r_ephemeral

@rephemeral.bsky.social

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“Everyone knows that in modern communication, messages compete for attention and cancel each other out. And that they are picked out for reasons that need have nothing to do with their truth.” —Bernard Williams

I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there’s a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life’s earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, “What the heck are you talking about?” I’m trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, “You don’t know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don’t know this?!” And I said, “Please forgive me. I’m just ignorant of these things.” And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

dril tweet: “turning a big dial taht says "Racism" on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right”

November 15, 2006 / 11:47 AM EST
This commentary was written by CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer.

This is a story I should have written 12 years ago when the "Contract with America" Republicans captured the House in 1994. I apologize.

Really, it's just a simple thesis: The men who ran the Republican Party in the House of Representatives for the past 12 years were a group of weirdos. Together, they comprised one of the oddest legislative power cliques in our history. And for 12 years, the media didn't call a duck a duck, because that's not something we're supposed to do.

I'm not talking about the policies of the Contract for America crowd, but the character. I'm confident that 99 percent of the population — if they could see these politicians up close, if they watched their speeches and looked at their biographies — would agree, no matter what their politics or predilections.

LA Times article from 1996 noting the elder Elbridge’s conversion

1996 LA Times article noting that Elbridge Colby’s great-grandfather, Elbridge Colby, converted to Catholicism

Our analysis casts doubt on the Tea Party’s “origin story.” Early on, Tea Partiers were often described as nonpartisan political neophytes. Actually, the Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born, and were more likely than others to have contacted government officials. In fact, past Republican affiliation is the single strongest predictor of Tea Party support today.

What’s more, contrary to some accounts, the Tea Party is not a creature of the Great Recession. Many Americans have suffered in the last four years, but they are no more likely than anyone else to support the Tea Party. And while the public image of the Tea Party focuses on a desire to shrink government, concern over big government is hardly the only or even the most important predictor of Tea Party support among voters.

Our analysis casts doubt on the Tea Party’s “origin story.” Early on, Tea Partiers were often described as nonpartisan political neophytes. Actually, the Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born, and were more likely than others to have contacted government officials. In fact, past Republican affiliation is the single strongest predictor of Tea Party support today.

What’s more, contrary to some accounts, the Tea Party is not a creature of the Great Recession. Many Americans have suffered in the last four years, but they are no more likely than anyone else to support the Tea Party. And while the public image of the Tea Party focuses on a desire to shrink government, concern over big government is hardly the only or even the most important predictor of Tea Party support among voters.

So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.

More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics.

In Australia, gas stations are running out of diesel. The government of the Philippines adopted a four-day workweek to reduce commuting. Pakistan announced a two-week school closure. Nepal is rationing cooking fuel. Thailand’s prime minister told civil servants to take the stairs, and the government set air conditioning to a minimum 79 degrees Fahrenheit.

Young Roger Ailes is standing on the top bunk of his bed and his father holds out his arms and tells him to jump.

When he does, his dad suddenly steps back and Ailes crashes to the floor.

“Don’t ever trust anybody,” his father says.

Clinton: "I think I did something for the worst possible reason -- just because I could. I think that's the most , just about the most morally indefensible reason that anybody could have for doing anything. When you do something just because you could ... I've thought about it a lot. And there are lots of more sophisticated explanations, more complicated psychological explanations. But none of them are an excuse ... Only a fool does not look to explain his mistakes."

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

TO: Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Issues w/Various Countries
We need more coercive diplomacy with respect to Syria and Libya, and we need it
fast. If they mess up Iraq, it will delay bringing our troops home.
We also need to solve the Pakistan problem.
And Korea doesn’t seem to be going well.
Are you coming up with proposals for me to send around?
Thanks.

they were also based on a keen interest in the processes through which reality is socially constructed. Dick believed that we all live in a world where “spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into heads of the reader.” He argued:

the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans.

In Dick’s books, the real and the unreal infect each other, so that it becomes increasingly impossible to tell the difference between them.

Other supposed benefits of the filibuster keep conspicuously failing to materialize. In theory, the sixty-vote legislative threshold is supposed to induce some bipartisanship. Meanwhile, we’re breaking the record for longest government shutdown.

There are better arguments for the filibuster—including that it does still frustrate some parts of Trump’s agenda. And of course this is the reason Trump wants to do away with it. But the filibuster constrains the president only in ways that are distorted and strange. The only major policy bills that make it through the Senate these days are passed via the odd auxiliary method of budget reconciliation, which lets the Senate dodge the filibuster for certain bills that deal with federal spending and revenues. In practice, this system perversely ties Trump and his lawmakers more closely together, since the only hope for getting anything significant passed is to graft it onto one of the major reconciliation packages, like the One Big Beautiful Bill, that the president spearheads and promises to sign.

Mayor Quimby even released Sideshow Bob

Years ago, Brad DeLong explained that this derived from the elder Bush’s habit of mocking hard-line anticommunists for calling on the U.S. to “unleash” Chiang Kai-shek on the mainland. He added:
But George H. W. Bush’s sons–even the smart one, Jeb–never got the joke. They, you see, didn’t know enough about world history or even the history of the Republican Party to know who Chiang Kaishek was, or what “Unleash Chiang!” meant. Hence Jeb Bush’s explanation that twentieth-century Chinese nationalist, socialist, general, and dictator Chiang Kaishek was a “mystical warrior… who believes in conservative principles, believes in entrepreneurial capitalism, believes in moral values that underpin a free society.”
This is a good example of how a tradition can be reinvented when its original meaning ceases to be useful. It is a bit amusing to see Rubio, who has been cultivating a reputation as one of the new foreign policy hard-liners in the Senate, on the receiving end of a Bush family tradition grounded in the elder Bush’s dislike for the anticommunist hard-liners of his day.

"In the U.S.," wrote Bartels, "voters replaced Republicans with Democrats and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Sweden, voters replaced Conservatives with Liberals, then with Social Democrats, and the economy improved.

"In the Canadian agricultural province of Saskatchewan, voters replaced Conservatives with Socialists and the economy improved. In the adjacent agricultural province of Alberta, voters replaced a socialist party with a right-leaning funny-money party created from scratch by a charismatic radio preacher . . . and the economy improved.

“In Weimar Germany, where economic distress was deeper and longer-lasting, voters rejected all of the mainstream parties, the Nazis seized power, and the economy improved. In every case, the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased dominated politics for a decade or more thereafter.”

North Haverbrook, where the monorail is king, looking shabby

Tom Tomorrow comic, always happy to give the Rightwing Nutcase plenty of airtime

The more the administrative and productive machinery expands, the more people's lives contract. "Private space has been invaded and curtailed by technological reality." The inner dimension of the mind as life in society is gradually reduced, ossified into almost mechanical reactions. This machinery determines needs and aspirations, expectations, erases the opposition between private and public existence, between individual and social needs. "Domination disguised as opulence and freedom extends to all spheres of public and private existence, integrating all authentic opposition." Both technological and technical efficiency and increased consumption capacity have made this system desirable. The system coagulates and ossifies, reproducing and perpetuating itself "justified by the achievements of science and technology, by its growing productivity, the status quo defies all transcendence." Society and nature, spirit and body, are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe. "In this society, the productive apparatus tends to become totalitarian."

Technicians and specialists "are the well-paid and satisfied beneficiaries of the system," says Marcuse.

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that “they are all crooks,” and that “government is no good,” further leading them to think, “a plague on both your houses” and “the parties are like two kids in a school yard.” This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s – a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn (“Government is the problem,” declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure. That is why even on news shows which provide us daily with fragments of tragedy and barbarism, we are urged by the newscasters to “join them tomorrow.” What for? One would think that several minutes of murder and mayhem would suffice as material for a month of sleepless nights. We accept the newscasters’ invitation because we know that the “news” is not to be taken seriously, that it is all in fun, so to say.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Nov 2005 National Review cover article on George Allen

So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do. —Robert Putnam, 2011

don’t fear the sower

In fact, in wading through these forgotten controversies, I felt myself quite at home. Substitute the name of Darwin for that of Harvey, and the truth that history repeats itself will come home to the dullest apprehension. It was said of the doctrine of the circulation of the blood that nobody over forty could be got to adopt it ; and I think I remember a passage in the 'Origin of Species,' to the effect that its author expects to convert only young and flexible minds.

63 percent of Jewish voters went for Cuomo, vs. 33% for Mamdani, per CNN exit poll

FINANCIAL TIMES

Even the way people on Wall Street talk and interact is changing. Bankers and financiers say that Trump's victory has emboldened those who chafed at "woke doctrine" and felt they had to self-censor or change their language to avoid offending younger colleagues, women, minorities or disabled people.

"I feel liberated," said a top banker. "We can say 'retard' and 'pussy' without the fear of getting cancelled... it's a new dawn."

Photo - Kyle Rittenhouse, right, is introduced to a cheering crowd by Charlie Kirk, middle, founder of Turning Point USA, as Jack Posobiec, left, host of Once America News Network, joins them on stage at a panel discussion at the Turning Point USA America Fest 2021 event, Monday, Dec. 20, 2021, in Phoenix.
Ross D. Franklin - AP

Donald Jr. post making light of the attack on Paul Pelosi

rude asshole inconveniently tall dog puts his nose on the dining room table, surveying remains of a toy it took him like five minutes to destroy

house hunters realtor adrian leeds

Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. (92)
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business