Pure evil

I was reading Julius Caesar and the phrase "a heart of controversy" came up and I thought about.

I thought about Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) using the existence of Sarah McBride (D-Del.) to raise money (Politico).

Googling I came up with the following statistic:

Republicans spent 215 million dollars with attack ads on trans during the election (Truth Out). 

Trump famously lied that kids come home from school a different gender, or taxpayers paying for surgery of prisoners. 

I think it's more treachery than gluttony, the above monster rips bodies apart. 

My experience working with transgender people was that they are the most oppressed people in America. Every year there's a day of remembrance where they read out all the names of transgender people who died that year. A coworker I had who was non-op male to female is dead. 

It happens in part because they are so few, and in part because it confuses people even more than gay experience does. Wrong gender, how could that be? Instead of reading Gender Queer, they want to ban the book. Prohibit understanding and acceptance. That's one way of being in the world. To me that's pure evil.

To see so called leaders actually going in the wrong direction on this is pure evil to me. Raising money off the negative force we're fighting to create a better society, is pure evil to me. Special level of hell, Dante needs to update and add a new level of hell for these types. 

How it's going?

"Last week, Donald Trump proposed for nomination — to key agencies, including the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice — a group of unqualified apparatchiks, sycophants and conspiracy theorists. As loyalists, they were picked as agents of Trump’s will, less independent administrators than a group of glorified Renfields. The problem for Trump is that his nominees are so unqualified that they may not have the votes to be confirmed, even in a Republican-led Senate. One of them, the former Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, has already dropped out of contention for the role of attorney general in the wake of new evidence of sexual misconduct with a minor at a party. Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing, and the Justice Department declined to charge him last year."

(Jamelle Bouie in NY Times)

Trump’s Education Secretary Pick Named in Sexual Abuse Lawsuit. Linda McMahon, who ran World Wrestling Entertainment for decades, was accused in the lawsuit of not preventing one of the organization’s employees from victimizing children who helped set up wrestling rings.

Political thoughts today

Reading how Harris couldn't convince the people she's anti-establishment, because she's not, in the Guardian. I don't understand why the Democrats have to jump through all these hoops and Trump just lied about the election and blathers about nonsense and grievances, and he gets in, I mean that's hardly a brilliant tactic, but democrats have to figure out how to beat that nonsense? That's what democrats are guilty of, not transcending people's ability to be duped by nonsense? They're guilty of having a coherent plan?

Some guy on Reddit was writing about the feeling of economic disaster people feel from inflation and people actually somehow were persuaded that Trump would be the solution?! To me that's just the population being stupid. I'm sorry to be so judgemental, but everything I read said that Harris' plans were much more likely to address inflation.

Here's my analysis of the elections. Unthinking dopes thought Trump would be better. He's not going to be, and they made a mistake. Sure Trump will, like a broken clock, be right twice a day, but he's not got a vision, he's out for himself, and his appointments to the cabinet have been exactly the opposite of what is needed. It's going to be painful to watch this shit show, and the faith that American institutions are going to be so robust that we'll be OK, isn't something I share.

American voters aren't likely to catch they got the best possible out of the worldwide inflation problems, and that rebelling against that is just going to be worse. For me that's not democrats not figuring it out, that's just Americans being stupid. Now political people should figure out how to pitch their message given that, but they were trying things. They had Liz Cheney. 

How Americans were so ignorant about Trump's downsides and basic inability to really understand what is going on, that's not the democrats failure, that's just dumb luck.

The way people spin the "lessons" is just more self promotion and saying, see, we should have never abandoned the workers, or whatever agenda and then blah blah blah. Nobody really understands why Americans are so attracted to the just break everything, except perhaps as Freud's death instinct. 

This article by Michael Bérubé has a similar theme, more on Gaza and Sanders. Here's an ending:

"We are now left to live with the bitter irony that many of those long-term investments in American manufacturing and infrastructure will bear fruit during Trump’s second term. Sometime in late January 2025, I suspect, we will begin to hear how Trump tamed inflation and reinvigorated the American working class simply by taking office. And we will continue to hear, as Bidenomics takes root and Trump takes the credit for its successes, that the Democrats lost by turning their backs on that working class."

America voted for Project 25, inflation and worse government. Honestly it makes me question democracy, but I'd rather fix it than abandon it. And that means it has to be a crime to lie in public forums. But that's a problematic notion because bias and perspectives create truths. If there's one thing Trump is really revolutionary about, it's his realizing the political potential of lying.

I think if our democratic systems were robust enough, he would have never gotten to the election. Judiciary and the press failed. He exposed their corruption. The rise of social media contributed. Education can't completely solve the problem either. Something new has to emerge ins response. Perhaps it's greater political involvement, resistance to evil, to wake people up.

Deactivated twitter

Woof, I did it, I deactivated my twitter account. Been wanting to do that for a while. I really struggled with it, because Musk kept doing things that I disliked, and I kept reading about things he was doing that I disliked. Him joining the Trump administration as an unelected official seems to have put it over the top for sports journalists.

Unfortunately the proliferation of micro blogging sites led to more social media. I didn't know which place to place my bets, so I did Tribal, Mastodon, Sky Blue, Threads.

Threads is similar in it's a sick oligarch we know about. I'm not sure others aren't as evil as twitter and threads, but I don't know yet. And they weren't in Europe, where I get a lot of soccer news. I think they're in Europe now, but I'm not sure.

Tribal is too beggy. Mastodon and Blue Sky seemed to be doing fine. 

I got some sex workers looking to sell me content on Blue Sky, but I just blocked them. 

I followed a trans woman and I got everything slanted towards that when I first signed up. 

Now all the sports journalists are signing up to Blue Sky. The issue with Blue Sky was it was hard to get an invite, as they wanted to control the growth. But they added a million users yesterday, so I think Blue Sky is the winner over Mastodon. 

Stephen King moved to Threads, but I follow the soccer journalists. 

How is this conservative?

There are many different ways of looking at politics, and I have a friend who just looks at oppression, taking away freedom, right and left. You can be a left wing libertarian, allegedly, like Noam Chomsky. 

Somehow I'm stuck in right as conservative, left as progressive. One side wants to keep government to a minimum. Government has exploded, my grandparents were conservatives, they voted for Reagan. They grew up during the depression, went to war. They were the great generation. I can see how they would be against the explosion of the government.

Young people are against all the rules these days, the rules set up to protect other people, they're hemmed in by all these rules. Trump represents breaking free from all the strictures. 

Trump is picking the exact opposite of the kind of people who should be running things, he's set on destruction and destroying. 

His administration picks are just a mockery of government, and that's a kind of destruction of government. That is why conservatives got behind what American liberals consider a gross travesty. I'm not sure if they're fully comfortable with everything he's doing. And maybe they can see some of the horror he's going to be unleashing, that the left will see more clearly and in detail.

The political bias is about ignoring as much as it is about seeing. Conservatives have an idea about their personality motivation. Liberals have an idea about how their personality feels about trying to help others through federal government. I'm not so balanced I can see the unintended consequences and downside to the left. My libertarian friend claims he can see the problems both sides make. 

From my leftist perspective, I see conservatives want to just wreck up government to show that it's not good. They have to distract with culture wars because the people united will do things to ameliorate the excesses of capitalism. Conservatives hate communism, collectivism, spreading money out, the believe in winners and losers, and the suffering of other is brought on not by systems but by personal failures. Maybe it's a character to highlight points. I've noticed in life that people just describe things how it fits for them, and make it work.

It's like spirituality, I can make every contradiction work out in Buddhism, because I'm fully invested in this spiritual tradition and I'm not superficial about it. That's why I dislike telling Christians they're not following the teachings by being a conservative Christian. Jesus seems to say take care of the poor, spread the wealth around, he seems to be a socialist, but some Christians want to do that personally, not at the federal level. I think Jesus would want to do it everywhere, but he's not my guy, my guy is the Buddha. The Buddha was trying to get the kings to be nicer and not war so much, he seemed to be pragmatic with who the kings really were in front of him, and reserved his real advice for the people who wanted to move towards enlightenment. But that is contentious, there is a Theravada book that suggests the Buddha wasn't interested at all in politics. There are conservative Buddhists, Sangharakshita voted for Thatcher, I could name some others.

I really feel that my perspective is true, and that there are other perspectives and democracy is a dance between conservative and progressive instincts. 

Maddow called trump a tin can autocrat, and I think that's accurate, most people don't think he's going to go dictator, he's has hyperbolic rhetoric for a bargaining position. He's the head of a family and his father was an asshole too, his grandfather was an asshole too. He doesn't hug and kiss his daughter on stage if he doesn't feel it. He's incredibly undisciplined, and just wants to do what he wants to do, and what he can get away with. I'm grateful that he doesn't have the military. I'm not feeling the commitment to democracy from Trump, but I also feel like he could have done more for the insurrection, but he wanted to be handed the dictatorship, like Caesar.

Hate him or love him, he tapped into what it took to win, honestly it's a slim margin, and there are questions about purged voter rolls, and bomb threats to polling places from Russia, no election is pure, that's why I think it should be just total votes, I don't like the electoral college, created to appease slave owners. 

Some quotes from Blue Sky which got over a million people yesterday.

"Maybe it’s just me, but it’s pretty terrifying that corrupt uninformed non-elected tech billionaire Elon Musk violated the Logan Act by having a meeting with Iran’s ambassador to discuss tensions between the US and Iran and absolutely no one will do anything about it." Ricky Divila

Zach Williams: And reactionary anti-institutionalism leads to Elon Musk negotiating with Iran. Swell.

I get the feeling that people who voted for Trump are going to tune out to his methods or they will see it as disrupting the status quo, which in reality is just ignoring all the rules and customs that have grown up over the centuries. 

My friend thinks institutions are robust enough to save us. I'm not so sure. I hardly think greater access by the oligarchs is avoiding the status quo. He's just called in a hatchet man who fires people and loses value. Conservatives might like that, not see a problem with it. If it leads to lower taxes, great. Ignore the negative consequences.

Monday morning thoughts

I found Saturday Night Live's opening skit chilling. Bill Barr joking about minorities, chilling. Trump has ushered in mediocrity in entertainment. 

The person calling people trying to persuade them to vote for Harris found similar to what I found in the park watching my daughter. I live in an immigrant neighborhood. One Ukranian woman who recently gave birth could not ranting about lazy immigrants. She was obviously infected with Fox fake news. She could not see the irony that she was an immigrant. Another Ukranian woman just got a bad vibe from Harris and wasn't going to vote. 

When I speculated about how Eastern Europeans might be tempted to vote for a strongman, because they resembled the vicious rulers they fled from, a Albanian woman shook her head.

My son could joke about Trump saying they're eating cats and dogs. I couldn't joke. 

I want an explanation that is prescriptive and leads to a path away from this mess. 

Criticizing Fox infotainment doesn't work because there exists MSNBC and many comedy shows that regularly debunk and make fun of the right. 

Criticizing young people doesn't feel right because they're going to have a sense of how things are distorted, they just got the wrong end of the firebrand if they think radical social media is truer than mainstream media. 

Right leaning people hate liberals as bad as liberals hate rapey felons with bad policy ideas. It's not equivalent hate seeming from my left wing thinking. Their ideas are obviously mistaken. The instinct isn't wrong.

There's no powerful conclusion, that can save me from the next 4 years. There's no easy fix for the shock people feel. My usual bromides about living the questions, and tolerating ambivalence doesn't really cut it. I'm scared. My only hope is that people leave their screens and fight vigorously. We're puny in this world but when we clearly see something and come together it can be powerful.

Maybe Trump can stop this war in Ukraine. Maybe his greed and age will stumble him up. I read about the hypothesis that we elect incompetent and ineffectual presidents because we don't want effective leadership, they're always clawless. Obama was obstructed, Bush was a dry drunk, Clinton self sabotaging. Maybe the president isn't really needed, and America just needs a grievance leader, a surrogate of wronged white man.

"Villa Vie Residences, a U.S. residential cruise company, has announced a 4-year round-the-world voyage for those wanting to escape life under Тrumр. The cruise will stop in 140 countries across all seven continents, with single cabin prices starting at $256,000." Reddit

An analysis of factors about presidential election.

Bhikkhu Bodhi

“ This doesn’t mean we should demonize the Trump supporters. Certainly, not all those who voted for Trump are ready to embrace fascism or throw their liberal opponents into the flames. It’s likely that only a relatively small number of those who cheered, laughed, and danced at the MAGA rallies are prone to violence. The vast majority are probably just ordinary folk, very much like ourselves, who voted for Trump because they believed he would best represent their interests.”

Bhikkhu Bodhi