Thoughts

Postmodern Marxian Reality 12/07/2017

We have entered a postmodern nightmare, lies have become “refreshing”, untruths are not to be taken “literally”, “even if it’s true it’s not”, “there’s no such thing” as facts, although, there are “alternative facts”. These are all statements made by followers of Trump, by his apologists. Ironically it is the Right, the reactionaries who have wrapped themselves around the warm comforting arms of Relativism, the relativism they once derided and accused the academic Left of wallowing in. We have entered the world of Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum, the world of reality TV, of a game show host president, of WWE style campaign rallies, an alternate reality of alternative facts, where the simulation is not just a copy of the real, it has become the real. We have entered a Marxian reality, not of Karl, but of Groucho.

That “Woke” Font Calibri 05/16/2026

Marco Rubio recently issued a memo titled “Return to Tradition: Times New Roman 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper” requiring all State Department documents to stop using that “woke” font Calibri that he attributed to “misguided diversity, equity and inclusion policies” and return to the “cohesion, professionalism and formality” of Times New Roman. Putting aside the reactionary philistinism of the memo to switch back to using Times New Roman why use Times New Roman at all? Why not use a more appropriate font like Garamond or Century Schoolbook, or why not Minion which has similar metrics to Times?

Fruit Flies? 06/21/2025

There has been a long and sordid history of reactionaries believing scientific research, even basic research to be elitist, bookish, academic, even frivolous, notice the gleeful disdain with which Palin pronounces “Fruit fly research in Paris, France”. The right-wing reactionaries believe scientific research to be some kind of leftist conspiracy; they fear that it will expose a truth that doesn’t conform to their worldview. Over a century ago William Jennings Bryan realized this dilemma, he understood that the Theory of Evolution is a refutation of the Creation Story, “The contest between evolution and Christianity is a duel to the death. If evolution wins, Christianity goes.”

The False Consciousness of AI 02/12/2025

Beware of deepfakes, and be aware of confirmation bias.

“The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.” Noam Chomsky, The False Promise of ChatGPT

The example I like to use is that of Jackson Pollock. A generative AI program can ‘learn’ how to reproduce Pollock, it can mimic his drip technic and even his color schemes, but can it think of the idea, can it imagine the technic of dripping paint onto a canvas spread on the floor. AI can simulate a Pollock but can it envision a Pollock, or even imagine a Pollock without a Pollock already existing?

Real Americans 06/04/2023

“This is our country not theirs. We are the real Americans” stated a Trump 2020 campaign newsletter [the underline is how it appeared in the newsletter]. The same sentiment was echoed by the Tea Party after the election of Obama with the refain “We want our country back”, i.e. a country without an ‘illegitimate’, Kenyan born, Black president. After Clinton was elected president some Reagan apparatchik claimed that Clinton was an illegitimate president because “the presidency belongs to us”, namely, to us Republicans. “They” believe this is their country, that they are the “real Americans”, therefore they are entitled to control it. This is their justification, their rationale for…

gerrymandering:: I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country. -North Carolina Rep. David Lewis, who oversaw the drawing of the state’s gerrymandered maps
voter supression laws:: If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula we would have a clear majority, we would have all five constitutional officers and we would probably have many more seats in the Legislature. -Robin Vos, Republican Speaker of Wisconsin Statehouse
election denialism:: God Bless President Trump. Real America knows this is all a sham. -Jim Jordan (R-Ohio)

Democrats and the liberal media do a disservice to this reality by claiming that voter suppression is due to racism, not that there isn’t an underlying element of racism, but the primary motivation is the suppression of the Democratic vote.

The Bible on Abortion 06/25/2022

A word to all who believe that the Bible is “the word of God”, there is no prohibition against abortion in the Bible, the Bible says absolutely nothing about abortion, not one word, so, if the Bible is the word of God, then did he just forget? Anti-abortionists claim that the sixth commandment, fifth if you’re Catholic, covers abortion but that’s “begging the question,” and there are hundreds of enumerated prohibitions applied to the other commandments, yet no mention of abortion, and most importantly, that is a theological rationale to what is a secular matter. Anti-abortionism is patriarchy couched in religious gibberish. It’s not about banning abortion per se, it’s about controlling a woman’s reproductive power, regardless of the stated reasoning.

The Updated “Great Replacement” Theory 05/19/2022

Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham et al. have been peddling a sanitized, less antisemitic version of the “great replacement” theory which substitutes Democrats for Jews. This replacement theory claims that Democrats, the “Radical Left,” the godless, anti-family, demonic pedophiles, want to replace white Christian Americans with “more obedient,” less law-abiding immigrants who will vote Democratic. They claim that immigration reform, tied to voting reform, is a “power grab” orchestrated by the Democratic Party to manufacture more Democratic voters.

“Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13 . They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!” Donald J. Trump, Twitter, Jun 19, 2018

“The reason that the Democrats have a special interest in the illegals is they want to sort of transform the demographics of America, even though illegals can’t vote, over time, illegals have children, their children are American citizens, they grow up, they can vote.” Dinesh D’Souza, The Ingraham Angle, May 17, 2019

“The Democrats are attempting to pack the electorate itself by importing tens of millions of new voters. They are doing this for one reason, to ensure they have complete control of the United States.” Tucker Carlson, April 8, 2021

“Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION…. Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” Elise Stefanik, Facebook Sept. 2021

Buffalo Christofascist terrorist attack 05/17/2022

A crucial factor of the Buffalo Christofascist terrorist attack that is not being addressed, by the politicians or by the media, is the anti-leftist foundation behind the attack. All of the terrorists’ “manifestos”, from Christchurch to El Paso to Buffalo cite Anders Behring Breivik as an inspiration for their attack. Breivik is the Norwegian anti-leftist, anti-socialist, anti-feminist terrorist who massacred 77 of his white Norwegian countryman at a Workers’ Youth League summer camp in 2011. So, why did he kill 77 white, mostly teenage, Norwegians… because they were socialists, he targeted white teenage socialists. This is not meant to ignore or belittle the racial, ethnic, and antisemitic motivation of the Buffalo, Christchurch, El Paso, and Tree of Life Synagogue terrorists but it is easier and less complicated for the media to explain away these mass shootings as racially motivated then to explain, or deal with the more complex foundational anti-leftist motivation behind right-wing terrorist attacks.

The Trumpists have become Lysenkoists 01/12/2022

The Trumpists have become Lysenkoists, ideology has trumped science. How else does one explain their callousness towards watching their own people die of COVID, Stalin would be proud. They deny science not because they’re anti-science per se, they deny the science that doesn’t conform to their wordlview, their regressive reactionary wordlview.

Facebook’s Audience 11/30/2021

The press, the pundits, and I suspect some of you reading this blame Facebook for all the fake news, the conspiracy theories, the disinformation, the “alternative facts”. Facebook certainly has a lot to answer for, their recommendation algorithms are designed to lead the unsuspecting down a path of ever increasing fear and rage, to entice them into unleashing their “monsters from the Id”. But none of those falsehoods, those lies would work if they didn’t have a willing, gullible, persuadable audience, an audience that wants, that needs their ideologically motivated worldview reaffirmed. This is how propaganda works, it relies on people being undiscerning, on them being intellectually lazy, on them being gullible simpleminded ignoramuses.

The Origin of Black Lives Matter 04/30/2019

With all the misinformation, misunderstanding, and histrionics going on about “Black Lives Matter” I thought everybody should be clear as to the origins of the term. It comes from a Facebook post written by Alicia Garza on the day in 2013 that George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin, “I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter…” Two of her friends, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, later came up with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter telling their friend that Black lives do matter, and the Right, as is their wont, misinterpret it as meaning only Black lives matter.

The Myth of a Liberal Hollywood 12/12/2018

Hollywood sells bourgeois ideology and markets capitalist hegemony. This notion of a liberal Hollywood is a myth created by conservative reactionaries in order to make them seem the victim of what they imagine as a vast “Radical Left” conspiracy to undermine their dearly held reactionary, philistine believes. They’re angry over what they perceive as liberal control of Hollywood, of academia, of the media, of the “deep state”. They’re angry because they have lost the culture wars and all they have to show for it are such cultural luminaries as Kid Rock and Scott “Chachi” Baio, oh ya, and The Piano Guys. All art is political, whether overt or not, knowingly or unknowingly. What one chooses to “express” and how one chooses to “express” it is an expression of one’s worldview, one’s ideology. Robert Zemeckis’, the most insidiously reactionary director in Hollywood, Forrest Gump is a morality play about ’50s American ‘values’, when America was great, Forrest versus the ’60s Hippie Jenny who, even though she eventually sees the error of her ways and repents, she ultimately pays the price of her unwholesome un-American lifestyle. And then there’s Back to the Future, back to 1950s America yet again, where at the end an ’80s suburban White boy bestows upon Chuck Berry a “new sound”, albeit a somewhat sanitized Black R&B guitar riff.

The “Democrat Party” Epithet 04/22/2018

The matter of the “Democrat Party” epithet which goes back to Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, was resurrected by Newt Gingrich in the 1980s, and which was then picked up in the 90s by such reactionary luminaries as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Then in 2017, after becoming president, Trump started using it, I’m assuming he was to told by one one of his toadies that it was an insult, an “own the Libs” thing, he then gleefully started using it every chance he got. Although the epithet had been around long before Trump it wasn’t until Trump started using it that it became de rigueur amongst the faithful. And the press, out of ignorance or just plain laziness, just quotes them with no correcting or without any acknowledgment of the epithet’s history or meaning. I’m not objecting to the term’s use for any partisan pro-Democratic reason, quite the opposite, the objection is to its historically sordid use by the anti-democratic reactionaries.

Liberal Science 03/07/2017

For years I’ve wondered, when did science become a “liberal” thing, and then it dawned on me, it always has been.

“The Empress” Melania 06/14/2016

Melania is more like her husband then the media or the fashionistas wish to portray her, she is just as conniving and duplicitous and just as petty and vindictive as her husband. Like her husband she is a birther. On the Joy Behar Show of April 20, 2011 Melania stated that “It’s not only Donald who wants to see Obama’s birth certificate, it’s American people who voted for him and who didn’t vote for him. They want to see that.” Behar then pointed out that the birth certificate had already been on display on the internet to which Melania responded “We feel it’s different than birth certificate.” Being as self-centered as her husband she assumes that because she questions whether Obama was born in Hawaii then all ‘American people’ must question whether he was born in Hawaii. Like her husband she monetized her position as First Lady, making at least $100,000 and by some estimates up to one million dollars from Getty Images royalties — she made a deal with Getty Images, unbeknownst to the press, that she would receive royalties for so-called White House “family photos”. But by far the most despicable, and most like her husband, thing she has done is to condone the right-wing’s anti-Semitic, misogynistic attacks on journalist Julia Ioffe for writing a less then bowing-to “The Empress” article about her. Julia Ioffe (Yuliya Ioffea Russian born, Princeton grad, who left the Soviet Union with her parent when she was very young in order to escape the rampant rise of antisemitism) interviewed Melania for GQ Magazine in 2016. After a Facebook post by Melania saying that the article was “yet another example of the dishonest media and their disingenuous reporting” Ioffe “received a torrent of antisemitic, vitriolic and threatening messages from Trump supporters.” (quoted from Haaretz) “I was getting some pretty vile images in my email and Twitter feed. You know, caricatures of Jews being shot, execution-style; a Back To The Future poster re-done as Back To The Oven; suggesting I would look good on a lampshade.” — as an example here is a headline from the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer “Empress Melania Attacked by Filthy Russian Kike Julia Ioffe in GQ!” Referring to her as Empress is common amongst the faithful. When told about the harassment of Ioffe, Melania’s response was “She provoked them.” thus placing the blame for the attacks of Ioffe on Ioffe herself, how very Trumpian of her. Interestingly the American media did cover the attacks on Ioffe but, as far as I am aware of, did not say a word about Melania’s response to those attacks, only Haaretz (an Israeli magazine) covered her response. And let us not forget that she is also a plagiarist, having plagiarized Michelle Obama and then, like her husband, she placed the blame not on herself but on someone else, her speechwriter. Plus her “Be Best” is an appropriation, a one upmanship, of Michelle Obama’s “Be Better”

Global Warming Denialism 05/15/2016

Why has denialism become an article of faith for conservatives, for Republicans, for the Right? What is it that makes them refuse to accept, to even willfully ignore, the overwhelming scientific evidence? Just as the Theory of Evolution is a refutation of the Biblical creation (“The contest between evolution and Christianity is a duel to the death. If evolution wins, Christianity goes.” William Jennings Bryan), man-made global warming is a refutation of the “all knowing” Capitalist markets. I realize that the basis for denialism is multifaceted involving Biblical Dominion (Genesis 1:26-28) and capital accumulation (market competition), but there is a more foundational, more existential factor that motivates this reactionary conspiracy-theory laden denialism. And that is, if the Capitalist marketplace works as its disciples say it does then it would have corrected for the threat on its own. So, to accept that Capitalism is destroying the planet one has to acknowledge that capitalist markets do not self-regulate, that the imagined “invisible hand” does not guide the markets for the benefit of society.

Ivanka, Her Father in a Shift Dress 11/16/2015

Ivanka ain’t no innocent, she outright lied about Clinton during the election campaign when she announced her half-assed maternity leave proposal. She claimed that Hillary did not have a maternity leave plan when in actuality Hillary did have one, and had had one for over a year before Ivanka’s lie, it was on Hillary’s website for all to see, if Ivanka hadn’t been too lazy to take the time to look she would have seen as well, or perhaps she was being willfully ignorant. And at the time of her announcement The Trump Organization did not offer paid, or even unpaid maternity leave. And she ain’t no designer either, her company is basically a knockoff company producing cheap copies of designer brand fashions. She is currently being sued by the Italian shoe designer Aquazzura for stealing designs. There are a bunch of designs that she has stolen from them but the Wild Thing strappy heel shoe is the most notorious — Notice that the Aquazzura shoe has a sleeker curve, a more refined ankle strap, and the pompom on the toe strap is not a jumbled mess as the one on Ivanka’s Hettie shoe. The overall design of the Aquazzura shoe is more elegant than Ivanka’s clunky and inelegant version. .

Attribution: “Ivanka Is Just Donald Trump in a Shift Dress” Erin Gloria Ryan Sep. 27, 2017

Abortion and Capitalism 07/27/2015

Why did the anti-contraceptive, anti-abortion movement suddenly crop up in the 19th century? Could it have been the sudden need for factory workers, the sudden need for a cheap and plentiful labor force?

Why Marx? 04/26/2015

Philosophies fall into either one of two basic worldviews, Idealism or Materialism. Idealism holds that reality is constructed by the mind independent of a material reality, that only mind (and/or spirit) is real. Materialism states that there is a material/physical world that is independent of the mind, and that it is knowable through experience and observation. Marx asserts that yes, there is a knowable material reality, but that reality is mediated by an ideologically constructed, and socially and culturally produced, ‘reality’.

Evolution and Belief 09/23/2011

Asking the question “do you believe in the Theory of Evolution?” is like asking if you believe in the Theory of Gravity. Belief has nothing to do with it, belief is having faith that something is true which is not susceptible to rigorous proof. A scientific theory is a set of tested propositions that can be used to explain and predict a class of phenomena.

Unseasonably Cold 07/24/2011

Isn’t it interesting that when it’s unseasonably cold all you hear from the reactionary propaganda machine (Fox News, Rush Limbaugh et al) is that that is somehow proof that global warming doesn’t exists, but when it’s unseasonably hot you don’t hear a peep from them?