December 14, 2022

Is there a vaccine to inoculate America against the smart and sane fascist anti-woke Ron DeSantis?

Is there a vaccine to inoculate America against the smart and sane fascist and anti-woke Ron DeSantis? The hypocritical culture warrior, fascist, and overall P.O.S. just did a 180 on Covid.

By Hal Brown

Archives on Right >

Why I was banned from Daily Kos

Posting now on Mastodon - see right column there

Preface: A big thanks to DonkeyHotey

The caricaturist who goes by the name DonkeyHotey (pronounced Don Quixote) has already provide writers with numerous illustrations for articles about the man who is looking like he will be the GOP candidate to president in 2024.

Click image to enlarge

I have used his caricatures numerous times as have many well known websites. Here's a story about his best 2021 caricatures.

DeSantis is in the upper right corner

Note the illustration he posted on Dec. 11th on Who, What, Why of Trump here.

You can follow DonkeyHotey on the sites below:

flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/
https://whowhatwhy.org/author/donkeyhotey/
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donkeyhotey.com

@DonkeyHotey@mastodon.coffee

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Today's story

Ron DeSantis is Trump without the stupid red MAGA cap to cover up is male pattern baldness. He has full head of hair. He still believes that to make America great it has to go back at least 100 years.

We know DeSantis will take any position, and change any of them, if he thinks it will help him achieve his political ambition to be president. Here's an example from the news today.

This was then: DeSantis recommends getting vaccinated

Today:

Democrats can't do a damn thing about which Republican ends up running. Most of them who I've read or heard believe Trump would be the easier candidate to defeat. They can wish Trump would be the candidate, but the various iterations of the saying "if wishes were fishes..." applies here.

It will be interesting where never-Trump Republicans will come down if the candidate is DeSantis. By now it is a political trope to say that DeSantis is an intelligent and sane version of Trump. He's not about to cozy up to the likes of Ye and Fuentes. He won't tweet barely coherent paranoid rants.

Pundits are not only saying he is more likely to win against Biden or any other Democrat should Biden not run than Trump, but polls support this:

My impression from reading and listening to never-Trump Republicans is that most of them want to see a tradition conservative run rather than someone who is waging culture warfare and wants to be an anti-woke autocrat.

Nicholas Kristof was on Morning Joe this morning discussing his NY Times column from Dec. 10th Trump Struggles but American is Still Feverish.

Excerpt addressing whether the defeat of Trump endorsed and Big Lie supporting Republicans means the fever has finally broken:

But I may be wrong — and I worry that it’s premature to argue that the national fever has broken. We as a nation still face arguably the greatest peril since the end of Reconstruction, for three reasons.
First, remember that this extremism goes beyond Trump and even beyond the United States. Italy has just installed a far-right prime minister whose party has its roots in neo-fascism, a reminder that the fever persists globally.
Second, even when Trump broke bread with Holocaust deniers and then urged a suspension of the Constitution, congressional Republicans mostly looked the other way. When leaders of one of our major political parties struggle to defend the Constitution or condemn neo-Nazis, America still feels feverish.
Third and most fundamentally, our political dysfunction is driven in complex ways by a broader economic and social dysfunction and despair, one that we fail to grapple with effectively.

If DeSantis runs, and wins, I think it will demonstrate that like the chicken pox virus does, it went dormant in the body and then emerged as a horrible case of shingles.

There's a vaccine, Shingrix, to deal with that. It requires two doses several months apart to be effective. If you have had it or know anybody who has, you are well aware of how bad it is.

If we extend this metaphor, and I haven't met many metaphors I'm not willing to extend if they make sense, we can say that America got the first dose of anti-fascist conspiracy theory destroying vaccine to deal with the disease of Trumpism. Now they need the second dose to prevent infection with DeSantisism.

Update:

By every measure, Ron DeSantis’ newest Covid gambit is a tragedy

If Covid-19 were capable of feeling emotion, it’d likely be delighted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' latest public health moves.

Excerpt: Imagine Covid-19, eager to infect as many people as possible, was able to hire its own lobbying team. Then imagine the dangerous contagion’s lobbyists, eager to help their client infect as many people as possible, began pressing politicians on what to say and do with regard to public health policy.
In this fanciful hypothetical, we could probably imagine what the politicians would be told to say and do by Covid’s lobbyists. Officials would be encouraged to, among other things, question the efficacy of vaccines, while rejecting the findings of public health authorities.
Or put another way, if Covid-19 could hire its own lobbying team, it’d be delighted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his latest announcement.

Addendum:

Thanks to A. my partner and percipient proofreader for reminding me of this.

There is one outcome we can hope for, though we can't to anything to make it happen. This is that Trump loses the primary, whether to DeSantis or anybody else, and decides to run as an Independent. His psychopathology strongly suggests he would do this. He doesn't have any loyalty to the GOP or anyone in it with the exception of his dwindling number of sycophants.

Doing this keeps him in the public eye until Tuesday, Nov. 7th 2023 when he splits the vote assuring an easy Biden win. He can have his rallies and spew his hate speech and paranoia to his cheering cult.

December 13, 2022

The MAGA mentally ill, emotionally vulnerable, or just plain dumb conundrum

The MAGA mentally ill, emotionally vulnerable, or just plain dumb conundrum

By Hal Brown

Archives on Right >

Why I was banned from Daily Kos

Posting now on Mastodon (see right column there

Public Domain from Wikipedia

Yesterday I wrote about the media normalizing mentally ill MAGA's.

Today I noticed the same thing that is a subject of this article in RawStory even before I read it.

Before reading this I noticed that George T. Conway, III was quoted as saying "The GOP congressman who called for 'Marshall Law!!' in a text to Meadows obviously must have thought he was participating in a coo, not a coup, and so is clearly off the hook." I even made an illustration and tweeted it to Conway.

As I write this this is being discussed on Morning Joe:

Looking back at Trump, who claimed many times to have the biggest brain and bringing up the genes he supposedly inherited from his MIT scientist uncle, and that he went to the prestigious University of Pennsylvania Business School (implying it was their graduate school). Actually he did his first two years at Fordham and transferred to Penn. While there was a clamor for Trump to release his tax returns I never saw anyone demand he release his college transcripts, not that this would have told us anything since he could have cheated his ass off and paid people to do his work.

My friend, a clinical psychologist, who has expertise in interpreting standard IQ tests, told me that she thought Trump's testable IQ would be slightly below average, that is under 100.

While some MAGA politicians spouting conspiracy theories have advanced degrees, and may fit into the category of being mentally ill in one or another way, Mark Meadows has an associate degree from the University of South Florida. We don't know what his grades were, but he is probably their most "distinguished" graduate.

Lauren Boebert went to Rifle High School in Colorado but did not graduate and got her GED.

Boebert's fellow loony-tuner Marjorie Taylor Greene has her BBA (Bachelors of Business Administration) from the University of George.

Of course there are now and always have been brilliant and accomplished people who never went to college or like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, dropped out, though they were in Harvard. Some even quit high school before they graduated. Richard Branson quit school when he was 15. David Karp dropped out of an elite Bronx high school, also at the age of 15, to launch Tumblr.

Arnold Schwarzenegger dropped out of high school to pursue a career in body building and Quentin Tarantino quit because he thought he could do a better job educating himself. There are many more listed here.

Then there's Elon Musk, whose IQ supposedly is in the neighborhood of 155. He is an example of someone who has lost the ability to think critically and not engage in self-defeating behavior because, while they are intelligent, they have the kind of psychiatric disorder described in my previous story.

There is no correlation between intelligence and psychosis, including delusional disorders. There has been research (see the article Personality and Intelligence, for example) into the correlation between various personality types and intelligence.

It seems to me that anyone can develop a belief that leads them into the morass of conspiracy theories like those of QAnon regardless of their testable IQ. For example here's how Steven Hassan, a well known expert on cults, describes how he ended up joining the Moonies. (About Hassan)

What all this seems to boil down to is that there is no conclusion to be drawn regarding the initial question about whether these MAGA cultists are mentally ill, emotionally vulnerable like Steve Hassan was, or just plain dumb. They can be either one, two or all of them.

Talking Points Memo reporter Hunter Walker is quoted in the RawStory piece: "Adults in government, not only engaging in frighteningly undemocratic language, but their base intelligence is called into question." We certain can fairly question their base intelligence, however going further than that leads us into the realm of both the unknown and the unknowable.

Intelligence may be a factor in their beliefs, but there's no way a conclusion can be drawn to label the overall intelligence of those who can be considered to be MAGA cultists.

Most recent stories:

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December 12, 2022

Should you be buried in a biodegradable wicker basket? Your family might not like it but do you really care?

This has absolutely nothing to do with caskets and coffins... it is about Mastodon

UPDATE DEC 16

Most recent story about Mastodon

Scroll down for the whole story

Here's a toot I just put on Mastodon

I wanted to see what was listed as trending on Twitter to add hashtags to my link to my Mastodon blog story which doesn't mention it and saw #ThursdayNightMassacre and found out that we have a new member @joyannreid who tweets are still there (see screen grab of her tweet) so a BIG welcome to her. Hard to track all the journalists moving here. Welcome to @pkrugman@mastod JenRubin@masto.ai and Rachel Maddow - maddow@beta.mstdn.cf

Morning Joe is on Mastodon

So is All in With Chris Hayes

Excerpt:

Twitter suspended the accounts of more than half a dozen journalists from CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post and other outlets Thursday evening, as company owner Elon Musk accused the reporters of posting “basically assassination coordinates” for him and his family.
The Post has seen no evidence that any of the reporters did so.
The suspensions came without warning or initial explanation from Twitter. They took place a day after Twitter changed its policy on sharing “live location information” and suspended an account, @ElonJet, that had been using public flight data to share the location of Musk’s private plane.
Many of the journalists suspended Thursday, including Washington Post technology reporter Drew Harwell, had been covering that rule change, as well as Musk’s claims that he and his family had been endangered by location sharing.
Twitter did not directly respond to questions about the suspensions. But Musk suggested on Twitter, without evidence, that the journalists had revealed private information about his family, known as doxing. “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” he tweeted late Thursday.

Other Recent news article about Mastodon: