From "The Age of Irrationality/With the rise of QAnon and the anti-vax movement, skepticism has become the province of the paranoid" by Katha Pollitt (The Nation).
September 23, 2021
"What do you do when a big swath of Americans believe things that are demonstrably false...?"
"Are we a nation of lunatics...?... We’re told to trust the voters because ordinary folk know what’s what, but how can you trust the voters if so many of them think their paranoid delusions are reality?... My friend Alan, a Marxist historian... compares our present moment to the world described by Johan Huizinga in The Waning of the Middle Ages. As feudalism began to break up in the 1300s and 1400s... [p]essimism, fear, and a sense of cultural exhaustion prevailed.... Maybe, Alan suggested... [w]hites and Christians feel their cultural preeminence slipping away, and they just can’t handle it, especially if superpatriotism, racism, and male supremacy were all they had to begin with.
Well, maybe. It would be better for Alan’s theory if present-day irrationalists were, like the members of other right-wing movements, disproportionately young white men enraged by their downward mobility and lack of girlfriends. But according to The New York Times, QAnon appeals to a much broader swath—'health-conscious yoga moms,' for example.... It’s as if the Internet is bringing together all existing forms of credulousness: Covid denialism, Trumpism, health nuttery, hyperlibertarianism, New Age woo-woo, fundamentalist Christianity, and an unhealthy fixation on exaggerated or imaginary dangers to children."
From "The Age of Irrationality/With the rise of QAnon and the anti-vax movement, skepticism has become the province of the paranoid" by Katha Pollitt (The Nation).
From "The Age of Irrationality/With the rise of QAnon and the anti-vax movement, skepticism has become the province of the paranoid" by Katha Pollitt (The Nation).
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Not sure there's anything more credulous than putting that list of credulous groups together, believing it's meaningful.
Don't get me started...
'We’re told to trust the voters because ordinary folk know what’s what...'
The average American is a moron.
If the average voter has an IQ of 100, they aren't exactly deep thinkers.
I talk to people all the time who never read newspapers and get their 'news' from a single source, either Fox or CNN/MSNBC (equal opportunity shaming).
If it's in "The Nation," I could write it without looking.
“What do you do when a big swath of Americans believe things that are demonstrably false?”
Inconceivable!
Demonstrable - You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means
And maybe people are just tired of getting their tails yanked......
Like the Russia Russia Russia - Hillary clinton machine - planted hoax?
...skepticism has become the province of the paranoid
Needs an I'm Skeptical tag.
What a fucked up premise in her title. I'd rather live in a nation of skeptics than a nation of unquestioning NPCs like Progressives want us to be. I'm sure all the hectoring, mockery, slime-casting, false associations, official disinformation, untrustworthy executives, social media censoring and irrational fearmongering will convince the last 15% to join the Herd Immunity movement.
"Science" is inherently skeptical. Explain that Katha!
"[w]hites and Christians feel their cultural preeminence slipping away,"
Does that include liberal white Christians like Rick Steves?
"whites and Christians feel their cultural preeminence slipping away, and they just can’t handle it, especially if superpatriotism, racism, and male supremacy were all they had to begin with. "
There's some Q-annon equivalent right there. The left are mired in "Everyone not on team corruptocrat is a white supremacist!"
i don't have anything to say to that but FUCK OFF.
You know who lacked a girlfriend - and hated Trump?
The young guy from Syria who murdered 10 people in cold blood at a King Soopers in Boulder Colorado.
The Nation: only we can be skeptical and paranoid!
Why do these white morons from backhill USA don't believe anything we tell them? Don't they know we're better than them?
Why fundamentalist Christianity? Why not all Christianity, along with every other form of organized religion? All based on faith, usually inherited from families. Was it Hitchens who decried all organized religion as child abuse?
Not that I have anything good to say about any atheistic mass movememt.
It's tough living once instinct no longer suffices.
When you start from Marx........
According to The Nation group-thinkers - anyone NOT democratical-SUPERIORIST -
is crazy crazy CRAZY!
doncha love how they include health nuts and libertarians.
The left's Brennan-CNN talking point operation is to vilify anyone who supports...
wait for it...
LIBERTY.
It's the old "greater frequency of or greater reporting of?" conundrum that we have seen in other areas of life (most visibly in crime statistics) as behavior tracking has improved. Lots of people have always believed in lots of dumb things. That's not new. What new is that we track and quantify it and people hype and manipulate the phenomenon for their own purposes.
As noted, any good scientist is inherently skeptical.
How many people on the left act as if they believe the falsehood that the USA has never been more racist than today?
I wonder what kind of bubble Katha Pollitt that she can nod knowingly at the person in the Street as they both consider the foolishness of the doubters.
It's kind of nice to have the Nation still around to feature comparative statements like this:
America has always had a lot of crazy right-wingers, but it’s one thing to believe that the Soviet Union was out to destroy us and another to believe that the world is run by a ring of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who kill and eat children to get their adrenochrome fix.
32 years after the wall came down, they're still deluded about the USSR.
I'd prefer a list of obvious falsehoods which contained:
-- people can change their sex or gender.
-- people are not sexually binary (with very rare exceptions).
-- pretty much any MSM/politicians' idea about race, especially "race is a social construct" and the existence of "systemic racism".
I remember when the anti-vaxxers were leftists and QAnon was just a boogie man to scare lefties back into line.
Not too concerned with what people BELIEVE. Do get riled about ACTIONS that cost me money or restrict my freedom. Biggest offender there would be government.
So what to do? Limit the allowed activities of government.
"What do you do when a big swath of Americans believe things that are demonstrably false...?"
You mean like believing that hoax that Trump was colluding with Putin?
Like believing the hoax that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation?
Like believing that the tech companies are censoring "misinformation", rather than that they're censoring anything that offends their politics?
Like believing that Hillary's private email server wasn't a felony?
Shall I go on, oh leftist purveyor of lies?
Hell, if we got rid of lies, you leftists couldn't speak.
"Are we a nation of lunatics...?... My friend Alan, a Marxist historian
Anyone who is friends with a "Marxist historian" is a lunatic.
Anyone who quotes a "Marxist historian", and identifies him as such, is so far off teh deep end she can't even see reality from where she lives
Maybe, Alan suggested... [w]hites and Christians
The most unvaccinated group of people in America are blacks.
The non-religious are in general less vaccinated than the religious.
Speaking of "believ[ing] things that are demonstrably false"
This is the most Katha Pollitt article, ever.
It makes much more sense, now that I'm responding to the correct post :-(
This isn't news, as 30% of the population has always been nutso or deeply ill-informed. In the past the narrow media outlets (TV, radio, newspapers) kept the loons in boxes. The costs of distribution and competition prevented media sources from delivering the transparent propaganda that now feeds irrationality. Churches shifted some...unverifiable...beliefs to the supernatural realm or afterlife. Brand-name ideologies (e.g., old school Communism) provided off-the-shelf reasoning to keep the easily influenced segment in narrow lanes.
Today we have billions of self-publishers on social media, and those seeking order and control cannot accept this. It explains the broad establishment hatred toward Trump, and recent censorship moves. Some false beliefs will continue to exist indefinitely in frothy little bubbles, or an economic disaster will push the pragmatists to the fore. Evolution (see the loss of ape tails post) will wipe out those who make fatal errors.
Unmitigated
“I'm sure all the hectoring, mockery, slime-casting, false associations, official disinformation, untrustworthy executives, social media censoring and irrational fearmongering will convince the last 15% to join the Herd Immunity movement.”
Right now, the only way to get to herd immunity is through catching and surviving the virus. The experimental gene therapies, billed as “vaccines” by our government, won’t get us there, because they aren’t anywhere near sterilizing, which real vaccines are. What we need is a standard, deactivated or weakened virus, sterilizing vaccine, like we have for other viral diseases like polio, mumps, measles, etc. But such a vaccine wouldn’t be experimental, so it couldn’t be available under an EUA, so requires full FDA testing, which takes years. Plus, there is probably no longer much of a market for it.
But then Delta came along, and during the month of July effectively pushed out the other variants from our county’s population, with its greatly increased infectivity (R0). The problem with herd immunity is that it too depends on infectivity (R0), and essentially doubling R0 raised the theoretical level for herd immunity from maybe 60% to 80-90% (don’t hold me to the actual percentages, as this is being done from memory) of the population.
When fundamentalists collide religious wars result, even when one side won't acknowledge it's religious. But that's what makes for fundamentalism, those in it just believe they are on the side of unimpeachable truth, and anyone who disagrees is either woefully ignorant, anti-truth, or malicious
People like Katha Pollit and her Marxist friend wanted a populace that could be easily manipulated to vote for their policies, but didn't realize that a compliant populace could be easily manipulated by the opposing side.
It really sucks when your master stroke comes back to bite you in the ass, doesn't it?
Talk about lack of self awareness! Here's a far leftist making sweeping, demonstrably false generalities about those to her right and asking what to do about their false beliefs, all the while consulting the musings of a "Marxist historian" for validation of her prejudices. How exactly does one get more consumed by false beliefs than by delving into Marxism? Why wouldn't she just ask her Marxist historian friend whether he foresees "right-wing movements, disproportionately young white men enraged by their downward mobility and lack of girlfriends" killing 100 million people like the Marxists of the 20th Century did. Do anti vaccine stances or QAnon (whatever that is) pose a danger to the world equivalent to the Maoist Cultural Revolution or the Killing Fields of Cambodia or the gulags of the Soviet Union? It's not the right wing crazies anyone needs to worry about, it's the communist poets and activists and intellectuals like her who would proudly starve the world population so as to demonstrate once again that Marxism is founded in insanity. She should be worried about the demonstrated death cult she espouses rather than the theoretical bogeymen she conjures up.
The use of the term 'fundamentalist Christian' shows their lack of intellectual seriousness and that they are only interested in propaganda.
'what shall we do with all these straw men giving me the vapors?!"
The answer is always more power for corrupt politicians, the priests of this non-theistic religion.
Most of my right-wing acquaintances (who fall more along the libertarian lines, really) don't understand who this QAnon person is. Anti-vaxxers tends to be relegated to a hand full of tik-tok videos 'exposed' by those denigrating anti-vaxxers.
In other words, these are not real problems.
If right wing hicks are the real problem with not getting vaccinated (the 'bash the people' du-jour) then why is it that democrat strongholds (cities) have large numbers of unvaccinated people? (Ah, qanon and anti-vaxxers. of course).
These "feminist" writers all look the same--like catchers' mitts. I did an image search on google. And she talks about men not getting laid! Mein Gott! The last time she saw a cock (if ever) was daddy's and I'll bet he waved it at her and she's been a lesbian ever since. I'm fed up with these arrogant dykes choking on testosterone envy hating on the unwashed masses.
Such a softball.
Anyway, I wonder whether high-IQ people (not that I accuse Katha Pollitt of being in this group) who insist that all our decisions should be handed over to the highest-IQ people realize that their insistence is self-refuting.
Always nice to hear from Marxist historian friends when thinking about people who believe things that are not so
This quote is very insightful from a related article:
America has transitioned from being a highly trusting country to a moderately trusting one.
I am wondering how this will change the US Society...
Biden Falls into the Trust Trap - Real Clear Policies
The Nation Article seems to be the usual Gas Lighting, and scapegoating the usual suspects, sigh. Lots of virtue signaling.
Demonstrably false? Such as socialism can work long-term? Plenty of examples to the contrary and none in support. I look forward to Katha Pollit and The Nation giving up on that one
No doubt there are backwaters of the Internet that demonstrate: once you are skeptical of "all the elites," there may be no stopping a downward slide. But Pollitt of course makes it too easy on herself. Trumpism as far as I know is: no open borders, some kind of points system, needless to say, non-racist; better balance of trade with China, more in the interests of the U.S.; similar for endless wars/security arrangements including NATO. Then there's conservative judges. What about these positions is "demonstrably false?" Anti-vaxx is an interesting one; as Ann shows in a neighboring post, there are and have been lots of anti-vaxxers on the left. Trump haters just now find it convenient that all their enemies are on the right, so they double down on this one (or two or three) covid vax. Wakefield's bullshit papers casting doubt on the MMR vaccine for two year olds were published in the top medical journals, and not retracted for ten years. The elite has weakened its own credibility.
No one talks about QAnon, or mentions it, except for those insightful opinion writers on the Left. To them the world is full of White Supremacists and QAnoners. Such a frightening thing.
As hard as this world is today, and it is, I find that my friends and families living in deep blue states are more frightened, more fearful, more full of scare and worrisome hours than my wife and I and our friends are living in a red state. There is something to the notion that, you become what you constantly hear about. And in this day and age of non-stop input, I suspect my friends and family in New York and Washington are fed a steady stream of bad news more than we are where we live. Or, they choose to seek it out. Either way, they are living frightened lives right now.
A Marxist historian friend? Really? Sure this isn't from the Babylon Bee?
Also, the waning of the Middle Ages and the break up of the feudal system led to, among other things, the rise of nation states, democracy, the Enlightenment, the age of exploration, colonialism, free markets, etc.
WK said "And maybe people are just tired of getting their tails yanked......"
And to think scientists wonder what genetic advantage the "tail-less primate" mutation conferred.
When I started reading the exerpt, I thought he was going to talk about how irrational his Marxist historian friend's beliefs are. Oops.
Why fundamentalist Christianity?
Lots of progressive pastors wearing rainbow stoles and mannish haircuts. Can't dis them.
Demonstrably false- like socialism will work if only we put the right people in charge.
Or real communism has never been tried....
"It’s as if the Internet is bringing together all existing forms of credulousness: Covid denialism, Trumpism, health nuttery, hyperlibertarianism, New Age woo-woo, fundamentalist Christianity, and an unhealthy fixation on exaggerated or imaginary dangers to children."
And a belief in the existence of 57 genders. You meant to include that, too? Right?
List missing the 93 genders.
"Whites and Christians" understand that Katha Pollitt and her ilk hold them in contempt. Katha Pollitt and her ilk don't understand that Whites and Christians hold them in contempt as well. Hence the arrogance on one side and the lack of it on the other.
'List missing the 93 genders.'
Ha! How about 'men can be women and women can be men.'
Get that one right and then we can have a rational conversation...
Can of Cheese for Hunter at 11:34 AM
Like the Russia Russia Russia - Hillary clinton machine - planted hoax?
Katrina vanden Heuvel, the publisher of The Nation, is married to Stephen Cohen, a prominent critic of the RussiaGate nonsense.
On calling out Christianity....
I always ask myself if I swapped in Judaism, Islam, or other faiths, would the sentence still be published?
If not, then let's just acknowledge it for what it is.
The Nation's science can be summed up easily: Trump vaccine dangerous and ineffective, Biden vaccine safe and effective. Or would be effective, but for the vaccine skeptics. The skeptics' failure to believe is like kids who refuse to believe in fairies are killing Tinker Bell.
Marxism - talk about your irrational beliefs held firm in the face of over a century's worth of contrary factual evidence.
From Pollitt's article:
According to a PRRI poll last May, 15 percent of Americans believe in QAnon. Yes, one in seven Americans agreed with the statement “The government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child-sex-trafficking operation.”
If a person "believes in QAnon", that does not mean that he "agrees" with such a hysterical statement.
If someone really knows something about QAnon -- has read QAnon messages and has studied discussions about QAnon -- then he has a different idea of what it means to "believe in QAnon".
The QAnon concept is that Donald Trump -- or else someone close to Trump -- sends cryptic messages that communicate inside information about Trump to the public.
* Someone who "believes in QAnon" believes that QAnon messages really do communicate such information.
* Someone who "does not believe in QAnon" thinks that such messages essentially are a hoax. They are not really from Trump (or someone close to him) and do not really communicate inside information about him.
I doubt that 15% of the population really knows something about QAnon. For sure, Pollitt does not really know something about QAnon.
=======
Keep in mind that the QAnon messages are cryptic. They are like messages from the Delphic Oracle. They are ambiguous and mysterious. That is much of the fun of studying and discussing them.
========
Some QAnon messages indicate that the Trump Administration was investigating pedophile rings and intended to arrest many participants.
Is that "a conspiracy theory"?
Of course, the Trump Administration -- just like other Presidential administrations -- investigates pedophile rings and intends to arrest many participants. For sure, the Biden Administration is doing such investigations every day, right now.
========
When I myself was studying QAnon, I deduced that QAnon was the President's son, Eric Trump.
So, for example, Eric Trump posts a cryptic message suggesting that his father's administration is investigating pedophile rings and intends to arrest many participants. I imagine that Eric heard his father, the President, say something along those lines. And so, Eric spent some of his own time and effort to communicate that idea to the public by means of his QAnon hobby.
So, when I say I "believe in QAnon", I believe that Eric Trump posts those cryptic messages in order to communicate to the public his own understanding of his father's thinking. For example, his father thinks it's important to investigate pedophile rings and to arrest many participants.
Other people who "believe in QAnon" might identify another person -- e.g. President Trump or some close associate other than Eric -- as the communicator. In general, though, that is what it means "to believe in QAnon".
======
There are various explanations for the Delphic Oracle. For example, that subterranean gases caused hallucinations in priestesses, who thus were inspired to utter cryptic prophesies.
Suppose that I believe that this explanation is the best explanation. Does that mean that I "believe in the Delphic Oracle"?
The lunatic is in the hall
The lunatics are in my hall
The paper holds their folded faces to the floor
And every day the paper boy brings more
--pink floyd
If, at this point in history, you still are a believer in statism, you're believing in superstition, and are not in a position to mock the beliefs of others.
To answer her question non-ironically:
1. You quit requiring them to attend government schools;
2. You spend your time attempting to understand their perspectives;
3. You take their facts and data and counter them with your facts and data;
4. You understand that you might well be wrong and consider the weaknesses in your perspectives;
5. You understand that some things will remain debatable or unknown and ambiguity must be accepted;
6. You understand that our form of government and economic organization does not require that everyone be rational, know only that which is true, etc. It's the best option so far for dealing with the ambiguity of reality.
You know, just do all those things that you supposedly learned to do while wandering the halls of academe in order to gain that diploma.
Boy, apparently I make a pathetic conservative. I have yet to meet a person in the wild who has so much as uttered the word "QAnon". But according to liberals on the internet, he (she?, it?) is an existential threat to our nation.
The typical QAnon and anti-vaxxer strawmen arguments. Very funny that despite the New York Times to have demonstrated several times to peddle false narratives on both QAnon and anti-vaxxers, as well as Trump and his supporters; that the folks at The Nation still believe in the NYT. What should we do with them? Ignoring them use to be the mantra, but these marxist spent Jan. 6th telling us to trust the voters, and now we have Biden as President.
""What do you do when a big swath of Americans believe things that are demonstrably false...?""
You mean like the fake Russian Hoax???
"What do you do when a big swath of Americans believe things that are demonstrably false"
Get the FBI and the CIA and the MSM and an Independent Counsel to make sure a big swath of Americans keeps believing those things. To its accidental credit, The Nation wasn't into the Russia collusion narrative (too mean toward Russia, too deep-statish).
Hey, Alan the Marxist historian, what do Marxists believe that is demonstrably false? Anything?
Mike Sylwester said… Some QAnon messages indicate that the Trump Administration was investigating pedophile rings and intended to arrest many participants.
Is that "a conspiracy theory"?
That appears to be demonstrably true. At now 66 years old before Trump I knew zero people prosecuted or even arrested for child porn. I’m now up to 3, including my former doctor now in jail with a sentence that exceeds his actuarial lifespan, and 2 Scout leaders that were a father-son combo, that tells me much was wrong in that family, some of which is likely still hidden behind a family wall of silence.
Such prosecutions were way up under Trump. There’d be a new news article almost every week about another one. Haven’t heard of any since Biden took charge. (That last sentence needs a special sarcasm font.)
The number of people worldwide who believe there’s a powerful group of pedophiles at the top of the political food chain is a lot larger than you might think. And the behavior of our so called elites does nothing but cement that view. How many were friends with Jeffrey Epstein? And while not pedophilia behavior- is anyone here willing to state they could leave a woman to drown in a car that they were driving without a valid license not reporting the accident for hours and subsequently spend no time in jail? Only the powerful DemoncRAT party elite can do things like that without dire consequences.
I am interested in Katha Pollitt's
[...]an unhealthy fixation on exaggerated or imaginary dangers to children.
What does she mean here? I've lost my Nation secret decoder ring! I can think of a few possibilities (leaving aside the QAnon bay-eating pedophiles, of course):
(1) Abortion. "Exaggerated" only in the sense that the numbers per year in the US are well down from their over-a-million peak a few decades ago. But not "imaginary," and very significant unless you're in the just-a-blob-of-tissue camp, as of course Pollitt is;
(2) Transgender kids. But is the threat withholding puberty blockers, surgical intervention, and the like from kids whose parents would need to be notified if the school nurse gave them aspirin? Or is the threat supplying these things?
(3) Masking small children. I have seen, as I'm sure many of you have, the viral video of the small child left at daycare who cries and screams and repeatedly pushes his mask up/down/off while the daycare worker thrusts it back and praises other kids who are managing to deal with theirs. Someone says "this is child abuse," and I have to agree.
(4) School COVID procedures more generally. Kids have been locked out of school for better than a year all over the country, and even while (mostly) back are instructed not to interact with one another in any way. They can't play with one another, let alone touch one another. This is a tremendous and pitiful loss. (OK, so I would've been fine; I like being alone, and I have a pair of very attentive biochemistry Ph.D. parents who would teach me -- or give me the resources so I could teach myself -- anything I liked. But I am not the United States.)
(5) CRT, which has gone from "They only teach that to elite 3Ls" to "This is necessary for kindergarten" and "You just want to remove all teaching about racism" in nothing flat. Teaching white primary-school kids that they are of the "oppressor race" and always will be is a horrific thing to do. It's sick.
(6) Encouraging kids, from a very young age, to think of a family with a Mom and Dad in it as not only not the norm, but beneath mention. This has been going on at least since I was in grade school, in the late 70s, but then it was as nothing to what it has become. Every family in a YA novel is (a) single-parent; (b) gay; (c) divorced; (d) contains at least one trans-parent; (e) homeless; (f) foster; (g) biracial; &c. Polyamory isn't in there yet, but I bet in five years it will be. All these situations are real, and most schools contain some examples of each, especially single and/or divorced parents. My high-school-teaching husband has had to deal with all of them. But they are still not the norm, and it's useless to pretend otherwise.
I don't know what other "exaggerated or imaginary dangers to children" Ms. Pollitt sees, but if this list is a fair guess, I beg to differ that this is an "unhealthy fixation."
Saying that you have a "Marxist historian friend" is not going to help your argument much, except of course among other Marxist historians.
No delusions on the left I see.
From Pollitt's article:
According to a PRRI poll last May, 15 percent of Americans believe in QAnon. Yes, one in seven Americans agreed with the statement “The government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child-sex-trafficking operation.”
Hmm.
1: How many years did the FBI cover up for the child-molesting "team doctor" for US Women's Gymnastics?
2: How long was Epstein flying the rich and powerful off to his "pedo island", where they could screw underage girls? how much political, media, and financial power did those people have?
3: How was it that all those "accidents" happened that made it possible for Epstein to "kill himself"?
4:The Obama Admin's immigration policies made it so that if you showed up with a kid in tow at the border, you were let in. Many of those kids were purchased by the "coyotes" in order to take advantage of that deal.
Are you seriously going to try to claim that many of the girls who were used that way, we not sold into prostitution once they had got the people into the US?
Please, remind me once again, why are we supposed to be disdainful of the "Q Annon" crowd?
Compared to the gullible fools who bought the "Trump Russia collusion" hoaxes? Compared to the people who claim that "transmit are real men" and "men can have babies"?
"Are we a nation of lunatics...?... We’re told to trust the voters because ordinary folk know what’s what, but how can you trust the voters if so many of them think their paranoid delusions are reality?...
1. Joe Biden is a rapist.
2. Joe Biden has molested Children in public.
3. Joe Biden has defended his son who is on camera with underage girls.
4. Joe Biden has taken hundreds of millions of dollars from numerous foreign governments.
5. Our Southern Border is completely open and thousands of un-vaccinated people are poring into our country every day.
6. The real enemies are American Citizens who aren't vaccinated.
A reckoning is coming. These degenerate fascist shitheads are completely transparent.
Swath is a great Old English word, right up there with sloth. The sloth made a swath with a scythe.
Unless someone proves me wrong, I'm claiming first use of Huizinga in a comment here.
Not here here, in this comment, but a while back. Homo Ludens and all that.
All the good snark has been snarked here already, so that's all.
demonstrably adverb a word used by Katha Politt meaning something is true or logical because she says its. So there.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all.”
"Marxist historian." Snort. Talk about your oxymorons. The future of an illusion. Christianity has had longer legs than Communism... Are Marxists still claiming that they have discovered the science of history and the science of economics?.....My understanding is that about 3% of the population is gay. I don't know what the percentage is, but I would guess that even less than that are attracted to underage children--exclusive of teenagers. So far as the number of people who wish to have surgery to undergo a sex change, I would guess that that number is not a great many either. I don't know any Q-anon people, but my feeling is that they also are rare birds....I've known some gay people, but I don't have any acquaintance with pedophiles, transgenders, or Q anons. The most contentious issues of our time involve people I've never met or known.
Original Mike said...Boy, apparently I make a pathetic conservative. I have yet to meet a person in the wild who has so much as uttered the word "QAnon".
Same. I have never once heard QAnon introduced into a conversation by a person on the right. I'm not joking when I say that QAnon doesn't exist. It's a left wing bogeyman invented to bash people not on the left.
I don’t trust Pollit to report accurately on anything more than two inches from her cooter. She’s been peering through her pubic hair for five foul decades now.
Plus, they’re Stalinists. Literal Stalinists. Some of the smarter people in The Nation made vague gestures trying to brush him away in the 50’s and then again the 80’s, but they were insincere.
Like Stalinists are wont to be. However, the book she cites has some merits. In the details. It is hilarious for Stalinists to accuse anyone of anything. They’ve had a century to pull their heads out of their asses and haven’t managed it yet.
The author, and the media in general, use Ivermectiin as proof of Qanon, Orange Man Bad, and The Insurecruon in much the same way King Arthur used a person's weight vs a duck as proof of witchcraft. I would suggest the author and other members of the media review the article linked below.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8088823/
https://freebeacon.com/courts/biden-nominee-helped-free-robber-accused-sex-trafficker/
President Joe Biden's nominee to serve as the top federal prosecutor in Maryland helped free a Delaware death row inmate who was subsequently implicated in a sex-trafficking ring and convicted of second degree robbery.
As a lawyer in private practice, Maryland U.S. attorney nominee Erek Barron provided pro bono assistance to Isaiah McCoy, a remarkably successful criminal defendant turned jailhouse lawyer. McCoy avoided a death sentence and federal sex trafficking charges thanks to prosecutorial sloppiness and assistance from lawyers like Barron. McCoy delivered a keynote address at a 2017 American Bar Association awards dinner, where Barron introduced him.
So, could someone please remind me why it is we're supposed to dismiss offhand claims that the top of the gov't is filled with sexual predators?
“So, could someone please remind me why it is we're supposed to dismiss offhand claims that the top of the gov't is filled with sexual predators?”
All you need to do is look at the pictures of Joe Biden nuzzling girls. A lot of girls, of various ages, often, but not always, teenagers. Yes, he is a sexual deviant, and his son, Hunter is worse. They both now have Secret Service protection, so are, essentially, unarrestable. As far as we know though, Hunter hasn’t used them to actually procure his hookers, as Bill Clinton used his security detail when he was Arkansas Gov. The NY Governor was recently forced to resign after dozens of corroborated instances of sexual harassment, including sexual assault, and even rape, surfaced about his exploits. If it had been you or I, we would have faced consequences with the first allegation.
I think that part of the problem is entitlement. There are certain rules that our society lives by, and being able to ignore them is indicia of power, and being able to openly flaunt them, of even more power. Thus, the only people wearing masks at the Emmys, Met, or Pelosi’s vineyard fundraiser were the help. Being able to flaunt power is exhilarating.
“What do you do when a big swath of Americans believe things that are demonstrably false...?"
Go to church and pray for them.
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