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How Sanders and Trump Pulled Off Two Very Different Revolutions

by PenniU07fk Posted on February 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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In New Hampshire, an angry populist who calls for a revolution and assails the Washington establishment, special-interest lobbyists, big-money politics, and rapacious corporations won an election in a historic move that could shake up and remake American politics.

And Bernie Sanders did, too.

Donald Trump triumphed in the GOP primary bagging about a third of the vote. He lapped the rest of the pack, while John Kasich placed second with about 16 percent, and Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio clumped together at about 11 percent. Trump’s conquest of the GOP came after the xenophobic tycoon reality-show star honed his populist message in a manner that echoed Sanders’ approach. Sanders, the democratic socialist who only recently identified as a Democrat, bested Hillary Clinton, the poster child for the Democratic establishment, by about 18 points. This was a commanding showing for Sanders, after the Clinton campaign tried mightily—with Bill Clinton deriding Sanders’ supporters—to close the gap to single digits. Sanders achieved this win by sticking to his trademark lines: Enough is enough, the banks have to be broken up, the billionaires cabal must be busted so it cannot buy elections, and a “revolution” is needed to smash corporate power, tax “Wall Street speculation,” and deliver universal health care, a living wage, and tuition-free college to the citizenry. He roused young voters and apparently fared well among white working-class men, who presumably share Sanders’ fury regarding what he calls a “rigged economy” that generates income inequality. (These blue-collar voters backed Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary.)

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How Sanders and Trump Pulled Off Two Very Different Revolutions

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Ted Cruz Attacks Sean Penn—and Here’s Penn’s Response

by JunePounds Posted on February 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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At an addiction policy forum in Hooksett, New Hampshire, on Thursday, Sen. Ted Cruz, the winner of the Republican Iowa caucuses, turned his talk about the awful consequences of addiction into a rant against…illegal immigration. And, of course, the media and Hollywood. After describing how addiction has affected his family—his half sister died of a drug overdose in 2011—Cruz quickly pivoted to discuss the flood of “undocumented Democrats” (Freudian slip?) coming across the border from Mexico and the need to build a wall to keep them out. He suggested the wall was also needed to protect the United States from drug cartels. Then he turned to the entertainment industry and one member in particular:

El Chapo. You know, Sean Penn seems to think he is a sexy and attractive character. I so appreciate Hollywood for glorifying vicious homicidal killers. What a cute and chic thing to celebrate. Someone who murders and destroys lives for a living. El Chapo’s organization brings vast quantities of drugs into this country, vast quantities of heroin.

Of course, this was a reference to Sean Penn’s recent Rolling Stone article, in which Penn conducted an interview with the fugitive drug cartel chieftain in a secret jungle location. The piece did not celebrate El Chapo—but Cruz was looking to blame all the usual suspects for the drug epidemic in New England: the media, Democrats, and a big-name actor.

Asked to respond to Cruz’s effort to link him to the addiction plague in the Granite State, Penn, in an email, told Mother Jones:

Ted Cruz is a generically funny and dangerously adept thought-smith. Clearly, he watches too much television and neglected to read my article before criticizing. It’s understood. He’s busy trading genius and raising aspirations with Mr. Trump. Blame Canada.

Penn’s last sentence is a reference to this.

We’ve asked the Cruz campaign if it would like to respond—and whether the senator is a fan of South Park.

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Ted Cruz Attacks Sean Penn—and Here’s Penn’s Response

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The Horrific Attack That Led This Reporter to the Bravest Woman in Seattle

by RubySDLOxzlznh Posted on February 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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In July 2009, a horrific crime shook Seattle’s South Park neighborhood: A man with a knife climbed through an open window into the home of Teresa Butz and Jennifer Hopper early one morning and proceeded to torture, rape, and repeatedly stab them both. Hopper survived the attack; Butz did not. Soon after, police arrested Isaiah Kalebu, a 23-year-old with a history of mental illness and intellectual disability. Kalebu was convicted in the summer of 2011 and given a life sentence.

Journalist Eli Sanders has followed the story since the attack with a series of features for The Stranger, the Seattle alt-weekly where he’s an associate editor. In 2012, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his deeply empathetic narrative about Hopper’s testimony at trial, “The Bravest Woman in Seattle.” Now Sanders has compiled and expanded his reporting into a book, While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man’s Descent Into Madness, released Tuesday by Viking. More than just a true crime story, While the City Slept is a compassionate tribute to the lives of the victims, and a rigorous accounting of the mental-health and criminal-justice systems that failed Kalebu and his victims in the years leading up to the crime.

We spoke to Sanders about his reporting process, the origins of the crime, and the need for mental-health-system reform:

Mother Jones: How did you begin your reporting?

Eli Sanders: The crime occurred early on a Sunday morning, and we heard about it at The Stranger not long after. I was sent out to South Park to see what was going on. It was clear that something really awful had happened, but it was not clear what exactly motivated it. In many senses, it remains not very clear.

I ended up doing a feature about the neighborhood processing this crime, and the trauma of being proximate to a crime like this. As I was writing that report, the manhunt for the person who did this was underway, and Isaiah Kalebu ended up being arrested and charged with a crime just as i was finishing that piece. So, after that, I began another feature. For this one, I wanted to see what I could learn about the man who had been arrested for the crime. Even then, I could see there were some cracks that he had slipped through in the criminal-justice and mental-health system in Washington state.

MJ: At what point did it become clear that this would become a different, deeper story than what you’d written before?

ES: I had gone to the courthouse to watch the trial when I could, not knowing if I would write anything about it at all. When I experienced Jennifer Hopper’s testimony, that was the moment. It was instantly clear that this was an incredible act of bravery, of bearing witness, of following through on a promise she had made to herself and to Teresa. And an incredible recounting of their love and what was lost. It compelled a response. At that point I felt that there was more could be told about this intersection of lives. And I didn’t really figure out what it was—what that larger story—for a bit longer.

MJ: The book follows Hopper, Butz, and Kalebu through most of their lives, starting with childhood. Why did you decide to go so far into the personal histories of your subjects?

ES: I had been writing as a journalist in Seattle since 1999, and I had written a lot about different crimes. But for me, it was never satisfying. I would write about a crime, and even when I went into some depth, I would feel that there was a lot more there. The crime does not begin at the moment that we hear about it, and it does not end at the moment of a guilty verdict. The causes, so to speak, are really not something you can comprehend quickly. So I thought, “What would happen if I stayed with a crime long enough to create as full a picture as possible?”

MJ: There’s a moment in the book, during jury selection, when one of the trial attorneys asks potential jurors whether they would need to know why the crime took place in order to convict Kalebu. Were you looking back at their lives for an answer to that question?

ES: There’s no culpability for the crime in the paths that Jennifer and Teresa traveled. Their paths have their own wide tributaries, and I thought they were interesting, inspiring, and also a reminder that victims of crimes are not one-dimensional. We often have a one-dimensional sympathy for them: “Oh that’s terrible.” It is terrible. But it’s actually more than just that. It is a disruption of a long path of an individual’s triumphs and failures and heartbreaks, loneliness, and overcoming that loneliness—and finally, for Jennifer and Teresa, finding each other despite a lot of odds. And then winding up, due to their own choices and forced beyond their control, in a house that they shared and loved, in a relationship that they loved, together, in South Park.

Yes, Isaiah’s path is traced with hope of understanding more deeply where his actions may have come from, but also with the hope of trying to understand him, to the extent that that can be done

MJ: Do you think you found those answers?

ES: It’s really for the reader to judge. I’m not a psychiatrist, I’m not a sociologist—I’m a journalist. I don’t think anyone has the answers as to where exactly your actions come from. And so I hope that this shows an interplay, a convergence, and at the same time, an absence of resistance or helpful intervention in Isaiah Kalebu’s life at moments when he really needed it. He’s someone who came out of difficult circumstances as a child. But as a young adult and as an adult, he was in and out of the criminal-justice and mental-health systems for years before this crime occurred. It’s easier to show with clarity what was not done at moments when something different being done could have made a big difference.

MJ: Does focusing on Kalebu’s psychiatric struggle run the risk of reinforcing people’s false belief that mental illness leads to violent crime?

ES: It’s something that I’ve thought about. The vast majority of people who could describe themselves as mentally ill are nonviolent. There is—as there is in any community—a small percentage with violent tendencies, and I think Isaiah Kalebu falls into that subset. But it would be a terrible mistake to say that because one individual who struggles with mental illness committed a crime, all mentally ill people are dangerous. That kind of stigma is exactly what people who are in mental-health advocacy have been trying to push the culture away from.

However, there’s an opportunity in a crime like this to see in very stark relief the terrible and extreme consequences of our failure to construct a public mental-health system that is sufficient for the needs of our citizens. That’s not to say that every person who needs something from that public mental-health system is like Isaiah Kalebu. But his case can show very starkly how fragile and how flawed the system is.

MJ: What did you see as root failures in the mental-health and criminal-justice systems?

ES: These systems fail for lack of public investment in a state that you might think would have a stronger social safety net. Actually, it’s not so much different than other states where you might expect the social safety net to be in tatters. It really is a microcosm of the whole country, especially in the period described—the financial crisis, the recession afterward, when programs that could help people like Isaiah Kalebu were cut and cut and cut.

MJ: Have you seen any progress?

ES: Some. But it’s not nearly sufficient to the scale of the need. It’s connected, I think, to the economic recovery, to a slightly increased awareness that we cannot simultaneously to expect taxes to be perpetually cut and to demand more of government. Sadly, in our politics, so much moves around cost. If we can get the sense that so often, it is so much more expensive not to invest in preventative measures, then it would be a huge change in mindset. The downstream effects of that change in mindset would be transformative for individuals and communities. But it’s a really hard sell for a politician. The average person will say, “Oh, you’re always asking for more money.” When it really works, you can’t see what it prevented from happening.

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The Horrific Attack That Led This Reporter to the Bravest Woman in Seattle

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Bracing for Defeat, Santorum Uses the Waning Spotight to Reminisce

by Hans38883997 Posted on January 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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On the edge of Sioux City, Iowa, in the muddy fields off Highway 20, a dirt road leads to large yellow mega-church atop a modest hill. It was there, at the conservative Cornerstone World Outreach, that Rick Santorum finally got his standing ovation.

Four years ago, the former senator from Pennsylvania was poised for a surprise victory in the Iowa caucuses. He topped Mitt Romney with the support of evangelical voters, among them the controversial pastor of Cornerstone, Rev. Cary Gordon, whose influence among evangelicals in the state draws presidential contenders to seek his endorsement.

Gordon endorsed Santorum four years ago. The two have traveled to Israel together, and Santorum’s campaign they are good friends. But in 2016, the pastor has chosen not to back a candidate. In a long and winding article published on TheIowaRepublican blog this week, Gordon, an immigration hard-liner, blasted Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump as all being too weak on the issue. (Cruz, who is working hard to woo the types of evangelicals who are influenced by Gordon, might have the most to lose from his decision to stay out of the race.) Although Gordon did not endorse Santorum this time, he did welcome him on Sunday, and allowed Santorum to preach to several hundred listeners in his pews.

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Bracing for Defeat, Santorum Uses the Waning Spotight to Reminisce

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Gillian Anderson Reveals the Hardest Part of the "X-Files" Reboot

by LaurenMussen Posted on January 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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When it comes down to it, actress Gillian Anderson is way more Gibson than Scully.

Or at least Stella Gibson, the no-nonsense detective she portrays on BBC’s The Fall (Dana Scully needs no such introduction), is the character Anderson likes best. In the decade-plus since The X-Files wrapped up its nine-season, two-movie run, the British-American actress and mum of three has moved on to roles that are more complex and fulfilling than the maddeningly skeptical FBI agent who made Anderson a household name.

Now, of course, she’s returning for the six-episode X-Files reprise that kicks off January 27 on Fox. Although the premiere was widely panned, TV critics promise it gets better: Many are raving about the third episode, which was written by fan favorite Darin Morgan and includes a role for X-Files superfan and Silicon Valley star Kumail Nanjiani.

Once Anderson’s initial tenure as Scully concluded, she moved back to London and did a play in order to “take a breath…It was important for me to remove myself from the intensity of the business as I had experienced it during the show,” she says.

That break was short lived. The British-American actress has been busy ever since, co-starring in dark TV dramas such as The Fall and Hannibal and pursuing numerous other screen and stage projects—if you’re lucky, you can still score tickets for her upcoming stint as Blanch DuBois opposite Ben Foster’s Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Anderson also has a role in War and Peace, a new BBC miniseries based on the epic novel, which premiered in the United States on January 18. And while most all of Anderson’s work is pretty great, this interviewer, at least, is overwhelmed with nostalgia for Scully’s signature eye roll. Watch the trailer, and then we’ll talk.

Mother Jones: So, how did you react when you were approached to do The X-Files again?

Gillian Anderson: My initial reaction wasn’t very positive because my experience of doing it before was doing 24 episodes a year! That’s just not feasible with three kids and other commitments. When it appeared that Fox would be willing to do a smaller amount of episodes, I suddenly had a bit more interest in having the conversation.

MJ: Was it difficult to play Scully again after all this time?

GA: It was natural to a certain degree, in that it’s a little like getting on a bicycle. But because it’s been so long, and because I’ve tried really hard to get as far away from her as possible in the other roles I’ve been playing, she was a bit further away than I had expected.

MJ: How has Scully changed since we last saw her?

GA: She hasn’t really changed that much. They’re no longer on the X-files, so she’s not an active FBI agent. She’s working as a surgeon, and her day-to-day life is pretty simple. She’s refocused.

MJ: What’s your favorite X-Files episode ever?

GA: “Bad Blood,” one of our comedic episodes. It’s been my favorite for a long time. I find it funny. It’s a very effective premise to have the two agents just about on trial for what may or may not be the death of somebody, and they have very different takes on what transpired. The nature of the different perceptions are quite extreme and show a lot about Mulder and Scully’s internal thinking.

MJ: I’ve always been struck by how your character paved the way for more diverse portrayals of women in sci-fi.

GA: It was a groundbreaking role for women, period. When The X-Files launched, there wasn’t anything else that was sci-fi on television and barely anything on film. So it not only was the first for a female character like that in sci-fi; it was the first female character like that on TV.

MJ: How did your preparation for playing Stella Gibson on The Fall compare with your prep for Scully? I mean, both are investigators, but they’re totally different.

GA: Scully—I don’t know how much proper research I did back then. I didn’t really have time. I got the job on a Thursday and we started shooting the following Monday. At some point, Fox arranged for us to go to the FBI and talk to a couple of agents. I did a lot more work for Stella Gibson to understand the nature of the troubles in Northern Ireland and the British occupation, the police presence in Northern Ireland and the impact that had on the ground, and also what it meant to be detective superintendent.

MJ: I love that The Fall highlights how sexually empowered women are judged by men, even as the male lead is a sexually motivated serial killer.

GA: I felt like I had never read a character like Stella before. There was something extremely enigmatic about her. She’s still a mystery to me, and that’s very unusual. Usually so much information is revealed about characters. But the lack of information matches who she is. It’s a sly way for the writer to lead people on. She continues to be compelling and interesting, even though we don’t know very much about her.

MJ: Do you prefer playing her to playing Scully?

GA: Yeah. She’s probably my favorite character I’ve ever played. I feel compelled by her in a different way. I don’t know how much of that is because I played Scully for such a long time that I appreciate the change of scene. I feel like I identify with Stella more, and I am more curious about where she’s headed.

MJ: She’s complicated, and not hesitant to tell people to fuck off. It’s refreshing to see that in a female TV character.

GA: Yep. Well, I don’t know if we need more women out there to say, “Fuck off!” But television isn’t the issue. There are a lot of female characters on TV who are intelligent, and a good enough portion of them aren’t all about the date and the car and the plastic surgery. It’s in film that it’s lacking! It would be great to see more women in a wider range of characters—and better populated in film.

MJ: It seems like that problem stems from a dearth of female directors and writers.

GA: I think there’s a lot of them out there—I just don’t think their material gets made. Studios don’t believe they’ll have an audience if women make it. A lot of female directors can’t pay somebody to hire them.

MJ: Would you say that situation is slowly improving?

GA: Laughs. I think it’s stagnant, in a big way. That’s what makes the change difficult. The numbers are astounding.

MJ: Vis-a-vis your upcoming role as Blanche DuBois, what’s the biggest difference for you between stage acting and your work on camera?

GA: You’re doing the same thing over and over onstage, so one of the biggest challenges—aside from being live in front of an audience—is keeping it fresh and new every night.

MJ: What do you like about playing Blanche?

GA: She’s one of the most extraordinary and complicated characters ever written. Tennessee Williams is extraordinary—playwright, poet, writer of letters. He was a brilliant man who had a tragic life experience, and his experience dramatically affects the pieces that he created. Blanche got all of his pain. In the South, where the play is set, you don’t show your pain—especially back then. Women are meant to behave in the world, and she’s a victim of that time. I find her an extremely moving and challenging character.

MJ: Tell me about War and Peace.

GA: This adaptation was done by Andrew Davies House of Cards, a British writer who has a talent in adapting large novels to screenplays. This is probably one of his best works. It’s directed by Tom Harper, and it’s a massive, massive accomplishment: It’s so beautiful and rich, you really feel like you’re in Russia—even though everyone is speaking with a British accent. Laughs. It’s very detailed in the relationships between these families, which was so integral to the story and the history of Russia. It’s got some of the most moving war scenes I’ve ever seen. You really get to care about the characters that are in this story, and that’s quite rare, I think. You have the intimacy of the relationships to invest in. People seems to be liking it in the UK and I hope they like it over here.

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Gillian Anderson Reveals the Hardest Part of the "X-Files" Reboot

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Southern White Women Are Apparently in Pretty Bad Shape These Days

by DanialLeverett Posted on January 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Since I happened to mention the famous Case/Deaton mortality study in the previous post, here’s the latest from Andrew Gelman. As you may recall, Case and Deaton concluded that mortality among middle-aged whites from suicide, alcohol, and drug poisoning had skyrocketed over the past two decades. This set pundits afire with theories about what was going on, but Gelman has done some age adjustment to the cohorts that Case and Deaton used, and then broken up the data by gender, and then by geographic area. Here’s what he gets:

After 2005, there’s no effect on middle-aged men at all. It’s all women. And if you break it down further, nearly the entire effect is concentrated among women in the South. But why? Gelman punts:

I don’t have any explanations for this. As I told a reporter the other day, I believe in the division of labor: I try to figure out what’s happening, and I’ll let other people explain why.

I think that’s wise. For one thing, if you slice the data in a different way, you might get a different result. What’s more, as I’ve mentioned several times, the increased mortality affects the young too, not just the middle aged. So if you spun some brilliant theories about why middle-aged whites are so damn depressed these days, you might want to rethink things. Your new theory needs to explain why the young and the middle-aged are dying in greater numbers, and you also need to explain why it’s affecting primarily women in the South. Good luck.

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Southern White Women Are Apparently in Pretty Bad Shape These Days

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What to Expect From President Obama’s Final State of the Union Address

by CarrollBerk627 Posted on January 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday night, President Barack Obama will deliver his final State of the Union address to cap what has been, in many ways, a historic presidency. Obama is the third consecutive two-term president, and his predecessors’ final addresses offer hints as to what we can expect from Obama’s speech. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both spoke of the importance of strengthening the economy and highlighted examples of economic progress. Clinton advocated efforts to close the “gulf between rich and poor,” while Bush warned of the dangers of rising entitlement spending if costs weren’t reined in. Expect Obama to follow suit and call for broad and sweeping improvements to the country. Obama’s specific proposals may differ—look for him to urge gun control legislation, a reform of the immigration system, and continued access to affordable quality health insurance—but the tenor of his speech should be similar: The past seven years have brought great progress, but there are a few steps remaining to cement his presidential legacy.

The speech

Obama is not just at the end of his term, but at the end of his presidency. Unlike his 2012 address, when he made a specific pledge to reform Medicare and issued pleas for bipartisan tax and entitlement reform, his speech on Tuesday will probably be painted with broader strokes, commenting on the general state of the country and progress that has been made since 2008. While you can expect him to mention the Affordable Care Act and call for more sensible gun control legislation, he’s also likely to focus on the future and the fates of ordinary Americans.

In a Sunday interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, foreshadowed the tone of the president’s remarks.

“You’ll hear him talk about every American having a shot in this changing economy,” McDonough said. “You’ll hear him talk about using all the elements of our national power to protect and grow the influence of this country. And importantly…you’ll hear the president talk about making sure that every American has a chance to influence this democracy. Not the select few, not the millionaires and the billionaires, but every American.”

Obama no longer has to worry about re-election, and he can’t expect much meaningful legislation to emerge from cooperation with Republican leaders in Congress in his final year, so he may take off the gloves in addressing the GOP. Condemnations of the Republican responses to climate change and mass shootings will be fair game. He may use Republican presidential candidates’ anti-immigrant statements to press for reforms to the immigration system—and to take down the GOP field a notch in the public view.

This election year is of particular importance to Democrats. They are currently outnumbered by Republicans in both the House and Senate, and relinquishing the Oval Office would create a nightmare scenario for those left of the aisle. While the president has promised not to endorse any candidate in the Democratic primary in 2016, he might look forward to November and devote a portion of his speech to a more direct rejection of conservative strategies, especially when it comes to guns, the economy, and health care.

The guests

The State of the Union guest list often tells us something about the themes or ideas the president wishes to express. This year’s invitees are no exception, as they are filled with people who symbolize key points of Obama’s tenure. The president has invited two activists, including Jim Obergefell of landmark Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same sex marriage. (Interestingly, he did not invite any activists from the influential Black Lives Matter movement, although it would be surprising if he didn’t make some mention of racially motivated violence, given its prominence in the past year’s public discourse.) Two Syrian refugees will also be in attendance, including nine-year-old Ahmad Alkhalaf, invited by Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.). Obama’s most noteworthy invitation, however, is for a guaranteed no-show. The president left one seat vacant in the First Lady’s guest box to commemorate the lives of those lost to gun violence—a powerful gesture just a week after his passionate speech on gun safety reform.

The response

Republicans announced last week that Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina would give the party’s official response to the president’s speech. Haley, both the youngest governor in the country and the first female and non-white governor in South Carolina’s history, represents a more welcoming, inclusive future for the party. In a political year whose spotlight has shone on Donald Trump, a white man with some not-so-friendly opinions about immigrants, Haley, a daughter of Indian immigrants, represents a softer sell for conservatism for anyone who isn’t wooed by Trump. Haley made national headlines last summer when she removed the confederate flag from South Carolina’s Capitol grounds.

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What to Expect From President Obama’s Final State of the Union Address

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Are Liberals Responsible for the Rise of Donald Trump?

by VeldaMarcell Posted on January 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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Five-time Jeopardy! champion Tom Nichols1 writes today about why so many people are attracted to Donald Trump. Nichols is a Republican,2 but he makes it very clear that he deeply loathes Trump (“hideous,” “narcissistic,” “creepy,” “stupid,” etc.) and will never vote for him. So what’s his take on Trump’s popularity? Is it due to economic insecurity? Inchoate anger? Bubbling racism and xenophobia? Hatred of the Republican establishment?

Nah. He says Trump’s rise is basically the fault of the left:

To understand Trump’s seemingly effortless seizure of the public spotlight, forget about programs, and instead zero in on the one complaint that seems to unite all of the disparate angry factions gravitating to him: political correctness. This, more than anything, is how the left created Trump

Uh-oh. That’s not going to go over well. For what it’s worth, Nichols is clear that he isn’t referring to garden variety political correctness, which is basically little more than avoiding terms that are obviously insulting or exclusionary. At worst, that stuff is annoying but well-meaning:

Today, however, we have a new, more virulent political correctness that terrorizes both liberals and conservatives, old-line Democrats and Republicans, alike…The extremist adherents of this new political correctness have essentially taken a flamethrower to the public space and annihilated its center…Any incorrect position, any expression of the Constitutional right to a different opinion, or even just a slip of the tongue can lead to public ostracism and the loss of a job.

…Gay marriage is a good example. Liberals wanted gay marriage to win in the Supreme Court, and it did. Leftists wanted more: to silence their opponents even after those opponents completely lost on the issue…I could reel off many other examples. When the New York Times tells the rubes that it’s time to hand in their guns, when The Washington Post suggests that Jesus is ashamed of them for not welcoming Syrian refugees the week after a terrorist attack, people react not because they love guns or hate Syrians, but because their natural urge to being told by coastal liberals that they’re awful people and that they should just obey and shut up is to issue a certain Anglo-Saxon verb and pronoun combination with all the vigor they can muster. And if they can’t say it themselves, they’ll find someone who will, even if it’s a crude jerk from Queens who can’t make a point without raising his pinky like a Mafia goon explaining the vig to you after you’ve had a bad day at the track.

…For the record, I despise Donald Trump and I will vote for almost any Republican (well, okay, not Ben Carson) rather than Trump….But I understand the fear of being silenced that’s prompting otherwise decent people to make common cause with racists and modern Know-Nothings, and I blame the American left for creating that fear.

…How long this will go on, then, depends on how long it will take for those people to feel reassured that someone besides Trump will represent their concerns without backing down in the face of catcalls about racism, sexism, LGBTQ-phobia, Islamophobia, or any other number of labels deployed mostly to extinguish their dissent.

This is hardly a new critique. Conservatives have been complaining about “being silenced” forever. The only difference between Trump and the rest of the GOP field is that Trump’s complaints are a little earthier than Rubio’s or Bush’s.

Still, even if I think Nichols is overstating things, it’s not as if he doesn’t have a point. Even those of us on the left feel the wrath of the leftier-than-thou brigade from time to time. I don’t generally have a hard time avoiding objectionable language myself because (a) I’m liberal, (b) I’m good with words, and (c) I write rather than talk, which gives me time to get my act together. But even at that, sometimes I cross an invisible line and get trounced for it.

But for someone without my advantages, I can easily see how it might feel almost impossible to express an unpopular opinion without tying yourself in knots. And let’s be honest: We liberals do tend to yell racism a little more often than we should. And we do tend to suggest that anyone who likes guns or Jesus is a rube. And the whole “privilege” thing sure does get tiresome sometimes. And we do get a little pedantic in our insistence that no conversation about anything is complete unless it specifically acknowledges the special problems of marginalized groups. It can be pretty suffocating at times.

For the most part, I don’t mind this stuff—and conservatives do themselves no favors by harping on supposed PC idiocy like the “war on Christmas.” But the reason I don’t mind it is that I can navigate it reasonably well4 and I mostly agree with the aims of the PC police anyway. People who have trouble with navigation obviously feel a lot more constrained. So while I don’t really buy Nichols’ argument—conservatives built the monster named Trump, not liberals—I do think he has a germ of a point. Donald Trump is basically telling ordinary people that ordinary language is okay, and since that’s the only language they know, it means they feel like they can finally talk again.

1Okay, fine: He’s also a professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College.

2Former Republican, anyway: “I’m a conservative independent and a former Republican. I quit the party in 2012 because of exactly the kind of coarse ignorance that Trump represents. The night Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary on the thoughtful platform of colonizing the moon, I was out.”

3 I included that second sentence only because it tickled me.

4 Much of this I’ve learned from reading stuff by academics, who are the masters of acceptable language. As an example: If you were to call something “black behavior,” you’d probably get mauled. The solution? Call it “behavior stereotypically coded as black.” This accomplishes so many things at once. However, it’s also phraseology that no ordinary person would ever think of. This means they literally have no acceptable way of expressing the original thought, which makes them feel silenced.

Source – 

Are Liberals Responsible for the Rise of Donald Trump?

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Christmas Eve Catblogging – 24 December 2015

by UXPDarrelffkzxi Posted on December 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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If the NFL can have a special Saturday edition of Thursday Night Football, then I can have a special Thursday edition of Friday Catblogging. This is my Christmas gift to all of you: catblogging a day early.

But there’s more! Today you get a movie. And not just any movie: in the spirit of the season, today’s movie brings ultimate cat fighting into your home. Be sure to note Hilbert’s stealthy, almost ninja-like paw movement at the beginning. I score it two takedowns for each, but Hilbert’s stunning surprise attack at the end threw Hopper out of the ring and won the bout. In the middle, you’ll notice that they fight like a couple of six-year-old girls. An hour after it was over, they both conked out and curled up together on the teal chair downstairs.

Original source – 

Christmas Eve Catblogging – 24 December 2015

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Enough Is Enough: Cassette Tapes Died For Good Reason

by BeatrizMcGhee Posted on December 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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I am, of course, familiar with the hipster love of music on vinyl. But I didn’t know that cassette tapes were making a comeback too:

Many people over 30 remember cassettes, with nostalgia, if not some disdain….Go to any indie show and inevitably, among the T-shirts and knickknacks, there will be tapes. Some record labels are now cassette-only. The National Audio Co., America’s largest manufacturer of audiocassettes, reported that 2014 was its best year yet.

But before the revisionists completely rewrite my adolescence, let’s be clear about something: As a format for recorded sound, the cassette tape is a terrible piece of technology….Each time you play one it degrades. Bad sound gets worse. Casings crack in winter, melt in summer.

Craziness. The only reason anyone liked cassettes back in the day was because they were better than 8-track tapes. When I was in college, you could hardly turn a corner without hearing an earnest conversation about Maxell vs. TDK,1 Dolby vs. Dolby C, chrome vs. metal, 60 minutes vs. 90 minutes.2 But those conversations only existed because everyone also understood that cassette tapes fundamentally sucked. There was lots of innovation, but it was all just part of a desperate attempt to improve the sound of a format that was inherently lousy because the tape was just too damn narrow. There’s a limit to what you can do when you cram four audio tracks onto eighth-inch analog tape.

But lots of people today have forgotten about all that, I guess. Oh well. I’m pretty convinced that about 90 percent of the population couldn’t tell the difference between music played on a half-inch reference tape and music played on a Teddy Ruxpin doll. So I suppose it doesn’t matter.

Still, cassettes? Seriously folks: a thumb drive is better in every conceivable way. Don’t get sucked in.

1I was a Maxell guy. I have no idea why.

2No one who wanted to be taken seriously ever considered 120-minute cassettes. And for good reason: they were just too fragile.

Continue reading: 

Enough Is Enough: Cassette Tapes Died For Good Reason

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