Category: Propaganda studies

Object permanence: how does it even work?

Posted on by Dale

This popped up on Facebook today:

This is the “evidence” used by racists whenever they’re doing the uh-UH you’re the racist thing: since the Democratic party took this position over a 100 years ago, they’re the real racists.

There’s plenty of this type of thing in archives about our great nation:

Like with today’s racists, it seems to have been a talking point passed freely around:

But back to my point about today’s racists’ uh-UH stratagem.  I have found that there’s no point in arguing any kind of historical perspective, because those folks don’t do historical perspective.  (Cf., “Why was there a Civil War?” With a conservative and a liberal take from writers who do have historical perspective.)

So when confronted with this fuppery:

… I shall now reply, “That’s absolutely true.  Those voters were racist cretins.  Here’s the deal, though: those voters haven’t changed. They’re still racist cretins.  Their party allegiance has certainly switched, though.”

Some choose darkness

Posted on by Dale

We all live in bubbles—it’s more comfy in here, isn’t it?

But some choose to live in some pretty dark bubbles.   On a whim just now, wondering what the conservative side of the world thought about Sean Spicer’s disastrous press conference where he idiotically compared Assad to Hitler (who didn’t even use chemical weapons, you guys), I went to the Fox News website and typed in Sean Spicer Holocaust.

This is what I got:

Zero results.

Here’s what Google gave me:

Not a fair comparison, you say?  Google is an aggregate search?  Fine. Here’s CNN:

No, it’s not because CNN is “liberal.”  CNN is a news outlet, and Sean Spicer’s astounding gaffe was news.

Fox “News” chose deliberately not to tell its audience that this thing happened.  Fox viewers have no idea that the Republican Administration’s press secretary said that

“I think a couple things. You look — we didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II. You had a — someone who is despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”

and that it went downhill from there.  (For a truly hysterical, laugh-so-that-you-might-not-cry summary of the debacle, see as always Wonkette’s take.)

A study done several years ago showed that people who watched only Fox News were less knowledgeable about current events than those who watched no news at all.  Even taking into account that correlation is not causation — people that blindered would seek a narrow worldview anyway — it’s still a reason why your rightwing relative thinks you’re an insane libtard.  Whenever you shower them with facts, their innate fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in: you’re a snotty, pointy-headed intellectual without any common sense.

It’s a pretty thick, dark bubble to be in.

The root of all evil

Posted on by Dale

Here’s the link to the article imaged below.

Emphasis mine.

This is Gingrich’s modus operandi: he loads everything he says with nasty, vituperative words so that even if you are only paying attention halfway, you cannot avoid feeling revulsion at whatever the hell he’s ranting about.

He’s done this since the 90s, and he’s done it deliberately. If you wonder where Kellyanne Conway or Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly came from, look no further.

Newt Gingrich is why we are where we are today.

Dear White House Press Corps…

Posted on by Dale

One of the drawbacks of swimming at the gym now is that the flatscreen TV in the locker room is tuned to Fox News, and I never thought I would see the day when I hoped that sports would be on the tube.

Me, after two weeks at the gym. (artist’s conception)

Today I heard yet another presser hosted by Melissa McCarthy Sean Spicer and watched in disbelief as one reporter, referring to the Current Occupant’s statement yesterday that terrorist massacres were being “under-reported” by the “very very dishonest press,” fumbled his question.  Spicer skittered away across the surface of the pond, untouched by any attempt to get some hard truth from him.

Sweet Jebus, White House Press Corps, do yourself a favor and head straight to the nearest elementary school. Sign in, and ask to be assigned to a kindergarten class.  Take notes.

BECAUSE KINDERGARTEN TEACHERS CAN GET BETTER ANSWERS OUT OF SEAN SPICER THAN YOU CAN.

Here’s the deal: Never never ever ask a kid a yes/no question about some misbehavior.

TEACHER: Did you hit Suzie?

SEAN: No, I was just blah blah blah.

No.  Watch and learn.

TEACHER: Tell me what happened here.  Sean, you go first.

SEAN: Well, Suzie called me a doopyface so I hit her.

And scene.

How does this work for you guys?

Instant replay:

REPORTER: Yesterday, when the President said that terror attacks were being under-reported, did he mean blah blah blah?

SPICER: —::deny:: — ::pivot:: — ::spin:: — [runs away laughing, possibly shouting “nanny-nanny-boo-boo”]

That’s not how you do it.  Watch and learn:

REPORTER: Yesterday, the President said about terrorist attacks, and I quote, “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”  What did he mean by that?

SPICER: Um… I thought Melissa McCarthy was funny, but she chewed too much gum.  No more questions.

So there go you.  Hie thee to an elementary school and pick up some skills.  I imagine you could even learn this in Betsy Fupping Devos’ new string of for-profit Talibaptist madrassas.  Well, if any of the people being paid minimum wage to ride herd on students there are in fact teachers.

School improvement… how does it even work?

Posted on by Dale

Betsy Davos, super-wealthy Dominionist, is the current nominee for Secretary of Education.  She is rabidly anti-public education, which is pretty odd since neither she nor anyone she knows, including her children, have ever been involved in any kind of public school.  Ever.  Not one.

Instead, she champions that rightwing shibboleth of “competition,” because competition makes everyone better, right?  You know, like when you line up the whole class of children and make them all race to the other end of the playground, and that one chubby kid just keeps getting faster and faster every day?  Just like that?

That’s right, boys and girls, if you let “the money follow the child,” then if a child is in a “failing” school, his parents can “choose” to send that child to any other [charter/private/religious] school of their choice, and presto! their child can now “succeed” instead of being “trapped” in a “failing” school.

OK, let’s look at that, because there’s a lot of sleight of hand going on here.

First of all, who decides when a school is “failing”?  That’s an easy one: we have standards set by a variety of levels of government from local to federal, and if a school doesn’t meet those standards, they are “failing.”  It is unusually curious that those standards for the most part align with the socioeconomic status of the students in any school.  A recent study (the link to which I cannot find; you’re just going to have to trust me) found that you didn’t need to run students through all those tests: you could get the same results by tabulating their parents’ income and education level.  THE SAME RESULTS, KENNETH.

Second, Davos is militant that those standards should not apply to her charter/private/religious schools.  Is that incredible to you?  Go see for yourself.  That’s a pretty sweet deal: enforce standards that make it impossible for certain schools to “succeed,” then suck their funding dry for your for-profit schools while evading those same standards.  I’ve written about this before.

And here’s the biggest sleight of hand of all: Everyone has been convinced to keep their eye on the charter/private/schools and argue about whether they are “succeeding” enough to justify draining public schools of their funding and students.  But that’s not the question.  The question is whether all this “healthy competition” is actually causing the “failing” schools to suddenly succeed.  In other words, is the chubby kid getting faster and faster every day just because you took some of the faster kids off the playground?

I submit to you that he is not, and that the whole “school choice” plan is a con of the most blatant and disgusting sort.  At no point are these people actually concerned about improving all schools for all children.  Davos has never presented such a plan, nor will she.  She wants to kill off public education once and for all, and the only reason I can think why she would want to do this is to take the money and run.  Oh, and that whole Dominionist thing.

Keep your eye on the lady, folks.

Amygdalas. Why is it always amygdalas?

Posted on by Dale

A friend rather foolishly clicked on a link in a spam email yesterday.

Fortunately,[1] it just leads to a webpage that first asks you to make sure you have your sound on, and then proceeds to auto-play a slideshow that is nothing but text, which the narrator then reads out loud to us.  Oy.  It also says that it’s only six minutes long, but as I type this it’s been way over fifteen and it’s still going.

I will now pause to let you guess what the presentation is actually about.

The presentation is about _____
A) a quasi-military organization plotting a coup, thereby enabling Clinton’s accession to the presidency
B) a super-secret cabal which will engineer the president-elect’s impeachment before the inauguration, thereby enabling Clinton’s accession to the presidency
C) an ad for a “free” book on secret cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, arthritis, etc.

If you guessed C, congratulations.

Yes, it’s true, boys and girls.[2] Hillary Clinton conspired twenty-three years ago to kill off 31,000 patriots a year with the pharmaceutical cartel.  Their plot was to put her in the White House, where she would allow them “access to the power and money” of the U.S. government something something drugs.

How exactly this is different from our current healthcare situation is unclear, but IT’S SCARY, KENNETH!  Hillary Clinton!  Cartel!  There is so much ooga-booga in the first five minutes of this thing that I cannot remember it all—and I’m not going back to listen to it again.  It hits all the notes: Clinton, conspiracy, patriotism, threat of death, etc.  There is no documentation or proof, just blunt assertions about “knowing” stuff that NO ONE ELSE KNOWS, KENNETH!

[The presentation is still running in another browser window.  Six minutes my ass.]

The speaker finally reveals his affiliation: HSI, Health Science Institute.  A more wretched hive of scum and villainy, etc., etc.

Why do I say that?  The target audience for this pitch is those of us over 55, who combine the traits the HSI values: intractable health issues, not-very-solid reasoning capacities, distrust of institutional healthcare, and increasing fear of death.  (And a whole bunch of us have an irrational fear/hatred of Hillary Clinton, so that’s a bonus.)  The pitch is deliberately crafted to engage the amygdala and its irrational fears—and create a sense of panic and urgency so that the poor senior citizen clicks on that link to receive the “free” booklet.

I’m guessing that in order to receive your free book, you have to give the HSI not only your mailing address, but also your email address and probably your phone number.  You will then receive pitch after pitch for their products WHICH WILL CURE YOUR CANCER THE NATURAL WAY WITHOUT SIDE EFFECTS, KENNETH!  These people are evil.

The only way to make sure is to click on that link.  Which I’m not going to do.[3]

—————

[1] For differing values of “fortunate.”

[2] It’s not true.

[3] I have written this entire blog post and the presentation is still running and still has not given me the information to receive my free book.  We’re now into the second free gift.

Evil

Posted on by Dale

I have been reading Mirrors, by Eduardo Galeano.  I have come to believe that there is a thread of evil running through human history that will not die but must be fought against without stint or let.

In the middle of a series of disquisitions about slavery and its never-ending end in the 18th and 19th centuries, I came across this:

When Iqbal Maiz was four, his parents sold him for fifteen dollars.

He was bought by a rug maker.  He worked chained to the loom fourteen hours a day. At the age of ten, Iqbal was a hunchback with the lungs of an old man.

Then he escaped and became the spokesman for Pakistan’s child slaves.

In 1995, when he was twelve years old, a fatal bullet knocked him from his bicycle.
[pp. 190-191]

In 1995.

Evil.

Evil is not having sex with someone to whom you are not married or is the same gender as you.  Evil is not realizing your brain is not the same gender as your body.  Evil is not praying to some other deity than you and your neighbors.

Evil is cruelty to anyone with less power than you.

Period.

Not in my name, not in my country.  Speak up.

None dare call it lying

Posted on by Dale

In her Washington Post op-ed on Friday, Ruth Marcus bemoaned our post-truth PPE.  She’s on point with her facts and her opinions, but on one item she completely missed the boat.

Ironically, while gigging the PPE for “not quite understanding what euphemism means,” she bends over backwards dancing around the hard truth[1]: “consistently heedless to truth”; “untrue assertion”; “untruths”; “chock-full-of-lies”; “truth-impaired”; “unconstrained by facts.”  Only in her last paragraph does she nail it: “The journalist’s challenge is not to tire in refuting the torrent of lies.”

The way to do that, Ms. Marcus, is to use the exact terminology each and every time: the PPE won by lying.  He continues to lie. He is a liar.

—————

[1] See what I did there?

Ethics—how do they even work?

Posted on by Dale

This is another in our Easy Answer series, in which I ask my congressional representatives a pretty easy question to answer and await their response.

This time my concerns spring from the probable hypocritical stance taken by our Republicker friends in regards to the presumptive president-elect (PPE) and his business dealings with foreign sources.  My trigger was this article from the WaPo.  It’s worth a read.

For real, the howler monkeys have been shrieking and flinging poo about Hillary Clinton’s “corruption” in taking money from foreign governments, etc., to fund the Clinton Foundation, the non-profit her family runs to “convene businesses, governments, NGOs, and individuals to improve global health and wellness, increase opportunity for women and girls, reduce childhood obesity, create economic opportunity and growth, and help communities address the effects of climate change.”  Much was made of its diabolical nature during the campaign, despite its consistent high ratings from independent organizations like Charity Navigator.

Likewise, the Republickers cranked up that smoke machine and did their best to make the Foundation look as if it were some kind of money funnel to the Clintons themselves, which of course it isn’t.  One claim I read was that you could tell it was corrupt because only 3% of its funding was dispersed in donations.  This was of course a deliberate lie and not an easy one for the regular voter to see through: since the Foundation runs its own programs, little of its funding goes to other organizations.  Let me repeat that for the hard-of-thinking: because the Clinton Foundation runs its own programs, it uses its funding to do that rather than pay someone else to do that.

So with such high dudgeon and general fantods on the part of the Republickers, you might very well think it was because of their high moral and ethical standards.  You might think that now that the PPE is heading their way, they’d be clutching their pearls and staffing their investigative committees to root out all potential corruption from the PPE and his foreign business issues.  You might think that, but then again you might be A Idiot.

Today’s email:

Many of your colleagues have been quite vocal in their calls to investigate Hillary Clinton on the basis of “foreign donations” or “entanglements,” implying that the U.S. President should be above suspicion when it comes to money matters and foreign entities.
Do you share their view, and do you intend to apply the same ethical standard to the presumptive president-elect’s business affairs?

As usual, I concluded with, “As a matter of course I will publish my question to you and your response both on my blog and on social media.”

Republicker Maths

Posted on by Dale
One of these things is not like the others.

Here was an interesting legal theorem that I had not encountered before, that affirmative action plans and slavery are morally and legally the same gambit, i.e., that both involve one person forcing an “unwanted economic relationship” on another.  (Needless to say, this happened in Wisconsin under the odious lizard-man Scott Walker.)

I’ll make this short.  They are the same in the sense that +5 and -5 have the same absolute value, i.e., |5|.  But even a Republicker —especially a Republicker— would rather have +5 in his bank account than -5.  And that, O Scott Walker, is the difference.