“The state of mind, the state of society, is of a piece. When we discard the test of fact in what a star is, we discard in it what a man is.” -Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values
There’s a lot of ruminating going on, as you would expect, regarding how the hell this country, which put human footsteps on the moon, managed to elect Donald Trump to a second term in office. I expect we’ll be seeing a lot of it in the months and years to come. Already I’m seeing that it was a woman at the head of the democratic ticket, or that democrats are insufficiently willing to throw hated minorities under the bus, which naturally gives republicans an edge among the voters. Some point to the right wing media cocoon. Others that too many voters simply don’t pay attention. Complaints about billionaire disinformation campaigns are being raised.
I’m sure there is something to all of that. But something more disturbing is developing among researchers who dig deep into the mindset of Trump voters. Yet it’s something we have all seen throughout our lives, and maybe it needs closer looking at, but the frustration factor is so great most of us would rather not even bother with them.
Think of the flat earthers, or the anti-vax nutcases. The ones convinced that the moon landing was faked. That global warming is a hoax. That UFO Aliens are real and walk among us. Every one of us who has had to engage one of these quickly realizes that it’s a mug’s game. Arguing with them is like trying to nail jelly to a wall. Good faith is a good starting point with someone, but you are allowed to see that it isn’t there when it isn’t there.
Trump voters are not all kooks, but we are finding out they all seem to have something terribly rotten in common with kooks, which is Facts Be Damned And I Have A Zillion Ways Of Denying Anything You Tell Me. As it turns out, they were not unaware that they were being fed lies by the republicans. They just didn’t care. If anything, they embraced the lies. The lies validated a choice they were always going to make anyway. They were not ignorant of the facts, they are hostile toward the facts. It is not a healthy skepticism, it is a willful rejection of truth.
You can pour a firehose of facts at this particular subset of the human family tree when it comes to their political notions, and not a bit of it will get through to them. They’ll change the subject. They’ll argue beside the point. They’ll throw junk science at you that both they and you know is bogus but as long as it’s something to throw back at you that’s what you get. You will hear the complete catalogue of informal fallacies out of them but not one single solitary acknowledgement of a fact. And the favorite, You Just Disagree With Me But I’m Entitled To My Opinions. And yet they are not kooks in the sense that they know the earth isn’t flat and leprechauns aren’t breeding intelligent goats to replace mankind. But they have the same exact response to facts that kooks do. It isn’t just simply I don’t believe you, it’s I don’t care if what you say is true or not.
The root of it, of course, goes deeper. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said that a bigot’s mind is like an eye; the more light you shine on it the tighter it closes. De Gaulle said that patriotism is where your country comes first, and nationalism is when hating other countries comes first. There are perhaps many poisonous springs from which this effect comes forth. But they all have that mindless hate at the core, and you can tell which of them is worth spending time discussing politics with…or anything else…and which are not, by the way they play this particular game: If you can’t make me change my mind, I win…if you can’t make me admit I’m wrong, I win.
So…I propose an update to the Voight-Kampff test. Let’s call it version two. It’s still about sifting the humans from the look alikes, but without assuming that just because one Is human, that they haven’t discarded, as Jacob Bronowski said, what it is to be human, whenever the facts offended them.
This idea that raising the standard of living drives the birth rate down is something Bill Gates has been saying and when I first read him arguing it I was surprised at how much sense it made. Some ideas just get into your head at a young age, and then you realize later in life it was just about rich and powerful men pushing you in a particular direction. Let’s not be trying to raise the standard of living for the poor because we need them to keep the middle class scared.
I’m pretty sure that’s Steven Pinker of the Blank Slate being talked about in that quote. The Blank Slate was my first exposure to him. In it he argued against a model of human consciousness that denies that our evolutionary heritage has any influence on our behavior. I was already thinking that model was wrong after reading Robert Ardrey’s book African Genesis which argued that if we sought a deeper understanding of ourselves in times of need then we should to explore those animal horizons “from which we have made our quick little march.” This was during the Cold War, so you can appreciate what those times of need were.
And on that basis I picked up Pinker’s first book expecting to read some elaboration of what Ardrey said. But he lost me when he began approvingly quoting Thomas Sowell, who called homosexuality a deathstyle (hello Dick Hafer) and incongruously argued that allowing gay men to marry would help the spread of AIDS. Yes, let’s not be encouraging gay men to get married and settle down. Sowell, who fancies himself as a recovered Marxist, also liked to bellyache about how American Marxists haven’t actually read Marx…oh yes they do, ad infinitum, and their arguing with each other about what Marxism is, let alone with what Marx’s critics say he is, reminds me of arguments over the Bible I had to listen to. How many Hegels can stand on the head of a dialectic…
So I wasn’t terribly surprised that Pinker spent some time on Epstein’s island, only to get his self important ass self booted off after telling his host he was wrong about something. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day (or once if it’s a military clock). If you want to slow down the birthrate, improve everyone’s standard of living.
And…yeah…Trump and Epstein seem to have had lots in common. Fragile egos of a feather sexually prey on teenagers together. Why were you even there Steven Pinker??
I don’t think he’s ever made his own bed, let alone his own breakfast, lunch or dinner a day in his life, let alone worked a deep fryer in a fast food joint. My first real W-4 job was at a Burger Chef. I worked the night shift and that included closing up and an hour of cleaning the food prep after closing. Show me the staged photos of him cleaning the prep area after closing…go ahead…this man could not have handled the work involved back when he was a teenager himself, let alone now.
He’s had everything handed to him his entire life and that’s why he gets pissed off whenever he doesn’t get his way.
In a recent episode of his online show Tucker Carlson Today, comedian Ari Shaffir and disgraced formerFox News host Tucker Carlson engaged in a candid conversation that veered into a provocative discussion about Transportation SecretaryPete Buttigieg’s authenticity as a gay man.
During the program, Carlson and Shaffir questioned the legitimacy of Buttigieg’s sexual orientation. Carlson recounted a conversation with one of his producers, suggesting that Buttigieg’s identity might be a political fabrication.
“Do you remember Pete Buttigieg ran for president? He’s supposedly gay, and now he’s transportation secretary. And I had one of my producers who’s gay, and he goes, ‘He’s not gay,’” Carlson said. He continued, “I was like, are you serious? He goes, ‘No, that’s complete bullshit. All gays keep very close track of that stuff.’”
I am So behind on this. I get daily updates on All That Stuff from Gay Mafia Central. But I tend to just let them accumulate in my mail folder until there’s so many I have to mass delete it all.
And Buttigieg is a policy wonk. This why those of us in the geek-not-fabulous-peacock stage-crew-not-stage tribe need to wear our pride items loudly every June because otherwise we might be mistaken for just your average everyday dorks.
The Mighty Ethan on Flickr
All kidding aside…Carlson and the rest of them really can’t deal with the world as it is because it does not validate their bar stool conceits. There are as many different kinds of gay male as there are left-handed ones. But the insular mind cannot handle that. If you don’t fit the pigeon hole they put you into they just try harder to squeeze you into it and failing that, declare you’re a fake. But it’s their reality that’s the fake.
Photo I pinched off one of the social media sites just now…
This is DeSantis talking to the voters. Notice anything about his boots?
Some would say he’s wearing lifts that are so extreme his toes aren’t even going inside the vamp let alone the toe. I would suggest that he doesn’t actually have feet. He has hooves. Cloven hooves.
When I posted a link to the final (ish) episode of A Coming Out Story to my Facebook page, with its simple title I Am, I figured I’d get some snark. And I did. But that’s okay, I’m giving some sideways snark back to a certain someone (Hi!) with that title.
I had no idea what to title that episode, and now that I’m doing them completely out of order it didn’t make any sense to give it a number either. The title came to me almost at the moment I finished it and I had to rename all my digital files to match it. But it was worth it because that’s the right title for that retelling of that particular moment in my life. There is power in embracing your personal truths, in deciding once and for all to be your authentic self, despite the pressure to conform or hide. It is exactly the right title for that episode.
The snark comes from a t-shirt I bought in Epcot Germany with just the phrase Ich Bin on the front of it. That was all. Not I Am German or I Am A Disneyphile, or I Am Whatever, but simply I Am. I liked it for the simple declaration of self truth, whatever that self truth might be.
During an interview, Stephan Fry said…
Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it – that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.
That’s a good way of looking at it, and it was sort-of what I was thinking when I bought that t-shirt with the words Ich Bin on it. I Am a gay man. I Am a software engineer. I Am a cartoonist. I Am a photographer. I Am Bruce Garrett. I Am.
So, happily, I wore it to my dinner at Biergarten reservation. And when that certain someone saw me arrive I pointed to the shirt, delighted to let him know that I’d learned a few German words and could even put them together into some sort of a sentence (if you’ve ever attempted German grammar you can appreciate how proud I was just then). “Ich Bin”, I said, pointing to the shirt, “I Am”.
And he gives me this look of pure disdain and says “The hilarious thing is you trying to teach me German.”
I wish I had a picture of the look on my face at that moment. But that was when I finally had to admit that we were probably never really very compatible.
What I am is what I am Are you what you are or what? What I am is what I am Are you what you are or what?
My trip to Oceano was not entirely uneventful. Nor was my finally getting the car its emissions recall work done. I posted the following to my Facebook page and I feel like I need to hash it out more here, because…well…To Be Continued…
Pay notice to the part where I discover the SCR catalytic converter wasn’t actually installed.
July 17: Car throws a check engine light in Grand Junction. There is no Mercedes dealer here to look into it, but tomorrow I should be able to make it to St. George Utah where there is one. I put it down to possibly the extreme heat and high altitude I was driving through.
July 18: On the way to St. George Utah the car begins a countdown, so now it’s definately an emergency. Made it to St. George leaving the car running at rest stops so as not to use up my starts.
July 19: Dropped car off at the dealer here and got it back soon after with the error codes cleared. I’m told it needs a very expensive set of emissions system parts, the SCR catalytic converter and NOx sensors, but all that is free to me with the big emissions recall which I’m planning on finally getting done this trip at the dealer in San Luis Obispo.
Somehow they tweak my car’s system into turning off the check engine light and stopping the countdown so I can get to Oceano and have the emissions work done.
July 20: I arrive in Oceano.
July 21: Ask the Mercedes dealership in San Luis Obispo to get my car scheduled for the emissions recall. As usual, can’t be scheduled until the parts come in. This time they’re saying it shouldn’t be more than a couple weeks. I’m staying this trip until at least October so maybe I can outlast the parts delay this time.
July 24: Have an oil change done at Bavarian Auto Haus, which I always do after the cross-country road trip. They use the good Liqui Moly oil and I’ve had them do this before. This time one of the guys there who seems to be either the owner or the Man In Charge tells me he’d like to dump every diesel car into the ocean because “you just can’t clean up diesel exhaust.” This will be the last time they touch my car.
August 23: I finally get the car scheduled for the big Mercedes diesel emissions recall. I had to come back twice to check if the parts had come in because nobody calls, and this second time the clerk at the service desk found out the parts were there after all. So now I’m scheduled but the soonest it can be done is September 7.
September 7 (Thursday): I drop the car off and get a nice loaner. Should only take two days but I might not get the car back until Saturday.
September 14 (the following Thursday): I finally get the car back. Big delay was attributed to needing to install OS on new main computer and configure it for the car. Also DEF quality sensor needed to be calibrated.
I get the car back to my brother’s house and then have to take it back in when the Check Engine light comes on.
September 15: I get the car back again. Explaination is the SCR Catalytic converter wasn’t installed.
September 17: A countdown starts but there is no Check Engine light. Also, the battery dies.
September 18: I talk to the dealer and then call AAA for either a new battery or a tow. The don’t have a battery for my car so it is towed to the dealer. Later I hear they’ve put in a new battery because the one in the car (it was six years old) failed a test so it was definitely bad and they put a new one in. Also the countdown started because the DEF quality sensor had not been calibrated.
I was told I would be called at 2PM to either get my car or get a loaner. I got no call until nearly close of business which was when I was told the problem was the DEF quality sensor still needed calibrating.
September 20: Dealership gives me a ride back to them, to get my car back. This time it looks like all is well, but I will need to give the car a few shakedown drives just to make sure.
[NOTE: Another one in the drafts folder I didn’t publish for some reason. Probably because the whole thing back then was making me so heartsick I didn’t want to bother.]
In my free time I’m reading a New Yorker profile of the new talk radio star, Dan Bongino, and there’s a passage quoting him as saying to his radio audience that
The day after Bongino riffed on the Arizona audit, he told podcast listeners that liberals are happy when conservative vaccine skeptics get sick. “These people want you dead” he said, and offered a call to action.
But “happy” isn’t the word for it. More like the hard cold satisfaction you get when a guilty verdict is announced. Justice was served.
Maybe that’s too cold for some and I appreciate that. I would have said the same at the beginning of this plague. It’s always confusion and fright at first when catastrophe strikes. But not now. The facts are in and have been for quite a while. We have the means to save lives we didn’t have back in 1918. But now people are demanding their neighbors not avail themselves of vaccines that can save their lives as a test of tribal loyalty, and that is a level of human depravity I never thought I’d ever witness.
MAGA antivaxxers are actively spreading lies about the vaccines and the science behind them. We see the stories over and over again of people reporting pressure not to get vaccinated from republican family and friends. It’s become politics. Now even Trump can’t convince them to protect themselves. And the hospitals are filling up with unvaccinated patients and that’s making it difficult for hospitals to take care of other people.
We could be mostly out of this by now if not for them. I’m out of sympathy and I’m out of fucks to give. If that’s happiness then why doesn’t it feel like that? I hate every part of this.
It’s times like this I can see my bitter Baptist grandmother in me. The one constant thing I hear said about her on that side of the family is she was a hard woman. As if that excused that stoney cold heart of hers. I can be that sometimes and no I don’t like being that and no I’m not happy. But as the saying goes, you made your bed now lay in it. Maybe that one person you might have convinced not to get protection if this hadn’t happened to you will live now.
I come home from my favorite hamburger joint and I find this waiting for me in the news stream…
Authorities search for suspect who fatally shot 5 people in Texas home
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A man went next door with a rifle and began shooting his neighbors, killing an 8-year-old and four others inside a house near Houston, after the family asked him to stop firing rounds in his yard because they were trying to sleep, authorities said Saturday.
San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers said authorities were still searching for 38-year-old Francisco Oropeza following the shooting…
Meanwhile Greg Abbott, governor of Texas, says he hopes to be able to sign into law soon, a bill to defy any new (or existing?) federal firearms regulations. He says it will make Texas a 2nd Amendment sanctuary.
I’ve heard it said that the 2nd amendment is an experiment that’s failed. I would respectfully submit that the experiment that’s failed is the mad rush to undo just about any and all existing firearms regulations out of a fanatical idolatry of weapons and war making. If Heinlein really meant what he said, that an armed society is a peaceful society, I think we can now say with certainty that he got that one wrong. Maybe he was imagining a world where everyone, including dangerous criminals and madmen, respond to prevailing conditions, to rewards and punishments, rationally and logically. What we’re seeing now more resembles the unleashing of the ID monster in Forbidden Planet.
There need to be rules, regulations, guardrails, just as you would need for any other potentially lethal thing, be it an automobile or toxic chemicals, heavy machinery or medicines. Firearms may be unique in that being deadly is their purpose…they’re weapons, that is what they have to be. But it does not make them all that unique. We deal with dangerous things all the time. And with dangerous people, be they predators or people you just don’t want behind the wheel of a car, let alone holding a gun. We used to have rules and regulations regarding firearms. Maybe some of them needed a little tweaking, but this experiment in deregulation has been a disaster. An armed society is a terrorised society.
This is making the rounds. I’m pretty sure what her religious reasons are for not wanting to use Windows and Apple computers. I used to joke that Leviticus forbids operating systems that support multiple threads, but this is about the LGBT friendliness of these companies, and perhaps to a degree the progressive/democratic politics of their boardrooms.
Employee claims she can’t use Microsoft Windows for “Religious Reasons”
I recently hired a new employee for my team. Everyone thinks she is a great addition, and she is clearly very talented as demonstrated in her interviews.
The problem came up during on-boarding when we supplied her with her company laptop. She said she would need it configured in a Linux based operating system because her religion does not allow use of Apple or Microsoft owned operating systems. We only currently have hardware configurations for MacOs/Windows and our expectation was that she will use Windows along with the rest of our team.
She says that she can fulfill all job duties without Windows and I am inclined to believe her but corporate policy dictates WINDOWS and my management is not on board with her request for Linux.
What actions can either (1) I take as a manager to protect her rights and get upper management onboard with her religion or (2) I take against her with management for failing to fulfill her job duties?
I’ve never come across any situation like this and am completely confounded as to how I should handle this.
Tell her your transgender IT support person will set her up with the computer of her choice. Then see what happens.
Hello Chinese censors and maintainers of the Great Firewall! I’ve been watching you crawl my blog for years and years. It makes me feel so special! Say…did any of those phish emails I got regularly at work come from you too?
Anyway…I think it’s high time I welcomed you to my little corner of the Internet Tubes!
“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it“. -John Gilmore. Internet activist, software programmer and contributor to the GNU project
This method of securing documents was not covered in my ITAR training that I can recall. So I’m assuming it’s something only those with a higher clearance than mine need to know about…
If it keeps the Time Magazine covers safe, it’s probably good enough.
Park Hopper, Water Park Option…Hey, Where’d The Magic Option Go?
Saw the following in my Google News stream, in an article about how Disney isn’t entirely happy with the money its making in the parks. This is about Disneyland but I would hazard a guess it also applies to Disney World…
The Walt Disney Company revenue grew as a whole, but further down in the report, Disney states that the Parks encountered an “unfavorable attendance mix” which it claims is the reason for lower Park ticket profits.
The report claims that per-capita ticket revenue was up due to Genie+ and Lightning Lane but quite offset by actual Disneyland attendance. This is most likely referencing the controversial and hot-button topic of MagicKey renewals, something Disney has remained very quiet on as of late.
If they still had the original Annual Pass system I’d still be a pass holder. But it seems as soon as Chapek got hold of the reins he wanted to eliminate the annual passes, and replace them with something more revenue enhancing. Thus, I wasn’t even alerted to when my pass was to expire. I knew when it was about to expire but I also knew there would be no more annual passes, but this new MagicKey thing which was hideously more expensive for less access than the annual passes were. So I bailed. I think a lot of people did. Now they’re not even for sale anymore, and probably when (if) they ever become available again they’ll be a limited number of them and you and I won’t get a chance to buy one anyway.
So that leaves us with the standard tickets. You buy one of those you are paying the max per day price, and only for the few days that the tickets are good for.
I bought two, thinking (incorrectly) that I’d still visit my favorite restaurants on my birthday week. As it turns out, they don’t let single diners make reservations at those spots anymore, but never mind… I bought two tickets, or rather, one ticket for two days at the parks. But you’re not actually getting two days, you’re getting two days in a five day window. You don’t have to use them on consecutive days, but you have to do the second day no more than four days after you use your first day.
I added the park hopper plus which allows me to hop to another park after 2PM, or visit a water park that day. (only Typhoon Lagoon is currently open), depending on whether or not the park you want to hop to is at capacity. At the moment you only need a park reservation for the first park you enter, not the one you hop to after 2PM, if you can. The water parks don’t need a park reservation currently.
So, two days within five days of each other, park hopper and water park option: grand total is 330 dollars. Well…and 22 cents. And you still need park reservations for whichever two parks you want to visit first on those two days.
I won’t go into how all this is so different, so Constraining, compared to before Chapek took over, but this is what’s being forced on the customers now, who previously had annual passes, or bought tickets as needed, and the uproar online at least is hot and furious.
So the per ticket revenue is down is it? Well I can’t spend any money on dining when I can’t get reservations. And if just getting into a park is this expensive, And complex, it sure isn’t fun anymore either. And that could be a problem.
I remember some years ago, I’m sitting in one of my favorite Disney bars, the Tune-In Lounge in Hollywood Studios. I’m talking to a man seated next to me who is taking a break from the family he’s with and we start talking about the cost of doing Disney. This was before Chapek started jacking up prices on Everything (including the ice machines in some hotels). He says to me…
You know, they talk a lot about magic here. Let me tell you how the magic works. You walk into a park here with maybe 100 dollars in your pocket, and you walk back out with maybe five. The magic is they make you want to do it again the next day.
But that was then. This is now.
I have seen this obsessive focus on profit margin at every little point no matter how trivial drag companies into the gutter. Disney is probably big enough they can survive on media revenue instead of what they used to make in the parks. But the parks used to be their big money makers and they’re not fun anymore, and the magic isn’t what it used to be.
I might not even go back next year. I’m doing it this year in large part to flip the bird at DeSantis and Florida republicans. But if Chapek is going to keep flipping the bird at park goers than why even bother.
But this year anyway, I still want to give some love to my inner Mouseketeer. It’s his birthday after all.
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