War is one of the most serious things a president (or any leader) can undertake. Ending a war is serious too.
The Toddler, however, has announced that he doesn’t care whether peace talks with Iran continue or not because they’re boring. Which is true, I’m sure they are. Negotiations and diplomacy aren’t flashy and dramatic They require thoughtful, detailed work and the Toddler is not into detail. I’m sure his vision of the war involved things going Boom Boom Boom and then big strong Iraqis coming to him with tears in their eyes, begging him for mercy as they completely surrender. Then everyone acclaiming him the bestest little baby president of all time. We’ve heard plenty of accounts of how his security and policy briefings have to be super-simple or he loses interest; I doubt his tiny brain can take in complex negotiations at all.
Much like W before him, this war was supposed to make him a great War President whom everyone loved and admired. Now that it’s turned into a millstone around his sinking popularity, he’s lost interest. It’s the same way he declared he wouldn’t upgrade the Kennedy Center once a judge took his name off it.
So he’s become obsessed with something he can control and which appeals to him: remaking Washington in his image. The ballroom. The UFC fighting arena (which he wants to make permanent). The reflecting pool. It reminds me of the insider stories of how the border wall became an issue: the Toddler couldn’t stay focused on immigration until they put it in terms of building a wall, something concrete he could talk about. He can focus on building monuments to compensate for his small … hands. Only poor Toddler, they’re still opposing him. As I’ve said before, it’s an interesting display of male privilege. If Clinton or Harris were this obsessed with a ballroom in time of war, the mockery for their girliness would define their presidency. Of course, with the Toddler, there are so many other things to mock.
The thing is, “Trump appears to have given up on governing — even governing aimed at consolidating his own power and legacy. He wants to punish everyone he imagines has wronged him but has lost all interest in making the government work, even for nefarious purposes.” Except finding new ways to impose his precious tariffs. I can’t say the removal of the Toddler as a political force is a bad thing. Then again, this country without a functioning president is not a good thing. “Everywhere one looks, the U.S. government is imploding under the weight of incompetence.” And possibly his dementia.
As Krugman says, “they are continuing to support him, and they are continuing to do so not just in concrete ways, but verbally, which matters. They continue to cover for him” The DOJ, for instance, says the Toddler could legally tear down the Statue of Liberty. With the Toddler no longer an invincible political force, some of the Republicans are starting to back away, for example, killing his $1.776 slush fund (though I’ve read that Actin AG Todd Blanche refuses to officially revoke the fund). But turning on him now, while good, doesn’t change that they empowered him for years and many still do. We have Hegseth and Kennedy wreaking havoc in their departments because so many senators supported them, then expressed qualms when it was too late.
I’m still unsure how this all ends but the fight definitely goes on. Let’s do all we can to win.
Platner is the Maine senatorial candidate notorious for the Nazi tattoo, and for the debate whether, even though he’s not a Nazi (from what I’ve read), thinking a Nazi tattoo is cool makes him unacceptable. Is he too Nazi adjacent or is this that old bugaboo, a “purity test” that will lock us out of the seat? I’ve heard different assessments on the left but as I’m not a Maineman and won’t be voting I don’t have to figure out who’s right. I’d definitely a prefer a candidate without Nazi tattoos but I don’t find him as horrific as I did Aaron Coleman.
That said, it’s worth nothing that some people are rushing to support Platner in the wake of an NYT story about his personal history — drinking, womanizing, adultery (according to his wife they’re working through it) and often something of a dick. Though not, according to his lovers, a monster or a rapist. The creepy thing is that some pundits on the left think this is awesome because Platner is a Real Man. He represents “a rejection of Dem HR lady politics” according to Matt Stoller. The Argument lists multiple other examples of pundits explaining that if you want a flesh-and-blood human being to run for office, expect them to have messy lives: “Cheating isn’t a moral failing we can forgive; it’s a mark of rugged authenticity, and any qualms about infidelity are the prissy reflexes of an out-of-touch elite.”
Well, no, it isn’t. As the post says, it reflects that in most elections we have limited choices; someone who might turn down an adulterous candidate may not have a better option. It doesn’t mean people who support Platner are drawn by his cheating machismo. And it’s telling that like Stoller, one Ken Klippenstein sneers that the alternative to Platner is “the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly. I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.” It must astonish Klippenstein that not everyone who stays faithful to their spouse is devoid of a sex drive.
As Liberal Currents puts it after posting more of Klippenstein’s sneering, Klippenstein’s declaration fidelity is for wimps and asexuals “is a puerile and chauvinistic sentiment. It’s the sort of high school cafeteria misogyny you’d get from an 80s sex comedy. It’s derogatory to women, to the people offended by Platner’s long list of misconduct, and to politicians Klippenstein simply sees as weak and unmanly.” And then Klippenestein posted photos of the women in the race — wow, these ugly old broads obviously have no sex scandals (that’s an interpretation, not Klippenstein’s statement).
This comes off as another version of the toxic masculinity stereotypes Dr. Nerdlove complains about: obviously you can’t expect a genuine authentic man to behave decently. We can’t expect them to be perfect, whether they’re in politics or not. However there’s a world of difference between “not perfect” and “isn’t a decent person.” Nor is a person who tries to live a moral life and fails the same as a serial philandering hypocrite (that’s a general observation, not targeted at Planter).
Like I said, Platner’s fate is up to Maine voters, not me. But these excuses for his conduct come off worse than anything I’ve heard Platner say in his own defense.
That was Jamelle Bouie’s argument, quoting Lincoln in a recent column: “‘Broken eggs cannot be mended,’ Lincoln observed in a reply to August Belmont, a leading Democratic Party organizer and financier in New York, who had forwarded, to the president, the comments of an angry Louisiana slaveholder who wanted restoration of the Union ‘as it was.’ Not much later, Lincoln repurposed the quip in different form. ‘Broken eggs can never be mended,’ he wrote in reference to the fate of slavery as the war carried on, ‘and the longer the breaking proceeds the more will be broken.’ Fort Sumter broke the Union and with it, slavery. Whatever the nation was or would be in the aftermath of the war, neither the nation nor its Constitution would protect, support or sanction human bondage.”
Bouie’s point is that if Democrats secure power in 2026 and then 2028, they need to do more than undo the Toddler’s wreaked havoc. Republicans have been pushing the restoration of white male supremacy and a presidency that’s truly imperial, free of any constraints (unless the president is a Democrat). That gives them a vision of the future, even if it’s an ugly one that reduces America to a third-world banana-republic oligarchy.
The Democrats, Bouie says, are working on plans for 2029 and the ideas are good: “break up utility monopolies, support child-rearing, regulate social media and artificial intelligence, and curtail corporate abuse. But none of this reflects or represents a far-reaching or comprehensive idea of what the nation might be. There is no coherent worldview at work, nor does there seem to be any inkling or awareness of the obstacles — structural, political and institutional — that will confront, and likely stymie, all but the most threadbare and ineffectual Democratic agendas for governing.”
Bouie looks at the Republicans’ radical vision for Reconstruction as a template. Paul Campos says Reconstruction’s ultimate failure should be a warning: “It’s a platitude that the confederacy lost the war but won the peace. That platitude is also largely though not completely accurate. The attempt to roll back that latter victory that continues to be captured however vaguely by the phrase ‘the 1960s’ is a battle that needs to be fought again and again. America is now a white supremacist plutocracy; it has been and can be something else. That the latter sentence gives the entire Democratic consultant class a heart attack doesn’t make it less true.”
I don’t think that means concrete proposals like “curtail corporate abuse” are bad — specific plans for improving things, along with a grand vision, matter a lot. People who may not be into grand visions may still support programs that make their lives better. And definitely being against the Toddler, Republicans and the Heritage Foundation is good: show what they’re advocating and supporting, call them out and support the opposite. As Masha Gessen says of Orban’s defeat in Hungary, “previous opposition politicians had described Orban’s regime as “corrupt,” a relatively mild term suggesting some aberration from the government’s intended function. Peter Magyar made no such accommodation. Borrowing a term coined by Balint Magyar, he has called it a mafia state — a fundamentally criminal enterprise. Third lesson: Don’t mince words.”
I agree with Bouie, structural reform is a necessity: blocking the Supreme Court’s increasing support for white supremacy and its double-standard regarding Democratic and Republican policies, for instance (if you think the Toddler’s immunity from prosecution for “official acts” will apply to a Democrat — well, the Supreme Court will be amazingly flexible in defining “official”). The often proposed idea of adding Puerto Rico and DC as states would be good. There are other problems which will be tougher. As Campos points out, rural, sparsely populated Red states exert influence all out of proportion to their population because they still get two senators. I have no idea how we deal with that; I’ve not heard anyone who does.
I doubt there’s any reform that can neutralize the anti-democratic forces for good but if it takes them, say, 30 years to regain their current clout, that’s 30 years we can be thinking up further moves. As Bouie says, however, the opposition to radical positive change is huge. I don’t see having a vision will change that.
As far as a grand vision, here’s one: full equality for all: women, LGBTQ people, POC, non-binary, the disabled. immigrants and anyone else I’ve forgotten to list. Which will require an active commitment to change society and make it more equal; the Roberts Court’s position that they oppose any action to fight racism because anti-racism is racist is bullshit. Before the children of slaveowners and the children of slaves sit down together, we have to work to level the playing field they’re sitting on.
Another suggestion: end rape. As long as men can and do rape women with impunity there is no true equality. And I still think the words from Micah “everyone shall sit out under his vine and his fig tree and none shall make them afraid” could be a good road map (regardless of gender, obviously). I’m not as sure as Bouie that a big vision is necessary but it can have positive results. Framing these things as the end game shapes how we proceed forward and generates new ideas. Working towards them can produce good results; even cutting the number of rapes in half would be a blessing.
However…. having typed all that I find I’m also slightly annoyed. It feels like the same thing that happens time and again when a Democrat replaces a Republican administration. Republicans run up the red ink, deregulate disastrously and make things worse. Then the Democrats have to clean up the mess while simultaneously finding ways to improve on the status quo. And do it while bringing the budget back into balance because both Republicans and the media will suddenly discover reckless spending is a major problem. Biden did a lot of good work and got little credit for it. Given the constraints on him (Republican Supreme Court, hostile media) I’m not sure how much of a new Reconstruction he could have accomplished or whether there was much voter support for reconstructing — though the DOJ going after the Toddler for J6 and any other crimes would have been a good step.
I do think there might be more interest in radical change now. As one piece from The Bulwark suggests, swing voters are vacillating between “change” and “burn it all down” (I have not read the whole article yet so I cannot comment on its ideas beyond that). Of course the flip side to that is that, I don’t believe for a minute that everyone is enthused about radical change; lots of people would probably prefer specific concrete improvements to some grand reshaping, even if it’s necessary. Whatever reforms, sweeping or careful, that the Dems come up with, it won’t satisfy everyone — as witness Bouie’s dissatisfaction with those proposals he mentioned.
We’re a lot less united on the future we want than Republican fascists are. Repubs are united in their desire to annihilate us; as Bouie’s argument shows, we’re not united the same way. I think most of us agree stopping Republicans is essential but we don’t agree on whether “Republicans are evil” is the primary message or “We’re going to fix things” or “we’ll burn it all down and start fresh and better.” And, of course, calls for radical change guarantee the media will freak. Despite their supposed radical elitist leftism, they’d have freaked if the Toddler had been indicted for J6; they’ll probably do the same if it happens after 2028 (“Democrats criminalize policy differences! Are Republicans right about weaponized justice?”).
Take my talk of full equality. A lot of the media (and people in general) suffer from the delusion equality is not a midpoint (between white supremacy and black supremacy, between patriarchal tyranny and matriarchal tyranny) but the most extreme option possible, which makes its supporters radicals extremists. Why not compromise? Find a midpoint between the extremes of white male supremacy and equality? The right agrees not to lynch anyone, black Americans settle on “not second class citizens but for now we’ll be a little less than first class”? Then we’ll have peace and unity!
There will also be endless arguments in our big tent that even if the policies are good, we’re doing liberalism wrong. Not extreme enough. Not centrist enough. Not appealing to Republican voters. Focusing on the wrong issues. I read an argument on FB recently that lecturing a struggling POC trying to support a family about how they need to respect trans pronouns is a losing strategy. The “change or burn it down” article similarly says responding to anti-trans bullshit makes Dems look like their priorities are those of out-of-touch upper-class liberals not caring about anything but niche issues.
Neither argument advocated throwing trans people under the bus but they both leave me uncomfortable. The idea that Dems should let Republicans rant and vent trans hate because they’re shooting themselves in the foot (at least outside red states) — sorry, that’s wrong. Uncontested it normalizes that anti-trans discrimination is an unremarkable, acceptable position. Even if opposing that is not the center of the campaign, we need to stand up for equality. As for the FB argument — is anyone actually doing what the OP complained about? There is a large difference between a candidate supporting trans rights and using people’s preferred pronouns and lecturing the poor and downtrodden that this should be their number one issue; as the post doesn’t offer any examples of the latter, I suspect the people saying this only exist in the poster’s imagination. As someone put it in a recent Lawyers, Guns and Money comment, Democrats aren’t just fighting Republicans they’re fighting the imaginary Dems in people’s heads.
Fixing this country will take a shit-ton of work, whatever the right path is. If we want to live out our lives in a decent nation, and enable other Americans to do the same, it has to be done.
As Paul Krugman explained recently, our healthcare system is a mess. Many countries have functioning government-run healthcare in various forms so there’s no risk of becoming paupers when coping with a medical crisis. Multiple efforts to improve things over the years have run aground on the medical world’s opposition, Republicans distaste for helping the poor and a racist distaste for doing anything that helps POC. Currently Republicans are doing their best to make it worse by whittling away at Obamacare.
And then there’s RFK Jr., the anti-vax crackpot currently running federal health policy. Some examples:
“The CDC was told to take down a webpage that explained how people who have multiple sexual partners can reduce their risk of contracting mpox. Asked why, an HHS spokesperson said it “was not medically accurate” and didn’t “align with Administration priorities.” Given Kennedy’s history of bullshit, I don’t believe that for a minute.
“Key officials responsible for leading US research on infectious disease threats have been barred from speaking directly with the World Health Organization — effectively shutting some of them out of the global discussions on virus outbreaks, according to documents and multiple sources who spoke to CNN.”
Kennedy has extended legal protection for research on hantavirus vaccines but “only for use in passengers possibly exposed to the Andes virus on the cruise ship M/V Hondius and in people who have had close contact with those who were on board.” Brian Christine, one of the leading administration officials dealing with the outbreak “was an Alabama-based urologist who specialized in penile implants. He has limited experience in public health and is known for his far-right views and conspiracy theories. He stated that the Covid pandemic led to a broader government conspiracy over control of people, compared the Biden administration to Nazi Germany, and downplayed the significance of vaccines in stopping the pandemic.”
“Mr. Kennedy is spearheading an intense push, across health agencies under his purview, for government scientists and federal data contractors to examine his long-held theory that vaccines are helping to fuel an epidemic of chronic disease“
“It’s now apparently received dogma in MAGAland, in the face of literally all scientific evidence, that the Covid vaccine “didn’t work,” and also killed lots of healthy young people. Again both these beliefs are utterly irrational, and in addition they treat basically the only positive accomplishment of the first Trump administration as a total disaster.”
Let’s not forget the Toddler in Chief; “Every person around is gonna have autism. That’s what’s happening. What is this thing that’s happening?” he went on. “It’s spiked so much. Anything having to do with medical, I always bring in autism.” Yeah, it’s gibberish but I’m sure it adds fuel to the fire for his worshippers. As will his claim babies get a big glass of 88 vaccines.
“The Trump administration has announced a plan to kill Biden-era drinking water limits on four Pfas “forever chemicals”, and to delay the implementation of standards for two other compounds.” That Kennedy is all-in on this is revealing — while I think of him as a health crackpot true believer, he has no problem not pushing for an end to environmental poisons (one of his supposed beliefs) when it’s politically inconvenient.
The United Kingdom has imposed a phased tobacco ban: if you’re too young to buy tobacco products now, you can never legally buy them. In the US, by contrast, a vaping lobbyist met with the Toddler and now the FDA is greenlighting fruit-flavored vapes, which are seen as more appealing to underage smokers. I’m sure they’ll hack away at more anti-smoking regulations if they get the chance as long as the bribery money keeps flowing. Kennedy’s chief spokesperson resigned over the issue: “he warned that authorizing flavored e-cigarettes would draw more children into vaping and increase their risk for a number of health issues, from addiction to cancer.”
They’re making America sicker — and ironically it’s right-wing Republican voters who suffer the most.
It’s Pride Month. While the Republicans remain committed to treating LGBTQ Americans as the spawn of Satan, particularly trans people, there’s plenty of people still ready to celebrate.
Wisconsin stands by its ban on ex-gay torture, though the hate group seeking to overturn the ban is suing. Given the recent Supreme Court decision, I’m not optimistic though ban supporters say they’re on solid legal ground. Even if they’re not, forcing the other side to fight for their hate is a good thing.
Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles celebrated Pride Month by declaring homosexuality is unAmerican. This drew enough criticism he retracted it, and blamed it on one of his staff (I am unconvinced). He’s now getting flak from his own side for not being homophobic enough.
None of this makes the threat to LGBTQ rights go away. The Republican Party is committed to destroying their rights. But it’s worth remembering the homophobes are a pissed-off minority and growing smaller, though no less vicious, every year.
E. Jean Carroll won a defamation lawsuit against the Toddler with the jury agreeing that he sexually assaulted her. As the Toddler believes he should never suffer any consequences for anything he’s done, his mob mouthpiece Todd Blanche— is now suing her. More detail here. As Paul Campos says, “we should judge every lawyer working in that office, and in every other office in the DOJ, on the following basis: You have found yourself in a position where you are working as an attorney not for the United States of America, which is the job you thought you signed up for, but rather for Donald Trump, because the DOJ is now Donald Trump’s personal law firm. Do you want to be Donald Trump’s lawyer, which means being a mob lawyer for a mob boss, doing mob lawyer things? No? Then quit. Today.” The corruption is inescapable.
2)The Toddler sent a suggestive nudge-nudge, wink-wink birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein, something the Wall Street Journal wrote about. The Toddler is once again suing the WSJ for hurting his snowflake fee-fees and reminding everyone how desperate he and Todd Blanche are not to dig too deeply into the Epstein files. Hmm, wonder why? Pam Bondi, ex-AG, refuses to talk about the cover-up to Congress, and says it’s all Blanche’s fault.
“Three teenage boys have walked out of court in Hampshire without having served a single minute of jail time between them, despite being found guilty of raping two girls. The girls, then aged 15 and 14, were attacked in separate, deeply harrowing incidents in November 2024 and January 2025 by two 14-year-old boys. A third boy, then 13, was convicted for his involvement in the second assault, during which the boys egged one another on, laughed, and filmed the assault on their phones, later sharing the footage online …. The judge, Nicholas Rowland, said that he wanted to avoid “criminalising” the “very young” boys. Boys who, you might say, criminalised themselves the moment they decided to subject two young girls to prolonged sexual attacks from which they will never fully move on, one of them at knifepoint.”
Young, yes. So young they couldn’t conceive what they were doing was bad? Nope. Young people do stupid shit but this ain’t stupid or an error in judgment, it’s deliberate cruelty. And yet “the judge also praised the boys for their conduct during the trial. These girls were forced through the ordeal of a five-week criminal trial in which the boys denied responsibility and sought to discredit them. One claimed the second victim had been “flirting” with him and lied to explain her absence to her parents. He denied using a knife.” One of the mitigating factors the judge cited was that one boy had a “limited concept of consent.” That’s an argument against him, not for him.
As I wrote some 15 years ago, many Republicans prefer someone who says the right things, even if they’re a sleazebag and hypocrite in private, over an ethical liberal. A faithfully married liberal who supports gay rights and opposes patriarchy is morally inferior to someone who’s banging their secretary but mouths the right platitudes about chastity, slut-shaming and gay-bashing. Sure, maybe they didn’t live up to their stated standards, but that makes them human, not immoral cesspools with no values like liberals (it’s a given for a certain type of conservative that liberals don’t have a different moral code, they have no morals at all). Or that no matter what someone’s done in the past, Christianity is all about forgiveness. A standard conservatives never apply to any Christian who’s not on their team.
As I pointed out elsewhere on this blog, trying and failing to be a good person does not make you a hypocrite. However if you then lie about your failings (“I would never look at porn online!”) you’re sliding into hypocrisy. And in many cases, particularly in politics, there’s no reason to think the hypocrite was even trying. Someone mouthing “moral” sentiments may not believe in any of them, as witness how quickly some companies dropped any support for DEI when it became inconvenient.
As noted at the first link, George W. Bush dodged the draft by his own admission but gave lip-service support to the Vietnam War. John Kerry served with honor but criticized the war. Conservatives who swore they despised Clinton as a draft dodger were all in on supporting W and treating him as a war-hero jet-jockey badass (by the time he took office, he’d been grounded from flying because he blew off a National Guard physical checkup back in 1973); Kerry was a traitor and probably faked his war wounds. Which was a lie — Kerry simply had the wrong stance on the war, and that mattered more than what he did.
The same thing is happening now with James Talarico, the Dem Senate candidate in Texas. He’s a Christian and apparently a moral, decent person so they hate him. And claim he’s a pedophile or at least gay. Or (gasp) vegan so he doesn’t understand Texas barbecue (Talarico quipped that he’s been eating barbecue since before opponent Ken Paxton’s first indictment for corruption). Or at least his girlfriend is vegan!! Or Talarico sacrificing children to Moloch (this could be a Qanon reference or simply a metaphor for abortion).
The same thing pollutes how right-wingers deal with sex. It’s been documented that comprehensive sex education coupled with access to birth control reduces teenage pregnancy and abortion rates. Republicans have a documented history of killing programs like that while supporting abstinence only sex ed that prevents nothing — not STDs, not pregnancy, not abortion. Because what’s important is not preventing abortion or pregnancy but sending the right message — teenage girls should not have sex! If they don’t want to get pregnant they should keep their legs closed!
Ditto the obsession with performing masculinity: Florida Republican Dan Weldon has quipped that — well, see for yourself.
As John Rogers says at the link, “I have to ask as a 59 year old straight guy who’s been married 34 years, worked on a pipeline, tagged a lot of markers for traditional masculinity — isn’t doing this gender thing all the fucking time exhausting? How do these people get through the day running ‘gender performance’ code?” Yes, I imagine it is, but it’s better than someone thinking you’re the unmanly one. Idiotic arguments like Weldon not only supposedly serve to other Talarico as Not A Real Man, they implicitly affirm Weldon is — he could sure identify obscure wide receivers! He’s got three Y chromosomes dude!
As Liz Plank put it a while back, “The men running the internet aren’t just controlling the narrative, they’re starring in their own all-male drag show, desperately performing masculinity for each other. Musk, Zuckerberg, and their billionaire boy band are so obsessed with proving who’s the most alpha that they’ve lost the plot. They’re not exuding strength; they’re just insecure men rigging platforms and rewriting algorithms like a group of closeted frat boys terrified of being the least manly guy in the room. At this point, their version of masculinity isn’t just fragile, it’s camp.”
As I blogged about back in April, Scott Galloway, the current guru on how to fix men’s and boys’ problems, sums up the solution as “protect, provide, procreate.” Which is an improvement over, say, misogynists such as Andrew Tate or Roosh (their interest in protecting women is zero) but as I say at the link, “if men are to provide, protect and procreate to feel like a Real Man, then a woman’s role is to be protected, provided for and pop out the babies.”
By implication that puts some of the burden of Real Manhood on women: they must let the man protect them, let the man provide for them and provide him with children. Which fits with Galloway’s argument that men need women as human guardrails to keep them from crashing off the road of life (as noted at the link, not a new view). Both arguments suggest the burden of solving men’s problems fall at least partly on women. For many people who make this argument, women are obligated to accept second-class status for the good of men, which was the topic of my first Undead Sexist Cliche. Not necessarily a horrible second-class status, just compromise a little on full equality. Men need women to do it.
This story about high school boys making and sharing deepfakes of female students (not a unique case) make me wonder if a better mantra is “see women as people like you.” To paraphrase Immanuel Kant, women are not means to an end, they are ends in themselves (the same is true of men, intersex and nonbinary people, of course). That applies even if the end is your orgasm or your masculine pride. The teens in that story didn’t see it that way. Digitally stripping their classmates naked, hey, it’s funny! As one of the interviewees said, the guys may do it for “social status, entertainment, money, sexual gratification, attention.” Plus of course, cruelty and deliberate humiliation of the girls.
This is horrible for the girls, obviously — well, not obviously, the school didn’t take the case half seriously enough. It’s also bad for the boys. Corrupting for the boys. For every five boys who delighted in humiliating the girls and high-five the AI creator for putting the girl in their place, there’s probably one who didn’t think about the girl at all. And another who doesn’t think this is cool at all but when his buddy shows the photos and gets the high fives, Mr. It’s Not Cool high fives him too. Because anything else would mark him as uncool and his buddies would think less of him — what, you don’t want to see Helen St. James naked? What kind of wimp are you?
As C.S. Lewis put it “you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected.” Once a kid crosses that line, they’ll probably cross it again; it’s harder not to, because they’ve already established what they’re willing to accept to be in with the in-crowd. Over time, it won’t be a pretense; the mask they wear will become their face.
Teaching men (and boys) not to think of women as sex toys, that women don’t exist just as means to men’s ends, seems like a better path forward than “protect, provide, procreate.” Not that this trio are bad things but they’re also not the only path to being a man, let alone a good man. Teaching men (and boys) to see women don’t deserve to be slut-shamed or humiliated, and that rape is wrong even if the guy wants sex this very minute and the bitch said no!!! and that being turned down for a date is a woman’s right, and does not cheapen the guy’s manhood or his honor — those would go a lot further to creating good men that Galloway’s formula. If we eliminated rape, the world would be a much better place. Even cutting the number of rapes in half would be a huge improvement. Literally that means thousands fewer cases of rape every day.
How do we get to that point? Well, there you’ve got me. A prophet, as Walter Breuggemann puts it, must both see the hollowness of the World That Is and visualize the long path to the World We Can Make. I can only manage the first part. At this point, though, society isn’t really trying. As that article about the high school deepfakes says, the school made little initial effort to stop this form of cyberbullying. Society makes little effort to punish or prosecute rapists. Being a sexist or misogynist jerk is never an obstacle to your career, as Brett Kavanaugh and Pete Hegseth have shown. Misogynists and harassers back up others of their kind because they don’t see any problem. And there’s a critical mass of them out there.
That’s a lot of resistance to overcome, but if we don’t work at it, it won’t change. To paraphrase G.K. Chesteron, gender equality hasn’t been tried and found wanting, it’s been wanting and never tried.
You’ve probably heard the Toddler says he doesn’t think about what the Iran war is costing Americans. Scott Lemieux: “Republican midterm messaging is being hampered by the facts that 1)Trump’s policies are directly responsible for making things more expensive after he won on a promise to make things cheaper, 2)nobody likes them on their own merits, and 3)as his inhibitions decline even further he can’t even pretend to care at this point:” All that matters is that everyone acclaim him as a great war leader who also negotiated a better agreement than the black president. Even though he won’t succeed at either goal.
JD Vance goes with the administration’s usual lie: inflation caused by the Iran war is all Biden’s fault. The Toddler is employing another favorite tactic, whining: Democrats who oppose him are traitors. He’s also started saying “Dumocrats” because the press were soooo impressed in 2016 that he’d make up mean nicknames for his opponents. I don’t think it’s going to help this time. Rubio is doing his duty as a Toddler Toady, brushing off Republican criticism of the latest cease-fire. Or alleged cease-fire — I suspect this is as much vaporware as all the other deals the Toddler thinks he’s made with Iran. And it appears he’s pushing them and every other nation in the Middle East to sign on to the Abraham Accords with Israel. That might well sink the deal.
Fox news is following the party line, lying that “He is restoring American strength on the world stage and he is disarming a terrorist regime of the possibility of getting a nuclear weapon.” Being confounded by a third rate military power is not restoring American strength, neither is running up a $29 billion bill to do it. and Obama’s agreement, which the Toddler tore up, was doing just fine keeping them from going non-nuclear. The Toddler, of course, lies about this; it’s bad enough people aren’t gushing over him as an awesome war hero but to say he’s not handling Iran as well as the Black President? Mike Johnson, who had to table a vote on the war because he couldn’t guarantee Republicans voting against it, has also lied that nobody but the Toddler could have brought Iran to the negotiating table.
As for negotiating, remember back in early April the Toddler was going to rain destruction on Iran if they didn’t reopen the straight? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want us destroying another Middle Eastern country so our president can strut and declare “mission accomplished!”, but it drives home that the Toddler is doing the opposite of restoring American strength.
Paul Krugman says some of this is that for all its technological sophistication, the military is unprepared to fight a drone war — and this would be a problem even with good leadership. That said, it doesn’t help that our Secretary of War is ignorant, unqualified and a shitty human being: “Extreme though Hegseth may be, he is a recognizable type: a jockish, puerile white man, a boy you knew in your public high school, if you went to one. He is the Jersey Shore as much as he is Kansas, Florida, Texas, and Oregon. You may recall him as the guy who shoved queer kids into trash cans in the cafeteria and said things about girls like “You’d need a crowbar to get her legs open.” As an adult, Hegseth is a man whom people have described leaving a bar, shit-faced, chanting “No means yes!” and “Kill all Muslims!”
“So how will Trump and his party respond to their string of high-profile policy failures, from Iran to inflation? Trump may find a way to accept defeat in the Persian Gulf while claiming victory, although that’s looking harder by the day. But there’s no reason to believe that policymaking will get any better, that the experts and the grownups will be let back into the room. The beatings — and the willful ignorance — will continue until morale improves.”
One of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights is that we, the people, have a right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. If they want to search us or our homes, they need probable cause, as opposed to spying on us just in case we’re up to no good. In the modern world this extends to things like wiretapping phones or searching our email without probable cause.
Like most rules restraining cops, the authorities hate this. In the words of Ed Meese, Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, there’s no point in worrying about the rights of suspects — if they weren’t guilty, they wouldn’t be suspects, right? Wrong. Besides, why should anyone object to people spying on them for the greater good. If you have nothing to hide, what do you have to fear?
Post 9/11, the George W. Bush administration tossed this one in the trash. Massive surveillance of Americans, particularly Muslims (who were also detained without trial in violation of habeas corpus). Infiltration of law-abiding, non-violent left-wing groups on the grounds that well, maybe they might possibly could know something about someone who was up to something violent. When this came out, the devoutly Republican letters to the local paper hit the same note: if you have nothing to hide, why should you care if the government spies on you?
First off, it doesn’t matter whether I have something to hide — I have a right not be spied on. Second, there’s lots of stuff I say on the phone or in email that isn’t criminal but is personal — and I do want to hide that. I’m quite sure the supposed patriots feel the same; they’d scream blue murder if the government were spying on them without cause or even with cause (Republicans prefer to pretend right-wing terror doesn’t exist) — the leopard is supposed to eat other people’s faces!
Third, spying on everyone isn’t productive. It wastes resources and one such program generated tons of false leads that wasted more resources when the government followed up on them. Fourth, having access to spying tools, a number of officials used them to watch on girlfriends, exes, and others for the obvious personal reasons.
This came to mind recently because Bandera TX City Councilor Jeff Flowers had a meltdown recently when the council voted to end its contract with Flock, the controversial security-camera company (some details on Flock here). According to Flowers, nobody has anything to fear unless they’re up to no good! There’s nothing wrong with being watched every second you’re in public! If you’re going to be that anti-progress, let’s ban cellphones and the Internet, you luddites! It makes me wonder if he has some kind of investment/financial ties with Flock, though that’s only a suspicion. I’m sure he’d be happy to let everyone go through his finances to check — after all, if he has nothing to hide, he has nothing to fear, right?
Moving on from that bit of tech to AI — former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed at a commencement speech recently for telling graduates that AI is inevitable so they need to get with the program. Don’t want AI running everything? Then use AI, accept AI, “choose to be in the room where these decisions take place.” As one person puts it on BlueSky, “Saying we will be in the room to shape AI decisions flies against the face of how all tech regulation has unfolded in the past 20 years. Which he would know being at Google. These decisions that impact all of us are made by a few men like him. And they like it that way. So disingenuous.”
Certainly AI continues to spread, with even a major city paper, the Charlotte Observer, using AI to turn reporting by humans into an article that humans then review. Speaking as a reporter, I can’t see this doing a lick of good. And it’s a McClatchy paper, so the use is much wider than just the Observer.
“The post, made by a user called Ill_Car_7351, was advertising exactly what it sounds like: A database of poop images, collected from an AI poop analyzing app that he had launched several years ago. Basically, 25,000 people had been taking images of their poop and uploading them to his app. He’d been collecting, analyzing, and annotating these images and now wanted to sell access to them: “I’ve got 150k+ labeled and classified images of 💩 from roughly 25K different people. Jokes aside, I know there’s a lot of value in it (hard to obtain, useful for ML [machine learning] training, cancer studies etc) but not sure on how to move about it. Feels like I’m sitting on a pile of shi..ny coins but can’t find who wants them.” The poster added that “the images are extremely rare,” and that he was trying to figure out how much money he could sell them for.”
“Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to.”
“The world’s largest data center project — backed by Trump allies and bearing his name — is stalled by delays and logistical hurdles that could stop it before it even starts. The latest sign of trouble emerged Friday: CEO Toby Neugebauer abruptly departed. That sent the company’s shares, which already shed 75% in the last six months, plummeting in aftermarket trading.” Not all the news is bad.
