10.24.12
It’s much worse than I imagined
Stupefying.
10.23.12
On the wish for authoritarians
It’s difficult for grasp how the Republican Party retains any support. That is, until you recognize that human beings, and the way they think, haven’t changed much.
Here’s William L. Shirer, in a yellowed 1959 copy of “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” with something to say on people who live in media cages:
I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state … It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsification and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a cafe, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was to try to even make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.
So when Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote last night that Mitt Romney had “fucked the dog” in the debate, he immediately followed it with: “This should be the death-blow to Romney, but I’ve said that before and been wrong.”
The Psychopath Vote, the Romney vote, has its media, much like the one Shirer described experiencing in his book. The internet did not give anyone a free, uncensored world. In practice, it made it easier to encapsulate the space of one’s own tribe.
As far as foreign policy went, viewers will have noticed how the GOP, using its media, has made global warming a third rail issue in American politics.
“The rapid melting of the polar ice cap is turning the once ice-clogged waters off northern Alaska into a navigable ocean …” reads the piece.
However, in 2012 America, one insane and dangerous political party, often faced by only supine opposition, has successfully convinced half the country that this isn’t happening or is of no consequence.
And so we’ve had debates in which the the incumbent and the gazillionaire menace squabble over who will be most aggressive digger and miner of fossil fuels.
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10.19.12
One reason I gave up cable
Basic cable, as Media Matters notes today, is rotted. It features a slew of name channels, all doing reality shows which range from intelligence-insulting to the outright nauseating. They cater to the worst of bottom-out-of-sighters in the country, most notably this year, the total dogshite demographic called “preppers.”
Or part of the Ted Nugent/Psychopath Vote.
Distilled, from Media Matters:
If one scene defines last week’s premiere of Ted Nugent’s Gun Country, set in the survivalist-thick scrublands surrounding Waco, Texas, it is the show’s unnervingly giddy and pony-tailed host standing behind a .50-caliber Browning armor-piercing machine gun and blowing a bunch of holes in the four-inch reinforced steel door used by a team of local “preppers” to protect their bunker armory against an attack of the undead. Neither the machine gun nor the vault hatch fills any conceivable civilian-defense need ….
It’s the sort of weapon you’d expect to see wielded with glee in a Dawn of the Dead remake …
The Pet Psychic is A Brief History of Time compared to many of the shows now airing on the channel. In recent years Discovery has joined other companies in its former documentary niche in largely abandoning in-depth science programming in favor of its antipode, what might best be called anti-science: shows that glorify stupidity and celebrate a giggling, Beavis and Butthead-style pleasure in blowing stuff up and killing things …
‘[The] arrival of Ted Nugent on [the Disovery] roster is a new low suggestive of just how much more socially destructive television can become,” it continues.
Read the rest. It’s thoroughly depressing, but an excellent supercilious takedown.
Preppers — from the archives.
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10.11.12
Nugent, his sworn enemy, and Discovery
From Media Matters, a capture of Ted Nugent’s tweets upon promotion of his “Gun Country” special on Discovery.
This morning Ted Nugent accused the Obama administration of treason and referred to them as “enemies of America.” Tonight, the controversial Washington Times columnist and National Rifle Association board member will be the subject of a Discovery Channel special promoting “an inside look at gun culture” through his eyes.
“FUN” isn’t quite the word I’d use to describe anything Nugent. And it would be interesting to interview Discovery channel bigwigs over Nugent calling the administration “enemies of America” and accusing the president of “treason” right after advertising his show on “gun culture” on their network. Nugent knows who reads his words and he stops just short of advocating armed attack on the president and his administration.
Earlier this year Nugent received a visit from the US Secret Service after he issued public comments at an NRA convention appearing to threaten the president.
A columnist at ThinkProgress writes:
What is sort of depressing is the way Discovery’s presenting the special, and Nugent, as “a strong and vocal advocate for guns, hunting and all things America.??? I wasn’t aware that denigrating women in public life and engaging in violent fantasies about people you disagree with politically, both staples of Nugent’s rhetorical and on-stage arsenal, counted as “all things American.??? Nugent may declare, in promotional material for the show that appears on Discovery’s website that “Our American Dream is measured in ballistics.??? I’m not sure Discovery realizes how crabbed and depressing that formulation is. It would be unattractive for Discovery to work with Nugent under any circumstances, but if the network is going to do a special on him, it would be nice if they could find their way to a more limited characterization of him …
Actually, the modern Republican Party has made denigrating women, always famous leaders of the Democratic Party, and “engaging in violent fantasies about people you disagree with politically” a common hobby for many Americans. The Ted Nugent, or Psychopath Vote, is a strong constituent of the Tea Party/GOP.
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10.10.12
Excerpted: How extremism was mainstreamed
Excerpted, from a Matt Taibbi piece at Rolling Stone (comments added):
“Well, it’s over. Or almost over, thank God. It looks like Obama will probably win, which I guess is good news, compared to the alternative – a Mitt Romney presidency would have felt like four straight years of waking up with a naked Lloyd Blankfein sitting on your face.”
Nobody except Matt Taibbi and a slim majority of his readers know who Lloyd Blankfein is. I made the same mistake.
“A decision that in reality takes one or two days of careful research to make is somehow stretched out into a process that involves two years of relentless, suffocating mind-warfare, an onslaught of toxic media messaging directed at liberals, conservatives and everyone in between that by Election Day makes every dinner conversation dangerous and literally divides families.”
Pretty much, although it doesn’t get at the huge splits and chasms that exist between the tribes of America.
I lost a friend recently because he and his upper class pals could not stop harping about the evil of the income tax, the 47 percent of the country — lazy moochers without the talent or work ethic to survive without entitlements — got out of paying it and how food stamps were bad.
Inevitably, as with anything from the right, an patently offensive joke was delivered:
A woman from Los Angeles who was a tree hugger, a liberal Democrat, and an anti-hunter, purchased a piece of timberland near Colville, WA .
There was a large tree on one of the highest points in the tract. She wanted a good view of the natural splendor of her land, so she started to climb the big tree. As she neared the top she encountered a spotted owl that attacked her. In her haste to escape, the woman slid down the tree to the ground and got many splinters in her crotch.
In considerable pain, she hurried to a local ER to see a doctor. She told him she was an environmentalist, a democrat, and an anti-hunter and how she came to get all the splinters. The doctor listened to her story with great patience and then told her to go wait in the examining room and he would see if he could help her.
She sat and waited three hours before the doctor reappeared. The angry woman demanded,???What took you so long???? He smiled and then told her, “Well, I had to get permits from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management before I could remove old-growth timber from a recreational area so close to a waste treatment facility. I’m sorry, but due to Obama Care they turned me down.???
Great stuff, gratuitously nasty to more than half the population, too. And now we ain’t pals.
“Politicians are much to blame for this, but we in the media have to take responsibility for the damage we do to the American psyche in the name of election coverage. At this very moment, there are people all over the country who are stocking up on canned goods and ammo for the apocalypse they believe will come if Obama is re-elected.”
The media isn’t responsible for the Ted Nugent voter, it just often covers them poorly, as if being a bigot is simply a difference in respectable opinion. It’s the property of the GOP. Taibbi knows it.
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10.09.12
The mainstreaming of hate
Laboratory of democracy, example #1. And some experiments yield results that are no good.
The current Republican Party has mainstreamed all the tropes of “The Turner Diaries,” the premier piece of race hate fiction in this country. I don’t say this lightly.
But after the last four years of the Obama presidency, it’s quite clear. One cannot ignore the mindless stockpiling of weapons in the absence of even the slightest moves toward gun control legislation, or even enforcement of exisiting rules.
And you would had to have been living in Antarctica to have missed all the common heroes of the right, portrayed as patriots, who generally and loudly profess to stand ready to revolt against the tyrannical government, warn of the alleged creeping menace of shariah law, people who wish and fantasize about the tossing out, reduction and destruction of others who’ve allegedly made the society corrupt — the blacks and browns (in “The Turner Diaries” called “mud people???) the millions of moochers, the poor, government bureaucrats and elites. The list of enemies of the good people of the place we live in is long.
Indeed, the entire survivalist moment, now calling themselves “preppers??? in an unsuccessful attempt to achieve distance from the old designation because of its association with neo-Nazis, is all of the extreme right.
There are no progressives or Democrats in the prepper patriot bunkers. No, the modern patriot drills in camouflage clothes and on gun ranges, honing shooting skills to stop crime, to make society more safe by peace through strength, but later needed when they must defend their families, stuff and bug out homes after society collapses.
Who will they be defending against?
Why, of course, all those on the enemies list: The non-whites who didn’t stockpile food, who lived on the government teat, those on the food stamp rolls (especially the food stamp EBT carders!) the corrupt and lazy progressives, any voters for the other side, a horde predicted to come boiling out of its urban warrens to take what all the good white people have.
The continued reality of this imagery, in political campaigns, as entertainment reality television, in daily news stories, in vanity press prepper civil war fiction (take a look at this mind-numbing collection at Amazon), is as morbidly depressing as a first, and only, reading of “The Turner Diaries.”
Only you can put the book back on the shelf or into the trash.
Pine View Farm has done a lot of documentation of spot news of this and today is no different, that blog pointing to an essay by Mr. Chauncey Devega.
Americans are unable to come together to solve common issues of public concern because political elites–the Right is preeminently guilty here–have developed a concerted campaign to “otherize??? and marginalize those Americans with whom they disagree.
In all, the Right-wing media apparatus feeds conservatives a daily diet of misinformation, distortions, and hate speech in which their foes are described as insects to be crushed, mentally defective, traitors, and people not fit to live. Such rhetoric is not harmless political theater: seeds do indeed bear fruit.
In September, the conservative website the Free Republic published a hypothetical scenario about how the American economy will collapse and “urban??? riots by black people will need to be put down by white suburban vigilantes.
Devega excerpts from “a hypothetical scenario about how the American economy will collapse and ‘urban’ riots by black people will need to be put down by white suburban vigilantes.”
A new social contract has been created, where bread and circuses buy a measure of peace in our minority-populated urban zones. In the era of ubiquitous big-screen cable television, the internet and smart phones, the circus part of the equation is never in doubt as long as the electricity flows. But the bread is highly problematic. Food must be delivered the old-fashioned way: physically. Any disruption in the normal functioning of the EBT system will lead to food riots with a speed that is astonishing. This will inevitably happen when our unsustainable, debt-fueled binge party finally stops, and the music is over. Now that the delivery of free or heavily subsidized food is perceived by tens of millions of Americans to be a basic human right, the cutoff of “their??? food money will cause an immediate explosion of rage. When the hunger begins to bite, supermarkets, shops and restaurants will be looted, and initially the media will not condemn the looting. Unfortunately, this initial violence will only be the start of a dangerous escalation …
In order to highlight their grievances and escalate their demands for an immediate resumption of government benefits, the [black or brown]
MUYflash mobs will next move their activities to the borders of their ethnic enclaves. They will concentrate on major intersections and highway interchanges where [white]non-MUYsuburban commuters must make daily passage to and from what forms of employment still exist …The results of these clashes will frequently resemble the intersection of Florence and Normandie during the Rodney King riots in 1992, where Reginald Denny was pulled out of his truck’s cab and beaten nearly to death with a cinder block.
“Sniper ambushes” will be the tactic developed to counter the non-white mob, writes the “author” at the Western Rifle Shooters Association:
This extremely deadly trick was developed by our war fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan, taking advantage of the significant effective range and firepower of our scoped 5.56mm rifles. Tactics such as the sniper ambush may not be seen early in the civil disorder, but they will surely arise after a steady progression of atrocities attributed to rampaging [blacks]
MUYs.
The piece, the author writes, was inspired by something this blog noted a month or so ago — a Small Wars Journal think piece on the US military fighting a domestic insurrection in Darlington, South Carolina.
The Tea Party promptly showed up in force to vent in the comments section:
Those who would actually need to invoke the Insurrecton [sic] Act would already have conducted the affairs of their offices in such a patently un-American, unethical, illegal, unconstitutional and treasonous manner (anybody we know?) that the elected official should uave already been arrested and put on trial. Only if for a protracted period the citizenry feels patriotically obligated to follow the constitution (the part about abolishing a corrupted government) to the point where knowing the US military will become involved, do it anyway.
This is the modern Republican Party, the party of Mitt Romney. If you think there’s little difference between the two current candidates for president or that voting in November is an exercise in holding your nose, you couldn’t be more wrong.
“The right has nothing to sell but hate, but, sadly, hate sells,” concludes Frank at Pine View Farm.
This is not the fringe. It’s solidly entrenched in the mainstream.
See The Pyschopath Vote, preppers and anything under the Ted Nugent and Extremism tabs for the last few years. It will leave your stomach upset.
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10.05.12
The Poor Man’s John Galt
Nugent does the Ayn Rand routine at the WaTimes, emitting this howler:
Mitt Romney is very wealthy. Good for him. He could only have achieved his amazing fortune in America, the land of opportunity. The opportunity that made Mr. Romney rich is still out there for the taking.
If you still don’t understand why it’s hysterical, time to go elsewhere. Copy editors wept.
The rest insists the only people who vote Democratic are lazy non-white “bloodsuckers” who spend what little they have on lottery tickets.
It’s beyond offensive:
[The] backbone of the Democratic Party, the ones buying the most lottery tickets, are the ones who can least afford it. Duh. If these mouth-breathers promise not to vote, the GOP should buy them a lottery ticket.
“You might want to note that there is no demonization of the wealthy from Republicans, only Democrats,” he writes.
Yes, readers have noticed Ted. The GOP, those not in the 1 percent, and he ain’t, are the finest collection of bigots and shoe-shiners the rest of the country’s probably ever seen.
The “mouth-breathers” and “bloodsuckers” spend it all on lottery tickets and liquor. Stop attacking your betters, stupid lazy drunks!
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10.01.12
One of many reasons I don’t miss cable TV
Reality tv for the Psychopath Vote. Or to paraphrase Paul Fussell, catering to the audience of shallow pocket that gets erections dreaming about shooting or shoving a bayonet into someone foreign or liberal, preferably smaller and not white.
The more indecent and infamous Nugent gets, the more atrocious television he makes. Like a perpetual motion machine of BAD — that which is puerile, odious or both, publicized as if it is the opposite, a defiantly burning example of freedom and liberty.
A show devoted to showing how tricked up semi-automatic long range assault rifles and machine guns to shoot antelope, pop mannequin heads and blow up vehicles. In case you’re attacked by zombies or, uh, real people. What a pitch that must have been.
As said previously, I grew up in a community of hunters. But there came a point where excess became celebrated simply because it was excessive. And now all the straining white flab in too-small camouflage clothes, all the paramilitary gear, the creepy obsession with private ownership of heavy weapons by men who rant about tyrannical government, just shows the rest of the world how psychotic much of this country has turned.
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09.28.12
Nugent recommends work crews for the 47%
From the Washington Times, Nugent explains the weird GOP conspiracy theory about the Democratic Party:
As I’ve written before, for at least the past 50 years the Democratic Party has intentionally engineered a class of political “victims??? who have been bamboozled into being dependent on the federal government for their subsistence, including food, housing and now health care. They get this without paying any federal income taxes, and that’s wrong. Something for nothing is always a scam. This is how you buy votes, plain and simple.
“No able-bodied American should get anything for free while doing nothing to earn it,” he concludes.
Work crews are the answer, presumably: “Put a rake, shovel, paint brush or broom in their hands …That will instill some pride back in their lives…”
In the face of such irresistible logic it would seem pointless to say: “But almost all of them are already working.”
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09.20.12
Supplier businesses to the Psychopath vote …
Are dependent on an Obama win for a continued business boom, according to the Wall Street Journal:
As Cabela’s Inc. prepares the selection of guns it will sell for the holiday season and winter hunting, the outdoor-gear retailer has two plans: one if President Barack Obama is re-elected, and one if he isn’t.
The Sidney, Neb.-based retailer and other companies in the guns-and-ammo business say if Mr. Obama wins a second term they are preparing for a surge in sales—the same as they saw after he was elected in 2008—from buyers fearful the president would back policies to make buying a gun more difficult. If Republican challenger Mitt Romney wins, though, the chain plans to stock more items such as waterproof boots and camouflage hunting gear.
“[Mr. David Humke], an avid deer hunter, worries guns might become less available in the future,” reads the Journal. “People feel it’s coming so they’re stockpiling,” he said.
Obese white guy in gun shop, with kid in cart, the kind of dude DD never meets, anymore. Different worlds, Nebraska might as well be Pluto.
Growing up in southeastern Pennsyltucky, I was in a community of hunters. Public school was always canceled the first day of hunting season. In fact, it was rare that people didn’t have guns in Pine Grove, PA. I had no problem with gun ownership.
But the continued completely irrational surge of gun sales nationwide during the Obama administration, in the absence of any gun legislation, is the hallmark of a people and culture with which I have nothing in common.
I don’t want to meet them again. What happened to their minds?
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