All The Red Pills

It is the red pill, right? LOL

Stream of thought went like this: FB friend shared a Mike Rowe post about why he's continuing to shoot his show (in response to a "Karen" (not really)). Today I thought I'd share it on twitter, but Mike doesn't share that stuff on twitter (and I couldn't believe I wasn't already following him) but rather his podcast links, mostly. The most recent one was about a "Line in the Sand" and George Bush Sr's bullshit coverage about the time he was in a grocery store and they had a fancy barcode reader. Not a regular one, but a new model that had a scale built-in and could read pretty messed up barcodes, etc... and the media painted him as out-of touch for being wowed by a scanner. Media assholes.

Remember Dan Quayle and the spelling flashcards that he honored by not challenging the teacher in front of her students by correcting the error on the card? Of course you don't. Because the asshole media didn't tell you that.

It doesn't take too many of these incidents to make a reasonable person very skeptical. Now, I'm going to tell you that while I am sure this applies to Clinton and Obama, there is a pattern of this type of bullshit coverage of conservatives that far outweighs any that they got. I mean, c'mon, when Ted Kennedy died, the coverage was slobbering. He KILLED A GIRL.

Trump draws so much crap, much of it deserved, but there are folk out there that have been red-pilled regarding him as well. The two main incidents are the "making fun of a disabled guy" and "fine people." I can't find the well-produced video I saw once of a liberal writer artist dude that found out that the mocking of the disabled guy was total BS perpetuated by the media and that's when he woke up to the reality that they lie like the rest of us do, when it suits us. Scott Adams regularly uses the "fine people hoax" as a litmus test for idiots.

Now, I have to include this next bit, because googling to make sure I got the Pill right led me to this movie and TED talk about Men's Rights.  She learned some valuable lessons while making the movie, definitely, but skip to the end if you like where she says something that is SO RELEVANT: drop your agendas and bias and actually listen to people, especially those with whom you disagree. Only then can we move forward.

If you are trusting the media to help you with that, you need to choose the red pill.

David Samuels and Long Form Writing

This crossed my twitter feed, and it's long. 

Although I shared it on twitter, I'm not likely to share it on FB (where I have twice the reach), because FB sucks these days.

It's worth the time. I say that because it's long. I plan on finding more by him to read, which shouldn't be hard, but I implore you to read this. He's a smart guy, smarter than me, and I daresay, probably smarter than you (and I'll admit that I'm sitting here thinking that I'm smarter than you because I can admit he's smarter than me, or you might say that I'm very proud of my humility!).

Him referencing Steely Dan is just a bonus, 

(To be an American is to inherit the gift of living with one foot in the present and one foot in the future, while the rest of humanity has one foot in the present and one foot in the past. Then, every 20 years or so, we trash whatever tenuous equilibriums we have cobbled together and leap off again into the unknown. So it is, and forever will be, until the oleanders bloom outside my door, and California tumbles into the sea—which might be any day now.)

but here are a few pull quotes:

Flatness animates the work of shitty graphic designers like Shepard Fairey, who thought that Soviet poster art was unironically cool. It was Fairey who created the iconic image of Dear Leader Barack that hung in a thousand dorm rooms next to its black-on-red inspiration, the famous poster image of Che, the greasy, stoned jungle rat. Che was a loser and a failure, and he spent his afterlife as a sullen witness to 10,000 stoner dorm-room conversations that all went nowhere....

or how about:

It’s the same subject-position, 500 years ago and today. We are here because we are living in the age of techno-Calvinism, which was created by the merger of Puritans and iPhones—with the history of slavery and anti-Black racism in America providing the necessary modern-day substitute for the Calvinist emphasis on original sin.

All the statues of the saints must again be smashed. Mark Twain, for racism; Edward Hopper, for whiteness; John Singer Sargent, for making sexism sexy; Miles Davis, because he was too friendly to Jews; John Coltrane, for not being political; Thomas Pynchon, for being a believer in popes; Stanley Kubrick, for selling indulgences; Jimi Hendrix, for antinomian heresy; Steely Dan, for exploiting Black artists; Eddie Murphy and Hugh Grant, for transphobia; Margaret Atwood, for not believing all women; J.K. Rowling, for saying that women exist; Quentin Tarantino, for allowing his characters to say a word that my editor won’t even let me type though it is a part of history and language that is repeated dozens of times in Tarantino’s movies and many thousands of times a day in rap songs. The America of the seekers and its Catholic aesthetic of wild hybridity is gone. In its place is the New Church of the Techno-Calvinists.

 Interesting:

“So, talking about the transition from saints to citizens,” I continue. “If you ask a New England Puritan in 1640, how do you feel about Jews? The answer might be, well, we certainly don’t want any of them living here. But by the time you ask George Washington, who is creating a republic with a formal separation between church and state, do you want Jews here? The answer is, sure. Why not?”

I like:

And in the most vulgar sense, here’s a people who have been oppressed as often, and worse, than anybody in Europe, culminating in the 20th century’s largest and most brutal episode of mass murder, which aimed at the extermination of an entire people, some of whom are still alive. And yet, Jews refuse to be victims. They show none of the hallmarks of having been oppressed. And so, as long as they exist in any identifiable, corporate form, they pose a problem for all theories of oppression by negating the supposed results of oppression, which is embarrassing. It shows everybody else up....

Near the end:

One thing I have noticed in my work, though, is that the people who yell the loudest are usually full of shit. And if the enlightened few get their way, well—there’s no telling what might happen. I’m not being hyperbolic. Anything can happen. Those are the facts. For those of you who weren’t there, it was called the 20th century, and my family lived through it, like most families on the planet—in Russia and China and Germany and Ethiopia and Iraq and Bosnia and dozens of other places on earth, or maybe most places on earth. Guatemala. El Salvador. Rwanda. Burundi. Uganda. What justice means is that your parents’ store will be burned down or smashed up and you and your loved ones will be beaten to death by a mob or lynched or burned alive with napalm or shot in the back by your friends or locked up in a psychiatric hospital or sent off to die in a labor camp.

So happy birthday, America—the golden land of steak and butter, where every man can live like a king and take the kids to the Polar Bear after dinner for soft-serve ice cream, and where people only rarely lose their jobs because of the misdeeds of their relatives.

God bless Americans, in all colors, shapes, and sizes.

God bless George Washington, who defeated the British redcoats who sought to usurp American liberties under the direction of the Mad King.

God bless Thomas Jefferson, who fathered the Bill of Rights and helped bring an end to the international slave trade. God bless Abraham Lincoln, who kept the Union together while abolishing slavery.

God bless Ulysses S. Grant, the swift and terrible sword of the Union, and William Tecumseh Sherman, his partner in crime, who burned down half the South and then annihilated the Western Indians, allowing Americans to span the Rockies with steel rails, and telegraph wires and fiberoptic cables, leading to the rise of the largest-ever planetary concentration of military, technological, and economic power, which Americans have used, overall, for good.

God bless General George C. Patton, the fearsome war-fighter and vicious anti-Semite who liberated the Nazi death camps and cried at what he saw.

God bless America’s national parks system, which was the creation of none other than Teddy Roosevelt, who defeated the Spanish slavers in Cuba and founded the Museum of Natural History in New York City, and guaranteed safe water and medicine and the right of working people to organize. If you take my advice, you’ll get in your car, or borrow someone else’s car, and drive to one of our national parks, and gaze out upon the manifold wonders of God’s creation. You won’t be disappointed, I promise. And if you’re craving some excitement afterwards, you can stop by any roadside strip club and see our nation’s beauty from another angle.

Back that ass up, America! Makes an old man wish for younger days.

Now, go read the whole, rambling, fascinating thing, please.