TOP SECRET: It's on for Cleveland!

Those of you who are also on the Soros payroll will doubtless have already received the following instructions with your monthly stipend. However, due to my status within the Organization as a Low-Level Information Source, I have been tasked with disseminating the details of Operation American Splendor to our allies within the New World Order:

TOP SECRET
TOP SECRET
TOP SECRET

1 April 2016

In order to further our long-term goal to eradicate the world's sovereign nations, particularly the United States of America, and establish a One World Government, the following operation (code name AMERICAN SPLENDOR) has been advanced to ACTIVE STATUS. This is a PRIORITY ALPHA operation, meaning that all Organization members not engaged in ALPHA PLUS or higher activities are required to suspend activity and devote all resources to AMERICAN SPLENDOR.

The object of AMERICAN SPLENDOR is to disrupt the Republican National Convention being held in the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio from July 18 to 21. This will allow our agents within the Republican National Committee to suspend the convention and appoint former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney as the Republican Party's 2016 presidential nominee.

Members of the Organization and allied organizations within the NEW WORLD ORDER taking part in AMERICAN SPLENDOR will take up positions outside the Quicken Loans Arena starting at 8:00 am on the morning of July 18, 2016. Those taking part in AMERICAN SPLENDOR will assume the appearance of gun rights activists protesting the banning of firearms within the Quicken Loans Arena. AMERICAN SPLENDOR participants should carry hand-lettered signs with pro-gun messages (see APPENDIX A for sample sign texts). AMERICAN SPLENDOR participants should also carry loaded firearms, including pistols, machine pistols, single-shot rifles, and semi-automatic rifles. Any Organization members lacking firearms can purchase them at sporting goods stores and gun shops. Members who have criminal records that would prevent them from purchasing weapons at retail outlets that carry out background checks can instead purchase weapons at gun shows (see APPENDIX B for list of gun shows being held between 1 April and 30 June 2016).

AMERICAN SPLENDOR participants should attempt to engage actual pro-gun activists present outside the Quicken Loans Arena to persuade them that the gun ban within the arena is unconstitutional and should be ignored. On the evening of July 19, while the roll call of the states is taking place, AMERICAN SPLENDOR participants and as many actual pro-gun activists as can be persuaded should attempt to storm the Quicken Loans Arena and take up positions on and around the convention floor. AMERICAN SPLENDOR participants will then open fire on convention delegates and members of conservative media outlets (see APPENDIX C for list of approved conservative media targets).

After five minutes of sustained gunfire, AMERICAN SPLENDOR participants will divest themselves of all firearms and pro-gun possessions and assume the identities of convention delegates. While law-enforcement personnel are arresting remaining actual pro-gun activists, AMERICAN SPLENDOR participants will exit the Quicken Loans Arena along with surviving convention delegates, then make their way to pre-arranged rendezvous points in downtown Cleveland hotels (see APPENDIX D for list of rendezvous points). At rendezvous points, AMERICAN SPLENDOR participants will be provided with temporary identity kits and transportation out of Cleveland.

In a separate communication, the Soros Organization has outlined preparations for selected friendly media outlets to respond to Operation American Splendor with calls for a national state of emergency, a ban on pro-gun organizations, and mass arrests of pro-gun activists. The Organization will also be activating a sleeper agent in California to eliminate radio host Alex Jones, who has demonstrated an uncanny ability to detect and expose dozens of previous false-flag operations aimed at eliminating private gun ownership and American sovereignty.

Remember, folks, this is all top secret information. If details of Operation American Splendor become widely known among conservative activists and media outlets, the attempt to disrupt the RNC and make Governor Romney the Republican presidential nominee could suffer complete failure. So, mum's the word!

Iowa never happened

For the last year, the Iowa caucuses have dominated the political discourse in the United States. Presidential candidates from both major parties have poured money and manpower into the state, and traveled there time after time to pay homage to the awesome power of the Iowa State Fair Butter Cow.

And the result? Both major parties ended up with basically tie votes. Clinton and Sanders were so close that several contests had to be decided by coin tosses. On the GOP side, Cruz, Trump, and Rubio all finished in the low-to-mid 20% range. The arcane caucus rules make it impossible to predict precisely which candidates will come to the conventions with how many pledged delegates, but right now it looks like the two Democratic candidates will wind up with 22 each (plus or minus 1), and the three Republican candidates will all wind up with 7 each (plus or minus 1).

So, as far as determining which candidate will win the nomination in each race, the whole long, complicated Iowa caucus might as well have never happened.

Sigh.

Birthers: a clarification

Back in 2008, when Senator Barack Obama was running for president, a group of Hillary Clinton dead-enders called PUMAs started running with a conspiracy theory claiming that Obama's Hawaiian birth had been faked somehow, and that he was actually born in Kenya, and was thus ineligible to serve as President of the United States. This was despite the fact that the Clinton campaign itself had found Obama's birth announcement in a Honolulu newspaper. The PUMA conspiracy theory quickly spread to various right wing sources, including Joseph Farah's WorldNetDaily, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and, eventually, Donald Trump. The proponents of this conspiracy theory became known as birthers, by analogy with the 9/11 attack conspiracy theorists, known as truthers.

In an amusing sequel to the birther phenomenon, Donald Trump, now himself the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, is claiming that rival candidate Senator Ted Cruz's Canadian birth makes him ineligible to serve as president. Because of the similarity of the claims against Cruz and Obama, and because Trump himself has made the same claim against both men, the term "birther" is being applied to Trump and other figures who are disputing Cruz's eligibility.

This is wrong. The anti-Obama conspiracy-mongers were called birthers because the heart of their conspiracy theory involved disputing that Obama was born in the United States. That is not the case with Cruz. Everyone, including Cruz himself, agrees that he was not born in the United States. Thus, there is no actual conspiracy theory involved; only the legal question of whether Cruz's universally-acknowledged foreign birth disqualifies him for the presidency.

If you want a term for the people who dispute Cruz's eligibility, you might call them "natural-borners", because the issue they raise is whether Cruz is a natural-born citizen within the meaning of the Constitution. Thus, Trump is both a "birther" and a "natural-borner", while Mary Brigid McManamon is a "natural-borner" but not a "birther".

Cruz's current natural-borner controversy is particularly amusing because, had it not been for the birthers making a prolonged fuss about Obama's alleged foreign birth, the question of Cruz's actual foreign birth might not even have come up.

No sex please, we're right-wing fundamentalist Christians

The internet has been abuzz with news that soon-to-be-former NFL quarterback and noted ostentatiously self-righteous prayerful Christian Tim Tebow and his now-former current squeeze Miss USA and Miss Universe pageant winner Olivia Culpo are calling it quits. 

Apparently, when Tebow first got a hankerin' for Miss Culpo and sent her cute love notes and won her adoration, he said to her, "Olivia, my darling, my love for you knows no bounds, but as a noted ostentatiously self-righteous prayerful Christian, I am required by my even greater devotion to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to remain celibate until marriage." And then Culpo answered, "Oh, Timmy, you say the most darling silly things! Now please fill me up with all your hot sticky professional-sportsball-player jizz!" And then Culpo learned to her astonishment that Tebow was totes serious about the whole no-sex thing, and after that there was nothing for it but to have their respective PR flacks send out press statements announcing that their eternal love had turned out not to be so eternal after all, and the pair was taking a road trip to Splitsville, USA.

However, I would be deficient in my duties as a guide to the behavior of my fellow white men if I failed to warn Miss Culpo that this may not be the end of it. There's a certain species of white man, particularly noted ostentatiously self-righteous prayerful Christian white men, who do not regard women as autonomous human beings. They feel that any woman who is "theirs" remains "theirs" despite anything the said woman herself might think. We call this certain species of white man "stalkers", and they have been known to hound, harrass, and even physically attack any woman who tries to remove herself from their sole possession.

Now I'm not saying that Mr. Tebow is going to continue haunting Miss Culpo's footsteps until she either succeeds in having him imprisoned, or he succeeds in murdering her. I'm just pointing out that he fits the profile like a really creepy, stalkery glove, and that if Miss Culpo has any sense she should make sure that her bodyguards are on high alert for the next, like, fifty years.

Recognizing reality

When I posted my obscenity-laced, spittle-flecked rant open letter to my fellow white men a few days back, I figured I'd get at least one response from a white supremacist, and I was right. The white supremacist in question was Fritz Knese, one of my girlfriend's ex-boyfriends. Fritz commented:

I am all for reading Asimov, but your concept that white guys should stop recognizing reality is BS. Like it or not, white men have made the world of today for the most part. We should not be apologizing to anyone for daring to be better. 

As Tim Gueguen subsequently noted, Fritz managed to completely miss the point of the post.

No, Fritz, I'm not asking you to apologize. I'm asking you to repent.

The phenomenon of confirmation bias is well-established in human psychology. Basically, we all believe what we want to believe, selectively editing the information we receive in order to emphasize anything that confirms what we believe, and de-emphasize anything that contradicts what we believe. Confirmation bias allows Fritz and myself to access the same pool of information and draw totally opposite conclusions about the relative abilities of different races. Fritz believes that "recognizing reality" means agreeing with him about white supremacy, and I believe that "recognizing reality" means agreeing with me about racial equality.

Does that mean that I don't think there is such a thing as objective reality? Nope. After all, objective reality is the ultimate source of the information that we both build our world-views from. The differences are entirely due to the information processing we both engage in.

Well then, does that mean that I don't think it's possible to determine which of our world-views jibes more closely with objective reality? Again, nope. We would not have been able to build up our current body of scientific knowledge unless we had a useful method for comparing different hypotheses and judging which conforms more closely with reality.

The problem is that our emotions tend to interfere with the process of judging hypotheses. Even the scientific method can be overwhelmed by the emotions of the all-too-human researchers who use it, sometimes unconsciously, and sometimes due to deliberate fraud. The more heavily invested our emotions are in a particular matter, the harder it is to keep bias from skewing the results. And you won't find a more emotionally-freighted question than that of racial superiority. It's going to be damned hard to find a way to get objective information on this topic, if it's even possible at all right now.

So let's leave to one side the question of whether Fritz or I is objectively right about race. Instead, let's look at another question: why do we believe what we believe? Given that our emotions are so heavily invested in this issue, it seems clear to me that, despite what Fritz says in his comment, "reality" has nothing to do with our beliefs. So let's look at the motivations behind white supremacy.

White supremacy is a form of social Darwinism, a zero-sum view of society that holds that one group or individual can only gain prominence by causing other groups or individuals to lose prominence. The white supremacist sees it as his duty to protect his own group, the "white race", from encroachments by other groups seeking to displace the "white race" from its paramount position in society. If a white supremacist is sufficiently anxious about the difficulties facing the "white race", he or she will resort to violence to fend off the perceived encroachments of other races, as we saw happen in Minneapolis. It isn't hard to see where this line of reasoning ultimately leads, because it has happened before. If the only way to preserve the "white race" is to subjugate or exterminate other races, then the white supremacist will do just that.

This is what I meant when I wrote that white supremacists turn themselves into monsters. By exalting their own group, they inevitably denigrate other groups, ultimately refusing to recognize the common humanity we all share. They've started walking down a particular road, and that road leads directly to the Nazi death camps. They may deny that that is their chosen destination (though plenty of white supremacists don't deny it), but that's where they're going, whether they admit it to themselves or not.

So, Fritz, you've got to ask yourself: is this where you want to go? You can deny it all you want (assuming you do in fact want to), but the logic is plain. Even if you've convinced yourself that all you're doing is "recognizing reality", you can still choose to reject it. You can say, "If reality requires that I be a monster, then I want nothing to do with reality, because it's better to be a human being than a monster."

Better yet, you can admit that your own confirmation bias may have led you astray, and that the question of racial superiority isn't as settled as you think it is. In that case, there's no need to reject reality. You can just admit that you aren't sure what the truth is, and in the absence of any certain proof one way or the other, you choose to err on the side of humanity.

Or, you can decide that, yeah, you're a monster. That's also an option.

An open letter to my fellow white men

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you guys?

Here's what you need to do. You need to stop going to Reddit and 4chan and 8chan and Stormfront. Fuck, you need to quit the internet altogether.

You've turned yourselves into monsters. I mean it. Every time you consume some piece of information that tells you how hard you have it compared to black people and Hispanics and women and whatnot, you lose a piece of your humanity. Do it often enough, and what's left isn't fit to associate with decent people. You're making yourselves worse, and you're making it worse for everyone around you.

You want to become human again? Go read a fucking book. I recommend James Baldwin, but even one of Asimov's old science essay collections would be better than the shit you're shoveling into your brains now.

Fuck.

(see also this follow-up post)

An open letter to Representative Glenn Thompson (R-PA)

Dear Representative Thompson,

You have been my representative in the U.S. House since I moved to Centre County, Pennsylvania back in August. As a constituent, I would like to discuss your recent vote in favor of the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act of 2015. While I certainly sympathize with your desire to prevent more right-wing religious fanatics from moving to the United States, I don't think this bill was the proper vehicle for doing so. For one thing, making it harder for victims of Painful Rectal Itch to immigrate seems counterproductive, since Painful Rectal Itch is itself a fanatical right-wing religious organization, and it tends to target people because it doesn't regard them as fanatically religious enough.

For another thing, even if the act succeeded in preventing members of Painful Rectal Itch from settling in the United States, that would do nothing to alleviate the many problems caused by the tens of millions of right-wing religious fanatics who already live here, such as attacks on women's reproductive health, hindering the civil rights of LGBT people, and attempts to corrupt the teaching of science in public schools. It seems to me that instead of hindering the settlement of refugees in the United States, your efforts to protect us from right-wing religious fanatics would be more productive if you voted for legislation enforcing the civil rights of sexual minorities and rolling back restrictions on reproductive health care.

I hope you will take this advice into account in your future legislative activities.

Best wishes,

Johnny Pez
Bellefonte, PA
November 2015

Stop the satire, the liberals want off

There's a satirical liberal Facebook group called Stop the World, the Teabaggers Want Off. The group seems to have decided that conservatives shouldn't have all the fun when it comes to attributing fake quotes to public figures. As Politifact notes, the group's fake quotes have been spreading among liberal FB users who think they're genuine. One of the group's fake Ben Carson quotes has even made its way into a Daily Kos piece (it's the one heading the piece).


Guys, come on, leave the fake quotes to the wingnuts. It's bad enough to have David Broder-wannabees in the media claiming that "both sides do it." Don't make it true.

Killing Time

History's greatest monster.

Another flatcar has jumped the track in the trainwreck that is the Republican presidential primary. Jeb "Can Fix It If It's An Election" Bush was boasting that he sure as hell would go back in time and kill Baby Adolf Hitler if he ever got the chance. And this isn't a case where some dimwitted reporter decided to ask a presidential candidate a dimwitted question. Jeb himself raised the matter, so the only dimwit involved is Jeb.

Now, I don't mean to boast, but the fact is that I am uniquely qualified to discuss this question, because I have actually killed Baby Hitler. Admittedly, I used my mad alternate-history skillz rather than a time machine, and I didn't murder Baby Hitler so much as I posited an accidental death for him, but a dead Baby Hitler is a dead Baby Hitler, and I'm prepared to put my claim to expertise up against anyone else's.

The dead Baby Hitler question is complicated by the temporal nature of the problem. Time, as others have noted, is not so much a linear progression of cause to effect as a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. The human consciousness exists in the present, and it remains in the present whether the human involved lives in the year 2015 or travels back to 1889. For the time traveler, being in 1889 cancels out all subsequent events. To the person-in-1889, there is no Nazi Germany, no World War II, and no Holocaust. There's just 1889. And this baby lying in his cradle hasn't done anything wrong; he's just a newborn baby.

On the other hand, the person-in-1889 has, simply by appearing in 1889, created a new reality. Every die that rolled and coin that flipped in the history that led up to our 2015 now has to be re-rolled and re-flipped, with the outcomes yet to be determined. Thus, our time traveler has eliminated the existence of everyone who will be born in the 20th century, an act of mass-murder that makes the Holocaust pale in comparison.

So, it's basically a trick question. The only way to kill Baby Hitler is to snuff out the existence of billions of people,* which pretty much negates any possible positive results from removing Adolf Hitler from history.

Bottom line: Hitler only killed Anne Frank. Jeb Bush would eliminate her from history altogether.

--
*Unless you do it the way I did it, via a thought experiment.

Dr. Ben Carson doesn't care what you godless heathens think of him

And neither do his millions of right-wing Christian supporters. In fact, the more all you liberal, atheistical, buttsex-having media types attack him by pointing out differences between what he says and your so-called objective reality, the more fervently they support him. Carson himself claims to have raised $3.5 million in donations since the biased media started attacking him with their "facts" and "science". Mind you, this claim itself may simply be Carson doing more reality-creation, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that Carson's supporters want it to be true.

Right-wing Christians are the heart of the modern GOP: they donate tons of money, and they vote reliably in both primary and secondary elections. The man who controls the right-wing Christians controls the GOP, and right now, that man is Dr. Ben Carson. Unfortunately for the GOP, it looks as though Carson isn't actually running for president. His operation looks more like a direct-mail grift than an election campaign, with a whopping 55% of donations being used for more fundraising. In other words, Carson seems to be doing a Palin, pretending to run for president in order to cash in.

So the big question here is, what will Dr. Ben Carson do when his grift runs its course? Will he drop out of the race and endorse one of the other candidates? Or will he try to keep the grift going by running as an independent or third-party candidate? If it's the former, then it'll just be business as usual for the GOP, as the right-wing Christian bloc holds its nose and votes for the establishment candidate. But if it's the latter, then the GOP will be in big trouble, with its biggest voting bloc being surgically removed, so to speak, by Dr. Carson.

Ben Carson Wikipedia

The Arthur Treacher's Fish & Chips restaurant chain was founded by King Arthur of Camalot, and the chain is still owned by the British Crown. Because of this, all Arthur Treacher's store managers are required by British law to be members of the Church of England.

After the Constitution was ratified, George Washington had a Presidential Crown created with the words "BY THE GRACE OF GOD, PRESIDENT" inscribed on it. Every President except Barack Obama has worn this crown during his inauguration. Obama's failure to do so means that he was never really President.

Three quarters of the dams in existence today were originally constructed by beavers.

Racial Realism

The media has been abuzz lately about this paper from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Angus Deaton and Anne Case, showing that lower-income middle-aged white Americans are dying off faster than they ought to be. And the question everyone in the media has been asking is, why is this happening?

The reason everybody is asking is because nobody wants to admit the obvious answer: white people are just plain fucked up. As Tim Wise noted a couple years back, white people have higher rates of smoking and drinking while pregnant, suicide, drug overdoses, and particularly binge drinking than other races. White culture is dominated by music celebrating alcohol abuse, marital infidelity, and doing time in prison. The role models for whites tend to be people like serial adulterer Newt Gingrich, pathological liar and sexual predator Bill O'Reilly, and drug addict and alleged pedophile Rush Limbaugh.

It isn't politically correct to say so, but the truth is that white people are genetically predisposed to self-destructive behavior. Liberals like Barack Obama who try to help them by offering them government-subsidized health care and unemployment benefits are fighting against basic biology, and it's a fight that they will inevitably lose.

The graph at the top of this post tells the true story. White people are an evolutionary dead end, doomed by their own inferior biology. They need tough love, not government handouts, and the sooner we recognize that fact and act accordingly, the better off all of us, white and nonwhite alike, will be.

Choices

I didn't realize it at the time, but I reached a crucial turning point in my life when I chose "Johnny Pez" over "Augustus Sol Invictus" as my online pseudonym.

An open letter to Donald Trump

Dear Mr. Trump,

You certainly put a scare into the GOP when you told The Hill on Thursday that "absolutely" you would consider an independent presidential run if you thought the Republicans weren't being "fair" to you. You went on to say that you "want to do what’s right for the country — not what’s good for special interest groups that contribute, not what’s good for the lobbyists and the donors.”

Well, Mr. Trump, if you want to do what's right for the country, then an independent presidential campaign won't be enough. If you win (which of course you believe will happen, because you say what all Real Americans believe in their hearts), you'll be a man without a party, trying to govern through a Congress controlled by the two established parties. How much could you accomplish then? Not nearly as much as you'd like to, that's for certain.

The answer is obvious. Mr. Trump, running for office all by yourself isn't enough. You've got to think big (which has never been a problem for you in the past). You need to recruit like-minded men and women to run for all those congressional seats that the two major parties hold. A quick look at Wikipedia reveals that there are currently 469 seats up for grabs: all 435 House seats, and 34 out of 100 Senate seats.

You're a man of vision, Mr. Trump, so I know you won't be content to preside over a government controlled by your opponents. You're also a man with vast monetary resources at your command, so I know that you can recruit and fund 469 congressional candidates while running an independent presidential campaign. You probably won't win them all -- you may not win any of them -- but you ought to be able to draw enough votes away from the Republican candidates to cost most of them their seats, and that's what you really want, isn't it? To make the GOP sorry for how unfair they have been to you. Because that's the kind of man you are.

Think about it, Mr. Trump. If you want to do what's right for the country, this is the way to do it.

Sincerely,

Johnny Pez

Why Do They Care?

Last Friday, after the Supreme Court ordered everyone to get gay married, Duncan "Atrios" Black at Eschaton asked a good question: why do they care? Specifically, why do conservative Christians spend so much time and effort angsting over gay marriage? "No one is making you get gay married. No one is telling your pastor he has to have God bless this legal arrangement established by the state." Black figures that they're running out of people to hate, and without someone to hate their lives will have no meaning.

I think the answer is a lot more evil and cynical and terrible than that. To find out why, you'll have to go back in time about forty years to the Disco Era. Some conservative Christians back then decided that what they really needed was a lot of political power, and the way to go about getting it was the usual way conservatives go about getting political power: find an unpopular minority group, and demonize the fuck out of it.

So these conservative Christians gave the matter some thought, and they finally settled on homosexuals as the perfect group to Hitlerize. For the next forty years, they devoted a lot of time, effort, and money to the project, and they succeeded. The result is what we have now: a whole generation of conservative Christians, tens of millions of them, who have been brainwashed into believing that homophobia is the core of Christianity.

In vain will you point out to them that Jesus didn't so much as mention homosexuality. They don't care. Forget about that whole Jesus dying on the cross thing. As far as they're concerned, the REAL point of Christianity is hatin' on the gays. That's why, whenever they talk about "religious liberty," it refers exclusively to discriminating against homosexuals. Deny them their sacred right to discriminate against LGBT's, and they act like you're feeding them to the lions in the Colosseum.

And that, to answer Black's question, is why they care. Because they've been raised to follow a cynical, evil creed that replaces worship with an Orwellian Two Minutes' Hate.

So how will this turn out? It seems to me that the congregation of the Church of Homophobia have three options: some will decide that the Christianity = homophobia equation is false, and they'll find their way out and back to mainstream Christianity. Some will decide that the equation is true, but that homophobia is wrong, and they'll reject both. And some will stick to it to the bitter end, part of an ever-dwindling minority drowning in their own hate.

Sic transit gloria mundi

What language do they speak in Latin America? If you answered "Latin," congratulations, you qualify as a wingnut commenter!

Via the Vermont Political Observer comes a story of Why We Can't Have Nice Things. Last year, an eighth grader at The Riverside School in Lyndonville, Vermont had an idea. The USA has a Latin motto, e pluribus unum. Several states have Latin mottoes, including such liberal vanguards as Alabama, Idaho, Oklahoma, and both Carolinas. Why shouldn't Vermont have a Latin motto? Of course, the state already has a motto in English, "Freedom and unity," but the student wrote to Senate Minority Leader Joe Benning to suggest that it would really class the place up if Vermont had a Latin motto too. The VPO notes:

As the idea developed, those involved came up with a motto: Stella quarta decima fulgeat. The translation: “May the Fourteenth Star Shine Bright,” is a nod to Vermont’s status as the fourteenth state to join the union. Nice. Poetic in both languages. Benning brought the student to Montpelier and introduced her to the Government Operations Committee, which would consider her proposal.

It was too late in the legislative season to introduce the bill last year, but this month Benning introduced Senate Bill 2 to give Vermont a Latin state motto to go along with the English state motto. All was calm, all was bright. Then local TV station WCAX did a story about the bill.

You're ahead of me, right? The station's Facebook page was soon inundated with angry comments from American Freedom Warriors denouncing the idea of Vermont having a Latino motto. Ifyouonlynews.com picked the story up from the VPO, and got some screen caps of the comments to preserve them for posterity:

Richard Mason: We are AMERICANS, not latins, why not come up with a Vermont motto that is actually from us

Dorothy Lynn Lepisto: I thought Vermont was American not Latin? Does any Latin places have American mottos?

Brenda Smolnik: I DON'T THINK SO!!!  I hate having to press 1 for English now.

Bill Ogden: Go back to your Latin country

Dan Zucker: The motto is on the language of the foreigners trying to take over the country they shood be chinese, since they are more than the mexicans go back to Kenya! i don't speak ATHEIST.

Linda Murphy: This is America! Not Mexico!


It sounds to me like the next great issue is staring the GOP presidential contenders in the face. Did you know that the USA has a LATIN motto? EPLURIBUSUNUMGHAZI!

The problem of centrism

Earlier this week, the people of Greece gave Syriza, formerly a far-left fringe party, a plurality of seats in their parliament. Syriza is now the leading partner in a coalition government, and its triumph is a testament to the dangers of centrism.

Centrism is an ideology that declares itself to be above ideology. It is an article of faith among centrists that partisanship skews the worldviews of all non-centrists. To a centrist, only centrists understand the true nature of reality, since only centrists are untainted by partisanship. Thus, to a centrist, the ideal type of government would be one where, after an election, the winning side and the losing side get together to negotiate a bipartisan compromise. That way, no matter which side won the election, the same centrist policies would be enacted. It would be the next best thing to not having any elections at all.

Which brings us to Greece. Since the restoration of democracy in 1974, Greece has been dominated by two major parties, the center-right New Democracy and the center-left PASOK. The two parties took turns ruling Greece until the financial meltdown of 2008 caused the country to enter a major recession. The recession meant that the enormous debts that the Greek government had run up during the boom years could not be repaid unless the country was bailed out by the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission (the three of whom are collectively known as the Troika). The Troika insisted that the bailout be accompanied by harsh economic austerity: savage cuts in government spending, in pensions, and in healthcare.

Unfortunately for their country and themselves, New Democracy and PASOK decided that the austerity program ought to be beyond politics, so both parties pledged themselves to support it. Thus, no matter which party won power, the same austerity policies would be enacted. It was the next best thing to not having any elections at all. It was the platonic ideal of centrist government.

Needless to say, Greek voters soon grew tired of voting for two identical parties. The result was that support for both major parties plunged, and fringe parties that opposed austerity suddenly found themselves turning into major parties. The two main beneficiaries of the centrist collapse were Syriza and the fascist Golden Dawn party. The fascists, being fascists, had a tendency to commit political violence, and that cost them support. That allowed Syriza to win big in the last election, and form the next Greek government.

There's another country in Europe where all the major parties have decided to embrace austerity: the UK. And the same thing is happening in the UK that has happened in Greece. The pro-austerity centrist parties are seeing support collapse, and that support is moving to the fringe anti-austerity parties. In the UK's case, the fringe parties that are seeing the biggest gains are the nativist UKIP and the Green Party.

The next elections to the UK parliament are scheduled for May 7.

The Short Goodbye

Mark Bernstein is one of the Grand Old Men of the internet, and an editor at Wikipedia. However, despite being both old and white, he has been on the side of the angels on the subject of GamerGate, chronicling the 'gaters attempt to turn Wikipedia into a weapon in their endless, mindless war on women.

Since Clare Hooper has done an outstanding job of summarizing what's happening there, I might as well just steal her summary wholesale:

A very, very brief summary is that the entry on Wikipedia about Gamergate has been the subject of weeks (running into months) of edit wars. It culminated in a decision from ArbCom, the highest user-run body of the site, to ban the five editors who were trying to prevent the page from being rewritten with a pro-Gamergate slant. According to Bernstein’s analysis, sanctions were also applied against some of the pro-Gamergate accounts — but only against a few accounts, and throwaway accounts at that.

Basically, Wikipedia has decided to hand over the keys to the henhouse to the foxes.

I myself have been contributing to Wikipedia for ten years. However, this is just too fucking much. Either the ArbCom is suffering from a massive case of the stupids, or the ArbCom is carrying water for the 'gaters. It doesn't matter which, because either one is reason enough for me to stop contributing.

So that's what I've done. Unless Wikipedia shows a sudden rush of good sense and both completely reverses this decision and issues a sincere apology that actually acknowledges wrongdoing and offers genuine contrition to the many injured parties involved, I won't be back.

Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter

Will Frederick County Councilman Kirby Delauter sue me for mentioning his name in a blog post?

I guess I'll find out.

Collateral damage

Gamergate is a war, and women are the targets, but as with any war, sometimes the guys with the guns miss their intended targets and hit innocent bystanders. This is known in the war biz as "collateral damage," and in the last couple weeks, the 'Gaters have inflicted a bit of collateral damage on a standup comedian named Brock Wilbur.

As Wilbur notes, he was "doxxed" on October 25. That is, a 'Gater somewhere discovered his home address and phone number and tweeted them with the hashtag #gamergate in the hopes that other 'Gaters would deluge him with harrassing letters and phone calls. Whoever doxxed Wilbur apparently did so under the mistaken impression that he was associated with the gaming website Kotaku. Since then, Wilbur has indeed been the recipient of various harrassing phone calls and emails, and was also the target of a "swatting," an anonymous tip to his local police that would have sent a SWAT team kicking in his door if he hadn't already warned his local police to expect to receive false anonymous tips regarding him.

Since the initial anonymous doxxing of Wilbur, other anonymous 'Gaters have re-posted his address and phone number every few days, ensuring that he continues to be subject to misdirected harrassment. As Wilbur points out, "the angriest voices of a movement have built something they no longer control. There is a system — a mechanization — for hatred that now exists, and has become self-sustaining."

Which raises an important question. I've been taunting the 'Gaters myself in a not-entirely-futile effort to make a stand against misogyny and maybe get my pageviews up. Is there any chance that I could be doxxed? I suppose it's possible, but I've been maintaining my "Johnny Pez" persona for almost twenty years, and very few people know which real-world person it connects to. As I've said before, I'm ideally suited to this, um, mission.