January 29, 2021

and might I add

Regular Trumpism is the same as QAnon except with less overt wishful thinking. It's just as founded on lies, and just as attractive to people whose motive is to participate in hate and violence. In both cases, people mostly join up not because they are tricked, but because they are assholes.

January 28, 2021

call QAnon what it is: not a cult, a hate movement

We commonly hear QAnon believers described as crazy, kooks, deluded, brainwashed, in a cult, and a whole laundry list of other terms which treat them as if they were suffering from hallucinations or mental illness. That needs to stop, because what that description does is absolve them of responsibility for their bullshit.

When we see someone acting without sanity and ignoring reality in favor of some bogus story, our natural assumption is to frame it in terms of a deficiency in their ability to know fact from fancy, and thereby imply that they are in some way powerless over what has happened to them. But that's not true here. Though occasionally someone mentally ill will surface in that scene, for the great majority of people there was nothing helpless or powerless about how they started avowing such nonsense. Every step of the process was a choice made by a capable and responsible adult.

The essence of the Q bullshit is that it's a libel that justifies hatred and violence. It accuses non-conservatives of heinous acts so that conservatives can be justified in hating them. And QAnon believers were not tricked into hating because the libels somehow magically overpowered their sense of reality -- they chose to set aside their sense of reality because they wanted to believe the libels. There is no otherworldly hypnotic power to Q's bullshit, any more than there is to Trumpsky's. Nothing about it can take away someone's ability to be skeptical. What takes away people's skepticism is the desire to join a hate movement. Hate isn't a side effect of delusion -- delusion is a side effect of hate. The hate isn't an accidental consequence of the fantasy, it's the motive for why the fantasy was ever taken seriously in the first place.

The majority of people in QAnon are indulging in hate because they want to. Implausible libels are the excuse, not the cause. The reward they seek is not to find meaning in a confusing world, as with most cults or conspiracy theorists -- the reward is that they get to enjoy hating. It's a powerful feeling and they love feeling it. From that, all the bullshit and the lies follow. Some of them have totally suppressed their critical thinking and will naively believe whatever the movement tells them (and if so, some can be saved when they see the predictions fail)... but for a lot of others, I think you'll find that they are not just passively being led around by propaganda, but are actively participating in the doublethink, and are just as likely to produce lies of their own as to uncritically believe someone else's.

QAnon is a vicious hate movement, and the people in it bear full moral culpability for participating. They are responsible for freely choosing to support hate and violence, not to mention supporting a public discourse based on lies. Barring evidence to the contrary that may come up for individual cases, we need to treat them as fully responsible for the harmful behavior they indulge within this movement.

January 21, 2021

Racism and doublethink go hand in hand.

You almost never meet a racist who isn't either fooling themselves, or faking it too well to spot the difference. They're the least honest political faction there is, and that's saying something next to the fake libertarian corporatist greedhead wing.

January 21, 2021

she hit exactly the right line to sum up all the shit that had just happened:

OUR FLAG WAS STILL THERE.

December 1, 2020

Arecibo was our best tool for tracking near-Earth asteroids... which we need to do.

Arecibo was not just a telescope, but a radar dish. With radar we could accurately measure the distances to solar system objects, and get substantial information about their surfaces. Without those measurements, we cannot plot asteroidal orbits accurately enough to ascertain when there's a threat of collision.

We need to build a new radar facility. But this time, instead of a single giant dish we can make a hundred normal-sized ones working in tandem.

November 6, 2020

I said from the beginning of this that I would gladly make peace and cooperate with conservatives,

so long as they stood with me against fascism. I am thankful to all who have done so... though the vote totals show that they ended up being an awfully small fraction of the 2016 GOP voters.

November 4, 2020

last night my partner was saying she's done trying to save America from itself

She was in a mood, and in that mood she was saying no more activism, no more trying to make things better -- if America wants Trumpism it just deserves the suffering it's going to get.

She feels better this morning, but those words aren't forgotten by either of us. We could make excuses for blue collar suckers before, but now we really can't. Trump was voted for by millions and millions of purblind assholes who saw everything that he did in the last four years and learned absolutely nothing from it. You can't justify or rationalize that as hope or ignorance, this was a choice made with open eyes, even if the brain behind the eyes is choosing not to see.

I believe adults bear a level of moral responsibility for their own willingness to be duped by cons and conspiracy theories. Being tricked and lied to does not let you off the hook -- especially not after you've seen the results and haven't changed your mind.

My respect for my fellow citizens is probably the lowest it's ever been... and it seems unbelievable that just twelve years ago a solid majority of them behaved in the exact opposite way and reaffirmed every platitude about what America could be.

February 22, 2020

Bloomberg is acting as a stand-in for Trump

In the passive way he took these attacks, he ended up in the role of a paper shooting-gallery target with Trump's face pasted onto it. The real message was "This is how I will take down Trump."

February 21, 2020

I think I am coming up with a one-sentence definition of fascism.

Over the last three years, I've had to put a lot of study into the nature of just what fascism is. I've had to conclude that it is quite distinct from authoritarianism, though naturally they overlap frequently. What exactly qualifies someone, or some movement, as fascist? I think the essence of it is the division of the populace into "right people" and "wrong people". Here is my definition:

Fascism is the advocacy of privileging one cultural group above other cultural groups within a populace, both through the power of the state and through extralegal means.

Any group that uses "blood and soil" arguments -- that is, saying that a given area of land rightfully belongs to one ethnic group and other groups should have lesser rights there -- qualifies as fascist, if the movement is willing to use forceful coercion to obtain such an end. It does not matter if they are otherwise not authoritarian.

Willingness to use threats and violence is part of the requirement. If a group claims that they have special rights to something but is willing to use only nonviolent protests, they aren't fascist.

Communist regimes -- no matter how totalitarian -- generally do not qualify as fascist, because communism lumps all of the people into a single cultural group to suffer equally.

Democratically elected regimes do qualify as fascist if they allow some kinds of people the right to vote but not others.

Nationalism is closely related to fascism, but a distinction can be drawn.

December 2, 2019

I certainly prefer Warren over Sanders, and think she'd be much more capable as Prez, but...

...I don't think Sanders is all that bad. I'd rank him at least in the middle of the pack as far as my choices go -- maybe well into the upper half now, what with Kamala's organization imploding and Castro making an ass of himself.

My brother, who worked in the Obama administration, once told me that he saw Sanders as mostly show and not much go, but Warren as "the real deal".

I was convinced at the start of the campaign that Warren was going to solidly overtake Sanders, because she has all of his strengths and few of his weaknesses. That doesn't seem to be happening. Why would more people like him than her? Does he really attract that many misogynists? Or is it the Russians again?