Trump’s False Moral Equivalency

For context let’s take a look at WWII. One side invaded its neighbors, gassed 6 million jews, and did other unspeakable things. The other side put a stop to it. If Trump had been around for it, he might have commented: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides.”

Or maybe he might have said, as he did on Tuesday:

And you had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. And nobody wants to say that. But I’ll say it right now. You had a group on the other side that came charging in…and they were very, very violent…I am not putting anybody on a moral plane. What I’m saying is this: You had a group on one side and you had a group on the other and they came at each other…and it was vicious and horrible. And it was a horrible thing to watch. But there is another side…And you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides…So I only tell you this. There are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was a horrible moment…a horrible moment. But there are two sides…

I don’t even know what to say…but what I do know is that Trump emboldens the enemy. Yes, the KKK, American Vanguard, neo-Nazis, and all of their ilk are–and must forever be–enemies of good people everywhere.

David Duke, the former KKK Grand Wizard, said in Charlottsville, “we are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump.”

“Obviously the alt-right has come very far in the past two years in terms of public exposure,” [Richard] Spencer said. “Is Donald Trump one of the major causes of that? Of course. He never talked about this conservative garbage we’ve been hearing for years…he was a nationalist.”

Andrew Anglin, who runs (or ran) the racist website The Daily Stormer wrote, “People saying he cucked are shills and kikes. He did the opposite of cuck. He refused to even mention anything to do with us. When reporters were screaming at him about White Nationalism he just walked out of the room.”

Racist commenters on Reddit were also explicit in praising Trump, for example, “Clearly President Trump is condemning the real haters: the SJW/Marxists who’ve attacked our guys.”

Commenters elsewhere were more explicit: “Trump comments were good. He didn’t attack us. He just said the nation should come together. Nothing specific against us. He said that we need to study why people are so angry, and implied that there was hate… on both sides! So he implied the antifa are haters.”

Again, “There was virtually no counter-signaling of us at all. He said he loves us all. Also refused to answer a question about white nationalists supporting him. No condemnation at all. When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room. Really, really good. God bless him.”

After Trump singled out white supremacists on Monday, David Duke wrote, “I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror, & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists.”

Heeding Duke, Trump came back on Tuesday and re-presented his false equivalency, to which Duke tweeted: “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa”

It seems that Trump thrives on adulation, and if he can’t get it from the media, then he looks elsewhere for it.

Trump does not have to go far to see white nationalists and racists, they are in his administration in the form of Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Sebastian Gorka. Trumpism which is indistinguishable from racism is going to lead us to another civil war.

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Sharia Law

Happy to see that counter protesters outnumbered the bigots in nearly every city yesterday. Thankfully with little violence involved.

What I don’t get about the folks who are fearful of Sharia Law being implemented in the US is how ignorant they are. We have church/state separation. As long as we keep prayer out of schools and the 10 Commandments out of court houses and wacky religious monuments out of parks, then Sharia Law will not be able to gain access either.

It is the same people who attempt to force their Abrahamic religious creed on the rest of us who are fearful of Sharia. Hypocrite much?

With all of the protests taking place yesterday I can only assume that these people will stand strong in keeping the 10 Commandments out of our public spaces.

Coulter’s Speech is Not Being Suppressed

Ann Coulter was on all the networks last night complaining that she doesn’t have an outlet to speak freely. I am guessing that she has lived so long in her make believe stipulated reality that she lost the ability to detect irony. 

If all she wanted was the freedom to spew her hate speech she could have done so while the cameras were rolling. Coulter reglarly appears on tv and has published books spewing her thoughts, delusions, and ideas. To claim that she is being denied freedom of speech is laughable. 

It is not freedom of speech that she craves but the freedom to instigate violence and to burnish her image amongst the whacky right. Sorry, Ann, there is no Constitutional right to incite violence. Get over yourself, the rest of us already have. 

Presidential Election 2016

Last time I voted for president was 1992, Bill Clinton’s first term. If you recall that election, he was the man from Hope who was going to build a bridge to the 21st century. I had spent the previous few years protesting Bush the Elder’s war on Iraq. That war lasted about 3 months and was followed by an extended bombing campaign masquerading as a no-fly zone. I protested Bush and Quail’s local campaign stops and went and listened to Clinton’s hope filled message.  I voted for Bill Clinton without reservation.

Within 3 hours of Clinton’s inauguration, US war planes were dropping bombs on Iraq; a message to the world that while the US regime had changed, its foreign policy had not.

I have not voted for president since. On that day I realized that choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.

Since then I have heard many argue that if you don’t vote then you don’t have any right to complain. However, I think that argument has it backwards. If you vote and your candidate wins, you can’t complain as you are getting exactly what you asked for; and if you vote and your candidate loses, well you knew the rules of the game and you should not be a sore loser by complaining about it.

I almost voted for Obama his first term, that whole hope and change thing had me a little giddy, but I resisted, and I am thankful that I did. Obama turned out to be as evil as any other president in my adult life. Habeas corpus has not been restored, our foreign empire has grown and not shrunk, black prison sites still operate, indiscriminate bombings continued and even increased, etc ad nauseum. Obama’s first term might as well have been Bush the Lesser’s third term. Needless to say, I did not consider voting for Obama his second term and am happy that I sat out his first election.

This brings us to 2016–Clinton v Trump. Of course I would not consider voting for Trump, a billionaire “populist” running on racism and tax cuts for the one percent. And I find the thought of a Clinton presidency of little more consolation. Hillary is gaining the support of the neo-cons who led Bush to war and she sits well to the right of Obama on foreign policy. She has not brought up the idea of restoring habeas corpus and has not mentioned wanting to bring any troops home, she has even touted Kissinger (a noted war criminal) as someone to look up to.

Of course the Green Party’s Jill Stein and the Libertarian Gary Johnson will be on most ballots. Sure those are real choices, the first an anti-vaxxer with no political experience while the latter states that the solution to climate change is to colonize other planets; uh huh, real choices.

So after more than a year of hoopla, with election day just more than a month away, our choices are going to be a war monger, a space cadet, and a couple of wackadoos; I’ll leave it to the reader to determine which is which.

Form Over Function, Poor Curation of the Local Library

Today I visited our local public library, an imposing and vast edifice, a marvel of modern architecture. Since architecture is not my forte, here is a description of the building from Missouri Life:

Built in 2002, the Columbia Public Library is a noteworthy design by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates. The 102,000-square-foot library is housed within a dynamic, dramatic cylindrical form. The design is a prime example of the architecture firm’s approach: collages of styles, colliding forms, and superimposing one plan idea onto another to yield geometric and dramatic interior spaces. Large skylights are “carved” from the curved, masonry cylinder to introduce abundant natural light. Shifted grids, diagonals, and a range of materials, colors, and textures result in a more informal and humanistic architecture. The corner site at Broadway and Garth Avenue is also arranged in a highly geometric plan, with the building’s crescent shaped plan and half-circle parking lot forming a complete circle. Paving patterns emanate outward from the building and its entry.

The building is as imposing and wonderful as the description makes it sound. There are computers, a massive video collection, a vast selection of music…I guess that with all of this pomp and excess that there just wasn’t any money left over for books.

This library has such a shoddy collection of books that it should be ashamed to even call itself a library. I did a keyword search for “epicureanism” it had not a single book available to checkout and take home. There were audio books and ebooks and just a couple of dead tree books that I could have gotten on a waiting list to check out. Surely this could not be. So I tried “Epicurean” to see if they just had a weak key word system, same result. Perhaps the curators are biased against Epicureans, I tried “Stoicism”, same result. “Stoic”, same result. WTF? Let’s broaden our terms, “Hellenistic Philosophy”, same result. OK, ancient philosophy is not this library’s strong suit, lets change subjects. “Kropotkin”, same result. “Emma Goldman”, same result. Really?

It is nice that the library system (Daniel Boone Regional Library) subscribes to a fairly large collection of digital books. Some of the ebooks are created from Project Gutenberg books which are public domain and created by volunteers. There are multiple problems with the way that these books are implemented for lending. First, why make one sign in to download a book that is in the public domain? Secondly, why check them out for a limited time, why not just let the user download a drm free ebook that they can keep? Thirdly, and most egregious, the library violates the Project Gutenberg license in multiple ways. In direct violation of the license the ebooks are stripped of the license, the library also utilizes Project Gutenberg’s trademarks without license compliance.

All in all the Columbia Public Library is a perfect example of putting form above function. Truly sad to have such a grand building and to have inept curators and administration.

This is Hillary’s Plan to Win Over Bernie Supporters?

All I can say is WTF?

Give a listen to Kain’s campaign ad from 2005. This is not ancient history.

Ted Cruz came in (a far distant) second in the Republican primaries, so Trump chose someone ideologically like Cruz to unify the party. Bernie came in a (close) second in the Democratic primaries, so Hillary chose someone who is his polar opposite. Is she trying to throw the election? Did she change her mind about wanting to be president? Or does she take the Democratic base for granted?

In her efforts to win over dis-affected Republicans, she is not even tossing a bone to Millennials, or to those who have already suffered through nearly 30 years of the Democratic Leadership Council’s brand of “Republican Lite”™.

Pro death penalty, pro TPP, anti gay marriage and anti abortion? WTF! Kain claims to have values to support his positions, is he now going to flip flop on every issue important to Democrats and claim he now believes just the opposite…will he still claim to have values?

Please excuse the swearing, but we are so Fucked.

 

Tragic, But Not a Big Surprise

I think we can agree, last night’s ambush of police in Dallas is a horrible thing. Kids are waking up today without fathers, mothers without sons, wives without husbands. Nothing good will come of it, only more oppression. It is unequivocally a terrible event. Can we agree on that before we move forward?

Agreeing that it is a terrible event, a tragedy even, can we still see and understand the direct causes? The events leading up to the Dallas Massacre are plain to see for anyone caring to look. Follow that link and it is clearly evident that police have been killing unarmed black men for years and years. After the spotlight was shined on the practice with the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, the police still killed 2 unarmed black (mostly) men a week for all of 2015. That is AFTER we identified the problem, and I can only assume it was worse before that.

From this site we get some statistics for 2015:

 

• Only 10 of the 102 cases in 2015 where an unarmed black person was killed by police resulted in officer(s) being charged with a crime, and only 2 of these deaths (Matthew Ajibade and Eric Harris) resulted in convictions of officers involved. Only 1 of 2 officers convicted for their involvement in Matthew Ajibade’s death received jail time. He was sentenced to 1 year in jail and allowed to serve this time exclusively on weekends. Deputy Bates, who killed Eric Harris, will be sentenced May 31.[Bates received 4 years for the charge of second degree manslaughter.]

 

Read that quote again. Less than 10% prosecution rate and only 20% of those are convicted. Put another way, police only have a 2% chance of being punished for killing an unarmed black person. These numbers seem fanciful, but they are correct. There is a war on, it is a war being fought against (mostly) young black (mostly) men. It is being financed by our tax dollars and is being waged by those who have sworn to protect and serve.

And then events unfold like those in Dallas. We all gape, we act surprised, we stare at the violence porn on CNN/Fox and; in the end, we do nothing.

Do you think we can make it a single week after Dallas without an unarmed black man being murdered under the color of authority?

The right likes to demand that all Muslims apologize for every act of terror. While I believe this is as asinine as asking every cop to apologize for the war on black men, can’t we at least expect these public servants to out the bad apples within their ranks?

While–rightfully so–the thin blue line will get a little thicker after Dallas, we also need to see that same thin blue line as a direct cause of Dallas.

What happened in Dallas is tragic, just as what happened in Baton Rouge and Minneapolis earlier this week are. Tragedy breeds tragedy, and I fear that it is going to get worse.