…I’m late…& it’s a very important date…or at least it was once…this year being 75 years later than that one…which under other circumstances would have made it a big deal this time around…but if there’s one thing I don’t get it’s why the metaphorical alluding to a state of war existing between us & the god damned coronavirus makes any fucking sense to people with any familiarity with what it means to live in a state of war
…for a start there’s a general lack of wholesale & wanton destruction & hunkering down at home in varying degrees of isolation is a far cry from huddling in bomb shelters when you’re not listening out for the sirens that tell you it’s time to do it all over again
…if we’re at war then it’s a more asymmetric variety
…& that bastard virus is a second front
…the real war we seem to be losing is the war against malignant stupidity
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/07/nuclear-regulatory-commission-radioactive-waste
…so…on the off chance anyone else is up this early I’m going to go ahead & throw this up where you can see it & then go back to backfilling it with links (which at some point presumably I’ll manage to stop) & mutterings for a while yet…
hell, maybe I’ll even make myself another coffee before I’m done
…or maybe I’ll keep the irish & hold the coffee…I could claim it was in remembrance
…speaking of which
…it’s ironic to think that while an australian asshole is responsible for many americans being on a steady diet of something that has no business calling itself the news
…some of the people trying to set that record straight hail from down under
…it’s not like there isn’t real news about stuff getting out of industrial facilities that shouldn’t have
…or once unshakable fixtures of the highstreet going belly up
…so…it’s nice to hear things that sound optimistic
…but why we’re still hearing this largely discredited stuff
…is…well…not a mystery
…but definitely a puzzle in the classic “quis custodet” model
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/07/business/small-business-loans-coronavirus.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/07/sba-disaster-loans/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/07/michael-flynn-criminal-case-trump-russia
…& speaking of russia
…plus the crazy is still in full swing
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/07/venezuela-us-mercenary-nicolas-maduro
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/07/trump-campaign-manager-brad-parscale-death-star
…& the shit is bad all over
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/07/coronavirus-california-rural-counties-reopen
…so it’s no surprise the continent is looking down it’s nose at its ex-confederate island neighbor
…still…this was nice, I guess?
This: “the war against malignant stupidity”. Or maybe it is malignant ignorance, eh? Which is of course worse, because ignorance implies being uninformed/unaware, while stupidity is the inability to be informed/aware. And so many people are willfully ignorant, lead by a reality TV king who denigrates science. Looks like parents everywhere were right, TV does rot brains. As always, thanks for the links.
…I went back & forth about calling it ignorance or stupidity & I guess I landed on the fence…I feel like ignorance is susceptible to learning in a way that festering stupidity maybe isn’t…it’s the willful aspect that really gets to me, I think?
…there comes a point where to maintain the posture they so desperately cling to these people have to be making so many choices to ignore reality that I just can’t credit even a moron not noticing that it’s actively of their own volition
…I get it…reality is scary…but I don’t seem to live in the world they’re busily trying to convince themselves we all do & I literally can not wait for reality to bring them up short & see it all crumble like the proverbial castles made of sand…just really wish it was easier to keep the faith that it will
…at least now I know a youtube clip I can drop in at the end though…thank you kindly
I mean, it’s stupid to be willfully ignorant, right?
Imagine you have no training or experience, but are attempting to build the walls of a house. An actual carpenter is looking over your shoulder saying, “That’s not going to work”…….and your reaction is “Shut up, who asked you?”
Just to add, they’re not just following a reality TV host, they’re being fed this stuff by the major networks.
Jeff Zucker at CNN hired new White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany back in 2017 with the open goal of putting a relentless Trump defender on the air to boost ratings and as nothing but a character in a manufactured drama.
With the stupid irony that Zucker has done a terrible job boosting CNN’s ratings. He is awful at his job. He is the guy behind the prime time Leno fiasco at NBC.
CBS yesterday gave airtime to a gross softball interview of Bill Barr by longtime Fox News Hillary Clinton reporter Catherine Herridge. They gave free airtime to Barr to push lies about Mueller and the FBI, when he proved last year with his lying release of the Mueller report that he is a historically rotten Attorney General.
People see this garbage and it is not surprising when they think Trump might not be all bad. The press is full of malignant incompetents.
…yeah…that whole “history is written by the victors” interview was a fucking car crash…& CNN owes a lot of people a lot of apologies
…the shitstorm is self-sustaining for sure…which, like so much about this whole mess, very much begs the question
The thing I keep reading is that it’s all about ad dollars for the networks, or it’s all about influence peddling, and I while I agree those are factors, there is more.
The superficial shoutfest model of TV news hasn’t changed for thirty years, and ratings and ad dollars have been trending down for years. Mainstream news broadcasts are less influential now than they once were.
If Hollywood operated the way the news business does and stuck to early 1990s mentalities, we would never have prestige TV, streaming, Pixar or the Marvel movies. You can argue whether entertainment is better today — although on the whole I think it is — but there is no question that there has been a lot of innovation and risk taking while chasing big financial returns.
That just isn’t true with TV news. There is no good economic or influence argument for hiring Fox News stiffs to do this junk, or continuing business as usual, but here we are.
“There is no good economic or influence argument”
…call me a cynic…but the operative word they seem determined to render inoperable there would appear to be “good”?
…in any model where you’re working back from always-more-money to reverse engineer a suggestion that the point of the business is something else you’re going to have to make some compromises…& traditionally if you set yourself up as a news outfit then some of those included that you weren’t in the market for the returns…literally
…& that counted for something…hell, the BBC or The Guardian or I guess even PBS are not business models that would have been able to provide the reporting they have, or garnered the respect they have over time, had they been chasing market share with bad faith programming the way that the likes of FOX & OANN so overtly do
…increasingly I think that when Marx suggested religion was the opiate of the masses he oversimplified…it turns out a surfeit of information so great as to allow people to fill their every waking moment with nothing but stuff that not only lets them not think about the things they wish weren’t true but actively demands it of them in the name of things they wish were true works just as well if not better than a bunch of glibly conditional promises of an everlasting life thereafter
…but then I get to thinking about the people who are quite obviously looking to leverage that effect while considering themselves “smarter than the average bear”…& who needs to be that angry with nobody to yell at?
excuse me…I’m gonna go watch Network again & then yell out my window for a while…
Know what isn’t stupid? Fur Face Friday!
https://groupthink.kinja.com/fur-face-friday-1843231492
…let’s face it…they’re better than us, aren’t they?
So much better.
Emma says yes, and she bites.
Emma’s so cute, I bet she can get away with anything. How could you stay angry with that face?