JohnHenry.US

Category: Essays

  • The Price Of Bread

    The Price Of Bread

    Spread The Word:

    Introduction

    The “price of bread” is a tried and true hook on which to hang any given complaint from any given ideological perspective to shock the consumer, draw attention, and stoke feelings of anger and frustration. The “bread” in question is a metaphor for any consumer good. The arguments in question tend to take the general form of “I can’t believe how terrible the economy is today. Why, when I was young I used to get two packs of name-brand cigarettes and two 16-ounce glass bottles of Mountain Dew for $2!”

    The “price of bread” argument fails not only in that it’s usually highly subjective and prone to strong influence of personal bias e.g. artificially glorifying “the past” as having been “better,” but it’s also completely meaningless by itself. Numbers increase, particularly in capitalized systems wherein the currency is based on an intangible asset like “the full faith and credit” of the issuing nation, as is the case with all such nations including the United States. By itself this increase means nothing that can be said to meaningfully reflect on the average quality of life.

    Worse than that for those seeking progress, it often inadvertently draws attention to weaknesses in argumentation and flaws in a given logical calculus attempting to rationalize or validate progressive social policy. In doing so, the net effect tends to be empowering counter-arguments rather than advancing the ostensible agenda at hand.

    In today’s example we’re going to look at a tweet by someone calling themselves “Fred Krueger” (not likely to be a real name, but it’s possible). Mr. Kreuger, who is entirely unknown to me, claims to hold a PhD from Stanford, and says he’s a “bitcoin maxi,” whatever that is, in his twitter profile. I’ve included a link to the original tweet below, but given conditions at Twitter I thought it best to also include a screenshot.

    Original URL: https://x.com/dotkrueger/status/1873320780739510285
    Tweet by "Fred Krueger" (@dotkrueger) reading: "The median family income in the US has gone from 10K in 1971 to 55K today, a gain of 5.5x however, The median cost of a car has gone from 4K to 48K, an increase of 12x. The median cost of a house has gone from 25K to 357K, an increase of 14x. The median cost of an ivy league college has gone from 3K a year to 87K, an increase of 29x. The average cost of healthcare per person has gone from $400 to $15,000, and increase of 37x. Basically, the average person in the US is worse off today than in 1971. So much for "progress"" Dated Dec 29, 2024
    Screenshot of original tweet posted at https://x.com/dotkrueger/status/1873320780739510285

    The tweet reads as follows: “The median family income in the US has gone from 10K in 1971 to 55K today, a gain of 5.5x however, The median cost of a car has gone from 4K to 48K, an increase of 12x. The median cost of a house has gone from 25K to 357K, an increase of 14x. The median cost of an ivy league college has gone from 3K a year to 87K, an increase of 29x. The average cost of healthcare per person has gone from $400 to $15,000, and increase of 37x. Basically, the average person in the US is worse off today than in 1971. So much for “progress.””

    Problems Of Fact

    There is a whole lot wrong here. First and foremost there is no indication of any of the sources of any of this information, so let’s track that down first. The Census Bureau tells us that the first number isn’t far off – the median family income in 1971 was $10,290. We also find with a bit of quick google-fu that the median price of a new car was $3890, and a new home was a nice even $25,000. Of course none of those numbers are normalized – those are 1971 dollars being compared to 2024 dollars, which is sort of the whole point of the exercise.

    The “reader added context” in this case isn’t particularly helpful and leans toward its own agenda.

    First and foremost the reader feedback ignores that the entire point of the framing is to compare price increases of specific items to baseline inflation. I believe the intent of the writer was to imply that life is much more economically challenging for most of us than a simple broad average inflation rate tells us, so noting that the numbers haven’t been normalized doesn’t really address any of the problems with the tweet and in fact mostly serves to point out that the people offering that particular criticism didn’t understand what they read very well. The fact that the numbers aren’t normalized is the whole point of the tweet.

    Second, there aren’t many people alive right now who were around in the 70s who really feel like they have nearly twice as much purchasing power today as they did fifty years ago, and there are some very good reasons for that.

    While the implication that quality of life is significantly improved across the board for most people is ostensibly supported by adding up the cash value of various goods and services, it also overlooks the necessity of far greater levels of spending than were necessary fifty years ago, even accounting properly for inflation. This is propaganda in the other direction; suggesting that people are basically doing just fine right now and any struggle you’re experiencing must be down to something other than a steadily decreasing quality of life. In short: gaslighting.

    But I digress, let’s get back to the tweet at hand and check some numbers. I’ve included a few direct citations links, those numbers not directly linked come from the same or similar sources.

    The median family income “today,” i.e. 2023, the most recent year for which statistics have been properly documented, is $80,610 – a difference from the quoted post of about $32K, and an increase of 8x, rather than 5.5.

    Already this is going to make the comparisons less striking, and we haven’t even checked them yet, but let’s finish the job for posterity and we’ll move on to understanding why we can’t keep doing this, nor allow it to continue being done.

    A new car in 2024 is averaging about 48,400.

    A new home is about $420,400 – a greater increase than the tweet by about 18% (and an increase of about 17x rather than the 14x cited).

    The rest of the numbers are similarly garbled; an ivy league education in 1971 was 2600 rather than 3K – a difference of about 13%. Today’s cost is 64,690 – $25K less than cited. The Social Security Administration tells us that per-capita health care expenditures in 1971 were $358 – less than 90% of the number given here. The most recent available information is for 2022, which the WHO tells us is 12,473 – about a sixth less than this tweet reports.

    So we’ve established that, at the very least, there are significant errors in basic information here, which of course throws all the calculations off.

    We’re not off to a good start; if someone wanted to argue against the core thesis of the tweet (that the average person in the US is worse off today than in 1971), this writer has certainly given them plenty of ammunition to call their basic reliability into question, which delegitimizes the thesis in the reader’s mind before it even happens.

    It all forces us to consider: why are we listening to this person or taking this message seriously in the first place?

    Problems of Reason

    On the other hand, here are two semi-randomly selected prices for 25-inch televisions from the Sears catalog in 1974. One is 609.95, the other 759.95, which average to 684.95. Divide by 25 and you’ve got 273.98 per viewable diagonal inch, in old-school NTSC resolution at best.

    I’m currently using a 40-inch Polaroid flatscreen as my desktop monitor. I paid $259 for it in 2019, which is 319.62 in 2024 dollars, or 7.99 per viewable diagonal inch.

    That’s a 97% price decrease, and this is why item price comparisons are always a flawed argument.

    Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, this isn’t less true but more so when the flawed argument is supporting a larger (and entirely valid) point about the relative cost of living.

    In 1974 the minimum wage was $2.00 an hour, that would be 12.80 today. But that’s also not a fair comparison because so many things have changed since then about how we make and spend our money. The internet and its accouterments were not a required part of living in 1974, and the expenses one might incur to replicate the necessary functionality were often far lower but also with much lower quality of access, e.g. looking up information in an encyclopedia at your local library rather than on your cell phone. Fundamentally free or close to it, but also limited access and functionality. (Worth pointing out for pedantry that there are of course costs involved in transportation plus the value of one’s time, but that’s still not working out to a monthly cell phone bill of $50-$200+ dollars…and if you’re a kid in the seventies and eighties like I was, you were at school with a library full of reference material several hours a day anyway).

    There is also a long, LONG list of important social advances that have happened in the last fifty years. That we are not yet in some progressive utopia doesn’t change that. However as a rhetorical tactic, to ignore or disregard that progress out of fear that people will think the job’s done and stop trying or something (see: “post-racial America” circa 2009) is insulting to the people who made that progress happen and disheartening to those working to ensure we keep moving forward. It also adds to the general sense of futility that can attach to any attempt at meaningful social change, on any level.

    Cherry-picked statistics are a fundamentally dishonest and manipulative tactic, and we have to start recognizing that and holding our information sources to a proper standard of valid reasoning and factual accuracy.

    “People aren’t going to change and it’s a waste of time to try. You may as well give up, because even with all this advancement you’ve gotten nowhere.” This is a critically important subtext contained within this entire argument. It’s messaging that serves only the interests of the entrenched and abused power to which so many people taking this attitude believe they’re working against.

    A loaf of bread ran 28 cents in 1974. It’s 1.92 now. That’s only 7 cents off the standard rate of inflation.

    These comparisons have no meaning. They’re only intended to shock and grab attention, but they don’t convey meaningful information. What they are is a nice setup for someone who understands why this framing fails (consciously or unconsciously; Hanlon’s Razor applies) to come along and yank out a list of similar comparisons – go ahead and price what would’ve conceivably passed for a home computer in 1974, or a mobile phone! – in an attempt to invalidate the core point that we’re living in a capitalist-sliding-quickly-into-fascist dystopia, which stands just fine on its own without making a bunch of cherry-picked comparisons in an appeal to emotion.

    In both cases – and this is important! – the actors at hand, both the person throwing these kind of “information” around and those who show up to try to undermine the thesis by attacking the obvious weak points in the supporting arguments or evidence, are deliberately and intentionally aiming at your emotional responses in order to subvert, distract, and ultimately mitigate your critical thinking, because they both know their arguments don’t hold up to critical analysis.

    Why It Matters

    An angry troll picking cherries out of a pile of statistics. Generated by Bing AI with additional modifications by JH
    “RAWR! THERE’S NOTHING BUT LIES AND DAMN LIES IN HERE!’ (Bing AI generated image, with modifications by JH)

    As with so many discussions of this nature, the first objection one can usually anticipate is some sort of argument from apathy – why does this matter, you’re just splitting hairs, this is all just pseudointellectual self-indulgent twaddle, insert dogwhistle for whatever audience e.g. “wokeism” or appeals to ridicule, etc.

    So let’s talk about why it matters for a minute.

    First, cherry-picked statistics are a fundamentally dishonest and manipulative tactic, and we have to start recognizing that and holding our information sources to a proper standard of valid reasoning and factual accuracy.

    This seems like one of those things that would hardly bear saying out loud, but apparently it does: the most effective way to lie is with as much truth as possible. Simply throwing a bunch of statistics around without context and validation is often the tactic of someone who knows they’re trying to make a point, but doesn’t know how, and doesn’t want to let that get in the way of the dopamine rush and-or traffic bump and-or possible passive income generated by throwing around empty aphorisms and questionable statistics that are emotionally appealing and don’t invite careful scrutiny.

    (NB: When this is done at high volume with deliberately malicious intent, it can quickly turn into what’s become known as the “Gish Gallop,” wherein the speaker just throws such a ridiculous pile of misinformation around that by the time you sort through it you’ve forgotten the original point and likely made some superfluous error the speaker can then seize on as evidence of your incompetence. Hence the troll…)

    But there’s more. Inherently the application of dishonest and manipulative rhetorical tactics reflects, at the very least, a lack of confidence on the part of the speaker in their own words – if they believed what they were saying they wouldn’t think they have to lie about it to convince anyone else. By using these tactics, the subtext we’re writing is that either we don’t believe our position holds up on merit, or we don’t believe we’re not capable of expressing our reasoning effectively. Most importantly, it shows. People tend to pick up on it when you’re trying to con them, whether they do so consciously or not.

    To a discerning media consumer – and we’re all media consumers, discerning or not – this is an immediate red flag that the speaker may not be a reliable information source. Maybe they know they’re lying; maybe they’ve bought into it and are choosing to resolve any internal cognitive dissonance between what they want to believe on one hand and reality on the other by trying as hard as they can to convince other people to believe with them. Whatever the specific situation may be, people who are paying attention are going to pick up on the flaws in the argument almost immediately, and that calls into question the validity of the entire thesis. As I’ve noted above, they’ll often pick up on it even if they don’t consciously realize it.

    Arguably however the real damage comes among the less discerning consumers, those who repeat this information in earnest good faith, not realizing that they’re basically being set up to fail. Now they’ve distributed the information, and those who consume it via their distribution will hold them responsible for its accuracy. The entire conversation is now reduced to back-and-forth arguments that resolve nothing and are all based in factual and logical error. They’ve sacrificed their own credibility and taken on a huge set of arguments, while validating the source of the bad information!

    I have a problem with this in a pretty serious way because I happen to fully support and believe in the surface thesis presented by this tweet as a question of personal ideology. I was alive and conscious in the early 70s and I absolutely believe that in many important ways we were all doing far better then than we are now. Many of us were also doing far worse, which nobody of any sense wants to ignore or pretend isn’t the case. However it’s also true, and important to recognize in this context, that in terms of stability and security in the lives of the average American, the 70’s and early 80’s were far superior to any time since including the present, and indeed the nature and pace of our social progress has sunk to embarrassing lows by contrast as well, especially when one thinks not in terms of what constitutes the current status quo but in terms of what’s being done to improve it, and why, and for whom.

    We had a lot of work to do back then.

    We still do.

    We’ve done a significant bit of it as I’ve alluded above, and there are significant and powerful forces in this world who do not want that work done because our collective progress threatens their personal power. We were more honest with ourselves, culturally, especially in advanced nations, about our need to grow and recognize that we weren’t the pinnacle of human advancement but just the current step in a never-ending series of them, and that our job was not to be the best but to be the best we can, improve on what came before us and set up and inspire what comes after to do the same, where “improvement” is defined as being in more complete compliance with the “ultimate ethic” of keeping the species alive and propagating.

    We know through the research of all human history that the greatest progress happens when human minds are well-educated and free to explore and express their thoughts and ideas in a fair and just context that ensures both the right of the individual to say their piece and the right of other individuals to reject their piece as ugly, ignorant, or malicious, including the right of society to collectively reject their values or ideology as unacceptable, immoral, or unethical.

    We know that the holding the privilege (and it is a privilege, as is everything else we keep trying to call a “right”) to say your piece does not include the privilege to insist everyone pretend they agree with it and love you for saying it.

    We know that human progress individually and collectively relies entirely on our capacity to unlearn old lies. We also know that there are forces in this world whose power relies (no pun intended) on us not doing that. The capitalists can’t keep running everything if we refuse to be capitalized or to participate in their games anymore. Problem is we’ve been letting them do it for about five hundred years now and they refuse to get out of the way.

    Now, given all of that…

    Ya Thought I Forgot, Huh?

    Our thesis is that dragging out prices fifty years ago, or a hundred, or twenty-five and comparing them to current prices is a waste of time and energy, except perhaps in radical situations like a collapsing currency where you’re seeing prices jump by orders of magnitude in a short period of time, and in very specific applications of economic analysis that simply aren’t either directly relevant to or within the personal intellectual capacity of the average person. It’s certainly of no value in social media conversations about the need for broad social reform of capitalized institutions.

    Another image of a troll picking cherries out of a pile of statistics, visualized here as stacks of paper. This troll is less angry than cunning, with an evil grin.
    Another AI take on trolls cherry-picking statistics, this one courtesy of OpenAI via Jetpack, and enhanced a bit by yours truly

    I hope that by laying out weaknesses that are readily open to valid criticism in this framing, we can learn to first frame our own thinking more effectively but also learn to start rejecting those who either can’t or don’t.

    Because the raw truth of the matter is that either you understand the things I’ve discussed here or you don’t. If you don’t understand them, you’re probably not qualified to be participating in the conversation as anything but a spectator, and that’s okay. I’m not qualified to perform heart surgery, and that’s not a reflection on my character either. NB: If I know I’m not qualified to perform heart surgery and insist on doing it anyway, that is definitely a reflection on my character!

    If you do understand the things I’ve discussed here and still choose to frame things in this way, you’re being deliberately dishonest and manipulative. This means you can’t be trusted, and nobody with a worthy message wants to have it promoted by someone who engages in deceit and manipulation to communicate it. Since I happen to think that the underlying message of diligent and constantly refining progress of human quality of life is worth, I have to stand up and call out this radically unhelpful framing as it is.

    If the message is worthy, deceit and manipulation isn’t necessary.

    If deceit and manipulation are necessary, the message isn’t worthy.

    What happens when we allow this kind of noise to flood our zeitgeist is that we begin to accept the premise that the behavior is necessary, like someone trying to rationalize lying on their resume. “Everyone does it, you can’t avoid it.” That argument has its place. For instance, I can’t avoid trying to make money with my work; I live in a world that requires money to survive and ensure my capacity to do that work.

    That argument isn’t valid in this conversation; it’s a capitulation to the bullies and the liars, the manipulators and deceivers.

    What happens when we allow those who are intentionally deceitful and manipulative to control the conversation is we force everything to become deceitful and manipulative in order to keep up. The deceit and manipulation undermines the legitimacy of the core ideas in people’s minds until eventually nobody knows what truth is anymore, and at that point Big Brother has won the game. We let them make deceit and manipulation necessary, and then none of us can trust each other enough to work together on anything…including pushing back against the powers who want to permanently convert the vast majority of us – everyone but them and those they choose – to “human capital stock.”

    So please stop doing this stuff and stop putting it over. Stop believing and validating things just because they push your emotional buttons in a way that satisfies you. That reaction, all by itself, is what every perpetrator of evil has counted on in one way or another for as long as we’ve been telling each other stories.

    The only way to stop the evil is to stop falling for it.

  • Why There Will Never Be A Successful “Third Party” In The US

    Spread The Word:

    To date in human history, there have been precisely two ways in which a “third party” will rise to primacy over the existence of two “major parties.”

    The first is some variant of coup or war or insurrection.

    The second is when the more rightward of the two existing major parties continues driving to the right until it has become egregiously abusive of or hostile to the rights and liberties of the people they’re governing. Egregiously, you’ve got to push people past the breaking point and THEN wait for the stragglers to clue in to the point where you functionally only have ONE major party. That will inevitably be the party which has traditionally represented the leftward polarity. It will shift rightward over time in pursuit of preserving its power, losing sight of core principles one by one until a contingent within that party get fed up and start their own thing, splitting the one major party in two. (Sidebar: This process is sometimes referred to as the “Overton Window.” I eschew this terminology because a) it’s inaccurate, b) Overton was a rank plutocrat, c) the idea had been expressed long before he did it, and d) I’m not making more famous or adding credibility to some Mackinac Center oligarch whose reason for describing the window in the first place was to strategize how to move it rightward and normalize fascism without those being seduced into it being aware of their seduction.)

    The formerly right major party falls entirely into extremism and failure and internal power struggles, the formerly left major party slides into the more moderate right position the former other party started off occupying, and the new party rises to represent the left, becoming the new “second” party as the former right party declines into impotence and obsolescence.

    The last (and really only) time this has happened in the US was close to two hundred years ago when the Whigs lost their compass and devolved into internal bickering and contention over the question of slavery, and the Democrat-Republican party split in two with Dems on the right and Reps on the left (which frankly made no sense by the labeling; the right represents artistocracy and bourgeoisie which is republican i.e. government by elites, the left the proletariat which is democratic i.e. government by the people; this has been the case since the left-right nomenclature was coined hundreds of years ago) and eventually reversed polarity between the end of the Lincoln administration and WWI, with the polarity reversal finally completing in the “Dixiecrat” shift following WWII led by Strom Thurmond and representing the last holdouts of right-wing authoriarianism in the Democratic party at that time. Their primary complaints were FDR’s social programs which didn’t discriminate against people of color, and his antagonism toward racial discrimination as then exemplified by the “Jim Crow” laws of the south.

    That split finalized the polarity reversal in the parties that began slowly prior to WWI and ultimately culminated in Strom Thurmond trying to do exactly what I described above, but from the right – which will not and did not work. That split was the final act of the polarity shift and the Dems have represented the left – such as it is – ever since.

    (NB: I’ve somewhat flagged the idea that Mitt Romney switching parties would be one strong sign that this process is accelerating and the end of the GOP is in sight. He might not, but that would definitely be the two-minute warning. The center-right status quo contingent of the Dem party is right in line with his milquetoast, lukewarm, pro-capitalist politics. Truth is if the GOP hadn’t completely lost touch with reality Romney would likely be their best shot at unseating Biden, but at this point 3/4+ of the GOP hates Romney because he only sometimes bows down to the skidmark at the top of the party. There *might* be one or two other Republicans who might fit in there – and Liz Cheney won’t be one of them, all due appreciation to her integrity re: Jan 6 – but Romney’s the archetype.)

    It always happens that way, including the direction of ideological “flow” from left to right. The left wing party never slides off the edge of the spectrum into autocracy; they slide right until they’re the major right-wing party, and then start sliding off that end of the spectrum into rank autocracy as they try to preserve and increase power. Again, lacking some sort of hot conflict, that’s the only way a “third party” has ever risen to prominence over the two existing major parties in any system I’ve been able to find.

    There are a few “squishy” spots in there, and occasionally in multiparty systems like the UK you’ll see one of the two majors so entirely step on their johnsons that the people turn their backs and adhere to whichever party most closely aligns ideologically with the self-defeated, but a) that’s an extraordinary circumstance and b) even that scenario isn’t functionally different from what I described above, you just have a multiparty establishment from which to draw your rising left rather than the single left-wing party; basically you’ve just performed one step of the process in advance of the actual split.

    The alternative path tends to more or less follow the NSDAP template: being radically right-wing from the outset but pretending you’re a “socialist,” where “socialism” is defined as socialism for those cooperating with the group in power and waterless showers for everyone else. They will target that thirty-ish percent of the population that’s ALWAYS willing to sell everyone out to tyranny if they think it’ll benefit them, organize them, and then conduct propaganda and disinformation campaigns to provide plausible deniability to those who can be convinced to join the baddies, usually through appeals to nationalist, religious, and/or racial supremacy, or personal greed through promises of increased affluence after the “other” is eliminated from society.

    Then they start trying to take over other countries until the rest of the world gets fed up and destroys them, at which point a new government is constituted and the cycle begins anew.

    (In the unlikely but not entirely impossible event Trump gets re-elected next year, that’s our future.)

    This means the cycle of politics will tend to roll over parties every 100 or 200 years (and we’re about due), through one or the other processes described above.

    Not once in the history of the democratic process has an external group constituting itself as a third party, containing no appreciable trace of either of the existing two major parties, ever successfully won more than a handful of minor elections, and never once have any of those minor parties grown in power to present a serious challenge to the two main parties at the national level, anywhere. It works the same way in any democratic system – democratic republics or pure democracy, first-past-the-post or proportional representation or even ranked choice. Minor parties will do better in minor elections under certain systems like ranked choice; never once has one risen from outside the establishment to supplant one of the two parties that existed when the third party came to life. The ONLY time that happens is when it happens as I described it above.

    In this country the most successful “outsider” candidates have always been either entirely party-independent or tagged themselves with a party label long after they’d risen to some level of power on their individual merits, e.g. Ross Perot’s Reform Party.

    I can’t find a single example in the history of democracy – and I spent four years of a polisci minor looking for one – all the way back to its earliest forms in ancient Greece and Rome, in which a new party showed up and slowly built power on its own by providing an alternative to the two existing majors until it successfully supplanted one of them, without a civil war being involved. It’s a nice theory, but it just. doesn’t. happen.

    People – even those who think of themselves as “liberal” – are generally change-averse to an extreme outside of conditions that are absolutely intolerable to the broad majority of the electorate. They – we – would rather sell out to fascism and pretend we don’t know that’s what we’re doing until long after the damage is done, at which point we’ll work to preserve their social standing and approval by pretending to have been merely stupid as opposed to deliberately evil, than risk a radical shift into unknown territory.

    The greens, the libertarians, etc? Useless, and none of them will ever gain more than token representation in minor offices.

    The most successful third party in the US, the Libertarians™, managed to become the only third party in US history to have presidential ballot access in all states in two cycles – a process that took 220 years, has never come within even plausible wildcard hope of winning, and they couldn’t pull it off a third time.

    The only member of the Libertarian™ Party to serve in federal elective office *at. all.* is Justin Amash, and he changed parties AFTER being elected so that doesn’t even count for the purposes of this discussion.

    No matter how nobly motivated or “right” they may be, you will never see a third party rise to power in this country from outside the existing political establishment without catastrophic conflict (and no, you seething edgelord, you do not want catastrophic conflict). It will not happen, barring an extraordinary set of circumstances that can’t be predicted and can’t be created intentionally

    It also won’t happen by some magical coalescence of “the big middle.” The big middle is moderate and leans conservative(*) by nature; hoping for that to drive serious change is like hoping you can stop that troublesome noise in your engine by turning up the radio. The most successful attempt in this direction was Ross Perot, whose “party” was a retcon anyway, created to support his presidential candidacy rather than being an existing entity he “joined” and represented. He got about 20% of the vote and 0 electorals.

    * In spite of broad misconception on this point, “conservative” is not and has never been synonymous with “right wing.” While things tend to play out that way over time, “conservatism” politically is simply a preference for maintaining the status quo over introducing radical change. “Liberalism” politically is a preference for radical change over maintaining the status quo. Conservatism is not inherently “right,” and liberalism is not inherently “left.” In spite of how wrong it sounds if you’re stuck in the “con=right lib=left” thinking, Donald Trump was a far more liberal president than Barack Obama because he had zero respect for the status quo and radically altered many aspects of our government, at least temporarily. That is right-wing liberalism, not “conservatism.”

    The ONLY third party electoral vote in US history was a faithless elector in the Republican party who voted for the Libertarian candidate in I think 1972, rather than the pledged vote for Nixon/Agnew.

    If there were a strong progressive running from the left as part of some party that currently doesn’t exist – the Greens have bad branding and unflattering history, the libertarians aren’t in the least bit progressive, and there’s literally no other party that’s even laughably contending – in the next election and Joe Biden passed away in mid-September leaving only Trump+whoever, Harris with no running mate or one that had to be VERY hastily integrated and publicized and sold to the electorate, and that strong progressive on the ticket, there’s a slim but non-zero chance the progressive outsider would win…but the safe bet is Trump would take it because unlike the left, the right wing in this country knows how to march in formation and not make waves. Which, incidentally, I find disgusting, odious, and an insult to everything meritorious about our entire system, but my feelings about it don’t change the reality.

    By and large people will tend to vote for a comfortable and certain tyranny than an unknown and uncertain freedom. They just convince themselves the tyrants will only hurt people they don’t like. It’s the mentality of one acclimated to their own enslavement: sure it sucks being someone’s property but at least you eat once in a while. No guarantee of that out on your own.

    (NB: That last part is why most of us refuse to quit bad jobs or demand better pay and working conditions, too. We don’t dare risk losing an iota of whatever petty comfort we have, even if holding on to it is literally killing us. Plutocracy always plays the same parlor tricks, they just file off the serial numbers and add or subtract a little chrome trim from the body panels so people who aren’t paying attention get fooled into thinking it’s a whole new ride.)

    In the upcoming election, as things stand right now, there’s not a chance in hell of Biden being seriously challenged from the left because we don’t want to risk going back to Trump – that conservatism I mentioned earlier. Sanders won’t run this time; he knows it’ll be a waste to try to primary Biden and will only serve to make people mad at him for trying. If you want real progress for the next four years, Biden is (somewhat unfortunately) your best bet. Say what you will about Biden, but it is to his immense credit (and our best hope) that he’s repeatedly proven movable on matters of considered principle. Not as many of them or as often as I think he should, but certainly more so than that whatever skidmark – probably Trump – who ends up running against him, or anyone likely to rise as a serious candidate in the next twelve months.

    Stein blew her cred pandering to antivaxers; Williamson occasionally says something powerful and brilliant but it’s generally a rare sighting in a flood of new-age pseudo-spiritualism and badly misunderstood concepts like karma appropriated from other cultures.

    No other remotely serious suggestion even exists at this point. The progressive wing in general – the justice dems and squad folks – aren’t politically stupid, they know trying to primary Biden this round will be political self-immolation. AOC, Sanders, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar? They know the GOP is tottering on the edge of implosion and four years from now will likely be a MUCH more auspicious set of circumstances for the progressive wing of the Dems to break off into their own thing, and then that party and the Dems will spend the next couple of cycles finishing the job of ending the GOP (possibly conceding a presidential election along the way).

    We will almost certainly have nothing but a string of center-right moderate status quo DNC presidents until that new progressive wing gets off the ground, settles their hierarchy, and rallies behind a presidential candidate of their own to present a genuine and serious left-wing challenge to entrenched capitalist-oligarch-plutocratic power.

    That is where your “third party” is coming from, not some fantasy of all the disaffected and disenfranchised voters in the country suddenly finding enough common ground to mount an effective, well-organized, and cohesive challenge to the two major parties.

    If you’re serious about wanting a real left wing in this country, this is the context in which you’ll need to create it, and that means a whole bunch of us need to be working with and reaching out to those progressive leaders because the power core already has an army of astroturfing profiteers and clickbaiters on their payroll, and millions of easily manipulated rubes think that is the “left” in this country.

    And right now, sad as it is to say, they’re right. It’s the only meaningful left we’ve got because the real left is split between being pumped full of bias confirmation clickbait by grifters and arguing with each other over bad, useless ideas like dreaming for a third party deus ex machina to get us out of this mess.

    When the grass roots refuse to grow, you get astroturf, and right now that’s the only grass of any serious relevance in this country. Let’s stop hanging on to old, useless fantasies and start getting seriously organized from a position of reason, pragmatism, and integrity.

  • Better Call Saul? Maybe Not.

    Spread The Word:

    This started being a curated post, but frankly as things worked out I think it deserves to be rewritten from the ground up.

    Back in 2010 there was this fella, Saul Anuzis. Saul had been a hotshot in the MI GOP for a few decades at this point, having held the state party chair among other prominent positions. He ran for national chair in 2009 and didn’t make it.

    So he ran again for the 2011 chairmanship. Was considered quite the likely prospect when he started.

    Along the way, he had the great misfortune to catch my attention while playing dirty pool.

    After that, he wasn’t such a hot prospect anymore

    Of course it would be silly to suggest that I was the reason for that.

    It all started here (amazing good fortune for me to find that the thread is actually still on Facebook 13 years later almost to the day)…

    Screenshot of Facebook post dated Oct. 11, 2010: Saulius Saul Anuzis · Really?? ...and Virg Bernero wants to be our Governor??? No wonder even Democrats are NOT voting for Bernero...embarrassing. (Followed by a fake tweet ostensibly from Virg Bernero reading "I am calling out my opponent for misleading voters during our debate last night. He refused a wedgie saying he WASN'T a NERD!"

    What you’re looking at is Saul Anuzis sharing a fake tweet from a Twitter account that I frankly suspected at the time but could never prove Anuzis himself was operating. Certainly whether he was or not, he treated this obvious parody as legitimate and responded to it just as though it was really written by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Virg Bernero.

    He even doubled down on it in the comments:

    Facebook comments from Anuzis on the photo thread: Saulius Saul Anuzis Even Democrats have to be embarrassed over a Twitter post like this...come on folks...this is serious business. Saulius Saul Anuzis Bernero shooting to beat Feiger...maybe get 37%!?!

    I took exception to this.

    In fairness, it wasn’t photoshopped; it was just a fake account.

    Transcript (too long for alt text):

    Don’t we think our electoral process and government are quite screwed up enough, without injecting photoshopped lies into the equation?

    Why not just photoshop Bernero’s head (or Obama’s, since that’s your ultimate target) into a picture and make it look like he’s peeing on the Bible, burning the flag, and r—ng a child [2023: redacted because I wouldn’t use this language in 2023, nor use the example at all, and I regret it…but I won’t deny I did it either, because I’m not a lying jerk -jh] and be done with it, if that’s the level of “integrity” that we’re bringing to the table?

    I mean, if you’re just going to insult people by lying to them and assuming they’re stupid enough to believe what you say just on faith, why not go for the BIG lie?

    As an ostensibly serious contender for the national chairmanship of the Republican Party, you should be aware that it is precisely this kind of childish and insulting behavior that keeps me resolved to never, ever trust a Republican. At least ONCE in a while I can find a Democrat who cares more about winning clean than about winning.

    The Weekly World News had better ethics than this. Shame on you.

    <insert lame “it was just a joke” defense, equally lame “I don’t get this internets stuff” defense, or a disappeared comment and personal ban here>

    Of course some troll had to jump in with the usual stalking routine, poverty shaming (told y’all I’ve been broke for a while), dumb word plays on my then-current domain names…which just opened the door to further analysis of Mr. Anuzis’ egregious misrepresentation. I’ll trim the troll BS and stick to the substantive parts:

    Partial comment screenshot from JH: "You see, Harry Reid didn't publicize a fake statement from the President and treat it as though it were real. That is what is happening here. I realize it's hard to keep track, what with that all-important ad hominem attack to launch, but try to focus, would you? There are serious considerations at stake in this election. Maybe it's pleasing to you, or to Mr. Anazis, to treat your solemn duty as though it was just another game of beer pong back at the frathouse, but some of us are just about at the end of our ropes with the ongoing descent of our political processes into sheer fiction. Maybe you prefer for YOUR leaders to lie to you, Mr. Joseph. I don't."

    Further relevant trim from the back-and-forth with the troll:

    The funniest part of all of this: You've not only failed to make a single assertion of any relevance, you've also failed to mount so much as a token defense of your candidate's behavior - and out here in the real world where the sky is blue, your candidate definitely has some defending to do. At the very least he's guilty of remarkably poor judgment.

    And then – right on schedule, as predicted in the first comment, here comes Our Boy to make his excuses:

    Saulius Saul Anuzis Actually, this is the "fake" Virg Bernero Twitter account...just sounded too much like him..my mistake. Virg's real account is @VBernero
    Always with the implausible “plausible deniability.” Knowing something like this was coming was precisely the reason I included the remark about poor judgement in the prior comment.

    Sure enough, it’s the “I don’t get this internets stuff” defense, with an attempted twist at “well it sounds like him!” It doesn’t. At all.

    So I called him out on that too.

    Crappy writing with the unfinished thought in the first paragraph…but the point was made, and firmly. This is not a man who should be leading anything or anyone; he demonstrably lacks the character for it. Thanks to the troll’s suggestion that I “write it up on your silly little website,” I did exactly that. The bulk of that material is below, trimmed of minor and irrelevant padding.

    This guy…wow.

    It’s one thing to create a parody Twitter account, although I question the ethics of doing so if you are a leadership candidate for one party and the parody is of another party’s candidate.

    I will also note here for the record that I have no evidence that Anuzis is in control of the Twitter account he supposedly is reporting on here…but it’s obviously not Democratic candidate for Michigan Governor Virg Bernero in control.

    So sure, parody.  Fine.

    Except Anuzis, as you can clearly see from the screenshot here, is deliberately playing this obvious fake as though it’s a legitimate public statement by Virg Bernero.

    – JH in the original article

    […]

    Now maybe if Mr. Anuzis was a college student pulling a prank or a young guy talking trash when he shouldn’t be, this would be a forgivable mistake.

    However, Mr. Anuzis is a candidate to chair the Republican National Committee.  He’s not just trying to have a voice, he’s trying to be the voice of the Republican party.

    And now he has demonstrated that his idea of ethics and integrity include treating an obviously fake public statement by an opponent as real.

    This is precisely the problem with not just the Republican party but with most politicians in this country period, and the people that vote for them:  we don’t seem to care about principles and ideals anymore.  Rather, it’s about who can make the most LOLs.  Hur hur hur, you are so clever.

    Maybe I’m at odds with the Republican party base on this – certainly your last successful presidential candidate would suggest that to be the case – but I’m not really interested in having a ham-handed giggling child in a position that includes the potential for him (or her) to influence public policy.  This is a position of national and world power, sir – tittering behind your hand like someone just made a wee-wee joke and you can’t help yourself is, at the very least, bad form.

    This is to say nothing, of course, of the outrageous ethical lapse in even pretending to believe that the quoted passage was actually a public statement by Virg Bernero.

    If this is what passes for “leadership” in the Republican Party, we may as well resign to becoming a one-party nation.

    – JH, extract from original article

    That was the end of the conversation, on October 12, 2010.

    By October 15th, Mr. Anuzis was no longer being spoken of as a serious contender for the Republican Party chairmanship. Indeed, Mr. Anuzis has done nearly nothing of note in politics since. His only activity of any real prominence was being part of the bipartisan coalition to push Michigan to sign on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact…and he still holds no titled or publicly disclosed position of significance within the state or national party.

    Oh, that vote for chair?

    Wikipedia

    He placed dead last in the first four rounds of seven, only managing to make it to second of three with the help of cast-off votes for candidates who had withdrawn from the race…and the third-place candidate was a woman, so not terribly likely to win a Republican election for anything anyway.

    Maybe I’ve heard some rumors that a certain candidate for RNC chair was told sometime around November first of 2010 that he was not going to win that seat because of certain past public indiscretions that may call into question his integrity, his affinity for the online campaign work that had become the top priority for anyone in electoral politics by 2010, and his perceived seriousness as a candidate, even if they had to bring in the current chair to split the vote and keep Anuzis out of any serious contention.

    What is known for certain is that incumbent chair Michael Steele announced his candidacy for the position on December 13 – long after the other candidates – and then dropped out in the fifth round of voting. His votes were then distributed among the remaining candidates, with Anuzis receiving the second-least in round 5 of 7. He picked up 8 of Steele’s 28 votes; Preibus 9, Maria Cino 11, and Ann Wagner none. In the sixth round, Wagner lost 11 votes and Cino lost 6; of the 17 open votes Anuzis got five and Priebus 13…which means Anuzis also lost a vote to Priebus in that round, as that’s one more vote shifted than had been previously committed to candidates who dropped. In the final round, Cino lost 6 more votes and Ann Wagner dropped out, leaving 23 votes to distribute; Preibus picked up 17 of them.

    Certainly it would be ridiculous for me to take credit for effectively ending the man’s political career. Anuzis blew it and displayed poor judgement at best and almost certainly poor ethics given the great likelihood he really knew the Bernero account was fake when he tried to put it over as legitimate.

    Of course, poor ethics has never been a bar to Republican leadership…but a situation in which the party chair could reasonably be painted as a technologicially inept doofus was a weak spot the Republican Party simply wasn’t willing to risk.

    Aside from a brief stint as a RNC national committee representative to fill a vacant seat, which was immediately lost to a Tea Party candidate in the following year, to this day (as of October 6, 2023) Anuzis has not held a single elective position within the Republican party, nor any appointments of significance. His only designated party position at all since that time was as senior advisor to Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, and we all know how that went.

    (A final note: it never stops making me laugh that if you take all the vowels out of Reince Priebus, you end up with R–NC- PR–B-S.)

  • How Facebook Is Destroying Democracy (2010)

    Spread The Word:

    This was a fairly exceptional find; I’d honestly forgotten about this article, written in March of 2010. Of course when it was written I was jeered and rejected as a handwaving extremist – how could you possibly think Facebook is destroying democracy, that’s just ridiculous – by all right-thinking people, with a healthy chorus of helpful disdain and ridicule from the usual gang of trolls.

    President Obama has proposed a 1.4% pay increase for active duty military in 2011. This is THE LOWEST SINCE 1973! Nice to know that during a time of rampant inflation, while war is fought in 2 theatres, our men and women in uniform get A LOWER PAY INCREASE THAN WELFARE RECIPIENTS!!! Please repost if you support our troops….1 Term say good bye

    This is the second time in a couple of days I’ve seen this, yet I’m not having a lot of luck finding any objective source that discusses these events, just a FB meme claiming it happened. [2023: This was originally written on March 8, 2010. The claim has since been broadly debunked as the nonsense that it is; military pay is tied to the Employment Cost Index and the president is required by law to propose pay increases tied to this index to ensure military pay rises in line with consumer product price inflation. Much of the related information which follows was written without that knowledge in hand at the time. -jh]

    I’d like to see more facts, including a broad discussion of the considerations which go in to making such a decision.  For example, what if the rate of increase among military personnel has been 10x the cost of living, while welfare payment caps have dropped, for all of the last ten years except this year in which an adjustment is being made to compensate for decreased military need and increased public assistance need? [2023 – this is where I basically cited the true mechanics of military pay raises without realizing it, in spite of using an extreme example. The underlying reasoning is why military pay is tied directly to ECI. -jh]  Obviously this very extreme example is not the case, but the underlying point remains: this is a complex series of issues, and the idea that posting some hyper-patriotic status message with a guilt-trip/us v. them tagline is going to solve anything is not only ridiculous, it’s incredibly destructive – and that’s the point of this article.

    It’s not that I reject out of hand the assertion of this latest rabble-rousing meme [2023 – and again rightly so, as the raw numbers were correct, so rejecting the assertion out of hand would’ve been wrong. -jh]. Rather the problem is that I have serious concerns about the direction we are being taken by our collective will to participate in such things without first determining their objective accuracy. 

    It seems to me that this kind of thing, while usually well-intentioned, represents the same sort of shallowness of thinking that led to the Iraq war in the first place, to some 60% of the US still believing as late as 2006 that Iraq was directly involved with 9-11, to the gigantic stimulus package [2023: this was the enormous bailout of Wall Street banks in 2008. -jh] that regardless of necessity was passed with such haste and sloppiness that it’s an iron-clad certainty that it’s not going to work as well as it could have.  We get all revved up over something and we just pounce, with little regard for the long-term results or the bigger picture.

    Look around this country, this world, your own mind. 

    Are you one of the people who thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to continue beating the “Obama’s citizenship’” horse? 

    Are you someone for whom “because the Bible says so” is a reasonable basis for laws to be made? 

    Are you someone who doesn’t throw up in their mouths a little bit every time you see a well-intentioned friend post a status message that suggests that if you don’t do the same, you are a traitor to your country and you want soldiers to die?

    Then I am sorry, but even if I love you from the very bottom of my heart, you are a Part Of The Problem. 

    How DARE any human being undertake to pass judgment on my love of country or fellow man – to suggest that I lack ‘patriotism’ or commitment to country or respect for those who volunteer their lives to defend it regardless of whether I think they’re ultimately being conned in 90% of the cases when this is their motivation for enlisting – based on my willingness to endorse with my name and supportive repetition a poorly-constructed paragraph full of – at BEST – emotively presented para-facts intended to do nothing more than stoke the ire of conservatives and further create a society of code words and passphrases by which we can identify “them” and “us” as defined by some arbitrary and subjective standard of political adherence that ultimately exists only in the mind of the person passing judgment?  How terribly disrespectful and presumptuous. 

    Frankly, I wouldn’t post that paragraph in my status message even if I believed every word.

    Why not?

    For starters, it’s written with all the intellect and critical thought of a rambunctious sixth-grader.  I’m 40 years old, and I’d be embarrassed to lay claim to the “logic” and “patriotism” presented here.  Look at it.  The SCREAMING CAPITALIZATION AND ABUSE OF PUNCTUATION!  The saccharine exhortation to “patriotism” that’s really an exhortation to look down our noses at those un-American liberal commie heathens who Don’t Support Our Troops (and in the process of that coercion, an exhortation to frankly piss all over everything that actually makes this country worth fighting for).  The snide, unspoken undertone that of anyone in Our Great Nation who might need some money from the government, them welfare leeches (read:  ethnic minorities, brown people, and white women who have sex with them; these folks never care that the vast majority of welfare recipients in this country are white people in heavily Republican/right leaning states) better be the LAST in line.  The suggestion that “supporting the troops” must necessarily entail supporting their orders.  The relentlessly stupid and continually increasing attempt to lay the results of 8 years (and more) of utter mismanagement and malfeasance at the feet of a president who has been in office less than a year and a half. 

    The whole thing just plain sucks.  It’s an intellectual void.  I’m sorry that some people will take that personally, but let’s be real here:  as much as I complain about people, I wouldn’t waste my time trying to point these things out if I didn’t love and respect them.  I’m sorry that it hurts some people’s feelings or moves some people to drop me from their friends’ list or what have you, but remaining silent is not an option. I’d certainly rather your feelings be hurt by me rattling you out of your comfort zone with the truth than they be hurt twenty years from now when you realize it’s too late to stop the decline and part of the reason for that is you were allowed to continue believing things that aren’t true.

    There are a lot of times when I’m writing that I feel like the guy at a party just sober enough to try and tell a friend that they’ve pissed themselves, only to get punched in the mouth for saying bad things.

    America…you’re drunk on fear and you’ve voided hate and xenophobia all over yourself.  Go sober up and change your pants. [2023 – spoiler alert: we not only didn’t sober up, we didn’t even bother changing our pants. We just drank more and more and insisted that anyone who didn’t void themselves in their Levi’s was an unamerican traitor in thrall to the illegitimate Kenyan non-citizen President. And it worked on about 70 million of us, and it’s still working. -jh]

    All I’m saying is that if you want to have something to say, try to make it something meaningful and fact-based if you’re going to complain about the government.  There are plenty of legitimate reasons to gripe without relying on this kind of unsupported hyperbolic hang-wringing panic-button nonsense, and in many cases (like this one) the unspoken messages tend to ring much louder with the coherent observer than the spoken ones do.  When I see a message like this, all I read is “I’m really worried about the economy and my position in life, but I can’t be bothered to find an effective way to improve things for myself so I’ll just whine about the evil gubmint.”  In the mean time, people are continually manipulated into cheering for the defeat of a health care bill that would, without question, save their lives or the life of someone they love in reasonably short order. [2023 – this was, of course, what became “Obamacare” after it was watered down and compromised to the point of being only slightly less odious than the godforsaken trainwreck of a health care system we had in place already. Obama’s compromise on this remains one of my greatest disappointments in his presidency. -jh]

    But instead the politicians play on our fears and prejudices, and we continue buying in.  It’s not health care reform people are rallying against, it’s the notion that they might have to pay for someone else’s care…which, if people were really angry about it, would be the absolute end of the insurance industry (and would also result in a 20-year drop in our life expectancy in a matter of a generation or two) given that’s the entire basis of the idea of insurance. 

    The problem in this country, quite frankly, is that we’ve become a nation of selfish, greedy, avaricious, entitled, lazy, ignorant, jerks. [2023 – and it’s only gotten worse since I wrote this in 2010. -jh]  Until we get it through our heads that we are ALL in this together and when one person fails we all fail, we’re going to continue these silly, pointless arguments, and people will continue to die senselessly and our nation will continue to erode as our best and brightest are continually prevented from reaching their full potential by the efforts of those who hold the cash to avoid sharing it with anyone.

    These snarky, factually void, and often logically broken memes are a huge part of the problem.  They play on mob mentality and the human need for acceptance in order to manipulate people into rallying against the very things that would improve their lives.  We get the leadership we get because we consistently refuse to educate ourselves to understand what real leadership and real solutions look like.  These kinds of memes make this refusal not just okay, but popular and easy – why bother knowing what’s going on in the world when we can just get it from our friends’ status updates?

    It is the fundamental obligation of a free citizen to make every possible effort to understand the issues and candidates that are spread before us at election time.  It is a direct assault on that obligation, and on freedom itself, to reduce this obligation to a copy-and-paste lynch mob.

    93% of people won’t have the guts to tell their friends to quit trying to manipulate them (and to quit allowing themselves to be manipulated!) via status messages….will YOU?

    [2023 – you can see in this article some of the roots that led me to start attending university to major in communication and minor in political science about five months after this was written. While it’s not bad, I generally failed to make the points I was reaching for, in large part because my abilities were limited by my lack of formal education in the subjects under the review and criticism of qualified professionals in the field. Still, I prefer being honest to stroking myself with ego-gratifying lies, and the honest thing to do is let it sit as written and accept that while I did a competent job of explaining my position, it’s a far cry from the level of expertise I could’ve brought to the conversation even a year later, let alone now nearly a decade and a half in the future. Among other major issues, I failed to clearly make the point that absorbing our political information in memes and snippets crafted primarily to appeal to our egos is poisonous to our democracy and we not only need to stop doing it, we need to pressure social media companies to enact stronger protections against the propagation of disinformation. It’s a good article, but it didn’t make the case I wanted it to as strongly as I’d hoped, in retrospect. -jh]

  • Tebow, Dobson, and God

    Spread The Word:

    Curated post from 2010, using the controversial anti-abortion ad aired during that year’s superbowl featuring Tim Tebow as a frame to discuss the larger abortion issue.

    (See original article: ‘Miracle’ Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad puts hit on critics – Faith & Reason [archive link verified working, Oct 2023])

    The debate over abortion in this country, and around the world, has raged since the first miscarriage.  In the main, the debate has been characterized by an overabundance of emotive outbursts, handwringing, ad hominem attacks, and a paucity of facts, balance, and clear, rational thought.

    One of the manifest expressions of the former list of attributes is the rise of hard-right “Christian” groups such as the American Family Association and Focus on the Family.  As a part of their overall fundamentalist diet of exhortations to donate money, condemnation of everyone who “ain’t like us,” and rampant, cynical fear-mongering for profit, these “faith-based” organizations routinely seek out hot-button issues like gay marriage, free expression, and abortion with which to stir up their marks and generate donations. 

    The Super Bowl 2009 advertisement featuring football star Tim Tebow and his mom making vague statements about family has stirred up some debate, but for me it’s not about the abortion issue.  The abortion issue is settled as far as I’m concerned; I don’t like them – and I know from the closest experience a man can that they’re not exactly a trip to the fun park – I wish they weren’t necessary, but until steps are taken to ensure that there is never a valid reason to terminate a pregnancy (steps that are currently well beyond the capability of our technology and our social evolution), they are.  Since they are necessary, the solution is to reduce their necessity while also providing a safe and reliable means of abortion for women who need it.  As need decreases, so will incidence.  Period.  There is no other logical solution to the “problem of abortion.”  So that argument’s done.

    My issues with the Tebow ad are not with his, his mother’s, or anyone else’s opinion about abortion.  I want that made clear. Everyone’s entitled to hold an opinion, regardless of how ludicrous I think it is.

    My issue is, first and foremost, with a group like FotF insinuating themselves into national discourse in the first place and secondarily with the stealthy way they’ve gone about it.  Frankly, I’d have had less problem with the ad if Tebow and his mom just walked onscreen and said “This man almost didn’t exist because I seriously considered terminating my pregnancy with him.  I’m glad I didn’t, and I believe you will feel the same way if you make the same choice.  Thank you.”  This heartwarming and light-hearted little diversion leads you to FotF’s website…where the indoctrination process begins.  “Oh, look honey, they don’t like abortion!  We don’t like abortion either!  We should sign up for their mailing list!”  And next thing you know FotF has a few hundred thousand more “members” that they can use to bully the media into covering them, and you as a member are suddenly being regaled with tales of doom and woe in which a vote for Barack Obama is a vote for mandatory gay marriage, mandatory gender education in first grade, the end of adoption agencies, nuclear war in the middle east, terrorist attacks in the US, a new Russian imperialism unchecked by a weakened and apathetic US military, [2023: and boy oh boy is that an entertaining read here in 2023, give that its premise is to predict the horrible, broken future of 2012 under the Obama presidency! It’s long and dull and enraging when you remember people actually think like that, but beyond that it’s hilarious. -jh] and all manner of other Terrible Things including a massive series of job openings when every good-thinking Christian quits their jobs and shuts down their business because they’re now being “forced” to act “against their morals” by (for instance) helping a gay couple adopt a child.

    Focus’ tactics and methods are execrable and well-known.  Any reasonably sentient mind can read the letter I linked to in the above paragraph and quickly note how often subtexts of pedophilia and homosexuality are both invoked and conflated.  In paragraph after paragraph we are told that the evil liberals, “the gays,” the ACLU, and of course that old standby the Commies, are just waiting for President Barry to welcome them in the door and transform America into a nation of roving homosexual pedophiles, anti-religious violence, and a new pot-smoking effete bourgeoisie that revels in the sight of Evul. 

    Organizations like Focus on the Family are brutal and terrorizing manipulators of public ignorance.  They rely on our inability to separate emotions from objective facts in order to push their dream of theocratic totalitarianism on the rest of us.  “Dr.” James Dobson and his ilk, each and every one of them, wants to be Nehemiah Scudder when they grow up.  This is the method behind their madness of the seemingly silly and naive attempts to influence education in this country; if we get ‘em while they’re young, they’re WAY easier to keep when they grow up. [2023: this isn’t just flowery prose; even as a firm atheist of some dozen years following decades of agnosticism, I still can’t – and never will – shake the brain-image of ‘God’ as an old white guy with a big white beard and flowing white hair. It was programmed into me before I could read, and I started reading when I was two. -jh]

    I appreciate anyone standing up for what they believe in [2023: given what I’ve seen people standing up for since writing this article, I can no longer stand behind the statement. -jh], but I think anyone who chooses to do so has the duty to ensure that they are fully aware of the implications of who they’re standing with.  I’m sorry, but if an organization like Focus on the Family came out hard in favor of anything I agreed with, I’d have to take a hard look at what I’m agreeing with.

    I’d respectfully suggest that those of you who are applauding Tebow here, or who think that your “support” for this advertisement or for Focus on the Family is going to prevent ONE abortion in the world today, tomorrow, or ever, may want to reconsider who you’re hanging out with.  Those groups are sick, endlessly focused on sexuality (and that often with a specific focus on children – EVERYTHING is a “threat” to “innocence” WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?! gimme money…[2023 and this con is also working better than ever, 13 years later. -jh]) and ultimately existing for the sole purpose of enriching themselves at the expense of the credulous, the frightened, the ignorant, the superstitious, and the confused…every one of whom are good people with kind hearts and the best of intentions, just like you.

  • More Two-Party Myths

    Spread The Word:

    Clearly we need further discussion of the two-party myths that are rampant in our discourse.

    I ran into this on Facebook. For those of you with screen readers or other visual impairment which makes it difficult for you to read text in images, it reads as follows:

    “We won’t be able to elect third parties if we never vote for third parties.

    It doesn’t make sense for someone in a deep red state to theor their vote away on Biden when they can try and run up higher numbers for Cornel West

    If they reach 5% of the popular vote, that guarantees ballot access and funding in the next election cycle.”

    It doesn’t guarantee a platform though. Nor does it circumvent Duverger’s Law.

    It’s important to point out at the top that this has been the operating strategy of “third parties” in this country for decades and it has yet to bear meaningful fruit. The two “third” parties that have made any headway at all, the Greens and the Libertarians, have yet to seat a federal legislator, and have only had spotty, inconsistent, and functionally useless success at the state level.

    You won’t be able to elect “third” parties in an electoral system based on single-member districts decided by simple majority vote until one of the two existing major parties decays so much on one end of the spectrum that a challenger from the other end can rise effectively, while the party in the middle drifts into the space formerly occupied by the fallen second party. That’s what we’re seeing right now as the GOP implodes and the democratic party continues sliding to the right under neoliberal capitalist-plutocrat stewardship and patronage.

    When serious leftist candidates have the confidence they can split off from the Dems and have a viable challenge from the left, it will happen. Then you’ll have a few cycles when the DNC basically runs the show while the GOP desperately tries to save itself by doubling down on plutocracy and the “new left” gets organized and gathers power from within the current Democratic party. We are probably in the early stages of this right now.

    It’s never one time happened any other way, even the direction of the shifts and rises are consistent – a leftist party becomes one of the two “majors,” and in the process of trying to protect and grow its power begins compromising and sliding to the right.

    As that slide – frequently called the “Overton Window” (* see below) – happens, the current right-wing group keeps moving further right until they hit the point of no longer being able to plausibly deny they’ve gone fascist/totalitarian. As the old left calcifies and stagnates it slides into the “moderate” right position.
    In every functional democratic system that has existed, it ends up either like this or with the hard right being so successful they rise to a level of power where they’re functionally capable of imposing the autocracy they crave and then you have a big war and a reset to more or less the status quo that existed prior to the rise of the right.

    Examples of the earlier process can be found in the demise of the Whigs in the US in the 19th century; examples of the latter can be found in Germany and other nations in the mid-20th century.
    It always goes one way or the other. Not once in human history has a populist left-wing movement coalesced into a viable party from outside the existing party structure.

    Focus on empowering your genuine leftists within the democratic party and helping them gather strength and viability so when the GOP finishes falling off the edge of fascism the new left has the confidence to believe they can step up. Your only other realistic option is sitting around carping about “third parties” and voting for almost universally unelectable candidates until you’re left with a one party system, and nobody wants that.

    Short of everybody getting off their asses and actually learning their individual candidates and deciding on an individual basis who they’re going to vote for, which absolutely will never happen because people are generally lazy and love to be part of an in-group, that’s the only way you’re going to find a viable pushback against the fascism and autocracy that has wholly swallowed the GOP and taken in a horrifying portion of the DNC as well.

    I know that’s not easy to hear and I’m sorry for that, but it’s the truth, and when we acknowledge it and work within it instead of trying impotently to fight the weather because it gratifies our egos to feel like we’re “too smart for that,” we’ll continue losing this country to fascism until we have to fight – literally – to get it back, and I don’t think anyone wants to go through that except the fascists, who think they’ll win that fight too.

    (* We shouldn’t use the “Overton Window” labeling. Overton’s description is deliberately malformed to present the process as being unrelated to left or right but rather, disingenuously, as a question of what is “socially acceptable.” Fundamentally it’s an attempt to advise right-wing politicians how to avoid social disapproval and loss of electoral power by being too honest about their intentions. Overton was a fellow of the radical right-wing, plutocratic, self-described “think tank” The Mackinac Center For Public Policy.)

  • Health Care A Right?

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    Is health care a right, a privilege, or a commodity? This began as a quite different post back in 2009. In 2023, I’ve reworked it to generalize elements that were personalized. It’s a little startling how little has changed about the steadfast position of the right that human beings somehow have a right to live but not a right to the things that keep them alive.

    The refrain is now almost cliché: “health care is a right, not a privilege.”

    Inevitably this observation draws out right-wing trolls, usually calling themselves “libertarians,” to insist that the idea that health care is a right somehow means that we’re all entitled to the services of medical professionals without those medical professionals being compensated, which is just nonsense and has nothing to do with the argument, but makes for a great little chest-thumping FREEDOM! scream for those whose idea of “freedom” begins and ends with their freedom to obstruct the freedom of everyone they don’t like.

    Typically, those arguments look a bit like this (and to be clear: these are all statements made in the course of the original conversation from which the 2009 version of this article was taken…and repeated constantly before and since.

    Rights are things that one has access to without another person giving up their own rights to Life, Liberty, or Property. Unless you are a doctor or surgeon and can diagnose and/or fix yourself, then you do not have a right to health care.

    Should the federal government provide your food for you? Should we all get free college through the government? Should HUD provide homes fr every person who decides they want to own one? And if you believe any of those things to be true, where does it end?

    I’m not making any argument for or against any sort of health care reform; I’m simply stating a fact: health care is not a right, it’s a commodity.

    Nobody seems to be interested in socializing health care on a local level, just the Federal.

    The idea of a free society in and of itself prohibits the concept of things such as “a right to health care”.

    The argument that a right to health care entails by necessity the violation of the rights of others to make a living is at best specious and at worst servile and self-destructive. This has always been one of the manipulative, dishonest, and underhanded tactics employed by the “libertarians” and right wingers: as soon as you start talking about people not having to pay out of pocket for health care, they start talking about health care providers being expected to work for free, which is simply not the argument being made.

    The entire framing also overlooks the basic fact that the government is of, by, and for us. Yes, it is precisely the government’s job to ensure we all have food, shelter, clothing, health care, and all the other things necessary to protect and empower those rights we love to talk so much about. That is the purpose of a democratic government (including the form of democratic government we call a constitutional republic).

    Then they’ll discuss all these other “rights,” like the “right to obtain and choose my own food,” but entirely ignore the reality that this isn’t a right; if it was, food would be free. I have the right to choose which food I’ll exercise the privilege of my material wealth to acquire, and that’s all.

    Even if I did have a “right to obtain food,” what good does that do if I don’t have any teeth to eat it with because I can’t afford dental care, or I can’t digest it because I can’t get treatment for the ulcers that are slowly metastasizing in my gut because I can’t afford to have them treated?

    In the world described by these folks, people fall into three categories: the plutocracy, the avaricious marks who support the actions of the plutocracy because they think they too will someday be greedy and selfish enough to become a plutocrat if only they wear their brown lipstick thick enough (this group is nearly always the one making these arguments), and the poor, who don’t deserve to be healthy because if they wanted to be healthy they shouldn’t have chosen to be poor.

    Self-governance and deregulation are not the solution to our current problems, in health care and in so many other areas of life in the twenty-first century: they are the cause.

    This particular brand of “libertarianism” is marked mostly by freedom of industry from regulation and a callous, selfish, and frankly heartless disregard for the well-being of other people masquerading as a stoic and perverse sort of social Darwinism, i.e. “only the strong survive, so long as I am allowed to define what constitutes strength in terms that are most advantageous to me in my current situation.” 

    The reality is that universal health care is not “taking from” the medical industry, but rather spreading the burden of cost among all of us collectively, consistently, across time, rather than the current reactive system that relies on treatment at the greatest expense to individuals in response to acute health issues.  Rather than trying to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars at once in response to a disease or injury, universal health care allows us all to pay a little bit at a time perpetually into a system that ensures we all get health care when we need it. This also neutralizes the constant demand of capitalism that everything be constantly more expensive in order to ensure profit margins.

    (Sidebar:  don’t believe the hype regarding long waits, death panels, etc.; while it’s true that various socialized models have various flaws, and that one of those flaws is that sometimes care is delayed, the idea that everyone will suddenly be on years-long waiting lists for acute life-saving treatment is a myth; a scare tactic, a boogeyman waved in the face of the frightened, credulous, and uniformed, in much the same way that “socialism” and “Islam” and “the terrorists win” have been. The only truth to the assertion is that truth which is deliberately created post hoc by those working to dismantle socialized health care systems, putting up roadblocks, preventing access to education to ensure there are sufficient professional to staff such a system, and then blaming the system they’ve broken because it’s not perfect.)

    Our constitution guarantees the “right” to  life and liberty.

    Can you have either of these, if you don’t have your health?

    If the answer to the above question is “no,” then health care must, by derivation of the enumerated rights, also be a right itself. 

    If one has the right to liberty, then one has the right to everything that enables that liberty.  While it is true that these derived rights may sometimes clash irreconcilably with reality – no matter what rights I have, if I’m born without eyeballs or optic nerves the current state of medical technology can’t make me see, even though from a legal standpoint I have the right to see – this does not invalidate the derived rights as rights per se; it only demonstrates that our rights are limited in fact by the caprice of fate.  I have the right to be an auto mechanic; I don’t have the skills, nor the inclination.  My eyeball-less self has the right to see; I just don’t have the tools to see, and in the extreme case I gave, there exists no substitute tool that could be made available to me by society.  Even so, we as a society have agreed to provide our best available substitutes, from alternate languages to guide dogs to audible signals at crosswalks.

    QED:  Health care is a right; we as a society have consistently agreed in many situations to provide health care or a working alternative in any number of situations.  Ergo health care is not only a right, it is a right that is almost universally acknowledged when framed in a friendly context like helping the blind people by putting in audible crossing signals, rather than a less “sexy” context like helping the poor keep their teeth and bodies, and thus their minds, in the best working order that is attainable by the consensual application of medical technology, and in doing so ensuring that they have the ability and inclination – even if gently coerced by a sense of debt to society – to be productive citizens.

    The bottom line is this:  regardless of whether you define it as a right, a privilege, or a ‘commodity,’ universal health care – including birth control and comprehensive sex education free of factual distortion by religious institutions pushing agendas of abstinence and strict heterosexuality, among many other health care needs – is a critical necessity to the survival of our species.

    The reality remains that we are all in this together, and if we don’t get together and work to keep the people we have alive while working to control population growth and the abuse of finite resources through comprehensive reproductive health education and care, this argument will be moot…because sooner rather than later, there won’t be anyone to argue about it anyway.

  • It’s Time To End Confederate Flag Worship

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    Over the years much has been written in defense of waving and displaying the “Confederate Flag.” We’ll forego the silly pedantic arguments about what the “Stars and Bars” really flew over, and all that nonsense – it’s diversionary argumentation without relevant meaning to the core questions we’ll address here.

    Back in 2019, the city of Wake Forest, NC, had to cancel their annual Christmas parade because they intended to allow a float from a group called the Sons and Daughters Of The Confederacy. In response, several people indicated plans to protest and potentially even incite violence, so the city decided to cancel the parade.

    This generated all the hand-wringing outrage you might expect, and of course brought to the forefront this old, tired argument about southern pride and so forth.

    In the intervening period, we’ve had the violent coup attempt in Washington where multiple violent traitors paraded through the halls of Congress…carrying the Confederate flag. States have passed resolutions to stop flying it on government grounds, along with significant effort to remove statues of Confederate “heroes,” rename public facilities named in honor of traitors, and so forth.

    Naturally all of this has the “Southern Pride” and “Heritage Not Hate” contingent – who, let’s be clear, have never been anything but bad-faith goobers making arguments the know have no merit – to raising all manner of hew and cry declaiming these actions

    These arguments tend to break down into three key points: My family was involved and I have a right to be proud of my family; the soldiers of the Confederacy fought valiantly for their cause and deserve to be honored and respected for that; you’re trying to “erase history” by interfering with my celebration of the Confederacy.

    So let’s go ahead and address these one by one, shall we?

    Family Pride

    I understand the idea of family pride and heritage. Often these things are very positive; I’m quite proud of my family history on my dad’s side working against the Nazi’s in the Netherlands during WWII, for example

    In this case, the agrument simply doesn’t hold up, and I reject it.

    The Confederacy was a collective act of treason against the United States, an attempt at creating a breakaway republic predicated on the idea that owning other people was a negotiable and acceptable proposition, and they prosecuted a war to defend that position with all the costs that entails.

    Fortunately for conscience and decency in the world, they lost and the “state’s right” to decide that some human beings weren’t human was denied in this ostensibly free country once and for all, as it should have been from the outset.

    However, as we’re seeing play out once again perhaps as a direct result of our reluctance to address this issue head-on in the first place, the simple fact of the matter is you don’t celebrate traitors. There are no flags of the third reich flying in German. The people of Romania don’t celebrate the heritage of Ceaușescu. Lithuania does not celebrate the “heritage” of the Polish government who tried to overthrow them. Germans do not honor the “heritage” of the Beer Hall Putsch. The city of Milwaukee doesn’t have a “Jeffrey Dahmer Culinary Appreciation Day.” The state of Illinois has not named its high school mentoring program for boys after John Wayne Gacy.

    In my family there is a tragic incident in which a woman and her boyfriend murdered their four year old daughter in the early 1980s. If I were to apply the “family pride” argument, rather than taking punitive measures against her because she did a horrible, unforgivable thing that cause an innocent life to be lost…I would say let’s have a Christmas parade float for all the infanticide perpetrators! I mean, I know it’s not really cool and all, of course it used to happen more often but we’re a better people now, but she’s family so I have an emotional attachment and my ego’s involved. Not only that, although it’s less common than it used to be people say things like “If those kids don’t stop raising cain I’ll kill ’em” all the time, so it’s pretty clear some people – quite a few of them – are perfectly okay with the idea of murdering children. I bet if you’ve got kids you’ve said it yourself! “If they don’t stop that racket I’ll kill ’em!”

    So you’ll just be okay with that, right? Even though some of you may have lost children to violence yourselves and even the suggestion is so outrageous as to deserve nothing more than a punch in the mouth…I mean, let’s be civil. Don’t be rude. Don’t be impolite. Can’t we have some unity here? It’s the Christmas season, where’s your holiday spirit? Where’s that forgiveness and all-encompassing Christian love we like to talk about so much this time of year? Let the baby murderers in. Heck, Susan Smith gets out right before Thanksgiving in a couple years, maybe we can get her to be Marshall!

    Right. That’s how every single person who defends confederate flag worship sounds to anyone who was not born and raised in the south. The only people I’ve ever met outside the “Old South” who parrot the point of view on the confederacy I hear as the mainstream there (at least outside the major cities) are open white supremacists.

    Nobody else, outside of that region of the country where it’s taught as gospel, buys in to the romanticism and whitewashing that’s been brought to the history of the Confederacy since its fall. And yes, I’ve seen a fair part of it and talked to a whole lot of people in my time, including time spent in community non-profit work right there in Wake Forest, North Carolina not that many moons ago.

    So that addresses this whole “my daddy fought hard for the south and that was honorable” thing. The cause wasn’t honorable, nor was fighting for it. AT BEST many uneducated people motivated by a firm conviction that some human beings should rightly be considered property *believed* they were fighting for an honorable cause, and so one must allow a sort of grudging subjective “honor” to attach in the sense of following and fighting for your beliefs, but c’mon. The most honorable position in the Confederate military was serving as a patsy to oligarchs; at least in that role you could disingenuously plead ignorance, and that’s the best argument to be made. There’s no honor or glory in stupidity.

    That brings us to…

    The Valiant And Honorable Sacrifice

    Pol Pot’s soldiers fought valiantly for a cause. So did Stalin’s, and Hitler’s, and Tojo’s, and Minh’s, and Mao’s, and Mussolini’s, and bin Laden’s. Back in 2001 19 men from the middle east made a “valiantly and honorably” sacriviced their lives for the cause they believed was just and righteous.

    Sure, YOU might not think so, because they’re the Bad Guys, but THEY sure thought so. They died to prove it, didn’t they? Just like your great-grandpappy at Second Bull Run.

    Pictured: The ultimate participation trophy, symbol of losers since 1865 (far left of the image), shows up at another lost cause: the January 6, 2021 attempt to overthrow the US Government by violent coup in Washington DC at the behest of President Donald Trump

    Fighting valiantly for a cause means less than nothing until you know what the cause is. If I die fighting valiantly for the cause of my asserted right to have sexual congress with ducks, I sure hope you don’t use that as a reason to give me a parade float and I would reasonably expect the ducks to be pretty angry if you did.

    I want to stress again that none of this is personal. There’s not some individual or group whose feelings I’m trying to hurt here. We’ve evolved now, that’s all. We don’t sacrifice virgins anymore either, and we don’t really have parade floats honoring The Great Virgin Sacrificers (sic) of History either.

    And history brings us to that last Great Pillar Of Confederate Apologia

    Erasing History

    This is frankly nothing but cheap gaslighting. Maniplative bad-faith argumentation constructed of the highest-quality bovine excreta.

    Erasing history is talking about “states’ rights” and leaving out what specific right was at issue – the right to own human beings based on the color of their skin.

    “Erasing history” is bandying about phrases like the “War of Northern Aggression,” which I was still hearing unironically when my daughter was attending a rural North Carolina high school, just about fifteen miles up the road from Wake Forest, in the oughts…and I was hearing it from her teachers.

    Erasing history what happens when you STILL get dirty looks in Granville County, NC if you ask an old-timer (or most of their descendants) about why Bob Teel and his boys never did time for killing Dickie Marrow.

    (Sidebar for those who don’t understand this reference: Dickie Marrow was a black veteran who was beaten and shot in Oxford, North Carolina (where my parents lived for the last twenty years or so of their lives) by two white bigots who claimed he said something untoward to a white woman. The white attackers were exonerated by an all-white jury at trial.

    In 1970.

    This event catalyzed the activist career of Benjamin Chavis, who eventually led a fifty-mile march from Oxford to Raleigh in protest. Chavis eventually became head of the NAACP, I believe.

    To this day, you’ll get the kind of look that will encourage you to be out of town by sunset if you ask the wrong people the wrong questions about this event. The book about the event, “Blood Done Sign My Name,” (disclosure: affiliate link) is routinely stolen or vandalized at the Oxford, NC Public Library to this day.)

    THAT is “erasing history,” Orwell style.

    In the end, I’ve had and seen this basic conversation a million times. I’m not particularly passionate about it because honestly I think it’s a settled issue and anyone who continues to act as though there’s really anything to debate about it is likely kind of dull-witted, usually motivated by emotion and ego, and often motivated by uglier things – no accusation against you personally intended, of course, dear reader.

    I’ve no deep interest in hating on people or whatever, this isn’t some “you dumb hicks” rant. I lived in NC for 15 years, met and continue to maintain deep friendship with and great respect for many fine people there. Some of them even maintain this confederate pride attitude, and I don’t fault them for it. I get it, my dad was a marine, I understand that pride.

    But it’s time to accept reality.

    Continuing to celebrate the Confederacy as though it were a noble cause, as though the “sacrifices” made in the name of keeping human beings enslaved were “valiant,” or as though there’s any reasonable basis for exalting and celebrating those who served the failed and unethical cause of slavery with their lives as though they’re heroes for doing it, just doesn’t hold up to reasoned scrutiny anymore.

    Those people weren’t heroes for fighting on the side of the losing team.

    I’m sorry, they’re not.

    The cause of the confederacy was not noble, the fight was not valiant, and the fighters were not heroes. They were at best useful idiots, and at worst seething, treasonous, bigots willing to die for the “right” to treat other human beings as property.

    I was born in 1970 and grew up in a world where the Confederate flag was still honored and adored as a symbol of rebellion, of raging against the machine, of refusing to back down in the face of authoritarianism. Over time we’ve come to understand these arguments simply have no merit. The idea that “fighting for my country is noble and good even if what my country is doing is horrific and unconscionable” was much more prevalent then and you can see how this perspective took hold in the south after their defeat, but now?

    No.

    That’s the 19th century, man. This is the 21st.

    Blind fealty to a geography because your g’g’granpappy originally cleared the land, I can even understand.

    But loyalty to or pride in the cause and prosecution of the Confederate States and their open act of treason against the United States, just because you had family fighting on that side, and many of those fighting for “the lost cause” lost their lives?

    No.

    We think more clearly than that now, at least those of us who can separate our ethics from our egos. If I suggested you should allow a Nazi parade float because there may be post-WWII German immigrants whose ancestors “fought valiantly for their cause,” you’d likely never stop smacking me in the mouth, and rightly so.

    And that’s how pretty much everyone outside the south who isn’t part of some alt right movement feels about confederate parade floats.

    It’s time to burn those stars and bars and throw ’em in the trash like we should’ve in 1865, and have done with this ridiculous argument.

  • Gun Law Reform: An Opinion

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    There is no question that major gun law reform is long overdue in the US.

    Before I go into this, I want to say up front: there are people on this page who witnessed this. They won’t talk for various reasons including potential liability, but they were there. I found out years later there was another witness: noted dudebro Tucker Max, who broadly embellished this story in one of his books.

    Back when I was in the wrestling business we did a gig at a joint in Durham NC. After the show, me and a few of the other guys were sitting at the bar having beers, just chillin, and this tiiiiiiiiny little biker dude with a mile-long mullet comes up to us and decides he’s gonna pick a fight with the biggest guy in the room. He was legit like…6’3″, maybe 270, built every inch like the jacked up barrel-chested stereotype of a pro wrestler. I’m not a small guy myself, but this cat’s biceps looked like my thighs.

    The wrestler kept telling the dude, you don’t want to do this. You don’t want to do this, you don’t want to do this. You’re gonna get yourself hurt and in trouble, you don’t want to do this. I’m just havin a beer, minding my own biz, why don’t you go find something else to do, you don’t want to do this, this isn’t going to end well for you. Stop. Simmer down and go away.

    Of course, little mullet dude didn’t simmer down and didn’t go away, and eventually he made his mistake and was promptly rearranged into a human daiquiri.

    People who want to argue with me about gun control remind me of that little biker dude.

    Fundamentally anyone opposing gun law reform in this country is advocating for their preference that innocent children continue dying by the truckload so they can feel safe getting their half-caf skinny mocha latte with rainbow sprinkles…but they just keep trying to make it about everything else. Even though they know their position is ethically indefensible and they don’t have a prayer of coming out of the argument with anything but embarrassment and humiliation, their need to try to camouflage their fundamental cowardice and fear of literally everything that moves in a bunch of empty NRA agitprop just will not stop.

    Never in the history of anything have I run into a gun owner who argued stridently against gun law reform and WASN’T exactly the last person you’d want having any kind of weapon in their hands because they’re sniveling cowards and you know they’re gonna try to shoot the first mosquito that buzzes their ear without checking to see who’s in the line of fire.

    Little dude might’ve been 5’1″, big ol’ mullet…and of course he had a little Saturday night special, which did him absolutely no good whatsoever beyond ensuring that whatever happened to him would be written off as self-defense and that he was handcuffed to the gurney that carried him to the ER. That was in like 1998. Little dude’s probably still in jail. Probably still can’t see through those swollen, blackened eyes either.

    It’s long past time for major gun law reform in this country, and if you have a problem with that you are fundamentally arguing that it’s okay with you if innocent people – including little kids in their classrooms – continue dying violently so you don’t have to feel scared shopping for ramen at Walmart. I think that’s so far beneath contempt I can’t even begin describing what I think is the proper way to deal with you, without risking a thirty day ban, and I don’t care if that makes you mad every minute for the rest of your failed and useless life.

    For supporting readers: The wrestler was a guy named Jason Arndt, who was part of the “OmegaPowers” clique that included me, the Hardys, Shane Helms, CW Anderson, Joey Mercury, and a bunch of other folks who all worked for the same indies and came up around the same time and place; a couple of them were around that night but I won’t put them on the spot by naming names. The nature of the business being what it is, it’s pretty unlikely anyone who was actually there will talk much about it, but there were plenty of witnesses.

    If you’re a fan of the business you might remember Jason as Joey Abs, the one actual wrestler who was part of Shane McMahon’s “Mean Street Posse” stable in the late 90’s WWE. I only happened to read Tucker Max’s version of the story once, which he heavily embellished and turned into a street war with bullets flying everywhere, but it wasn’t like that. Dude got his ass beat, hard, and might have squeezed off a shot in the process – I genuinely don’t even remember anymore.

  • Keith Moon Was A Terrible Drummer

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    One of the guys in The Who was talking in an interview about Keith Moon and was asked about replacing him, and the response was basically “hah. no. There’s no replacement for Keith Moon, he was his own thing.” This vid (courtesy current Styx drummer Todd Sucherman, who’s quite the beast himself!) shows you why.

    Of course the headline above is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Moon was an amazing player and a huge influence on me and millions of other drummers. But boy…you try playing like this for a drum teacher and they’ll probably run out of the room screaming, quite possibly with the thought that you should be legally proscribed from ever touching drumsticks again. This cat was so far off the map he often didn’t even use a hi-hat (see the notes here, for example – a breakdown of the kit he used from 1970-1973 with the note that the hi-hat was “not used onstage.” You can also find several photos of stage kits on stage at gigs with no hi-hat anywhere, at this link). You can see in the clip below that he’s using a ride where most of us keep our hats. If you watch closely for the right camera angle you’ll see there’s no hi-hat on the stage, not even an empty space for one. The band ribbed and rode him about this until they finally talked him into using a hi-hat for something other than decoration…and it ended up being “Who Are You?” which basically rewrote the book on hi-hats.

    It’s not a Bonham thing where he’s “just that good,” either. The man was an entire approach to drumming unto himself. Ironically about the only drummer I can think of off-hand who’s work came close is some of the work done in Styx by their original drummer John Panozzo – I posted their “Come Sail Away” a few days ago putting him over, and a lot of the work in that is super reminiscent of Keith.

    The dude just…he didn’t keep a beat, man. He kept time, but there’s just no bass-on-one-snare-on-three-quarters-on-the-hat groove in anything the Who recorded with Moon. EVERYTHING was a fill with him, and there is no question that had The Who been working with a different drummer during their “classic” years, they’d have been a completely different band. Even stuff that’s fairly straightforward like “I Can’t Explain,” if you listen closely, the drum parts aren’t like anything else you’ve ever heard.

    Keith Moon is the women’s clothing of drums: no pocket. I saw someone on Todd’s post saying moon was “sloppy” and “all about Show,” but I disagree with this for the most part; Moon was “sloppy” in the same way Jimmy Page is a “sloppy” guitarist. It’s not so much “slop” as it is about letting the music take you where it wants to go, rather than you taking it. It’s the kind of sloppy that every emotive player hopes to achieve.

    Found the music critic who’s never played an instrument. Might have a stick, but it’s up hi…well, it’s not beating a drum.

    Somebody like Buddy Rich or even a really chaotic player like Ginger Baker – anyone with training, anyone who knows how to hold their sticks conventional style, anyone who studied the jazz and blues roots of the instrument – would lose whatever mind they had trying to duplicate this playing style. Rich probably could’ve done it – a lot of Moon’s work reminds me of watching a Buddy Rich solo – and Baker could’ve too, but in the end they’d both end up still centered around that traditional “trap” arrangement of snare-bass-hi-hat. Same with Bonham, Peart, Ringo, Portnoy, Cameron…any of ’em.

    You couldn’t imitate this playing style if you had to, and frankly the more time you’ve spent in lessons and tapping out paradiddles on a practice pad the less likely it is you’ll ever be able to really get your brain in the space necessary to even try. I’ve been playing for 45 years as of the time this article was written, and I can’t do it. Not even close, I’d break my wrists and give myself a heart attack.

    You could play the parts, like a “normal” drummer, but you can’t cop the style; that was 100% whatever madness was rattling around in this guy’s head. There’s no fancy stick tricks and subtle ghost notes here. Just pure, pedal-to-the-floor rhythm, without the slightest hint of any kind of training or practice or time spent watching other drummers to learn his craft. It’s like he just picked up some sticks (and dropped them! you can see it happen at least twice here) and said “welp, hit things is the trick then? Right!” and went to it. Dude probably never played a rudiment exercise in his life.

    Covering Moon is almost like playing a bad actor in a film; in order to play a bad actor well, you have to get really good first, otherwise you don’t know enough to do the job effectively. Moon is like this; the more properly trained and well-practiced you are, the harder it’ll be to cover Keith until you get so good that you can start deliberately working outside the boxes of orthodoxy.

    Moon’s not my “favorite” drummer, but he’s unquestionably the most *unique* drummer who ever existed, and easily among the most influential. You don’t imitate Keith Moon, you just do your best to figure out how to do his parts while playing like an ordinary, earth-bound creature.

    Yep, Keith Moon was a terrible drummer…and that’s why he’s quite probably the single most influential player in modern music history. Everybody cops some of his style, often without even knowing it, and that includes plenty of folks who were already well-established when Keith came crashing out of the practice space like a one-man drum avalanche, and everyone since.