Cruzing through the Crazy 3
Aside:
As someone who lives near a golf course, I must admit that my opinion of George Soros just notched up.
Also, would Agenda 21 sound so scary if it didn’t have a name like a bad Tom Cruise movie?
This website does not track you.
It contains no private information. It does not drop persistent cookies, does not collect data other than incoming ip addresses and page views (the internet is a public place), and certainly does not collect and sell your information to others.
Some sites that I link to may try to track you, but that's between you and them, not you and me.
I do collect statistics, but I use a simple stand-alone Wordpress plugin, not third-party services such as Google Analitics over which I have no control.
Finally, this is website is a hobby. It's a hobby in which I am deeply invested, about which I care deeply, and which has enabled me to learn a lot about computers and computing, but it is still ultimately an avocation, not a vocation; it is certainly not a money-making enterprise (unless you click the "Donate" button--go ahead, you can be the first!).
I appreciate your visiting this site, and I desire not to violate your trust.
March 30, 2015 at 1:13 pm
We can keep insisting this guy’s crazy, offering convincing evidence of aberrant belief showing he is. And he may never be president but he’s not alone. The fringe crazy is a mainstream power & there’s no arguing with it. Cyberspace and communications technology doesn’t help. Getting them out of power is the only thing that does and they won very significantly in 2014. And all across the fractured country, in state legislatures they control, they continue to pile and pass legislation that is quite plainly insane and unconstitutional, all of it from the banning of non-existent shariah law, to the anti-gay pieces disguised as religious freedom laws, to nullifications that insist the state government can choose to ignore federal law and regulation, to even the weirdest matters, like law to look into protecting the individual state from electromagnetic pulse attack by terrorists or Iran, gets passed. And the newspaper editorial sections and alt weeklies in the couple of big cities in these places cluck and call it nuts nonsense but it goes forward anyway. And the next election they get even more elected, not less. Follow it to an endpoint. It’s catastrophic. Shaming hashtags on Twitter won’t fix it any more than Facebook and Google freed Egypt and the Middle East. American collapse was always going to be unique to its own historical nature and a Stillson as President with control of Congress is not a faint possibility. The Queen could destroy the Democratic Party merely being herself, a wealth centrist retread who stands for nothing except power and not-the-crazy-person.
March 30, 2015 at 2:48 pm
The crazy caucus is, indeed, a very real thing which has made itself subject to manipulation via its consuming fear of anyone and anything different.
I don’t think that makes pointing out the crazy any less valuable. Ridicule can be powerful, though I agree that it can also be pointless.
As long the majority of the persons of good will in this country think that the Presidential election is the only election that matters, as they seem to believe, the right wing will continue to get away with this stuff.
March 30, 2015 at 3:20 pm
Let me put it another way. Decades ago I worked at a newspaper in an area that was red Pennsy. It still is, according to DailyKos’ 2014 map. I was assigned to cover a local meeting and this around the time of the first Iraq war. I sat there for hours and one of the local burghers kept bringing up emergency preparations, in case, you know, if Saddam Hussein hit the local part of Interstate 81 with Scuds. Everyone pretty much ignored him because he was crazy. Just before the war broke out another reporter at the paper, an acquaintance of mine, came to my desk to ask me who he could call in my ring of contacts at think tanks in DC who could provide comment on what Saddam Hussein might attack in the Lehigh Valley. He knew he’d been assigned a ludicrous story and I laughed and told him I could give him some names but that everyone would say the same thing, that there was nothing in the Lehigh Valley to be attacked nor was there anything in Hussein’s arsenal that could attack even if there was. Some type of story was cobbled together anyway, for the sake of local angle and, because, a couple crazy and stupid people wanted it. But it was still the fringe. It didn’t drive elections, it didn’t create law.
Today that’s all gone. There is no reason, anymore. Today, Krugman — in his column — called it the post-truth society, or something. It’s easy for the insane right to find a “think tank” in DC with “experts” who will tell them, yes, their hometown is at risk. Not just from one thing, but from many and they will do it in great detail. Virtually, all the old reasonable people have been swept away and replaced by “experts” who cater to the insane right’s network of beliefs. There is no way to stop it. It’s financed and guaranteed by America’s wealthy and corporates.
And this is why the Democratic Party and the left have so often failed so abjectly. They have no answer to it. Posting on Facebook and multi-e-mail campaigns everyday don’t have the same effect on the left as they do on the right. The right has made a gigantic industry of it. It has monetized it, as well as used it hard as a weapon to defeat progress. The left, on the other hand, doesn’t financially support its “experts” and troops with any kind of the same fervor or hard resources. Crowdsourcing for the left doesn’t work as well as crowdsourcing for the right.