Conservative spaces are not encumbered by pesky things like facts. Setting things their way doesn’t make one correct.

Meanwhile, there’s me wondering why hockey is all of sudden so popular in the middle of the summer.

See, this mad-libs-style reversal of rhetoric doesn’t work because of pesky things like facts.

Here’s the thing: “Family-hauler” is so dumb. In a sane society, that wouldn’t even be a thing. Those kids should have the freedom to get around on their own, but they can’t because of all the super-sized “family-haulers” that would kill them.

That’s an interesting example, because the unions were correct. Reagan happened, but then when they did endorse the next Democrat for President, he fought hard to undo the damage, and didn’t promote something like, say, NAFTA, right? Or when they endorsed Biden, he didn’t break a strike, or anything?

Basically, when does this process of putting promoting better people in the party begin?

Okay, which version actually happened over the past 50 years—yours or mine?

Here’s the hitch:

It is a literal yet unfortunate fact that we must hold our noses and vote for anyone who stands a chance at beating a Republican in a national presidential election. Until such time as the parties have been taken over by people who wouldn’t nominate someone like that.

This strategy guarantees that the parties will keep nominating someone like that. (After all, they keep winning.) There’s no mechanism for replacing the party leadership in it, nor any realistic scenario by which it would happen.

In a nutshell, what this meme is about is all the people that we’ve run into who say, “both sides are bad,” because they believe the Republicans lies about Democrats, and the Republican talking points on issues. Actual centrists, in Republican lingo, are “the far left.”

TIL a new acronym, but one doesn’t need to infer the purpose of the system from what it does. The designers of the system said out loud that segregation was a feature. They gave speeches and wrote memos about it.

I keep recommending The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. In the book, he documents how the modern suburb was created through zoning in order to keep Black people out by making living there too expensive, both through the land cost and the car needed to navigate it. It’s really crazy just how open and deliberate it was!

There are multiple meanings of “support.” There’s an endorsement meaning, which can be explicit or tacit, and there’s an aiding meaning. The Democrats may not explicitly endorse it, but the Biden administration certainly did tacitly endorse it by directly aiding it. And most of the party has been tacitly endorsing and aiding it for decades.

Huh, that’s really odd conclusion to draw from Democrats literally supporting genocide. Harris couldn’t even be bothered to come out against it during the campaign even when they knew their support was a losing issue.

It’s a simple moral calculus, don’t you see? You must always vote for Hitler and help him kill 5,000,000 people, if the alternative is somebody who’s going to kill 5,000,001 people.

This was obviously the outcome no matter who was elected. Israel has always been very clear about this.

Often I feel that people believe that paved roads are naturally-occurring, geological formations. As evidence, I submit the people complaining about road construction and maintenance work as if it’s a ploy by the government to obstruct their travel, or the Lemming that I ran into a few weeks ago who was convinced that people in poor, developing countries have to drive cars, because it’s too expensive to build bicycle infrastructure.

This is why we call them “gender-affirming vehicles,” or “emotional support trucks.”

More research is always good, as it can deepen our understanding, but the basic outline of what’s going on is already known. A lot of people just don’t want to believe it, because we’re all stuck on the metaphor that we’re all captains of the ship inside our own heads. You see it in this thread; people want to blame non-voters, as if millions of people all had perfect information and all made decisions based upon it through conscious reasoning. Because they’re just—I dunno—bad people? (Which is a completely bonkers belief when you start to dig into it.)

Actually, neuroscience tells us that consciousness doesn’t really exist, except as an emergent phenomenon of sensory experience. Brain scans show that thoughts, feelings, and decisions occur before we’re consciously aware of them; the conscious mind is basically a rationalization machine, inventing narratives about why we did a thing or felt a certain way, only after the fact. And, it’s notoriously bad at it. (The Misattribution of Arousal is one of the classic examples.) So, if you can affect the way that somebody’s brain works, you can in many ways control what the they think and feel.

And that’s exactly what authoritarian demagogues do.

The Girl Who Could Talk to Birds

I’ll go extra-spicy and point out that there’s no such thing as “ownership” as we know it without government. Legal-wonkishly, ownership is enforceable, transferrable, exclusive title to property. I can “own” land that I’m only physically present on for a few days per year because my name is on a piece of paper in a file cabinet in a government office, and it’s backed up by a court system and police force that’s constituted and willing to enforce my title.

I just mention it because a lot of the deregulation whiners are the same people as the “taxation is theft” whiners.

Steve Biko died in prison in 1977. There were a bunch of movies about Biko that came out in the late '80s to early '90s, the most famous was Cry Freedom starring Denzel Washington. Nelson Mandela was famously imprisoned, and released around that same time. My guess is that since most Americans don’t really pay deep attention to the news, especially world news, it just got all blended into a miasma of vague memories about some South African anti-apartheid activist.