Infinite Quack

Trump’s Attempts to Overturn the Election Are Unparalleled in U.S. History This article illustrates how bad things have become. Imagine you're holding an election on a spaceship. The votes have been cast, and one side has a clear majority. But the other side is so intent on winning, by any means, that they start opening airlocks to flush ballots out into space. Not only is this obviously an illegitimate tactic, it's also dangerous. You're throwing away precious oxygen. You're risking not just the election's integrity, but the safety of the whole crew. This is what the Grifter Oligarchy Party is doing. They're playing to win at any cost, and the cost now extends to basic norms of behavior. A system of laws stops working when a significant part of the population just decides to ignore them, and do whatever they feel like. The cost extends to making bald-faced lies, planting ideas in the heads of disgruntled Trump voters -- who have been primed, over the course of ...

Behind Trump’s Yearslong Effort to Turn Losing Into Winning This crap makes me furious. It wasn't a surprise when it arrived; Trump has been broadcasting for a long while, to anyone who would listen, that he was going to do all he could to cast doubt on the integrity of the election in an effort to retain his hold on power if he lost. But anticipating it doesn't mean any of us should stand for it. The expectation that we will choose our leaders through a voting process is baked into our Constitution, and has been since its beginning. But like any legal system, operated by fallible humans, it relies on a basic expectation of decency, on good-faith attempts to discern what is true and what isn't. Going around sowing doubt in the integrity of the voting process -- it's the kind of thing that is effective due to some inbuilt tendencies we all have, to form beliefs based on insufficient evidence. It's a con. Trump isn't good at much, but he is good at conning people....

As Biden Plans Transition, Republicans Decline to Recognize His Election “It’s important for the cause of democracy and freedom that we don’t allege fraud and theft and so forth, unless there’s very clear evidence of that,” Mr. Romney said. “To date, that evidence has not been produced.” Trump was clear about laying the groundwork to contest the election if he lost, saying back in September he could only lose if the election was "rigged". That would be like me saying I can only lose my next game of Monopoly if the dice are rigged. Like much of what Trump says about himself (and he cares about nothing else), it's pure self-aggrandizement divorced from any sense of reality. He's simply delusional. Most other Republicans continue to back him up, though not because they believe the election was stolen, nor that they particularly like Trump. They're just concerned that being seen to contradict him will cost them politically. Folks like Romney, with integrity and politi...

R.I.P., G.O.P. This aligns pretty closely with what I've been saying. The GOP used to be a party with a set of values at its core. I didn't often find those values matched mine, but I can respect a value system I don't agree with. These days, the party acts as if it cares about just one principle: "We wanna win." Not preserving democracy or defending against authoritarianism. Not defeating racism or sexism. Not protecting the country against threats, like this pandemic, that affect everyone regardless of political affiliation. Not even doing what's best for the economy. They are now the party of "win at any cost", even when the cost is the soul of the country. Donald Trump becoming their party leader has made this clear: they back him up whatever he says, and he exemplifies a person who makes decisions without referencing a value system. He didn't start this transfo...

America, we need to talk about how the multiple crises we're facing are interconnected. There are so many to choose from, and two that are probably foremost in the reader's thoughts recently, but I want to discuss five of them. (There are others. I’m not even including climate change.) Let's dub 2020 the Year of the Disaster-Plex, shall we? For many of us, the year the scales fell from our eyes. This lousy year hit us with the Covid-19 crisis first. Viruses happen, and the worst ones are the plagues: when viruses jump from other species into ours (1) . So long as we live in close proximity to animals and have less-than-perfect sanitary practices, this will keep happening from time to time. It's bound to be more common now that there are several billion of us, and we keep flying around the world in metal boxes. This one is unusually nasty because it's a stealth virus. When a plague can spread through multiple people who catch it and cough it along, without even knowi...

  I just binge-watched HBO's Chernobyl yesterday... all 6 1/2 hours of it. Here's the IMDB link . I wasn't really planning to do that. Susan had encouraged me to give the show a try and watch the first episode. It's a dramatization, but based pretty closely on the real events (with some errors as I'll note later). I was hooked almost immediately, unable to look away as the tragedy of the disaster unfolded, which won out over my need for a break from the emotional wear and tear. It's been a while since I've watched something so horrifying and sad. It's hard to miss the parallels to today's crisis. President Trump himself chose to frame the battle against Covid-19 as a war. Well, sure, you can think of it like that. It's a struggle in which people are dying, though the opponent is a force of nature instead of a human one. You could view the Chernobyl disaster, and especially the effort to contain it and recover from it, in the same terms. Once the...

What don't most conservatives realize? Answered by Peter Kruger What I'm hearing in this post is the anguish of someone who holds an actual conservative philosophy, an actual system of values. I may not agree that conservatism is the way to go (I think the world is changing fast and we'd best change with it), but I have 100% respect for someone who holds that other system of values with honesty and open eyes. The people he's angry about, who insist on calling themselves "conservatives" and who sully the name... they are not demonstrating that they hold a system of values. What they're demonstrating, I feel, is best summed up by the term "cult". A strongly held view crosses over into becoming a cult when you insist on members holding beliefs regardless even of directly observable facts. Denying reality has no place in a system of values. Denying reality is not a philosophy, it's a deranged state of mind. Treating every inconvenient fact or obs...

The New York Times normally sets a limit on how many articles non-subscribers can read. They've exempted their Coronavirus coverage from those limits. Like everyone else, I'm glued to the news as this tragedy unfolds. I've been watching stories about the virus move higher and higher on the page. For weeks the Times has made it their top story, and the way things are expected to go, that will continue for a lot longer. So far -- so far -- my own family has yet to be directly impacted. It's heartbreaking to imagine what it has been like for so many families that haven't been as lucky. When someone acquires the full set of symptoms, it is nasty and dangerous. Around the world, nearly 60,000 have died, says the Times, and with tests hard to get in many places, it's likely those numbers are under-reported. Over a quarter million people are known to have caught the virus, and that  number is likely to be dramatically  higher in reality. Recall part of what made HIV s...