Category: Politics

Comments on recent political activities and developments primarily in the U.S. and Canada.

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Trooper of the Year

No all police are corrupt, self-serving, fascist pigs.

Of course not.  I am occasionally reminded by friends that you should not judge all police by the bad behavior of a few.  They are right, of course.  But when you read a story like this, you begin to wonder if the people who advocate defunding the police aren’t right.  Here you have a police officer arriving at a scene in which a emotionally disturbed young man is threatening to take his own life.  The sensitive, kindly, thoughtful State Trooper demands that the man drop his weapon.  When he doesn’t– he had it taped to his neck– the distinguished officer shoots him dead.

Now, it is one thing to argue that this outcome was unfortunate.  It is one thing to argue that this outcome was unnecessary (the man in question was in his own room in his own house and not threatening to kill anybody but himself).  It is one thing to argue that the situation was unclear.  But it is something else entirely to give the officer an award for “Trooper of the Year”.

The officer, Jay Splain, went on to kill three more people.  Is there a bigger award than “Trooper of the Year” we can give him?

So the institution of the state police are all in on it.  So many of them felt so strongly that there was nothing wrong with this outcome that they called public attention to it and gave him a prize and a commendation.

Even some conservatives will tell you that this kind of incident could be avoided with a little common sense: there was no need for the police to even escalate the situation at all.

But he had a gun.  But isn’t that his god-given all-American Jesus-Loving wholesome family values right?

Mr. Martin saw nothing wrong with allowing the police to investigate themselves.

Mr. Martin thinks people like me think people like him are stupid.  He’s right.

But I would love to ask Mr. Martin, since the principle of allowing police to investigate themselves is alright with him, would he mind if allegations of welfare fraud were investigated by, say, local black church leaders?  Drug dealers?  Let’s get representatives of the pharmaceutical companies to judge.  Traffic violations?  I think NASCAR should send us some reps.

 

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A Rashomon Moment on Highway 401: The Trucker Convoy

In the Japanese movie “Rashomon”, by the incomparable Akira Kurosawa, a magistrate convenes a hearing to determine who was responsible for the death of a man in a remote area of a nearby forest. Each of three protagonists, the man’s wife, a common thief, and the man himself (through a medium) confesses to the murder(!) Why? Because it is preferable to them to confess to a heinous crime than to admit to a dishonorable act that each committed during the incident. In the end, a witness comes forward who saw the incident and relates the truth to the court; only one of them is the real murderer, but all three of them are shown to have behaved shamefully.

“Rashomon” was made in 1950 and is often cited as the reason the film academy added “Foreign” to its Oscar categories. I saw it when I was very young and it shook me, and still influences my perception of why people act the way they do. (Another film I saw around the same time, “Monsieur Verdoux” by Chaplin– had a similarly powerful impact on me.)  Nowadays we sometimes say people are “invested” in a particular narrative. In fact, some people are dying of Covid 19 because of their investment in an anti-vaccine ideology.  To the end, most of them refuse to concede that they were fundamentally, ridiculously wrong about Covid.  They can’t stand the idea of admitting they were idiots.

Science isn’t perfect but it’s a hell of a lot more reliable than some website that caters to a political constituency and rages about conspiracies and media bias. And yes, the “mainstream media” is actually another way to describe accountable, institutional journalism that isn’t perfect but has a pretty good track record of uncovering facts and evidence. Most news organizations presented with the claim that vaccines cause illnesses will diligently seek evidence: scientific studies, personal accounts, opinions of qualified, experts. Something like the extinction or near extinction of certain diseases, like measles and polio– which is not hard to verify– is pretty compelling evidence.

Have I wandered?  No.  There is a powerful connection between the truth revealed by “Rashomon” (and “Monsieur Verdoux”) and truth about the pro-Trump right-wing anti-vaccine rabble that is destroying America.  This is about shame.  This is about people who have long despised the “educated elites” who promote equality and feminism and the fight against global warming and the truth about American history (that it is a history of racism and genocide) and want to tax gas-guzzling pick-up trucks and take away your guns because they have contempt for those things, and not because it is good social policy.

These people have felt a sense of shame at the condescension liberals hold for them and this is their chance to say “fuck you” to the members of the “establishment” who make them feel stupid and vulgar.

And they would go very, very far to avoid admitting that they really are stupid and vulgar.

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Pre-School

According to a study in Tennessee, children from poor backgrounds offered a pre-school program (for 4-year olds) did worse in several important categories by Grade 6.

This is not supposed to be true.  It is counter to other studies which generally showed that children do better — they graduate high school and have fewer disciplinary issues– if they have an extra year of school at about age 4.  For as long as I can remember, that has been the accepted wisdom on pre-school.  But this study flatly contradicts those assumptions.

If it survives further analysis and assessment, it will have to be taken into account regardless of the politics of government-funding for pre-school.

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The Kabuki Theatre of Putin and the Ukraine

[I am publishing this because I was wrong.  I want to acknowledge it, because that’s the only way we learn to be better and more astute in judging these issues.  I really thought Putin would not go this far, but it is clear he is a madman–madder than we thought–who is dangerous to all of Europe.]  Gwynne Dyer courageously acknowledging that he was wrong about Russia’s intentions on the Ukraine.  The odd thing is, he was actually right.  He thought Russia would not invade Ukraine because Ukraine had a far more formidable army than most commentators thought.  He was right about that– most commentators also thought Russia would overwhelm Ukraine within a matter of weeks.

Still leaning towards the idea that all this blather about Ukraine is just so much self-perpetuating frenzy: everyone is reporting it so it must be true. And who is supplying all the networks with the lustrous video of tanks and missiles and armored personnel carriers racing around? The Russians of course.

Gwynne Dyer thinks Putin has no intention of invading and he’s right more often than most pundits. Every TV newscast starts out with “INCREASING tension today… ” but tension can’t increase every day without reaching 100% at which point it’s either the same or it decreases. North Korea had it’s time; then Iran. Now it’s Putin.

Strikingly, nobody ever mentions the size of the Ukrainian army, which is actually the largest in Europe at 250,000.

If you hypothesize that this is all just theatre and watch the news in that context, nothing seems jarringly out of place. The White House wants to look tough and determined; Putin wants to look like he’s big and powerful enough to go toe-to-toe with Biden (he’s not: Russia is really not that big or powerful), the media thrives on a perpetual state of crisis.

It’s like Republicans and the crime the rate: it’s always going up. It’s now at 26,000 percent.

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Divine Incest

The Vatican announced on Wednesday that Pope John Paul I, the Italian pontiff who reigned for only 33 days before his death in 1978, will be beatified after a miracle was attributed to him, bringing him one step closer to sainthood.   Ny Times – The Vatican announced …

What is this bullshit?  Did anyone tell the Roman Catholic Church that it is 2021 now?  The witches are gone, the Inquisition is gone, the miracles are gone, the magic is not afoot.

Pope Francis has authorized this step, adding to my disappointment with his appointment.

A sick young girl in Argentina was allegedly healed mysteriously by an “invocation of the Venerable John Paul I” according to the chief miracle detectors and busters office of the Vatican, the “Congregation for the Causes of the Saints”.   Any hospital could point you to dozens of similar “miracles”– unexplained sudden recoveries.

Make sure, Pope Francis, that you appoint your friends to this august body: that’s how it works.  That’s how you ensure that you too will reach the pinnacle.

And popes are not saints.  Saints are not saints.  Olga of Kiev, who brutally murdered thousands of Drevlians (a tribe living in what is now the Ukraine) is not a saint.  But the Catholic Church thinks she is.

What we have is this: each pope for the last 50 years has come to realize that his own canonization depends on establishing a precedent or model that will provide the framework for his own beatification.   I predict that every single pope from now to eternity will be Canonized.  It’s like sports halls of fame: every chief executive in the league offices has arranged it so that his own induction will seem inevitable, by establishing the kind of vague, loosely defined criteria that can be buffed and customized to suit any succeeding executive even if he is as mediocre a person as Gary Bettman.

It’s almost as bad as Franklin Graham inheriting his father’s divine mandate to lecture us all on how Donald Trump is really Jesus.

 

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Norm MacDonald

Did I miss something?  After Norm MacDonald’s death this week, I kept reading about what a great comedian he was.  I had never liked him much but I wanted to be fair:  I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to him.  Maybe I missed something.

Here’s one of his jokes.  He tells us that during a medical examination of Arnold Schwarzenegger because of a faulty heart valve some of the doctors were concerned because they became turned on during a routine examination.

That’s it.  That’s the punch line.  The audience, on SNL (which is live) didn’t laugh much either.

He also joked about a custody battle between a mother and her ex-husband who was transgender.  It was witless, crude, and dismissive.  It was the kind of joke back-slapping conservative males made and enjoyed at the time.  [Well, well: I now read that Macdonald was a Christian.  It’s possible to be politically progressive and Christian, but clearly Macdonald was your standard, off-the-shelf conservative hypocrite, mocking feminists, poor people, and gays, perhaps with slightly more subtlety than Dennis Miller, while nursing a gambling addiction.]

Again, in front of a picture of Bill and Hilary Clinton: “here’s a picture of the first bitch”.  No joke– just calling Hilary Clinton a bitch.  In another segment, he calls her a liar.  Again, no joke– just calling her a liar.   On an episode of “The View” he accused Bill Clinton of being a murderer.

A lot of Beatles paraphernalia was up for sale, including a “rare” photo of George Harrison not looking haggard.  Huh.

Two homeless people got married at a homeless shelter.  If you want to buy them a gift, they are “registered” at a recycling center.   Huh again.

I’m told his “off the cuff” comments on carrot-top were hilarious.  I’ve watched the clip.  I’m open-minded: maybe there is some reference there that is hilarious, and I missed it.

Same with a cooking demonstration on Conan O’Brien’s show with Gordon Ramsay.  We’re supposed to find his inability to follow instructions– like a drunk, really– hilarious.  The biggest laugh was his use of an obscenity, which the audience laughed at because they knew it would be beeped out.  It was all lame, tedious, witless, and boring.  Conan must have loved him– that lame segment should never have seen the editing suite.

Paul McCartney is going to host an online chat.  Already, 2.5 million calls have come in from people hoping to chat.  But 2 million of them are from Ringo.  That one is not even a little funny.

How about this: Donald Trump decided to divorce Marla Maples because she violated the pre-nuptial agreement by turning 30.  Sophomoric.

Washington D.C. mayor is not interested in polls, or anything that isn’t crack.  Again, very sophomoric.

A joke, in bad taste, about Reagan being allowed to still think he owns the ranch he sold to the U.S. government.  Maybe Norm didn’t know Reagan had Alzheimer’s.

He mocks women for their looks.   He mocks Ellen DeGeneres for wanting to have a baby, because she and her partner are both women.  Yeah, they are.  Did someone miss something here?  This might have been funny had it not already occurred to every single person in the audience.

More women would vote if you could bake your vote.  I’m not making that one up– yes, he thought that was funny.  Yes, he read it on Weekend Update.  No, the audience didn’t find it funny either.

When a joke failed– which was often– he would ramble on aimlessly about how that one didn’t work, which is not even funny once, or make a banal comment like “what a world we live in” as if he discovered something that was not already obvious to everyone.  Or, fatally, he would try to explain why the joke was actually funny even though the audience didn’t laugh.  That’s not a secret: Macdonald’s approach to comedy was to try to make a virtue of knowing that the joke wasn’t funny.   Like Red Skeleton.  He and some others thought it was very appealing in, I suppose, a kind frat-boy mode.

I think it’s an attempt to explain why someone who checks him out because you said he was great might be disappointed: because you don’t get it, see?  He doesn’t care if you don’t think he’s funny.  Really?

After joking about Rikki Lake having to get rid of a dog by eating it because it was aggressive with her young child, he compounds the lukewarm audience reception with “she ate a whole dog”, which torpedoes the wit factor of any joke.

Those are neither the least nor most funny of a bunch.  A joke about Richard Gere and a gerbil is worse than tasteless.

A lot of his humor is based on the “everyday man” school of comedy, which holds that anything sophisticated or complex should be mocked because if I don’t understand it, it can’t be true or valid.  Gay marriage.  Transgender surgery.  George Harrison frowning in a picture.  And why can’t I make fun of obese talk show hosts?  Well, you can– but making jokes about their obesity really isn’t all that funny anyway.  Calling Bill Clinton a murderer with a tone of  “everybody knows it, right?” isn’t even witty.  If there’s a joke about someone involved in the Clinton scandals– and there are lots– tell it.  But Macdonald didn’t have that kind of Carlinesque skill.

Macdonald did not graduate high school and he has the tone of someone who loves to get digs in on those people who think they are smarter than you simply because they are smarter than you and got educated and understand something about finance and trade and economics and medicine and music and history– those snobs.

He defended Louis C.K. after he was blacklisted for some relatively mild allegations of inappropriate behavior– a position I agree with.  But he also defended Roseanne Barr  after she made several tasteless, racist tweets.

Well, gosh, so did Donald Trump.

Jokes about Oprah Winfrey’s husband writing a book on how to be a success (Macdonald quips, “marry Oprah Winfrey”), are okay.   A genuine joke: congratulations, Norm Macdonald.  Use this one as a model for humour.  And ironic insight.  A smart perception.  A revelatory twist.  Go for it.

That’s it for Norm Macdonald.  Some okay jokes.  Someone who must have been quite likeable in person– he has lots of defenders, including Jon Stewart and Conan O’Brien.

That doesn’t make him funny.  And it doesn’t diminish the ugliness of character that keeps leaking into his “wit”.

 

 

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Digestible Disney

In the original legend of “Robin Hood” the bad guys were greedy aristocrats; in Disney’s version, they are tax-collectors. In the book “Hunchback of Notre Dame”, Frollo is an arch-deacon, not Disney’s magistrate. And in real life, Rasputin was a monk; in Disney’s Anastasia, he weirdly becomes a warlock instead.

Disney loves making stories easier to digest.

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The Bible on Abortion

From Reddit:

Quoting the bible to contradict a Christian almost never helps, but there is only one part that brushes against the value of an unborn life versus a fully formed human.

Exodus 21:22 –

And if men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she has a miscarriage, yet there is no [further] injury, he shall surely be fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him; and he shall pay as the judges decide. But if there is any [further] injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

We can extrapolate from this that the value of an unborn fetus is not equal to the value of the mother. As the passage says, cause a miscarriage and you’ll be fined, not put to death. There are pages and pages of research about this passage where pro-lifers try to twist and contort the meaning in the original Hebrew, but the context makes it quite easy to understand the message that was trying to be conveyed.

Biblical Scholars– the overwhelming majority of which are pro-life– argue that the verse refers only to live births.  But at least one admits that “in fact, it is never used for a miscarriage, though it is used of a still birth.”

Further to that, does this passage make sense if it only refers to live births?    Where is the harm, exactly, if the woman is struck and then gives birth?  If it is the harm of being struck, then why the reference to “miscarriage” or “birth”– your choice?  It really does not make much sense unless it refers to a miscarriage.

The pro-life partisans argue that the particular Hebrew word is not used elsewhere to refer to still-births, but, of course, the Bible isn’t a comprehensive list of all possible eventualities.  The argument has some currency, but not very much, in my view.

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Fascinating Logic

“I can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event because I am not in a position to do so as a school district employee,” Mr. Latson stated in one of the emails, which were obtained by The Palm Beach Post. Mr. Latson said he had to stay “politically neutral” and separate his personal views about the Holocaust from his job as a public school official.  From NY Times

I think most people would find this statement pretty weird, but it’s really not much different from the Trump supporters who don’t quite want to sound as stupid as Mr. Trump himself but are terrified of being accused of disloyalty.  Especially with that rabble lining up for 2024.   So they say stuff like, “I can’t say if there was fraud or not, but Mr. Trump is certainly entitled to make sure that every vote is counted correctly and whether some of these allegations of voter fraud are true or not”.

If the Democrats did the same thing under similar circumstances, the Republicans would go ballistic and scream at the authorities to shut down the recount.  Well, come to think of it, that’s pretty well what they did in Florida in 2000.

What Mr. Latson is really saying is, “please don’t judge me because I believe the Holocaust never happened.”  He knows his acquaintances would find his belief both ridiculous and bigoted: it’s not an innocent belief.  It is a belief founded in centuries of Antisemitism.

No one says “I can’t say if the Holocaust is a factual, historical event” if they believe it really happened.

And no one says, “I can’t say if Joe Biden really won the election or not” if they really didn’t believe that Joe Biden won the election.  But if they openly said, “Donald Trump actually, really won this election” they would have to explain to their constituents why they are ignoring the results of a free and fair election, when that’s how they got elected.

And that is too awkward for them.

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The Trump Monument

A wealthy donor should sponsor a big monument in Washington D.C. near the White House, showing McConnell, Rubio, Lankford, Cruz, Pence, and many of the others, raising Trump on a throne to the sky with joyous expressions on their faces.
 
Why would the Republicans object? It will represent them beautifully.  But make sure it is durable, because in 4 and 8 and 12 years, we will want to be reminded of where that party was now, and who was complicit, and who their gods were (because your gods tell you what to believe).
 
And nearby, a statue of Susan Collins, slightly askance, a bit quizzical– gazing in wonder– with her comment on not voting to impeach on a plaque: “I’m sure he learned his lesson”.