I’ve given up sniping at Republicans. The misanthropic lunacy which has finally overwhelmed their politics has absolved me of any further need either to reason with them or laugh at them, Frankly, I have better things to do than wrestle with the category errors that any engagement with them and their idiocies would invariably entail. In any event, we’ll all find out together in November whether they’ve finally achieved their long sought after political orgasm, or instead are forced to subject us all to yet another decade of disgusting foreplay.
I can hardly wait.
When JD Vance goes on public TV and defends promoting dangerous shit that was utterly made up to get the attention of the media he thinks their campaign has been lacking, but deserves, yours is the only reasonable response. That “senior adviser to Bush”‘s “we create our own reality” has been taken to its most monstrous extreme which doesn’t advance the aspirations of an empire one bit, but speaks volumes to the aspirations of an evil midwit. We will learn the power of that creation come November, one way or the other.
Currently, traveling some of the highways and byways of WY, ID and the PacNW. There’s lots of struggling rural areas out here, and lots of fairly prosperous industrial-sized ag operations. I wouldn’t want to even try and guess how the election might go.
On these forays I have the same recurring thought that I had the very first time we did this back in the 70s: “I can’t believe this country elects one president.” Witnessing the political insanity of our neighbor to the north, I’m not at a sure a parliamentary style of government would put us any further ahead, however.
Thanks for tagging up, WT. You’ve been on my mind of late.
Love what you did with “midwit” there—so perfectly apt for the new generation of Republican tech-bro/incel/fascist revisionist self-delusionals like Vance, Musk, Thiel, Hawley, Andreessen, De Santis, et effing al. So much more resonant than “halfwit,” of which the GOP already has an overabundance (see Mike Johnson).
And ah, yes, the Electoral College Todestanz. Montana and Wyoming, which all together have approximately the same population as the city my daughter lives in, send four—count ‘em, four—senators to Congress, ostensibly to make sure that we never, ever completely escape the 12th century.
Parliaments are guarantees of precisely nothing. (see Germany in 1914, 1933, 2024) And France, with it’s smug reliance on republicanism (small”r”), and executive “dirigisme,” has scarcely done any better, at least in the 21st century.)
Anyway, I can’t waste any more time on these assholes—life is too short. Besides, I’ve recently discovered that my optometrist, of all people, is an adherent of “Intelligent Design” Started off by trying to explain it to me as he would to a five year-old. When I told him he had a lot of gall trying to revive teleological explanations for the development of complex organs on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the Scopes Trial, he let me know in no uncertain terms that he’s studied “far more science, sir” than I have.
He had no more proof of that, of course, than he has of Divine Creation, but clearly the logical iffiness of proof by assertion has never cost him even a moment of self-doubt. Anyway, no more pulling Republican tails for me for the time being, at least until I can find a new optometrist.
I take no credit for “midwit.”
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Midwit
It’s already used, abused, mocked and derided all over Xwitter. But it did seem to fit the recipient pretty well in this case.
Indeed it did. If nothing else, the term is itself living proof that language, like the culture it expresses, is always on the move, no matter how many of us, Republicans especially, would rather it stayed perfectly stationary from the time we feel the first tingling of puberty until they throw dirt in our faces.
Being more of an anti-social than social media type these days, thanks largely to Elon, I’d never heard the term before, although the ringing of the Bell curve itself, like some collective form of tinnitus, has haunted us all for decades. First thing my freshman classmates always wanted to know about any professor was “Does he/she grade on the curve?” And then there were those evil CIA-funded sociologists in the Sixties who spent entire careers evaluating the distribution patterns of obscure human foibles, diligently searching for clever new control mechanisms their masters could apply to clueless third-world recalcitrants. Oy….
Oh, and, re: your optometrist. I just came across what might be an appropriate appellation.
“Credentialed midwit overconfidence”
I can’t even imagine deciding to venture anywhere near “revive teleological explanations for the development of complex organs on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the Scopes Trial” with you. Oy!, indeed. Better to be silent and thought a fool…, as it were.
No worries. Sometimes even advocates of plain speech can’t help throwing a few sparklers into their monologues. I was just reminding the good doctor that fundamentalists are the last holdouts in the ancient struggle for epistemological supremacy between science and Christianity. Everyone else surrendered long ago. Once the church lost the power to have dissenters burned at the stake, even the Jesuits, who could sell shoes to a snake, eventually abandoned their attempts to subordinate the scientific method to the necessities of Catholic dogma.
The key to the doctor’s argument was the asserion that such marvelously complex organs as the human eye—which he admittedly knows a lot about—could not have been produced by natural selection as described by Darwin in “The Origin of Species.” Fine, that’s an argument, but if you want to call it a *scientific* argument you have to begin the search for supporting evidence by allowing for the possibility that what you find might contradict your religious a prioris. Otherwise you’re making a religious argument, not a scientific one, regardless of how desperate you are to hide that fact from your audience of potential converts.