Emmy-nominated 'Desi Lydic Foxsplains Accusations that Republicans are "Weird"' plus the short form Emmy nominees

My footnote to The Daily Show examines 'Harris Hunts for a VP' and the Veepstakes from left to center telegraphed my intentions for today's post.

The Daily Show uploaded the latest episode of the Emmy-nominated Desi Lydic Foxsplains this morning. I might just embed that in tomorrow's entry, then examine all the short form nominees at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards. Stay tuned for that, too.

Without any further ado, I'm sharing Emmy nominee Desi Lydic Foxsplains Accusations that Republicans are "Weird" | The Daily Show.

Democrats have taken time away from building a socialist abortion laser to call Republicans weird, so Desi Lydic foxsplains who the real weirdos are.

Lydic's satire shows that calling Republicans weird is working. They can't even formulate a good accusation of projection, just "I know you are but what am I?" That was a lot funnier when Pee Wee Herman said it.

At her new home of Mother Jones, Kate Abu gives explains Why the “weird” attack is working.

In this week’s video for Mother Jones, Kat Abughazaleh@katmabu breaks down the Democrats' latest attack line: calling out Republicans as "weird." The recent embrace of the word “weird” started with potential VP candidate Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, who used it on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" to describe JD Vance, President Trump, and the out-of-touch policies of MAGA types: “These guys are just weird!"

It's getting under the skin of Trump and his allies. While they argue this insult is on par with Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables,” let’s be real: This isn’t about name-calling for its own sake. Who in their right mind wants to eliminate the Department of Education or inspect kids before they play sports? That's just weird. Defunding libraries and banning no-fault divorce? Also weird. "Constantly talking about genitals, having an opinion about skull size, and burning books in the 21st century?" Kat says. "All of that is indisputably weird."

Ultimately, "weird" is about framing the debate in a way that cuts through the noise and speaks directly to what most people already feel: That Trump's agenda for the Republican party and the country is all a bit… weird.

Kat Abu isn't alone in explaining why weird is sticking. Here is AOC responding to Vivek Ramaswamy whining about being called weird.

Being obsessed with repressing women is goofy.

Trying to watch what LGBTQ+ people do all the time is abnormal.

Punishing people who don’t have biological offspring is creepy.

It’s an incel platform, dude.
It’s SUPER weird.
And people need to know. https://t.co/vgDeM9e7pU

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 29, 2024

I put my own two cents in.

Vivek just told us we hit the target. He shouldn't encourage us like this.

— Crazy Eddie's Motie News (@pinkusensei) July 29, 2024

Keep working that eye.

Follow over the jump for the short form nominees at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards.

Falling U.S. birth and fertility rates for Father's Day

Happy Father's Day!  Last year, I used Stephen Colbert to mock Alex Jones over his custody battle.  This year, as I wrote  in Life expectancy down for a second consecutive year in the U.S., I am "writing about the lower birth rate for Father's Day," even though that is usually considered a concern of mothers.

The least apprehensive and most thoughtful report I could find on the issue is The surprising thing about the declining U.S. birth rate from PBS NewsHour.

More than 3.8 million babies were born in the U.S. last year, but the birth rate drop was the largest one-year decline since 2010. Why hasn’t the downward trend changed direction, even though economic conditions have improved? Amna Nawaz explores some of the factors with Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania.

Kohler is the calmest expert I've seen interviewed on this topic.  On the one hand, he's saying that there is no reason to panic just yet, as lots of well-off countries have even lower birth rates, so the U.S. is actually becoming more normal and that we are not yet at levels where low birth rates are a serious economic concern.  On the other hand, birth rates can drop far enough that they will cause problems that social policy can't fix.

In reality, it's not the birth rates that concern me; the graph above from Calculated Risk shows that, even adding in the drop between 2016 and 2017, total births were lower in 1997, not a time I recall widespread concern about not enough babies in the near future.  It's the fertility rate.  The graph below from Mother Jones shows it at a record low, well below replacement rate.  With an increased death rate and a lower immigration rate, that will cause the population of the U.S. to stop increasing sometime this century.


I have been in favor of zero population growth for as long as I can remember.  However, I'm not sure the U.S. economy is set up for a stable or slowly declining population, a point I made in the Hipcrime Vocab: Why Slowing Population Growth is a Problem.  We are going to have to figure how to do so.  Otherwise, I might live long enough to experience the wisdom of the saying "Be careful what you wish for; you might get it."

The Archdruid picked a good year to be down on science

One of Greer's overarching themes for the past year has been that technological and scientific progress has become a secular religion and that the failure of actual technological progress to live up to expectations is causing people to lose faith.  He called that faith Technological Superstitions and told people they should give A Pink Slip for the Progress Fairy.*  In particular, he thinks that science as currently practiced is a doomed cultural project, a thesis he stated explicitly in The Suicide of Science and elaborated upon in Dark Age America: The Sharp Edge of the Shell.  He had pointed things to say about the future of science in both.  In "The Suicide of Science," he made the following forecast:

What Oswald Spengler called the Second Religiosity, the resurgence of religion in the declining years of a culture, could have taken many forms in the historical trajectory of industrial society; at this point I think it's all too likely to contain a very large dollop of hostility toward science and complex technology.

He expanded on the form that rejection would take in "Dark Age America: The Sharp Edge of the Shell."

Modern science is extremely vulnerable to such a turn of events. There was a time when the benefits of scientific research and technological development routinely reached the poor as well as the privileged, but that time has long since passed; these days, the benefits of research and development move up the social ladder, while the costs and negative consequences move down. Nearly all the jobs eliminated by automation, globalization, and the computer revolution, for example, used to hire from the bottom end of the job market. In the same way, changes in US health care in recent decades have benefited the privileged while subjecting most others to substandard care at prices so high that medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the US today.

It’s all very well for the promoters of progress to gabble on about science as the key to humanity’s destiny; the poor know that the destiny thus marketed isn’t for them.  To the poor, progress means fewer jobs with lower pay and worse conditions, more surveillance and impersonal violence carried out by governments that show less and less interest in paying even lip service to the concept of civil rights, a rising tide of illnesses caused by environmental degradation and industrial effluents, and glimpses from afar of an endless stream of lavishly advertised tech-derived trinkets, perks and privileges that they will never have. Between the poor and any appreciation for modern science stands a wall made of failed schools, defunded libraries, denied opportunities, and the systematic use of science and technology to benefit other people at their expense. Such a wall, it probably bears noting, makes a good surface against which to sharpen oyster shells.

"A wall made of failed schools, defunded libraries, denied opportunities, and the systematic use of science and technology to benefit other people at their expense"--those look like things I've been worried about since the very beginning of this blog.  At least Greer and I agree on a common set of perils to civilization.

That written, it turns out that the year coming to a close was a good year for Greer to pick the topic of loss of faith in science.  While it had its scientific triumphs, it also had its very public failures, such as the two I described in A bad week for private space.  USA Today, as seen in the Guam Pacific Daily News went so far as to declare Science took a step back in 2014.

In 2012, scientists finally cornered the elusive Higgs particle, essential to explaining the most fundamental forces of nature. In 2013, we learned the Voyager spacecraft had reached the space between stars. As for 2014 - well, some years are best forgotten.

The year now winding down has seen its share of trailblazing scientific developments. But it has also had more than its fair share of disappointments and goofs, led by the retraction of two ballyhooed stem-cell papers from the top journal Nature and backtracking on a spectacular astrophysics finding announced at a press conference in March.

Even the technologically boosterish Wired acknowledged the public embarassments in The Best and Worst in a Tumultuous Year for Science.

It’s been a roller-coaster year for science. It started with what looked like a remarkable breakthrough in stem cell science, which was soon followed by a stunning announcement by cosmologists: the first detection of gravitational waves, direct evidence for a popular theory of how the universe began. But as the year draws to a close, the first of these discoveries has been thoroughly discredited, and the second appears to be on the ropes.

That’s not to say it was all bad. In October, scientists landed a spacecraft on a comet for the first time ever. And the year saw other interesting breakthroughs in everything from synthetic biology to anthropology. Here are our picks for the best and worst of science in 2014. If nothing else, they remind us that while science often moves in fits and starts, and sometimes stumbles, it keeps pushing forward.

I'll get to science's successes in a later entry.  For now, follow over the jump for more examples of the past year's goofs, failures, and downright frauds in science.

'Game of Thrones' attack ads from Mother Jones

Almost simultaneously with my posting the link to Game of Thrones D&D character alignment charts, a friend of mine posted the link to "Game of Thrones" Attack Ads from Mother Jones.  I promised her that I'd convert it into my next "Game of Thrones" entry.  I'm keeping that promise.

First, Daenerys Targaryen: Wrong For Dragons, Wrong For The Realm.

This ad paid for by the Committee to Protect Dragons.

Next, Joffrey Baratheon: Where Is The Birth Certificate?

What is King Joffrey hiding?

Finally, Robb Stark: The Biggest Celebrity in The North.

This ad paid for by Crossbows GPS.

With this entry, I've gone full circle back to my first "Game of Thrones" entry, Game of Thrones: 2012 Campaign Edition.  That's OK; I like closing circles.

No Death Star means more signatures needed for future petitions

On December 14th of last year, Kotaku reported Petition to Build the Death Star Gathers Enough Signatures to Rate a Response from the White House.  A month later, The Guardian was among many to relay the White House's response.*

White House Death Star petition is a no-go
Petition urging building of Star Wars-style weapon system rejected as 'administration does not support blowing up planets'
Conal Urquhart and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 12 January 2013 07.16 EST

Paul Shawcross, the head of the science and space branch at the White House Office of Management and Budget, outlined the reasons why the White House was not planning to build a Death Star, an artificial planet used with devastating consequences in the Star Wars films.

He said the estimated cost of $850 quadrillion would not help deficit reduction plans and asked: "Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?"

The original has a clever title, This Isn't the Petition Response You're Looking For, which I thought was one of the best things about the reply, along with a listing of all the science and space accomplishments of the Administration and a burnishing of Obama's nerd credentials.

As for the cost the official response cited, it came from Centives, a blog written at the time by a couple of economics undergraduates at Lehigh University.  It turns out to be a severe underestimate, as the figure is for just the steel.  One reader noted in comments that the total cost of modern warships is ten times that of the steel alone.  Add cost overruns, and the price would be about one sextillion dollars.  That's one followed by eighteen zeros.  No wonder the people at The Monkey Cage blog wrote Death Star? No thank you.

The story didn't end there.  Fast Company as republished in Scientific American reported the next reaction by the Obama Administration.

Tired Of Star Wars Fans, The White House Is Raising The Bar On Online Petitions
By Anya Kamenetz
January 18, 2013

Want an official response from the government? You'll need to collect at least 100,000 signatures.
...
Under its We the People initiative, anyone is able to submit a petition on any topic, and if it receives enough signatures, the White House staff pledges an official response. At first, that number was 5,000. Then it rose to 25,000. But after a recent petition asking the administration to build a Death Star from Star Wars forced a (hilarious) official response, the bar now's been raised to 100,000 signatures.

Mother Jones elaborates on this news in the aptly titled "My God, What Have We Done?": White House Staffers React to Insane Online Petitions.  That makes me glad I didn't sign the petition.  That way, this was not my fault!

*I found two other articles worth reading about the release.  PoliticusUSA added visuals to the response in the good-natured No Death Star, ‘The Administration does not support blowing up planets’.  So did Wonkette, who added their trademark snark in Obama Administration Crushes Nerds’ Dreams, Will Not Build Death Star.

Who's hiding under the bridge of an online science article?

Trolls, that's who.  Discovery News gets first crack at discussing them in Scientists VS Internet Trolls!

Scientists on the cutting edge vs pessimistic web trolls! All across the Internet, scientists are forced to continually defend their work against a group of people discounting their research. What's so controversial about their work, and why the attention? Trace puts a spotlight on all the haters and gets some answers!

Trace at DNews at least can put a positive spin on the critics in the comments. At least some of them are genuine skeptics who are open to persuasion and reason, while others are just, well, trolls.

On the other hand, Chris Mooney at Mother Jones describes a more malignant type inhabiting the comments section of climate blogs in The Science of Why Comment Trolls Suck.
The online peanut gallery can get you so riled up that your ability to reason goes out the window, a new study finds.
Thu Jan. 10, 2013 3:06 AM PST

Everybody who's written or blogged about climate change on a prominent website (or, even worse, spoken about it on YouTube) knows the drill. Shortly after you post, the menagerie of trolls arrives. They're predominantly climate deniers, and they start in immediately arguing over the content and attacking the science-sometimes by slinging insults and even occasional obscenities. To cite a recent example:

What part of "we haven't warmed any in 16 years" don't you understand? Heh. "Cherry-picking" as defined by you alarmists: any time period selected containing data that refutes your hysterical hypothesis. Can be any length of time from 4 billion years to one hour. Fuck off, little man!?

It was reasonably obvious already that these folks were doing nothing good for the public's understanding of the science of climate change (to say nothing of their own comprehension). But now there's actual evidence to back this idea up.

As someone who has been recognized for excellence in trolling three times, these people aren't really trolls.  These people are mission posters.  If they're paid, and some of them are, they're Agents.

Agent is a sinister and elusive opponent who usually works in concert with other Agents. Agent generally uses standard combat techniques, but differs from other Warriors in that he is in the employ of some organization. The organization may be political, commercial, or even criminal, and it’s Agent’s job to post messages that advance his employer’s interests.

I get my share of Agents here, but they're just spammers.  A denialist would actually be a step up.

Fiction vs. Fact for the Tea Party Patriots

I'm going to take advantage of this month's NaBloPoMo theme to talk a little smack about the Tea Party Patriots, the closest analog in the Tea Party Movement to Coffee Party USA. However, I won't be alone. Take it away Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones!

The Washington media was buzzing Wednesday after the leaders of the Tea Party Patriots came to town and announced that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) deserved a primary challenge, along with any other Republican who voted to raise the debt ceiling. Mark Meckler, a national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, told the Daily Beast that Boehner's deficit plan was "an embarrassment." At a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, Meckler declared Boehner's numbers "fake" and "phantom."

It was an interesting choice of words, since they might also describe the number of tea partiers Meckler and his co-coordinator, Jenny Beth Martin, claim to represent. In the news coverage, Tea Party Patriots has been consistently identified has having at least 3,500 local chapters, making it one of the largest tea party organizations in the country. But many of those chapters are, to use Meckler's term, phantom, which raises the question of whether the GOP House leadership should really be paying quite so much attention to the noise coming from the tea party leaders working the media circuit right now.

That would have been good advice, considering that listening to it resulted in a stock market crash and S&P downgrading the U.S. credit rating.

Last fall, the Washington Post’s Amy Gardner tried to verify the TPP’s numbers. She attempted to run down every one of its local chapters. Out of the 2,300 chapters TPP then claimed to have, Gardner could only identify 1,400; of those, she was only able to make contact with 647. Most had fewer than 50 members, and some consisted of a single person. That's a fraction of the 15 million people TPP's leaders often claim to represent when they're on the Hill demanding that Republicans refuse to increase the debt ceiling. Which raises the question of why, exactly, Republicans are taking them so seriously.

About the most generous hard number one could use for the membership of the Tea Party Patriots would be the 831,887 accounts who "like" their page on Facebook. Even that would be overly generous, as those accounts could include both legitimate fan pages of other organizations and fan pages of public figures that are separate from the public figures' personal pages, as well as users' sockpuppets they create to be their own neighbors on Farmville. Even taken at face value, that number would overstate their support, as a lot of those people are "slacktivists" who are perfectly happy to read, like, and share the posts on Facebook, but don't contribute any money or even show up at rallies. A better source of the organization's strength would be the number of people on their email list. Good luck getting that out of them short of inducing them to brag about it. Mind you, with this group, that might be easier than one might think.

There are other reasons to question the wisdom of Republicans taking economic advice from national leaders of the Tea Party Patriots and other top tea partiers in the news this week. Consider the fact that before riding the tea party movement to national fame, Meckler was a high-ranking distributor for Herbalife, a company considered by many consumer groups and regulatory agencies to be a pyramid scheme. After that, he got into "affiliate marketing," an industry responsible for all of those "tiny belly" ads haunting the Internet that the FTC says are a scam. His colleague, Jenny Beth Martin, also doesn't have a great track financial record. In 2007, she and husband lost their house and ended up owing the IRS more than $500,000 in back taxes.

I posted this paragraph in a comment to Fiscally Irresponsible at Hysterical Raisins, introducing it with "the financial rot extends down to the grass roots" and concluding it with "As I wrote, rotten down to the grass roots." At the time, I hadn't read the article at the last link in the paragraph. I should have; things are worse than I thought!