Tag Archives: Strange Sound

Political Rants

Examining the Three Crises Three

I’m guessing none of you noticed, but I returned to podcasting a week or so ago. It was a slight return, a special episode of Strange Sound – special in the sense that there was no music and no editing to speak of. We had just passed the anniversary of January 6, and I had a bee in my bonnet. Either that or a rat up my ass. Not really sure which.

Anyway, in this special episode I expounded on what I call the Three Crises Three. It’s a bit like the political version of the Three Mustaphas Three, except less funny and no music whatsoever. My main point was that we as a society are facing three very serious crises simultaneously – crises that fuel one another in a toxic feedback loop of destruction. And hell, that can ruin your whole day.

What are these Three Crises Three? Let us discuss them one by one:

Crisis One: The Coup

Though it sounds cliche to say so, we experiencing a crisis of democracy in the sense that our republican constitutional government is under serious threat. Now, I know our system is deeply flawed. The alternative, however, is not something better – it’s autocracy. The right is openly talking about this as a real possibility.

But they are doing more than talking. Last year they identified all of the trigger points in our electoral system (and there are many). This year and every year moving forward, they’re going to apply pressure at those points. They had a plan and it failed. But failed plans are good practice. Clearly, the Autocratic Party (formerly the Republican Party) is building toward a second attempt, starting with the election this fall.

Crisis Two: Trumpatosis

Yes, I call COVID-19 Trumpatosis … because he deserves it. This pandemic is literally killing us by the hundreds of thousands. It is also sickening millions more and rending the social fabric of our nation, making organizing and mutual aid much, much more difficult. The Democrats are proving themselves incompetent at coping with this crisis, failing to take the steps necessary to end it.

On the other hand, the Autocratic Party is the party of denial. They have been from the very beginning. They are building successful political careers on the basis of massive failure and negligence in their response to COVID. What’s more, the Autocrats will be hard to beat if progressive Democrats can’t engage in aggressive GOTV efforts in the upcoming elections. Which means no end in sight for this crisis.

Crisis Three: The Climate Catastrophe

This is the ticking time bomb. The climate crisis underscores the fact that our old model of politics is no good anymore. It the Autocrats take power, they will stop even the most flimsy action on climate change. They will further ramp up oil and gas extraction and restart Keystone XL and other fossil fuel infrastructure investments. We can’t afford that detour. In any previous decade, diversions of this kind could be endured, but now – with less than ten years left to address this crisis – it’s simply unacceptable.

I know that the left in America hates electoralism. They have good reason. But we simply need to do this thing. We need to turn back the political cycle this fall and send more progressives to Washington. It may not be sufficient to address these crises, but it is none the less necessary.

For more on this, give the current episode of Strange Sound a listen.

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

The case for vaccinating everybody.

Here we go again. Cases are rising, as are hospitalizations and deaths. This COVID-19 catastrophe – the Trump Plague, as I like to call it – is not going away anytime soon.

Why the hell is this happening? I think we all know the answer to that. From the beginning, Trump and his allies played down the seriousness of this illness. The Republican Party and the right more generally have made a political football out of vaccination and wearing PPE. As a result, only a little more than half of Americans are fully vaccinated.

The miracle that wasn’t

Cast your mind back to fourteen months ago. Everything shut down, people were panic-buying toilet paper, etc. – you remember the drill. If someone had told you then that there would be not one, not two, but three highly effective vaccines available within a year, would you have believed it? Perhaps. But what if they had told you that many millions of Americans would refuse to take it? I, myself, would have thought that was nuts.

Well, here we are. We literally have the means to end this pandemic, and we’re choosing not to do it. And mind you, this criticism goes beyond the reluctance of my fellow Americans to take the jab. There’s a whole world out there begging for these shots. It is well within our means to manufacture and distribute enough shots to save millions of lives in Asia, Africa, South America, etc. It is also well within the scope of what can reasonably be defined as our “national interest” to do so. But we’re not. What. The. Fuck.

The hard problem

Our COVID vaccine standoff reminds me of the politics around climate change. The right keeps working to force the issue into a cultural context. In their view, your position on the salient question becomes a marker for the type of American you are. So if you encourage people to get the COVID shot – literally, to save the nation from this plague – you’re a “woke” liberal forcing your views on others and squelching their freedom of speech/expression/choice.

The same dynamic is at work with climate change. It doesn’t matter how much evidence there may be of already-occurring global warming. Right-wingers despise the idea of doing anything about it because that’s what the other side wants. Even if the policy would help people on the right, it’s more important to them to “own the libs” than to flourish or even survive.

One way out

I tend to be an optimist. My feeling, generally, is that losing hope is basically surrendering to hopelessness. The only thing we have in our favor is that there are more of us than there are of them. Our only chance is to act boldly, take the initiative, and move forward, even if we have to drag them along with us, kicking and screaming.

With respect to COVID, that means requiring vaccines (or a legitimate exemption) to gain access to a wide range of services (short of essentials like nutrition, housing, etc.). It also means making the necessary investments to quickly implement a robust global vaccination program, so that we can not only save millions of lives but head off these variants.

If people are truly tired of masks and social distancing, that’s what we have to do – get at least 85% fully vaccinated. You can have the thing you want, but you need to do this first. Pretty simple, right? DO IT!

Cuba revisited

Just a brief call back to last week’s column. After posting that piece and its Strange Sound podcast companion episode, I commented on some vaguely related Tweet by Code Pink and incurred the dubious wrath of what I call the Mas Canosa chorus. A crowd of right-wingers from the Cuban exile community basically called me a hater of freedom, etc., because I dared criticize some of their number for yelling “Fuck You” at Code Pink.

I typically don’t engage in pissing wars on Twitter, but I looked into this a bit and it seems that the Cuban exile community has invested in some Twitter bots. Were my digital accusers non-human? Hard to say, though their grade-school level virtue signalling could well have been the product of automation. “If you side with the brutal Cuban dictatorship over the people of Cuba, yearning only for the right to speak freely, then you cannot claim to stand against the powerful,” I was told by someone who supports strangling the Cuban people to death with sanctions. Sure sounds like a bot to me.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Usual Rubbish

Our influencer needs some pruning.

2000 Years to Christmas

Jesus Christmas, is THAT what he’s been doing? Oh, yeah … sorry. I forgot that his pronouns are it, its, and … uh …. it. I mean, ITS pronouns, not his. Sorry, sorry. But …. is that what it’s been doing? Whoa.

Oh, hiya. Glad to see some visitors from the sane side of reality. Here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted squat palace, it’s crazytown USA. Chock full of nuts, you might say. In here, we just page through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or the DSM-5, as they call it) and take turns embodying each entry to its fullest. It’s almost like the authors have been hiding in the walls, watching us through two-way mirrors. (Is that paranoia … ?)

Sure, that’s problematic. But we’ve got other things to occupy our thoughts. Like, for instance, what the hell is that mansized tuber up to now? For years it’s been like … well, like a potted plant, taking up space in the courtyard, hoping for rain. Now, suddenly, tubey (friends call him tubey) has reemerged from seclusion, firing up its social media accounts and firing off posts like a mighty oak dropping acorns. It is a site to behold.

Branching out

Lord knows that tubey has been in one or two scrapes, as any reader of this blog will surely know. But nothing like what it’s likely to run into on social media. For instance, tubey just restarted his Facebook page after a long absence, and already some loser has asked it to admin their page. Imagine the gall! (Some podcast named Strange Sound …. what the hell is that?)

I think he's right, tubey. You have to turn it on first.

Now, typically when you haven’t done a thing in a while, you get less practiced at that thing. That’s just common sense, right? Tubey, however, doesn’t subscribe to the notion of competence, let alone common sense. That’s why he’s strongly considering opening a TikTok account. Or maybe Instagram.

Master of none

There’s such a thing as spreading yourself too thin. And when you are a root vegetable, such a thing can be fatal. Fortunately for tubey, it has us to advise it. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is also happy to pitch in with his suggestions, though they’re a little hard to parse. Marvin has never mastered English … or any other language, come to think of it. Which leaves us to interpreting random squeaks. Don’t try this at home!

Let’s face it – none of us is an expert on social media. Maybe tubey will be the first in Big Green land to make it work. Or maybe he’s just nuts like the rest of us.