Politics – Spectre Collie

Half the Country

On the day before the election, I’m mentally back to where I was a couple of months ago

As much as I love Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg, I’ve been avoiding watching their sketches playing Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff on Saturday Night Live because I need pure, earnest enthusiasm to mentally handle this election season.

But I watched last weekend’s cold open with a guest appearance from Harris, and I was surprised. Surprised that it was actually funny, surprised at how much of the material they can gather for a sketch without having to make anything up¹, and surprised to be reminded of how easy it is to feel joyful and hopeful.

Even out of office, Trump has spent so many years doing psychic damage on all of us that it’s surprising when we’re not feeling beaten down and paranoid. It was unsettling to watch something and not be spinning through all of the reasons I should be rolling my eyes, and instead just see two quite wealthy and famous women having such a good time goofing off with each other that they could not stop smiling and giggling. Yes, “Keep Calmala and Carry Onala” is inexcusably silly, but yes, I will absolutely allow it and would even consider buying the T-shirt.

I’ve never seen anybody in Trump’s circle ever look genuinely happy. The closest they get is a kind of coked-up mania, or a self-satisfied sneer as they’re saying something particularly racist, misogynistic, or transphobic. Apart from that, they’re always dour and mean, even when they’re trying to be light and funny. They’re the personification of Melania’s horrible Christmas display. They’re not just joyless; they actually tried to make the case that being joyful was bad or shameful.

Early in Harris’s campaign, people said that she was running on “vibes.” Emphasizing being free and joyful. And the pundits all lost their shit at the idea, insisting that Americans really care about serious business like policy proposals.

If nothing else, we’ve seen that that’s demonstrably false. Because one of the two major parties in this election has brought jack shit to the table in terms of policy, and it’s still apparently a close race. Just complete incompetence, despite the media’s desperate attempts to help legitimize them, repeatedly excusing them for having no policies, or translating their nonsense into an absurdly generous interpretation of what they might have tried to almost be saying. They have nothing to promise except ethnic cleansing and higher prices for everything. The party of freedom and fiscal responsibility is running on the promise that if they win, it’s going to be a dictatorship that will mean hardship for most Americans.

It’s nothing new to point out that they’re just so spectacularly bad at everything², but at this point it’s completely bottomed out. They have nothing left. And all the people who are still desperately trying to make it all seem sane and normal have nothing left to defend them with besides “half the country.”

I’ve complained about it lots of times before, but it’s one of the most pernicious lies that people across the political and sanity spectrums insist on repeating, that “half the country supports Trump.” It’s still objectively false, since half the country doesn’t bother to vote. And of the half that does, only a relatively small percentage are actually the MAGA stereotypes that we keep seeing getting dunked on and/or exhaustively interviewed in the media. It would be more accurate to say that “a little less than a quarter of the country isn’t bothered enough by Trump to vote for a Democrat.”

The reason I think it’s a distinction worth pointing out: once Kamala Harris is in office, and Trump loses yet another presidential election and starts having to answer for his long list of criminal offenses, that’s only the start of fixing everything that’s broken. No doubt there will be some MAGA types trying to First Order their way back into relevance, but I feel like they’ve blown it with this campaign, and they’ve become too much of a liability for all the billionaires hiding behind them.

I think the more pervasive enemy is apathy and cynicism. It’s obvious that there’s been a huge propaganda push telling Americans that there’s no real difference between the two parties, and that everybody’s corrupt. But propaganda can’t force people to believe something that they didn’t already suspect on some level.

So personally: I’m feeling optimistic that Kamala Harris is going to win the popular vote — as long as every eligible voter does their basic civic duty and votes! — and I’m confident that they’re prepared to jump through the inevitable hoops that the GOP will try to put them through in order to steal the election. That’s not based on any real info, just feels. It feels like the message is connecting with people, it feels like people are motivated to vote, it feels like Republicans have once again spectacularly underestimated how strongly women feel about their autonomy, and it feels like enough people still remember 2016-2020 and have no desire to see an even worse version of it.

But more than any of the positive signs, I’m optimistic just because my despair reserves are empty. It’s no exaggeration to say that people are exhausted. I’m tired of seeing those assholes constantly being shoved in my face and demanding my attention, cackling like Emperor Palpatine, begging me to hate them. I’m hoping that they’re all resigned to an America where they have no relevance apart from being on trial, being voted out of office or disbarred, and of course, appearing on Dancing With the Stars before vanishing completely.

My secret special wish is that they manage to take Elon Musk with them.

And I’m back to feeling like I did on that first White Dudes for Harris Zoom call, when I heard Governor Walz come on and lay out the facts. All the things that we’ve known for years, but the media acted like we weren’t allowed to say. That it’s 2024, and we care more about competence and confidence than outdated ideas about whether race or gender alone makes somebody “electable.” That nobody actually wants the bullshit the GOP is selling, stoking fears of immigrants and trans people that normal people don’t actually have. And that it’s just plain weird how we lived through the batshit insanity of the Trump administration, and all our institutions insisted on treating it like it was all normal.

I refuse to believe that “half the country” actually supports Trump’s bullshit, and I don’t believe they’ll even get the people who used to begrudgingly tolerate Trump’s bullshit. I don’t even believe that half the country supports Kamala Harris! But I don’t believe it’s naive, unrealistic, or overly optimistic at all to believe that half the country is tired of the dysfunction of the past ten years, and we’re all ready for a reboot.

1
Yes, the Republican candidate for the President of the United States did mimic fellating a microphone at one of his rallies.
2
And so smug about it, which is the part that always gets me. How anyone can support these clowns and be not just embarrassed, but arrogant, is beyond me.

Saved by the Bell Curve

A celebration of being comfortably in the boring majority

When I complained about the American news media’s gross journalistic malpractice, I also talked about my disappointment with the Harris-Walz campaign falling back into the worst Democratic election habits. But it would be foolish, and just plain unrealistic, to ignore everything that the campaign has done remarkably well. If nothing else, simply bringing back a sense of hope to all of us trained by the Democratic Party to be perpetually anxious and on the precipice of the downfall of democracy itself.

But the aspect of the Harris campaign that’s been impressing me the most lately is how they’re fighting multiple opponents on multiple fronts — at times, it’s seemed like a dogpile — without going too far on the defensive.

After all, the thing that first got me enthusiastic about the campaign wasn’t that they surpassing the GOP by every measure of success — the Biden Administration has been doing that for four years — but that they were beating the “Democratic elite.” Since Biden’s withdrawal, the campaign has been holding its own against the right, the left, and the media establishment, staying on message about doing what’s best for the middle class.

They’ve also done a remarkably good job of emphasizing that multiple contradictory things can be true at the same time. For instance:

Donald Trump is shockingly stupid, incompetent, childish, narcissistic, and completely unfit for office.
Donald Trump is a serious threat to the future of American democracy.

Those two things have always been true, but seeing them both in action at the same time creates a cognitive dissonance that people just aren’t good at processing. We’re used to our villains being devious masterminds, always thinking two steps ahead of their opponent, always having a contingency at the ready to thwart our heroes.

When you see this worthless shitstain staring at a solar eclipse, it’s difficult to reconcile with the fact that his self-serving incompetence resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. We can’t understand how somebody so incompetent could be given so much responsibility.

During this election season, the thing that keeps pushing me from anxiety to incandescent anger is being reminded of how undeserving everyone in the Trump campaign is. This has been the most brazenly incompetent, voter-hostile, off-message, poorly run campaign I’ve ever seen. Just a non-stop clown show. Even more than with Hilary Clinton’s campaign, it’s felt insulting to the Democratic candidate that she has to prove herself competent without fault, while the Republican candidate is praising Hitler and rambling about the magnificence of Arnold Palmer’s penis, and everybody just shrugs and says “oh well, that’s Trump for ya!” It’s made me long for the good, old-fashioned sinister evil of the past. Devious masterminds working from the shadows, instead of billionaire dipshits just blatantly buying a campaign without even trying to hide it.

So that’s another thing to like about the Harris campaign: she’s brought war criminal Dick Cheney back into the spotlight. I have to admit it’s been entertaining to see people throwing tantrums every time the DNC brought a Republican onto the stage, and especially as Harris has done multiple appearances being chummy with Liz Cheney under a banner reading “Country Over Party.” Not because there’ve been signs that Harris is going back on her progressive policy proposals, which would absolutely be a valid concern, but simply for acknowledging that moderate Republicans and never-Trumpers have more in common with Democrats than MAGA types do. And that the President of the United States has to represent everybody in America, regardless of political party.

It is most likely my pro-Harris bias talking, but I’m a lot more comfortable hearing her talk about working alongside Republicans than when Nancy Pelosi says it. Pelosi comes across as having genuine nostalgia for the Reagan and Clinton administrations, as if they were the golden age of reasonable American politics, instead of the breeding ground for everything that’s wrong with both parties today. With Harris, though, I get a sense of practicality and authenticity. Part of that is simply because she often says stuff I don’t agree with entirely; nothing she says sounds too good to be true, but just common sense good ideas that if enacted, would be more progressive than what we’ve seen in years.

She repeats her talking points relentlessly, to a fault even, but that doesn’t seem to me like a lack of sincerity but instead an insistence that this is the platform, we’re not changing it without a lot of deliberation, because it’s what we believe in, instead of just what people want to hear.

Again: we’ve been stalled for so long that ideas that used to be thought of as wildly progressive are now just plain common sense. Nobody in the Harris administration is going to be pushing hard for universal basic income, but then if the left got everything they wanted, they’d have nothing to complain about.

Which is their favorite thing to do. For several years now, I’ve just kind of gritted my teeth and kept mostly silent whenever the Extremely Online Left went off on yet another self-righteous tirade that had little to do with reality. I always assumed “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and we were both ultimately on the same side. But this year, it feels like I’m better able to see through the bluster and realize that all of the posturing and purity tests have never done much of anything to effect actual change. After seeing a lot of people spending years yelling “Kamala is a Cop,” it’s tough to take them seriously when they threaten to withhold their support for Harris unless she moves to the left.

The one enormous issue, of course, is the Biden administration’s poor handling of the attacks on Palestine, and the Harris campaign’s refusal to talk publicly to Palestinian Americans to reassure them that their concerns are being heard. Harris has stressed wanting to stop the genocide without abandoning the alliance with Israel, but it does seem tone deaf for a Democratic campaign to be giving more visibility to Republicans than to Palestinians.

Which is a stark reminder of the concerns of practicality vs ideology when it comes to a presidential election. I like to think that since the Obama campaign, most of us have matured a bit and can appreciate that you’re not voting for your cool new friend, but for someone who’s going to have to represent 300 million people with wildly differing opinions. It is inherently compromised, and it’s not idealism but fantasy to pretend otherwise. It’s entirely valid to consider Gaza the most important issue in this election, but that means doing everything possible to elect the only candidate who can possibly broker a solution, and it’s appalling to me to see people refusing to acknowledge that.

Considering how often people on social media point to the “Land doesn’t vote, people do” maps, you’d think that they understand how numbers are important to democracy. And you’d think they’d understand how a bell curve works. When you’re in a position of trying to get as many votes as possible, it makes more sense to aim for the big group in the middle instead of the small groups at either end who very loudly insist that they have all the answers.

The most perplexing question in American politics remains why such an ineptly run campaign, led by an idiotic and felonious election-loser, assisted by a few charisma-free trickles of lukewarm diarrhea whose only interesting feature is their absolute hatred of women, could be “so close.”

Obviously, it’s largely if not entirely driven by the outsize influence of money in American politics; the richest people in America clearly do not want Harris to win, and they’ll sacrifice the whole country to keep their hoards intact.

Some of it is simply desperation. They repeat over and over that “50% of America” supports Trump. Fox News’s Bret Beier just recently made that claim when trying to tear down Harris in an interview; he asked, “are you calling half of America stupid?” Traitor Ted Cruz has tried to use the same tactic to repeat his attempts to undermine the 2020 election, saying “a lot of Americans have doubts about the voting results.” It’s always used to defend the indefensible, when they reach the point where they can’t reasonably justify a lie, and can only claim that it’s what the people want.

I’ve already put in my vote¹, I’ve donated as much money as I can afford, and I’ve sent a few letters to try and encourage others to vote, so all I can do at this point is hope that the numbers work out. I no longer believe, as I did for most of my life, that progress happens as a result of the extremes pushing the complacent middle in one direction or the other, but by boring moderates recognizing that the goal is to make as many people as satisfied as possible.

I don’t consider that compromising values, I don’t consider it abandoning my own label of “progressive Democrat,” and I don’t even consider it putting an end to my own idealism. It’s a different kind of idealism, an insistence that reasonable adults can strongly disagree on important issues and still get along and still make progress. That seems more permanent, better able to break us out of the current cycle, where the United States of America has an existential crisis every four years.

I’m tired of having to pretend that the MAGA “movement” is a genuine political party, or that it deserves a voice in my government, instead of just acknowledging that it’s the racist, lunatic fringe that it’s always been. For that matter, I’m tired of feeling like I should be doing more to appease the people who are going to end up calling me a “shitlib” anyway. Go make yourselves useful and start a viable third party or something.

When everyone is trying to tell you that we’re just a coin flip away from disaster, it’s reassuring to be reminded that I’m comfortably in the majority — at least as long as you split the graph horizontally. Unlike a politician, I can comfortably say that MAGA supporters are stupid, and I’m part of the over 50% of Americans who just want reasonable, competent adults running the government.

1
For Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, in case you were wondering

Fourth Estate Sale

Democracy Dies In Disappointment

My enthusiasm for the Harris/Walz campaign has cooled a little recently. Not enough to change my vote, obviously, but enough to make me less optimistic that we’re going to see the significant reboot of the US political system that I’d been hoping for.

The problem: it seems like whoever was the Harris campaign’s Authenticity Manager was brought in for a meeting with the Democratic elite and quietly let go. “Thanks for your service, I guess, but I think we can take it from here,” they said with condescending smarm, probably. “After all, we have been running Democratic campaigns for the past forty years, so I think we know a thing or two about elections. Why don’t you Pokemon Go on home?”

Do campaigns even have Authenticity Managers? I don’t know. But for a while, it sure seemed like the campaign was cutting through the bullshit and taking a definitive stand on a bunch of issues that Democrats have normally tossed around like a hot potato. I was even happy to hear Harris taking a stand on issues I don’t agree with (She said repeatedly, “We’re not taking away anybody’s guns,” and I’m like, “Well, you could take away some guns, certainly, seeing as how the problem is that there are too many?”) because it meant we were getting back into the realm of adults who can reasonably disagree on important issues. Instead of “my unassailable and infallible savior” vs “the demon who will destroy civilization as we know it.”

Over the past couple of weeks, though, it seems like the campaign has been settling back into the old familiar nonsense.

I understand that the Democrats are still traumatized by the 2016 election, and they want to avoid being overconfident. And I also understand that it’s in Harris’s best interest to play the underdog. But every day I see another message from the campaign suggesting that things have taken a terrible turn, they’re just barely hanging on, they desperately need our help, doom is upon us all. This isn’t the party that was coming in and energizing everyone just a couple of months ago; this is the party that’s spent the last decade with control of multiple branches of government and still shrugging and insisting that they were powerless to do anything. Wouldn’t it make more sense to be emphasizing enthusiasm and excitement? Saying “our message is really connecting with people,” reminding us that the GOP doesn’t have the overwhelming mandate it insists that it does, and giving us some hope that they intend to make a difference?

And seeing more of the same in terms of funding requests is particularly frustrating. Early on, we were getting reports of raising hundreds of millions of dollars within a week or two, which was hugely exciting as a sign that there was a clear mandate for Harris. After the announcement of Tim Walz as VP candidate, the enthusiasm and support took off again. Last I checked, the campaign had raised almost a billion dollars, mostly from first-time donors — meaning this wasn’t the usual Democratic machine grinding away, but genuine excitement that change was coming. But now, I’m getting increasingly desperate requests for donations from Harris, Walz (with increasingly strained football metaphors), and Barack Obama. We’re being outspent in battleground states! Ma’am, you’ve got a billion dollars! The Obamas have enough money to buy at least a dozen of me, outright! If you’re getting outspent, that sounds like a you problem, tbqh.

The ad that set me off in particular was something like “Do you want to wake up November 6th feeling like you could’ve done more?” Deliberately — shamelessly — taking advantage of the despair a lot of us felt back in 2016, when our anxiety over “why is the race this close?” turned into “holy shit, how did this happen?” I’ve already donated more money to this campaign than I have to any other political campaign, and that’s on top of trying to donate to hurricane recovery and humanitarian relief charities from the multiple disasters going on. And we all know that the most prominent Democrats are very wealthy (if not obscenely wealthy) people, and most of us don’t begrudge them that. But when the Obamas are coming onto my phone to tell me that if Trump wins, it’s because people like me didn’t do enough, that just strikes me as extraordinarily tone deaf.

It all makes me wish there were some way to get information about what is actually going on, from a source that’s not directly invested in any political party or campaign. It would be great if something like that existed in the United States.

Instead, we’ve got the most prominent newspapers and broadcast media all deciding at once that they’re bored with the same old journalistic malpractice they’ve been doing over the past decade, and committing to actively undermining campaigns and eroding our faith in our institutions.

I wish that were hyperbole, but there’s just no denying it anymore. It’s not even tricky to find examples these days; I just randomly went to The New York Times website, and right there at the top of the front page are multiple examples of misreporting things that I know to be true. Creating a false equivalence between Harris’s support for an actual child tax credit, Trump lazily repeating the old GOP cure-all of tax cuts for the rich (or people “higher up the income scale” in Times speak). Harris’s outreach to black communities spun as political maneuvering to “shore up” the Black male vote at the last minute, even though she’s made a point of talking directly to Black men for the duration of her last two campaigns at least. Reporting on Trump’s blatantly fascist speeches — in which he promises to use the government to punish his enemies — not with emphasis on what he actually said, but on the idea that his supporters don’t believe it’s a serious threat.

For the past several years, I’ve been making excuses for the Times and the rest of “mainstream media,” saying that they were driven by fear of litigation or an overabundance of caution over journalistic integrity. We saw it in the “both sides” coverage of the climate crisis, long after the truth was evident even to the most gullible person? We thought we saw it with the Clinton campaign, where they normalized the most lunatic fringe claims of the GOP, seemingly out of respect for political norms or some such. I find it impossible to be so charitable anymore, and keep giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Hat Speech

When you get maybe a little TOO into a piece of campaign merchandise and what it means for America

Back when Kamala Harris’s campaign took off, she quickly secured the Democratic nomination, and then announced Tim Walz as her running mate, I got swept up in the moment. I quickly blew through my “campaign donation money” budget and even bought a couple of pieces of campaign merch.

One of those is the camouflage hat, which was quickly sold out and was immediately called “iconic” by the campaign. And sure, that’s a little too over-enthusiastic, but not by that much, surprisingly. It’s a pretty great piece of merchandise because it’s got layers of significance to it.

Most obvious is that it was introduced to welcome Walz to the campaign, since he’s apparently an avid hunter. It’s intended to underscore that contrast between Walz as being from the rural heartland, Harris from the coastal urban areas, coming together with a shared vision of America. And it’s pointedly taking back that rural heartland imagery from the Republicans.

For my entire lifetime, the Republicans have somehow managed to push tax cuts for the wealthy and anti-consumer deregulation, all while painting themselves as the America-loving populist party. It’s been a bizarro world for decades, but it’s gotten especially ludicrous as we’ve seen these guys who’ve clearly never been to a fast food restaurant before try to pass themselves off as Champions of the Common Man. It’s fitting that they’ve ended up with Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan as mascots, because they both made fortunes selling a cartoonishly trashy version of America.

And the Democrats have just shrugged and said “let them have it.” What’s also been true my entire lifetime is that the most visible people in the Democratic party have acted like there’s nothing more cringe than being “folksy.” I remember Clinton being sold to us on the idea that he was the anti-Jimmy Carter; southern but with no trace of Hee Haw, cool enough to go on Arsenio Hall’s show with his saxophone, and highbrow enough to fit in with the liberal elite.

One of the things I love about the Harris-Walz campaign is that it’s often felt like a rejection not just of the modern GOP, but of the weird, elitist disappointment that the Democratic party has become. And the camo hat is a symbol of that, too: I would bet you just about anything that Schumer and Pelosi were more comfortable appropriating West African clothing than they would be wearing anything that had a whiff of Wal-Mart about it.

So the hat just underscores the whole idea of the Harris campaign as being a big tent — they’ve stressed that everybody is welcome in their version of the Democratic party: not just rural types and city types, not just all races, but anybody who wants sane politics in the United States. I could tell how clearly that message was coming through by how angry it was making leftists on social media any time a Republican was given the stage at the DNC.¹

So getting a camouflage hat was me being a poseur, but I felt like it was in the spirit of this campaign being a dramatic reboot. Anyone who actually knows me is well aware that not only am I not a hunter or fisher, I don’t even like being outdoors that much. So I figured that a camo hat would be for me like wearing drag. Practical clothes turned into a costume for a pasty-white computer boy. Maybe the beard helps me get away with it? Whatever the case, I figured it would be important as a middle finger to the GOP and to anyone who would reduce all of us to cartoonishly broad stereotypes.

But I have to say that actually putting it on felt more momentous than I’d expected. If I were in an anime, or an early-80s Amblin movie, there would’ve been blue sparks of electricity coming off of the hat. I never expected that a performative show of anti-snobbery would have me flashing back to being a kid. Like I said, I’ve never had any interest in hunting, and I pretty much immediately disliked fishing as soon as I tried it. And that was treated vaguely like a failing on my part. Never quite explicitly, and never by my parents, who were always completely supportive of whatever I wanted to do, but it was all still enough to suggest that I wasn’t quite a “real” man.

And I felt like I had a fleeting moment of clarity. I remembered how much I tried to lose my accent, and how much I aspired to distance myself from anything that would get me branded as a redneck. I realized that I wasn’t so much assigned the stereotype of “gay liberal computer nerd” as I embraced it, and even aspired to it. A bunch of rich people decided that these people fit into a stereotype that has nothing to do with these people, and I’d dutifully picked my side. It was like realizing I’ve been spending all this time putting the clown makeup on myself.

Considering how big a fan I am of Miller’s Crossing, I should know that sometimes a hat is just a hat. But I really, really like the idea that we’re chipping away at the last 50 years of stereotypes and assumptions and finally understanding that people are capable of a hell of a lot more than a bunch of political strategists ever gave us credit for. I like the idea of actually moving into the 21st century.

1
To be fair, more or less: Nancy Pelosi has frequently gone on about the need for a sane, rational, and functioning Republican party in the US, but there’s a very clear sense that she wants to go back to the pre-Trump days, where there was an eternal stalemate between Reagan/Bush Republicans and Clinton/Obama Democrats. No thanks.

The Audacity of Cringe

Giving up smoking and other bad habits, and rebuilding a better outlook based on The New Honesty, Good Vibes, and Trust

I mentioned that I started using social media apps again once I noticed that the Kamala Harris campaign’s account had started firing on all cylinders, making politics fun and engaging instead of anxious and dreadful.

But what I hadn’t considered was that I’d also quit smoking around the same time. In retrospect, I was just trading one previously-reliable dopamine-hit distraction for another. And once I made that connection, it also helps explain so much of everything I’ve been turning over in my mind, trying to make sense of things that refuse to make sense, and wondering how we all ended up in this state.

There are several eerie parallels between addiction and this whole social/political dystopia we’ve made for ourselves in 2024:

The distraction becomes the focus. For me, the “quick smoke break to clear my head” gradually turned into “I’ve got to finish this so I can have another cigarette.” This doesn’t feel that different from watching the glut of political media put all of their focus on the politicians and their campaigns, instead of the real-world problems that they were trying to address. People have been pointing out for years that the emperor has no clothes, which the political media has taken as a cue for incessant discussions about The Power and Significance of Nudity In America’s Fast-Changing Political Climate.
It rejects the idea of ever having enough. In the 80s, it was 24-hour news channels. Now, it’s having to fill every pixel of every screen, and every nanosecond of the day, with content. Old-fashioned notions of relevance and newsworthiness were discarded long ago, because there always has to be something to focus on, something we can make seem important, even if it isn’t.
It feeds off of self-awareness. I always felt like being aware of how much I was smoking was the same thing as being in control over it, but for me, it wasn’t.¹ With media — traditional or social media — and politics, self-awareness is never used towards changing behavior, but reinforcing behavior. People on Twitter came up with the ostensibly ironic term “doomscrolling,” and then dove back even deeper into their phones and their imaginary, perpetually angry and miserable communities. And one of JD Vance’s least-harmful bits of weird behavior was saying that he had a Diet Mountain Dew and “people will probably say that’s racist.” The GOP is perfectly aware that they’re (with good reason) perceived as racist, but instead of engaging in any actual introspection, they’ve simply decided that the accusation is meaningless.
It reinforces the same patterns over and over again, until it loses any resemblance to the original. It’s been over a decade since I actually enjoyed a cigarette; by the end, it became more of a burdensome obligation than anything pleasurable. I’m reminded of that when I see how political media took the necessity of fact-checking and turned it from actual journalism into the performative ritual that it is now, giving nonsensical rebuttals to obviously true statements, presumably just because they have to write something. So now, instead of being a reliable source of truth, they just reinforce the (false) notion that everyone is always lying to some degree or another.

1
Respect to people who’ve been able to quit with willpower alone, but I never have been able to without chemical help.

Hillbilly L-Shaped Sectional

An obvious, absurd, and harmless lie is the best way to show contempt for someone without ruining the mood

I hate it when people over-explain jokes. And I really hate how modern media has so much space and time to fill up with “content” that it’s resulted in a surfeit of professional and amateur pundits generating so many unnecessary essays and opinion pieces and think pieces about every inconsequential thing.¹

But this is bugging me. In this Presidential campaign, there’s one scandalous rumor that seems to have spread like crazy and really resonated with people. It’s based on a shitposting tweet from someone claiming that VP candidate JD Vance, in his memoir, describes having sex with a couch.²

There has already been a ton written about this phenomenon, ranging in tone from angry, to humorless, to scolding, to earnestly over-explaining. Some of them, like Charlotte Clymer’s post calling out the hectoring scolds in media for paying attention to the wrong things, are good. Others, like a post on Platformer making a false equivalence between an obvious, harmless lie and deliberately inflammatory misinformation, are so off-base they make me angry. But I have yet to read one that I think gets at the core of it.

The point isn’t to make anybody believe it, since it’s too absurd to believe. And it’s not to trick Vance into having to deny it, since it would be a waste of time. And it’s not really meant to put them on the defensive by humiliating them, since, like saying Trump has small hands, it would be a stupid thing to get defensive about. Even if it were true, it’s harmless. Weird, but harmless. Especially when compared to the dozens of legitimately offensive stuff that we know to be true about him. It’s just a bafflingly dumb insult.³

Which is the whole point, and I think it really is that simple. The reason it feels like a fever has broken in the United States is that people are tired of being angry and worried and miserable all the time, and we’re ready for some happiness and some reckless optimism. This dumb thing lets us show contempt for the contemptible without having to think about how terrible they really are.

I’m tired of news and social media presenting a never-ending succession of unforgivably awful things that Trump has said or done, milking yet another cycle of outrage for everything it’s worth, tricking some of us into believing oh this time, for sure, he’s gone too far! and then going on with no consequences. And seemingly no memory, as they set us up for the next one. It’s more fun to say he has tiny hands than to say he’s a racist, misogynist, narcissistic, incompetent grifter. The “tiny hands” thing isn’t true, but it lets me express my utter contempt without feeling like his virulent hate has infected me.

Vance is a reprehensible person. It’s a good thing he’s such a laughably terrible candidate, because hearing his beliefs from a more competent person would be alarmingly repulsive. I don’t want us all to keep wasting our lives fighting battles of attrition against regressive people who have nothing of value to contribute to society.

In fact, I don’t want to think about that couch-molesting dipshit at all. I’d rather be happy.

1
In my defense: posts on this blog aren’t meant to persuade or really even inform, but are just me trying to sort out how I think about a topic. You get what you pay for!
2
The tweet expertly cites page numbers in the book, and independent of anything else, is just a masterfully-executed shitpost.
3
Completely unlike actual disinformation, and anyone with any sense should be able to tell the difference.

Happily Outside the Room Where It Happens

What happens when an already-dysfunctional political system comes into contact with ten million experts

Previously on Spectre Collie, I presented my grand theory on the state of American politics in 2024, which is that nobody actually understands what the hell is going on. And more importantly: the more confidently somebody asserts that they do understand what’s going on, the more suspect they are.

With a few notable exceptions. After the past few weeks, the only people that seem trustworthy to me and insightful enough to say what’s actually going on are Harris, Walz, and Buttigieg.¹ In other words: I’ve become the guy smitten with politicians and extremely distrustful of the “mainstream media,” the New York Times in particular.

In other words: what the f@$#?!²

I think the short answer is that everything has been allowed to get so weird and nonsensical that it requires a full reboot. I already thought that we were seeing a reboot of the Democratic party, but it looks like it’s turning into a total turn-the-entire-system-off-wait-30-seconds-and-turn-it-back-on-again to reset everything to the center.

And yes, obviously, it is the center. Maybe slightly left; it’s hard to tell anymore when they’re on stage at a Democratic rally saying how much they respect the Second Amendment. Everything in the Harris/Walz platform is just widely popular common sense. The only reason it’s ever interpreted anywhere as “dangerously leftist,” or even “boldly progressive,” is because corporate journalism and social media have failed us.

1
And a smattering of independent journalists
2
Reminder: I promised my mother I’d stop using the f-word online.

Do Not Cite the Deep Magic To Me

A simple and hopefully obvious reminder that if we try to learn everything from history, we are doomed to repeat it.

First I have to acknowledge that this post is entirely the result of my being too online over the past couple of weeks. I have been back on the centralized social media apps, and they are bad places that do bad things to people.¹ Everybody got such a rush from so much news happening so fast, some people are now displaying withdrawal symptoms from having to wait for Kamala Harris to announce a VP pick.

Again, and I can’t stress this enough: always-on news channels and infinite social media feeds are a blight on humanity.

But since there are going to be tons of self-proclaimed political science and policy experts going online to offer their opinions, and since I’m apparently helpless to resist going back to read everything they have to say, I’ve just got one simple request: let’s stop acting like things are still the same as they were even four years ago, much less back in 2008.

What prompted this: reading multiple predictions about who was going to be chosen as Harris’s VP, which all sounded identical to conversations that have been happening for as long as I’ve been following politics.² “It has to be Shapiro, because they have to do well in Pennsylvania,” or “they need someone who will go against Trump’s energy,” or “America’s not ready for a gay Vice President,” etc. etc. It’s all so outdated and irrelevant that they might as well be talking about star signs or bodily humours.

It really stood out to me because I was guilty of it myself. When all the “elite” Democrats were going through contractions trying to squeeze out Joe Biden, my biggest concern was that there’d be no one to replace him, forcing the Democrats into reliving the contentious “Hillary vs Bernie” infighting that helped make me disgusted with the party. I have to admit that I’d immediately discounted Kamala Harris, because I immediately assumed that she was too “risky” and would never get the nomination.

What was that based on? Just years of seeing the Democrats be frightened of their own shadows, constantly playing to some mythical undecided strawman in Iowa that probably never actually existed, and always finding a way to be foiled despite being the most risk-averse people imaginable. Plus all the self-satisfied “social media leftists” in the Bay Area, who’d never shut up with the “Kamala is a cop” nonsense.

But we should all recognize that none of that applies anymore, assuming it ever actually did. Everything leading up to Harris’s nomination feels so unprecedented, it’s gotten to the point where it’s unnerving. When am I going to have to be cynical and disappointed again?! For now, though, it feels like we’ve got a candidate for President who’s actually someone who’d be great at the job. Who’s smart and capable, and personable. Not just an emergency fill-in, not just someone who was the safest of all available options, and not just someone who’d be good at getting votes.

It’s an exciting feeling, the thought of somebody getting into office because they’d be good at being President, not just good at strategizing through an election. And I’d hope that whoever is the VP candidate (and it goes without saying, but there are no outright bad options in the front runners), they’re chosen not just for strategy, but for personality, and the dynamic they’ll bring to the campaign.

And frankly, I’d hope that the campaign takes full advantage of their opponents absolutely shitting the bed, and of the Democratic establishment being too scared of the alternative for too much infighting, and continues running a campaign based on the right thing to do, instead of just the thing that “plays best in the flyover states” or “energizes the base.” Or whatever other nonsense the 24/7 political news cycle has poisoned us with. It feels like we’ve been given the chance to do a reboot, and we should take advantage of it.

1
Mastodon is still okay. It seems to be near-impossible to unintentionally “go viral,” and the lack of up-to-date topical news makes everything much calmer.
2
And then getting frustrated and disillusioned and ignoring all of it until the next major election.

Idiotic Design

The blissfully liberating chaos of not trusting anyone who claims to understand what’s going on

The featured image in this post is a screenshot from CNN’s YouTube channel, where the title of a video promised “What the data is saying about who Kamala Harris will likely choose as VP.” It includes headshots of the front-runners, with a precise percentage value under each one. When you watch the video, you see that the “data” is gathered not from polls, but from people betting on the outcome.

In other words: nobody knows shit. (And also: 24-hour news channels were a mistake).

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve broken all my pledges to be a mentally-healthier and better-functioning human, and I’ve gone right back to obsessively reading social media.¹ The reason is because Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign is nailing it.

They came out swinging with two “channels:” first there’s the campaign, which releases official statements in response to significant events, with thoughtful takes that stay true to the campaign’s message of freedom, unity, and moving forward. Second, there’s “Kamala HQ,” which calls itself the “rapid response” team, and posts memes directly responding to whatever is the hot topic of the moment. It’s legitimately funny and fun to read, building on the unfamiliar sense of optimism that came with Biden’s endorsement and the start of Harris’s campaign, and somehow against all odds making it actually enjoyable to follow a US presidential campaign.

The only reason I’m not even more impressed with Harris’s social media team is because 90% of the time, they just post completely unedited clips and statements from their opponents. Over the past three-and-a-half years of a mostly functioning government, I’d forgotten just how bad the Republicans are at everything, and how much Trump and Vance seem so eager to just completely shit all over themselves on camera.

But again, I think Harris’s campaign has come out strong. And it’s not just because they have a social media team that’s young enough never to have used dial-up internet. It feels like more than any other Democratic campaign in my lifetime, they understand what a Presidential campaign needs to do: tell us what we want to hear and also what we need to hear.

1
Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram, at least. Twitter is still inexcusable garbage and everyone should delete their account immediately.

Freedom

Pausing for a moment to consider the year’s worth of political news that’s happened over the past two weeks

Vice President Harris released her first campaign ad for President, and it’s pretty spectacular. On his blog, Jason Kottke points out the emphasis on “Freedom” — not just the Beyoncé song (although that is absolutely an important part of it), but the ideal — and why it’s such a perfect message to kick off the campaign with.

Kottke quotes from an interview with Pete Buttigieg, pointing out how we’ve let Republicans corrupt the word “freedom” to push an authoritarian agenda, even though it’s actually progressive policies that make real freedom possible. That’s the kind of common-sense insight that made me a supporter of Buttigieg, and it seems especially common-sense insightful when you consider it was from 2018, before the pandemic.

That’s when we were shown repeatedly that the Republican Newspeak version of “freedom” just means “freedom from responsibility.” It’s not “conservative,” since genuinely conservative values assume some level of responsibility to society. It’s not even libertarian, since the idiots screaming “tyranny” at the prospect of wearing a mask or getting vaccinated also have unsurprisingly strong opinions about banning people from getting married or making their own reproductive decisions or receiving health care.

We Have Always Been At War With DOMA

Unpacking my own hypocrisy (maybe?) and avoiding getting gaslit by the Obama administration.

After I read Kal Penn’s memoir, I was pretty salty about how it just barely even mentioned being not-straight¹, and instead treated it as if had been a non-issue. He casually says that in his mid-20s, his friends already “knew that [he] was dating dudes;” he makes a passing reference about figuring out his sexuality; and he has a chapter about his partner that is more about NASCAR than anything else.

That’s pretty much it. It stands out because so much of the book is about facing discrimination as an Indian-American working in Hollywood, or as an actor (at the time primarily known for his work in stoner comedies) working in the Obama Administration, but makes absolutely zero attempt at describing any kind of intersectionality with his sexual orientation.

It’s been bugging me for the last few weeks, since I’ve been wondering how much, if at all, my criticism makes me a hypocrite.

1
For lack of a better description, since I don’t know exactly whether Kal Penn identifies as gay, bisexual, queer, etc.

What Do You Want?

(Language warning in the video, in case you’re watching around kids or other sensitive people. But I think it’s warranted).

Hey Proud Boys and MAGA “Patriots”… what the fuck is it that this country hasn’t given you? pic.twitter.com/AC53tAW2gs
— Corey “The Buttercream Dream” Forrester (@CoreyRForrester) January 8, 2021

Corey Forrester, a Georgia comedian who sometimes goes by his alternate identity “The Buttercream Dream” says exactly what I’ve been feeling for the past three days (at least), in one tweet, two minutes, and fourteen seconds.

This country has given you so much. We’ve wasted so much time trying to empathize or even understand you. What exactly is it that you want?