“Weird” was always a high compliment on the left. “Keep Portland weird” isn’t a reference to Portland being conservative, and everybody knows that. Bumper stickers of “Keep XYZ weird” usually appear on vehicles with Bernie stickers, hippie signage, and “be kind to cats.” Pink hair, piercings, unusual lifestyles, drag queens – this was all a hallmark of the left.
Three days into the Kamala campaign, though, the weird has become bad and quirkiness is ridiculed. Instead, the campaign features corporate drones on Zoom calls who chirp motivational slogans at thousands of tiny squares – pun intended.
Between having sex with furniture and sitting on a Zoom call, would anybody with an ounce of common sense choose Zoom? It’s unexpected that between being weird and going corporate the grandchildren of Woodstock chose corporate.
Why not, though? Democrats became the party of Wall Street and austerity, so why not the party of “bash the weirdo”?
Clarissa's Blog 
Weird =/= weirdo though.
Vance, Weiner, Giuliani, Trump = weirdo.
Biden, Kamala, Butigieg = weird. Good weird.
The good thing is that people who hear “weird” know what kind people mean. It’s usually the person trying to examine your child’s genital in the public restroom. Or the ones who want to determine what birth control, if any, you can take.
Not to mention the couch.
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And the winner of “The Most Shallow Comment” competition is…
The Anonymous commenter who regaled us with “people know what kind people mean.”
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Typical though.
When NT leftie people say they are for *weirdness* what they mean is stated sexual habits. That’s it. It has no other dimensions.
It in no way includes perceptual, neurological, or social weirdness. If it did, I’d be a completely unapologetic leftie by now. But no, not only do they not tolerate any of that (unless you rack up compensating points by chopping off your boobs and taking testosterone, apparently– and even then I think if you challenge any of their philosophical tenets you’ll still get the boot, so that is treacherous ground), they absolutely require a level of social awareness and skill at signaling that seems nearly superhuman. You must at all times keep track, not only of today’s stated rules about race, social, and employment hierarchies, but also of today’s *unstated* rules, which are different. I don’t know how anyone manages it without being a total psychopath, but… that’s just me. I couldn’t do it. I require a certain amount of stability and clarity of expectations to function on even the most basic level. They constantly and viciously enforce social conformity– like highschool cheerleaders who never grew up. You can’t do/wear/say that anymore. That’s so five minutes ago.
Meanwhile, as a Christian and an active member of my church, I actually do find people who will tolerate lack of eye contact, flat affect, poor turn-taking in conversation, impaired hearing (this confuses people: I sing in the choir. I can’t pick out speech from background noise), and a lack of social subtletey– where sometimes I can say the wrong thing, actually hurt someone’s feelings, apologize, be forgiven, and not become a pariah. My kids don’t have to suffer ostracism because of me. This is not just nice, it’s essential.
Immediate family and church: it exists nowhere else.
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Meanwhile, Trump thinks he can tell who’s a “crappy Jew” or a “horrible Jew”.
https://x.com/jacobkornbluh/status/1818311534482763780?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1818311534482763780%7Ctwgr%5Ed134984f4ed2e078d7b32997efa6017cc7dd9e6e%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mediaite.com%2Fpolitics%2Ftrump-agrees-with-conservative-radio-host-that-kamala-harriss-husband-is-a-crappy-and-horrible-jew%2F
What a POS.
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Words, words, words. Nothing matters except words. It’s like an illness, this is. He said, he said, he said. An utter incapacity to see beyond what anybody said.
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Words are all we have, my friend, to understand someone’s thinking.
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Whatever happened to “Actions speak louder than words?” I would think we have more than words to evaluate someone’s thinking.
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It’s this very particular neoliberal mentality where people very sincerely don’t notice anything beyond words.
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no no, remember words are violence. Violence is speech. Everyone must be judged by xer social media footprint alone.
That’s one of the solas, right? Sola media?
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Some of us use our brains for the purposes of understanding something. But I agree that there are people who have none.
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A timely reminder for those who might need one: the Orange Man really is bad. I’ve seen a lot of people mocked for reading Trump’s threads, being overly concerned about his manners, etc., etc., etc. The man is bad. Full stop. I don’t say Kamala is some kind of saint, but she meets my particular voting criteria:
“Um, is there a candidate who isn’t liable for sexual abuse and fraud, isn’t a convicted felon, didn’t try to foment the violent overthrow of the American government… Okay, there is one? Cool. I’m with her.”
Some problems I find pretty simple.
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Well said.
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Thanks! I have my lucid moments.
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I simply don’t want to be hassled to death with “anti-racist and anti-transphobic” trainings. I don’t want to be humiliated at work with loud announcements that my physiology makes me guilty of terrible things. I don’t want to be investigated, suspected, locked down and medicated against my will.
There’s no likelihood that Trump will remove any of this. But there is a likelihood he’ll not make it worse. Kamala is guaranteed to make it worse. I care about that enormously more than the personal foibles of these very rich people. I don’t want to be hassled. Why is that too much to ask?
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From the various things you’ve written in the past, it sounds like your university is unusually heavy handed with things like anti-racist trainings. I’ve encountered a couple of things at my university (large, public, generally left-leaning faculty) that make me want to roll my eyes, but you report things that I just can’t imagine happening here.
You’ve also complained many times that your university doesn’t have much going on in terms of research. Is it possible that your administrators are so over-the-top with trainings and weird policies because the university as a whole doesn’t have much to brag about on the research front? My university’s administrators are always going on and on about the latest giant research grant or prestigious award that someone won, that’s what they want to talk about 90% of the time. Are your administrators trying to impress someone about how anti-racist they are?
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Spot-on on every count. We need something to stand out, right? A brand marker or a competitive advantage or whatever. And precisely for the reasons you mention, our administration decided to brand us as “an anti-racist institution.” It’s working because we’ve got positive mentions in the mainstream press for this anti-racist stuff. We are getting funding for it. Good federal funding which was out of reach before. Broke all records on donations this year because it’s a great write-off for corporations. The local Chamber of Commerce is loving us for it.
If we had anything else going for us, then maybe we wouldn’t have to pedal this so hard.
Only an academic can understand how it works. 🙂
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I seriously doubt either of the possible presidents of the US is going to make any difference if that is what is going on at your institution. Your problem is your administrators, and if this has worked for them they are just going to keep doing it. Your best hope is that they can sell their “successes” well enough to move on to a different university.
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That’s not true, though. The companies that donate and the NSF that funds “anti-racist scholarship” are reacting to the federal guidelines. The Chamber of Commerce folks don’t do this because they enjoy it but because they are trying to avoid being hassled by the government. Fish tots from the head, and this is not a small situational problem. This is going to get everybody if it’s not stopped.
As I said, I have practically no hope that Trump would do anything to stop it. But he won’t make it worse. Kamala made it very clear from day 1 that she is planning to make it a lot worse.
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I guess it’s a “worldview” thing that makes the difference. See, for me, an anti-racist training is, at best, enlightening and could lead me to be a better teacher and person–at worst, a minor inconvenience. It’s like anything else–take what you can use, leave the rest.
As for Trump’s problems being “foibles…” Well, I see those a bit differently, too. I don’t see a “turn to the right” moment for me anytime soon, but I think I’m getting some glimmer of where the right is coming from.
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Dang it. That was me, again.
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So you would willingly stand up in front of your colleagues and say that you are a racist and a homophobe and give examples?
Because that’s what we are forced to do. Any resistance is interpreted as an act of racist aggression.
I respect your position and this is a completely sincere question. Would you do it?
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See comment above. I think your university sounds very over the top.
I’ve been to various DEI trainings and we’re usually asked to do things like “identify situations in which people might misunderstand each other due to cultural differences” or “think of a conflict in your workplace that was poorly handled, how could it have been handled better” or “here’s the description of a conflict between two colleagues, what could you do to intervene effectively?” I’ve never seen anyone asked to do anything like a self-denunciation.
Our trainers also seem to mix up training groups so that it’s extremely rare that you are in a group with anyone you’ve ever met before (big campus), so anything you discuss or share is not with colleagues. I’ve never been in a training session with another faculty member in languages or the humanities that I can remember, it will be just random things like me, an Engineering professor, an accountant from Biology, a secretary from Physics, an IT person, a librarian, an academic advisor, someone from Residence Life, etc. The only times I’ve ever known anyone in a training, it’s because I know them for a random reason like they live in my neighborhood or they happen to be married to someone I work with.
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opps, that was me TomW again
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Here’s the thing, though. Our faculty don’t get these trainings. Only department Chairs and upwards are made to participate. For now. In those trainings, we are aggressively pushed to narc on the faculty in our departments.
It’s possible that you don’t know because it’s not happening at the non-administrative level for now. Nobody at my department knows because I don’t know how to tell them about it.
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Comes with being at the top of the food chain, with all the responsibilities and privileges that entails. I wouldn’t worry much about it.
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Only a person without dignity wouldn’t worry about it.
Gosh, it’s so sad to hear these Soviet responses. This is exactly what people said in the USSR about every indignity they were subjected to. When one doesn’t even understand why this is humiliating and wrong, truly, I despair.
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For fuck’s sake, Ukraine is much more important to me than any personal indignity. I don’t have to confess to being racist and transphobic in front of an audience, but I’d do it every day rather than have Trump and Vance hand Ukraine over to Putin.
Here, I’d stand up and tell you every day how people who believe in God are superior to me in the many ways you’ve explained on this blog.
I know you used to say that Trump is a supporter of Ukraine because he gave it the Javelins. I disagree, but think there’s no point in relitigating it.
And yes, I agree that Obama was terrible for Ukraine. He wanted to look cool (he said something along the lines of Romney being stuck in the past because he thought Russia was our biggest rival), and I don’t know what else.
I did think about the fact that the Ukrainian army in 2014 was not what it was in 2022, so whatever support the US provided probably wouldn’t have been as effective.
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“we are aggressively pushed to narc on the faculty in our departments”
I feel sorry for faculty in departments not headed by someone who’s experience the poison of an informer society…..
I have the feeling that anonyrat would narc on anyone below them in a heartbeat…. while feeling very virtuous about it.
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I appreciate the respect for my position. Thanks.
And yes, for two possible reasons (I have not had to do this personally in my training as yet). One, I would see the admission as a simple fact that yes, sometimes I’ve been, in some way, shape, or form, racist and homophobic. Hell, some time back on Stephen Colbert’s show, he told a thoroughly reprehensible joke about Putin always having a place to put his balls as long as Trump keeps his mouth open. Unacceptable on every level. And I laughed my ass off.
A song from the musical “Avenue Q” helps me in this regard–it’s called “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.” It’s funny, and largely true. I would take this big public admission not so much as Winston Smith admitting that 2 + 2 = 5, but more an opportunity to take a look at those attitudes I take casually and think twice about them.
The second reason would be as part of an illustration that things that I might do in the course of a typical day that perpetuates a system of written and unwritten rules that makes things harder for gays and people of color (was I supposed to capitalize that? Not sure). And if the workshop was well-run with empathy and logic, there’s a chance that those lessons might stay with me in a positive way, irrespective of some minor discomfort or hurting of my fee-fees. If the workshop is not well-run, I would just say, okay, that was disappointing, and go get some Chick-Fil-A. (The unbreaded nuggets I find particularly delightful, I have to admit.)
Now that’s just me speaking for myself, of course. But I think adults can, like I mentioned before, take what they can use and leave behind the rest. And I do mean adults–driving little kids to tears with thoughts that they’re horrible people is not any kind of step in the right direction. And I’m just a guy going on 61 who was diagnosed with ASD just after my 60th birthday, and about 9 years earlier, we adopted three special-needs kids. So without getting into too many damning details, I’ve fucked up a lot of shit. I’m trying to figure things out. And as of now, I can’t get past a person who has behaved like Donald Trump being the President, and I can’t understand a whole party defending, praising, and getting behind his way of doing things.
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Demands for ideological compliance tend to be higher for more senior positions. The question of whether you are willing to do it depends on how much you want the job.
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2024-05-21-david-unterhalter-finally-succeeds-as-jsc-gives-nod-to-three-judges-for-supreme-court-of-appeal/
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I remember the early race-relations “Social Actions” training courses that were mandatory for Air Force personnel back in the 1970’s. They were at best an unnecessary pain in the ass (The U.S. military at the time was one of the most thoroughly integrated organizations in the country, with Black, Hispanic, and Asian NCOs and officers holding a considerably greater percentage of mid-level and command positions than in the civilian workforce). At worst, the courses emphasized the “differences” in colleagues of different ethnicity and led to personnel feeling like they had to walk on eggshells around co-workers whom they had never felt uncomfortable working with before the training.
In other words, the mandatory training was a net waste of time.
Dreidel
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@Anonymous
“at best, enlightening and could lead me to be a better teacher and person–at worst, a minor inconvenience“
You claim to be an academic but seem unable to identify ideological indoctrination. How come? This shows not just very poor judgment, but lack of intellectual rigour and discernment.
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OR… it shows that I know the difference between indoctrination (here is what you should think) and education (let’s explore more and different ways of thinking to come up with different solutions).
Do you know this difference?
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The contradictions here astound me. To prove you’re anti-racist, you have to give examples of your racism.
If Betsy DeVos were still at the Department of Education, you could report your school anonymously for racism and ask for an investigation. LOL.
To me, this is like confession. (I was raised Catholic.) You think of a sin to confess that’s not too bad (e.g., lying) and that won’t make the priest worry about you. So in the training, you say that on the second day of class you forgot the name of a black student (who remembers students’ names after just one day of class?) and that you accidentally misgendered a student before they had told you what their pronouns are. Something bad but not too bad.
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Your suggestion is not bad, but with all due respect, this is nothing like a Catholic confession. I am not even going to count the ways this analogy does not work as I don’t have that much time on my hands.
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A confession is voluntary and private. It’s also transcendent.
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What’s really weird is that now Harris is positioning herself as tough an immigration, as if anybody prevented her from stemming the flow in the past 4 years.
And nobody’s disputing it because people’s brains get erased overnight.
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Also funny that Vance has to be tied to project 2025 or whatever he felt about Trump in 2016, but Harris can easily disavow her policy positions while in office with nary a peep from the media.
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People are such lemmings. I almost kind of feel bad for them.
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Plenty of people are disputing it.
MSM is very carefully not quoting them.
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Good grief. You leave a thread for a few minutes…
Sad? Soviet? Humiliating? No dignity? I call shenanigans.
Shakespeare said it best, through Hamlet: “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” I’m being humiliated? Not if I don’t think I am. I have no dignity? Only if I think I don’t have any. To repeat: I’m a motherfucking almost-61-year-old with ASD trying to raise 3 special needs kids. Don’t give me this no dignity-humiliation bullshit. You’re responsible for your own goddamn dignity, and no one humiliates you without your cooperation, thank you very much. I keenly recognize humiliation and loss of dignity, and 90 minutes or two hours in a mostly anodyne workshop where you’re training to meet students where they are ain’t it.
And by the way, there is a difference between performative, purposely flamboyant weirdness and just saying batshit weird-ass stuff about not having kids.
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All of this is done to me against my will. I’m being extorted into doing things that I find reprehensible. Does that not matter? People are being forced into saying things they don’t believe. I can’t bring myself to accept you really think it’s OK.
What if you were forced to stand up at work and proclaim, “I despise childless cat ladies and adore Trump”? Would that also be OK because you can make yourself think it’s OK?
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How do I phrase it? Real life usually involves being forced to do things that are reprehensible, unless you were born to a billionaire. Corporate America is a huge exercise in hypocrisy where you’re constantly supposed to pretend you’re passionate about your work as though it involves something other than making the rich richer and eliminating jobs.
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@Col. Potter
At this point I think that no matter what one tells you, you will not listen. I can only presume that this is due to ignorance of the impact that Wokery is having all over the world, but in the Anglo-sphere in particular, with academia one of the areas worst affected. You also have bigger fish to fry, what with three special-needs children to raise.
And still, “I’m a motherfucking almost-61-year-old with ASD trying to raise 3 special needs kids. Don’t give me this no dignity-humiliation bullshit” doesn’t cut it. Disdain and indignation have no place in rational discourse.
I used to be a gay, pro-abortion, skull-f***ed left-wing activist for over thirty years. But if you have intelligence, critical acumen and discernment, you can only take so much bulls*** for so long. It has been a long and painful process fro me: seeing through all the lies, the indoctrination, the manipulation at all levels, but in particular the weaponising of words in order to destroy everyone who is not on board with the message.
And yet, nobody can do it for you. I cannot tell you, “Go read this and this, educate yourself on this and that, and so on”, because nobody can convince you of the truth but yourself. And you have to admit it, in Western society, which skews left and/or liberal to the point that on some issues no debate at all is allowed and even questioning the current dogma entails immediate cancellation, it is very difficult to see through the propaganda, which is not just constant and relentless, but intense and all-pervasive, and coming from the most unexpected quarters.
Reading this blog for the past 5 years, Clarissa’s sharp-witted posts and the comments of intelligent readers like Cliff Arroyo, methylethyl and a few others, has been and is an education in sharpening my wits about what is going on.
And since the issue du jour is the US presidential race, I will say this. I am not an American citizen and therefore I would never presume to tell US voters what they should do, but if I were, I would vote for Trump. Not because he is a better person than Harris, they are both humans and as such flawed individuals, but because he is less bad. No one in politics is a good person, by definition. Good people cannot be in politics, and if good people enter the political arena they either leave immediately or are inevitably corrupted by it. As a voter, you are called upon to staunch the wound, to resist evil, to at least lessen it to the extent that is humanly possible. Instead, people idolise politicians, see in them the heroes that they would like to have been and cannot be, and in this way perpetuate a political discourse of moral antagonism that does nothing to improve the common good.
I apologise for taking up so much space.
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“61-year-old with ASD trying to raise 3 special needs kids”
Very laudable…. now imagine that periodically you have to attend meetings where an ‘expert’ explains to you you are actively harming these children and then you have to stand up and agree and explain in detail how you are harming them and preventing them from reaching their potential…. and then listen and approve while other people raising special needs kids explain how they are responsible for their kids’ problems.
These meetings aren’t about normal human foibles and how to do better as an everyday person, they are specifically about targeting people and telling them they are failures in their life’s work.
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There’s a very good movie called Angi Vera (it’s a name) from 1978 about how a young woman, idealistic and a bit of a rebel, is turned into a cynical apparatchik in post WWII Hungary.
Lots of valuable scenes, one of which is a self-criticism session which is about giving the party ammunition to use against you.
That’s not on youtube but this short scene (with English captions) with her mentor gives you an idea.
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Many interesting responses and questions. It’s true, my last response was over-heated–that was thoughtless of me. And thanks to Mr. Arroyo for the fascinating clip–I’ll have to put that on my list.
In random order–I would not accept a situation where I was being forced to say really silly things I didn’t believe. I’m fine with the anti-racism stuff because as far as I’m concerned, I’m saying things that are good for me, true, and useful. I would also not, for example, teach students that slavery was in many ways beneficial to the slaves.
So what would happen if I were asked, or encouraged (forced?) to do or say something as part of my job that I thought was wrong or hurtful, to me or someone else? Well, I might try to find some way around it, as Clarissa has been doing with the illnesses and injuries. I think that’s valid if that’s how she feels about these workshops. Maybe I’d try to say something to someone in authority. Maybe I’d “suck it up” because I have to support the family, but there might be a point where I couldn’t any more–it’s something we have to decide for ourselves as adults in this cockeyed world.
What I’m seeing a lot of in the responses to me is, well, a great deal of fear and paranoia. The idea (expressed in Cliff’s clip) that we’re just one step away from informing on and eventually eliminating those who disagree with us, and that potentially we all have a target on our backs and we’re scheming to see who has the bigger target on his back. I mean, yes, you can live that way. Sometimes, sadly, history confirms such paranoia. But why let the fear make the decisions? That’s a personal choice, not an objective reality.
Finally, there’s avi’s post about discovering truth, and I’ve seen that kind of explanation from the right before, and it strikes me–it’s how very religious people speak. There is no objective thing where you say, “Oh gosh, all I’ve believed is bullshit, and here is the real truth!” You just… feel it? Discover it? Meet William F. Buckley on the Road to Damascus?
To be “woke” was meant simply to be aware of racial prejudice and discrimination. Some people misuse this idea, as some people misuse all good ideas. As of right now, end of July 2024, I’m quite sure that the worst of the wokesters have nothing on Trump. I might find for myself that I’m wrong about that… but I don’t THINK so.
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“To be “woke” was meant simply to be aware of racial prejudice and discrimination. Some people misuse this idea, as some people misuse all good ideas.”
I THINK I can see what you’re trying to say, but it also has a whiff of “no true Scotsman” about it. And as a fellow ASD-er… as uncomfortable as it may be, I think you need to seriously consider the possibility that you’ve been snookered. We do tend to take people at their word. And sometimes they lie.
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I have to admit, this is getting more and more fascinating. And in some ways, more and more discouraging–there’s just such a huge gap in worldview. I mean, I can have reasonable conversations with “go red” folks in town, but here… I guess not so much.
I’ve counted at least two or three posts in this topic alone that seem to offer as a fact that needs no proof–The left is a morass of Lies. Manipulation. Indoctrination. Bullshit. “So much from the Left, of which I used to be a faithful member, that I couldn’t take it anymore. Then I realized I’ve been lied to…”
Really? Here’s what I see on the Left: I watch Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and read Amanda Marcotte. They take on Trump and the right and make fun, and here’s the thing: everything they make fun of happened. They deal with facts, and they lampoon them. How do I know they’re facts? Because I can confirm them pretty quickly. Opposing viewpoints? Mostly websites that are written in all caps and full of punctuation errors.
There are some exceptions… Marcotte did refer to Trump as “President DrinkBleach,” and that’s not 100% fair (only 85%, I’d say). And they make fun of the lies that do indeed come from the left–“You should see Biden behind the scenes! People half his age can hardly keep up…!”
What I see on the right… well, a whole lot of lies, manipulation, indoctrination, and bullshit. There was a drag party in town during Pride Month. Laughter, fun, friendliness, open invitations to dance, talk, eat, whatever. And on the other side of the street? Masked protestors shouting “Life! Liberty! Victory!” (Just think if they’d said “pursuit of happiness.”) Who do you think I’d like to have as my neighbors? Who do you think I’d like to go to a church or temple social with?
The line between who is the snookered and who is the snookie is rather fluid.
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Are you under the impression that this is a nest of “go red” folks?
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“Go red” is too broad a brush, admittedly. My main source is the “Reasons for the Turn” thread. I looked over it again–lots of stories of Finding Faith, which would be fine, but I distrust any faith that leads to greater fear and hate. Here are some lies I found in that thread: trannyism is dogma. Black worship is dogma. LGBTQ+ is dogma. No. It’s just giving everyone the same right to exist peacefully, which is pretty much what The Nazz* wanted, if I’m not mistaken.
The lies that turned people off of the Left that were probably lies? Yeah, the Left has a number of things to answer for. I think there was a lot of holding back on COVID, although I don’t regret the vaccinations and the safety measures. I could see someone resenting that going forward. But behind the scenes machinations involving Obama, Hillary, Bernie, et al….? My goodness! Politicians doing back-room stuff? Holy Boss Tweed, Batman! I’m shocked, shocked…
So yeah. Flawed, imperfect, not always honest… but every time I hear a commercial where the (I hope well-paid) voice-over actor intones with ten tons of evil emphasis, “Progressive. (extra hiss on the “s’s”) Liberal.” I say, “Yup. Thank God.”
*Lord Buckley’s name for Jesus.
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I’m confused by your willingness to believe that all politicians are lying (they are of course), but that your news sources are not.
Do you reckon they all start saying the same things, using the same catchphrases, at exactly the same time… because they have all spontaneously landed on the same ineffable truth?
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Huh??????
I remember Clarissa once told someone she was arguing with herself, or something like that. I THINK that might be what you’re doing…? I just can’t connect your response to anything I’ve written, or any conceivable interpretation of what I’ve written. I mean… my news sources? As opposed to whose news sources? I’ll admit it, I’m in the weeds.
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Shoot. It’s Col. Potter again.
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I’m very sorry for the constant glitches with the sign-in system. It was not something I chose, I promise.
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No worries. Peace, fun, and bubble gum.
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Sources you cited, assuming this was you:
“I watch Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and read Amanda Marcotte. They take on Trump and the right and make fun, and here’s the thing: everything they make fun of happened. They deal with facts, and they lampoon them. How do I know they’re facts? Because I can confirm them pretty quickly. Opposing viewpoints? Mostly websites that are written in all caps and full of punctuation errors.”
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Ah–thanks for clearing that up. I think I’m on board, now.
I might also add some side trips to Jon Stewart, John Oliver, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, (NY) Times, (Washington) Post, (Chicago) Tribune, vox, and salon. I’ll assume they’re all “lying” for the moment.
First, Colbert and Meyers… they’re entertainers, yeah? I don’t think “Waaah, Stephen Colbert lied to me!” is going to hold up anywhere. They go for the laugh. But as I said, they take things that actually happened, things people actually did and said, and make fun of them. It’s not their (or their writers’) faults that the news can be silly and people in power can be nitwits.
Of course, I’m old enough to remember Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley and so forth–“reliable” news. That’s changed a bit. The news has a slant. And yeah, some things are emphasized more, downplayed more, or even downright left out. Sometimes I learn things that are left out here on Clarissa’s blog–Trump helping Ukraine with javelins, for example. I mean, there you go–a lifetime of grift, graft, fraud, racism, bullying, sexual predation, and general fuckwittery, and kind of off by itself–let’s help Ukraine. All right, then. Broken clocks are right twice a day.
As for other “lies” from the news… well, here’s what I do. Let’s take one small and kind of obvious example from the AV Club (oh yeah, sometimes I look at the AV Club): “Olympics Opening Ceremony Art Director Issues ‘Sorry, Not Sorry’ to Upset Weirdos.” Now we’ll unpack–it’s based on the real statement from the real art director responding to the backlash following the opening ceremony. Obviously there’s no attempt to be objective–the writer has a point of view about the ceremony and toward those who were upset by it. It happens to be a point of view with which I agree–or to put it a bit more kindly, for all the people who were upset, I congratulate them on having such thoroughly happy and problem-free lives that they have the time to be outraged by performance. (I could also recommend they look up Dionysus’ Feast as well as The Last Supper, but hey, I can’t improve the whole world at once.)
Now there are all sorts of headlines and news items, as well as think pieces and punditry regarding the ceremony. There’s not a lot of objective truth beyond there was a ceremony and it made some people upset. I work to find the truth that makes sense to me. And then on to the next bit of important earth-shaking news, such as whether or not Bluey and her family are really moving. But all of “my sources” repeating catch-phrases? Saying exactly the same things? Sometimes, I guess. But not as often as you seem to think.
I’m a little exhausted now. I might have more later.
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Forget getting outraged over a TV show. That outrage has zero effects on anything. Here is a story about teenagers arrested for leaving skid marks on a rainbow crosswalk:
https://www.krem.com/article/news/local/arrests-wednesday-at-newly-painted-pride-crosswalk-mural/293-57722e04-0df0-4484-856e-fed3d7a37c23
They face actual charges. Maybe even time in jail. We are talking about an enormous imbalance of power here where insulting one side’s sacred imagery results in arrest and a criminal record while insulting another side’s sacred imagery is ha-ha funny.
So whom are we going to congratulate with having such problem-free lives that they arrest kids leaving skid marks on the ground? Who’s the really sensitive, pouty side that unleashes the criminal justice system against kids who are not sufficiently deferential?
This is one of many cases. Some sacred objects are truly more equal than others.
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I can also bring here some of the many headlines about “women” who raped other women and children. We are supposed to believe there’s a sudden epidemic if rapey females when the reality that it’s all men posing as women.
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And let’s not even start me on the war in Ukraine. A few weeks ago, NYTimes put on the front page a photo of a destroyed Ukrainian city with a claim that it’s the Russian city of Belgorod destroyed by… Ukrainians. I can list these cases all day. The WashPo and the BBC are even worse on this subject.
And the way in which the MSM behaved during COVID or the BLM riots, lies upon lies. The propaganda is worse than in the USSR, and I say it from extensive personal experience with the Soviet propaganda.
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Thanks for sharing this. Two picky points: one of the youths is an adult, and there is a difference between vandalism (physical damage and destruction) and mocking something. Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” doesn’t do any real harm to any faith, unlike say, defacing Torahs or destroying Bibles.
That said, I don’t think the youths should do time. I think what’s called for is a mandated class in citizenship–not “why you should like gay people” or “why you should embrace LGBTQ+,” but simply why being a good citizen means you don’t deface property. There doesn’t even need to be any questions like, “What about the symbols make you so angry?”–that’s not the point. And then have them clean some streets or something.
As for rape, yes, it’s horrible, always wrong, never excusable. I don’t think protecting all our citizens from rape needs to intrude on “trans rights.” You have a right to transition; you don’t have a right to rape.
BLM and COVID and Ukraine constitute bigger topics for separate responses.
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There’s no such thing as an unbiased source. If your sources are all biased in the same direction, you’re only getting half the story, or less. There are, after all, more than two viewpoints 😉
There’s no avoiding MSM, which appears to be… all of your sources. Have you tried getting any other angles?
Mostly, what I find is that MSM is propaganda and reinforcement by and for the white-collar professional managerial class, and entirely ignores the concerns of blue-collar workers, rural people, and anyone on the bottom 60% of the income curve.
I am familiar with Colbert from his tenure on the Daily Show. Yes, it was funny. But after a while it left me with kind of a sick feeling. This is not news: it is supercilious, dismissive humor that lets us feel snooty because we “know” enough to laugh at these news bites, but not enough to discuss them in any depth. It frees us from finding out more, though, because haha that’s so silly and now I don’t need to know anymore about it. I’m so smart I can now dismiss the entire subject without knowing any more than this clip-and-laughtrack about it. It’s very comforting and ego-stroking, and I think actively gets in the way of people knowing anything substantial about things in the news. Prepackaged opinions.
If, when you go looking for the other side, all you find is ALL CAPS and no grammar, it seems likely you’re looking at sources cherrypicked by your MSM trusted newshubs, selected specifically for looking dumb, so they can safely be made fun of. No better than Libs of TikTok which does the same thing by cherrypicking the most egregious examples of unhinged leftie extremism, and reposting them for outrage porn clicks.
There’s been more than one study at this point concluding that right-leaning people have a far better grasp of leftie viewpoints, than left-leaning people have of rightie viewpoints. This has, I think, everything to do with the slant of MSM sources. It’s easy to miss what anyone outside the left is saying, if you don’t go actively looking for it. None of us can avoid what the left thinks, no matter how much we’d like to, because it’s pushed by every major news outlet 24/7. But if you want to be informed about anything outside that bubble… and that’s a majority of Americans, btw… you have to go looking for it.
Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss might be a good place to start.
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I appreciate that you write “to” me and not “at” me. I started reading an interview with Taibbi–obviously not a fawning Trump lickspittle. I could probably ride with him for a bit, at least. Will fit in some Weiss when I can as well.
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I would not characterize either Weiss or Taibbi as conservative at all. But they are at least good journalists operating outside the mainstream left establishment. I disagree with them on many things, but I have a lot of respect for their work, and their integrity.
Most of what they cover, I’ve already gotten through quicker dirtier sources, but by the time they publish it, it’s been vetted better and written about more carefully 😉
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…in terms of just really high-quality journalism on subjects that matter, I’d also recommend Sam Quinones, particularly his two books on the opioid crisis. The man does fantastic work.
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Excellent! Thank you.
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“There was a drag party in town during Pride Month. Laughter, fun, friendliness, open invitations to dance, talk, eat, whatever“
Well, good for you, I’m sure lots of fun was had by everybody. And the more’s the pity, since that same drag party during Pride Month [Pride Month?! I cannot believe you do not have the intellectual acumen to question the very concept: it’s positively Orwellian. A typically Soviet answer indeed, as this blog’s host would say] is just the apparently harmless epiphenomenon of a very harmful ideology, which, while advocating, preaching and promoting the notion of self-declared boundless autonomy as the highest good, has been and is transing unprecedented numbers of vulnerable children on the autistic spectrum. As you say you have three children with special needs, you might want to research this topic, it is not that difficult. Ever heard of the Cass Report? It came out early this year: again, widely available.
“I have to admit, this is getting more and more fascinating. And in some ways, more and more discouraging–there’s just such a huge gap in worldview.“
Yes, that’s precisely it. We have very different experiences and that is why it is fascinating – and generally more useful because richer in insight – to listen to those who have gone through those experiences which you find so mirthful and fun and friendly… and who have seen that they are not so harmless as they might look.
The last Pride parade I went to was World Pride 2011, in Rome. I was one of the delegates from the gay activists chapter in my city. That was the moment when I saw some very disturbing things that I had previously dismissed as irrelevant at best and a mere annoyance at worst. I remained in the “movement” as it was called then for a few more years, until 2014, before I really started to see things clearly. It was not instant conversion, and I wasn’t even religious then. But a lot of things started to fall into place as I slowly began to connect the dots. Things have only gotten worse since then, unimaginably worse in fact. And yet, it’s beautiful, and disturbing at the same time, to see how extensively one has been plied with lies, how nothing is what it seems, how everything in that world is much more complex than what it looks. By design. One of several advantages of this experience is that it inoculates for life against indoctrination, no matter where it comes from.
In a previous answer above, you mention that my kind of explanation is how very religious people speak, as if that would diminish the credibility of my testimony. I find that type of discourse not only disingenuous, but also very patronising: are you implying that religious people may not make valid contributions to the search for truth, since you seem to discount that possibility on the mere basis of the speaker’s faith? Please, allow me then to refer you to James Lindsay at https://newdiscourses.com/. He’s a notorious atheist and will disabuse you of the farcical notion you seem to hold of Woke as simply to be aware of racial prejudice and discrimination.
One final note: you mention watching Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers – among others. Well, I rest my case. If you cannot see how dishonest, manipulative, mendacious and meretricious those people are, you really are beyond help.
And now I shall hold my peace. I promise not to answer back, no matter how rebarbative your reply may be, as I do not wish to risk abusing the host’s patience any further.
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Finally got around to listening to James Lindsay and doing a little digging on where he’s coming from. Please refrain from sending me such things ever again. Dude’s a screwball.
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“In a previous answer above, you mention that my kind of explanation is how very religious people speak, as if that would diminish the credibility of my testimony. I find that type of discourse not only disingenuous, but also very patronising: are you implying that religious people may not make valid contributions to the search for truth, since you seem to discount that possibility on the mere basis of the speaker’s faith?”
The term I should have used was, “how people in a cult speak.” Now see, that’s disappointing, avi. Because I, too, have been on a long quest regarding faith, and ideally, the search for faith should OPEN the quester’s mind, make it more alive to different ways of being and thinking and just plain finding our way. Something closed in your mind and heart instead. It’s too bad that if there is an “end of all things,” the only response you’ll receive from the Big Guy is “Sorry, man, I never knew you.”
There’s more I could say about the (somewhat… controversial?) Cass Report, the myth of drag queens indoctrinating future trans folks, and whether someone who has directly insulted my intellectual acumen twice has the right to use the term “patronizing.” But I guess I’m done, too.
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“being a good citizen means you don’t deface property”
Leaving skid marks on a road is not defacing property…. apart from no one explaining why the government felt a need to politicize part of the street.
I’m all for gay rights but that’s a won battle in the US and no need for government to actively ‘celebrate’ pride month any more than it needs to ‘celebrate’ goths or juggalos (are they still a thing?) or snake handlers.
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I still maintain that the only reason to paint it on a road, is because you’re afraid nobody will deface it anywhere else.
And then how would you claim hate and oppression??
OMG someone left skid marks! In the road!! Call the cops!
Next we will ticket people for trampling on the sacred rainbow. That’s painted in the crosswalk.
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On the “Weird” thing:
https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/why-youre-being-weird-works-so-well
Too cringe: didn’t read: This guy is a True Believer, and not only did he notice the uniform pivot to “All y’all are weird” *as a campaign strategy that was instantly adopted by social media and MSM alike as though it were spontaneously everybody’s own idea and not a creepy memo that everyone follows like they’re the Borg*… he approves and is convinced it will work. Great work, team! Propaganda is awesome!
(there is definitely an emoji for this, but I have yet to figure those out on WP)
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I’ve spent my whole life being told I’m weird. Bullied as a child. Called a freak by my mother. This “you’re weird” strategy sounds juvenile, dumb and deeply unappealing to me.
The funny thing is that “childless cat ladies” that is supposed to be so insulting is simply a literal statement of fact. If you are childless, you are childless. But “weird” is emotional and subjective. How it’s better is a mystery.
I have already said that I find the “childless cat ladies” an enormous mistake and I think Vance is a huge mistake for Trump. So let’s not re-fight that because there’s no need.
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You are about the third person in as many forums I have heard saying similar. One of them even noted that they had switched party allegiance over it, because their childhood associations with being called “weird” in exactly the same you’re-excluded-from-society way were still so painful.
Not my monkeys and all, but how do people notice the lockstep, see the propaganda machine in action, and… still go with it? Like, I have a big nasty disgust/recoil reaction whenever I see people *whom I otherwise agree with* doing that let’s-all-agree-to-copy-each-other’s-catchphrases thing. It’s super creepy and fake. It’s very nearly the same gut-level reaction I had to mall santas, rubber masks, and people in animal costumes, when I was a little kid: this is not real, this is someone pretending to be something else. Get away from me! Uncanny valley stuff.
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