Sunday, July 21, 2024

Of Course It Wasn't Worth Getting Out The Crayons

     I didn't expect it would do much good.  If you're deep into the Trumpian Cinematic Universe, you've left objective reality behind.

     In response to pointing out that attempting a crime counts as committing the crime, even if the attempt does not succeed, I got a tortured hypothetical situation with only the slightest connection to the counting of votes in the 2020 election and disputes about the count.  Yeah, no, and not even the point; and easily dispelled by using a parallel:* the downballot Dems didn't do all that well in 2020, with narrow majorities in the Senate and House (the latter flipped the other way, barely, in 2022, and how'd that happen if the fix is in?): if they'd had a fat enough thumb on the scales to change the Presidential vote, they could have handed themselves comfortable majorities in both bodies and legislated to their heart's content.  They didn't.  Congress has been remarkably unproductive.  One commenter claimed the Democrats want a "tyranny of the majority," but given the number of times in the last forty years they've held the House, Senate and Presidency, if they were after it they'd have got it by now, with bells and ribbons and parades on May Day.  Hasn't happened and it wasn't for lack of opportunity.

     Commenters have accused me of being "ignorant," while supplying no facts or history to counter mine.  If you won't do the homework, you don't get to call other people ignorant and expect any response aside from derisive laughter.  I was able to watch January 6 in real time and there's no retconning actual events, no matter how much you may wish to or how many glittering lies your Great Leaders may spin.  (Of note, live/near-live TV coverage that day was often forced to rely on wide shots, showing the literal "big picture," the true extent of the crowd and the broad sweeps of movement, the lulls and pauses as they happened, the cries of "Hang Mike Pence" after his decision was announced.)

     They have also accused me of being a Democrat.  Nope.  I'm a Democrat voter these days, but I'm still not a registered member of any political party; Indiana doesn't require it to vote in general elections and in party primaries, they only ask which ballot you want.  I'm a small-d democrat and small-r republican, and a small-l libertarian, too.  I think it's too bad Republicans decided Christian Nationalism (with a wide streak of White Nationalism) and a cult of personality was their way forward.  All my life, I have counted on having two big mostly-sane parties running in elections that are mostly "Coke vs. Pepsi" and "Crest vs. Colgate," and keeping one another between the rails, despite the occasional John Bircher or would-be socialist in their ranks, and that they maintain internal Party discipline by pitching out the genuine nuts, crooks and extremists that sneaked in.  I can't count on the Republicans to clean up their own party any more, and they're immune to any shame when their worst ideas and politicians are revealed.  At best, the GOP are the Whigs and Know-Nothings of our time, riding a ticking clock to irrelevance; at worst--  Well, extreme parties have ruined nations and instigated wars plenty of times in the past, and the price is always paid in blood and ignominy.
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* One of the better examples of this way of reality-testing is physicist Richard Feynman's work investigating the Challenger disaster: he looked into the history, engineering and production management of the Space Shuttle's liquid-fueled engines, and found the same pattern of each successive level minimizing the risk analysis of the preceding level that had doomed the solid-fuel boosters: if the engineers determined there was a one-on-ten risk of failure, their bosses, not wanting to look bad and knowing how cautious the engineers were, reported it as one in a hundred, and this happened over and over, all the way up: there were design problems, but there was a problem with management culture that kept them from being recognized and fixed until we lost a Shuttle.  And even then, we lost another one....

1 comment:

  1. It's pathetic that some people accuse you of being ignorant. I would accuse you of being well-read.

    With the incumbent now out of the race, a new dynamic will appear. I am expecting a creep of misogyny and racism into the far-right rhetoric.

    Today's GOP might as well be the Know-Nothing party. It is sad that the Party of Lincoln perished about a decade ago.

    ReplyDelete

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