Category: The Current Situation
It’s quite impressive how quickly the Trump crowd pivoted from gleefully saying “Fuck your feelings” to empty calls for unity.
I’m all for unity, healing, and reconciliation, but not without a few non-negotiable steps first. As David Frum put it in his recent piece in The Atlantic, The Conservative Cult of Victimhood:
There is no redemption without repentance. There is no repentance without accountability. There is no accountability without consequences.
When I see calls for consequences from progressives and the mealy-mouthed, cap-in-hand calls for unity from the MAGA crew, it looks like this:
The problem is that the repentance has been performative so far, and it appears to be in the service of avoiding accountability or consequences. If any of you have ever had a bully in school (or hey, even at work), you know what that’s like. If you’ve ever had an abusive significant other or spouse, you know what that’s like:
Here’s the text of the main tweet from A. R. Moxon:
Republicans appear to be finished with the “trying to kill us while blackout drunk” phase of their abuse cycle and into the “crying at us to unlock the door while asking us why we’re being such a bitch about this” part of their abuse cycle.
And here’s the text of the reply from Halldór Auðar Svansson:
It’s interesting how abusers always behave in such predictable ways that it can be modeled accurately. Now we are at the “I’m sorry that things got so out of hand, now we need to heal but that requires you to shut up about what I did” part.
Also worth considering: Some of their biggest voices don’t believe in unity, or that it’s possible. Case in point: Dennis Prager, big Trump supporter and guy behind PragerU, who wrote the think piece Calls For American Unity Are Either Dishonest Or Naive in Investor’s Business Daily back at the start of the first Trump campaign.
So before we can have reconciliation and healing, we need to make sure that the right people face the consequences of their actions and make the appropriate restitutions. Otherwise, we’ll face the same crisis, and the next time, it might be carried out by more competent people.
There will come a time for reconciliation, but that time hasn’t yet come, and the apologies seem far from sincere. Let’s not answer those “calls for unity” just yet.
This note-perfect parody of Conan the Barbarian pokes fun at the Jacob Angeli Chansley, who’s better known as the “MAGA Viking” from the Wednesday’s terrorist attack on the Capitol Building in Washington, DC.
One thing that you should know about Chansley: He’s a QAnon conspiracy theorist, a failed actor, and “failed to launch” — that is, he’s 33 years old, unemployed, and lives with his mother.
In short, he’s a pretty good MAGA mascot.
Since the issue of the First Amendment to the Constitution to the United States of America is going to be a hot topic in light of Donald Trump getting ban-hammered by Twitter, then a lot of social media sites and even Shopify, I thought I’d share this quick little guide to how it works:
In case you were wondering, here’s the full text of the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
If you need a longer lesson that doesn’t read like a boring civics text, there’s always this classic from the webcomic XKCD:
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Headline of the day
You just know that they wanted to go with “shithole country” rather than “banana republic”.
When I saw this picture of a fur-and-horns-clad Trump-inspired right-wing rioter who’d broken into the Capitol today…
…I was reminded of The Omega Glory, a particularly campy installment of the original Star Trek series. Here’s a scene from that episode:
Here’s a summary of that episode from Women at Warp:
The Enterprise discovers the USS Exeter in orbit around Omega IV. The crew is revealed to have died except for the captain, who remains on the planet. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Unlucky Red Shirt #12 beam down to the planet and find Prime Directive-violating Captain Ronald Tracey. He has made friends with the “Kohms,” an “Asiatic” group in conflict with the savage Aryan “Yangs.” Tracey believe he has found a “Fountain of Youth” with the planet’s population, but it turns out it’s just evolution/natural selection following a devastating war with biological weapons. It turns out that his crew would have lived if they had stayed on the planet a bit longer. Kirk and Co. eventually discover that the Yangs and Kohms are parallels to the “Yankees” and “Communists” of the 20th Century Earth. The Yangs, after a decisive victory over the Kohms, celebrate by bringing out a tattered U.S. flag, pulling out a Bible, and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag.
Cue record scratch noise.
After a few random fights scenes between Kirk and Tracey, Kirk soon triumphs, Tracey is arrested, and the Yang chief pulls out a copy of the U.S. Constitution. Jim next gives a classic Kirkian speech about the power of words, the Constitution, and the good ol’ US of A in general, and the Starfleet crew leave those freedom-loving Yangs to begin living out the words of that foundational American document. The camera slow pans to the Star Spangled Banner hanging in the corner and credits roll.
The Yangs were about to kill the Enterprise landing party until they overhear Kirk mention one of their “worship words”: Freedom. A dialogue ensues, and Captain Kirk, Spock, and McCoy discover that the Yangs — who are really just a bunch of angry, violent white people who engage in cultural appropriation and symbol idolatry — simultaneously worshipped the U.S. Constitution and did not know what its words meant.
In the episode, the Yangs believed that only “chiefs and sons of chiefs” could speak the “holy words”:
YANG CHIEF: Chiefs and sons of chiefs may speak the words, but the Evil One’s tongue would surely turn to fire. I will begin. You shall finish. Ee’d plebnista norkohn forkohn perfectunun.
KIRK: Those words are familiar. Wait a moment.
The Yangs, in their worship of the document, had turned “We the people” into the gibberish “Ee’d plebnista”, a bunch of nonsense syllables that they spoke out of rote, without any sense of their meaning.
In the end, Kirk recognizes the words that the Yangs have mangled, and gives one of those speeches:
YANG CHIEF: When you would not say the holy words, of the Ee’d Plebnista, I doubted you.
KIRK: I did not recognise those words, you said them so badly, Without meaning.
YANG ELDER: No! No! Only the eyes of a chief may see the Ee’d Plebnista.
KIRK: This was not written for chiefs. (general consternation) Hear me! Hear this! Among my people, we carry many such words as this from many lands, many worlds. Many are equally good and are as well respected, but wherever we have gone, no words have said this thing of importance in quite this way. Look at these three words written larger than the rest, with a special pride never written before or since. Tall words proudly saying We the People. That which you call Ee’d Plebnista was not written for the chiefs or the kings or the warriors or the rich and powerful, but for all the people! Down the centuries, you have slurred the meaning of the words: “We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution.” These words and the words that follow were not written only for the Yangs, but for the Kohms as well!
As a geek and sci-fi aficionado, I had always considered this episode one of the worse entries in the Star Trek oeuvre, and most certainly one of the least realistic.
Today’s news proved me wrong. 