Dr James Dobson, a prominent and influential evangelical leader who advised four US presidents, has died aged 89.
Dobson was a fixture in conservative US politics for decades and most recently served on Donald Trump’s advisory board for evangelical affairs.
The ministry he founded, Focus on the Family, is one of the largest in the world, with a presence in nearly 100 countries.
As we get ready to behold the commercial news media’s whitewash of this man’s life, lets pause and review the atrocities. Because this man leaves in his wake some deeply festering wounds on our nation, and especially on some of its children.
James Dobson is dead. Finally. This awful homophobe made the world a significantly worse place by his living in it. His brand of hate was tremendously influential in the modern Republican Party. Future Americans should look at Dobson with contempt and disgust, much like the racist scum of our collective past and of the Trump administration today.
…
From the very beginning of his public career, Dobson was horrible. He came to public light in 1970 with his child raising manual, Dare to Discipline. This book made him the anti-Benjamin Spock. It was openly pro-corporal punishment. He claimed to oppose child abuse, but his guidelines on this was much more vague than it was on beating the crying kids…
…In a follow-up book The Strong-Willed Child, which also advocated beating the hell out of the brats, Dobson stated about how long the beating should go on, “Yes, I believe there should be a limit. As long as the tears represent a genuine release of emotion, they should be permitted to fall. But crying quickly changes from inner sobbing to an expression of protest … Real crying usually lasts two minutes or less but may continue for five. After that point, the child is merely complaining, and the change can be recognized in the tone and intensity of his voice. I would require him to stop the protest crying, usually by offering him a little more of whatever caused the original tears.” Ah yes, keep hitting the child until their will gives up. What can go wrong?
And it wasn’t just kids that he urged hitting. It was also the family dog…
They say the abused child is greatly at risk of growing up to be an abuser. You wonder how many masked ICE thugs you see gleefully terrorizing immigrant families, separating children from parents without any hint of compassion, how many MAGA bullies and thugs on the streets and in the halls of power, were raised according to Dobson’s methods…
“There were men waiting for them in civilian clothing. The [ICE agents] detained the family for many hours, and it was a terrifying time for the two children and their mother,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School.
“They were crying in fear. One of the agents at one point lifted up his shirt, which displayed the gun that he was carrying,” Mukherjee said. “The 6-year-old boy was terrified to see the gun. He urinated on himself and wet all his clothing. No one offered him a change of clothing for many hours.”
Dobson would approve of all of it. There’s the man. He believed himself to be God’s own right hand, and gods don’t feel shame.
[Update…] And so it begins…
Dr. James Dobson, a politically influential child psychologist who started a radio show counseling Christians died Thursday.
-ABC Action News
Democratic state Rep. Nicole Collier from Fort Worth returned to the Texas Capitol on Monday but says she remains locked inside the Capitol because she wouldn’t sign a permission slip to be under escort by the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The escorts for all House Democrats who left the state last month — preventing a vote on a GOP-led redistricting effort — are meant as a guarantee that they will return to the House by 10 a.m. Wednesday for the next special session.
She wouldn’t sign. So what? So fucking what? Seems like the rest of them did. Which means they have police “escorts” tagging along with them everywhere so they can’t leave the state again. Which means even if Collier, who wouldn’t sign, leaves the state, They’ll Still Have A Quorum!
At this point it’s just the sort of cheapshit petty harassment that republicans do, and their gutter crawling voter base just loves. If this really was a mature, principled party, they’d just shrug and let her make her statement and go on about their business (of helping Trump rig the midterms). But they are the party of the perpetually aggrieved and frightened of the world they live in. The Grand Old Poltroons. And that’s not just a democrat, it’s a black woman sassing them back. Of course she has to stay locked in. They’d sell her back into slavery if they could.
I hadn’t read any of Fred Clark’s posts in a while, I suppose for some reason I can’t get his blog to work in Feedly. So just now on a lark I checked in.
I also appreciate his telling how it feels to move into a new place in the center of town and you can walk to “a supermarket within walking distance, and a half-dozen coffee shops, four pizza places, and more restaurants and bars than I’d manage to visit over the next 15 years of living there.” Yes, urban life is Wonderful. Especially if you’re a walker. And especially so when it seems you are welcomed to it with a street fair right outside your front door.
I really need to figure out how to get his posts to show up in Feedly.
[Update…] This time I tried I got the link to Slacktivist added to My Websites easily. I have no idea what the problem was before.
In The Future Everyone Will Have 15 Minutes Of Reality…
Meanwhile, in the land of Fox News, Plantation Owner Christianity, RFK Jr and Donald Trump, a man uses AI machines trained on other people’s music, to create a band that doesn’t exist, generate thousands of mock music tracks from that mock band, put them on a streaming service that pays real bands next to nothing for their music, and then builds an army of bots to stream his mock band’s mock music and get millions in royalties from all his mock listeners.
FBI Acting Assistant Director Christie M. Curtis said: “Michael Smith allegedly produced hundreds of thousands of songs with artificial intelligence and utilized automatic features to repeatedly stream the music to generate unlawful royalties to the tune of $10 million.
SMITH created thousands of accounts on the Streaming Platforms (the “Bot Accounts”) that he could use to stream songs. He then used software to cause the Bot Accounts to continuously stream songs that he owned. At a certain point in the charged time period, SMITH estimated that he could use the Bot Accounts to generate approximately 661,440 streams per day, yielding annual royalties of $1,207,128.
SMITH spread his automated streams across thousands of songs to avoid anomalous streaming as to any single song. SMITH was aware that if, for example, a single song was streamed one billion times, it would raise suspicions at the Streaming Platforms and the music distribution companies that those streams were the result of streaming manipulation. A billion fake streams spread across tens of thousands of songs, however, would be more difficult to detect, because each song would only be streamed a much smaller number of times. As a result, SMITH repeatedly identified the need for more songs as crucial for facilitating the fraud scheme. For example, on or about December 26, 2018, SMITH emailed two co conspirators that, “We need to get a TON of songs fast to make this work around the anti-fraud policies these guys are all using now.”
If only they’d paid his royalties in mock money, say three dollar bills or one of Trump’s bitcoin things, it would have been the perfect mock crime.
I had an odd vivid dream this morning about being in photographer mode for a while. It was odd in some of its detail, which is not unusual for a dream. It was encouraging because I’ve been wanting to see that part of me awaken since the beginning of the year and so far it won’t.
That part of me feels exhausted. Like I’ve said everything I wanted to say with a camera and now I have nothing more left to say. It’s all Been There, Done That. Since the start of the year I’ve taken multiple trips with one or more of my cameras to go find things to explore and, then come back home without so much as touching them. Now they just sit unused. I’ve thought about selling some of them, but I’ve a collection of good ones now and it’s almost for that reason alone I won’t. Instead of looking at my cameras as a photographer, I’m seeing them now as a collector. I feel like something inside of me is just draining away.
So the dream last night was welcome in a way. Oddly, in the dream I am a younger guy, but I was also aware that I’m working part time now, not fully retired anymore like I was. So I couldn’t just flit away and go looking for things to explore with my cameras. I’m driving the little green Prism., not the Mercedes. And I’m living in the apartment with mom, but it’s located in some new neighborhood I don’t recognise, but with easy access to the interstate. And my bitter abusive maternal grandmother is still living in the apartment with me and mom, and one reason I’m out and about is I’m getting away from her.
I really wish she would stop appearing in my dreams. But I suppose it’s she did a lot of damage and even at age 71 I’m still trying to recover from it.
It seems like it’s not quite the end of winter, but warm enough for shirtsleeves instead of a coat outside. I’m trying to think of where I can go when I only have a few days off. In this dream I consider driving to New Orleans, but it’s too far and I’ve done a lot of the points down south. I think I should go north, but there is still snow cover up north. I have an urge to just throw it all off and drive all the way to California. But no…I have to be back at work after just a few days.
So I go north, into Pennsylvania, and at a highway food stop I suddenly see something I want to get with my camera. What I have with me just then is the black Nikon F with the photomic FTn light meter head. It’s a really good shot. This highway food joint has as its trademark a pair of cowboy boots, and this particular one has a large fiberglass pair of them on a pole high up above the roof, sorta like how McDonald’s has their golden arches, and Bob’s Big Boy has that kid in checkered overalls. It’s the incongruity of that huge pair of cowboy boots on the pole standing watch up against the sky with the sunlight hitting them just so and the clouds in the background that are just right that attracts my attention. As I said, a vivid dream.
I raise my camera to my eye, turning on the light meter and taking off the lens cap as I do, only to discover I don’t have the right lens on it for this shot. It’s the 50mm and I almost always shoot with a 24. In my haste to get out of the apartment I only took that one camera and the lens that was on it.
So I attempt to back away to compose the shot I want of the thing I am seeing, and there is outside seating at this place so I have to navigate around the tables and other people eating there. And a young woman asks me about my camera and we get into a conversation about cameras because she has one too but it’s a different make and she wants to know more about the Nikon.
And I go into my speal about how I’m not really a Nikon person but a Canon person but sometimes I like taking the Nikons out because they have a different mechanical feel…and I wake up.
What was so encouraging about this dream was my photographer’s eye opened up for a while in it and I saw something I just had to get a shot of. That hasn’t happened in almost a year. But I don’t know if I can make it happen again in real life. As I write this I’m afraid that if I go somewhere with my cameras again the same thing will happen and I’ll come back empty handed because I can’t feel that part of me inside.
I’ve been thinking lately of putting up a new photo gallery on the website, a Best Of gallery where I put what I think is are the very best images I’ve managed to make over the years, the stuff I’m super proud of. Maybe working on something like that will reawaken that part of me inside. Or at least give it a good send off.
Along with, apparently, nearly everyone else here in Charm City, I got one of these in the mail the other day…
This comes from a religious publisher, Remnant Publications, that’s known for mail bombing its wares all over the country, so I reckon Maryland, or at least Baltimore, is having its turn at being on the receiving end of one of their mass mailings. Remnant is affiliated with the Seventh Day Adventists. But the author of the book, or at least its original author since it’s apparently been through many revisions over the years, was Ellen G. White, a co-founder of the faith. Though having gone through many editions the book itself dates back to the 1800s, about ten or eleven years after what the Seventh Day Adventists call The Great Disappointment (the world didn’t end), and purports to explain the rise and fall of nations in terms of the cosmic battle between Christ and Satan. Just the thing to add to my collection of Jack Chick tracts. Especially as it seems to be an anti-Catholic screed, although I’m told later editions of the book have toned that down a tad.
I am not a Catholic, I’m an atheist, and recently I got my hands on a really lovely graphic novel about a gay teenage Catholic boy trying to reconcile his emerging sexuality with his faith, and his crush on a classmate who is atheist. It’s Hey, Mary! by Andrew Wheeler and Rye Hickman.
It’s very sympathetically done and it gave this Baptist Boy Turned Atheist a better insight into that faith and its culture, and why it matters deeply to some of them. In the end the Catholic boy embraces himself, and his faith, and his atheist boyfriend, and the two of them agree to find a way to walk together, because they are in love. Because each of those pieces of themselves, and each other, make a whole.
I love stories like that. And it’s not hard to see the difference between it and The Great Controversy. The one looks to scripture to discover its eternal truths, the other to the human heart.
So with Trump sending the troops and tanks (yes) into DC, the MAGA noise machine is going overtime to explain to the base that cities (especially cities with a majority black population and government) are pits of crime and violence. Except…well…they aren’t. Sure there are bad neighborhoods everywhere, but violent crime is actually down overall. At least according to the last most recent reliable stats. But I’m sure they’re working on fixing the stats right this very moment.
Fox host: “If they had National Guard troops in Times Square it would make me feel safer
AINSLEY EARHARDT (FOX HOST): So the president implemented this Making D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force and in less than a week they’ve taken 100 violent criminals off the streets. I think it’s great. I wouldn’t mind seeing the National Guard, especially if it’s in areas where there is a lot of crime. I mean, think about Times Square. There is a lot of crime there. We cover a lot of stories there. If they had National Guard troops in Times Square it would make me feel safer.
I don’t think all of this is deliberate hyperbole. There’s some real fear there on the part of this group of Trump/MAGA blowhards. They’re surrounded by too many Not White faces, too much social and cultural representation that isn’t their own. To walk in Not Fox News/Trump/MAGA territory is to be out of their comfort zone.
But there’s something else I think that’s at work here. I’ve walked through Time Square by myself many times. Last time I was in NYC (to see Boys In The Band at the Booth Theater) I wandered around from the Hotel to Hell’s Kitchen, had a great time just exploring somewhere I’d never been before, and the local food was excellent. But I’m used to this. I’m single, an only child, and prefer taking my walks by myself because a companion, unless very good friends or a lover (which I’ve never had), would restrict my wandering. Plus, I might walk their legs off. That’s all well and good, but there is something else I’m used to, and have been since childhood.
Evaluating my surroundings moment to moment.
It happens automatically, and so routinely I don’t even notice it anymore. But it’s there, in the background of my thoughts. Always.
I remember a moment I was walking to Friends bar near DuPont Circle with strike 3. There was nearly no foot traffic at that moment, and 3 and I was chatting easily as we walked. I barely noticed the group of older kids walking toward us, and I only remember in retrospect adjusting my path to take them just out of arm’s reach as they passed us.
I heard a sickening thud. One of the kids, large and heavy set, had thrown an elbow at 3’s chin and nearly knocked him over.
And suddenly there it was, and there was nobody else around to come to our aid. As often happens at these moments, the streets were empty. It was just the two of us and those kids who were laughing at 3. I moved to stand between them and 3 wondering what the hell I was going to do if they turned on me too, but they just kept laughing and walked off. 3 wasn’t badly hurt, and we went on to Friends.
As I said, it was only thinking about what happened in retrospect that I noticed my slight change of course. So they would have to take a step toward me if they wanted to cause trouble and I’d have time to react. That was no result of self defense training. It was the reflex of years of school yard bullying.
It’s with me always. It was beaten into me. Evaluating my surroundings as I walk along just comes automatically and naturally, even now at age 71. And I want to emphasize this: it’s not worry. I’m not constantly worried I’ll be attacked. I’m not constantly afraid. I just…watch. I’ve come to see it as just another part of life. Like putting my wallet in a front pocket when I’m in a crowded place. Like making sure the door is locked when I leave the house.
These people bellyaching about how afraid they are in the cities…I think a lot of it is theater. Performance for the rubes. But not all of it. I am conditioned to be alert. Because I was bullied. By people like the ones looking into the cameras on Fox News. I recognise those faces. I recognise the predatory gaze, and the snear in their voice. I know these people. They are my schoolyard bullies, all grown up now, still playing the old game on their favorite childhood targets. They don’t know how to evaluate their surroundings because they never had to. And it scares them to be anywhere they are outnumbered.
They witlessly gave me a survival skill. What they gave themselves was a false sense of power and security. And you’re really seeing it now.
[Update…]
And just for my classmates to know…I regard my years at Woodward as among the best of my life. The bullying happened in Jr. High. So I’m told, that’s usually where the worst of it usually is.
And You Thought AI Was Just For Stealing Other People’s Artwork
Apparently it can steal the artist too. Or will soon be able to. And also every one of us.
This, as Joohn Choe says, is INTERESTING. I would also add, disquieting.
These are the parents of a kid who was murdered during a school shooter event at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida. Apparently they had an AI version of their child created using things the boy wrote, plus more general information about him. Acosta talked to an animated photo of the boy, complete with moving lips and incidental facial gestures. “This is a very legit Joaquin,” his father said. But is it, and to what degree?
I can appreciate parents in their grief turning to AI to recreate their lost child. Losing a child is probably the most painful kind of grief humans experience. So don’t expect this sort of thing to be shamed or legislated away. We as a species are going to have to learn how to deal with it, because it is already here, and it’s going to get even more realistic as the technology improves. But I have questions.
Choe asks what if we could have A.I. that was trained on our parent’s writings, photographs and videos? Would we want that? He adds:
There probably isn’t enough for those of us born in the 20th century but people who’ve spent their entire lives online, like the “digital natives” whom no one ever calls that anymore, that’s going to be a lot easier.
I could easily be a case in point, even though a lot of my life was spent before the personal computer, modems, BBSs, and the Internet. There is actually a lot of Me out there. This blog you’re reading for instance. Especially this blog, since it is as I’ve often said a “Life Blog”. That is, it isn’t themed on any particular topic, though yes it often gets political. It’s more like an online diary, which is what blogs initially were. There’s a lot more of “me” in it than it would have been if it were fixed to a particular topic.
There’s 2+ decades of this blog, and if that isn’t enough, all my commercial social media posts, all my posts on USENET, my BBS posts, especially those I made over several years on a gay BBS and it’s network of BBSs. There are all my saved emails (I save everything), and my YouTubes. Could a machine be trained on my artwork? That sort of thing is very subjective, but it would be instructive as to my inner emotional self. Perhaps an analysis of my program code would provide insights into my logical rational self. But would anyone who actually knew me recognize the resulting simulacrum as me, or would it occupy something like the uncanny valley?
What goes into making a personality? Would it get the gestures right? The tone of voice? The facial expressions? The awkward word dumps because sometimes I forget to keep my mouth shut and not let the first thing that comes to mind pop out? (Hi Tico!)
I’m not sure what concerns me more about this. That it gets it wrong or that it gets it right.
People grow. Would a simulacrum grow? Given several copies of a person all having the same life experience would they grow into the same future person? Chaos theory says probably not. But then which is the more authentic version?
What if you could set off the simulacrum at different starting points of a person’s life? They would not all grow into the same person the original eventually became. Maybe most of them get it close, but none of them would get it the same. Assuming they even could grow. But maybe that would be the point. Anyone who ever loved me enough to want a Forever Bruce would not want it to grow and change. Probably they would want a version of me that was always and forever me at some stage of my life. But that isn’t real. That would not be me.
AI versions of ourselves would have to be allowed to grow. But then they would change in possibly likely but not completely predictable ways. Unless you forced some future growth path into the algorithm. What is a soul? What is free will?
There’s a lot to think about here. Not that any of it is likely to get any sort of quality thinking from the tech bros, or anyone else. Especially anyone in grief. Maybe some future AI version of me would want to tell everyone running it that it isn’t me at all, just remember me fondly and stop trying to bring me back to life because it isn’t happening. And maybe knowing that it exists because someone is grieving my loss, decides to just shut up and act the part anyway. Which would be very much like me after all.
I’ve been making some tweaks to the artwork in my semi-biographical cartoon story here, A Coming Out Story, because I was unhappy with some aspects of it. Some of that is looking back on the skill I had when I began it two decades plus ago, versus the skill I developed over the years. But a lot of it is how bad it gets when I get myself in a hurry and just try to push it out of me. This applies to everything I draw. Unless I proceed deliberately, and carefully I am no damn good. But then I am slow. Combine that with the periods of time when I have no head of steam up at all for the work and I spend weeks doing nothing at all, and the episodes just come out so damn infrequently I am not at all surprised the story has very few regular viewers. So there were times I felt compelled to just Get It Out, and now in retrospect a lot of that artwork I am unhappy with.
That was especially true with episode 36, Moment of Truth. That was a super important episode for me because it is a critical shift in the story. Remember, I subtitled it, The First Person You Come Out To Is Yourself.
Episode 36 is where that finally happens. I needed it to be special, in terms of its artwork, and it’s tenor. But that meant it was a lot more work and by that point, after two decades plus of working on it, and I’m 70 years old and I don’t know if I have enough life left to finish it, I was getting anxious. Looking back on it, even after I finished and posted it, I wasn’t completely happy with the artwork. But I felt like it was “good enough” and I had to get it out.
That’s always a mistake, but especially with me. I am no professional cartoonist. I joke that I’m a hunt and peck draftsman for all the erasing and redrawing I do. I’m almost completely self taught, save for some high school art class instruction and the helpful tutorials Howard Cruse kindly put up on his website (I miss him so very much). I have to dig in my heels and Slow Down and be deliberate and careful. Something else I’ve learned over the years is to just let the artwork sit overnight and come back to it with fresh eyes.
So I’ve been redoing a bunch of my ACOS panels for the past several months, and I’m feeling Much better about the story as a whole now. But I’ve been saving most of my energy for that for episode 36. Because the artwork is much more detailed, and almost none of it is repeatable from panel to panel, it was a Lot of work. I’ve almost completely worked over the first three strips of two each (the entire episode is this) and I still have the final three to do. But I can already see how much better the artwork gets across what I wanted to get across in that episode.
I want to start work on the episodes I skipped over when, in my panic about my heart health, I posted the episode titled I Am. That was not meant to be the final episode, more like the period at the end of the story arc of my finally coming out to myself, after the guy I was crushing on put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a squeeze (episode 34, Flirting In Denialville). But I saw I could use it to give the story some sort of closure in case I was unable to finish it. That’s not how it was meant to end, there is still a Lot left to do. I want to get back into it.
This thread came across my BlueSky feed the other day…
Yeah. The article in question is from fall 2019, but it seemed staringly obvious to me during the run up to the election and after, especially in how Trump and the republicans were governing. If the base was all about their economic anxiety you wouldn’t have known it by how often the republicans cut the economy out from under their base. But the base loved them anyway, because they were all in on the culture war items: racism, misogyny, xenophobia and homophobia.
That’s what it is about. It is the alpha and the omega of what it is about. “… the core of support is cultural backlash & reaction.”
It was, and is, staringly obvious. Yet it stunned me at the time, and still does, how so many democrats, liberals, and gay liberals no less, keep insisting the republican base is winnable if we can just speak to their economic woes. But no. No. That 35 or so percent of the American polity is not reachable.
I’ve been watching them from a gay man’s perspective since I was a teenager. But even before that, as a boy sitting in the pews of a Yankee Baptist church, singing in Sunday School that Jesus loved All the little children, and in grade school reciting the pledge of allegiance that ends with liberty and justice for All. I’ve been watching them all this time. It was hard to fathom people who categorically rejected the core values of their country and their religion, and yet insisted they were the perfect examples of both. Back in the day one just wrote them off as crazies. And now they have their hands on the levers of power.
They will never accept life an America that they have to share with the hated Other. They will burn it all to the ground first and dance in the ashes of civilization. They’ve been like this since before I was born, since before the Civil War. The white supremacy, the attitudes toward women, gays, other religions, other cultures, science, higher education. They will burn the earth to a cinder if that’s what it takes to rid it of everything they hate. They will never change. They are unreachable.
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