Category Archives: Uncategorized

That Was Fun

Twitter, that is. An amusing couple of months.

But, no more for me.

Not interested in being part of Musk's next toy.

Yes, I do drive a Tesla. My only excuse is that I bought it more than a year ago, before Musk had fully blossomed into his current florid assholery. He was just a jerk. Now, ugh.

System justification

System justification theory (SJT) is a theory within social psychology that system-justifying beliefs serve a psychologically palliative function. It proposes that people have several underlying needs, which vary from individual to individual, that can be satisfied by the defense and justification of the status quo, even when the system may be disadvantageous to certain people. People have epistemic, existential, and relational needs that are met by and manifest as ideological support for the prevailing structure of social, economic, and political norms. Need for order and stability, and thus resistance to change or alternatives, for example, can be a motivator for individuals to see the status quo as good, legitimate, and even desirable.

According to system justification theory, people desire not only to hold favorable attitudes about themselves (ego-justification) and the groups to which they belong (group-justification), but also to hold positive attitudes about the overarching social structure in which they are entwined and find themselves obligated to (system-justification). This system-justifying motive sometimes produces the phenomenon known as out-group favoritism, an acceptance of inferiority among low-status groups and a positive image of relatively higher status groups. Thus, the notion that individuals are simultaneously supporters and victims of the system-instilled norms is a central idea in system justification theory. Additionally, the passive ease of supporting the current structure, when compared to the potential price (material, social, psychological) of acting out against the status quo, leads to a shared environment in which the existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred. Alternatives to the status quo tend to be disparaged, and inequality tends to perpetuate.

Precious Bodily Fluids

The longtime water superintendent for a small town in Vermont has resigned in protest after local officials ordered him to restore the town's water to the state's standard for fluoride levels—which he had been secretly and unilaterally lowering for years due to his own personal anti-fluoride beliefs.

And his righteous, five-page resignation letter offered yet another bombshell in the small-town water scandal that has made national headlines in recent weeks. He asserted that he had been surreptitiously lowering the town's fluoride levels for much longer than previously known—for over a decade rather than the nearly four years officials had previously disclosed.

Restoring the town's water to the state-recommended fluoride level "poses unacceptable risks to public health," the now-ex water superintendent, Kendall Chamberlin, wrote in his resignation letter, according to local media. “I cannot in good conscience be a party to this."

Chamberlin held the title of water superintendent for 37 years in Richmond, Vermont, a town of about 4,100 in the northwestern part of the state. But apparently in that time, he failed to mention to his fellow residents that he had been taken in by unfounded fears that fluoridated water is harmful.

Pure Scam

A number of right-wing media stars have recently been peddling a prepaid cellphone carrier to their audiences, hyping it as a low-cost alternative to “woke” AT&T.

There’s just one problem: PureTalk—which these personalities have promoted as a patriotic, “veteran-run business” that doesn’t peddle “wokeness”—actually relies on AT&T’s wireless network.

"We Need To Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives"

So what kind of politics should conservatives today, as inheritors of a failed movement, adopt? For starters, they should stop thinking of themselves as conservatives (much less as Republicans) and start thinking of themselves as radicals, restorationists, and counterrevolutionaries. Indeed, that is what they are, whether they embrace those labels or not.

...

Put bluntly, if conservatives want to save the country they are going to have to rebuild and in a sense re-found it, and that means getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it. Why? Because accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible. One need only consider the speed with which the discourse shifted on gay marriage, from assuring conservatives ahead of the 2015 Obergefell decision that gay Americans were only asking for toleration, to the never-ending persecution of Jack Phillips.

The left will only stop when conservatives stop them, which means conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about “small government.” The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life — and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.

...

To those who worry that power corrupts, and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point. If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus? It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after we have won the war. For now, there are only two paths open to conservatives. Either they awake from decades of slumber to reclaim and re-found what has been lost, or they will watch our civilization die. There is no third road.

Source: We Need To Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives

"Fascists" is it, then.

Deja Wrong

“Why not say, ‘Hey, this is the path. We’re not going to be MSNBC, we’re not going to be Fox. We’re going to go after independent thinkers’?” Smerconish said Oct. 7 at the Un-Convention, a gathering designed to “find common ground” across politics. "And I don’t just mean just me on Saturday. We’re going to build a whole network around that principle.”

Does that appeal mean Smerconish no longer believes CNN is a “non-ideological” network? He responds via email with a quip straight from the centrist’s credo: “A good day for me is when half of social media say they hope I’ll be fired because I belong on Fox, and the rest complain that I’m carrying water for [President] Biden.”

Flashback to 2010 and this faux-interview (Jay Rosen, the author, did both Q and A in this):

Q. You are very critical of the View from Nowhere in journalism. It’s almost a derisive term for you.

A. That’s true. I let my disdain for it show.

Q. Why?

A. Because it has unearned authority in the American press. If in doing the serious work of journalism–digging, reporting, verification, mastering a beat–you develop a view, expressing that view does not diminish your authority. It may even add to it. The View from Nowhere doesn’t know from this. It also encourages journalists to develop bad habits. Like: criticism from both sides is a sign that you’re doing something right, when you could be doing everything wrong.

When MSNBC suspends Keith Olbermann for donating without company permission to candidates he supports– that’s dumb. When NPR forbids its “news analysts” from expressing a view on matters they are empowered to analyze– that’s dumb. When reporters have to “launder” their views by putting them in the mouths of think tank experts: dumb. When editors at the Washington Post decline even to investigate whether the size of rallies on the Mall can be reliably estimated because they want to avoid charges of “leaning one way or the other,” as one of them recently put it, that is dumb. When CNN thinks that, because it’s not MSNBC and it’s not Fox, it’s the only the “real news network” on cable, CNN is being dumb about itself.

In fact, American journalism is dumber than most journalists, who often share my sense of absurdity about these practices. A major reason we have a practice less intelligent than its practitioners is the prestige that the View from Nowhere still claims in American newsrooms. You asked me why I am derisive toward it. That’s why.