Dream relocation or Lovecraftian descent into madness?


 At 5 years old, [Sara O'Neil] told her mom [in Iowa] that she’d live by the ocean someday.

As an adult, she made her dream a reality. Sara joined the Navy, married, had four kids and, for more than two decades, built a life in Southern California.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and with it the realization that the Golden State’s liberal politics didn’t align with hers.

Wanting to feel grounded during a tumultuous time, Sara and Johnny started going back to church. They picked Calvary Imperial Beach chapel, part of the sprawling Costa Mesa megachurch that was meeting in person — in defiance of state restrictions on large gatherings.

Sara, then a nurse at Sharp Mary Birch Hospital for Women & Newborns, managed to get a medical exemption [for the COVID vaccination] because she said she’d experienced an anaphylactic shock with a previous vaccine. After three interviews, Johnny, a Navy vet turned firefighter, won a religious exemption.

Still, COVID-era California weighed on them. Sara worried that she might be living in the end times the Bible prophesied.

And as Sara and Johnny soon learned, their new church had an outpost in Iowa, stocked with people like them.

So Sara and her husband, Johnny, a Southland native with a sunny disposition to match, packed up and joined the droves of Californians leaving the state, some for political reasons.

The church attracts 30 to 40 attendees on any given Sunday, and members say about half are from the Golden State. In the Ames church, the newcomers found a community of like-minded folks. Together they worried about vaccines, prayed outside Planned Parenthood offices and said blessings at antiabortion clinics.

Johnny, she said, will more than likely vote for Trump, whose track record he trusts. Sara’s views are complicated. She blames Trump for the first pandemic lockdowns, and for funding vaccine research. Although Trump “was obnoxious to listen to,” Sara excuses his racist comments, such as characterizing Mexican immigrants as “rapists.” 

The couple, who both served in the military after Sept. 11, 2001 — Sara in the Persian Gulf — now doubt that Al Qaeda carried out the attacks, a view that is unsupported by evidence.

“I think 9/11 was a CIA mission, and I think they blew up that building,” Johnny said. “There’s too much evidence. I’ve seen too many videos.”

the oldest two kids reminisced with their parents about one of the things they miss most about California: the state’s diversity.

At his Iowa high school, Johnathan still can’t believe how his friends at school casually use a derogatory slur as a nickname for the one Black student on the football team.

“Casual racism, I will say, that’s a real thing,” he said. “I didn’t think it was a real thing until I moved out here.”

[The Family] insisted that they’re still all in, despite their gripes about Iowa’s lack of diversity and limited understanding of Mexican food.

 

The Making of Incarnation

 

by Tom McCarthy

All bells and whistles

But very little substance to latch onto. While it has a soupçon of Borges, Neal Stephenson and Cheaper by the Dozen, it only reminded me of how much more enjoyable those would be.

Ostensibly a sort of deconstructed look at elements coming together in a science fiction blockbuster film, there's not much of a plot, just details that spin themselves out into disquisitions.

--

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
by Richard P. Feynman

A motley collection of shorter works by Feynman on vastly different subjects from different points in his career. Generally interesting, but no real blockbusters. His essay on 'cargo cult science' has a great theme of scientific skepticism.

Feynman also reads much better when he's been filtered through Ralph Leighton. His own writing is a bit rough. It's funny because he was such an engaging speaker, but I guess he needs that animating live touch.

 The Glass Hammer, by KW Jeter, bears the stamp of Jeter's mentor Philip K Dick, both thematically and in a character that seems very much like a stand-in for PKD. There are some thoughtful idea about reality and media scattered throughout the science-fictiony tropes and Dickian paranoia of post-whoops America, psychic computers (or are they?), new religions, and the messiah (or is he?).

The book makes the case (pretty well) that what we're seeing now, most notably typified by Trump, but by no means confined to him, is a changing nature of conspiracies in modern political life. And that it is corrosive to democracy and the nation and the very idea of that 'knowledge' and 'expertise' are possible.

I've solved the case in Disco Elysium (Final Cut), though that's probably the least exciting thing about the game. Part choose your own adventure; part Infocom plus some graphics; part psychopolitical meditation -- it's really sui generis and a great experience, if you're up for it. The game was originally "refused classification by the [Australian gam] Board, making it illegal to sell in the country, due to its depiction of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, and violence, as well as showing "revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency, and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults""

I could try to say more, but it's like the Matrix -- you have to experience it for yourself. Great voice acting. Bonkers writing. There's enough depth in the decision trees that my replay has uncovered all sorts of novel things already, but I doubt there's so much that you could play it endlessly.

--

Segueing into books, Virtual Cities is a nice midpoint. Subtitled An Atlas & Exploration of Video Game Cities, the book describes 45 game cities from 1983's Ant Attack to very recent games. The author has degrees in urban planning, so some of his commentary is an interesting take on how realistic the cities are as a place where humans could live. I guess I had hoped for more information on design, both the visual design of the cities from an art and graphics standpoint, and from a game design standpoint. While each entry has a short 'Design Insights' section that covers some of this, it's very brief. Most of the text is given up to sort of a in-world guidebook description of the cities. Sometimes this diegetic stance has some wry humor, especially if you know the game. But I can't say I've played a lot of these games, so often they come of as in-jokes you don't get.

Each city also has a pretty well-executed map. But where the book really fails is with the images. Rather than use in-game generated images -- perhaps there were legal and copyright issues -- everything is rendered by the same artist, in a somewhat similar (and not overly accomplished) style. For Gabiel Knight's New Orleans, they work well enough, but for most others they don't provide a good feel of what the game is really like. Which is a shame, because the book itself is well-made. A solid-hardback with full color pages throughout.

Such a great concept, but a miss on execution.

--

The Light Ages poses as something of a rehabilitation of medieval science. The book follows the career and environment of English monk John Westwyk, author of The Equatorie of the Planetis, a work in English describing the astronomical instrument of his invention, a modification of the astrolabe. So there's a lot of timekeeping, sacred calendars, astrology and models of planetary motion. While interesting (I now have a much better idea of how to use an astrolabe, and why it has the shape it does with that off center circle) there's precious little science to get excited about [and why should there be, since there really wasn't such a thing as science yet]. Some of the history is very interesting on its own, such as the fact that Westwyk joined the unsuccessful Despenser's Crusade against the antipope. Here's a few tidbits from my Kindle notes:

Why the days of the week are ordered as they are:
And the date of the Great Flood:

Most of you know I spend quite some time battling the forces of ignorance and wrongitude in weird corners of the Internet. Young Earth Creationists, antivaxxers, climate change denialists, COVID-19 denialists, flat earthers, conspiracy theorists, Obama birthers, etc.

Often when I report on these shenanigans, I'll point out the errors in fact and inference that people are making, and make some comment like, "Haha, I know that you, Dear Reader, would never fall into such folly. Because, by virtue of being on my friends list, haha, no doubt you are right thinking and virtuous, and would never make such errors."

But I can't say that any more. Because it turns out some of you suck at critical thinking, and I'm here to call you out.

Maybe you were always a dunderhead, or maybe it's a symptom of Trump Derangement Syndrome, or Russian disinformation, or the very nature of social media. But if the goal is to get to the Truth, you're not helping when you push falsehoods, even if you are on 'the right side'.  

But I do have a solution to offer. You can learn how to think critically. And you can practice it and get better at it, until it becomes second nature. 'Oh sure, I know how to critically think', you assert. That's just what the flat earthers say who pick away at the arguments of the globetards. So the first, and possibly most important, lesson is this:

The baloney detection kit is not a weapon to be used on occasion to defeat the arguments of people you disagree with, it is a defense that should be always on to protect you from accepting something as true without sufficient evidence. Possibly even a statement you have already accepted, but should reconsider.

If you only pull out your baloney detection kit when you're trying to find some niggling detail in someone else's argument so you can safely ignore it and go on with your life, you are using it wrong. That's exactly what science deniers do. It's just a defense mechanism. Confirmation bias in action.

It's what conspiracy theorists do. Conspiracy theories are a short-cut to proper thinking. The real world is complicated; conspiracy theories are usually quite simple. But there is no short-cut to proper thinking.

The Baloney Detection Kit was the catchy (and work-safe) coinage of Carl Sagan in his book, The Demon-Haunted World. So you don't have to learn some aspects of critical thinking from me, you can learn them from him, either the full text of that passage, or this excellent condensed summary. But allow me to quote and amend a bit here.

OK, now to you dummies.

Case 1: Umbrella Man is an object lesson in 'reserving judgment' and 'keep a long memory'. No not this Umbrella Man. That's a totally different conspiracy theory. This one was the guy instigating rioting in Minneapolis in the wake of the George Floyd killing at the end of May. Early on, there was wild social media sharing of this fucking bullshit, I mean baloney. Anonymous texts from an anonymous person, posing as the ex-wife of Umbrella Man identifying him as a member of police. This is crap evidence. Did I get any thanks for pointing out that this is crap evidence? Of course not. It's just like telling a young earth creationist that Mount Saint Helens is crap evidence that the earth is 6000 years old. They don't thank me either.

As they say, “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”. This lie about wicked policeman guy flew for most of two months, until we found out the truth, that Umbrella Man was a white supremacist asshole. Even when we knew that the particular policeman pointed out in the bullshit had an alibi, the believers implausibly sidled over to "well, it wasn't him, but it was some other cop". How can that even make sense, you chowderhead? Your bullshit evidence fingered a particular cop by name. How does he suddenly morph into a random cop based on the same evidence? If OJ didn't do it, it doesn't mean some other NFL running back did it. It only makes sense if you've been infected by some kind of conspiracy theory. A simplification of a complex world. Something like ACAB.

Now let's get something straight. Just because I don't believe All Cops Are Bastards, doesn't mean I believe All Cops Are Beneficial. Both are simplifications of a complex reality. To presume I do would be to commit the fallacy of a false dichotomy. 

Case 2: Lynching in Palmdale?

in the middle of June, Robert Fuller, a black man, was found dead hanging from a tree in Palmdale, California. It was initially considered by the city as "an alleged death by suicide."

My initial response was "A terrible thing, but I hope the initial determination of suicide holds up, because the alternative is horrible."

So because I hoped this was right, I went looking only for evidence that confirmed this opinion. WRONG!!!

I reserved my fucking judgment, and (because this was an important issue) I kept a long memory.

Meanwhile, other similar cases emerged in the news, possibly because the media became sensitive to the topic, including that of Malcolm Harsch which had happened even earlier in Victorville. And soon, the story was being spread through social media -- by some of you, my lamebrained friends, that these were lynchings being perpetrated by or at least covered up by the police. Medical examiners are practically police, so we shouldn't listen to them either. Ultimately the unsourced information that spread like wildfire was that 5 black men hanged from trees had been ruled suicides. As snopes notes, it's not even clear who these 5 men are supposed to be. But for some that can be identified, further evidence has come to light, and they are in fact almost certainly suicides.

In the case of Harsch, video evidence of the event emerged and the family was satisfied. “On behalf of the family of Malcolm Harsch unfortunately it seems he did take his own life.”

Robert Fuller had a history of suicidal ideation. 

This one left a note.

I confess I know less about the NY case than the CA ones, but as far as I can tell, the family has quietly accepted it as suicide.

So what was the evidence that these were lynchings in the first place? It seems to me that the only 'evidence' that they weren't suicides was the fact that the police said they were suicides. That's some fucked up conspiracy theory bullshit right there.

Case 3 Oh god the stupid thing about anarchists is too stupid to even talk about. But suffice it to say my comments received as warm a welcome as I usually get from flat earthers. AAABastards/Beneficial is just as terrible a short-cut to thinking as ACABastards/Beneficial.

But for all these cases, the truth finally got its shoes on weeks, even months, later. So please stop spreading bullshit based on poor evidence. Even if. ESPECIALLY IF it punches your buttons. Because that's where you are vulnerable. Sometimes there is a conspiracy. Those Russian disinformation specialists are not imaginary. Their job is to punch your buttons. 

Work on that baloney detection kit.

 You Look Like A Thing And I Love You, by Janelle Shane

The book seems to be a reworking of material Shane has shared in her AI weirdness blog. On the one hand, it shows, on the other hand, it makes for light entertaining reading.

I was a little disappointed that the scope of the book focuses on various flavors of machine learning AI (as opposed to symbolic or strong AI). Of course, the latter is a super hard problem, but it's of infinitely more interest.

But the book does reinforce the idea that machine learning AI is terrible and terrifying. If you set it the task of winning at chess and other games, it does an amazing job, because it's easy to 'reward' the program with victory or points. But when the goal is to teach an AI to, for example, act as a customer service agent, or identify what's in a picture, or drive a car down the street, it's harder to train them when the victory condition is 'act like a human would act'.

So the book is a compilation of more or less hilarious and horrifying failures of AI. The basic idea is to train your AI to absorb training data and make a bajillion connections so that it can spit out more of the same. The problem seems to be that we're bad at setting tasks, bad at giving clean data, and bad at making the original judgments the AI is trying to emulate. One of the common examples is text generating AIs, where you train your AI on recipes or Harry Potter novels and let it make up its own once it gets the hang of it. Another common thing of the sort is the autocomplete or Google's help in finishing your search request, which is how "Why won't my parakeet eat my diarrhea?" became a thing. Once the AI randomly latched onto that as a cromulent phrase, people making google searches also latched onto it. That's some serious click bait there. And thus the problem. The Google AI takes those clicks as 'rewards' that it is very accurately predicting what people were going to ask.

But mostly they're just odd, like the motto hearts Shane recently posted:



Other examples look at trying to decipher what's in a picture. For training data, the AI used people-generated descriptions of pictures and then went number crunching away. Now ask yourself, honestly, how many times have you described a picture by saying, "It has zero giraffes in it." probably never. But if there were a giraffe in the picture, you'd probably be likely to mention it. So the AI has seen a few pictures that are described as containing giraffes, but it has never seen a picture described as having zero giraffes in it. The result is that the AI often declares that there are giraffes in pictures that do not contain giraffes.

This kind of bias in the sample has real-world consequences as well. An AI trained to make hiring or loan application decisions turns out to be very good at modelling the human-generated data and discriminating against the same kind of people the employers and banks do. Since the AIs are rather opaque black boxes, it's hard to root out such bias, since we don't really know what the AI is paying attention to.

A related example from driving. The researchers thought they were teaching the AI to keep the car in the middle of the road, and not driving off the sides. Instead, they seems to have taught the AI to keep the green grass at fixed locations on either side of the field of view. When the car went onto an overpass, the green disappeared and the car was flummoxed.


Great, amusing read that shines a light on some important issues as inevitably medical and financial data gets churned through AIs like this.

---

The Witchfinder's Sister, by Beth Underdown

I found this a disappointment. Matthew Hopkins was an English witch-finder who had a brief, but very nasty career. I was ready to get my hate on, but the Hopkins of this novel does not seem to much resemble the original. As the title suggests, the book follows Hopkins' [entirely fictional] sister Alice as she returns to join his household after she is widowed. There are dim family secrets that slowly get winkled out, but the action stays on Alice, so much of the witchfinding occurs offstage. It does provide a slow excruciating crescendo as our narrator gets ever more closely involved with the witchfinding and the deplorable details emerge.

But the motivations provided by the backstory conflict with what we know of the real Hopkins, and the author toys with witchcraft being real, which seems like a bizarre step. If people really can and do magically murder people, it's worth finding them out. The tragedy of the witchhunts is that it was all bullshit.

There's been quite the confluence of events. Buzzfeed (don't laugh) ran a deeply researched article about Lawrence Krauss and a number of sexual allegations against him. None violent, but sleazy. Apparently enough to warrant being banned from a couple campuses where he used to work. While I was dimmmmmly aware, for me it was basically internet gossip about someone I don't really know.

I found the article convincing, and icky enough that it bothered me that I remembered that Krauss was a fellow of CSI (nee CSICOP). And I went to the trouble of checking their page of fellows to be sure.

And there are two things that probably made that association leap to my mind. Number one, another Fellow is Benjamin Radford, and he too has been associated with some similar accusations (starting from incidents after a consensual relationship turned sour). Again, I am not the insider here, but I gather that Barry Karr [or maybe Ron Lindsay -- like I said, I'm not an insider] made an investigation, meted out some punishment, and I don't know the ins and outs, other than to say that Radford is still a Fellow, as is his most noteworthy accuser (from where I sit, not being close to any of this). So I feel confident that something was done with at least some semblance of justice. But the episode also pulled additional anonymous whispers out of the ether.

The second thing that probably kept it fresh in my mind was that the latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer noted that Susan Gerbic had been made a Fellow. This was surprising, because most of the Fellows are members of the professoriate in disciplines from physics to psychology. And Susan runs the guerrilla skeptics on wikipedia. I mean, if done right, obviously it's to everyone's benefit for Wikipedia to be accurate, and credulous viewpoints need to be countered by skeptical ones. But...

#1: my brief foray into Wikipedia editing convinced me that it takes a certain kind of person to enjoy and win the Wikipedia editing game. And it isn't me. And I'm vaguely suspicious of the people who find themselves at home in that environment.
#2: Susan's common appearances on the Skepticality podcast did not impress me favorably. In addition to her stated work to push an agenda, it was clear she was also generally a shill for conferences and meetings, etc. Some of the things that pushed me away from greater involvement in organized skepticism (it was not enough that I volunteered to be part of the Independent Investigations Group (an organization I helped name) but to stay in, one would be required to take classes for money -- fuck that).
#3: In short, rather than a skeptic, she strikes me more as a True Believer. Our side is right, and this justifies almost anything.
#4: More recently, I see that Susan is essentially defending Radford on his Wiki page (see the Talk) to keep the page clean of talk of the accusation. Now I don't know that it's notable or meets Wikipedia's standards, but it does bother me that it seems that the truth is less important than defending the people in one's camp.

Anyhoo, this had me thinking about CSI having two fairly well documented pervs among its Fellows (and I wasn't so hot about the merger between CFI and the Dawkins Foundation). And so for a long time (when I only knew of one perv) I was reconsidering the bequest in my will to CSICOP. And now there were (at least) two pervs. Now when you look at the list... there are a lot of people I admire, from Susan Blackmore to Daniel Dennett to EC Krupp to Joe Nickell to Bob Park to Eugenie Scott. Maybe two bad eggs isn't too bad a proportion? On the other hand, there's more than enough star power that I really wish they'd get rid of any bad eggs. After appropriate scrutiny.

And then my stepdad died last week. And I read through his will. And I thought a lot more about my own.

And then a miracle... Lawrence Krauss was (at least temporarily) un-Fellowed from CSI. And I note that between looking at the CSI Fellows page a few days ago and now, Susan Gerbic has also vanished from the list, shortly after arriving. This I assume(?) is at her behest.

So we're back down to one perv (that has come to my attention) who served metaphorical time for one incident. All cool?

(Thank lackofgod that pervy Mike Shermer has an entirely separate Skeptic organization for me to shun. It's true, I shunned him for being dumb long before I knew about any pervy accusations, but every little bit helps. Also a shame that James Randi (who gave his name to yet a third skeptic organization) turned a blind eye to Shermer being 'a bad boy on occasion'.)

Seems like I'm down on all the skeptical organizations, but hey it's just some of the people and the organizations that suck. Not the ideas or the truth of the matter. And possibly CFI/CSI has taken a small step to suck less... and can stay in my will.

Creationist: Take a look at all you present, anything you think a 5 year old won't understand, explain it. Act like a teacher, Teach it first.

Endogenous Retroviruses

When mommies and daddies love each other very much, they make a recipe for a baby. They mix a copy of half of daddy’s recipe with a copy of half of mommy’s recipe to make a baby recipe. The recipe is so long that it takes nine months to make a baby!

And by looking at your recipe later, you can see that you are related to your mommy and daddy because you can see bits of their recipes in you! (Or you’re adopted, but your mommy and daddy still love you!)

And this can go back through the generations. If half of grandpa’s recipe goes into your mom, and half of mom’s recipe goes in you, then one quarter of your recipe comes from grandpa!

Now, if you have first cousins, that means one of your parents was the brother or sister of one of theirs. And those siblings had the same parents… your grandparents. By comparing your recipe to the recipe of your first cousin, you can see that you share a common grandparent. This is called common ancestry. Since recipes get shared in an unbroken chain from ancestor to descendant (that means a baby!), if you have enough information, you can determine whether two recipes have a common ancestor. Fortunately, those recipes are really long, so there is a lot of information.

But sometimes little accidents happen to the recipes. This is really important, but we’ll save that for when you are six. But one particular kind of accident is when you get sick. Sometimes a germ will leave its cooties in your recipe. Ew!

Before, maybe your grandpa had a recipe with a line that said:

Step 146734 Make five itty-bitty toes on the end of each foot.

And afterwards, it might read

Step 146734 Make five itty-bitty toeGERM COOTIESs on the end of each foot.


And now that might be part of your recipe! Because he is your ancestor.

Your friend on the playground might have this in her recipe:

Step 146734 Make five itGERM COOTIESty-bitty toes on the end of each foot.

Do you have a common ancestor with her?

Did you say no? Because the cooties are in the wrong place? Haha, the joke’s on you. The answer is actually yes. All human beings are related. But looking at this one tiny piece of the recipe, we don’t have any evidence that your friend descended from your grandpa. (Don’t ask him about it in front of your grandmother.)

Since grandpa got the cooties in his lifetime, it can only show up in that exact spot in his descendants, or in someone else who coincidentally got the cooties in the same exact place in the recipe. But the recipe is so long this is very unlikely.

But if we look at the whole recipe, you and your friend actually have a lot of recipe cooties in common. Ew! I know. But it’s pretty harmless. Everyone has them. Thousands of them. And because a lot of them are in the same place, we know you share common ancestors. But since a few of them are different (like the one from your grandpa) we know that your common ancestor was further back in generations than your grandpa.

So by comparing the number of shared cooties to the number of unshared cooties, you can see how closely related you are.

And when we compare your cooties to those of a chimpanzee, we find a lot of cooties in different places, but a lot of cooties in the same place! We also have common ancestors, but it wasn’t in your grandpappy’s day or your great great great grandmammy’s day. It was 5 million years ago.

In fact, orthologous cooties fall into a nested hierarchy among primates.

Many people have recently opined about the justifiability of punching a Nazi(*) in the face. A surprising (to me) number of people are for it.

(*)To clarify, unless we're talking about these six Nazis, at best there are 'neo-Nazis' these days, or 'jerks with hateful ideas who are dangerously close to the levers of power'.

I test the Nazi punch hypothesis out in my own mind, and I just find it hard to accept. I mean, what if it was a lady Nazi? In Romeo Must Die, Aaliyah wisely observes that "in America, if a girl is kicking your ass, you do not have to be a gentleman." Honestly, I'm egalitarian enough that if a boy or girl is kicking your ass, you do not have to be a gentleperson.

And yes, if a boy or girl is kicking that helpless person over there's ass, this probably requires some intervention.

But these rules are not just about kicks and asses. They should be good for punches and faces. "Hey you! Anonymous coward punching an unsuspecting guy in the face! What's wrong with you?"

Anyway, some dudes may have some archaic patriarchal misgivings about punching a lady Nazi. Perhaps they could do something else generally considered illegal or antisocial? Maybe they could throw rocks at them or grab their pussies? This new moral hypothesis opens up so many interesting questions!

But it's fraught with so many logistical difficulties. I mean, not every neo-Nazi will go to the trouble of tattooing 88 on his forehead. They might look like anybody! If only we could form an organization that could identify them based on objective criteria and make them wear distinctive clothing or something, so we'd know who to punch.

But there seem to be deeper flaws that worry me. A lot.

If we decide that, for a certain class of people, we no longer have to treat them with the usual rules of civility and humanity, it would seem (to avoid being hypocrites) that other people could use this same hypothesis to justify treating other classes of people as sub-human.

Wait a moment! Have I fallen into Bizarro world? Nazis treating certain classes of people as sub-human is one of the justifications for treating them as subhuman. I have it all backward! It's not that we would be hypocrites to NOT allow other people to think this way in the future. It's that other people thinking that way in the past made US start to think like them.

You can't fight an ideology by implicitly accepting its tenets. You are strengthening it by making it the only way of looking at the world.

---

Now some have correctly pointed out that neo-Nazis can be experts at using 'the System' to quash opposition. "Oh, we're the victims, save us, save us, Law & Order!"

So then I ask: Why the fuck would you fall into their trap by punching people on the street? Are you stupid?

The good guys also have some experts at using 'the System', from politicians to judges to civil rights lawyers. I'm neither, but I expect they would advise you to refrain from punching people in the face.

Because it does play into their trap. Punch a few Nazis, set fire to a building, and the system might restrict the rights to "habeas corpus, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right of free association and public assembly, the secrecy of the post and telephone". In the name of security. To protect the crybabies.

And what is the goal of Nazipunch? What positive result is achieved?



When Obama was elected, the racists were gnashing their teeth, and afraid, and the left held out its hand and said:



And the dummies on the right were afraid Obama was going to grab their guns and put them in FEMA camps.

And so they hid in their bunkers, clutching their guns and bibles, despising the left, falling into their own groupthink, biding their time until... well, until their savior appeared. And they voted for him, to the astonishment of all those who thought they were safely and silently encapsulated in gun-lined bunkers where their unchallenged ideologies couldn't possibly hurt anybody.

And you know what? As dumb as they are, they played by the rules. In the state houses, the governor's mansions, the House and Senate, and now the White House. It's true that "democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time".

Now the shoe is on the other foot.



And the other side is afraid Trump is going to grab their pussies and put them in death camps.

It's all very familiar. Not all that different.

Now this is not to say that everything is fine. Trump's actions have real effects on pussies and Syrians and so on. But do you know how many pussies get contraception coverage on their insurance when you punch a Nazi?

Zero.

If anything, it plays into the hands of crybaby Nazis.

---

If you are conspiracy minded, well... probably you have already written me off as a closet Nazi, but consider this.

We know the Russians want to create chaos in our country.

We know the Russians have worked hard to get the dumb-dumb right to distrust the government, distrust the mainstream media, and listen only to RT.com and Breitbart.

Fortunately, we on the left are waaaaay too smart to be manipulated by Russian propaganda. Right? Right? No one would be suckered in by the idea that democracy or free speech are inherently flawed concepts, and are better replaced by punches in the face. Angry moron Trump voters wanted to blow up the system. Only idiots would want to blow it up bigger.