m betting on human stupidity. Too many of our fires in recent years go back to that.
    Like nous and Thulen, hiked there regularly, especially when the kids were too small to do more challenging vertical. Drove through it for years when I was working in Boulder. A number of really nice one-of-a-kind houses went up in this one.

  20. …which the fire jumped with no sweat…
    Given 60+ mph winds, even grass fires will spark spot fires well over 400 yards ahead of the fire line proper. IIRC, during the big run the Troublesome fire made at Estes Park in 2020 with similar winds, there was spotting more than two miles out.

  21. Six wet months early in the year so the grasses grew tall and thick, six months with basically no precipitation so it was tinder dry, an unusually (but not horribly so) high wind day, and an ignition source in exactly the wrong place.
    I’m not sure those who have never lived west of the Great Plains can even imaging just how dry the vegitation routinely gets in this part of the country. What you describe was unusual, but not terribly so. The “six months with basically no precipitation” is entirely normal; it’s the wet 6 months that got the grass high which is the killer. Unfortunately, without that precipitation, the streams and reservoirs go dry, and we have those problems….

  26. we’re in the middle of a crazy windy storm here in NC right now. it’s full of water, though. flash flood alerts going off on our phones all night.
    it was 75 here on Saturday, 80 on Friday. and there’s a 100 chance of snow by 11AM today.
    takes a lot of wind to turn 75 into snow in the matter of 36 hours.

  27. takes a lot of wind to turn 75 into snow in the matter of 36 hours.
    Truth. A former colleague here along the Front Range, where such transitions are pretty routine, said his rule was divide the wind speed by 10 to get the inches of snow that were going to come next. This storm just past was very close. In Fort Collins, gusts to 75 and 8″ of snow; in Boulder, gusts to 115 and 11″.

  29. Don’t have time to read cleek’s link right now, but Zach Beauchamp was once an Andrew Sullivan protege (i.e. Daily Dish writer). lots of time has passed, but I wonder if that gives a clue to his underlying vantage point.

  30. Haven’t gotten thru Beauchamp’s article entirely. But he starts out saying “No other established Western democracy is at such risk of democratic collapse.”
    One word: Hungary.
    Where, be it noted, Trump has just endorsed to local autocrat. Quelle surprise.

  31. The Vox piece is definitely worth reading. I don’t have a good sense of how great the danger is.
    I think the main threat comes not from the right wing militias— there are always creeps like that around—but the Republican Party elites pandering to Trump’s narcissism for their own purposes. If they really do pass laws making it impossible for Democrats to win, a lot of left wingers might start talking and thinking like our own JT. Or alternatively most of us just sigh and live under the new semi authoritarian order. Or both. Then we have our Time of Troubles, but it would start with the Republican Party elites.
    The militias by themselves can commit atrocities like the Oklahoma City bombing or terrify people in the Capitol, but it is the elites who can destroy the system.

  32. wj – don’t disagree that Hungary has been teetering, but I’m guessing that Beauchamp was using his ‘established’ qualifier to separate out the former Eastern Bloc states (I’d put Poland in this category as well).
    Does a 30 year history with a patchy first decade count as ‘established?’

  33. AFAICT, This kind of thing has been happening all over the country. It’s January 6 on a local scale. I don’t think anyone has an effective answer for how to deal with it.
    There was an nbcnews dot com headline the other day about public health officials resigning all over the country. Health care workers are burnt out.
    I don’t think it’s just a question of whether it’s militias or the R elite….

  34. nous, that might well be where he’s coming from.
    On the other hand, from 1867 and 1948 Hungary had a functioning parliament with a multiparty system and a relatively independent judiciary. So it’s not like the post-Soviet era is their first time around. (Poland, in contrast, only had a half dozen years after WW I before a coup ended that experiment.)

  35. Janie, that is IMHO, the real problem. The actual out-in-the-woods-playing-with-guns militias we can deal with. We probably ought to get a little more harsh in doing so (the Bundys, for example, should be in jail or dead and their cattle confiscated), but we can deal.
    It’s the yell-and-scream-and-disrupt-things types that are the problem. Most of them would never consider actually shooting someone. Probably be outraged is someone suggested that was where they were going. But they can do far more real damage.

  37. Just finished reading the Beauchamp article and he explicitly mentions Hungary, but puts it in a separate category from the ‘established’ democracies.
    I found little to argue with in the article. He’s done a lot of homework. There are plenty of names and links to follow for anyone who cares enough to do a deeper dive.
    I am not at all reassured that the people who specialize in this research are pointing to the same things I have been thinking out loud here for the last year.
    The one question that I keep coming back to in all of this is the question of law enforcement. If we do end up with a more intense and widespread version of Portland post-Floyd as the outcome of this polarization, I have to believe that the enforcement will be similarly one-sided in its application. That’s going to up the pressure on Democratic leaders to assert their control over both law enforcement and protesters on the left through the deployment of those agencies. This leaves the alt-right free to embrace accelerationism. That would resemble the Italy situation referenced in the article, but it’s unclear if anything like the Red Brigade will form on the left here, while the militia movement is well established on the right.
    The alternative, though, is that we end up with right wing authoritarian backlash and a partisan police force that makes enforcement in most places look like enforcement in Kenosha – armed “patriots” get police blessing while “rioters and arsonists” bear the brunt of both.
    Either way, though, our deep structural problems with policing are going to probably end up getting ignored out of a sense of authoritarian expedience.
    Not fun times.

  38. The Republican Party has been open about its intention to steal elections. Breakdown will come when it succeeds, blatantly enough that leftist activists take to the streets. Because then the fascists will be on the streets opposing them, and the police will be on the side of the fascists.

  39. The Republican Party has been open about its intention to steal elections. Breakdown will come when it succeeds, blatantly enough that leftist activists take to the streets.
    No, the breakdown will come when non-activists take to the streets in protest. Which, I have to say, I think rather more likely than not at this point. At least at the local level.

  40. Pro Bono – if that moment you describe happens where/while there is a Democrat in office it will be a moment of truth. The DNC leadership wing of the party (the self-described moderates) could easily decide to cut loose the progressives for fear of losing the suburban white vote and the big donors. That, however, will alienate the student/progressive/labor coalition and probably ensure more conflict, but with the Democrats trying to keep the crackdown more TV friendly in its optics.
    The LAPD gives us a good idea of what all that looks like. Not reassuring.

  41. “Pernicious polarization” is a problem because Americans refuse to take “politics” personally in Real Life(tm).
    Would you shop at a store that has MAGA posters plastered all over? Would you hire a plumber with “TRUMP 2024” bumper stickers on his truck? Would you keep playing golf with somebody who insists the 2016 election was stolen? If you would, then a MAGAt takeover shouldn’t bother you much — it would just be “politics” after all.
    –TP

  43. “It’s the yell-and-scream-and-disrupt-things types that are the problem.”
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/dan-bongino-and-the-big-business-of-returning-trump-to-power
    That despicable vermin, managed by his subhuman wife, was permitted to protect Presidents of the United States as a Secret Service agent. One presumes he was forced, I say forced, to be vaccinated against the usual diseases, although apparently the rabies shots didn’t take.
    It’s too late.
    Our only slim hope for America avoiding the coming conservstive-led conflagration is that the Bonginos and the entire of retinue of conservative genocidal wanna-bes are co-opted by their own colossal, grifting perverted capitalist hate-is-the-product bullshit and pull back because they wont be able to sell their bogus supplements, survival kits, fake anti-Covid pills and unguents, Chinese-made American flags with 61 stars, holsters and all of the other faggot weapons accessories that place sexy bulges in their clothing for losers to lick in such great amounts as their savage disorder engulfs every street and cul-de-sac in America.
    Why do we think the evil Hannitys and Ingrahams and rest of them were on the phone to White House staff gibbering and crying over Trump’s* refusal to call off the attempted violent overthrow of the U. S. Government and the murder of Democratic officaldom … billions of dollars of despicable Business would suffer, and they aren’t quite done cashing in before they fully unleash the dogs of war on America and we can’t have that, can we?
    Well, not quite yet.
    This piece of dead shit, Limbaugh’s one year anniversary of his death, thank God, he’s dead, is February 17.
    Excerpt from the above linked article:
    “New technologies provided an ambitious host with unprecedented reach: satellite transmission allowed a single broadcaster access to hundreds of stations, and toll-free calling let listeners across the country hear their own voice on air. Limbaugh’s show became the cultural standard-bearer of American conservatism. William F. Buckley, Jr., an early mentor, effectively ceded the floor in 1993, when his magazine National Review hailed Limbaugh on the cover as “The Leader of the Opposition.” Talk radio made Limbaugh wealthy—at his peak, he earned about eighty-five million dollars a year—and he didn’t obscure the fact that his strongest motivation was financial. When the biographer Zev Chafets visited him at his manse in Florida (twenty-four thousand square feet, with a salon decorated to resemble Versailles), Limbaugh told him, “Conservatism didn’t buy this house. First and foremost I’m a businessman. My first goal is to attract the largest possible audience so I can charge confiscatory ad rates.”
    On February 17, every year from now on, Limbaugh should be dug up and shot in his dead head just to make sure, annually, that he is out of the picture, and as a lesson to all conservatives that we will no longer be fucked with.
    Here’s another sawed-off little asshole making up for poor posture as a weakling kid by grifting America for tens of millions of dollars on behalf of the murderous conservative movement:
    https://www.bosshunting.com.au/lifestyle/fitness/joe-rogan-diet-workout-plan/
    He announced the other week that he is so flexible that he could, if he wished, suck his own cock, because apparently no one, outside of his publicist is willing to the dark and dirty work of getting the slimeball off a fine Christian conservative activity.
    I hereby remove all First Amendment rights from Rogan and Bongino. What are the twin twats going to do about it? Call the fucking government they fucking hate?
    *https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/trump-january-6-letter-insurrection-act-20220103.html
    If this is true, then Donald Trump must be executed by the rule of law. If he is not dealt with by that maximum sentence, then America is fucking dead.
    If he is merely jailed for some soft time at a country club, then he will be re-elected FROM jail and either run the country from his cell like a Mafia Don running the country’s business, or he will sign his own pardon papers in jail, be released and then begin imprisoning and killing all of us, except for Marty, with the full power of the Federal Government behind him.
    But, yes, as Donald pointed out, it the Republican elite that is the most dangerous, mortal domestic enemy of America.
    Right up there with foreign threats, nuclear Iran, which the malignant conservative Trump helped become nuclear, Putin’s Russia, which the vermin, traitorous conservative movement is cheering on for the invasion of Ukraine, and the CCP.

  45. In other news, which I have alluded to in recent days, after several days of very mild cold/flu symptoms, I tested positive for the Covid-19 virus on December 29.
    Virus cases are soaring in Denver, Colorado, as they are in many other areas.
    I’m fine thus far. The mild symptoms are now nearly dissipated.
    I began quarantining two days earlier when the symptoms appeared. I will continue for the full 10 days recommended by my care provider, plus two more days to make sure and will be retested this Friday.
    I’m fully vaxxed and boosted and otherwise in good health and physical shape.
    I’m careful and observe masking protocols. I’m avoiding the elevator in my building. I check my mail late at night.
    I expect I contracted the virus in a restaurant Christmas week. I had just come off a six-day period of voluntary isolation prior to that because I had flown back from a wedding in Pittsburgh December 14, where several folks were, stupidly, unvaxxed, plus I had the common flu before I left on THAT trip and was still feeling the effects of that. I was tested for Covid before I left on that trip because I was a little worried about giving something to all those strangers on the plane out, in case the prior bout with the flu might have been Covid.
    Visited three eating establishments after the isolation Christmas week. Managed to enjoy oysters and champagne on one of those visits, and on another got into a shouting match with an anti-masker who was shooting his mouth off.
    Probably got this thing from him. But like Trump, he’s still out walking the streets.
    Even after this Friday, with the virus wreaking havoc still, I will be sticking close to home for the foreseeable future.
    So here I am. I’ll be fine. The only real loss is that I didn’t get to see my son and his girlfriend order the holiday.
    I hope all of you are well too.

  47. I’m deeply concerned over the lack of gunfire by pistol-packing conservatives who sanctify private property while constantly boasting what they might have to do do threatening intruders:
    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/1/3/2062637/-Anti-vaxxer-yells-sieg-heil-repeatedly-at-West-Hollywood-restaurant
    I’m hoping the concealed-carry conservatives all just pussies and do nothing but talk smack, but I expect if it was BLM or any other group perceived to be liberal and doing the invading, it would be an immediate cause to draw weapons and ask questions later, as our conservative courts and judges inspire them to do.
    Do something conservatives. Defend your country and other people’s property.

  49. Well, you could make a case that 2016 was stolen. In the sense of giving the office to someone who got a lower number of votes. Not what the term “stolen” means, but still, it’s a more valid point of view than claiming that 2020 was stolen.

  52. The crazies seem to be attacking each other.
    I just drove the hour and a quarter back from my daughter’s house, and I was thinking about this thread and wishing there was a way to set their various factions (surely there are factions, there are always factions) at each other’s throats.
    The pessimistic view of that scenario would be what Gandalf said about Mordor and Isengard: “The victor would emerge stronger than either, and free from doubt.” I don’t know if that applies in this case, I have no crystal ball. But as with the Covid situation, unfortunately the damage would probably not be confined just to the combatants.

  53. Trump is an epiphenomenon. He recognizes a pool of resentment that he can take to the bank, financially and otherwise.
    The pool of resentment is the problem.
    For myself, I’m more or less preparing myself, mentally and otherwise, for an extended period of domestic hostility, quite possible extending to the end of my life. This country may never be a coherent political entity as long as I live.
    I straight up do not understand the motivations of Trump supporters, or more generally of (R) party supporters. In principle I’d like to, because I don’t think it’s possible to resolve any of this stuff without some degree of mutual understanding.
    Then again, I’m not sure all that much would be resolved by my understanding. It’s quite possible that what they want, and what they are angry about, are things that not only don’t resonate with me, but are things that I profoundly disagree with, if not abhor.
    I bear no particular ill will toward conservatives-or-whatever-we-want-to-call-them, however there are also a lot of things that I can’t and won’t accept. By “not accept” I simply mean I find them plainly wrong.
    We’re at some kind of stalemate. They don’t want what I want, they don’t value what I value. And vice versa. And nobody’s going anywhere in numbers large enough to make a difference.
    Things that can’t continue, don’t continue. We can’t continue as we are. What “not continuing” looks like, I have no idea.
    Best of luck to one and all.
    Thullen, stay safe out there, buddy.

  54. Yes, JDT, luckily it sounds a really mild case. Get better soon, and back on the oysters and champagne asap.
    On the main theme, I too am (unsurprisingly) at a loss. I find myself agreeing with, variously, nous, Donald and Pro Bono. It’s a grim place to be in, despite the fact the fact that I am in excellent company.

  55. I straight up do not understand the motivations of Trump supporters, or more generally of (R) party supporters. In principle I’d like to, because I don’t think it’s possible to resolve any of this stuff without some degree of mutual understanding.
    My sense, very much from the outside, is that Trump’s supporters fall into a couple of quite possibly non-overlapping groups.
    First, we have the flat out grifters, very much in Trump’s own mold. They simply do not care, perhaps cannot even imagine caring, about anyone but themselves. Some (including the Murdochs) are running various enterprises in order to fleece the marks. Others are politicians, seeking to hold power by whatever means seems most useful. None of these have issues they care about, or which would need to ne negotiated for a solution. They just want their personal gain.
    The second, far larger group, are those who are basically afraid. Afraid of change, afraid of loss (financial, status, or whatever), afraid of whatever fantasy has been woven for them. In some cases, the change they are afraid of involves issues that others (e.g. we here) care about. In other cases, those they oppose would actually be more than happy to help them avoid the ill effects of those changes. Except for the detail that this group has been conned into believing that those they oppose must have some ill intent behind any offer of help.
    The first group can, IMHO, only be dealt with by making them clear that continuing as they are will seriously damage them personally. A bunch of criminal convictions for the Trumps, and for the politicians who organized Jan 6, would be a big step forward there.
    The second group can be brought around. But probably not before the first group is taken down.

  56. I don’t want to start a fight in the comments, but it amazes me that you can analyze Trump supporters without mentioning racism or sexism. To say that the second group ‘can be brought around’, I wonder how that happens without having them figure out that they are motivated by a racial and/or sexist animus.
    There are a shit-ton of articles about this sort of stuff, so many that it is possible to find an article that will support your viewpoint. But here are two
    https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2020/11/12/americans-didnt-repudiate-donald-trump-but-black-voters-did-column/6222692002/
    https://www.channel4.com/news/revealed-trump-campaign-strategy-to-deter-millions-of-black-americans-from-voting-in-2016
    The whole black men vs. black women recedes in significance when you see that as a total demographic, 9 out of 10 voted against Trump.
    The optimistic view is that these racist and sexist voters are older and are becoming a smaller demographic. That’s not my view. It is far too easy for the first group to maintain their hold on power by appealing to these tropes, tropes that are floating around in the collective zeitgeist, looking for a suitable host.
    And taking down the first group will just mean that others will step up to take their place. You find a way to remove Boebert, Taylor-Greene, Cawthorn from the equation, what stops the next crop of racist/sexist idiots from moving up?
    Brexit was a foreshadowing, and the anti-vax shit is just underlining how people can grab onto positions that will ultimately harm them and do it for reasons of shared identity. As Russell said, Trump is epiphenomenal and the grifters are the same. You aren’t going to get anywhere without addressing the root causes.

  57. Part of the scared are a group of Evangelicals that support Trump because they believe that he is basically a garbage human, but they believe that the Democratic Party is in the grip of Satan, and bent on destroying society, and already engaged in totalitarianism. They support Trump because they believe that their god is orchestrating Trump despite what Trump personally wants.
    I don’t think this group is reachable. They live in a non-falsifiable, self-authorizing world of feelings. All we can do is hope that they get run over by the clue bus in whatever idiosyncratic way might allow them to self deprogram. I haven’t the faintest what that might be, and suspect that it will take thousands of individual tipping points to get anywhere.

  58. I don’t want to start a fight in the comments, but it amazes me that you can analyze Trump supporters without mentioning racism or sexism.
    Ah, but you see, I think both of those are are just aspects of fear. There are, I suppose, some few who hate members of other races (or women) ab initio. But in most cases it is more a matter of fear of losing money/position/etc., and having been taught that members of those other groups will be the cause of that loss. Remove the constant drumbeat of propaganda reinforcing that fear, and the problem drops substantially. (So says the resident optimist.)
    Evangelicals that support Trump because . . . they believe that the Democratic Party is in the grip of Satan
    . . .
    I don’t think this group is reachable. They live in a non-falsifiable, self-authorizing world of feelings.
    Perhaps not. But in many cases their feelings require constant reinforcement from outside. Break that feedback loop, and many (not all, of course, but many) will find their way back to their earlier “character matters” position — that is, that the ends do NOT justify the means.

  59. Ah, but you see, I think both of those are are just aspects of fear.
    When you generalize it like that, it feels like you don’t want to or can’t admit it makes up pretty big chunk of that group. And when you have people who will swear up and down that they don’t support Trump, but are happy to tut-tut if Obama put his feet up (while wearing a tan suit, the horrors!) or the gauntlet Harris has had to run
    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/us/politics/kamala-harris-racism-sexism.html
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/07/kamala-harris-sexist-racist-attacks-spread-online/
    or the more recent “Biden is instituting fascist vaccine requirements”, it makes the dividing line between that 2nd group and those ‘I hate Trump, but…’ pretty fuzzy. And much less likely that they can be ‘brought around’.

  60. I think the way to understand Republican voters is to watch Faux. The message of Faux is “Republicans good, everyone else is bad.” Real issues are rarely discussed and never discussed honestly or thoughtfully. The tone is sneering, jeering, with a lot of appeal to the maturity level of upper elementary school. Personal attacks on individuals and character attacks on groups are the norm and substitute for discussion of policy. What motivates Republican voters? Egotism. They see themselves as the good guys battling to save America from the evil everyone else. Racism and sexism are subsets of that but they disrespect all of us.
    Of course there are Republicans who are not part of the Faux mindset, but they are a small minority.

  61. Oh I forgot another significant part of the pattern: faux victimization. The way they justify their disrespect for everyone else is by convincing themselves that they are the real victims. SO they are the only good Americans with the only good real values and everyone else is unamerican and must be cancelled and they are entitled to do whatever it takes to win because they are protecting America and themselves, they being the real victims. It’s the pathology behind fascism.

  63. I’ve had a lovely Xmas / New Year’s despite a sick child, who was nevertheless very jolly, but we couldn’t go out much and Covid preventing us seeing grandma abroad.
    I finished the new Knausgaard, which is good but I feel merits further thinking on my part’
    https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/the-morning-star/
    I also devoured the new Franzen which is really, really good – his best. If I was in a position to turn books into miniseries, I’d pay a lot of money for it.
    https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/crossroads/
    I started reading Middlemarch, but don’t have the head for it (got sick on New Year’s day) so instead am finishing Ferrante’s “Days of Abandonment”, which is brilliant:
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/21/women-on-the-verge
    So this is all great, but then you watch “Don’t Look Up” and realize that, whatever its merits as a film, it’s describing US and our carelessness exactly at this point in time – only difference being that the comet will hit in 20 years time, rather than six months – all of which is rather depressing.
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/29/climate-scientist-dont-look-up-madness
    And the war criminal Tony Blair will be knighted, with full support of Labour leader Keir Starmer (whom I am trying to like, but with increasing difficulty).
    And my daughter will go back to school tomorrow without any safeguarding measures in place, so that we will probably all get Covid in a few weeks – happy days.

  65. novakant, hold that thought (about Starmer), I’ve got a few Grauniad articles that I hope you can weigh in on in a post I’m finishing up now

  66. The mass suicide of conservatives continues, as commanded by the genocidal Republican Party/pro-Kremlin/pro/Confederacy/Insurrectionist movement and its media propagandists.
    https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-stories-are-endless
    Just because there are fewer of these psychopaths does not mean they can’t continue by hook and crook to rule as a minority fascist movement.
    Unless they are stopped. Dead. In their tracks.

  68. If crypto-Christians can’t send us to the fires of Hell, they will send the fires of Hell to your childrens’ doors:
    https://www.thedailybeast.com/christian-sect-burning-shed-focus-of-deadly-colorado-fire-investigation?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
    It continues: “Beneath the surface lies a tangle of doctrine that teaches its followers that slavery was ‘a marvelous opportunity’ for Black people, who are deemed by the Bible to be servants of whites, and that homosexuals deserve no less than death.
    More:
    “While homosexuals are shunned by the Twelve Tribes (though ex-members say the group brags about unnamed members who are “formerly” gay), the group actively proselytizes to African Americans, yet one of its Black leaders glorifies the early Ku Klux Klan.”

  69. All Americans should mimic the lawless conservative movement and its Trump Mafia family vanguard, and ignore the Rule of Law and fight every subpoena issued by every Court and governmental body in the land, if those courts and bodies are infested by conservative movement cadres, unless the subjects of the summons are themselves conservatives, in which case enlist an army of bounty hunters to track them down.
    https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/trumps-judge-quash-subpoena-ny-attorney-general
    Stop the entire American conservative judicial machinery in its tracks.

  70. 46 years old. What a waste.
    I’m not so sure. The article notes she was an anti-vaxxer even before covid. Which makes this just evolution in action. Never pretty, of course. But, ya gotta weed counter-survival genes out somehow. And if she’d lived, she would have had years to do more damage to others.

  71. I’m not so sure.
    there’s a sort-of karma aspect to stuff like this which is not lost on me.
    but it still seems sad, and a waste, to me.
    46 is pretty young to die, especially from an easily preventable cause. even if it’s due to your own foolishness, and even if your foolishness created risks for others.
    I find people like this exasperating and at times enraging, but COVID is a crap way to go, and I don’t wish it on anyone.

  72. a tangle of doctrine that teaches its followers that slavery was ‘a marvelous opportunity’ for Black people
    a point of view that has been expressed by, among others, Pat Buchanan, in an email shared with me by my Trumpie brother in law.
    yes, they were slaves and were treated as livestock – livestock with benefits, in the case of black women – but at least they got to hear about Jesus.
    just another thing for Jesus to weep about.
    I asked my bro-in-law not to send me any more crap like that. he has been kind enough to respect my request.
    I note in passing that Charles Murray is taking another swing at the good old ‘black and brown people are cognitively inferior’ trope. it’s a reality we must face, says Murray.
    the guy sells a lot of books, so I assume there’s an audience for this stuff.

  73. It’s sad, it’s a waste, it’s a tragedy … in the Greek sense … except that it is all jimmy the greek to these dunderheads, like some shallow sorority and fraternity self-hazing.
    It’s also extraordinarily dangerous to the country.
    Cults murder themselves, and when they don’t, they murder those who oppose them.
    She was a lowly lieutenant to the sadistic vaccinated Republican and conservative Jim Jones and Charles Manson Generals encouraging her to seek oblivion.
    Who else did she infect while taking one for the Gipper God?
    Murder/suicide.
    All are primary effects.
    Nothing secondary about it.
    They are deliberately causing and embracing chaos.
    They believe it to be a ladder to absolute fascist power.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG3H9E-B464
    We are going to need more dragons.

  75. but at least they got to hear about Jesus.
    I read somewhere the assertion that slaveowners in the South thought that giving their slaves religion would make them more accepting of their circumstances. But then the owners got caught up in religion themselves.

  76. i feel sorry for her, and Ashley Babbit and all the other people who get turned away from sanity by the cynical greedheads who run the Republican myth-making machine.
    yes, she and Babbit and all the horse-paste-gobbling-jackholes are personally responsible for their outcomes. but the people who continue to profit off of the lies they sell to the easily-led are twice as despicable, in my book.

  77. Perhaps not. But in many cases their feelings require constant reinforcement from outside. Break that feedback loop, and many (not all, of course, but many) will find their way back to their earlier “character matters” position — that is, that the ends do NOT justify the means.
    The reason I despair for the “hardline anti-modern Trump-cynical culture warrior GOP Evangelicals” is because they basically live in cells that are constructed specifically to provide constant reinforcement on a local level.
    The cynical top-down grifters that you point to only have that position of power because that opportunity was created for them by 40 years of local activism coming from radicalized fundamentalist evangelicals. They have whole communities of alternative health and media that rival Q (even as the two have become entangled).
    They are not driven by any national media trends and there is no way to end the reinforcement because that reinforcement is built into the local communities and the networks between them. It’s basically a P2P network of anti-secular, anti-modern, dominionist sectarians.
    Good luck with a blue pill for that.

  78. What we know is that in the beginning American* slave owners were vehemently opposed to missionaries as far as their slaves were concerned because they feared the messages sent, that it would not make the slaves more docile but infect them with the idea that, if they were equal in the face of G#d, they should be so too on Earth.
    The result was a compromise know as the slave bible of 1807.
    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/heavily-abridged-slave-bible-removed-passages-might-encourage-uprisings-180970989/
    e.g. the whole Exodus story had to be removed.
    The slavers were correct in a sense, cf. e.g songs like ‘Go down, Moses’, that slaves would draw exactly those dangerous parallels between their own situation and the Sons of Israel in Egypt.
    *in the Americas, not limited to the US

  79. In case this has not yet been mentioned above:
    https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/notorious-judge-undermines-navy-s-vaccine-requirement-n1286947
    According to that absolutely notorious judge, the military has no right to require the soldiers to get vaccinated, if they object to it. It’s not explicitly said, whether it is just because the objection is religious in nature but at least that is what the SEALs asked for and what the judge agreed to referring to the 1st amendment in his injunction).

  80. people who would rather play wingnut politics than take orders don’t seem like the right people to be SEALs.

  81. According to that absolutely notorious judge, the military has no right to require the soldiers to get vaccinated, if they object to it.
    Next step: orders that soldiers must not get vaccinations. Hey, once upon a time being gay was a bar to serving. Next, being vaccinated might be. And no doubt this judge would be just fine with that . . . since it is his particular ideology being mandated.

  82. re:waste
    MAGA is a drug. It is addictive, for some people. An overdose can kill you. Even a less-than-lethal dose can make you dangerous to sane people.
    The questions for sane people are: how should we deal with the addicts? and how should we deal with the pushers?
    The War on Drugs has been a costly failure. Would a War on MAGA be any better? What would it look like, anyway?
    Leaving the MAGAts alone to mainline the stuff in their lily-white ghettos has a certain appeal. Unfortunately, they don’t live in ghettos. They circulate among us, and are tolerated by most of us.
    –TP

  83. no need to declare a war on Trump supporters, they’re bringing their own war. I’m just trying to understand how to deal with it all.

  84. It’s not explicitly said, whether it is just because the objection is religious in nature but at least that is what the SEALs asked for and what the judge agreed to referring to the 1st amendment in his injunction).
    From memory of pieces written by Naval authorities, so possibly suspect… The Navy has not granted a religious exemption to vaccinations for years. Not one. Their standard procedure for such requires documentation from a chaplain, an officer in the chain of command, and raises questions like, “If you have had a religious change that precludes maintaining readiness in your current position, we will discuss whether we can find you a new position or whether a general discharge is in order.”

  85. The War on Drugs has been a costly failure. Would a War on MAGA be any better?
    That’s why I think drunk driving is a better analogy. We don’t try to force people not to be alcoholics — as with the War on Drugs, Prohibition didn’t work. But we do force them not to do things as a result of their alcohol addiction. Seems like something similar could be tried here, to protect others from their folly.

  86. The Navy has not granted a religious exemption to vaccinations for years. Not one.
    And, amazingly, the filing granted by the judge makes that very point. Apparently they think this proves that the exemption is window dressing — and being not real means that it violates their rights somehow.

  87. people who would rather play wingnut politics than take orders don’t seem like the right people to be SEALs.
    I thought service members were required to follow lawful orders. Getting vaccinated isn’t illegal, is it? ;^)

  88. I thought service members were required to follow lawful orders. Getting vaccinated isn’t illegal, is it?
    I think the argument there is that being ordered to eat a ham and cheese sandwich isn’t illegal either. But someone who’s Jewish might reasonably have a problem with it.
    No, I don’t think the cases are really comparable. And I think general (not honorable) discharges are in order in these cases. But the situation isn’t quite absolute.

  89. Garroting one’s enemy, perhaps slitting his or her throat, certainly killing anything that moves is fine if not dandy and pardonable and not in violation of whatever small-print slop the Bible and its thick and ordinary followers, Christian killers, will not only do but train strenuously for …. a needle in the arm, not so much.
    I’m not taking any fucking vaccine; hey, the Seals I’ve been around use the f-word as punctuation.
    Keep the government out of my fucking military healthcare.
    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/27/eddie-gallagher-trump-navy-seal-iraq
    One wonders about some tenderfooted he-man punk Seal and his or her feelings about donning a gas mask in combat.
    My God, can you imagine what would John McCain would have done if the North Vietnamese had tried to vaccinate him? He would have given up and expired immediately.
    I happen to know from my Navy Seal step-nephew that Seals are required to carry a weapon, including in their luggage on flights (what good it does in their luggage is beyond me), at all times when off base domestically becuase of fear that Russian and Chinese agents may attempt to assassinate them.
    By the way, he’s all grown up from the teenager who just a few years ago would point an unloaded semi-automatic weapon at Hillary Clinton on the TV. He’s not to be messed with now, and seems to be a gentleman.
    I also know that Navy Seals stationed in Japan during the pandemic and not permitted stateside leave for extended periods of time reportedly suffered from high rates of suicide on account of homesickness.
    Is that a trait we want in our warriors. Again, it’s not like they are confined to tiger cages in Japan.
    Also, no doubt when our fine Christian boys catch the clap on shore leave here and abroad, on wonders whether they take the penicillin shot in the butt, or orally, the righteous wonders.
    My step-nephews Navy Seal Commander was killed, tragically, in a training accident just before I saw the former in Pittsburgh in early December.
    https://people.com/human-interest/navy-seal-commander-and-father-of-5-dies-after-training-accident-in-virginia/
    That judge is full of shit, just like the conservative dog shit who recommended and confirmed him.
    Every time he takes a breath, my religion is offended and I gird my loins (Christians seem so loin-centric) to administer God’s wrathful vengeance.
    I wnder if a Christian Seal has been ordsered to sneak in on Osama Bin Laden and administer a Covid booster shot, if they would have followed orders.

  92. According to that absolutely notorious judge, the military has no right to require the soldiers to get vaccinated, if they object to it.
    Skimming through the opinion, it appears at one point the judge says that what matters about the reason a person objects is not whether it is factually true, but whether the person sincerely believes it to be true. So, apparently, if the person sincerely believes the mRNA vaccines contain material extracted from animals, that trumps the verifiable fact that every single component of the vaccine is synthesized.

  93. …COVID is a crap way to go, and I don’t wish it on anyone.
    I don’t understand this. What would be a good way to go at 46?

  94. Like Nelson Rockefeller?
    Actually, one’s lungs hardening into cement and massive organ failure as one’s last thought is the final speech you gave dissing the vaccine and calling for Tony Fauci’s arrest, while your husband or wife and your children stand behind glass weeping, and the last thing you hear is one of them giving off that first telltale dry cough you infected them with would make great white sharks and Torquemada get graduate degrees and up their games.

  95. I don’t understand this
    pretty much what Thullen said.
    or, more simply, 46 is too young to go, full stop, and COVID is a crap way to go at any age.
    we have vaccines now. nobody has to die from this stupid virus anymore. it’s profoundly sad that some folks seem more than happy to put themselves and other people at risk.
    makes no sense to me.

  96. Is the murderous, genocidal, tax-hating Governor of Florida going to roust up his new special unaccountable guard to collect fines, have fired, and arrest the real estate jokers who refuse to party like it’s 2019?
    https://www.marketwatch.com/story/exclusive-wall-street-cancels-plans-to-host-miami-parties-at-key-real-estate-conference-as-covid-cases-surge-11641342631?siteid=bigcharts&dist=bigcharts
    Can DeSantis send his filth conservative operatives cross state lines and take dialing for dollars smiling-like-maniacs realtors and real estate moguls and developers into custody, drag them back to Florida, shove a Mojito in their hand, buy them each a hooker (and bill them later courtesy of the DeSantis Presidential campaign), rip off their masks, and demand “Party, dammint, or else!”
    There will be violence.

  98. …COVID is a crap way to go, and I don’t wish it on anyone.
    A truly crap way to go is covid as a result of your uber ambitious husband insisting on cavorting with anti-vaxxers when you are undergoing chemotherapy. (Well, at least he got vaccinated. Even if that fact seems to be a Florida state secret currently.)

  99. i know five people currently with COVID.
    that’s five times more than i’ve known since this started.
    (six, if you count The Count)

  101. May be just a statement about my lack of a social life but I am not aware of anybody of my personal acquaintances that caught it let alone died of it.
    No reason to keep one’s guard down though.
    And the situation may well change when I start with my new career as a schoolteacher next month. The current policy is ‘anything but school lockdowns’ and unvaccinated schoolkids have to get tested 5 times a week to enable that.

  103. the problem is… how long can you keep your guard up? COVID simply isn’t going to go away.
    personally, i’m very content working from home and not going to big dumb indoor parties. i’m living la vida introvert, and loving it.
    but most people aren’t.

  104. I can be this easily, in times of lost love and deadly pandemic:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKlSVNxLB-A
    But, sometimes I just gotta get outta here:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4M3WI4lWYXk&t=1426shttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdOExTkx_Hk
    You’ll want to go to the 22:53 mark on that one and experience the acoustics in a bedroom at the Dakota in NYC.
    Or:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRuiVyq2Akc
    Or:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJwt2dxx9yg

  106. I’m a bit at a loss with the Cook Report as to why they chose to focus on the presidential vote as a measure of effect when presidential elections are statewide. Gerrymandering is specifically aimed at controlling the House in order to monkey wrench the agenda a president of different party affiliation and fast track the agenda of a like party president.
    Loss of national majority status is exactly the reason why we have the GOP gerrymandering their states.
    So the GOP districts are more competitive and the Dem districts less so. That’s the formula for maximizing wasted votes for Dems.

  107. but, GftNC, we’ve been told by literally every amateur and professional pundit alive that the Dems had already decisively lost 2024. so, predictions at this point are just bad hindsight.

  109. ‘m a bit at a loss with the Cook Report as to why they chose to focus on the presidential vote as a measure of effect when presidential elections are statewide.
    Presidential votes are counted statewide to see who will be President. But they are tabulated precinct by precinct. When Congressional (or state legislature) districts are redrawn, you need some way to predict which way they will go next time. Precincts are what get shifted, so those are the data you have.
    You can’t use the legislative vote for predictions on the new districts, because incumbancy makes a big difference, and current officeholders won’t be incumbants in at least parts of the new district. And, given how far ticket splitting has decreased, Presidential votes are the best proxy available for how votes for non-incumbants will go next time.

  111. The McArdle piece ends with:

    It will take uniform state and federal standards, and probably some financial assistance, to clear the roadblocks that currently stand between millions of Americans and our first electric car.

    A rare bit of plain common sense from the erstwhile Jane Galt. I was pleased she didn’t follow that with “so I’m against it”.
    Sometimes I think the way to win over conservatives / Trumpites / libertarians / what have you is to just say nothing and let them figure it out for themselves and think it was their own idea in the first place.
    Looking forward to the day when she concludes “screw it, I’ll just take the bus”.

  112. Probably the best summary of what is wrong with US foreign policy that I have seen in a long time—
    https://thecolumn.substack.com/p/conservative-crt-panic-liberal-human
    They link it with both some liberals who cling to American exceptionalist myths and conservative critiques of anti racist ideology.
    I actually have a bit of sympathy for the exceptionalism mythology, so long as people are brutally honest about how far from reality it is much or most of the time. But the ideals are often good.

  113. But they are tabulated precinct by precinct.
    Or other administrative unit. Colorado, for one, no longer has precincts. Now that California has gone to a permanent arrangement of sending a ballot by mail to every registered voter, they will quickly figure out that a little-used precinct-level in-person voting add-on is a large expense for little return. (See also Hawaii’s new vote by mail system, where there are only eight locations in the entire state where you can vote in-person.)

  114. Now that California has gone to a permanent arrangement of sending a ballot by mail to every registered voter, they will quickly figure out that a little-used precinct-level in-person voting add-on is a large expense for little return.
    Point of information. California has precincts, not least because we have a mosaic of overlapping administrative districts: city, agencies (transit, utility, etc.) county, state, and Federal. But any given physical polling location will serve a bunch of precincts.
    We may well follow Utah by going all-mail voting. Although, given DeJoy’s ongoing efforts to trash the US Postal Service, one might have reservations about the wisdom that.

  116. Well after all, if a proposed solution doesn’t work perfectly in all possible circumstances, the fact that it is a massive improvement is most circumstances is irrelevant. Best, in that case, to do nothing. Perfect solutions being so thick on the ground, you know.

  117. We may well follow Utah by going all-mail voting.
    CA did, mostly. At least you made it permanent that all registered voters will receive a ballot by mail in all elections, including local ones. And I think the same bill finished replacing assigned precincts with county-wide vote centers. Once states get to both of those, they look at how much traffic the vote centers get and ask how many of them they really need.
    I’ve been predicting that AZ will flip from Republican state trifecta to a Democratic one in 2022. If that happens, I expect them to switch from mostly (>80%) VBM to all VBM almost immediately.

  118. I’ve been predicting that AZ will flip from Republican state trifecta to a Democratic one in 2022. If that happens, I expect them to switch from mostly (>80%) VBM to all VBM almost immediately.
    If so, I think the first thing they’ll flip will be the current requirement that VBM voters have a physical mailing address to which the ballot will be delivered — i.e. not a PO box. Which ignores (deliberately) the fact that most Native Americans who are living on reservations do not have such physical mail delivery options.

  119. Which ignores (deliberately) the fact that most Native Americans who are living on reservations do not have such physical mail delivery options.
    A few years ago my brother in law in rural Kansas built a new house. The USPS told him at that time that because there had been no previous service at that location, they could not assign a street address for him and he would have to get a PO Box in town. Six days a week the USPS delivery guy drives right by the turnoff for their house where the mailbox would be.

  120. I’d be writing a letter to my member of congress. (And driving it to the post office, I guess.)

  121. they could not assign a street address for him and he would have to get a PO Box in town
    I grew up in the country (rural California), and we didn’t have a street number until I was in high school. We just had a mailbox down at the road, with our name on it. Yet the Post Office managed to deliver the mail 6 days a week; no problem. (Picked up outgoing, too, if we put the flag up.)
    So it’s an excuse, not a reason, not to do something. One can wonder why the USPS felt the need to refuse to make deliveries. But it’s not like the technical problem lacks a known solution.

  122. There are lots of reason, many detailed here over the past year, to dispair the Republican Party and all its works. But there are still stories like this.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/maricopa-county-election-cyber-ninjas-fraud-trump-senate/2022/01/05/9bc64ace-6e50-11ec-aaa8-35d1865a6977_story.html
    Note that the Maricopa County Board, 4 of the 5 being Republicans, not only unanimously rejected and refuted the various insinuations that were the best the Cyber Ninjas could come up with in their “audit”. They did so in fairly blistering terms.

    “We have seen how people react when they think that an election has been stolen. They storm the U.S. Capitol. They threaten to kill and hang and shoot election workers. And they called other Americans traitors,” said Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates (R) on Wednesday. “The American family cannot stand for that. I will not stand for that.”

    Further

    During an annual ceremony to elect a new board chairman Wednesday, Gates, the panel’s newest leader, reiterated those sentiments: “The attempt to undermine democratic elections puts at risk everything else we take for granted in a free country — speech, security, economic progress. And that’s why the county has not been silent — and will not be silent — in the face of lies,” he said.

    Too bad there aren’t more folks like this in the party at the national, and in the case of Arizona state, level.

  123. Meanwhile, the Proud Boys take a tactical page from IS in the wake of their actions from a year ago:
    https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3n338/what-the-proud-boys-did-after-jan-6
    “Over the past year, the Proud Boys have worked to embed themselves amongst local activists who haven’t been tarnished by the Jan. 6 insurrection,” said Devin Burghart, executive director of the Missouri-based Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR). “They’ve enmeshed themselves into local efforts to push back against vaccine mandates, or critical race theory, and other local conflicts, which has allowed them to steer clear of the national discussion about the insurrection and provide them with a base of support that they didn’t have prior to Jan. 6.”
    More of that cell-like networking that I’ve been saying makes it hard to counter the slide on the right.
    They will continue to accelerate conflict and recruit until the violent confrontation they crave is met. At some point that confrontation becomes inevitable. And if that confrontation is not initiated by the center right, it will be seen as leftist governmental overreach, and only serve to further energize the insurgent right.
    That’s how this stuff works, whether here or in Aleppo.

  124. Following nous’ point
    https://www.npr.org/2022/01/05/1070199411/5-takeaways-from-the-capitol-riot-criminal-cases-one-year-later

    A few weeks after the Jan. 6 riot, NPR first reported on the disproportionate share of people facing charges who appeared to have U.S. military histories. Back then, we reported that around 1 in 5 people charged had served or were currently serving in the military, which is nearly three times the proportion of veterans in the general population.
    Though the percentage has gone down since that initial reporting, it is still high: Around 13% of those facing charges have military or law enforcement backgrounds. Those facing charges served in nearly every branch of the military, including the Marine Corps, Air Force, Army, Navy and National Guard. Among the accused are current and former police officers from police departments serving places as large as Houston and New York City and as small as Rocky Mount, Va. There were friends who served together in the Marine Corps, a cadet at The Citadel, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at least one recipient of the Purple Heart.

  125. I believe that more of the rank and file of the US military is gung ho to murder liberals, blacks, Jews, immigrants, feminazis, gays, lesbians, and federal employees (their civilian fellows) than we dare to imagine, since a failure of imagination is America’s ongoing hobby.
    Bill Gates? Oh, that Bill Gates.
    https://www.newsweek.com/arizona-gop-official-says-family-threatened-slaughter-after-he-defended-elections-integrity-1617208
    Have any of those threats been followed up and any arrest results by fucking subhuman conservative law enforcement down there in Arizona?
    Maybe they are bolloxed up and confused with THE Bill Gates, who is injecting them with microchips via the vaccine.
    If the 13% of the 1/6/2021 conspirators and their White House leaders are not arrested, charged with sedition, and executed, in public, by horrifyingly savage means, then the City on the Hill will be a done deal, which it should have been since racist subhuman Ronald Reagan uttered the words while exempting Sammy Davis Junior on account of the fact that Sinatra like the latter.
    A grease spot, a wisp of radioactive smoke after Armageddon, can I get a spell check on that, vermin right wing American Christians?
    I know, I know, the kvetching, the whining, the keening from the your moderate stinking conservative in the aftermath: “But … but …what about my tax cuts, and geez, ya mean I can’t pollute any longer and hate on the cross-dressing niggers?” will be unbearably annoying, like malaria-carrying mosquitos hatching and buzzing round our heads after a rainstorm on a bomb-cratered battlefield in Korea in a war we thought we had won.
    But once we get the death squads going, why stop with the 1/6 traitors?

  126. A sampling of the evil Polpotian spawn of Patrick Buchanan, who has been tolerated as a living vermin racist quite long enough.
    This epicene punk is maybe 24 years old:
    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/things-worth-getting-mad-about/
    Merry Christmas and a partridge in a pear tree from this 12-year old elf:
    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/what-january-6-actually-means/
    And natch, the most dangerous American to the world and the Nation, Rod Dreher, hawking fake cracker fascist conservative candidates, who will kill us.
    He’s fucking Rasputin. Actually the realization of what Rasputin was reputed to be. He’s a killer.
    Don’t let the dumb hat and the very clean hands fool you.
    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/jd-vance-pat-buchanan-heir-washington-post/
    Book sales are strong.

  128. Booze and …. ax-throwing:
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-yorks-ax-throwing-bars-hope-to-cut-through-pandemic-malaise-11603394392?adobe_mc=MCMID%3D29625618524736249253777192912538967248%7CMCORGID%3DCB68E4BA55144CAA0A4C98A5%2540AdobeOrg%7CTS%3D1641469534
    Just saying.
    When the weather warms up, they could have their patrons suit up in armor and joust in the parking lot.
    Maybe some crocodile wrestling in a large aquarium behind the bartenders after a round of shots.
    Catapulting dwarfs into hot bubbling vats of vegetarian chili.

  129. A bar called “Secondary Effects”, in which we keep a hobbled Donald Trump in a cage too small for him on the bar and patrons can pay a fee to poke him with pointy sticks through the cage slats.
    Maybe truss up his violence-loving minions from the ceiling like Iberian hams and distribute dull carving knives to the patrons for slicing tasty bits off them.
    A competitor bar, called “Cackles” will open soon across the street with a Lindsay Graham- themed recreation room devoted to arcane torments recreated from Rod Dreher’s favorite reminiscences of the Christian Middle Ages when leg irons were considered a fashion accessory for all the cool kids.

  131. This epicene punk is maybe 24 years old
    the things the epicene punk thinks we should really be angry about, rather than the riot of a year ago:
    * Fentanyl overdoses
    * Congresspeople profiting from inside information
    * abortion and declining birth rates
    * increased divorce rates
    * difficulty of home ownership
    * COVID “tyranny”
    * Massive corporate profiteering during COVID
    * “Oligarchic manipulation” of elections, by which he means rich people using their money to influence elections
    Most folks here, including myself, are probably on the same page as this guy for at least half of this stuff. And with the exception of support for legal abortion and for COVID vax and mask mandates, there’s nothing “liberal” about any of it.
    What this guy mostly seems upset about are (a) the effects of gross income inequality and concentration of wealth, (b) financial corruption of public actors and institutions, and (c) all the people who aren’t conservative Christians.
    for (a) and (b), I’m not sure his understanding of root causes and workable solutions is accurate. I’m also not sure they were uppermost in the minds of the folks running riot in the Capitol last year.
    (c) is something he’s just gonna have to learn to live with.
    I remain unclear on what exactly it is that these people – all the angry conservatives – want. Whatever it is, presenting your case in the form of threats is probably not going to win hearts and minds.
    Not mine, that’s for damned sure.

  132. I remain unclear on what exactly it is that these people – all the angry conservatives – want.
    they want glorious victories for Republicans and the humiliating defeat of all who stand in their way. declared policy goals are subject to change at any time in order to serve the primary goal.
    they simply want to beat liberals. that’s all their media tells them to want.

  133. they simply want to beat liberals. that’s all their media tells them to want.
    Or at least whatever cartoon version of liberals they have in mind at any given time.

  134. maybe they just like being angry
    just watched Biden’s speech about Jan 6 on YouTube. the comments were a trip and a half.
    the US is not a united country. we don’t all share the same values, don’t all want the same things, don’t all live our lives the same way.
    there’s nothing wrong with that.
    what makes it even remotely possible for the nation to function is accepting that you aren’t always going to get your way. Trump supporters and right-wingers in general appear to have difficulty with that concept. But without it, the deal is off. The operating concept of the country breaks.
    They need to bring something constructive to the table. Not threats. And they need to accept that they aren’t going to get everything they want.
    That’s a reality we all live with. I sure as hell do. They need to get it through their own heads as well.
    If they want to draw a line in the sand, so be it, we’ll all deal with it. But it’s not going to improve anything for them, in any way.

  135. When I started reading TAC many years ago it was puzzling, because I frequently agreed with many of their complaints. This was especially true on foreign policy, with Larison as their columnist — he seems to have started out as a paleocon and that was in keeping with TAC, but I think he became much more liberal, with caveats. (I am guessing he is anti- abortion, but that is just a suspicion based on his religion because I have never seen him write about it.) I think he might be what used to be called a seamless garment pro- life Christian. Anyway, he got fired.
    The rest of TAC is still paleocon, so you get this mix of criticism of wokeness, capitalism, woke capitalism, military interventionism etc…. I just subscribed to the Washington Post ( one year for ten dollars, gotta remember to cancel next year when it goes up to 100 dollars) and read their long piece on Vance and again it was the same sensation. There is all this stuff about criticism of the excesses of capitalism, but when it comes to actual policies so far the Republicans still go for tax cuts, massive Pentagon budgets ( along with most Democrats) and saber rattling. They care about free speech, but only for themselves. There are exceptions—Rand Paul and a few others are serious about their anti- interventionism but most Republicans would bomb Iran in a heartbeat.
    I expect very little from TAC style conservatives. They may talk occasionally about the evils of capitalism and some might be sincere, but nothing will come of it. But all the nasty stuff, the bigotry and so forth—that they will act on.

  136. Nothing like a little bipartisan terrorist violence:
    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/01/january-6-capitol-hill-pipe-bomb/621178/
    The DNC is afraid of and wants nothing to do with the terrorist.
    The FBI is trying to identify and locate the terrorist.
    The RNC is hoping they don’t lose the terrorist’s vote in 2022 and 2024 and beyond by convincing him/her that they share his evil goal of blowing up Washington DC and the entire political system.
    The RNC and Trump terrorists are promising the terrorist(s) they will clean house at the FBI, and prevent the agency from locating the terrorist, leaving the identification to Bannon and House Republican vermin for the purposes of giving him a political appointment overseeing the FBI once their coup of our government is in the bag.
    The terrorist would be good Chief of Staff for Ted Cruz or Rand Paul.
    Lindsay Graham might put him/her on the payroll too, as the former is always anxious about falling behind in the race to the bottom with conservative jagoff assholes.

  137. Ginny and Clarence Thomas hope to adopt the terrorist after the Supreme Court finds his actions constitutional.

  138. Luke Broadwater:
    As Democrats are speaking about the impact of Jan. 6, they are talking mostly to an empty chamber. Not a single Republican is seated in the chamber as Senators Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, speak about the horrors of that day.

  140. read their long piece on Vance and again it was the same sensation. There is all this stuff about criticism of the excesses of capitalism
    Vance is a venture capitalist, and a lot of his $$$ comes from Peter Thiel, one of the ultimate OG SanFran tech bros. And vampire wanna-be, but I digress.
    So, there’s all of that.
    I recognize that life and people are complicated, and I don’t expect complete consistency from anyone about anything, really.
    But JD Vance as a voice against the excesses of capitalism seems borderline incoherent.

  143. they want glorious victories for Republicans and the humiliating defeat of all who stand in their way.
    In short, they are invested in “their team” the same way pro sports fans are. And have as little awareness, or interest, in what “tbeir team” actually does off-screen.
    It should be noted that the same mindset afflicts some on the Democratic side as well. Just nothing like a majority, so they don’t (usually) drive the conversation.

  145. Ginny and Clarence Thomas hope to adopt the terrorist after the Supreme Court finds his actions constitutional.
    Of course, they might have to move to Maryland first. Because by then the Court might well have reversed that horribly offensive intrusion into the rights of soverign states that is Loving v Virginia. At which point, they would cease to be a married couple, and so couldn’t adopt.

  146. Who’d a thunk it?
    In the mail today came one of the usual monthly bills. An enclosure says:
    “Due to a nationwide inventory shortage, we are currently unable to provide a return envelope as we typically do for your payment. Please use your own envelope….”
    Somehow, that particular inventory shortage had not crossed my mind. (Fortunately, I pay on-line, and so will not feel the lack.)

  149. True Republicans never give up on their team.
    Much as we saw with Real Americans(TM), “True Republicans” . . . aren’t.

  150. Somehow, that particular inventory shortage had not crossed my mind.
    The electronics shortage hit me this morning. I was going to order another Raspberry Pi 4 since the only I had is now in a project. Out of stock everywhere I would normally check. Some places say order now for delivery after Feb 28, some say they don’t know when they’ll have stock.

  151. Electronics? Anything with chips (including cars)? Imports generally? Sure.
    But envelopes?!?!? All those take is paper, for God sake!

  152. Covid antigen tests, the quick kind, are nearly impossible to procure.
    The virus itself seems to possess an uninterrupted supply chain.

  153. Because this is still a new year open thread, I want to recommend a series of books which have given me pleasure in the last couple of years, and which I think some of you might like too.
    They are spy books, but of a particularly anti-heroish kind, with really good dialogue and a wonderfully brilliant but grotty main character, Jackson Lamb:
    He is the Falstaff of the spying world: obese in body; revolting in personal habits; gratuitously insulting in manner.
    Not all are of an exactly equal standard (one at least is very farfetched), but the dialogue sparkles rather demonically, the characterisation is very entertaining, and the setting perfect for Anglophiles who are interested in the more seamy side of the street. I’ve just read the latest, Slough House, and enjoyed it a lot. I gather from this piece that they are currently filming some of it for AppleTV starring Gary Oldman. Anyway, for those interested:
    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/15/mick-herron-i-look-at-jackson-lamb-and-think-my-god-did-i-write-that-my-mother-reads-this-stuff

  154. Been reading through the New Republic piece that JT posted above, which I will repost here for convenience:
    https://newrepublic.com/article/164408/young-intellectuals-illiberal-revolution-conservatism
    If the regime has already been corrupted, usurped by evil forces who will punish anyone who dissents from the woke orthodoxy, what measures aren’t justified to redeem it? If the founding principles have been distorted beyond recognition by an unjust regime, why should the legal parameters of that regime circumscribe acceptable means of rebellion? As Claremont senior fellow Glenn Ellmers recently put it, “Overturning the existing post-American order, and re-establishing America’s ancient principles in practice, is a sort of counter-revolution, and the only road forward.” Liberal democracy as the founders envisioned can only be restored by subverting liberal democracy as it has become. “I think the vast majority of people feel … that this is the end,” Leary told me. “We’ve either got to take control or all is lost.”
    One of Buckley’s earliest influences was the idiosyncratic libertarian writer Albert Jay Nock. Nock’s most memorable concept was that of “The Remnant,” a tiny, marginal community of right-thinking people who knew the true nature of state and society. Nock, in a moment of deep pessimism, advised that instead of seeking power through reform or revolution, individualists ought to simply nurture The Remnant—those who, when things got bad enough, would be called upon to restore the good life. The Remnant, as in the Book of Isaiah, are those who remain, who keep the faith, who wait to rebuild in the wake of catastrophe.
    I hear these voices all over amongst both my family and their evangelical cadre, and the apocalyptic neo-orthodox christian types on the St. John’s College alum lists. The worst who are full of passionate intensity on the right are all channeling the spirit of counter-revolutionary indifference to democracy.
    And, yes, lots of Leo Strauss (and beneath the Strauss, Schmitt) in their philosophical foundations. Their mission is to eject or destroy as much of the polity as necessary to restore the true nature of The People. They won’t return to any democratic urges until The Remnant has a firm majority in whatever remains after the purge.

  155. If the regime has already been corrupted, usurped by evil forces who will punish anyone who dissents from the woke orthodoxy, what measures aren’t justified to redeem it? If the founding principles have been distorted beyond recognition by an unjust regime, why should the legal parameters of that regime circumscribe acceptable means of rebellion?
    Delete the word “woke” from the first sentence (or substitute “reactionary”), and you have an equally cogent pair of questions from the other side. No doubt the author is blind to that reality.

  156. wj – why would he be blind to that reality?
    And the more cogent question that faces us – given that the ‘horseshoe theory’ exists in potentia, how close is that potential to becoming a reality on either side?
    As someone who has a finger on the pulse of the radicals on either side, I can guarantee you that the left is nowhere close to staging a violent coup attempt. That level of organization and of militarization just does not exist.
    I know you find these equivocations salutary and comforting, but they really are disconnected from practical reality as it stands today.

  157. Delete the word “woke” from the first sentence (or substitute “reactionary”), and you have an equally cogent pair of questions from the other side.
    No. You do not. Not even close.

  158. But envelopes?!?!? All those take is paper, for God sake!
    And adhesive. Cellophane for the little window if that’s the style. People to load the materials into the machinery. Printing. Back in 2020, I really believed that there would be vote by mail snarls in the states that had waited until the last minute to try to scale up because they wouldn’t be able to get enough stuff printed.

  159. re-establishing America’s ancient principles in practice
    I live in a town that was founded in 1629. I attend a church that was first gathered as a congregation in the same year. That’s not even 400 years, and that’s as old as it gets in this country.
    400 years is not ancient. In the context of human history, it’s the blink of an eye.
    My wife and I were visiting family in AZ a few years ago and we went to see the original homestead of English-speaking white people in Sedona. It dates from around 1900.
    122 years is not only not ancient, it’s barely a sneeze. There are houses in my neighborhood older than that.
    There is nothing – not one single thing – in this country that has earned the name “ancient”.
    That’s neither here nor there, neither good nor bad. It is what is is. But what it absolutely is not is “ancient”.
    When I read stuff like this, I have literally and absolutely no freaking idea what the author is talking about. The author appears to make an appeal to some kind of deep historical precedent for his or her social and political preferences. I’m pretty sure it’s hogwash.
    The Remnant, as in the Book of Isaiah, are those who remain
    The remnant, in the book of Isaiah and other of the prophetic books in the OT, were Israelis who survived the utter collapse and destruction of the nation of Israel by foreign conquerors. With the bulk of the population having either been killed, or carried off into captivity.
    I’m sure it’s flattering to these people to think of themselves as the faithful few persevering in the face of catastrophes like being required to either get a vaccination or wear a mask, or let a trans person use a bathroom, or whatever other abominations the rest of us are inflicting upon them. But it seems a bit overwrought, to me.
    the left is nowhere close to staging a violent coup attempt
    The left is not only nowhere close to doing so, the left has no interest in doing so. It’s hard to say what “the left” even means in the current day US.
    Dwight David Eisenhower would be a radical leftist in the current climate. The term is meaningless.
    As an aside, I spent a bit of time today watching Biden’s speech about January 6 on YouTube, and reading the comments. Biden’s speech was remarkable for taking the issue straight to Trump and his sheer inability to get his head around the fact that he lost the fncking election in 2020 – I’m not sure any politician in my lifetime has laid the facts out in plain speech in the way that Biden did today. Well done, uncle Joe.
    The comments were overwhelmingly negative, and were remarkable for their complete and utter divergence from reality. I really do think that Trump supporters are lost. They are unreachable.
    I have no idea what to do with that.

  160. As someone who has a finger on the pulse of the radicals on either side, I can guarantee you that the left is nowhere close to staging a violent coup attempt.
    nous, I am entirely clear. It isn’t that the left would. It’s that there is no obvious reason why the case for them doing so isn’t every bit as (in)valid as the case the far right tries to make for itself.

  161. The more “with-it” companies have already noticed if you mostly pay your bills electronically, and silently omitted the envelopes.
    If not, then it’s my idea, and they owe me royalties in future.

  162. It isn’t that the left would. It’s that there is no obvious reason why the case for them doing so isn’t every bit as (in)valid as the case the far right tries to make for itself.
    I’ve been looking at the first sentence and I really don’t understand it. It might be 1st language attrition (definitely a thing here), but can you spell it out for the demi-lingual speaker I’ve become.

  163. The more “with-it” companies have already noticed if you mostly pay your bills electronically, and silently omitted the envelopes.
    My stodgy old municipal utility company silently omitted the return envelope starting the month after I signed up to pay online.

  164. Almost the only time I get a mailing from my electricity service provider is when my current contract is about up.

  165. Dwight David Eisenhower would be a radical leftist in the current climate. The term is meaningless.
    Let’s be totally clear. In the current climate Ronald Reagan would be a radical leftist. The term is beyond meaningless.

  166. wj: It isn’t that the left would. It’s that there is no obvious reason why the case for them doing so isn’t every bit as (in)valid as the case the far right tries to make for itself.
    lj: I’ve been looking at the first sentence and I really don’t understand it. It might be 1st language attrition (definitely a thing here), but can you spell it out for the demi-lingual speaker I’ve become.
    It’s at least as likely to be sloppy phrasing on my part.
    What I had originally attempted to point out was that exactly the same phrasing (save a single word tweak) could equally well justify bad behavior from either side. Which someone purporting to be an intellectual (yes, even a conservative intellectual) really ought to be bright enough to realize. Except he obviously wasn’t. Or realized, but figured his readers would be too dumb to notice — which seems typical of the “leaders” on the far right these days.
    nous had taken my words to suggest that I saw the left as likely to resort to the kind of violence the original author was trying to justify. So my first sentence was to say that no, I don’t think the left is there. I just think the argument is equally plausible either way — which is to say, not at all.
    IMHO, anyone arguing for violently (or even by subterfuge) reversing an electoral result** is implicitly conceding that they cannot make a case which will attract a majority. Which, to my mind, means that they deserve to lose.
    Hope that helps.
    ** A mindset which, in my youth, did have a significant following on the far left. Happily, Che Guevara, Pol Pot, and Mao are no longer a great folk heroes there.

  167. wj – you were musing about how people on the right were being gulled into following Coup Bully Con. That New Republic article is saying that the literate segment of the religious right is not following Trump so much as they are going along with it all because Coup Bully Con at his worst is better than the moral degradation of the Democrats, and the destruction of the state would be better than preserving the republic with the Dems in charge.
    I don’t care if what they aim to achieve is plausible or not. All I care is that they are willing to try and have been actively working to do so for five years. They may not be able to get their plan to work, but they can certainly break the republic beyond repair and consider that an acceptable outcome.

  168. They may not be able to get their plan to work, but they can certainly break the republic beyond repair and consider that an acceptable outcome.
    They do appear to consider that an acceptable outcome. Which only demonstrates, yet again (on the off chance that anyone had missed it) that there’s really nothing resembling a real religion in “religious right.”

  169. GftNC:
    Thanks for the book recommendations.
    And further, now that Gary Oldman is on board, I’m on the edge of my seat.
    Especially, for a reason we both know, if it’s “grotty”.

  170. Hutus and Tutsis seemed quite alike to the undiscriminating eye until their FOX News, RTLM, pointed out the differences and then one was standing over big piles of the dead others with machetes.
    Hitler’s Brownshirts in the early going were ignored as brutish clowns. They replaced a fellow who got a zeppelin named after him.
    What’s a Serb? What’s a Croat? What’s a Muslim? What’s a Bosnia? What’s a Sarejevo? They intermixed for a long time. Then they didn’t. They had their FOX News too and then they had a tidal wave of intermixed bloodshed.
    The Czar: It’s getting better all the time.
    The Boshevik: It can’t get no worse.
    History: You better run for your life, little girl.
    Pol Pot: If I see one more of those four-eyed bi-focaled troublemakers, I’m going to start a bone collection.
    Jefferson Davis: Lincoln should be shot. I really liked being Secretary of War for the entire country. Especially Kansas.
    We’re just going to let it happen to us.
    The secret is to relax … until our sphincters set off the alarms.

  171. Stalin: Your crime, no.1, was spelling Bolshevik wrong. Your train leaves in an hour.
    _______________________________
    I’ve never trusted the very young, like those quoted in the New Republic article, and those punks at TAC, who presume to don the mantle of Jesus, the Prophets, the Forefathers, the ancient ones.
    No one at the age of 23 can presume to have a historical sense, except the insane, by which I mean Newt Gingrich.
    They creep me out.
    If a guy is walking around calling himself Tacitus, I’m keeping one hand in a fist just in case.
    Some dude who fashions himself to sound like Chesterton in his elocution is a wobbling bubble who deserves to be pricked with a spear.
    The only mantle I wanted to wear at that age was Mickey Mantle’s and Willie May’s and that of four lads from Liverpool.
    It never occurred to me after reading Sartre to begin smoking Gauloises held with the wrong fingers.
    I did aspire to live in a garret and scribble Melvillean tomes. Otherwise, it’s minnows all the way down to the vasty deep.
    I’ve finally achieved the garret part.
    I do sometimes grip a lapel in one hand and pontificate to the ceiling in the voice of the double-taking Edward Everett Horton and/or Professor Irwin Corey, and if the latter, I always start in the middle of a paragraph.
    The profundity is crushing.
    Maybe the Reverend Horton Heat, but I ain’t anywhere near having the guitar chops for that.
    At age 70 (what? when? that can’t be) now, however, I have a great sense of foreboding.
    I still think I can outrun it in a foot race.
    I do wonder if the hammies will hold up.
    I’d better stretch.

  172. Thanks. I may be overthinking this, but when you say that what because it would have been possible to change ‘woke’ to say, ‘neoliberal’ or ‘capitalist’ or some other phrase that would flip it from a right to a left thing, the observation is meaningless? Cause to me, this sounds like the ‘both sides do it’ mindset.
    When I read your “It isn’t that the left would”, it sounds like you are acknowledging that no one on the current actual left is thinking of that now. If that is the case, it is definitely not a both sides do it situation. The para before the quote has this
    The key to understanding the attitudes of young conservatives is their pervasive sense that the war for the soul of America has already been lost, their belief that progressives have taken control of every efficacious power center in American society—save a few hours per night of Fox News—and reshaped the country beyond recognition. The most acute expressions of this revolution, in their view, are the normalizing of transgender identities, the pervasiveness of racial “equity,” abortion, cancel culture, and the pornification of media (including for young children). But their catastrophist sense of American affairs is difficult to fully grasp for those of us who don’t feel it. It has a decidedly religious, eschatological dimension. Buckley’s febrile heirs have convinced themselves “that basically we’re at Megiddo,” Butler said, referring to the site of the final showdown in the Book of Revelation. “We’re in the battle at the end of time, and the prince of darkness is already at the door, and the whole world is now a contest between activist left and activist right.”
    So just because you can alter the polarity of the statement with a word or two doesn’t really deflate the observation that the right has come to believe that it is necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.
    Apologies if that’s a gross misreading, but that’s what I feel like I’m left with.

  173. Will THEY die fast enough, by their own hands, to save the Republic:
    https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/01/is-god-a-bullshit-artist
    Or, will the dead republicans be permitted to vote more than once in coming elections by the remaining living republicans, who will then kill us?
    https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/01/the-republican-party-is-pro-1-6
    It’s a fair bet that von Hindenburg used the words “heil” and “sieg” in conversation during his lifetime.
    But that was different than their later usage by the pure.

  175. Let’s be totally clear. In the current climate Ronald Reagan would be a radical leftist. The term is beyond meaningless.
    Change the words “Ronald Reagan” to “Che Guevara” and “leftist” to “reactionary” and see, it means the same thing!
    QED
    🙂

  180. Ted Cruz is on fire!
    https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1479264723740684288?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1479270519937531911%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es3_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com%2F2022%2F01%2Flyin-ted-makes-a-brief-exception-to-his-ethos-apologizes-profusely
    Hosing him down with raw sewage is not quenching the flames.
    Is it time to try gasoline and a match?
    Texans own lots of guns. Why aren’t they using them now on the conservative traitors to the country that Texans keep stealing money from every time it rains?
    What are those guns? Paperweights? Doorstops? Cigarette lighters?
    What happened to the good ole spirit of the Alamo?

  182. It’s not clear to me what the TAC writers consider “corporate corruption” to be.
    They certainly don’t mean Citizens United.
    It’s much more tied to corporations treating gay and transgender humans to “outrageous” equality with other employees.
    The make themselves sound like Henry David Thoreau at times and then, as with him, you find out Walden Pond was right next to a heavily traveled road, Thoreau moved back into town after a mere two years, and today the pond is a mess of litter, though some clean-up has occurred.
    Emulating Kucinich? Good luck with that. Which Kucinich? Or just the one who took on the utility company?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Kucinich
    For such history buffs, they don’t know much.
    What’s next, Patrick Buchanan tuning in, turning on, and dropping out, like Wavy Gravy?

  183. So just because you can alter the polarity of the statement with a word or two doesn’t really deflate the observation that the right has come to believe that it is necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.
    so, they want to Burn It Down?

  184. I’m taking wj to mean that the grievances the people cite as justifying their revolution are no greater than the usual grievances just about anyone at any time would have in a pluralistic society. Their not getting their way on what is actually some fairly minor crap falls well short of the tyranny and oppression they claim it to be. People on the left (or of whatever political persuasion) are just as aggrieved as these self-appointed revolutionaries on any number of points. But they aren’t claiming that it’s time for them to take up arms to break the system over it.

  185. Interesting that Democrats Pelosi and company were graciously thanking republican staffers who assisted members during the murderous January 6 onslaught, while elected maskless fuck republicans were hiding out and coughing on the Democrats:
    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/1/6/2073143/–Something-s-changed-in-his-values-former-McCarthy-staffer-slams-lawmaker-s-coziness-to-Trump
    I’d like five minutes with Trump in a room alone.
    Why do these filth conservatives suck his dick?
    What’s he got on these so-called conservative pussies?
    It can’t be charisma. It’s gotta be dirt, bought and paid for.
    Like the Mafia, trump’s every sentence to his republican shills when he smells the slightest bit of disloyalty has got to start with the words: “It’d be a shame if ……

  186. A minority fascist rump attempts to rule:
    https://apnews.com/article/business-europe-russia-moscow-kazakhstan-3349e68089ccdbcd08e76a5e8fd4a909?utm_source=pocket-newtab
    Instructive.
    “But they aren’t claiming that it’s time for them to take up arms to break the system over it.”
    I’d prefer the system (our pretty good one, which the right is attempting to make utterly dysfunctional, not the kazakhstan variety, which should be violently overthrown) take up arms to break the insurrectionist claiments and their fake claims and protect the rest of us.

  187. another take on Christian authoritarianism.
    It is, perhaps, telling that “both heaven and hell are absolute dictatorships”. (An observation I first encountered decades ago.) It makes religion-based authoritarianism more likely than not.

  189. Yes, when the religious reactionaries talk about rejecting liberalism and ancient roots all they really mean is rejecting the pluralism of the Enlightenment. Never mind that what they embrace was causing horribly bloody wars between sects and witch hunts that wiped out thousands.
    But in the eyes of Politco the whole of the Thirty Years War comes down to an argument over the aesthetics of communion, so…

  190. Change the words “Ronald Reagan” to “Che Guevara” and “leftist” to “reactionary” and see, it means the same thing!
    QED
    Exactly wrong. There is no significant group on the left arguing the the positions that Guevara et al held are too conservative to be acceptable today. Whereas Reagan’s positions are too liberal for the Faux News and MAGA crowd.

  192. wj, you are of course talking about the actual historical Ronald Reagan, not the party saint. And few things will anger his worshippers more than pointing out the differences. Worst of all, it’s the few redeeming* things about him that are the greatest heresies as far as the party’s current dogma goes.
    *and even some of those he imo did out of motives that I do not share.

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