Combat! - Page 42 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Competition for worst Twitter user really heating up

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media December 20, 2016 2 Comments

Senior Newsweek reporter and Shit Account Tourney dark horse Kurt Eichenwald

Christmas is nigh upon us, and that means ~~peace on Earth~~ the year-end scramble to determine who used Twitter worst in 2016. Although the Gawker network was mortally wounded by Hulk Hogan’s libel suit and then sold to Univision, it’s still producing its most valuable product: the annual Worst Tweets list. Some of them do not seem so bad to me, but others suggest the race to the bottom is moving at breakneck speed. For example, there’s this strong entrant in the microgenre of performative wokeness:

That is very woke. Anyone can be sick of male entitlement, but you have to be really sick of male entitlement to recognize it in an alligator attack. And to be so finished with it that the news doesn’t even make you sad? Being sad at the news is what wokeness is all about. What we have here is some kind of wokeness horseshoe, where concern for the injustices afflicting humanity becomes so great that you stop caring about human lives. That is some next-level stuff, but it may meet its match in this:

re: saying trump has a small dick:

1)having a small dick is perfectly fine & not something to shame ppl for

2)shame his character instead

— Sophia Benoit (@1followernodad) November 15, 2016

Okay, yeah, people should not be shamed for having small penises. But if I say Donald Trump is dumb, and you pop up to say that having low intelligence is nothing to be ashamed of, you’re kind of missing the point. Society needs insults. They are by their nature cruel and unfair, but to limit our range of derision to “you have poor character” is to impoverish expression. Maybe it’s worth reducing language to a 1984-style Newspeak to protect guys with small dicks, but I’m not sure. The important thing is that you have established you are kinder than everyone, by closely scrutinizing their behavior.

It’s a real horse race, this list. Fortunately, the mean socialists behind Chapo Trap House have organized the third annual Shit Account Tourney to determine, democratically via brackets, who used Twitter worst this year. Owing to the narcissism of small differences, probably, a lot of their selections come from liberal/woke Twitter, which did seem to get suddenly more grating around the second Wednesday in November. The subtly insufferable Arthur Chu looked like a shoe-in, at first. But now dark horse Kurt Eichenwald seems poised to knock him out of the semifinals, perhaps thanks to this transcendent interview with Tucker Carlson last weekend:

No one is fooled! It’s kind of unfair that this work of public cynicism is propelling him to the top of the SAT, because it didn’t happen on Twitter. But a few days later, Eichenwald announced that he is suing a Twitter user who sent him a seizure-inducing GIF. If you want snarky writers to hate you, sue Twitter users. In a just world, Eichenwald’s bid for the championship will still crash on the libelous rocks of Mike Cernovich. But maybe the contempt we feel for those people who agree with us wrongly will carry the day. Only time will tell!

How white is Richard Spencer, really?

By Dan Brooks in Fascism December 19, 2016 1 Comment

White nationalist Richard Spencer has the erect bearing of a Leghorn.

Richard Spencer strongly identifies as white, like his mother, despite rumors that his father is a tube of chicken semen she accidentally sat on at the fair. Spencer is the president and director of the National Policy Institute, a “racial realist” think tank he founded, and the executive director of Washington Summit Publishers, a publisher he also founded. He is about my age. His professional accomplishments make me wonder why I don’t run a policy institute and a publishing house, but maybe I’m just not as white as he is. It would be scientifically unsound to conclude that, though. We also must control for education. Spencer went from the prestigious St. Mark’s preparatory high school in Texas to the University of Virginia, then immediately to a master’s program at the University of Chicago, followed by two sessions at the Vienna International Summer University and then a PhD program at Duke. Given this trajectory—from prep school to grad school to president of his own think tank—it’s easy to understand why whiteness is so important to Spencer. Getting born to the right parents has been the key to his professional and political life.

Friday links! Billionaires against elitism edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links December 16, 2016 0 Comment

Steven Mnuchin and Mike Meyers at a meeting of the Integrity Club

The 2016 election was about resentment toward economic and political elites. That’s why voters (nearly) picked the billionaire TV personality instead of the hundred-millionaire president’s wife. Now that the electorate has demanded Washington stop rigging the system in favor of rich people and their execrable children, Donald Trump is here to clean things up, along with his children. But he’s also got a posse of rich men. Here’s notorious bro Bernie Sanders with a fun fact:

Incredibly, Trump’s 17 cabinet-level picks have more wealth than one-third of U.S. households combined – 43 million households!

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) December 16, 2016

If you really wanted to make America great again, you could nominate these 17 people to give up their fortunes and double the assets of the working class. How many people would not give one rat’s ass what Rex Tillerson did after he did that? You could give him room and board in the White House and let him live on his salary as Secretary of State. But that would be crazy—better to let him keep his money and also give him global power. Today is Friday, and the CEO of ExxonMobil is going to help a TV billionaire make things right for the little guy. Won’t you strike up The Internationale with me?

Medical marijuana is legal in Montana, but for how long?

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics December 15, 2016 0 Comment

The face of chronic pain

Good news for Montanans with anxiety and subscriptions to Xbox Live: a judge has ruled that medical marijuana providers can start selling to any number of patients immediately. Ballot initiative I-182, which passed in November, was supposed to repeal the three-patient limit that made it impossible to run a dispensary for profit. Unfortunately, a “scrivener’s error” inadvertently delayed repeal until July 2017. Apparently, the authors of the initiative rewrote it at the last minute, changing the section numbers but not changing the part about when which sections took effect.

You don’t see the anti-abortion people making these kinds of mistakes. Anyway, Judge James Reynolds of Helena ruled last week the law’s intent should overrule its letter. He struck down the three-patient limit effective immediately. Doctors in Montana can diagnose patients with chronic pain or PTSD and prescribe legal marijuana, and the market can provide it to them.

It would appear that one of the longest-running controversies in state politics has been settled. The typo that delayed the ballot initiative that repealed the law that worked around the governor’s veto of the repeal of the original ballot initiative that legalized medical marijuana in 2004 has been overruled! When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound like the issue is settled after all. We’re right back where we started, plus PTSD and chronic pain.

When I got to Missoula, dispensaries were everywhere, and so were their products. Between March 2009 and March 2011, the number of medical marijuana cardholders in the state went from 2,000 to 39,000. I talked to electricians who said the greenhouse boom was the best thing that ever happened to their business. Garden suppliers said the same thing. Montana had a growth industry, which is a little like the Cubs having a shot at the World Series.

Enter the party of growth and business. In 2011, Republicans in the state legislature voted to repeal the ballot initiative that legalized medical marijuana—only to be vetoed by then-governor Brian Schweitzer. They passed the three-patient limit for each provider instead, and it worked. No dispensary could stay in business with only three customers. The suit to have that law declared unconstitutional lasted five years—just long enough for November’s ballot initiative, I-182, to repeal the law instead.

It seems this issue has been laid to rest in much the same condition as it arose. A ballot initiative has made medical marijuana legal and done little to limit the number of its patients. We’ve even got a Democratic governor and Republican legislature. Will the opponents of marijuana stop narc-ing out for a minute and leave the voters’ will in force? I hope they do, but I bet they won’t. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. I got up and shoveled four inches of snow this morning, and already my sidewalk is covered again. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links, snowed-in and cozy with nothing to do but type, just like in The Shining.

Clinton took Michigan for granted, non-Russsian source reports

By Dan Brooks in 2016 Election December 14, 2016 0 Comment

If you want to know how the Democratic Party is both not wrong and not likely to win an election ever again, consider this sentence from a recent letter to the Missoula Independent:

Blaming the Democratic Party for the election of Donald Trump excuses the real culprit: the uninformed electorate.

If you programmed a computer to identify Yogi Berra aperçus, this one might fool it. It’s not my fault I lost; they were the ones who didn’t vote for me. Anyway, Beth Taylor Wilson of Missoula is right: on every issue, Hillary compared to Trump as sense compares to nonsense, and the Democratic Party put up a progressive platform this year. They were also the only major party not to nominate a walking personality disorder. And yet they lost. They lost even though the admittedly uninformed electorate did its job and picked Clinton, by a margin of three million votes.

My question for the B.T. Wilsons of the world: How is it the voters’ fault that Hillary lost the electoral college? Perhaps some share of the blame lies with the professionals who spent nearly one billion dollars in donations to get her into office. Like you, I assumed the Democratic Party attracted the canniest politicians in America. Then I read this Politico story about how they campaigned in Michigan. Here’s a morsel:

The only metric that people involved in the operations say they ever heard headquarters interested in was how many volunteer shifts had been signed up — though the volunteers were never given the now-standard handheld devices to input the responses they got in the field, and Brooklyn mandated that they not worry about data entry. Existing packets with notes from the volunteers, including highlighting how much Trump inclination there was among some of the white male union members the Clinton campaign was sure would be with her, were tossed in the garbage.

I don’t want to be a negative Nancy Pelosi, but this is the second time Clinton has blown a sure thing. Sure, it’s mostly Russia’s fault. But sometimes I wonder whether Democrats are overestimating how many people are still with them. They might even be taking some of their constituents for granted. That’s easy to do when the Republican Party has gone berserk and nominated a Batman villain for president. Only an idiot would vote for that, obviously. It was so obvious that here we are, now, a nation of idiots without even a smart lady to lead us.

“The voters were too dumb to pick Clinton” might be true. It sure looks that way from a certain perspective. But if that is your perspective, “it’s the voters’ fault” is a poisonous idea. If you believe electing Trump was a mistake, as I do, then you have to consider how the Democratic Party allowed that to happen given the electorate we have. Democracy means the customer is always right.