Since today is Christmas Eve, yesterday must have been Christmas Adam, right? (First I’ve heard about this.)
NY Times, 22 Dec 2024: Behold! ‘Christmas Adam’ Is Born., subtitled “First there was Christmas Eve … and then a new celebration was created.”
This is how religion works. Similar to the way everyone knows that Jesus was born on December 25th.
Of course I’m sure they would deny this. Passing the truth along to other people, even imposing it on them, isn’t cruel, it’s kind, to their way of thinking. This is what all the missionaries thought, and still think.
NY Times, Opinion by David French, 22 Dec 2024: Why Are So Many Christians So Cruel?
NY Times, Frank Bruni, 19 Dec 2024: What if Trump Doesn’t Need to Keep Any of His Promises?
Short answer: all Trump has to do is tell his fans that he *has* kept his promises, and they’ll believe him. Continue reading
So not only is our incipient administration authoritarian, it’s authoritarian and being run by an oligarch!
NY Times, 19 Dec 2024: Elon Musk Flexes His Political Strength as Government Shutdown Looms, subtitled “The world’s richest man led the charge to kill a bipartisan spending deal, in part by promoting false and misleading claims about it.”
Continue reading
Once again, the drone panic is not about drones.
NY Times, Zeynep Tufekci, 19 Dec 2024: How to Make the Drone Panic So Very Much Worse
The writer begins by recalling a similar panic from decades ago that I only recently heard about.
Continue reading
NY Times, David Wallace-Wells, 18 Dec 2024: Can Anyone Make Sense of Luigi Mangione? Maybe His Favorite Writer. (gift link)
Luigi Mangione of course is the guy implicated in the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO in New York City a few weeks ago. Continue reading
One more piece about the drones, from Vox, which fancies itself a site that “explains” things. (Curiously, it’s filed under “politics.”)
Vox, Li Zhou, 17 Dec 2024: What’s up with all these drone sightings?, subtitled “The 7 biggest questions, answered as best we can.”
First let’s finish the second Robert Reich item we began yesterday. Then the drones.
Robert Reich, 13 Dec 2024: America’s four stories (Part 2)
Continue reading
I’ve been curious, but have never been sufficiently tempted, to watch or listen to right-wing media for any period of time. These two pieces confirm my impression that most of its content is about fear and outrage. Fear of a complex world conservatives don’t understand, outrage that nobody does anything about it. They just want to make it all go away, and presumably are pleased that Trump seems intent on dismantling most of the government, and making all those icky immigrants disappear. (Which of course he won’t be able to do.)
This short AlterNet piece, ‘Alternate reality’: What happened when an NYT reporter immersed himself in far-right media, posted Dec 13, summarizes this much longer NYT piece:
NY Times, Stuart A. Thompson, 13 Dec 2024: I Traded My News Apps for Rumble, the Right-Wing YouTube. Here’s What I Saw.
The writer watched 47 hours of video on Rumble for this article, beginning two weeks after the election
Continue reading
Infrastructure note. I’ve installed an initial set of theme pages under the “NF Reviews” menu item above, which appear as items in a drop down menu. All the titles on the main page are on one (and only one) of the theme pages, though many of them straddle one or more of the nominal ten themes. I’ll figure out some way of cross-referencing them.
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Robert Reich has a couple long posts this week titled “America’s four stories” and how Republicans have done better aligning themselves with them than the Democrats have. Haven’t read them yet. But at a glance I’m fascinated in that the four stories represent a kind of American mythology of how the world is and how Americans are supposed to behave. American behave as if these stories are truths handed down from on high, but of course they’re only *stories*, narratives, derived from the circumstances of where Americans came from and what they did when they got here — and other nations and cultures surely have different stories.
Robert Reich, 12 Dec 2024: America’s four stories (Part 1), subtitled “Trump has offered extreme versions. The Democrats stopped offering them at all.”
