...and ANOTHER thing!
Come back here, I'll tell you!
Hoo boy, this one got away from me a little.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned this [quite possibly apocryphal] anecdote before, but when columnist George Will started his career, he allegedly lamented to fellow columnist William F. Buckley, “How will I possibly write two columns a week?” To which Buckley supposedly replied “Easy — two things a week will annoy you. Write about those.”
You might have noticed I use similar fodder for this newsletter; which is more like a journal for me — a journal that, due to various psychological conditions, I let dozens (dozens!) of people read. My brain is like a crowded daycare center full of screaming children — wait, no, my brain is like a house full of screaming children, and this newsletter is the daycare where I can send the screaming children that are my thoughts so that I can focus long enough to get some work done. But when the same few things annoy me week after week, I worry that I’m being boring — and perhaps more importantly, I worry that boredom means I’m/we’re desensitizing to the awfulness. I mean, how much more is there to say about Russian atrocities in Ukraine, or some idiot politician doing something dishonest and/or dishonorable, or whatever ephemeral culture war nonsense that has Americans at each others’ throats (which, just to keep track, this week has something to do with Disney indoctrinating children with pro-gay propaganda or some such because Florida passed a poorly-written law about talking about sexual orientation in elementary school that the Disney corporation opposed or whatever the hell, and anyone who opposes the law — and, incidentally, supports the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court — is a “groomer” in favor of pedophilia. It’s a weird time.).
It’s a delicate balance — focus too much on [gestures broadly] the general state of things, and it’s difficult not to be overcome by a sense of pessimistic exhaustion, what the Germans call weltschmertz; but pay too little attention to world events and you risk becoming a blithe Pollyanna with a tenuous connection to reality.
So I’m going to try to cover things just enough to get the screaming children to daycare, so to speak, but not so much that I just crawl back in bed.
Putin Still Being Putin
As the Ukrainian military drives Russian invaders out of its territory, the scale and scope of atrocities committed by Russians against Ukrainian civilians becomes clearer. It’s a scandal in itself that Russian war crimes have become so commonplace that the general reaction to the discovery of more war crimes is essentially “well, obviously.” But here we are.
In the town of Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, Russian soldiers appear to have executed any male under the age of 50, often in front of their families, in a terror campaign. There are also mass graves in territory previously held by the Russian military; as well as reports of rape of women and even children. Just truly, truly awful stuff.
President Biden caused a lot of teeth-gnashing and handwringing when he said, supposedly ad-libbed, that Vladimir Putin can’t be allowed to stay in power, but, I mean…he’s not wrong? And he’s less wrong every day.
Useful Idiots
There’s this weird chorus on both the populist Left and populist Right (where the ends of the horseshoe get close together) that is so skeptical of information about the war that they’ve painted themselves into a corner by entertaining things like “maybe the Ukrainians murdered themselves to generate anti-Russian propaganda.”
Like this rightwing moron:
And this leftwing troll:
Tracey here is implying that those (like him) who deny the perpetration of war crimes in Ukraine are smeared as “Putin apologists,” but the Department of Defense will not definitively say that war crimes occurred. It should be noted, however, that the reason the Pentagon can’t “independently confirm” the atrocities in Bucha is because there are no Department of Defense investigators on the ground there. But in the same article, the same DoD official says the DoD is in no position to refute the claims. So sure, we don’t have definitive proof, as yet, that Russians are slaughtering civilians. But as Henry David Thoreau said, “some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” The circumstantial evidence in Ukraine is quite compelling — such as the satellite imagery showing a suspicious lack of dead bodies littering the street before the Russian invasion, and then showing dead bodies piling up during the Russian invasion.
Ok, Groomer
There’s a new smear being deployed on the Right:
There’s been a vague belief in the political fever swamps for decades that the shadowy (often impliedly Jewish, for what it’s worth) “elites” do all manner of unspeakable things to children — drink their blood, eat their flesh, wear their faces as masks, what have you. But that belief that was once relegated to the truly insane fever swamps has now gained prominence in the mainstream (mostly because the fever swamps have expanded to the point of engulfing the mainstream), as evidenced by the so-called QAnon conspiracy. It’s now a distressingly popular belief that cultural and political elites in this country regularly participate in a widespread network of trafficking of and sexual crimes against children. Which is, of course, banana crackers; but untold millions of Americans genuinely believe it.
Also, just a quick note on the Florida law: I’ve read quite a bit about it and listened to people whose opinions I trust, and I can certainly see the point opponents of the law have. While the original text of the bill was worse — it literally outlawed discussion of sexual orientation in the classroom before third grade — the version that passed had replaced “discussion” with “instruction.” “Instruction” was not defined, to my understanding, and therefore can lead to vagaries and confusion, which will inevitably lead to lawsuits; but to call it “Don’t Say Gay” is also disingenuous.
So now we’ve entered an era where opposition to a poorly-written Florida law regarding sexual orientation subject matter in schools gets you pegged as a “groomer,” and voting to confirm a Supreme Court Justice who followed sentencing guidelines in child pornography cases during her tenure as a judge gets you smeared as “pro-pedophile.” It’s a dangerous mixture of evil and rank, mouth-breathing stupidity.
It’s stupid because it’s so obviously untrue and requires a willful ignorance of reality; but it’s evil because of what it can and will be used to justify. When you slander your political opponents as honest-to-God child sex criminals — or, at best, supporters of honest-to-God child sex criminals — there is nothing you won’t justify in opposing them. It doesn’t take long for that path to lead to some truly terrible places.
Handling All the Family Business
Might as well just keep this train of thought rolling: The Georgia congressional primaries are next month, which means Marjorie Taylor Greene is up for re-nomination. She actually has a primary challenger in Jennifer Strahan, who is by all accounts a non-crazy conservative Republican. I haven’t seen any polling in the race, but I would be shocked if Greene didn’t roll to the nomination while getting less than two-thirds of the vote.
I’ve mentioned before that I have many relatives in Greene’s district, and I got myself into a little familial trouble by speculating that those relatives feel adequately represented by Greene and her foolishness. But what conclusions should we reach when someone like Greene is overwhelmingly supported in the primary? To be clear, the choice isn’t between Greene and a Democrat; the choice is between Greene and a “normal” conservative Republican who [presumably] isn’t a malicious crank conspiracy theorist and embarrassment to the state. If the voters in her district choose, of their own free will, to be represented by Greene, why shouldn’t we conclude that her constituents simply want to be represented by a malicious crank conspiracy theorist because they like it?
We’ve been told multiple times that there’s “no place” in the Republican party for people like Greene who traffic in anti-Semitic stereotypes, who believe in and spread dangerous conspiracy theories, who attend white nationalist conferences, and who just generally awful people. But if such people keep being chosen to represent Republican voters, we should come to grips with the fact that there absolutely is a place in the Republican party for people like her.
And Now for Something Lighter
It should come as no surprise that I was never a fan of Donald Trump. As far back as the 2012 campaign when he was pushing Obama’s birth certificate nonsense, I knew he was bad news for American politics (I tragically underestimated how bad, but I feel like I had him pegged from the beginning.) And one of my pet peeves about Trump has always been the myth that he’s a “great businessman” when he clearly isn’t.
The most illuminating (and in my experience, disturbing) example of this was early in the 2016 primary when Donald Trump held a press conference to “defend” his business record after Mitt Romney — an actually good businessman — devastatingly (and accurately) lambasted Trump’s business acumen.
For those of you who don’t remember, Trump had props with him on stage — bottles of water with the Trump company logo, packaged steaks, etc. — and he was using them to show the supposedly quality of “Trump Water” and “Trump Steaks.”
But here’s the problem: Trump Water was actually just Costco brand water with Trump Hotels labels printed on them. Trump Water was not for sale anywhere; it was simply given away at his various properties. More succinctly, Trump Water, as a company, does not exist.
More brazenly, the steaks that Trump was touting as Trump Steaks products were actually Bush Brothers steaks — still in Bush Brothers packaging. But Trump was nevertheless claiming them as Trump Steaks — a company that went defunct in 2006 — almost like he was daring anyone to call him on it.
He also mentioned that he “sold” Trump Airlines, but even that wasn’t true: The company defaulted on its loans and he was forced to relinquish control of the company as a legal matter. He sold Trump Airlines the same way a foreclosure “sells” a house back to the bank.
Now you might be thinking, “Charles, it’s a little weird to be so upset about a press conference that happened six years ago…” Probably. But it was a real Emperor Has No Clothes moment for me. The guy was up there clearly lying — And not even lying well! He literally brought someone else’s product up there and called it his own without even changing the packaging! — and everyone was just nodding along.
There’s marketing, there’s bullshitting, and then there’s sociopathy. Holding a press conference where you brazenly lie to the faces of those watching, I believe, is the latter. It was maddening — both in the angry sense, and the crazy-making sense.
Which is all a roundabout way of mentioning that what Trump did to water, steaks, airlines, and American political culture, he has now done to social media:
“Josh Adams and Billy Boozer — [Donald Trump’s Truth Social startup]’s chiefs of technology and product development — joined the venture last year and quickly became central players in its bid to build a social-media empire, backed by Trump’s powerful brand, to counter what many conservatives deride as “cancel culture” censorship from the left.
Less than a year later, both have resigned their senior posts at a critical juncture for the company’s smartphone-app release plans, according to two sources familiar with the venture.
The departures followed the troubled launch of the company’s iPhone app on Feb. 20. Weeks later, many users remain on a waiting list, unable to access the platform. […]
The company has an app for iPhones but no app for Android phones, which comprise more than 40% of the U.S. market, though the company has advertised seeking an engineer to build one. […]
Downloads of the Truth Social app have declined precipitously, from 866,000 installations the week of its launch to 60,000 the week of March 14, according to estimates from data analytics firm Sensor Tower. The firm estimates the Truth Social app has been downloaded 1.2 million times in all, trailing far behind rival conservative apps Parler and Gettr at 11.3 million and 6.8 million installations, respectively.
You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh. Donald Trump is not, and has never been, a good business man. His schtick is to repeatedly swindle people into letting him put his name on their buildings, and paying him a lot of money for it. He’s a one-man Ponzi scheme (which, incidentally, I think the original Ponzi scheme was also a one-man operation). What baffles me is that his current grift is getting working class Americans to send him money. And it works! Every Trump business venture eventually ends as a farce, some quicker than others, but the bill always comes due.
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: Art
Clue: Nearly 10 feet long, “Lavender Mist” from 1950 is one of his drip paintings.
Jackson Pollock
Today’s clue:
Category: T.V. Trivia
Clue: This patriarch of the titular family was employed at Spacely Space Sprockets.
Dispatches from the Homefront
The pottytraining of our oldest daughter is going surprisingly well, er, at home. Apparently all it took was a single bag of M&Ms, and that kid is on the toilet more than a tourist in New Delhi with an enlarged prostate.
The problem is, they apparently don’t give out M&Ms at daycare and it seems the incentive to use the potty for its own sake is not nearly as strong.