Squid Factor
“Squid factor” is the batty slippery grasping inky confusion of history, fact, delusion, timelines, hate & looniness that is right-wing debate.
It doesn’t always include screaming. It usually includes the line, “I’ve been studying history for years!” and then, when the person using it cannot define terms or communicate a point and is asked to do so, the line, “Well, you must not know history.”
Add to this the use of circular logic, that leads them to make pronouncements such as — heard recently — “The eastern bloc and the cold war led to the Holocaust.” When it is pointed out they’ve got the timeline backwards, their eyeballs jiggle as they attempt to make some kind of clarification to themselves before spitting out the next nuttiness, such as equating the Romanovs with the Communists — whatever the latter term may mean in their minds.
They usually believe some historical event their ancestors were involved in is part of a great conspiracy to keep it a secret. They sound like NPR interviewing an author who claims no one knows about the Einsatzgruppen, regardless of the Wiki link.
These people are like clones. Their knowledge of history comes of disconnected moments they remember from the History Channel or some movie version, or possibly some romantic novels, along with the right-wing blogs that reflect their own confusion, or the kind of religious gossip that is rife along the Israeli/Palestinian border. They wouldn’t know historical rigor if it came up and bit them in the socks.
Then again, sooner or later, they’ll start telling you about what native tribe — usually Cherokee, sometimes midwest — their family is part of, and how they’re not accepted by the tribe. Perhaps their confusion of the timeline is part of a misunderstanding of Native American circular time?
I should note that the best way to set this off this raving is to threaten their rice bowl. They often work as part of the overall drug dealing/drug war/police/criminal system which is becoming a major employer in this country. It’s no use pointing out they work for Monsters, Inc. — being paid from the misery of others. Sooner or later they will hint, in more or less obvious terms, that “certain groups” need to be swept so that the world can be a Decent Place again. This may include anyone from “terrorists” (which in their minds can mean anything from anyone who speaks Farsi to the whole of Hollywood), but they seem to have a thirst to either wipe out the troublemakers, branch and root, or use them to expand the funding for the drug/cop/prison system.
Obviously to the detriment of the school system.
Patience and the Pigskin
National Public Radio is doing a series on high school football culture.
Rather than get into what this culture does to those of us who don’t want to be part of it, here’s a tip for those of you who are being dragged to pep rallies against your will. It’s easy, it’s simple and it works.
When you’re forced to leave your classes to go to the gymnasium to whoop up the team, simply gather in one of the upper corners of the bleachers and quietly read or do your homework. It won’t be long before the people who like games will complain that you are quashing their vibe.
Since the administration can’t force you to stand up and cheer, when approached simply ask for a separate study hall, with a monitor. After one or two times, when they discover that all you do is read and study when you’re in the study hall anyway, the monitor will head back to the rally where he or she wants to be anyway.
Then you can bring out the chess and ouija boards and have arcane debates and art and dance contests.
Win/win.
Whose Rice-bowl is this?
After several arguments with people who offer me all kinds of crap about the new health-care debate, someplace in the conversation they give away they’re associated with the health-care industry.
BEFORE you start discussing health care with anybody — if you don’t want your head to explode — find out if they receive any sort of money from the health care industry. Doctors, clinicians, nurses, medical writers, even janitors in hospitals. Every single one of them will argue for private health care, and offer arguments against those very draw-backs already part of privatized care. They’ll even tell you the government will force you to go to certain doctors or pharmacies — and what private insurance company doesn’t already do that? They’ll tell you the government will decide on your treatment or deny you coverage — how would that be any different, even if it were true?
Their rice bowls are being threatened. They can only see a future of shrinking paychecks — and it will be over your dead body.
Yes, I want to see that 1000-page bill posted on the net. How much you want to bet most of the riders are based on what the health-care industry lobbyists want? Let’s see this thing — it could backfire on the people demanding to see it.
Nearest just said there should be a debt-forgiveness program for all health-care workers, doctors to nurses to pharmacists, with huge college bills on their backs. Or they’ll stay in a constant state of panic over who is going to pay off those student loans. Let’s face it, as the boomers fall out of the system and the money starts drying up, those loans are going to get hellish. Who’s going to pay those? Not the CEOs of the health-care industry. All those doctors who were in bed with them they’ll just smother with a pillow (that’s a metaphor, for those people who don’t understand the word “rhetoric” — like in the recent Supreme Court hearings).
Plant or Stooge?
Recently I’ve been receiving posts from a new acquaintance. Supposedly she is “an old-time activist.”
She’s been feeding me blathering, screaming emails that are supposedly on our side. Whenever I ask for more basic links, rather than the nit-wit blogosphere versions, I’m accused of censorship.
Are we running into the same kind of plants and stooges that tried to clot the green tweets on Twitter? The pro-demonstrator users outed the Iranian police and kept an eye on their attempts to block real news with nonsense.
Our own right is filling the internet with the kind of garbage our kind of people won’t read. They’ve figured out we’re turned off by screaming, so they’re using plants to block the real story with goofery. Certain bad guys in history discovered that intelligent, decent people cannot stand screaming and temper-tantrums. They used bad-baby behavior to turn us away from what they were up to. Need I name the most famous artificer?
I’m going to wipe the afore-mentioned person off my Parlor Tricks list, send out this blog link, and then put her back on, so I can send out alerts to real stories buried in the right-wing muck. We need to keep track of what the Right Wing underground is up to. She’s a nice clean feed for the dirty tricks. I’ll keep the wire up.
How Heatlh Care Works Now
1. Use a new healthcare industry to allow businesses to get away with lower salaries (Businesses stupidly went for this thinking it would weigh less).
2. Build a new industry and new jobs. Part of the deal was that as workers moved to new jobs, health care industry could take all their money from the last employer.
3. When baby-boomers retire, harvest their asses.
4. Let somebody else worry about all those bodies in the streets and in the emergency rooms.
5. Guess who gets to be “somebody else”? Not us Baby Boomers — YOU GUYS.
Right Wing Mindset
Starting a series of photos called RIGHT WING MINDSET. If you can’t stand the thought that anything on this planet might be getting a mouthful of food, a board foot of wood, an inch of space, without you control it and get to dole it out, then, my friend (?) you’ve got a bad case of RWM. Get help. Get treatment. Or get fucked. Me and my little Canon will be out taking shots at YOU.
First up, we have a bus stop, on Yesler, Seattle, Washington. Now, class, what makes this an example of RWM? That’s right – nowhere to sit. Because some poor, homeless boozer might be able to lie down in a dry place and get some sleep, the rest of us, including old women with plantar fascitis, children and working guys, don’t get to sit down and take a load off. What? A serf might be able to rest or read a book? They’re not learning to read in our education system, anyway, so why would they need that? Ayn Rand must be spinning in her grave (spin, Ayn, spin – preferably upright on something hard and hot).
Bus stop, Benaroya Hall, 3rd Avenue, Seattle, Washington. Oh, look. People at the bus stop might be able to walk into the ticket office and go the restaurant and cafe without having to walk all the way down the block and chance missing their bus. Well, those bus people can’t eat or drink on the bus anyway, can they? The guy with the crutches and the woman with the baby stroller shouldn’t be pounding down caffeine, anyway.
What “BIA” really means
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- Found at the — ahem — rummage sale in Clallam Bay.
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- Other pow-wow shirts: “White Men Can’t Dance” and “My heroes have always killed cowboys.”
(click on images for closeups).
From our friends in Neah Bay, I suspect (disclaimer: but not an official council t-shirt). There’s nothing funnier — and more appalling — than the truth. Comedy starts in trauma.
We better hope all these people don’t start drumming for Holocaust Memorials — that’s a LOT of tribes to be building expensive mea culpa for. You think they’d let us get away with 40 acres and a mule?
Anybody up for computing how many people we and our ancestors drove off their land, killed, infected, neglected, and otherwise persecuted by government policy? And multiplying that by monies owed? In terms of modern currencies?
If Israel can come back, then there’s no statute of limitations on national genocide and land theft.
And you thought the bailout would be expensive. Pray all they want to do is build a nice, clean, art-supporting casino next door.
Maybe we can get training running the blackjack tables?
(By the way, the shirt flew out the door.)
I want my money back
Has anyone actually faced the REAL problem with free-market health care?
You have to pay for it the whole time you’re working. Then, about the time you really need it, you retire or leave work and — what happens to the thousands of dollars your employer gave to the privatized health-care industry?
That’s right — the health-care industry takes your money and runs.
The Boomers paid millions if not billions of dollars to a health-care industry that took our money, and here we are in our old age with no health care.
And Rush Limbaugh is screaming about the Free Market? Being forced to hand over money all our lives for health care we’re going to lose in the end don’t sound so Free Market to me. We’ve been forced to create and prop up an industry, and we got little or nothing back.
Now my question: how much stock does Limbaugh have in this industry? How much of our money went into his pocket and those of the Pirate Bush Dynasty?
Unless somebody was getting paid off for this robbery, there’s no other reason to support it.
Questions should be put.
Swamp Christians
Okay, I’ve come up with a term that just sends Nearest into a storm of giggles every time I use it:
“Swamp Christian.”
You know the type. Snake-handlers, Leviticus-First, If-English-Was-Good-Enough-For-Jesus. Think the Big Bang was about the creation, instead of the movement of objects through space. Use the term “evolutionism.” Turn a blind eye while the priest grabs the boys or the pastor grabs the girls. Show up celebrating gay funerals. Try to treat adults like kids. Stand up in legislatures and do obvious grabs at political power. Wear ‘way too much makeup on TV and always end a culture-war rant with a demand for funds — or drool over the people who do. Start cults where they lock up un-submissive women. Yada yada yada.
The kind of people Jesus would have slapped his own forehead over, groaning, “God! I thought I made this stuff simple enough! I meant: ‘Do the right thing and don’t be a jerk!’ “
QED
This was part of a discussion for Norwescon panels:
The problem with these panels at fan cons is that often terms are not defined before they start, and they spend most of the hour tearing the terms apart instead of getting into the meat of the subject. If somebody thinks global warming is “junk,” use the scientific method — ask them for their reasons. Require proofs. And no, they don’t get to quote scientists whom we find out are pissed about having their names used in an argument for a theory they never backed. Either GET the proof — or go back to the lab.
Most religion IS the original science, but it is based on older theories. Or equipment. For example: “I have an eye. I can see the sun move. Therefore, the sun moves, not the earth.” With math, a proof could be offered that the EARTH moved. Certainly helped with those pesky retrograde planets. At last, with space travel, somebody could stand on the moon and see the earth as the planet it was. With the original (eyeball) equipment. Meanwhile, religion stayed static, depending on the old eyeball observations. It can’t change or move because it limits the equipment.
If religion or politics want to BE science, they have to bring proofs — and then where is faith? Or economic theory?
How to sooth a religious person who thinks the Big Bank is about creation: point out that it’s ONLY really about the movement of objects through space. If they ask, “Well, what if you prove there’s a god?” the shrug is: “Then it’ll be proved.” But remind them of what Douglas Adams said. QED.
Ethiopia is MUCH more civilized than us — they divide science and religion quite happily, and don’t mix them up. That very religious country is very proud of the Lucy exhibits.
