I’ve always thought that fundamentalists support Trump because they’re idiots who choose to believe he repented from his philandering, lying and other sins. Or as a calculation – Trump himself is an unrepentant sinner, but he appoints conservative judges and supports conservative policies.
Here’s an alternate theory – Trump’s fundie supporters see him as being just like them.
Maybe the administration would take a bit more care with the coronavirus pandemic if it weren’t loaded with folks who are looking forward to the end of the world…
Trump gets these people and their brutal, zero-sum view of the world — and vice-versa. For starters, the universe is divided neatly into friends, who must constantly prove they’re really friends, and mortal enemies, who must be trampled. Also, of course, the truth that he knows, like the truth they know, is the only truth, even if it’s often subject to revision. And just as the world is out to get them, it’s out to get him. What’s often painted as a marriage of convenience between Trump and the religious right is far closer to a pure love match. When Pence fixes those doe eyes upon his president, he isn’t just kissing up; he means it."
These fundies believe the end times are here, the Rapture is coming, and any day now they’ll be transported bodily to heaven.
… before things start to get really ugly on the earth, with God-sent wars and plagues far worse than COVID-19, they’ll be wafted up to heaven en masse, to live in eternal peace, bliss, and moral superiority while everyone else — including lesser Christians — suffers years’ worth of unspeakably gruesome torments prior to the final, earth-destroying battle between Warrior Jesus and Satan at Armageddon, and the Final Judgment in which Jews and others who refuse to convert are condemned to eternal torture in hell."
Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo really believe in this toxic bullshit. Or they claim to, which is the same from a policy and political perspective. Trump probably does too – this worldview casts him as literally having been chosen by God.
This does not look comfortable to me but Minnie seems to love it. I think it’s because the concrete is absorbs the sun. I patted her two minutes later; she was a very warm dog. 📷
Minnie is back to herself, energetic and cheerful. This morning when she came in she was very excited, and I sat on the daybed with her for a little while and petted and praised her. Much of the time she appears to be walking normally; you have to look closely to see she’d favoring the injured leg. I am optimistic she will not need the surgery and soon she’ll be back to where she was before, or very close, and I’ll be able to take her on our regular, long, 3-mile walks. Although I’m enjoying them alone; without her I can do the walk in 100 minutes or so on good days.
Minnie gobbles treats and cheese and rotisserie chicken with gusto, but turns away from her regular kibble and canned food. She doesn’t even eat peanut butter, which she previously jumped for joy over. She is barely eating since Wednesday. I talked with the vet about Minnie not eating her kibble and canned food, and also got comments on Reddit and Facebook. My conclusion is that Minnie is playing mindgames with me, as she did when she was a puppy, and holding out for better food. So from now on I’m a tough guy; we are back to the normal routine, modified for current circumstances: Glucosamine treats and a cheese ball containing her anti-inflammatory pill in the morning, and kibble in the morning and evening. If she doesn’t eat the kibble, she doesn’t eat. We’ll give that a couple of days and see how it goes. 📓
We watched episode one of “World on Fire,” a big-budget British miniseries about England during World War II, focused, so far as I can see, entirely on regular people, not great generals or statesmen, drawn from all social classes.
Two cast members I recognize: Sean Bean is a shell-shocked World War I veteran, father of a brave young woman and an insolent, obnoxious teen-age boy. It’s a very different role from the last thing we saw him in, the swashbuckling Richard Sharpe adventure stories, set in the Napoleonic Wars 200 years ago, that aired mainly in the 1990s, with two sequels in the mid-2000s. Bean is also famous as Eddard Stark on Game of Thrones, and for a role in the Lord of the Rings movies. We only saw the first LoTR movie and I, at least, was so bored by that that I didn’t bother with any of the others and have nearly forgotten it. This is a very different role than I’ve ever seen Bean in; he’s previously always seemed to be some variation of the dashing warrior, sometimes a hero, sometimes a villain but still basically the same guy. In this he’s a working-class father, psychologically scarred by his own war experience, and now a committed pacifist. He moves stiffly and his clothes are cheap but neat, fitting my image of a certain type of respectable working class British man. And yet in his own way he’s as strong and courageous as Richard Sharpe or Eddard Stark.
The other actor I recognize is Helen Hunt, playing an American journalist in Berlin and Poland as the Nazis begin their march across Europe. The series is set in 1939; HItler is rolling into Poland and still proclaiming that he is only interested in peace; Helen Hunt’s character is a radio journalist, trying to warn the world that Hitler is lying. She’s strong and tough as nails. Also a different role for Hunt than I’ve seen her in; she was a movie and TV star in the 90s, in “Twister,” “As Good as It Gets,” “Mad About You,” and a flawed but interesting movie called “Pay it Forward.” She was gorgeous, and could do sexy and also smart and she was a good actress too. The most recent thing I can remember seeing her in was the HBO miniseries “Empire Falls” in 2005, where she was still recognizably the same actress she was earlier in her career. I loved “Mad About You” and have been bummed that the new miniseries is only available to Spectrum cable subscribers – I’d gladly have paid for it on Apple TV, Amazon Prime or whatever, or even signed up for a new subscription service for the duration, but Spectrum is not available where we are and anyway I will not go through the hassle of switching Internet providers just to watch ONE TV series.
In “World on Fire,” Helen Hunt plays a woman who would have been described at that time as “handsome,” rather than beautiful or sexy. It’s a more limited performance than Bean’s, with a narrower range and more conventional, but Hunt is still very good. Her character is tough, brave and smart, the very ideal of what a journalist of any gender should be.
The series is DARK. I went into it with some vague idea that it might be a period piece like “Downton Abbey,” a fun melodrama that would have some sad moments but that would remain safely inside the TV. But “World on Fire” is, at least so far, a bleak and scary story. The Nazis were some of the biggest monsters history has produced, and in 1939-40 they appeared to be an unstoppable force, rolling effortlessly over Europe and leaving a trail of dead and broken bodies behind them. It must have been a terrifying time to be alive, and the series captures that perfectly.
Although it also occurs to me that the Nazis' sin was that they treated Europe the way that Europe and America treated Africa and Asia. So maybe the Nazis were not so uniquea after all.
I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of this one.
“Little Fuzzy” (both the 1962 version by H. Beam Piper and Scalzi’s version in 2010) is the story about a prospector on another planet who finds a race of cute, furry childlike aliens (I think the Ewoks in Star Wars were lifted from Piper’s Fuzzies). The prospector takes it on himself to fight a legal battle to get the Fuzzies declared as people – the equivalent of humans – with all the rights attached thereto. Both the Scalzi and Piper novels are terrific, although the Piper, at least, is problematic because it echoes the White Man’s Burden justification for racism, which lives on in American exceptionalism today, the premise that other races are like children and white people are like their parents, with a responsibility to guide those childlike brown-skinned people into adulthood. Which is a load of crap.
Still, I re-read the Piper Little Fuzzy relatively recently, and I quite enjoyed it; the aliens in that novel really ARE like children. And the Scalzi novel was very good too.
One of my three unpublished novels is a reboot, in its own way, of one of my favorite series of novels, the Cities in Flight series by James Blish. Written in the 1940s-50s, Blish’s premise is the invention in the early 21st Century of a device called a “spindizzy,” which combines a faster-than-light starship drive, artificial gravity, and a force field that can hold in air and keep out radiation. Whole cities on Earth are put in spindizzy globes and flung into space; “gone Okie,” in the jargon of the stories. The hero of the series is John Amalfi, Mayor of New York, New York, which is now a trading ship flying between the stars, with a bridge on top of the Empire State Building. Like all the Okie citizens, Amalfi has had immortality treatments, so he’s hundreds of years old. The series is great fun! But also badly dated, and not one I’d necessarily recommend to new readers today.
In my reboot of the series, I did not make the setting New York or any terrestrial city, both for copyright purposes and because then I’d have to do research and stuff. Instead, I made up a city, Nighthawk, built into an asteroid and converted into a starship. In my story, Nighthawk has fallen on hard times, trapped in orbit around a planet, and the hero is somebody from the bowels of the city, an honest street cop on a corrupt force. I had fun writing it.
No, the post office isn’t failing because Amazon is ripping it off, which is Trump’s stupid theory. People are just sending less First Class mail, and Congress won’t let The USPS go into other lines of business, such as banking.
Yglesias is skeptical that six-day-a-week delivery needs saving.
But given USPS’s popularity with the public, it’s also not really clear why spending money on this would be a big problem other than a principled opposition to having the government do anything at all.
In the immediate circumstances of a collapsing national economy that coincides with a census, a huge surge in people’s dependence on delivery services, and the potential need to convert the entire fall election to vote-by-mail, laying off tons of postal workers seems obviously unhelpful. But unless Congress can reach some sort of deal, that’s the situation they’ll be facing by late summer.
As others have pointed out, having a service that can visit every home and business in America in a single day seems like an incredibly useful thing potentially. One that should not be dismantled. Not useful every day, but useful during an emergency. Such as a pandemic.
Additionally, as Cory Doctorow pointed out earlier today, the postal service disproportionately benefits rural people and veterans, two groups that Republicans are popular with. It continually amazes me how the Republicans continue to shit on their supporters, and the supporters just ask for more.
100-year-old Bell Telephone ad; restaurant sleepover of World War II; rare 17th Century Parisian apartment for holiday rental (gorgeous!); how you get your hair done in the 1920s for a permanent wave; Harlem fashion boutique (1968) credited with popularizing Afrocentric style for the next decade; mini-dressed hostesses working for British Rail in 1972.
Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic.net
Trump plans to murder the US Postal Service, in violation of the US Constitution.
The USPS is about to declare bankruptcy. It’s at the center of the longstanding plans for disaster recover and has been since the Cold War. It’s the only institution that could (for example) deliver covid meds to every home in America in one day.
pluralistic.net/2020/03/2…
But Congress has decided not to bail out the postal service, despite Art 1, Sec 8 of the US Constitution: “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.
Minnie is hopping around on three legs and occasionally using the injured one, which suggests it is healing. She’s got her old personality back – active, curious and playful. She even tried chasing one of the cats yesterday.
However, she won’t eat her regular kibble or canned food. We’ve been giving her treats, a little cheese and a lot of rotisserie chicken. She loves that rotisserie chicken.
I put down a bowl of kibble for her to eat a few minutes ago.
Monotony, frustration over having to wear a mask, being unable to take the dog to the park, or go anywhere around people. And I have so many opinions!
But I am also mindful that there are people out their dying in the most miserable conditions, exposing themselves to contagion to stock supermarket shelves, and medical personnel working 20 hour days without adequate protection. So yeah my problems, while large to me, are small.
For 40 years, journalists chronicled the eccentric royal family of Oudh, deposed aristocrats who lived in a ruined palace in the Indian capital. It was a tragic, astonishing story. But was it true?
Ellen Barry unravels the mystery at the New York Times
James Nicoll reviews Isaac Asimov’s 1950s time-travel novel, “The End of Eternity,” and finds it still holds up.
Interestingly, Nicoll notes, the premise of Eternity is similar to the Foundation series — a secret cabal manipulating human history — but this novel takes the story in the opposite direction.
Earlier I said the premise of Foundation is sinister when you think about it: The two forms of government we see are empire and rule by a secret, unaccountable conspiracy of technocrats. Both of these states are presented as utopian, when in reality the first has been shown to be pretty awful, and the second looks a lot like Communism, which has not proven to be swell either.
Nonetheless, I cut Asimov slack. He was a VERY young man when he initially wrote Foundation, reading headlines about the Nazis seemingly unstoppably conquering the world and wanted assurance that everything was going to be OK. Asimov’s fictional science of psychohistory could have provided that assurance, had it existed. That observation is not original to me; Alec Nevala Lee said it in his terrific history of science fiction, “Astounding.”
I think it’s also true that in both the Foundation series and later in End of Eternity, Asimov was exploring the desire to be assured that the grownups are in charge of the world, as presidents and prime ministers and heads of billion-dollar companies and vast government bureaucracies, and that these grownups had matters under control. The 21-year-old Asimov who wrote Foundation had very diffferent ideas about that premise than the 34-year-old who wrote The End of Eternity.
Asimov wrote more Foundation stories in the 1980s. By that time he was in his 60s, written hundreds of books, including bestsellers. He appeared many times on national TV and had been published in the New York Times. He was an American public intellectual, and was himself one of the supposed grownups running the world. He had a different perspective on those issues once again.
We had the second seder at our house, with upwards of 20 aunts, uncles and cousins swarming over the place. Our cousins Janet and Barry even brought their dog; Mom couldn’t stand dogs but she made an exception for Dusty.
Dusty is still one of my alltime favorite dogs, although I believe Janet and Barry prefer Custer, their next dog. And now that I think of it, Custer is a weird name for a dog.
