Sunday, August 3, 2025

The conservative mind & gerrymandering

I think the conservative mind literally wants to kill complications, counterexamples to their theories and vision, hatred for the liberal imagination, and sees the freedom to murder kids accidentally in gun ownership as a right, while others rights don't exist. Like the right to a medically necessary abortion to save the mother's life, maybe a woman who malfunctions like that as a breeder doesn't deserve to live. Maybe marginal cases just should be erased easily.


If Texas gerrymanders, California and New York are talking about fighting back. Fighting all the time, just escalates, there are two wings that balance each other out, in a democracy, but in fascism, authoritarianism, Trumpism, you try to win at all costs, and are particular about not seeing the larger checks and balances. 

When you cheat to win, it means you don't think you can win with the regular rules. That's not really the democratic spirit. Until Trump, America was a democracy. 

Tuesday, July 29, 2025

Ishkabibble

It's weird that people are just figuring out Trump is a monster. There's a lot of articles and posts on social media where I want to say, "no shit" or "what took you so long?"

Example: In 2020 I read an article in Mother Jones. If you read that article you don't need any list released. It would probably interesting for the names besides Trump, who we know liked him, admired him, hung out with him. 

Trump even said to grab married women by the pussy. I mean, that's enough right there. One crude comment maybe isn't enough to judge, but if you're paying attention. People who get it now were not paying attention.

How about ICE videos every day where they're beating people up? How about kidnapping, exporting without due process? He's sloppy and incompetent. He's a bad president. And they re-elected him. That's the ultimate shame of America. I'll never get over that. 

It's weird people are just waking up now. It shows how complicit the newspapers are with not knocking people over the head with it. It shows how willing people of a right wing political bent are willing to overlook things. Fox News is still going on and on about Hillary's e-mails, even though many Republicans have done the same thing. They don't focus on that. They're like an obsessed broken record. It's ishkabibble.

The Pedhofurher is spending a billion to outfit his plane, he's clearly got a fuck it attitude. No more elections, he doesn't care what the people think or history's legacy. He flew to Scotland to open a golf course on the US taxpayer's dime.

If you're really against graft and corruption in government, you have to be against the regime.



Thursday, July 10, 2025

David Brooks in the Atlantic



The Atlantic has an article called Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good? by David Brooks.

David Brooks takes a lot of liberties telling the story of morality in America. The hope is to explain why people like Trump. For me the explanation is nihilistic desire to wreck things up, the death instinct. People think they're going to clear things out, shake up the system. It's not working the way they want, good Americans resent taxes, and with inflation and global warming, why not just wreck things up? There's too much to worry about, life is too complicated. Just lower taxes.

Of course the current regime isn't lowering taxes, just shifting money into rich pockets and running various grifts. 

Brooks story is that in traditional society, that gave you a role, and a scope of how to think about ethics. You tried to be the best you could be in your role in society. That was the best ethical thing you could do. Now we don't have roles in society. I've worked in a restaurants, hardware store, library, taxi driver, schools, publishing, warehouses, as a social worker, chess tutor, a million different jobs. There's no role for me in society besides worker, father, husband, citizen. It hasn't been hard for me to figure out how I want to vote, and to see the importance of voting. 

I live in a immigrant neighborhood. I talk in the park while my daughter plays. I can't seem to convince anyone to vote. Some American born, first generation woman even made fun of me by suggesting people vote. My son reports the hispanic soccer players in the park love Trump. 

Certainly the sizeable Jewish population around me votes for lower taxes, they don't send their kids to public schools, they don't trust the government. There's a polish woman who home schools her children, "not enough god in school", who told me to forget Trump's sieg heils. Lots of people drive Tesla cars in a Jewish neighborhood. They must not be so afraid of another wave of anti-semitism like the one in WW2. 

Israel is beset on all sides, but it's a place where Jewish people can go if things get temporarily hot in their country. The Jewish people have been kicked out of all the middle eastern countries in the middle east, but took over Israel. They will not be kicked out of Israel. 

Trump likes strongmen, he likes North Korea, Russia, Hungary and Israel. At the moment, the right wing Jews in my neighborhood like the current regime. The left wing Jews don't like him, of course, but there is a woman who stands outside the voting who tells the orthodox Jewish people who to vote for. They're what you call a single issue voter, they follow closely who supports Israel the most, and then say to vote for them. She wanted me to vote for Cuomo, who I didn't even rank. I look Jewish, so she told me how to vote. If I wear my baseball cap to keep the sun out of my eyes, I'm covering my head, so I could be Jewish. 

She saw Mamdani as a Muslim monster because he's Muslim and because he's a democratic socialist. The bile that has come out of even Democrats mouths, is amazing. Yet a huge turnout in young voters, he won by the slimmest of margins--12 votes!

Now with Cuomo, Adams and Silwa splitting the right and center votes, Mamdani is ahead in the polls. The left is getting excited, maybe the revolution is really happening. The right is terrified of communism. I have a right wing friend who specializes in eastern european woman who hate communism. It's like the Cubans. They can drive on public roads, walk down public sidewalks, have the government take away garbage, and hate with a white hot passion doing collective good by the government. 

What they don't like is totalitarianism, authoritarianism, but they confuse the means of communists with the actual desire for public good. We should have health insurance already, but no, America has to be against that. 

I've digressed from Brook's story, but I'm describing the political reality on the grounds that I see. I see a retired bus driver who watches Fox news and thinks they're persecuting Trump, not holding him accountable to the rule of law. You can't talk to these people they're so brainwashed. Brooks purports to explain why these people are so befuddled and confused. They like authoritarianism, it tells them how to think in this confusing world. The loss of roles, the freedoms of the enlightenment have completely trashed the humans ability to think. Brooks quotes his hero Alasdair MacIntyre.


Some selected quotes from the article

"We’ve tried to cure the moral vacuum MacIntyre saw at the center of the Enlightenment with narcissism, fanaticism, and authoritarianism—and the cure turned out to be worse than the disease."

"How do people make decisions about the right thing to do if they are not embedded in a permanent moral order? They do whatever feels right to them at the moment. MacIntyre called this “emotivism,” the idea that “all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.” Emotivism feels natural within capitalist societies, because capitalism is an economic system built around individual consumer preferences."

"One of the problems with living in a society with no shared moral order is that we have no way to settle arguments. We have no objective standard by which to determine that one view is right and another view is wrong. So public arguments just go on indefinitely, at greater levels of indignation and polarization."

We sort of see that playing out in the supreme court as they make up whatever suits the current regime. I used to think the court had precedence, and legal reasonsoning, but no more. 

"If no one can persuade anybody about right and wrong, then there are only two ways to settle our differences: coercion or manipulation."

"In the 1980s, the philosopher Allan Bloom wrote a book arguing that in a world without moral standards, people just become bland moral relativists: You do you. I’ll do me. None of it matters very much. This is what Kierkegaard called an aesthetic life: I make the choices that feel pleasant at the moment, and I just won’t think much about life’s ultimate concerns. As MacIntyre put it, “The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil.”"

"Over the past 30 years, people have tried to fill the hole in their soul by seeking to derive a sense of righteousness through their political identities. And when you do that, politics begins to permeate everything and turns into a holy war in which compromise begins to seem like betrayal."

"Ted Clayton, a political scientist at Central Michigan University, put it well: “MacIntyre argues that today we live in a fragmented society made up of individuals who have no conception of the common good, no way to come together to pursue a common good, no way to persuade one another what the common good might be, and indeed most of us believe that the common good does not and cannot exist.”"

Read the article.

Here is his conclusion:

"Recovering from the moral scourge of Trumpism means restoring the vocabulary that people can use to talk coherently about their moral lives, and distinguish a person with character from a person without it. We don’t need to entirely reject the Enlightenment project, but we probably need to recalibrate the culture so that people are more willing to sacrifice some freedom of autonomy for the sake of the larger community. We need to offer the coming generations an education in morals as rigorous as their technical and career education. As the ancients understood, this involves the formation of the heart and the will as much as the formation of the rational mind."



Trying to revive America 

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

4th of July



I had a group of friends, and they emailed regularly. The rise of Trump killed the group. They argued and quit the group. 

There's a guy who lives above me, works at a grocery store, who's a libertarian, doesn't want government. He thought Obama was as corrupt as anyone else.

Night doorman across the street agrees with him. Denies the obvious difference in corruption.

Retired bus driver across the street thought Trump was being persecuted legally with frivolous cases. 

Jewish fellow in the park didn't think 700k people died from Trump's inaction around Covid. "Maybe".

Albanian woman in the park said, "you have the right to guns, right?"

Cote d'Ivoire woman thought the protests in Portland meant the January 6th insurrection was just a protest. She moved to Hungary with her mixed race children. They recently protested Orban saying don't celebrate pride with a massive turnout. The current regime likes Orban. 

Italian-American woman neighbor, who thought vaccines were bad, moved to Texas.

Irish-American woman who converted to Judaism moved to Idaho. She loved Trump.

Polish woman in the park said to forget Musk's two sieg heils. 

Senate passed the apocalypse bill, that's going to wreak havoc on America. Now only the House stands in front of it.

Trump is talking about exporting people he doesn't like from the country. Doesn't matter if they're citizens or if they were even born here, or fought for the country. 

We're truly looking at a horrible society of nightmares. 

HCR: "Just after noon today, the Senate passed its version of the budget reconciliation bill. All Democrats and Independents voted no. Three Republicans—Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina—joined the Democrats in voting no. That left the bill at 50–50. Vice President J.D. Vance cast the deciding vote, pushing the measure through the Senate and sending it back to the House to vote on the changes made by the Senate. From the reporters’ gallery above the floor, CNN’s Sarah Ferris heard Senator Angus King (I-ME) yell to his Republican colleagues: “Shame on you guys. That was the most disgusting vote I’ve ever seen in my life.” The measure cuts taxes for the wealthy and corporations and offsets those cuts in part by slashing Medicaid and food security programs for low-income Americans."

USA 1776-2025 RIP. I'm a third in denial, third minimizing and a third really really really angry. Only anti-social nihilists can applaud these moves. Call your Representatives, that's our only last hope. Protest on Saturday. Lots of people's dying words will be, "I blame Trump." Repetition compulsion, he's provoking another great depression. Hard times ahead, more violence.

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Zohran Mamdani




Zohran Mamdani has won the Democratic primary for Mayor of NYC. Usually the democratic primary winner, wins the race. The time Giuliani won as a republican was when there was a referendum for Staten Island to succeed from NYC. So basically the people who didn't want to be in New York City elected Giuliani into office.

Zohran Mamdani (33) was born in Uganda, to Indian parents. Move to Cape Town when he was 5. His mother is a filmmaker (1991) film Mississippi Masala, starring Denzel Washington and 2016 Disney film Queen of Katwe) and his father is an academic at Columbia, who studies colonialism, was expelled from Uganda under the dictator Idi Amin. He's from Queens, he's in the State Assembly. Moved to NYC when he was 7. Went to Bronx Science, then Bowdoin College in Maine with a bachelors in African studies. Mamdani worked as a prevention counselor and cricketer, and attempted a career in hip hop (video). He worked on a few political campaigns and then ran himself. His district includes Astoria and Long Island City. 




The amount of weird stuff coming out is crazy, lots of fairly racist, islamophobia and against democratic socialist nonsense. Trump is against him, so that's the biggest endorsement you can give. To me, it makes people look really bad. 

Cuomo is going 3rd party, along with Adams, so it's going to be Adams, Cuomo, Curtis Sliwa and our man Zohran Mamdani. To me, anyone but Zohran Mamdani is a wasted vote. Zohran Mamdani will win in a landslide. There was unprecedented young voter turnout, hopefully that amazing trend continues. 

Cuomo and Adams are crony capitalism, which we're tired of. Silwa is wacky vigilanti pretending to be law and order candidate, running for the attention, knows he can't win. Actually if the DINOs who don't like Zohran Mamdani voted for him, he could get a little closer, but I'm pretty sure those 3 split their votes. And then there's the candidate for the people, who is savy and wise beyond his years and hopefully turns out to be a good leader, and can fight the negative press against him. De Blasio was slammed by the press and cast as bad, and he's one of the best mayors we've had in a long time. 



Sunday, June 22, 2025

USA bombs Iran

If there was some mechanism for holding leaders accountable for murder, I would love that.

The current regime has done many harmful things, I could see this coming, with the tacit support of jingoistic New York Times. It's been quite a disillusioning time for this old fellow.


Links:

Heather Cox Richardson

I'm not going to link the Times which seems to think amplifying Taco Bone Spurs lies is valid journalism. 

Guardian

Friday, June 20, 2025

Disappointing New York Times

The top article on the left of the page is "A U.S. Attack on Iran Would Show the Limits of China’s Power" (NYT)

To me this is disgusting, exploring the potential benefits to harming another country by having a war with another country. It's disgusting.

I think I need to cancel my subscription.

"China has much to lose from a runaway conflict."

Um, the world, USA has too much to lose from conflict.


8/1/2025. I'm reading through the NY Times, and it's become too sympathetic to Trump, and it's become more of a tabloid with shocking headlines instead of deep analysis. The Guardian in England is the paper of record now.