Archive for February, 2021

commenting

Sunday, February 7th, 2021

I had the displeasure of looking down to the comments section of some breitbart article. Saying more or less the same as this here, but with a certain cloistered echo where no one outside this belief Mayne reading or responding. But All right. This is evident ally going to become a pillar of “hidden history” for a segment of the population, and not really willing to follow the rabbit holes on Dominion, the “big picture” ” how can the map turn out so?” in relation to a Republican Presidential candidate who — at war with “Republican Establish!ent” you would think would follow with a reaction from “Republican Establishment” voters.

One.

On the other hand, what seem to me to be reasonable claims that Dominion voting machines were compromised and used to flip presidential results are too preposterous for consideration? I’m not a computer security expert, but Sydney Powell has produced several such experts who say it happened. In Antrim County Michigan, they were caught flipping votes, and the machines examined by forensic experts who told us in their report how it was done. The voting machines tagged a high percentage of votes as “errors,” sending them for adjudication where operators could change them at will with no supervision or paper trail. Then there is the “big picture” evidence. There are 19 bellwether counties that have predicted the outcome of a very high percentage of presidential elections. Trump won 18 of those 19, but lost. Trump won Ohio, Florida, Iowa, and North Carolina. No president has won those states and failed to win the election in 100 years. Yet, rather than give Powell’s evidence a close look, a handful of lawyers in the White House just dismiss her as a kook and hand power to the Democrats. Giving a “close look” would, of course, require extreme measures such as seizure by U.S. Marshalls because the democrats (and some Republicans) refused to allow examination voluntarily.

II. Here lay a classic bit of conspiracy — sometimes rationalizing sometimes analysis. It is the “kooks thrown into the mix by Powers that Be to divert from the real conspiracy concerns”. Moving in the same basic reasoning: Indeed, it was a clever political ploy by the Clinton Administration to jump at Ross Perot’s challenge for a debate on Larry King, so with Gore v Perot noe Ross Perot becomes the face of NAFTA opposition. The dilemma with this vote challenge fight is Giuliani looked absurd even if you cut Powell and Wood out of the equation.

For my own part I will say that it’s disappointing, to say the least, to have had so much fringe kookery contaminating whatever might be true about alleged electoral fraud. It got so bad with crazies like Sidney Powell (with her “Release the Kraken” idiocy) and Lin Wood (with his “Mike Pence and others will hang” lunacy) that you could no longer discern truth from fantasy.

In fact, I even began to suspect that Powell and Wood were engaged in a sort of psy-op designed to do more damage than good to the Trump cause, and specifically to undermine the efforts of Giuliani. Why else would two seasoned and respected lawyers say the crazy things they said?

Three. French Revolution analogies in vogue.

For someone who loves France this is some pretty dumb stuff, Rod. Armed mobs aided and abetted by a small minority of members of the sovereign legislative body *absoutely can and have* overthrown governments. See the Insurrection of 31 May – 2 June 1793, the July Revolution of 1830, or the fall of Louis Philippe for some examples off the top of my head.

And the mere fact that a conspiracy theory has no basis in reality absolutely does not mean that a bunch of armed idiots can’t use it as the basis of a government. Have you forgotten the famine pact and it’s misbegotten progeny, the general maximum?

There is nothing the left will do that can’t be undone by the Democratic process. All you have to do is convince people, which will get progressively easier (pun intended) as those idiots fail in their basic tasks of government because they’re off having a circular firing squad about whether Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Thurgood Marshall should be canceled for some shit that they’ll dig up or dream up.

Meanwhile supporting or enabling an armed faction believing in “eucatastrophic victory” is the road to living in Syria–something that will almost certainly kill millions and take generations to recover if that’s even possible. Christian love in action, again apparently.

Four. Actually, reading on the immediate post Reconstruction period of WW2 — the reason such a “denazification” or “defascization” analogy falls apart is … Leniency and shrugs were liberally granted anyway, no matter how darkly you view T.ump. On this supposed “truth and reconciliation” fantasy…

Hyperbole aside, can you spot the flaw in this oft-used historical analogy? South Africa was a brutal racist police state. Most countries that have staged variants on truth commissions or qualified amnesties for past collaborators did so in large part because they were transitioning from authoritarianism to liberal democracy, and doing so requires immediate creative thinking about how to deal with past crimes and operate a current government without re-filling the prisons. It’s a damnably hard problem, not least because laws change dramatically in such transitions, prompting difficult questions about how to assign culpability to actions and collaborations that were perfectly legal in the Before Times.

Regardless of how darkly you characterize the Trump administration, that analogy just does not apply to the United States. Our laws, with almost no exception, are the same, and are in fact being used to prosecute hundreds of people connected with the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill ransacking. There are no pressing questions of lustration, of property-denationalizing, of teaching old civil service new codes of behavior.

Shorn of such urgencies, any proposed Truth Commission process looks more like a one-sided lecture, potentially backstopped by some government coercion aimed at those who are producing and consuming media in ways that the commissioners find distasteful. Not a very promising scenario for “reconciliation.”

Five. Book Review, forced historical connections.

I recently re-read Love in the Ruins. The first time I read it was my early 20s and while I enjoyed it, I didn’t quite get it. Now, in my late 30s, married with kids, close in age to the heroic Dr. Tom More, it hit very close to home, both personally and globally. Given the Walker Percy bent of this blog’s commenters, I’m sure many of you have read it too.

The book is 50 years old this year, and could have been written yesterday. Except the QAnon-ers like Congresswoman Greene are even crazier than Percy’s Knothead conservatives (but subject to the same “unseasonable rages, delusions of conspiracies, high blood pressure, and large-bowel complaints”).

And of course, there are plenty of parallels between the TRUST SCIENCE! crowd of today and the Leftpapa researchers in Percy’s Fedville, between the swamp-dwelling radical guerillas in the novel and the critical race theory extremists in our real world. I mean, Uru (formerly “Isaiah Washington,” a well-known football player turned political science Ph.D.) immediately brought to mind one Colin Kaepernick. But I digress.