Posts by Rich Lock
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to Bart Janssen,
the rise of right wing populism
There has been no such rise.
I don't understand why people keep saying stuff like this. People keep promoting arguments to explain why Trump got more votes
But Trump didn't get more votes - he got fewer votes.
There is no rise in the right.
Which does not change the fact that a large chunk of the voting population were perfectly happy, and in many cases absolutely delighted, to be able to vote for a man and associated administration who are one short step away from being outright fascists, and who, rather than doing the usual coding and dogwhistling of their normal unpleasantness, made absolutely no effort to hide it during the campaign, and were in fact happy to have it front and centre.
And while that type of thinking may be limited in the population as a whole, the fact is that key positions in the Trump administation have been filled by far-right people, including a literal white supremacist.
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to Russell Brown,
People I figured had some capacity for thought seem sort of excited about it, if anything.
Yeah, this. There's a weird sort of mental gymnastics going on with various political establishment suits, commentators and other supposed thinking and engaged folk where they appear to have convinced themselves, and are now trying to convince everyone else, that the clouds on the horizon are probably just a shower, and anyway the crops need rain. Meanwhile everyone else is heading for the storm shelter and wondering if the levee is going to hold.
Reasonable folk may disagree, etc, and (especially in politics) there's always been the 'well, I think you're misinformed or just not interpreting that correctly' factor, but just recently this seems to have shot up by orders of magnitude. I can't think of a time when I've felt like so many people are attempting to convince me that 2+2=5. I can't get my head around the levels of denialism required to not only just blatantly ignore parts of the same picture that we're both looking at, but to actually swear up and down that they simply don't exist at all, or show something completely different. It's like being told gravity doesn't exist after stepping off a high building.
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Up Front: Walk This Way, in reply to Russell Brown,
Every day, some fresh absurdity, some new outrage.
You might be mildly interested to know that I've actually been waiting/wondering when you're going to write about this. Partly because I need a place to just vent about exactly this: just...what the fuck? What the actual fucking fuck?
There's been a few jokes circulating about how the world has actually fallen into the alternate reality - the 'evil' time stream - like this one. I've always felt at least a bit out of step in terms of things like my opinions and thought processes, but until now never so completely that I actually genuinely occasionally wonder, even if only for an instant, whether I'm the crazy one, like some sort of 2nd-grade Twilight Zone/I Am Legend* rip-off.
*the book, obviously, not the rubbish Will Smith film.
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Aaaah, Peaches. No. 1 on my personal 'probably shouldn't have absent-mindedly sung that catchy little number to myself in front of my 5-year-old daughter' list.
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I find the whole thing fascinating, in a 'far too old for this, but kinda wish it had been around 20 years ago' sort of a way. Although I'm also extremely happy that I had the opportunity to work through my idiocy without every single moment of it being immortalised for posterity.
It appears to be a truth universally acknowledged that many single men, in possession of good internet connections, are probably going to be hassling women and generally making idiots of themselves on dating sites. Dick pics. Just....whut?
Anyway, by way of some comic relief, it's been scientifically proven that it is impossible for a women to make a profile so repulsive that a man won't come sniffing around.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Dennis Frank,
A Hillary voter who admits to creating propaganda designed to discredit Hillary, but in order to infiltrate the fake news subculture.
A few people recently have mentioned NPR's Planet Money podcast, episode #739 titled "Finding the Fake-News King".
Apparently (I haven't listened to it yet) the fake-news-story creator they interview (who might even be the same guy) observes that he's in it solely for money, and that he tried peddling fake anti-conservative news, but that liberals would quickly debunk it with facts & research, and it would wither on the vine. In contrast, he found that anti-liberal news was swallowed wholesale and spread like wildfire, and on top of that any attempt at fact checking was regarded with suspicion, as if the fact checkers themselves were partisan members of the conspiracy to hide the "truth" of the fake news stories.
There was also this piece a while back, which makes a pretty convincing case that the sort of people likely to swing in behind Trump are also the sort of people who fall for pyramid schemes, purchase errection pills, and send money to Nigerian princes.
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Hard News: From Zero: The Meth Episode, in reply to william blake,
drugs that ....instill fear and paranoia
Hey, if only the Nazi's had been on E instead of speed, they'd all have got together and loved one another. Just like those football hooligans in the 90's! Or something.
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Hard News: From Zero: The Meth Episode, in reply to Russell Brown,
This brings to mind the infamous 2002 study that claimed even controlled doses of MDMA were so neurotoxic that casual users were at risk of Parkinson's disease and other conditions.
Probably also worth mentioning that other research taking place in 2002 was showing, um, the exact opposite effect.
As an aside, the BBC TV documentary mentioned in that article is worth a watch, if not already seen. It's on the 'tube.
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Hard News: From Zero: The Meth Episode, in reply to william blake,
The counterpoint to that interview, from the highly respected Richard J Evans:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/16/blitzed-drugs-in-nazi-germany-by-norman-ohler-review
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I had a (very) brief skim of the blogpost in question, and to be fair to The Archdruid, and Farmer Green, that isn't exactly the suggestion being made.
More like a food miles kind of thing, I think, and pragmatic enough to import what can't be produced locally.