Jan 22

Not Comey

Why Trump won, straight from the source.

Think whoever penned that plaint voted for Clinton? I sure don’t.

Note that this in particular was all on Obama: he could have prevented many if not most foreclosures with tools already available to him. He didn’t. This was a choice. A choice. Just like Larry Summers for SecTreas was a choice.

I’m going to keep beating clueless know-nothings over the head with this sort of evidence though I know it won’t make an ounce of difference.

But it’s fun making ya’ll angry at least.

Jan 22

Debouch

If your “resistance” didn’t include resisting or at least recognizing the need for resisting Obama, you’re not resisting anything but rather representing and proclaiming your tribe. Your resistance is meaningless and worthless and will fail.

Yes, everything has to start somewhere, but instead you’ve started with nothing, bound for nowhere, with no possible good to result.

Jan 22

Simultaneity

Listen, fucking stupid liberals and Democrats: it can be simultaneously true that the ACA was a giveaway to insurance companies, intended to fend off single payer and that destroying it would harm millions of people.

Do people really have that much trouble holding two ideas in their heads at the same time? Need bigger craniums. (Mine is already really large.)

Ain’t reality neat?

Jan 22

Ticks and other stats

People distrust statistics and the experts who spout them because everyone — including me — has at least once in their life had some soi disant expert tell them something they’ve directly experienced is impossible due to this or that statistic.

For instance, it recently happened to me in the context of the election. I was told on some site that I won’t name because I am nicer than I used to be that there were no voters who will now vote for Trump who had originally supported Bernie. That statistics showed that this “just didn’t happen.”

I personally know three in the office where I work. Not one, but three.

This kind of dismissive sneering arrogance is what makes people distrust the self-appointed cognitive elite. I distrust them too, even though I share many of their characteristics.

But I want no part of them, because my tribe is no tribe.

Jan 22

Venusian

It’s too bad Venus isn’t a little further from the sun. Then we could have two planets to screw up.

Jan 21

Berning out

Funny how I was accused on several sites of being a BernieBro when I expressed doubts about Clinton*, despite not really being a Bernie supporter (mainly because I thought he’d be ineffective and wasn’t really radical enough for me).

Let’s see: didn’t really support Bernie, never voted for him, did not see him as being very effective in office, and yet I’m a BernieBro. Ok, then! Sure, that makes loads of sense.

When I mentioned that I supported Jill Stein far more strongly, it was like their brains melted down; you could almost hear the circuits liquefying, observe the smoke pouring out like in an old 1960s sci-fi b-movie as they skirled ever-more shrilly “BernieBro! BernieBro!”

It’s no mystery at all why Clinton lost.

It doesn’t matter who you supported. If it wasn’t Clinton, you were a BernieBro. See how much good that did.

*Doubts that turned out to be very fucking justified, as we see in the tragic present.

Jan 21

Profound thought of the day

“Doublings: I suggest that you hold in your hands two distinct books. The main text of each is the same. It is all too easy to compare these two books to the two Don Quixote invented by Borges, the one written by Cervantes, the other, identical in words, written much later by an imagined Pierre Menard. Despite the words being the same, so much has happened that the meaning is different.”

-Ian Hacking, from the foreword to Michel Foucault’s History of Madness