Never has a knife been so sharpened for a movie

As I have mentioned before, there is an online world of Right-ish movie/culture critics who writhe about how "woke" feminism (and, to a degree, queer promotion) has ruined the Star Wars franchise, the Tolkien franchise, the Marvel franchise, etc.  Prime amongst them is the guy called the Critical Drinker, and I do watch some of his Youtube videos, as well as some of those by Nerdtronic.  

I have to confess that, to a significant degree, they have a point.   (I mean, I posted about the huge female presence in The Last Jedi at the time, and how a major thread in the story was about how stupid and impulsive men are.)    And there is no doubt that Marvel has been working to promote stories with female leads, with increasingly diminished critical and audience returns.  And Disney cartoons now feature gay characters, not that I think that is necessarily a bad thing.   But still, none of this feels organic:  it is just  too obvious.

That said, it's not as if the problems with the Star Wars franchise are just due to this:  I have argued before that the fundamental issue is the lack of a clear and consistent treatment of the Force throughout the series.  And I think it is just not that interesting a universe without some consistency on a fundamental thing like that.   As for Marvel:  it is a mistake to base a meta theme on the multiverse, because it is an idea that can drain away tension in dramatic storytelling - if anything can happen, nothing much matters.

Anyway, a key figure of hate - the key person the Right wing critics attack for this - is producer Kathleen Kennedy.  And as she is behind the latest Indiana Jones movie (Dial of Destiny), they have been slavering about how she is going to ruin it like she's ruined everything else. 

I think it's kind of funny:  the movie has so far been getting mixed reviews from its showing at Cannes - it has 50% on the not always reliable Rottentomatoes - and I think quite a few are putting it below the first three movies but a tad above Crystal Skull (which I think is unfairly demonised.)    If that is the true positioning, the movie is bound to make a squillion dollars regardless of these bearded critics say.  

But boy, have they been pre-emptively promoting the critical and audience downfall of this movie.

They are, just like the woke producers who they hate, being just too obvious that there is no way they are going to give the movie anything like an objective viewing.

And who knows - I may not like it, either.  The ending apparently is divisive, and a bit fantasy-ish, and my biggest concern is that I will read what it is before I get to see it.

I still think the trailer looks quite OK, though...

Stan's word salad

When I search his name in my search bar at the side of the blog, I see that I have been complaining about the waffle of Stan Grant for many, many years.  

His parting shot on Q&A is a spectacular example of his pompously earnest word salad style - and now he adds apparent indigenous spirituality that is as obscure in meaning and consequence as is about half of all commentary he makes.     

No doubt he does get purely racist rubbish thrown at him continually on media and social media.   

But I still think his style is grating in a way that has nothing to do with his skin colour.

I'm also against Q&A as a format, as many people I follow on Twitter are.  I haven't watched more than short bits of it for quite a few years.

Gender waffle

Probably a good idea that the Guardian not provide for comments to this piece, because it is bound to invite skepticism, if not ridicule, of the whole gender ideology that seems to have leaked out of universities' humanities departments and infected a surprising large number of younger people.  Here's the subheading:

Madison Godfrey inhabits gender beyond a binary, but transition isn’t what makes them trans

Here's part of her piece:

Not every non-binary person labels themselves under the transgender umbrella – but some do. My transness is not about feeling uncomfortable in my body; it is about feeling uncomfortable with the gender that was allocated to this body. Although I was once assigned female at birth, on days when I wear winged eyeliner and a crop top that makes my boobs look great, I am still non-binary. Medically transitioning, sometimes involving hormone therapy or surgical procedures, can constitute an integral part of a person’s journey of gender affirmation – but pursuing this process is not a prerequisite of being trans or non-binary, and does not determine the validity of anyone’s gender identity. Imagining it as a checklist overlooks the barriers often encountered by trans people who want to medically transition – such as inaccessibility, costliness, wait times and stigma perpetuated by some practitioners. To suggest that being trans requires a specific type of transition is to enforce a hierarchy that is ultimately elitist.

The assumption that every trans person wants to transition also reproduces stale discourse that all trans folk feel “born into the wrong body”: a stereotype that shouldn’t be uniformly applied. As poet Sam Rush writes, “I wasn’t born into the wrong body, I was born into the right lesson.” For some people, transitioning is literally lifesaving – but squeezing all trans narratives into a narrow trope erases individual experiences, minimises us into a caricature of ourselves, and is ultimately boring. Trans and non-binary folk inhabit more than one character description. Besides, just because someone pursues transition doesn’t mean they hate their body. Consider the moment when you change your outfit just before leaving the house; it’s not that you necessarily hated the initial fit, you just want to wear something that makes you feel more like yourself.

So, rather than simply acknowledge that some men have apparently feminine traits, and some women have "butch" traits, and may or may not be fully (or partially) same sex attracted with it, and everyone has known this forever; people now spend an incredible amount of time on what is increasing hard for me to not see as an intensely narcissistic endeavour of self analysis and self justification for their own tastes in how they want to present themselves.  

Incidentally, I think the gist of this article is the same line that Eddy Izzard takes:  he has been "out" forever as an occasional transvestite who only sleeps with women, but now he has decided he is "transgender", although one with no problem going forward with penis intact (and, I think, only sleeping with women.)   

This is kind of weird to most people, but harmless up to a point:  it becomes problematic when they insist that we all have to accept a dubious and faddish intellectual framework ("trans women are women!", "being non binary and trans is a thing") and all of its consequences because that's what suits them.

Update:  The column has attracted some comment on Twitter:

 Many are along these lines:

The inevitable problem with the Voice appears already

I mean, I don't want to be negative about the idea of the federal government having to give due consideration to an indigenous "voice" on legislation that affects the indigenous community. It sounds fair as a concept, and there is precedent from other countries.

But I find this week's argument between Mick Gooda and Noel Pearson about the wording of the relevant amendment pretty much an endorsement of my prediction the concept is going to have serious practical problems even if it gets up.    

I happened to see Gooda on 7.30 talking about his concerns, and he came across as very reasonable and cautious and well intentioned.   Pearson's response comes across as bullying and unfair, and perhaps someone needs to have a word in his ear (and Langton's, and that of anyone else who takes this line) that the more belligerent they sound (and the more they claim it will be disastrous to the future of indigenous politics if the referendum fails), the more they are likely to push skeptics to voting "no".  [I can imagine a huge number of aboriginal activists outraged that it's racist and paternalistic to effectively tell them to "behave" if they want to get their way - but I would say it's more a case of realism and pragmatism based on the history of referenda in this country.]

Long story short:  if there is already strong friction between long standing, mainstream aboriginal leadership figures on the implementation of this system, why shouldn't we expect that the instituional "Voice" will also routinely be the subject of criticism from within the indigenous community that it has given the "wrong" advice to government on particular issues?    And if so, how will that changes things going forward?      

I suspect that the problem in Australia may come down to the size of the country and hence the number of groupings of indigenous here:

Aboriginal people belong to Mobs (tribes) and within those are Clans (family groups). There are over 250 Mobs in Australia and even more Clans (some Mobs have upwards of 7 clans). Most Aboriginal people will have a ‘moiety,’ ‘totem’ or ‘spirit protector’ and usually an individual will have more than one – tribal, gender, family, personal.

All Mobs have their own ‘Country’ with boundaries that are typically marked on trees and by natural landscapes such as a river being a boundary between two neighbouring tribes or clans.

I would bet that most countries with successful institutionalised indigenous advisory bodies that are formalised just don't have that problem.   

 

Right up my alley

 It's not published until the end of the year.  It's only 208 pages long - why such a long lead time?

Goff has been mentioned at least once before here, but I don't recall if I have read much about him before.   I have found his views on Wikipedia.  A defender of some form of panpsychism, I see.  

Well, I do like the way he is trying to find a path forward between religion and scientific materialism.

A Friday religion post

I was just thinking how I hadn't had a new, interesting thought about Buddhism for a few weeks, Googled the topic, and turned up this good essay at Aeon:

Reckoning with Compassion

It deals with my long standing concern about Buddhist approaches:  while teaching a fairly simple or straight forward moral behaviour code on one level, on another, an emphasis on the source of suffering being desire (and teaching the importance of meditating that away) can surely lead to a kind of passive acceptance of other people's bad behaviour (as well as "natural evil", such as illness), even if it impacts you directly and an non-passive approach may be what is really required.   In the essay writer's case, this related to sexual abuse, and she talks about "compassion" teaching in Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism and the way it can led to a passive response to wrongdoing.  

Here are some extracts:

So perilous is the habit of self-cherishing that Mahāyāna teachers devised radical methods for extricating oneself from it. These moral-psychological therapies require that the practitioner take up dramatically counterintuitive attitudes in order to reveal and unravel the depth of their self-cherishing. Among the most celebrated of these teachers is the 8th-century Indian scholar Śāntideva, whose text the Bodhicaryāvatāra is widely admired and studied as the guide to Mahāyāna ethics. There, among his philosophical expositions of the way of life of the bodhisattva, Śāntideva encourages his reader to reflect upon the fundamental equality of all beings and the indefensibility of pursuing one’s own self-interest on the basis of a dubiously reified ‘I’. He also proposes that one can counteract one’s tendency toward selfishness by taking a pointedly critical perspective toward one’s own shortcomings, including negative emotions such as anger. Rather than directing our anger at the people we believe have done us wrong, Śāntideva advises that we should depersonalise the problems that befall us and chalk them up to the inevitable vicissitudes of a complex and interdependent world. In other words: ‘Them’s the breaks.’

This is a practice that strikes right at the logic that inspires self-cherishing. The thinking goes: if I weren’t so heavily invested in my own selfhood as something intrinsically real, with discrete interests to defend, then I would not experience others’ slights with such a personal charge. This is not to say that I wouldn’t experience them at all – that they wouldn’t be happening or that I wouldn’t notice them – but rather that I would be able to let those misbehaviours slide off me, simply regarding them as the product of innumerable, impersonal causes and conditions rather than targeted attacks on me and my ability to have things always go my way. When someone does this, Śāntideva argues, they become invincible to suffering not by changing others’ behaviour but by cultivating the mental fortitude to withstand life’s provocations with forbearance. Śāntideva suggests a contemplative practice for inculcating this radically diminished sense of self known as ‘exchanging self and other’, in which the practitioner imaginatively ‘exchanges’ their own happiness for others’ suffering. Being willing to give up happiness and take on pain enacts the kind of unbiased, boundless altruism that is the hallmark of the bodhisattva....

 Experimenting with reversing habitual responses like defensiveness or selfishness is profound. Relaxing our territoriality and letting go of our need to always be ‘right’ (or at least our need to make sure others know when they are wrong) can have a salutary effect on how we engage with others. But there are also profound problems with this approach.

And the downside:

Some time ago, a friend who works with survivors of sexual violence put a challenging but tactful question to me: what about her clients, whose trauma so often shows itself through self-blame? The majority of sexual assaults occur between people who know each other, often through methods of coercion that falsely lead victims to conclude that they ‘let it happen’ or are in some other respect to blame for the abuse. In cases like these, it is incredibly important to be able to say (and be heard in saying): ‘They were in the wrong. This was not my fault.’

A similar pattern holds, I suspect, for many people who have experienced abuse and certain forms of oppression. The fact is that there is a lot of explicit and implicit social encouragement not to be hard on others, to be accommodating, to get over it – in other words, to internalise the costs of the harm that has been done to them rather than force the awkwardness of asserting a boundary. In cases like these, ‘banishing all blames into the single source’ becomes the emotional labour of ‘taking one for the team’.

Essentially, what my kind critic was telling me was that this ideal of viewing all of our problems and struggles as stemming from self-cherishing was actually a great way for victims of abuse never to be able to heal. Sometimes expressing and holding a boundary – a boundary between self and other, between one’s own needs and theirs, between the workable give and take of harmonious social discourse and occasions that require a hard ‘no’ – can be necessary and even therapeutic. Especially for someone who is already well practised in the habit of taking on the burden of other people’s wrongdoing, the instruction to ‘banish all blames to the single source’ may come all too naturally, re-inscribing their existing trauma rather than helping them heal and grow through it.

All pretty interesting, if you ask me.   

The article also links to this other Aeon essay, which I think I noticed before, but never got around to reading: The Problem of Mindfulness.   Must read it later.

As predicted by virtually everyone...

The news:

Disney’s venture into an immersive, very expensive Star Wars experience is ending.

The company said that its Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel at Walt Disney World in Florida, which costs nearly $5,000 per couple for a two-night stay, will take its final voyage on Sept. 28.

It is hard to credit that Disney executives could not work out that most people into role playing games (which essentially was the whole point of staying at this hotel - or at least, the only basis on which the cost could be justified) are not rich.   More like college age dudes who haven't started making money yet.

 

Reminds me of something

Whenever I see her looking like this:

 ...she reminds me of this:

Exce that Homer may be dumb, but he's not nasty.  And he is still married.

Time for some light relief

The short parody videos of the distinctive looking comedian Alasdair Beckett-King are nearly always  good, and I'll show this one as an example.  (One joke in the middle of it struck me as very funny).

A point that seems little mentioned in mainstream media coverage

Update:  well, OK, here's a Washington Post report on the GOP refusing to talk about tax increases.

Are we sure that neurological condition in his throat isn't affecting his brain too?

 

A neat summary

I do find it totally exasperating that so many on the Right will not admit that the Trump campaign interactions with Russians was scandalous.   It is absurd to think that, if the same thing had happened on the Democrat side (let's say, Hunter Biden contacted by, and having secret meeting with,  alleged Chinese government contacts who wanted to pass on dirt on Trump) that they would shrug and say "that's nothing, what are you on about?"  like they try to do with the Trump campaign and family.  And furthermore, act as if bipartisan committee intelligence investigations confirming active Russian (secret) campaigning on line to support Trump is a big nothingburger.   

It's why MAGA types are just not worth engaging with - there is not a sensible brain cell left in their heads.

Update:   the fine print, as discussed in the Washington Post story on the Durham report:

When the inspector general, Michael Horowitz, issued his findings in 2019, Durham took the unusual step of publicly disagreeing with him on a key point — disputing Horowitz’s finding that the decision to open the investigation into Trump’s campaign was justified.

“Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened,” Durham said at the time.

Yet on Monday, he appeared to back away from that criticism, writing “there is no question that the FBI had an affirmative obligation to closely examine” allegations brought to the agency by an Australian diplomat who told them of alarming statements made over drinks by a low-level Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos.

Durham’s report suggests he thinks the FBI should have opened a preliminary investigation, rather than a full investigation, based on the Australian’s tip. The report highlights a conversation between two FBI officials at the time who appeared to bemoan the weakness of the new case.

“Damn that’s thin,” wrote one FBI official in early August 2016. “I know,” replied another, “it sucks.”

Durham’s final report comes against a backdrop of two failed prosecutions. Igor Danchenko — a private researcher who was a primary source for a dossier of allegations about Trump’s alleged ties to Russia — was acquitted in October of lying to the FBI about where he got his information. Durham personally argued much of the government’s case in that trial, in federal court in Alexandria.

Update:  I quite liked this column by Paul Waldman about the Durham report.  Here's a gift link.   

I'm quickly reading some of the huffing and puffing on the Right wing commentary side*, which is full of outrage about how no one is being prosecuted for this, and once again, it's the following familiar story.

They build themselves a house of cards on certain issues by selecting the narrowest range of facts that are spun for partisan, self promotional reasons.   (As with, of course, climate change, where they have always been welded to a mere handful of contrarian, ageing scientists and commentators, while ignoring the vast amount of work the mainstream has confirming the mainstream view.)   When an issue is somewhat complicated and some discrepancy comes to light, they leap onto it to try to boost it into a narrative that reads "Ha! Your story is now destroyed!".   In other words, they con themselves into not being able to see, or acknowledge, a "big picture".   Then, when the facts continue to accumulate against them (increasing natural climate disasters, increasing record temperatures, Durham fails at prosecutions)  their only reaction is to scream "I don't understand - the nation is about to fall because the people just can't see that I'm right."  

Truly, they gaslight themselves via continual hyper-partisan hyperbole of self serving narrative into never being able to see (or admit to) a "big picture" truth, and therefore can't understand why their view isn't having the consequences they want. 

*  The New York Times has a piece with lots of links to the cites hyperventilating about it.  As the writer says:

Mr. Trump had termed the Russia investigation “the crime of the century,” and with no one doing time for that crime, the Durham report could still prove to be Exhibit A in how the American right seems to be living in its own universe — and how Mr. Trump still dictates the parameters of that separate reality.

On his Truth Social website, Mr. Trump said the special prosecutor had concluded that “the FBI should never have launched the Trump-Russia Probe!” In fact, Mr. Durham said he agreed that the F.B.I. should have opened a preliminary investigation.

 My only quibble:  it's not that the American right "seems to be living its own universe":  they undoubtedly do.  And they just can't understand when a majority won't join them there, leading them to believe they are being "persecuted".   

We need Musk to leave for Mars

 

Elon gets the best advertisers

I've been meaning for weeks to laugh here about the fact that one of Twitter advertisements that has been popular in my feed for the last couple of months has been one encouraging the eating of offal!  ("Organ meats" is the term used, I think.) I have never clicked on it, and I don't have a screenshot handy, but I gather from googling the topic that there's a bit of an offal fad going around in Right wing muscle bro circles at the moment.  (Think Joe Rogan types.)

But I did get another weird promoted tweet yesterday..this one for sexy Christian muscle bro gear:

I'm kind of assuming that advertising rates on Twitter might be very cheap at the moment, hence attracting the most esoteric small advertisers?

Flim flam Musk

 I was also appalled to read this story, which seems to not have been picked up by many normal news outlets:

Graphic videos of animal abuse have circulated widely on Twitter in recent weeks, generating outrage and renewed concern over the platform’s moderation practices.

One such video, in which a kitten appears to be placed inside a blender and then killed, has become so notorious that reactions to it have become their own genre of internet content.

Laura Clemens, 46, said her 11-year-old son came home from his school in London two weeks ago and asked if she had seen the video.

“There’s something about a cat in a blender,” Clemens remembered her son saying.

Clemens said she went on Twitter and searched for “cat,” and the search box suggested searching for “cat in a blender.”

The worst part (from a corporate response point of view) was this:

Various users have tweeted that they have seen the cat video, with some trying to get Musk’s attention on the issue — some dating back to early May. Clemens said she flagged the video on May 3 to Twitter’s support account and Ella Irwin, the vice president of trust and safety at Twitter and one of Musk’s closest advisers. ...

Autocomplete suggestions in search bars are a common feature on many social media platforms, and they can often surface disturbing content. The terms for “dog” and “cat” autocompleted viral animal cruelty videos in Twitter’s search box Thursday, when NBC News contacted the company for comment. Twitter’s press account automatically responded with a poop emoji, the company’s standard response for the last month.

Can't wait for the apparent successor of Twitter (seems like it will be BlueSky?) to kick in fully.

Back to a favourite topic - dream flying (and proving it)

I don't know why, but I have been remembering dreams more often lately, even though with the cooler weather I have been sleeping with less interruption than I usually have in summer. 

The levitating/flying dream has made a welcome return.   The only thing is, as I explained in two posts way back in 2006,  my variation of the dream usually involves great interest in, and satisfaction at, being able to prove it is real (such as by being videoed while off the ground, or having a sufficient number of witnesses that I think that, surely, they must be believed.)  My elation in the dream is not just with the pleasant sensation of being able to think my way into the air, but with the intellectual knowledge that this is revolutionary for science and humanity, and people will see it is real.

Of course, that then makes for a somewhat disappointing sensation on waking up into the more mundane world.

Anyhow, on the whole "why do we dream we can fly" issue, I see now that there was an article about that appeared in 2016 in Slate (and Atlas Obscura), and I'm pretty sure I had missed until now.  

It would seem that the dream is virtually universal (although I am still pretty sure there are people who claim never to have had it), and an interest in what it means, or what causes it, has been around a long time.  Some extracts:

Psychologist Dr. Rainer Schönhammer has compiled scientific flying-dream explanations going back to the early 19^th century. Many of the earliest guesses were physiological—1860s German psychologist Karl Scherner thought that the rising and falling of the chest inspired dream flight, while his peer J.E. Purkinje believed that the relaxation inherent in sleep makes dreamers feel like they’re floating. The more Freudian Paul Federn pinned it on nighttime erections, which, author Diedre Barret explains, he “viewed as an overcoming of gravity,” but this theory has since been discounted. More recent theories have focused instead on the brain stem and the inner ear, which controls balance.

Although he doesn’t knock the potential physiological causes of dream-flying, Dr. Michael Schredl, a psychologist with the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, is more interested in what such dreams and such distinctions might say about the dreamer. “Flying dreams are a fascinating topic,” Schredl writes in an email. In a series of studies, Schredl has sought to connect the prevalence of flying dreams with particular personality traits or life choices. By compiling dream data gathered since 1956 and performing both broad and deep surveys of his own, he has come to a few zooming conclusions.

First of all—anecdotally at least—”persons with waking-life flying experiences dream more often about flying,” Schredl writes. Hang gliding instructors, for instance, often practice their professions in dreams, only without their equipment. And the fact that the frequency of flying dreams has picked up since the 1950s suggests that more real-life airplane trips equals more somni-flight. This would be consistent with the “continuity hypothesis” of dreams, a somewhat controversial theory that posits that our dream experiences are just weird remixes of our waking ones.

To dig deeper into these hypotheses, Schredl analyzed the 6,000-entry dreambank of one particular anonymous subject, who has kept a diary since 1984. Schredl found that although this subject had more airplane dreams after his first ever real-life transatlantic flight, more creative flying dreams weren’t affected. The subject sometimes flew with the help of a house, a magical juggling ball, or a unicycle, and he did so in order to illicitly cross borders and to impress a girl (“and he succeeded!,” the study makes sure to point out).

Airplane journeys, Schredl writes, may be less important than general happiness. A broader Schredl-helmed study shows that overall, people with more “positive emotional states” while awake tend to get to fly in their sleep, too.

It has just occurred to me while writing this post:  did flying dreams have much to do with belief in witchcraft, such that it would have been dangerous in those days for a woman to admit to having a flying dream?  

Googling that topic has led me to a 2009 article in Folklore on this very topic:  The Witches’ Flying and the Spanish Inquisitors, or How to Explain (Away) the Impossible.   Those with knowledge of a certain site* might be interested to use this citation to read it:   https://doi.org/10.1080/00155870802647833

It turns out that the Spanish Inquisition (as well as other European inquisitors) was (and were) very interested in the question of whether witches really could fly.  Seems that for the most part, they were were actually pretty skeptical that there was a physical reality to it.    

Interesting!

* Sci-Hub  

   

 

 

    

A few random Friday thoughts

*  My goodness, Diane Feinstein looked as if she's on death's door when she turned up in Washington.    She did turn up to her committee, though.  

* Amongst the most convoluted commentaries on the Trump CNN "townhall" (that oddly featured a 100% pro Trump audience - not a common feature of the "townhall" format, I thought) is that by Ben Shapiro on Twitter, which starts by saying CNN did Trump a massive favour (true), but then ends on this contorted conspiracy note:

Collins asked zero of the questions Republicans cared about and all the ones Democrats cared about. So, in other words, this was billed as a GOP primary night, and it was just Kaitlin Collins asking questions Democrats have about Trump. Republican voters sensed this. So when Trump took out the kitchen sink and began hammering Collins into the wall with it, they cheered. Republicans will -- ALWAYS AND CORRECTLY -- cheer biased moderators being steamrolled by Republican candidates, no matter what those candidates actually say. Trump wins more favor with Republican voters; Democrats remain offput; independents continue to wonder why we're relitigating 2020. Ridiculous failure by CNN on all fronts -- unless, of course, their goal is to renominate Trump for the ratings and because they think he's most beatable (NOTE: this, by the way, is precisely their goal).

Mind you, a lot of people have said that the event did help him from a Primary point of view, but hurt him in terms of motivating Democrats and Independents (and the rare sensible Republican) to make sure he loses at the actual election.  For example:

* Google's Bard does sound as if it will be a significant improvement to Chat GTP:

In a bid to tackle the issue of AI hallucinations – whereby the AI creates a sourced text or information that it claims to be true – Bard will include an annotation on the information sourced elsewhere and provide a link to it.

* I'm curious still about what other physicists think of this argument by Sabine:

*  Did I mention before that her recent video about the transgender teens issue seemed pretty balanced to me?  If not, the link to the Youtube video is here.   (She copped a lot of attack from the trans rights mob for even asking the question whether it's a "social fad" amongst teenagers - which is actually a good sign that it's balanced.)

Things don't seem to be going Putin's way

It's not like I think I am an instant expert on modern land wars in Eastern Europe, or Western Asia?, as so many at the MAGA nutjobs seem to think they are:   but it's hard not to conclude as a result of recent news stories that things are not going well for Putin at the moment.   

I am therefore somewhat curious as to the amount of copium the conservatives with a culture war hard on for Putin (at the later day Catallaxy blogs, for example) might be huffing at the moment.   

Of course, things could turn again, I presume.   

Wow, indeed

Just noticed this on Twitter:

So, a Supreme Court judge has a wife who believes the most extreme, fascist friendly, Right wing conspiracy nutjobs in the country.  

Sure, sure:  nothing to see there.

Guns and paranoid ideology

A pretty good point made by Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times.  I'll gift the piece, and take some key points from it:

Timothy McVeigh, the right-wing terrorist who killed 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, cared about one issue above all others: guns. To him, guns were synonymous with freedom, and any government attempt to regulate them meant incipient tyranny.

“When it came to guns,” writes Jeffrey Toobin in “Homegrown,” his compelling new book about the Oklahoma City attack, “McVeigh did more than simply advocate for his own right to own and use firearms; he joined an ascendant political crusade, which grew more extreme over the course of his lifetime and beyond.”

Reading Toobin’s book, it’s startling to realize how much McVeigh’s cause has advanced in the decades since his 2001 execution....

The reason that America endures a level of gun violence unique among developed countries, and that we can often do little about it, is so many politicians have views on guns that aren’t far afield from McVeigh’s. As Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, has pointed out, it’s become common to hear Republicans echo McVeigh’s insurrectionary theory of the Second Amendment, which holds that Americans must be allowed to amass personal arsenals in case they need to overthrow the government. As the MAGA congresswoman Lauren Boebert once put it, the Second Amendment “has nothing to do with hunting, unless you’re talking about hunting tyrants.”

The Republican Party’s fetishization of guns and its fetishization of insurrection — one that’s reached a hysterical pitch since Donald Trump’s presidency — go hand in hand. Guns are at the center of a worldview in which the ability to launch an armed rebellion must always be held in reserve. And so in the wake of mass shootings, when the public is most likely to clamor for gun regulations, Republicans regularly shore up gun access instead. In April, following a school shooting in Nashville, Republicans expelled two young Black Democratic legislators who’d led a gun control protest at the Tennessee Capitol. A few days later, the State Senate passed a bill protecting the gun industry from lawsuits.

True, the killings in Allen led a committee in the Texas House to pass a bill raising the minimum age to buy an AR-15-style rifle to 21 from 18, but, as The Times reported, in the unlikely event it passes the full chamber “it would face almost certain rejection by the State Senate, where the hard-right lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, holds powerful control.” Today’s Republican Party can scarcely tolerate anything getting between an eager buyer and a deadly weapon.

It’s hard to think of a historical precedent for a society allowing itself to be terrorized in the way we have. The normalization of both right-wing terrorism and periodic mass shootings by deranged loners is possible only because McVeigh’s views have been mainstreamed. “In the nearly 30 years since the Oklahoma City bombing, the country took an extraordinary journey — from nearly universal horror at the action of a right-wing extremist to wide embrace of a former president (also possibly a future president) who reflected the bomber’s values,” wrote Toobin.

As it happens, in the hours after the Oklahoma City bombing, before the authorities knew who McVeigh was, he was pulled over during a routine traffic stop and then arrested for carrying a gun without a permit. In 2019, however, Oklahoma legalized permitless carry. Under the new law, McVeigh would have been let go.