I Love It When Snark Comes Together

Two days ago, I said that I was going to start to refer to the GOP as the party of the Confederacy. Then today, I read on TPM that one of the denizens of the Right is advocating rounding up all Muslims in this country, whether or not they are Americans, and deporting the lot of them to the Middle East.

Uh-huh. The Right has been beating this drum for centuries, except up until fairly recently, it was about repatriating Black people to Africa. The people who didn't like the idea of free Black people were lining up to support that idea, even to the point of ponying up cash to help fund Liberia. If you go back and read some of the justification for repatriating slaves to Africa, it is stunningly similar to the rationale for forcing all Muslims to leave the country.

Same old shit, different target group. The party of the Confederacy marches on.

It's Like the Internet. Only Slower. A Lot Slower.

Until some pieces-parts arrive, I am back to dial-up.

"So how slow can it be," you ask? Glaciers move faster than the modern Internet through dial-up.

Click on a bookmark, go read a magazine article. Read the web page, click on a link, go cook dinner. Read second web page, click on a third, go wash dishes. Click on a fourth web page, teach yourself calculus. And so on.

You have to do it that way, for if you actually sat in front of the computer and watched web pages load as fast as a slug moves, you'd open up your veins.

Jail to the Police

A South Carolina cop repeatedly hit a man in handcuffs with his baton. Once the guy in cuffs was on the ground, the cop continued to beat him and broke his leg. Two other cops just sat there, chewing their cuds and with their thumbs up their asses while the beating went on.

Kershaw County had better warm up its checkbook. This one is going to cost them.

(H/T)

How Low Can ICE Go?

Very, very low, it seems.

Customs officers at Newark Airport used a 12-year-old Polish girl as bait to capture her illegal immigrant brother, her family claimed Wednesday.

Ewelina Krzywda was held 10 hours by officers who threatened to send her to a juvenile jail in Chicago and a foster family in Texas if her brother didn't collect her in person, relatives charge.

Never go bear-hunting with a Customs official, for they will douse you with scent and tie you to a tree as bait.

You have to wonder at the cluelessness of the Feds in the DBP sometimes. Did they not think that this sort of fuckery would escape public attention?

Now Hear This: Stand By for Terminology Change

For the foreseeable future, I plan to stop referring to the GOP as "the party of Hoover".

Calling the GOP the "party of Hoover" slanders Herbert Hoover. Hoover may have been an economic putz who did little more than wring his hands (and grease the skids) as the nation slid from the Crash of `29 into the Great Depression, but I have not seen anything that would imply that he was, in his soul, as viciously mean-spirited as the modern GOP.

So I will refer to them as "the party of the Confederacy" or the "Confederate Party" from here on out.[1]

That is all.

[1]Only because writing "the party of vicious sheet-wearing, pants-wetting, heartless, homophobic, pervy, xenophobic, know-nothing racists" would take too long to type.

Offline-ish

I have "connectivity issues" at home, so I have been largely offline. Parts are on the way to fix it. (None of the nearby wireless networks are unsecured and I don't feel like driving to the library to use their network.)

So you'll pretty much have to surf elsewhere until my service is back.

Wild German Radioactive Boars Are Multiplying!

Seriously. You just can't make up this kind of shit.

First wild boars. Then, maybe, ants?

(H/T)

"The Laws of Physics Are a Liberal Plot"

According to Conservapedia, the Theory of Relativity is a liberal conspiracy to divert people away from the Bible.

Really. This is what conservative thought has come to?

Pay no attention to that whirring sound in the background, it is only William F. Buckley spinning in his grave. He ought to be up to 18,000rpm by now.

Not With a Whimper, But With a Bang

65 years ago today, the city of Nagasaki became the second (and so far the last) target of an atomic weapon.

Japan surrendered six days later.

I wrote about this a year ago. I think that those who believe that Japan would have folded without an invasion are wrong. Operation Downfall would have cost millions of lives, lives which were spared when the reality that one airplane could destroy an entire city sank into the Japanese leadership.

I also believe that if atomic weapons had not been used then, they would have been used later, quite possibly during a confrontation between the Americans and the Soviets, possibly during a confrontation when both sides were so armed. Without the two atomic bombings of Japan, the damage and devastation of such weapons would have been a theory and, in the heat of a conflict, the "oh, it won't be so bad" theorists would have prevailed and millions would have died.

Is Texas Running Out of Prisons, or A Grain of Truth in an Ocean of Fail

The Chief of Police of Dallas, Texas, on the subject of date rape:

“We’re needing to create a message to the victims of this type of crime, related to, you know, someone you don’t know that well, you having a little bit too much to drink,” explains Chief Brown, suggesting women, “have your friends watch you” if you intend to drink in front of a man.

There is a tad bit of truth in what the chief said. Unfortunately, that bit of truth is drowned by the blowback of women's reaction to a larger truth and that is this: Women get blamed for what men do to them and have been throughout history and across cultures. It has only been within living memory that the reaction to hearing about a wife-beating has changed from "she must have been asking for it" to "what sort of a brutal pig would do that". Everywhere you find a tradition of women wearing body-obscuring garments, the stated reason is along the lines of "men cannot control themselves". In "honor killings", you may have noted that they almost never touch a hair on the head of the man involved "because he was a good man led astray by feminine wiles..." or nonsense such as that.

Blaming the victim is very common in both sexual assaults and sexual harassment. Even in the sex worker trade, it is noteworthy to read of cases where the cops put in the work to arrest the customers.[1] It is less widely spoken of in other crimes. Carjacking is treated as a serious crime with little regard to why the victim was driving where he or she was driving at the time. About the only time a mugging victim is ever blamed for being mugged is if he was staggering down the sidewalk, nearly blind drunk, at the time he was relieved of his wallet.

(One columnist mentioned that the cops take burglary less seriously if, say, stuff is taken from an open garage. Which overlooks the point that if the garage is open, it's probably not burglary, just theft.[2])

The real truth, though, is that life requires a degree of situational awareness. As much as it offends people to take precautions to avoid being a victim, that's life.[3] Rohypnol is out there, date rapists can get their hands on it, and women need to be as aware of that fact as medieval kings were aware of the possibility of their food being poisoned.

So let's be careful out there, shall we?

[1]Case in point: Eliot Spitzer.
[2]In classic law, burglary requires "breaking" to get into the building. If the door is wide open, there is no "breaking".
[3]CCW. I rest my case.