Never been one to let the carrier drop

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempts_to_overturn_the_2020_United_States_presidential_election is a great summary of Trump’s attempt to cheat thus far. (Of course, looking at things like gerrymandering and voter suppression, we can, to quote the 80s drug ads, say “Republicans, he learned it by watching you.”)

One does sometimes wonder to what extent Trump’s money enables him to buy his way out of trouble, to what extent his ‘word salad’ mode, stubbornness, and apparent stupidity and immaturity enable im to get out of trouble, and to what extent his bizarre facial expressions and orange tint short-circuit some part of people’s brains. In any case, he clearly has lived his whole life never having to deal with the consequences most people would face for their actions..

.. until now. I think a lot of us rejoiced to see his twitter account shut down, although many have had to be reminded that twitter is a private entity that has no requirement to carry anyone, so it is not a first amendment issue that they are censoring his attempts to cause a armed revolution. I have run numerous online forums and I have more than once had to explain to people that me refusing to carry their warmongering/trolling/etc was not a violation of their freedom of the press. This gets complicated and very messy and the lines get less than totally black and white – I gesture you to the problem of the cakemakers and the gay wedding cake – but in Twitter’s cause it wasn’t. They had a published AUP that Trump has been violating for *years* – and IMO they should have shut him down the first time he threatened a world leader using Twitter. Hopefully in the future they will not give presidents quite so much rope with which to hang all of us.

I admit I am very apprehensive about what happens on the 20th. It’s easy for me to imagine enough MAGA-whackjobs with guns to simply kill their way across the mall, although on the other paw, my suspicion is many of these people are armchair warriors who will come undone when faced with the actual carnage and horror that is war.

My hope remains that we’ll move forward in some kind of positive direction from this, with the republican party hopefully burning to the ground and some sort of entity that actually represents conservative thinking in either the traditional sense of “let’s keep what we have” or “he who governs least governs best” instead of “Let’s be as evil as we can because these people are so gullible we can fool all the people on the right all the time!”. Part of the horror of Trump is that true right-wingers no longer really have a party. Of course from my point of view, the Dems chose someone so centerist they could well be a moderate republican. I voted for him myself, understanding that the alternative (Trump) was much, much, much worse – I like to think even some of his followers are starting to understand just how evil, unprincipled, and even unhinged the man was. But Biden was a looooong way from my dream candidate, and Kamala even more so. While I like that she represents minority and female leadership finally being slightly less underrepresented, my opinion of prosecutors as a class is extraordinarily low. I do not think it is possible to be both a prosecutor and a good person in America. Back to Biden, though, he was who we could all agree on, but he was almost no one’s first choice. Still, I wish him the absolute best of luck and hopefully wisdom will guide his words and deeds. It sure didn’t guide his predecessor’s.

The real hope, beyond positive growth, is that there’s not a violent uprising on the 20th (many people on horror-sites like thedonald.win are calling for one) and that if there is, it is quickly quelled. I like to think that the number of people willing to talk on the internet about how they’d kill every cop and soldier and democrat they could get their crosshairs is much much lower than the number of people that would do such a thing. I don’t envy the FBI the challenge of trying to determine a actual threat level and take appropriate response. I do think this is the first time in my life I have been grateful for the efforts of the feds.

One thing I am reminded of, not for the first time, is why even though I feel we need to retune the police, I continue to believe that police are a necessary part of human society. Without police, I would never have the freedom to not own a gun, and it is a freedom I cherish.

Anyway, back to the wikipedia. The wikipedia is not run by the left or the right, and they try very hard to achieve neutral point of view. This is not a easy thing to do on controversial subjects, and one often has to wonder how well a government would run that was run by lawmakers editing laws on a wiki, using the wikipedia’s rules.

If you want to see the ensuing drama for any given subject – and there quite often is, everyone has strong feelings about *something* – go look at the talk pages. Often they are archived from time to time, so you may have to find the archive page and click back several pages to get to the real drama. I admit I find them fascinating – and sometimes even entertaining – reading.

However, on almost all thinks Trumpian, I find the Wikipedia’s summaries well compiled. Yet another example of how collectivism works.

The one counterargument that I came up with the other day is that the UK government in the time when the sun never set on the british empire was definitely somewhat a meritocracy, with a attempt to educate the governors and military leaders to the extremes of their capability (sing “I am the very model of a modern major general” and think about what he’s saying)..

.. and they never saw the problems with colonialism, and it took them some time to see the problems with slavery. (Less time than it took US, to be sure, but still, a disturbing amount)

… unless you happen to be white republicans. In which case, by all means, start a riot.

I can’t say I’m really surprised.. I’ve long known Republicans were the party of violence, because they’re the ones always starting wars to rob nations of their oil. And Trump of course has always turned this up to 11, with having web pages talking about “joining Trump’s army”, repeated lies to his followers, extreme rhetoric that makes it clear that he’s only president of Republicans and he thinks Democrats should die at the first opportunity – even *retweeting a video that says the only good democrat is a dead democrat*.

They like to think they’re the party of law and order, but they’re not. They’re the party of “the police are above the law and should murder anyone they want” – which is *not* law and order. They’re the party one thinks of when hearing of whackos taking over a federal property and not getting charged with any crimes. Yes, the police let the right get away with a lot more than the left, but that doesn’t mean the right are more law abiding. I could gesture to the list of Trump-circle folk now with felony records – or I could of course gesture to things like the Klan and the Proud Boys. (They are also the party of “Corporations are above the law”, “The rich are above the law”, and “The president is above the law”. And of course, the party of electoral disenfranchisement.)

Unfortunately one thing conservatives are not good at is skeptical thinking. Over and over they’ve been fed obvious falsehoods and yet they still keep repeating the lines that were programmed into them by the talking heads on the TV even as it becomes more and more obvious those lines were lies. And they’re never going to figure it out, apparently – if they can’t realize by now that Trump clearly lost this election, and clearly tried to cheat his way to victory, then they’re probably not going to figure that out later. If things like Trump claiming COVID would go away doesn’t convince them their leader was a moron – not to mention, I remind you, we are talking about the person who went bankrupt *running a casino* – then I don’t know what will.

I have this theory that the bizarre facial expressions Trump makes while he talks short-circuits the brains of some of the people watching. Although, I also think in general we’re not that great at being skeptical when exposed to talking heads, and we’ve seen over and over that while liberal news is willing to use quite a lot of zeal in putting spin on things, conservative news is willing to flat-out lie, over and over.

I am hoping that seeing a attempted armed coup will cause some of the right to start to realize with great shame that yes, they were aiding a wannabe-Hitler. Not that Trump was ever anywhere near as smart or capable as Hitler, but he did want to be king for life and if he could have gotten away with genocidal acts he would have. Actually, in some ways Trump was worse than Hitler. Hitler at least wanted what was best for Germany, before he became a drug addict. Trump only wanted what was best for Trump, ever.

And while we’re talking – conservative morons, the immigrants were never a problem. You have been lied to, over and over. They were a convenient group to demonize.

One silver lining about yesterday’s riots – unless we are total hypocrites (and make no mistake, we are total hypocrites and what I am about to write will not come to pass), we can never again start or feed (by sending guns or troops) a war to “make the world safe for democracy”. We have demonstrated that we have no moral superiority, that we are not and never were the side of the angels, and that in fact our system of government will eventually hand nuclear codes to a toddler.

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/533172-zimbabwean-president-capitol-riots-show-us-has-no-right-punish shows that I am not alone in thinking this. (Of course, I’ve been sharply critical of the USA’s tendency to be murderous thugs, a oil company with a army, for quite some time now – and we also have a recorded history of overthrowing democracy in order to install totalitarian regimes, so “Making the world safe for democracy” was never really anything but a convenient excuse for being abusive in the ways we wanted to be.)

Another article that says things better than I could: https://eand.co/this-is-why-america-is-becoming-a-poor-country-41a8d6003e90.

I know that lately it’s been hip and happening if you’re on the right to ignore reality. After all, we’ve seen the Laffer curve not work out time and time again, and yet you all keep voting like you’re Charlie Brown running to kick a football that by now you should be able to figure out that Lucy is going to yank away from you. You all remain deeply committed to the idea that the invisible hand of the market will fix everything – and let’s not even talk about the obvious economic sense of solar and wind, and your attempts to lie to the american people – some of which are apparently dumb enough to not understand that the grid has required some energy storage in order to remain stable for the last 50+ years.

But let’s talk about what voting for the right in a modern context means.

It means “People who have bad luck should starve and die.”

It means “If you happen to live in a watershed where fracking is occuring, you deserve the cancer that’s going to kill you. You also deserve the bankruptcy that our horrible, corrupt, broken healthcare system will push you into for treatments before you die.”

It means “I believe in freedom only when it’s a freedom I want to have”. In particular, you shouldn’t have the freedom to mess with your blood chemistry – unless it’s with alcohol – but you should have the freedom to carry a tool for killing other people. You shouldn’t have the freedom to do *anything* if you’re black.

It means “The police should kill any non-white people they want to, for any reason, and I will cheer them on. Murder of innocents by police and by our army is perfectly acceptable.”

It means “The rich deserve to be able to enslave the rest of us.”

It means “We should choose the dumbest possible way to generate and use energy if it makes the people who are currently rich richer.”

It means “Corporations should be more important than people.”

It means “You should be educated with a series of lies that matches how we’d like you to see the world so we can go on raping, murdering, and looting”

It means “If you are not a white male, you deserve to be a third-class citizen”

It means “Capitalism is more important than people. If capitalism isn’t compatible with mass automation, continue with mass automation and just let the excess workers starve to death. They are worth nothing anyway.”

It means “Life is cheap.”. In fact, we underline that fact with the USA’s COVID death record.

It means “Justice is for sale to the highest bidder.”

And, lately, it means “The majority’s votes only count if the majority voted Republican.”, along with the corollaries of “If you can’t win, cheat” and “lying about voter fraud in order to cheat your way to a victory is totally valid.. if you’re a republican.”

It means “Every child left behind”. It means standardized tests and money/funding are more important than teaching. After all, gotta make those profits at the standardized testing companies. It also means the rich should have a good education and the poor should have a bad one so we can make sure they remain poor. And of course, it means we should lie to our children – we should pretend there is any reason at all to think the Bible is anything other than a bunch of stories written by a bunch of people 2000 years ago, for example.

I’m not even going to touch the subject of religion, since there’s a whole category on this blog specifically for that.

I could go on for a while..

There was a additional point which occurred to me. In the middle of a pandemic, with people starving, people having trouble paying rent, the US government thinks more toys for the military are far more important than a $2000 check for people with income under $152k. Make no mistake, more than $2k of your tax dollars are going to military toys, and the senate overrode the president’s veto on this. Keep in mind everyone in the senate with the possible exception of Bernie has a net worth well north of a million dollars. So, these millionares think it’s more important to keep the big bucks going to the socialism-for-mass-murderers system that is the US military contractors and the military-industrial complex, but you, the people? No. You don’t deserve that money. Better to spend it murdering.

In this particular case there is a clear party divide. The democrats would give you a check, but the republicans think you deserve to starve so they can add another million to their bank account. Those of you who say “Voting democrat is stealing money out of my wallet” – no, both parties are taking money from you. The difference is the republicans think you especially deserve to have your money taken if your income is below average, and also think that the money shouldn’t go to help the starving and sick, but rather to go to more toys for blowing things up, which will be used to commit murder.

So, as of right now, the US is now *double* our closest competitor in terms of COVID cases – and our closest competitor is *India*, a country with 3x the population we have.

I’m inclined to blame a lot of things, including a incompetent, incredibly selfish government (especially the Republicans) which is only interested in it’s own selfish ends and not the needs of the people it is governing, our capitalism as a religion (call in sick for work? You’re barely making rent as it is..), our incredibly awful medical system that exists first and foremost to make more billions for the billionaires, with taking care of the health of the people who use it as a very distant second, let’s not forget our president who has the mentality of a toddler and the IQ of Alexa – he keeps thinking – and telling people – and apparently a lot of people are dumb enough or brainwashed enough to listen – that it will just go away. And of course let’s talk about how people on the right are both dumb enough and delusional enough to politicize *wearing a mask*. I guess the good news is there will be less of them next year, but the bad news on that front is unfortunately most of the ones who will die have already reproduced.

Yes, there’s plenty of blame to go around. But will we learn? Will we stop spending trillions on tools to blow up other countries so we can steal their oil and start spending trillions on price-no-object health care?

No, probably not. In the meantime a large and disturbing number of people want to overthrow the results of the current election (I can tell you, after personally digging through millions of rows of data, that the number of people cheating on the election is statistically insignificant. It wouldn’t even change a election won by only 20k. Republicans have just increasingly become believers of “if you can’t win, cheat” – and what better way to cheat than by claiming the other side cheated? I mean, it worked in 2016 – while we know Trump used to walk in on teens in beauty pageants and there’s any number of creepy pictures with him and various young girls, the message was pushed hard that Clinton was running a child sex ring. And people bought it.

I guess I shouldn’t let these things bother me since after all there is nothing I can do about them. But it is depressing as anything.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/what-republicans-are-doing-worse-treason/617538/

– I think this article does a good job of pointing out the obvious.  Republicans, in their quest to be as awful as possible and hurt humanity as much as possible so a few individuals can get further ahead, have finally gone over the watershed line and are now advocating to throw out the result of a free and fair election. They are living in a interesting cloudcuckooland where if someone didn’t vote for their Dear Leader, their vote must be wrong – they are now screaming “Count all the republican votes. Throw all the democratic votes out.”

I’m impressed, yet again, by their awfulness, greed, and stupidity.

So, one of the challenges that I’ve talked about repeatedly is how money isn’t value, it is a pointer to it. And I think this is a important thing to remember, just in general. However, someone who will remain nameless talked about how Biden “was going to stop all fracking and it was going to make things more expensive for me”.

Well, first of all, Biden’s not going to stop all fracking. He’s just going to keep us from expanding fracking. But second of all, fracking is something we do that increases costs to all of us enormously. It’s a monumentally dumb thing to do because we’re damaging the most valuable resource on the planet, water, something we all need, in order to get something that’s readily available, energy. (The sky is literally raining soup here.)

The thing that you have to remember, when thinking about this, is fracking’s cost is hidden in the future. It’s huge – probably trillions of dollars – but you don’t pay it now, you pay it 20 or 50 or 100 years from now.

If you don’t frack, we have less natural gas and we have to depend on other sources of power. (The same friend pointed out that there are clouds and days with no wind – I didn’t point out about hydro and pumped storage, or flow batteries, or electrolysis and hydrogen.)

Now, if we do the sensible thing (solar, hydro, wind, next-gen nuclear) all of the sources of power will be considerably cheaper in measured cost to get them than fracking. The cost of energy *in real resources and human lives* will go *down*.

If we do frack, we destroy the groundwater, we lose millions of gallons of water to the process, and we condemn our children to have to spend trillions of dollars cleaning up our mess. Naturally republicans are in favor, because to them, the money *is* the value. They see it making greenbacks now, and the idea of tracing value flows instead of tracing money is beyond them.

It opens a interesting side idea. What about a government where in order to serve as a congresscritter, you have to show certain abilities? A meritocracy, in other words. I would *love* to see a sport pilot license as a minimum requirement to be a congresscritter. (Learning to fly a airplane teaches you a lot of important life lessons). Even more interesting would be one in which you had to show significant proficiency in C. (Hey, at least that way I’d know they knew what pointers *were*)

One of the things I really struggle with re: Trump – and a friend of mine reminded me of this the other day – is that, angry as he has made many people, and as much damage as he has done, it’s difficult to call him a worse president than Dubya.

The reason for that is, Trump didn’t start a war. Dubya killed at least a million innocents in a war over false pretenses that was largely to make money for America’s oil companies and military-industrial complex.

Now, Trump did many things that one would have expected to start a war. I think some of what happened here is the world recognized that he is, in fact, a toddler, and used some forbearance – partially because we cannot afford to have WWIII. (And hopefully – this is probably too much to ask, but hopefully – we will retool our democracy so that the loser of the popular vote can never again get into office, since that would have saved us from *BOTH* Trump and Dubya. Of course, it’s unfortunately also a open question whether Hillary would have started a war with Russia.)

However – with the side note that the jury is still out on how much Trump egged on a war between the left and right by repeatedly lying to the very gullible – Trump only got about 200k innocents killed as compared with Dubya’s million – and that’s based on the very difficult to verify theory that a more capable leader would have done a better job of managing COVID. (I do note we’re coming up on *double* the number of cases of our closest competitor – and they are a country with 3x our population – but I also note that America’s very stupid money-above-all-else capitalism-throw-everyone-but-the-billionares-under-the-bus was always going to result in us having the most cases)

My hope is that we’ll learn from all this. Another thing I was thinking about while I was doing my finger exercises today is that one of the big problems with America and maybe just with humanity in general is that money tends to buy power, but having excessive money tends to lead to brain damage. (From my point of view, having excessive money is also usually a sign of brain damage – unless you’re planning to build some enormous project like a spacecraft or a singularity, having excess money is letting the tool use you instead of using the tool – and I’ve known some pretty unhappy billionares personally or two-degrees-of-seperation, so I know of what I speak here. Not being able to have enough even when you have too much is a disease)

Another problem I suspect that comes up is that the children of billionaires never have to solve any really difficult challenges so they don’t learn as much as the children of other people, but they still end up with excessive amounts of power because they inherit the money. This is another good demonstration of part is wrong with Trump (who is one of the worst businesspeople I’ve ever read about – as I’ve mentioned elsewhere if he had just put the money from his father in a mutual fund he’d have a lot more money than he does, and of course we all know about his leaning on America’s “Socialism, but only for the rich” by having repeated bankruptcies.

Anyway, despite my criticisms, I am still thinking Trump deserves recognition as a Republican who’s managed to not start any wars.