Month: October 2018

It’s hard to know for certain whether Nikki Haley’s decision to step down as the ambassador to the United Nations is basically an autonomous decision or is driven more by the president and his displeasure with her service. There is plenty of ammunition to arm either argument, and so it may be that this is a rare case where it really is a mutual decision.

What’s not really in doubt is that Ambassador Haley is ambitious. Having already served as a state governor and in a cabinet level position, the next step seems fairly obvious. She will seek the presidency and hope that at worst it earns her a place on the ticket as someone’s number two. The big question is whether she will wait until 2024 to make her run.

To be sure, she’s saying all the right things:

Ms. Haley, who has long been seen as a potential presidential candidate, said she had no intention of running for the presidency in 2020, as has been speculated. Instead, she said, she plans to campaign for Mr. Trump’s re-election.

“I think you have to be selfless enough to know when you step aside and allow someone else to do the job,” Ms. Haley said.

Yet, she knows just as well as everyone else that Robert Mueller’s special counsel’s office has accumulated a near phalanx of cooperating witnesses who are providing evidence against the president in the Russia investigation. She knows that the investigation has been on a campaign-related hiatus since Labor Day and will begin making big news again in only a handful of weeks. It is best you make your departure from the administration official before that happens to remove as much of the taint as can be removed. She has already made certain to leave a trail of dissent and disagreement with Trump policies and actions that she can point to in defense of her decision to serve in Trump’s cabinet. She can provide inside information to create further separation if she needs to, while choosing to stay mostly loyal if that seems like the better political choice.

She seems to have things plotted out fairly well, although it’s probably a mistake to agree to serve out the remainder of the year. That may require her to defend the president in ways that will come back to haunt her.

In any case, I wouldn’t take her promises not to run in 2020 and to campaign for Trump’s reelection at face value. Those are promises she can keep if they seem worth keeping, but if things work out they way she hopes she will be breaking them.

What those who have studied authoritarianism since Adorno and his colleagues published The Authoritarian Personality, Hofstadter wrote
The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Hannah Arendt was penning some of her classic work, up to more present-day theorists and researchers like Bob Altemeyer and John Duckitt have warned us about is increasingly becoming reality. David Neiwert’s latest tweet thread is well worth reading.
Herr Combover barks about a particular group he doesn’t like, and lo and behold, his authoritarian base give in to their base instincts – submission to Dear Leader and meting out violence against those Dear Leader targets.

Neiwert makes another pertinent observation: there is nothing even remotely like this on what we might think of as an actual left: communist, anarchists,antifa (sorry liberals – these folks don’t think of us as left by their standards). There is one side that is hell-bent on trashing democratic norms and institutions, and spill a bit of blood along the way. Those folks are right-wing authoritarians and the GOP is for all intents and purposes their home. Herr Combover has his stormtroopers. No one else does. The aftermath of the 2016 election unleashed the id of this bunch to a degree unseen in a long time. Even Obama’s impending 2008 victory produced less violence and eliminationistic rhetoric than the current era – and that election and the months afterward were ones of genuine economic insecurity (to put it mildly).

You can like it or hate it all you want, but there is one viable political party in the US that actually produces sane leaders and potential leaders, and has a base (and a much larger potential base) of sane people. It ain’t the GOP folks. It’s the Democratic Party. At this point, if anything even remotely resembling the progressive dreams that many of you once espoused still mean anything, you’ll be voting, canvassing, and donating like your life depends on it.

I noted in ‘Charlottesville: Race and Terror’ tied for most nominations at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards that “Mass shootings, hurricanes, and Syria dominated the news last year, so it’s no surprise they dominate the nominations and I plan on writing about all the nominees about them.”

I begin with the following video from the Washington Post, which earned a News & Documentary Emmy nomination for Outstanding Breaking News Coverage for its coverage of the 2017 Hurricane Season.  Watch When the roads turned to rivers: Texas in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.

“People are more resilient than you think,” says a Houston resident. Watch this Washington Post original documentary on how Southeast Texas is dealing with the devastation Harvey left behind.

The other nominees for Outstanding Breaking News Coverage include CNN’s Worldwide Hurricane Coverage, so this category includes two nominees that covered the hurricane season.  The rest consist of ABC News: The Las Vegas Massacre and CNN’s coverage of the Fall of Raqqa and the Manchester Concert Attack.  As I wrote, mass shootings, hurricanes, and Syria dominated the news, so they’re dominating the news nominations.  Since I already embedded a video from The Washington Post, I’m embedding one from CNN: What Hurricane Harvey left behind.

A week after Hurricane Harvey made landfall, CNN drove from Corpus Christi to four other cities to see the destruction it left behind.

There is more coverage of Harvey nominated in the next category, Outstanding Coverage of a Breaking News Story in a Newscast, where The Weather Channel’s Live Coverage of Hurricane Harvey is nominated alongside “Charlottesville: Race and Terror,” “BBC World News: Fierce Fight for Mosul,” “CBS News: Las Vegas Massacre,” and “NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt: Las Vegas Massacre.”  I’m pretty sure that “Charlottesville: Race and Terror” has the inside track, but that won’t stop me from embedding Incredible: Dog Rescued on Roof during Harvey from The Weather Channel.

Follow over the jump for coverage of Hurricanes Maria and Irma.
For my readers who are wondering about coverage of Hurricane Maria, “Sin Luz: Life Without Power” by The Washington Post earned a nomination for Outstanding New Approaches: Current News.  Unfortunately, this video is on Vimeo, not YouTube, so I can’t embed it here.  Joining it are “The New York Times: 10 Minutes. 12 Gunfire Bursts. 30 Videos. Mapping the Las Vegas Massacre” plus two more nominees for video journalism from The New York Times, “Escaping Boko Haram” and “How 655,000 Rohingya Muslims Escaped,” and “From Migrants to Refugees: The New Plight of Central Americans” from Univision Noticias Digital.

Univision’s “Primer Impacto: Unidos en el Dolor: Huracán María en Puerto Rico (United in Pain: Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico)” and Univision’s “Aquí y Ahora: Un doble golpe (Double Impact)” both earned nominations for Outstanding Coverage of a Breaking News Story in Spanish.  Competing against them are another report from Univision’s Aquí y Ahora, “Terror en Las Vegas (Terror in Las Vegas)” (sometimes the news looks the same in both English and Spanish, even if it sounds different), and two about the Mexican earthquake, “CNN en Español: Terremoto en México (Mexico Earthquake),” and “Noticiero Telemundo: Terremoto en México (Earthquake in Mexico).”  Since it covers both Hurricane Maria and the earthquake, I am sharing Aquí y Ahora: Doble Golpe | Promo | Univision.

Next, Las primeras imágenes que se conocen de los daños causados por el huracán María en Puerto Rico (The first images that are known of the damages caused by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico).

El periodista de Univision Galo Arellano muestra desde San Juan que algunas, construidas con madera, sufrieron daños en los techos y paredes. (Univision reporter Galo Arellano shows from San Juan that some [structures], built with wood, suffered damage to the ceilings and walls.)

That’s a different perspective than I’ve taken on the disaster, as I’ve looked at it through the lenses of Puerto Rico Statehood and last year’s flu epidemic.  It’s about time I examined the damage itself, instead of its secondary effects.

The final nomination for coverage of last year’s hurricanes honors WJXT-TV’s Hurricane Damage (Jacksonville, FL) from Hurricane Irma, thus completing the trio of major storms that made landfall in the U.S.  Competing against it for Outstanding Regional News Story: Spot News is another nominee that covered severe weather, WLS-TV’s “ABC7 Eyewitness News at 4pm” (Chicago, IL) on “Deadly Tornadoes,” along with reports from WJZY-TV’s FOX46 10 p.m. & Digital Coverage (Charlotte, NC) on the Charlotte Protest, WPLG-TV’s “Local 10 News at 11:00” (Miami, FL) on the Attack at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport (another mass shooting to cover), and KTAZ-TV’s “Noticiero Telemundo Arizona” (Phoenix, AZ) on Black Lives Matter Protest Crew Pepper Sprayed.  Since today’s entry is about hurricanes, I conclude today’s entry with WJXT Irma Montage.

I’m not fond of comparing generations to make political points or to satisfy a desire to express frustration, so I don’t write about “The Greatest Generation” or make a habit out of bashing baby boomers or comparing Generation X unfavorably with Millennials.  In our present circumstances, though, I think it can be inspiring to think about what other generations have lived through, if for no other reason than to remind us that things have been a lot more difficult in the past than they are now.

My father was fortunate to serve his time in the army in-between the Korean and Vietnam wars, but he certainly had colleagues who fought in both of those conflicts as well as World War Two. A close friend of his did the beach landing at Anzio and fought up Italy’s boot.  I met a relative by marriage in the 1990’s who had done five beach landings in the Pacific, each of them as terrifying as the D-Day landing depicted in Saving Private Ryan. He came home and farmed in the flatlands of Minnesota, and I’m not sure I’ve ever met a tougher or more weathered individual. At one point, he survived for two days by playing dead on a Pacific Island while Japanese soldiers walked around bayoneting anyone who seemed to still be breathing. On the third day, the Marines showed up and rescued him while collecting their dead.  Then he did three more landings.

My generation was spared these kinds of things. The main civil rights bills were all completed by 1968, a year before I was born, and the Vietnam War was completely over by the time I was six.  The Supreme Court’s Roe ruling has been in effect since I was in my first year of nursery school.  I did lose my job after the 9/11 attacks and suffered some losses and financial hardships during the Great Recession, but that’s nothing to compare to what my parents’ generation experienced growing up during the Great Depression.

As unpleasant as our political battles have been over the last thirty or forty years, they simply don’t compare to the Civil War or the battles to end American apartheid or the way the country absolutely came apart in the 1960’s. No one has been drafted to fight in our wars.

Older generations than mine endured much worse with less complaint and more fortitude, and I find myself having to remind myself of this whenever I feel worn down and exhausted. What’s really bothering me, when I stop and think about it, is that I thought these prior generations bequeathed to us something more stable and enduring. I resent that their hard work is being squandered, and I honestly resent having to do the kind of hard work I thought they had spared me.

It turns out, my generation will get its time in the barrel after all. And the younger generations won’t ever know the kind of relative peace and calm we enjoyed for most of our lives.  What’s old is new again, and no one should kid theirselves that the battle will be shorter or easier this time around. It would be an excellent start to have a good midterm election, but that’s not guaranteed and it would only be a first step.

On climate alone, our children’s challenges will far exceed our own, and we’ll be fighting a 1920’s-era Supreme Court at every step along the way.

So, when you’re feeling shocked or fatigued and want to just check out, remember that you’ve had it comparatively easy up to now. The country has come apart more than once before, and so far the good guys have found a way to come out on top. This is a low point. With hard work, things start getting better from here.

Many people are considering Kavanaugh’s confirmation as evidence of a coming bust in the November elections. One side or the other (or both sides) of our UniParty system will indeed take a hit. Below are takes on two sides of that voting story.

Consider them well.

Read on.
#1-

Fake News and Weaponized Bots: How Algorithms Inflate Profiles, Spread Disinfo and Disrupt Democracy by T. J. Coles

Algorithms are getting so sophisticated that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell which online comments are real and which are generated by “bots”; which sites are genuinely popular and which are generating fake hits. In my new book Real Fake News (Red Pill Press), I argue that fake news can be traced back to ancient Babylon (at least) and that today’s hi-tech fakery is merely a continuation of policies designed to reinforce elite domination, be the given elite “right-wing” or “left-wing.”

DO BOTS AFFECT PERCEPTIONS?

Online fake news has become a phenomenon. By the time President Trump came to power, few Americans had heard of the “alt-right,” the ideological grouping partly responsible for Trump’s electoral success. Trump lost the popular vote by 2.6 million, but he won the Electoral College vote. In other words, “alt-right” voters were numerous enough to give Trump a plurality in the overall vote and thus the Electoral College. How do we explain this discrepancy, that online fake news is a phenomenon, yet its main champions remain obscure to most Americans?

It turns out that bots are pushing fake news s to make stories go “viral” by sharing them among fake bot accounts (“sock puppets”) on social media. In 2011, a team at Texas A&M University  created gibberish-spewing Twitter accounts. Their nonsense could not have possibly interested anyone, yet soon they had thousands of followers. They found that their Twitter “followers” were, in fact, bots.

In 2017 under a Pentagon grant, Shao et al. analysed 14 million Tweets spreading 4,000 political messages during the 2016 US Presidential campaign. They found that “[a]ccounts that actively spread misinformation are significantly more likely to be bots.” Fake news, they say, includes “hoaxes, rumors, conspiracy theories, fabricated reports, click-bait headlines, and even satire.” Incentives include sending “traffic to fake news sites [which] is easily monetized through ads, but political motives can be equally or more powerful.” During the presidential campaign 2016, it was discovered that the popularity profiles of fake news are indistinguishable from fact-checking articles.

The authors note that, “for the most viral claims, much of the spreading activity originates from a small portion of accounts.” The so-called super-spreaders of fake news are likely to be “social bots that automatically post link to articles, retweet other accounts, or perform more sophisticated autonomous tasks.” Regional vote shares toward Trump did not match the geographical location of (likely) bot accounts. Though it is unconfirmed, it is likely “that states most actively targeted by misinformation-spreading bots tended to have more surprising election results.”

Ratkiewicz et al. argue that Twitter has a structural bias for fake news due to its “140-character sound bytes [which] are ready-made headline fodder for the 24-hour news cycle.” Ferrara et al. write that bots can “engage in … complex types of interactions, such as entertaining conversation with other people, commenting on their posts, and answering their questions.”

—snip—

Not surprisingly, the military is in on it, too. In addition to the Pentagon funded mentioned above, in 2014 the Guardian revealed that the UK Ministry of Defence was spending over £60,000 of taxpayers’ money on a project called Full Spectrum Targeting. The project was conducted with Detica (a subsidiary of  BAE Systems), the Change Institute and Montvieux. “Emphasis is put on identifying and co-opting influential individuals, controlling channels of information and destroying targets based on morale rather than military necessity.” The Cognitive and Behaviour Concepts of Cyber Activities project cost over £310,000 and included Baines Associates, i to i Research and several universities, including Northumbria, Kent and University College London.

BOTS AS PSYCHOLOGICAL WEAPONS

There were serious underlying structural problems that led to Donald J. Trump becoming President of the USA. But fake news and the “alt-right” acted as a trigger for those underlying problems. Social media and bots helped Trump’s cause. Scientists have argued that the sheer volume of social media users means that the comparatively small influence of psychological targeting can translate into significant numbers of impacted users.

In 2014, scientists working for the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California and San Francisco exploited nearly 700,000 Facebook users by making them participate in an experiment without their knowledge or consent. “The experiment manipulated the extent to which people … were exposed to emotional expressions in their News Feed,” says the research paper.

The experiment “tested whether exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviors.” The two parallel experiments involved 1) reducing friends’ exposure to positive content and 2) reducing their exposure to negative content:

—snip—

The results concerning emotional contagion were statistically miniscule: 0.001. But, as the authors, point out: given “the massive scale of social networks such as Facebook, even small effects can have large aggregated consequences.” This, they theorize, equates “to hundreds of  thousands of emotion expressions in status updates per day.”

—snip—

FAKE NEWS, BOTS & THE MAKING OF A PRESIDENT?

The New York Daily News reports that Robert Mercer, one of Trump’s billionaire hedge-fund backers, worked for IBM on technology used to develop its Watson super-computer (“Brown clustering”), as well as Apple’s Siri technology. Mercer is a Trump mega-donor. There’s no evidence directly connecting Robert Mercer to pro-Trump bots. Yet, the kind of technologies and services in which Mercer-related companies are involved include influencing elections:

Trump has 30 million Twitter “followers,” only half of whom are real; the other 50% are bots. The newspaper also spoke to Simon Crosby of Bromium technologies, who explained that some of the Watson technology, allegedly developed by Mercer, “can quickly build, test and deploy bots or virtual agents across mobile devices or messaging platforms to create natural conversations between apps and users.” Crosby goes on to say that “arbitrary and ridiculous information [is] spread very quickly, and now to targeted  user[s],” who are “more susceptible to believing it and spreading it.”

—snip—

CONCLUSION

Psychological warfare emanating from billionaires like Mercer under the guise of online, grassroots (in reality astroturf) organizations, as well as from the military in as-yet-undisclosed forms, cannot dictate politics in a vacuum. Rather, they provide a subtle background to and trigger for complicated underlying factors, the main one being widespread discontent with current political systems. Fake news lights a fuse, igniting the powder keg of discontentment. But we should keep in mind, too, that monarchs, despots, big business, and advertisers have, throughout history, used the latest technologies to manipulate, dazzle and even the terrify those over whom they exercise power.

Condensed version of the above?

Sure.

Low IQ voters…of any and all political persuasions…will fall for the huge fake news efforts that bots can disseminate.

Since it appears to me that:

A-Tendencies towards racism, sexism, ultranationalist jingoism and other kneejerk hatreds are mostly distributed in the lower IQ areas of the human genome. Thus it is those types of people who will be the ones most likely to vote…out of anger if for no other reason.

Then:

B-The Trumpist revolution…almost completely based on negative emotions and massively aided by BotNews…will continue.

But…!!!

Here is the other side of this story.

#2-

Partisan Pollsters Fail Black Progressive Candidates by Pete Tucker

Now…that headline sounds very threatening, but I doubt that the author wrote it. Why? Because the article is actually very optimistic. Read on. (Emphases mine)

Ayanna Pressley, a progressive African American congressional candidate from Boston, was predicted to lose by 13 points in the Democratic primary, but she won by 18 points. In the primary for a New York congressional seat, the final poll showed Latina socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez trailing the Democratic incumbent by 36 points; she won by 15 points. In Georgia, polls showed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, the African American former minority leader of the State House of Representatives, well ahead in the Democratic primary, but nowhere near the 53 points she won by.

In Florida, the nation’s third largest state, polls for the Democratic gubernatorial primary showed Andrew Gillum, the progressive African American mayor of Tallahassee, finishing fourth, with around 12 percent of the vote. But Gillum won 34 percent of the vote, nearly three times what most polls had him at, and captured the nomination.

Then there’s Maryland, where the Democratic gubernatorial primary was supposed to be neck-and-neck, but the more progressive candidate, Ben Jealous, walked away with it, beating his chief challenger by over 10 points and taking all but two counties.

While primaries are difficult to predict, today’s polls are not just failing, they seem to be doing so in a way that makes progressive candidates of color appear to have less support than they do.

These polling errors are far from harmless. Faulty polls can turn into real losses by suppressing both votes and funding. It’s not hard to see why: Who is excited to back a sure-loser? This applies to potential voters, who are more likely to stay home on election day if their preferred candidate has no shot, as well as to potential donors, who would rather support a winner.

Contrary to public perception, polling is as much art as science. “What you’re trying to do is anticipate what someone is going to do at some future date,” respected Iowa pollster Ann Selzer told The Atlantic. “How do you take your best shot at predicting what someone will do?”

To make their predictions, pollsters look at any number of factors, including who voted in the prior election. But if pollsters base today’s voter turnout on an election that took place prior to Trump’s presidency and the resistance it has triggered, they’re “going to be wrong,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told The Guardian. “What the turnout factor is for millennials, what the turnout factor is for people of color, really has a massive impact and it’s very often predicted incorrectly.”

In the Trump era, young and nonwhite voters appear to be heading to the polls in numbers great enough to upend pollsters’ predictions.

—snip—

I have often said here that most polls are rigged in favor of whoever pays the bills, and also that polls and pollsters have their own societal lacks and non-understandings. Are there as many door-to-door polls in predominantly minority neighborhoods as there are in mixed or all-white neighborhoods? I doubt it. Are Millennials, Gen Xers, minorities and other people who are rightfully distrustful of the system as it stands now going to answer the phone if they don’t recognize the number? I don’t. Are they as likely to answer email polls? Again…I don’t.

But…are they going to vote?

It looks like…this time…they are.

We shall see in a little less than a month.

I certainly hope so.

As the Holy Man Yogi Berra once said, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”

Yup.

Of course, he also said “It gets late early out there.”

Yup twice.

Which way will the pendulum swing this time?

We shall see…won’t we.

Later…

AG

In the 1970’s, the U.S. Navy decided that they wanted an independent assessment of how difficult it was to read and understand their training manuals. The result was something called “the Flesch-Kincaid scale,” which will take a given piece of text and let you know what grade level of reading proficiency you need master in order to comprehend it.

Using that scale, a company called Factba.se went and looked at the interviews, speeches and press conferences from presidents going back all the way to Herbert Hoover. What they discovered is pretty interesting. For example, George W. Bush actually had a modestly bigger vocabulary than his father and both he and FDR spoke at a seventh grade reading level.  Hoover and Jimmy Carter, by contrast, spoke at an eleventh grade reading level, while Obama was assessed at tenth grade and Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford and Clinton clocked in at ninth grade.  Donald Trump’s number was 4.6, so we can generously round that up to fifth grade. Basically, your typical eight year-old can read a transcript of anything Trump says and understand it without difficulty.

Of course, at a 2015 rally in South Carolina, Trump famously boasted, “I know words. I have the best words.” Whether he knows a lot of words or not, he doesn’t use very many of them.

That doesn’t keep him from complaining that he’s not considered an elite or from telling his supporters that they’re the real elite.

“I always hear about the elite. . . . They’re elite? I went to better schools than they did. I was a better student than they were. I live in a bigger, more beautiful apartment, and I live in the White House, too, which is really great. . . . I think we’re the elites. They’re not the elites.”

In fact, he’s taken to calling his fans the “Super-Elite.”

Barry Thompson, a 58-year-old Trump supporter from the Minneapolis suburb of Cottage Grove, said that he hadn’t heard the president’s riff on the “super elite” but that he likes it. A woman standing in line behind him shook her head and disagreed: “He’s not an elite. He’s a billionaire, but he talks on our level. He talks to us.”

There’s some secret elixir in those quotes. How do you say that someone is a billionaire but he’s not an elite?

Well, you can say that if the billionaire talks at your level and your level is not elite. Many people might not realize that Trump is resonating with them in large part because he doesn’t use any hifalutin language that makes them feel inadequate in some way, but at least some of them are aware of this and don’t mind mentioning it as one of things about Trump that they find appealing.

Strangely, it makes them want to have a beer with him even though he doesn’t drink beer and claims to have never touched a drop of alcohol in his life. It makes them think that he understands and cares about their problems even though Trump was a millionaire by the time he was eight years old and has shown no sincere signs of caring about anyone but himself in his entire life.

It might be exasperating for college graduates, but Trump’s mangling of the English language and his fifth grade way of expressing himself has helped him form a strong bond with a lot of people who actually want a president that doesn’t challenge them intellectually.

What’s also frustrating is that another part of Trump’s appeal to these folks, many of whom were lifelong Democrats, is that he wasn’t strongly associated with either party and so became a vehicle for a lot of people who wanted to someone take “a wrecking ball” to Washington DC and its elites. That’s an understandable sentiment, but Trump has aligned himself in most things with the far right of the Republican Party.  Obviously, his nominations to the federal courts reflect this, but so do his policies on climate, taxation, regulation, race, immigration, and women’s issues.

The main areas where he’s taking a wrecking ball to both sides of the establishment are on trade and tariffs, and on the American postwar global infrastructure and alliances.  I’d add in the war on the FBI and the intelligence community, but the GOP seems to be going along with this with considerably less fuss than they are his trade wars and assaults on NATO and our closest foreign friends.

A working class guy from Cottage Grove, Minnesota doesn’t have any obvious reason to want the President to be chummy with North Korea and Russia while alienating Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom, nor would it seem he’d want a president who loads the judiciary up with Federalist Society flunkies.  If he wanted corporations to go untaxed and unregulated while rich people drain the treasury of all its revenues for infrastructure, he would have been just as happy with another Bush.

And, yet, these folks are still convinced that Trump speaks to and for them.  There’s probably a political lesson worth learning in all of this, and it might begin with going back to the fact that FDR spoke just as plainly as George W. Bush.

In fact, the only president who came remotely close to speaking as simplistically as Trump was Harry Truman who spoke at a 5.9 grade level.  It’s probably not coincidental that FDR and Truman earned some real loyalty from the working classes. They spoke at something close to their level.

Wouldn’t it be nice if this guy somehow won?

What are the chances that President Trump spends one ounce of energy complaining about this?

Not much comment is needed. The ongoing leftiness “I’m shocked!!! Shocked, I say!!!” response to Trump’s cruelty that started during the 2016 primaries has:

#1-Had absolutely no effect on his successful act for well over 3 years.

and

#2-Slowly morphed into nothing more than unwanted, vapid complaint for most of the U.S. population as the defeats have continued.

Action is needed.

Not complaint.

Effective action!!!

Read on.

The Cruelty Is the Point-Adam Serwer

President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.

The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty.

—snip—

The [museum’s] artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street–one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.

—snip—

The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.

Ford testified to the Senate, utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her.

—snip—

The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together.

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

—snip—

The laughter undergirds the daily spectacle of insincerity, as the president and his aides pledge fealty to bedrock democratic principles they have no intention of respecting. The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decrying “false accusations,” when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of “Lock her up!” The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused, now laments the state of due process.

This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.

—snip—

Trump’s… only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.

Hitler, anyone?

Watch.

AG

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the eastern shore Virginia Gothic house. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below. I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

For this week’s cycle I have started to fill in the back and foregrounds. These are all preliminary colors but serve to help me see where I’m going.  Note the sky, lawn and foliage.  I’ve also outlined the wires and lines of the building.  A fair start.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.