Tracking: tweets and elephant cries

[This has been an exceptionally depressing two weeks in political news. Somewhat edited for clarity.]

• I will remember March 4, 2023 as the day when, echoing the Nazis, Michael Knowles, a “conservative” religious fanatic, called openly for the erasure of transgender people.

• I have been in the past two weeks reminded of this song about the failed response to Thatcherism in the UK: “On, on, on, cried the leaders at the back / We went galloping down the blackened hills / And into the gaping trap / The bridges are burnt behind us and there’s waiting guns ahead / Into the valley of death rode the brave hundreds”

• I gave up on CNet years ago. Their content might as well have come from a large language model, even before there were LLMs.

• They stole that part of their Bible from the Jews, who they then who they spent 1600 years beating up on.

• “The disease is real and the reality is enough.”

• The germ theory of disease is only a bit more than a century old, and it has yet to deeply penetrate the public consciousness.

• The second amendment was about the militia. It never was about an individual right.

• We need people who repent and are willing to take on the task of being an object lesson.

• The Wall Street Journal has been pushing the lab leak crankery since April 2020. I don’t know why. Maybe they want to start a war with China.

• The WSJ a history of good reporting and a far right editorial slant. Not that much has changed under Murdoch.

• I am not feeling very much like writing a summary of a summary.

• Why is it always treason with Republicans? Nixon, Reagan, Trump: treason.

• Cardiology is notorious for attracting narrowly focused doctors who are in it for the money.

• Praying for the death of enemies is black magic, specifically forbidden to Christians.

• The doctors who know Covid best will tell you that it’s dangerous, don’t get it and don’t spread it. Other doctors not so much. When Semmelweiss proved that women were dying because his colleagues didn’t wash their hands, his colleagues went on infecting women. Time was, doctors smoked even though they knew smoking was dangerous.

• We may eventually find good uses for the technologies that are incorrectly called AI but so far we’re sure doing a bad job of it.

• On the liberal side, we’ve been screaming about this for 23 years, since the Brooks Brothers riot. Our voices are hoarse, and still there is no response from anyone except antifa, and few people like [Joe Walsh].

• The far right is calling for a spiritual war against evil. They’re the evil.

• Why aren’t more people willing to fight the fascist Republican Party? Antifa has been out there, and that’s good and that’s fine, but we need a much bigger movement if we’re to defeat the monster.

• After the attack on transgender people, the Republicans will likely move on to Blacks, Jews, and Muslims.

• Capitalism did not invent greed. If your practice of politics is based in that, you’re doing it wrong.

• Brookings, home of well-educated fools.

• DeSantis reminds me a lot of Nixon who became President despite negative charisma. A bit of treason helped. So DeSantis has a chance.

• And yet there is still no good substitute for Twitter. Mastodon does not replace Twitter.

• So [US refugee policy is returning] to the 1930s and the Jews, or whoever, will be turned away.

• The Democratic leadership simply doesn’t seem to understand the threat of fascism. It’s eerie. On January 6 we saw Nancy Pelosi being tough and competent but now we’re back to drifting onward.

• I’ve been writing about Covid. It loves us; it thinks we taste good.

• On Walgreen’s preemptive cave to anti-abortion activists: the alternatives are mostly awful. CVS is a huge and greedy monopoly, owning Aetna and Caremark. not a place you want to take your business. Rite-Aid isn’t so bad but they’re losing money. I wonder what Costco pharmacy is doing.

• I think the weird extremism of some tech billionaires is an expression of threatened masculinity. It’s decision time for the human race and the Earth and people are scared, even very rich people and tech billionaires are not brave; courage is hard to come by; it’s not something running a business confers.

• If I never see another web3 or blockchain ad it will be too soon. This place [Twitter] is going to the dogs. In fact, dogs are nicer.

• Are there veterinary Covid vaccines?

• My Democratic representative is bleating about bipartisanship again. Just which fascist does he expect to make a deal with?

• Love Charles P. Pierce’s epithet for Hawley, “fleetfoot” Hawley.

• There is no evidence that a child needs two parents of different genders, or even two parents. What’s important is that at least one person be available for the child to form an attachment to. And, really, if a child is raised by their uncles or aunts, that family’s elders are single-sex.

• Prof. Timothy D. Snyder’s discussion of slavery in European history and Oghenechovwe Ekpeki’s point that Nigeria right now is worse than any fictional dystopia prompts the thought that Amazon would run a slave market if they were allowed. Instead, they subcontract that to China, slaver to the world.

• After how Trump treated the FBI, I would have thought they were ready to break out the hobnailed boots to tread on Trump but, no, some agents are still loyal to Trump.

• Why do people forget cause and effect when confronted with taxation and government spending?

• A press that is monopolized by a handful of organizations is not free; every major electronic news medium is under the control of conservatives. “A hundred justifications and the presses are ready to roll / The gateways to the nation they are firmly under control”

• I don’t think Elon Musk is comfortable with women as senior managers.

• The Bretbug bites again.