To: Mother Jones Magazine
From: Mitch Berg, Deplorable Peasant
Re: Schadenfreud
Dear MoJo:
Ordinarily, I eschew schadenfreud.
However, please be advised that I will gargle with your tears.
That is all.
Good News: After five years of “economic growth” under Obama, the economy might actually take off again.
The US economy will grow by 2.3 percent in 2017 and 3.0 percent in 2018, said the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, revising its earlier forecast.
That compares to gross domestic product growth of 1.5 percent this year, according to the OECD.
Bad News: Because Keynesianism:
The Republican property tycoon’s team has said he will devote $550 billion to rebuilding decrepit infrastructure.
Really Bad News: And that’s all presuming the Democrats don’t call in their markers with Janet Yellen.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Global temperatures falling because El Nino ended? Well, THAT can’t be right. It’s completely contrary to the consensus of opinion in the scientific community.
Time to make a few “adjustments” to the readings.
Joe Doakes
Good politicized science, like good writing, is all in the rewriting.
What happens when you, much like a colonial power of the 1800s, build an entire political strategy out of harnessing minorities against the majority?
Specifically, when you do as the Democrat party – especially Hillary Clinton, in the 2016 campaign did, making the crux of the campaign about identity politics?
You will get a response based on identity politics.
One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.
If you make politics about identity…then politics will be about identity.
With all that that implies.
The Midway in Saint Paul – at least, the part between Selby and Thomas – could use a break. After the “Green Line” strangled dozens of local businesses and ate up most of the parking that the street’s businesses depended on, the city looks ready to inflict a soccer stadium on the neighborhood.
But it appears at least one business thought it’d be worth taking a risk on stale, blighted, and ostensibly demo-bound Midway Center.
Which makes the local Soccergentsia nervous:
Well, this doesn’t seem to be a good sign. Three doors down from the Midway Rainbow, RK Midway fixing up empty retail to rent again? pic.twitter.com/vMcEhFw7nG
— Brian Quarstad (@IMSoccerNews) November 16, 2016
Magical thinking is, apparently, not robust thinking.
I’m not a member of the “White Working Class”. I worked pretty hard to not be part of it, earlier in my life. For better or worse, I’m a service-economy guy.
Paul Krugman new yhork times.
Democrats have to figure out why the white working class just voted overwhelmingly against its own economic interests, not pretend that a bit more populism would solve the problem.
Here’s a word to the wise, Paul Krugman – but since it’s you, I’ll have to explain it.
Being told what “one’s best interests” are is a good enough reason by itself.
Would Paul Krugman tell black people, or Native Americans, or women, what’s “in their best interests?” That would be racist, sexist and mansplaining.
It’s no different when you Bluesplain to people you don’t know, have never met, will never meet, and whose lives would kill you dead in half an hour what “their best interests” are. There’s no cutesy PC social-justice-academy term for it – but it’s the same thing.
And that’s when the Bluesplaining comes from someone who’s actually got a point – which Paul Krugman does not. How do we know this?
Because he wrote this…:
Any claim that changed policy positions will win elections assumes that the public will hear about those positions. How is that supposed to happen, when most of the news media simply refuse to cover policy substance? Remember, over the course of the 2016 campaign, the three network news shows devoted a total of 35 minutes combined to policy issues — all policy issues. Meanwhile, they devoted 125 minutes to Mrs. Clinton’s emails.
Right. The press was hard on Hillary.
Oh, yeah. And…:
Beyond this, the fact is that Democrats have already been pursuing policies that are much better for the white working class than anything the other party has to offer. Yet this has brought no political reward.
No, they do not – and yes, the reward has been bestowed.
Krugman is just too much of a clown to know it.
At least one professor got the message and got some useful takeaways from the complete failure of the “academic-industrial complex” for which Krugman is a poster child:
First, we must stop being insufferable know-it-alls. As scribes and scholars, we have expertise in a particular beat or field, but that doesn’t make us qualified to determine which candidate is best to lead 320 million Americans, each of whom has many and varied needs. Nor is it our job.
God knows it’ll never be Krugman.
This is the sort of statistical oddity that I obsess over.
In the entire world – eight billion people – there is one person alive known to have been born in the 19th century. And she turns 117 today:
Born November 29, 1899, [Emma Morano] is the world’s oldest living person and the secret to her longevity appears to lie in eschewing usual medical wisdom.
“I eat two eggs a day, and that’s it. And cookies. But I do not eat much because I have no teeth,” she told AFP in an interview last month in her room in Verbania, a town in northern Italy on Lake Maggiore.
Apropos not much.
This past three weeks has been fascinating; I’ve watched a whole lot of people I’d considered fairly rational, sensible people completely losing their grip on reality. I could talk – “joke”, sure, what the heck – about how people on the political left frequently seem groaningly ignorant about history, but that’s a separate subject for another time.
I’ve seen some of them writing or sharing *precisely* the sort of end-of-the-world apocalyptic gloom and doom that they were mocking *some* Republicans for writing eight years ago – advice about surviving the end of civilization, the fall of civil society, barbarians at the gates, pretty much the whole “Walking Dead” bit.
The part that has me the most interested, though, is the dark, furtive references some of them are making to “resisting”…whatever it is they’re worried about. Some are even taking measures they’d considered downright unholy – indeed, measures that a month ago most of them were working to foreclose.
And while I detest schadenfreud, I just have to ask those liberals; are you finally starting to understand (however irrationally and mistakenly) why some of us bitter, gun-clinging deplorables fought to hard to protect the *originalist* interpretation of the Second Amendment?
Maybe just a little?
Shannon Watts, the national head of Moms Want Action – the group of criminal-protection “activists” that serve as the shrill, hectoring front for Michael Bloomberg’s billions – had something to say about yesterday’s episode at Ohio State:
It was, of course, a car and knife attack.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
High taxation chases another business away.
Too bad. Vehicle sharing is a wonderful way to reduce greenhouse gasses and thereby save the planet.
Luckily, driving business out of St. Paul will not reduce revenue which, of course, is the most important thing.
Joe Doakes
They’ll always find a way to keep the revenue coming.
To: National Public Radio (cc: Minnesota Public Radio)
From: Mitch Berg; not really a pollyanna
Re: The Season For The Wheezin’
Dear various PRs,
Last Thursday was Thanksgiving. And like every week after every Thanksgiving, I know what that means, especially vis-a-vis Public Radio programming.
To listen to your broadcasts, we are on the precipice of a national mental health plague, something Americans only survive with the aid of therapy, drinking or an endless slathering on of (wry, fashionable-understated) cynicism. A time of year where all ceremony is onerous, all family members are insane or intolerable, all travel is wearing, all human interaction is a layer of plastic fakery over a rotten, frothing core of anxiety and desperation.
That’s right – the Holiday season.
Public radio programming will be clogged with with newscasters droning on about seasonal mental health afflictions; with “entertainers” jabbering about the only kind of get-togethers any of them seem to have – ugly, dysfunctional ones; with obscure writers and artists elevated (?) to radio commentators, testifying to the ordeal we’re all about to go through.
Point taken, Public Radio – the upper-middle-class, over-miseducated, secular (wildly-disproportionally secular-jewish) crowd is exquisitely bored with the whole thing.
But might I suggest you poke your collective (heh) nose outside your Subaru-driving, Oberlin/Bard/Saint Olaf-educated, Whole-Foods-shopping, free-range-alpaca-wearing, urban-liberal-privilege-wallowing, Israel-divesting, coffee-shop-music-loving, prematurely gray, bumper-sticker-clad Obama-shilling bubble and take note that for a whole lot of people, perhaps the majority, the holidays aren’t about mindless personal drama, and bring us some measure of joy?
I mean, fine – you’ll joke about how pathetic you find it. That’s fine – and nothing new!
Just saying – perhaps you can put down the bottle and take your head out of the oven and look around a bit?
That is all.
You want a lot of publicity for very very very little effort?
Put on a white pointy robe and yell “Make America Great Again!”
David Harsanyi points out what a lot of us on the right already know: the “Alt-Right” is to 2016 what the “Vast Rightwing Conspiracy” was to 1995, and the “War on Women” was to 2012; a smear, pushed with relentless dedication by a media that were basically Democrat operatives with bylines, to smear the Democrats’ opponents by associating them with the a convenient, if barely extant, boogeyman. It was something that Saul Alinsky called “framing”, and that anyone who’s studied psychological abuse calls “Gaslighting”.
David Harsanyi points out the facts on what is, to borrow a phrase, “fake news”:
Every major cable news network had a discussion about the importance of the [National Policy Institute – the place where the “crowd” yelled “Hail Trump”]. But here’s a little nugget from the NPR piece that asserts the election has given this “once fringe movement a jolt”: “About 300 people — split nearly evenly between conference attendees and protesters of the conference outside — were on hand at the downtown D.C. event.”
300 people – 150 of them attendees?
150 people go to the big game warehouse in Roseville to play Warhammer every weekend with no media coverage.
Four times that many people turn out in maroon shirts at the Legislature every time some liberal bobblehead tries to introduce a gun grab bill.
There are bowling leagues with more people and political clout than the National Policy Institute.
About 300 people? Some jolt. To put that into context, there were well over 300 people at thousands of churches and temples across the Washington area this weekend praying for peace on Earth. In this country, you could pull together 300 people for a meeting about anything, actually. Thousands of UFO enthusiasts got together in the Arizona desert last year in hopes of not being mass abducted by space aliens.
A few years ago, I attended the Socialist convention in Chicago, where at least a thousand activists gathered to discuss how to end economic freedom. Since then, 43 percent of Democrat primary goers have given this extreme movement a jolt, I guess.
In a nation of a third of a billion people, there should be a lot more crazies than that. And who knows; if CNN and the NYTimes wave enough cameras around looking for boogeymen, then that’s exactly what we’ll get. You create a media market for something, you’ll get…something.
Our knowledge of the universe keeps expanding. Every year we make discoveries about the world and universe around us that make the Nobel Prize breakthroughs of previous years seem like nursery rhymes. Every new wave of discoveries pushes out the frontiers of human knowledge to levels that would leave the greatest thinkers of days gone by standing slack-jawed and agog.
And yet even the most brilliant of theoretical physicists knows that there are things that mankind may never, ever have the instrumentation, the knowledge, and even the imagination to measure.
Like my hatred of Twitter.
I was listening to some archival coverage from NPR over the weekend, from May of 1945, about the death of Adolf Hitler. I was kind of surprised:
“On the one hand, he directly ordered the death of 11 million Jewish, gay, Roma, Sinti and Slavic civilians in a campaign of ethnic cleansing, and launched a war that led to the deaths of between 50 and 70 million people.
On the other hand, he was a committed vegetarian and dedicated to animal rights, and his death by gun suicide highlights attention on the epidemic of gun violence, in which guns killed millions of Europeans.
So the truth is somewhere in between.”
Well, no. I made the whole thing up. Well, not the whole thing; Hitler could in fact not bear the though of animals coming to harm. He was a very forthright vegetarian, and had no tolerance for any sort of cruelty to animals. But nobody in history has suggested that those facts even nudge the scale in comparison to his crimes against humanity and morality.
That would be just stupid.
I thought about this as I was listening to NPR talking about the death of Fidel Castro.
It was a series of “Journalists” bending over backwards to ensure the world knows that there were two sides to Fidel Castro; the one who “stood up for the little guy” (using funds taken from Russian and Eastern-European “little guys”, but that’s getting too detailed, right?), who was a huge patron of Cuban arts and sports, and public health on the one hand…
…and who may have been a bit of a totalitarian tyrant on the other. The truth, an NPR reporter sonorously reminded us, was “somewhere between the two”.
And it made me wonder – how many people WOULD he have had to murder to push the needle?
A visitor to this planet might wonder who’s being more satirical, NPR or me.
Speaking for myself, I’m not going to participate in the left’s jabbering about “the Alt-Right” – which is to this cycle what “Vast Rightwing Conspiracy” was to 1996, and “War on Women” was to 2012; a mass smear attempting to tie the entire American “right” to the most noxious people who can possibly be linked to it.
In this case, some “Klan” leaders who nobody has heard of (there are bowling leagues with more members and political clout than the KKK has these days) who were thrust into instant, utterly temporary, undeserved prominence by dint of “endorsing” or “heiling” Trump.
However, Trump has refudiated his ‘supporters’ on the “alt-right”.
Suppose that’ll get any headlines?
Democrat operatives, November 7, 2016: “Our electoral system is rock solid, there is no election fraud, the results we get are impeccable, and failing to accept its results is paranoia and maybe treason.
Democrat operatives, November 26, 2016: “We can not accept the results of the election in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, because our election system is rife with fraud and easily hacked by…Russians”.
Make no mistake, this isn’t about trying to get Hillary into the White House; it’s about trying to delay three large states’ electoral vote totals long enough to throw the election to the Congress, thereby giving Democrats leverage to try to illegitimize President-Elect Trump, give the demented Democrat chanting classes a bloody shirt to wave at the ignorant for the next 4-8 years, and set up a narrative in which Hillary – among the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world – is a victim.
Fidel Castro is dead – but the dictatorship lives on.
For now.
Over at Bablublog – the foremost Cubablog for the past 13 years, now – Humberto Fontova notes a couple of the facts that the worst of our repulsive media, especially NPR, can’t quite:
In the above process he converted a highly-civilized nation with a higher standard of living than much of Europe and swamped with immigrants into a slum/sewer ravaged by tropical diseases and with the highest suicide rate in the Western hemisphere.Over TWENTY TIMES as many people (and counting) have died trying to escape Castro’s Cuba as died trying to escape East Germany. Yet prior to Castroism Cuba received more immigrants per-capita than almost any nation on earth—more than the U.S. did including during the Ellis Island years.
He helped train and fund practically every terror group on earth, from the Weathermen to Puerto Rico’s Macheteros, from Argentina’s Montoneros, to Colombia’s FARC, from the Black Panthers to the IRA and from the PLO to AL Fatah.
Would anyone guess any of this from reading the media today? Or from reading President Obama’s message of condolences to the terror-sponsoring Castro family?
Every item above thoroughly documented here.
More tomorrow on the American media and left’s repulsive performance over the weekend.
Oh, yeah – and Canadian Prime Minister McDreamy.
UPDATE: Or Green Party Prez candidate “Dr.” Jill Stein:
Fidel Castro was a symbol of the struggle for justice in the shadow of empire. Presente!
— Dr. Jill Stein (@DrJillStein) November 27, 2016
Please, “Doctor” Stein, I beg of you – run for president again.
Today’s ♫ NARN music playlist.
Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air!
Today on the show:
Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is normally heard on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.
So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:
Join us!
November, 2008: Many conservatives, yours truly included, were disappointed at the election of Barack Obama, an unqualified junior senator and “community organizer”, to the presidency. Not surprised, at least in my case, but disappointed. (Our disappointment was amply justified, but that’s a separate, upcoming post).
In the interest of civility, Obama supporters responded with their primary form of non-televised communication (in the days before industrialized photomemes, anyway), the bumper sticker:
(Which, if you think about it, is the first industralized photomeme).
And we did, indeed, get over it – and, for many of us, that involved spending a few years in the Tea Party which, before a coordinated assault by Democrat Media/Industrial Complex and the GOP Establishment neutralized it, kicked Democrat ass in a way that, to a smart person, should have been seen as a foreshadowing of Trump; if you stand for something, you win.
(The sum total of “violence” after the Obama election involved a “riot” at Ol Miss that lasted an hour, involved no property damage or arrests and a little naughty language; one church burned in Massachusetts for which the perps were arrested, convicted and sentenced to long prison terms, a couple of minor assaults, maybe, and a few grandiloquent gestures that damanged nobody else or their property)
Anyway.
It’s been two and a half weeks since Trump’s near-landslide electoral victory (and, if you leave California and its millions of useless voting mouths out of the equation, popular victory as well). Democrats have responded with petulant name-calling, bitter declarations, social barbarism, and rioting. The Democrat movement in America has made itself look like the petulant, entitled children so many of them in fact seem to be.
So it’s only fair:
Deal with it.
City of Minneapolis offers to deal with the gang problem…
…by creating a protection racket, and inviting the mobsters to it.
Although, to be fair, it’s a program that tries to deal with criminals, rather than going after the law-abiding citizens. That, at least, is a step forward for Minneapolis.
I hate to indulige in schadenfreude.
Part of it is because I’m a pretty emphathetic guy. I put myself in others’ shoes pretty easily.
Part of it is that while I don’t believe in karma, I do believe what goes around comes around.
However, hearing about the psychic trauma some “blue-staters” are feeling over this past weeks, I’m rapidly giving into my worse nature and saying “Good. Suffer, you vacuous hamsters. If your well-being is so wrapped around a presidential election that it affects your mental health, you should really not participate”.
“But Mitch – isn’t that an unfair caricature?”
Sorry, but no – it’s not.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is shoveling his sidewalk. As he’s shoveling to the east, Avery LIBRELLE, out for a walk, comes up from the west and catches BERG by surprise.
LIBRELLE: Hey, Merg!
BERG: Uh…hi, Avery. What’s…
LIBRELLE: Drumpf is appointing racist white supremacists from the Alt-Right to his cabinet!
BERG: Avery, I have a question for you. One of the reasons I support the Second Amendment is that I believe it’s possible – not “highly likely”, but possible – that despite all the safeguards built into the Federalist system, our government could one day be take over by people who actively trample the peoples’ freedom.
LIBRELLE: That’s paranoia, treason, and an ammosexual gun fondler fantasy.
BERG: Huh. But Donald Trump is now president, and you’re worried…
LIBRELLE: …that government is actively going to stifle and quash peoples’ freedom.
BERG: Gotcha. So when a Second Amendment supporter says that they’re acting in defense of liberty, they are…
LIBRELLE: Fat bald white gun fondlers who’ve watched Rambo too many times and are probably terrorists waiting to happen.
BERG: And when Hillary Clinton supporters say it about Trump, they are…
LIBRELLE: Guarding freedom against a fascist tyrant.
BERG: Gun owners…
LIBRELLE: Fat angry stupid traitors.
BERG: People attacking Trump…
LIBRELLE: The highest expression of democratic ideals.
BERG: Conservative…
LIBRELLE: Evil. Hate. Death.
BERG: “Progressive”
LIBRELLE: Love.
BERG: Naturally.
And SCENE
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
In the olden days, people recognized differences. Sunday morning, you wore one set of clothes, went to a specific place and behaved in a specific manner. Monday morning, you wore different clothes, went to a different place, and behaved in a different manner. And dinner, you changed into yet a third set of clothes, went to different places and behaved in still different ways.
Nowadays, Liberals cannot distinguish differences in time and place. Every place and every time is Political. Every activity is Political. Making dresses is Political. Playing football is Political. Every gathering is Political.
Which is why Democrats thoughtfully distributed the Know Your Stuffing guide to help you start Political arguments over Thanksgiving dinner.
Which is why I never vote for Democrats.
Joe Doakes
To be fair, it’s just one of the latest reasons on the pile.
In the Strib (where else), one John Paul Scott – who is described as a “writer in Rochester”, which must be a little akin to being a farmer in Manhattan – wrote a long, gassy ode to expunging Trump supporters from your lives.
I sent an e-mail to an in-law, telling him that his genial hockey buddy and Trump supporter friend Johnny was no longer welcome on Thanksgiving.
I’m not a hater. Johnny’s a good guy. He means well and has done nice things for me. I’ve known him 20 years. But I can’t feed him any more of my potatoes. And I encourage everyone reading these words to defenestrate all the Johnnys in their lives, if they feel so inclined. Or better yet, they could emulate what the comic and patriot Wanda Sykes did last week in Boston, which is to condemn the rise of the strongman, brooking no generosity or period of cooling — and to flip right off anyone who doesn’t want to hear it.
Ah, the party of intellect.
They do seek a world like Alan Dershowitz described in attacking the faculty at Harvard Law School – “people with different colored skin, or wearing a skirt, who all think the same way”.
He continues. And continues. And continues. Scott, the “writer” (uh huh) certainly is no editor.
But here’s his conclusion, of sorts (emphasis added):
In fact, it’s probably better that you [don’t keep Trump supporters in your lives], not if you don’t want to normalize the election of a man who seems poised to penalize his critics… foment anger within his base.
Huh. Penalizing critics.
Huh.
Mr. Scott – take some time off from your “writing’ (whatevs) and google “IRS Scandal” before you jabber about penalizing critics. Or for that matter, google “John Paul Scott Thanksgiving Invitation”.
Some of us have pushed away family over far less.
I just bet “some of you” have. Lots and lots.
I will welcome a chance to talk with any of your family about that, Mr. Scott. Oh, yes.
And once you’ve taken a stand, they might have to think about what matters more to them — their fondness for the strongman, or you.
It seems like an easy choice; neither is worthy of any attention.
Mr. Scott, I do hope you read this. I would welcome a chance to discuss this article on the air. I doubt you have either the courage or the intellect, but how about we give it a shot?
And here’s a note to the entire American left; your “my way or the highway” schtick is why Trump won.
UPDATE: A friend looked up Mr. Scott’s bio.
“…The first word under Mr. Scott’s name was “Groupthink”. That sounds accurate…Definition from Wikipedia “Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome.Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints by actively suppressing dissenting viewpoints, and by isolating themselves from outside influences.”
It’s almost as if Mr. Scott is a conservative sock puppet, set up to mock and lampoon liberalism.
But this is Minnesota. There’s no such thing as “over the top” on the left.
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