A blog about societal, cultural, and civilizational collapse, and how to stave it off or survive it. Named after the legendary character "Crazy Eddie" in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye." Expect news and views about culture, politics, economics, technology, and science fiction.
I think I should start paying attention to Peter Thiel and Curtis "Mencius Moldbug" Yarvin, both of whom have cyberpunk villain ideas straight out of SnowCrash that are influencing Vance. They would be right on target for this blog.
Rachel Maddow shows JD Vance explaining his lack of faith that democracy can deliver on his conservative ideals, and shows the influences behind Vance's preference that the United States government be gutted and instead run by a dictator.
Rachel Maddow looks at the conservative history of attacking universities for exposing students to ideas that conservatives don't like, and highlights JD Vance in his own words discussing ideas for punishing universities and well as businesses that he sees as being on the wrong side of the culture war he is waging. This is part one of two clips cut from the Monday, September 30, 2024 Rachel Maddow Show. Find part two and other Maddow clips on YouTube at MSNBC.com/Rachel.
As Maddow points out, Vance is continuing a cause championed by cranky people pursuing a sometimes explicitly fascist agenda. I call that being on the wrong side of history. May Vance and Yarvin also be on the wrong side of the future.
I closed out Michigan hearing goes viral as Corden, Kimmel, Fallon, and Colbert spread the laughter with "Don't listen to me, Georgia Republicans. Just keep drinking the Qool-Aid." Why did I spell Kool-Aid with a Q? Because of the role followers of QAnon have been playing in spreading conspiracy theories, such as the ones being spread by the attorneys working for what's left of Trump's campaign discouraging Republicans from voting in the runoff election for U.S. Senate in Georgia because the system is rigged. True, that's not a core idea of the Q mythology, but it certainly is adjacent to it. So, what is QAnon? I am outsourcing that to "The Daily Show with Trevor Noah" and Vox for a silly and serious look at the elaborate conspiracy theory and how it has spread.
Conspiracy theory researchers explain how QAnon spread through Instagram.
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At first glance, the images under the hashtags about child trafficking don’t look that different from anything else you’d expect to see on Instagram. They feature bright pastel colors with trendy fonts spelling out taglines like “wake up” and “get loud.”
What the people who see these hashtags — and the lifestyle influencers who often post them — might not know is that the hashtag is being used to bring QAnon ideas into the mainstream. In March, 23 percent of people surveyed by Pew had heard of QAnon; by September, that number had risen to 47 percent. Now the conspiracy theory has reached a bigger support base than ever before via QAnon-lite memes — with serious implications for the election.
Once again, the video examines the role of social media in propagating the conspiracy theory and injecting it into the mainstream, this time concentrating on Instagram, although Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are all mentioned.
What started out as a fringe conspiracy theory in 2017 has recently spread into the mainstream. Dozens of people linked to the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory ran for federal office in 2020, and two were elected to Congress. This CBSN Originals documentary explores how QAnon has taken root amid challenging times and a growing distrust in American institutions, and what it means for the future of the country.
In addition to the role social media plays in spreading misinformation and recruiting their users into the cult of QAnon, CBS News examines the other causes and effects of the conspiracy theory, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the election, and protests again police brutality among the causes and the harm it is causing to fighting actual child trafficking and on American politics among its effects. Scary.
Speaking of scary, keep the following quotes from David Frum in mind while reading this post and watching the videos.
Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.
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The one-third of America that identifies as “conservative” will be isolated even more profoundly within an information ghetto of deception and incitement.
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“When we talk about online radicalization we always talk about Muslims. But the radicalization of white men online is at astronomical levels,” tweeted the sharp social observer Siyanda Mohutsiwa the morning after the 2016 election.
Frum describes why liberals and others should care why many people on the right believe at least part of the QAnon conspiracy theory. When I wrote that I might post "something more serious" today, I meant it. Even though I started with comedy, I was being "ha, ha, only serious" about an issue that is deadly serious. My hope is that the next sentence Frum wrote comes true: "Perhaps the very darkness of the Trump experience can summon the nation to its senses and jolt Americans to a new politics of commonality, a new politics in which the Trump experience is remembered as the end of something bad, and not the beginning of something worse." The Crazy Eddie in me approves.
I'll have something lighter tomorrow, most likely another clip post from Saturday Night Live. Stay tuned.
Imagine that, after a narrow Joe Biden victory in November’s election, Donald Trump refuses to concede defeat — citing, among other things, alleged voter fraud in mail-in ballots. Imagine that this goes on for months, right up until Inauguration Day in January. Imagine huge protests in the streets on both sides, massive unrest that the police are unable or unwilling to contain. Imagine that some armed pro-Trump supporters, furious with what they see as a coup attempt, take matters into their own hands.
This may sound far-fetched. But in June, an organization called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) convened a group of more than 100 bipartisan experts to simulate what might happen the day after Election Day — running a kind of political “war game” where veteran Democrats role-played as the Biden campaign and veteran Republicans acted as the Trump team.
They simulated four scenarios: a big Biden victory, a narrow Biden win, an indeterminate result à la the 2000 election, and a narrow Trump victory. In every scenario but a massive Biden blowout, things went south.
“We anticipate lawsuits, divergent media narratives, attempts to stop the counting of ballots, and protests drawing people from both sides,” TIP writes in a post-exercise report summarizing their findings. “The potential for violent conflict is high, particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.”
What happens when Trump loses the 2020 election but refuses to leave office? Allana Harkin sits down with a number of experts to run through all of the possible scenarios we could expect out of a contested 2020 election. It’s the worst Choose Your Own Adventure you’ll ever play! #ExpectTheWorst2020
This piece was produced by Mike Rubens with Ishan Thakore and edited by Anthony Mascorro.
Yikes! At least Rosa Brooks, co-founder of the Transition Integrity Project, had good advice on how to deal with the possibilities.
In June, a bi-partisan group calling itself the Transition Integrity Project ran a simulation of different ways things might play out if President Trump loses in November and refuses to concede, as he has hinted at in the past. In the end, not a single scenario in the game ended well. To discuss, Jim Braude was joined by two Transition Integrity Project members: Trey Grayson, former Kentucky secretary of state and director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government; and David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, now a senior editor at The Atlantic and author of two books on how Trump has undermined American democracy.
The possible tactics Trey Grayson and David Frum describe are even more grim than the responses Harkin got from Brooks in the first video, but at least Frum has a "forewarned is forearmed" attitude about the possible outcomes. I hope Biden's campaign and the rest of the Democratic Party heed Grayson's warning not to rely on the law and conventional thinking, because the Trump campaign and the Republican Party won't. As the saying goes, "don't bring a knife to a gunfight."
That's the advice for the elites. I'll quote Nils Gilman, one of the co-founders of the Transition Integrity Project interviewed by Vox, for what my readers should do.
Let’s start with what ordinary people can do. I think the first thing everybody can do is you can call your senator, your member of Congress, your state legislator, your governor, and insist on a couple of basic democratic principles, which really ought to be totally noncontroversial and nonpartisan: Everybody who wants to vote should be able to, and everybody who’s voting should have their vote counted properly.
The second thing we need is for people to be prepared to take to the streets in nonviolent protest if that doesn’t happen. I want to emphasize nonviolent.
We’ve learned over the last couple of months, since the Movement for Black Lives protest really took off again in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, that taking to the streets and showing commitment to a democratic process beyond just the ballot box is a really important part of driving change. We’ve also learned that there are violent elements, both on the left and agent provocateurs on the right. Both of those things, in fact, manifested themselves in the protests that we’ve seen over the last few months.
I think if people are going to take to the streets, which they may need to do in order to insist that our democracy be maintained, then they need to be prepared to be very disciplined about insisting that it be nonviolent.
That’s what ordinary citizens can do.
I plan on taking that advice and I hope my readers do, too. After all that has happened this year, I think we should have learned to "expect the worst." We can at least be prepared for it.
My friend Michael Stafford, like me a former Republican who got disgusted with the Republican Party and was also involved with the Coffee Party, offered a hopeful picture of the state of our former party in The Conservative Spring at the Cagle Post. Andrew Sullivan over at the Daily Beast picked up on his article, but turned Michael's title into a question, quoting two passages invoking the similarity between the modern GOP and the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. First, here is the hopeful passage about the party's state.
Now, as the GOP regroups from its electoral debacle, public criticisms of conservative dogmas have expanded beyond a small circle of dissidents. Prominent conservatives are saying heretical things that would have gotten them tarred, feathered, and banished a few months ago.
The long night of strict doctrinal conformity- a period when dissidents were condemned for the slightest deviations in the equivalent of media show trials, purged, and then airbrushed out of old CPAC convention pictures- shows signs of ending.
The high priests of the conservative infotainment industry are both discredited and politically vulnerable. Their agenda has been exposed as a bankrupt fraud- a Potemkin village, a path to nowhere.
Of course, this could be the equivalent of a Prague Spring, or, to extend the metaphor to a Communist country, a Tiananamen Square.
The window of opportunity for reform could shut quickly. The Conservative Spring might be followed, swiftly, by dour Brezhnevian repression, and another round of purity purges. Authoritarian elites, after all, have a nasty habit of regrouping and reasserting control. And it is unclear whether reform ideas can be effectively communicated to a base that believes in movement conservative inerrancy, is cut off from other information sources, disdains intellectuals, is dangerously misinformed, and is accustomed to the confrontational, schoolyard bully-style of talk radio.
Sullivan stopped there, but he could have quoted one more Soviet reference.
Through the years, dissidents have paid a heavy price for daring to question conservative dogma. Some, like Bruce Bartlett and David Frum, have lost jobs and suffered other career consequences for speaking out. Others, including me, have been driven into political exile of one form or another.
We’ve endured scorn, petty harassment, ostracization, and worse because, in the words of Andrei Sakharov, we told uncomfortable truths about the huge amount of “substitution, deceit, and lack of correspondence with reality” in modern conservatism and refused to subordinate our integrity to demands for ideological conformity.
Sullivan may have not fired all the ammunition my friend Michael gave him, but he did use the opportunity to give his prescription for GOP reform.
Until the GOP accepts its cultural and intellectual dead-end, it will not endure for long as a national party... I propose two places to start: a commitment to developing conservative ideas for environmental protection and a volte-face on gays. That was one way the Tories climbed back to electability in Britain. But David Cameron didn't have a fundamentalist religious movement and a far right media-industrial complex to overcome. And it took the Tories three consecutive losses to get real.
Sullivan isn't that optimistic about the GOP's likelihood of turning around in the next four years. As for me, it's too late. I'm not going back.
P. T. Barnum is supposed to have said, "all publicity is good publicity." I'm not sure that Mitt Romney will agree with the man who also said, "a sucker is born every minute," something Romney and a lot of the other Republican candidates are banking on. Right now, Willard M. Romney is getting a lot of bad publicity, which is summed up in the half-hour-long attack ad presented as a muckracking documentary I posted in the first installment of this series. The blurb accompanying this video minces no words about what it sees as Willard's legacy and why he's bad for business, in more ways than one.
Mitt Romney was not a capitalist during his reign at Bain. He was a predatory corporate raider. His firm didn't seek to create value. Instead, like a scavenger, Romney looked for businesses he could pick apart. Indeed, he represented the worst possible kind of predator, operating within the law but well outside the bounds of what most real capitalists consider ethical.
He is exhibit number one the left wants to use in the coming election to give capitalism a bad name.
In other words, Willard is a liability, not an asset. While he might be "most electable," if his opponents want to score points based on economic philosophy, he's also the most vulnerable.
The blurb continues.
He and his friends at Bain were bad guys. Any real capitalists should disavow Romney's 'creative destruction' model that made him wealthy at the expense of thousands of American jobs.
Mitt Romney and his cronies pioneered 'deindustrialization,' a process by which they searched out vulnerable companies, took them over, loaded them with debt, and collected obscene fees while doing so. He sent jobs overseas or killed them altogether, and then picked apart the remains - including pension funds - before the companies went bankrupt.
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If you wonder why America has lost so many manufacturing jobs overseas, look no further than Mitt Romney -- the King of Bain.
Willard, John Galt hates you. So, apparently, do a lot of other people who've seen this video and are commenting on both it and the reaction to it. One of them is Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs.
