The Big Guy

"When someone tells you that they're going to be an asshole, you can be assured that they're going to be an asshole" ~ ~ Dlarehd L. Rowahamo 

Republicans and other supporters of former President Donald Trump insisted that the investigation into his and his campaign's ties to Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election was "a hoax", a "witch hunt". They derided it as "Russia, Russia, Russia". They claimed that the investigation by Robert Mueller exonerated Trump - no collusion! They claimed that the obviously partisan Durham report, which among other things stated that the FBI should have opened a "preliminary investigation" instead of a "full investigation" when presented with suggestions that the Trump campaign was conspiring with agents of the Russian government, also not only exonerated Trump, but "proved" that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, President Biden, and possibly even James Madison were corrupt. But the truth was that a Trump campaign staffer bragged to a foreign diplomat that they were communicating with Russia to dig up dirt on Clinton; Trump Junior and other campaign staffers did meet, at Trump tower, with Russians claiming to have dirt on Clinton; former General Michael Flynn did resign after lying, not only to the FBI, but to Vice President Pence about his contacts with Russians, and let's not forget Trump bragging to Russian diplomats and revealing classified information to them in the Oval Office as well as his obsequious relationship to Russian President Putin. There was plenty there to justify an investigation. If it was a witch hunt, they sure found a lot of witches. 

Despite the glaring evidence that there was something there worth investigating, Republicans vowed that they would exact retribution upon the Democrats for their supposed persecution of Trump. It didn't really matter whether or not there was something there, they were going to find something. Their majority (albeit small) in the House of Representatives gave them a platform to conduct their own investigations, if you can call the clown car of committee hearings that they are conducting an investigation. 

Republicans' idea of "evidence" is to dream up a scenario that they think sounds plausible, that, if a hundred details coincidently go a certain way might be true, and then maintain that this thin veneer of plausibility is "proof". We saw this in their claims that the 2020 election "landslide" was stolen by the Democrats, and are still hearing about it from failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. They have applied this illogic to their allegations about President Biden. They think that it's plausible, or even likely, that the only reason that Hunter Biden was on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma was to provide a conduit to bribe then Vice President Biden into dropping an investigation into their business dealings. As if Hunter was the first relative of a president or senator or governor to be hired to get some kind of access to power, as if political donations were for merely charitable purposes. Despite their suppositions, there's no evidence, there never was any evidence, and I doubt there ever will be any evidence. The latest ephemeral "evidence" is a FBI memo from an informant who says that he heard from a Ukrainian source that a Ukrainian employee of Burisma told him that he bribed Joe Biden $5 million and that he has 17 tapes to prove it. Except no one at the FBI has heard the tapes or talked to the Burisma employee or the other Ukrainian source or has even been provided with names or contact information by the informant. It's a rumor about an allegation about hearsay. And it's suspiciously similar to allegations that Rudy Giuliani made a few months ago. And despite it's thinness, the Republicans are claiming that the existence of this unconfirmed, unconfirmable allegation, somehow confirms the allegation - proves it.  And this is somehow the basis for impeaching Biden. Circular reasoning at its finest.

Governing by Appalachian hill country blood feud. 

Checking the Facts

The other day I saw someone refer to "so-called fact checkers". In other words, the fact checkers weren't really checking facts, they were just another part of "the media", spreading their "fake news". I'm sure that it's no surprise that most Americans no longer view "the mainstream media" as a credible source of information. The proliferation of alternative news sources has only accelerated that trend. But is the information in mainstream media actually unreliable?  

There are fundamental things that most people do not understand about "news". The first thing is that not all of what you see on television news, or in a newspaper, is "news". Most media sources' content is roughly divided between "news" and "opinion". The "news" is what we might colloquially think of as "just the fact ma'am" - a strict, no frills recounting of what happened. The opinion side of a media outlet would include what "what happened" means, it would include an interpretation of events and speculation regarding the consequences of what happened. It's easy to point to a newspaper's editorial that you vehemently disagree with and extend your negative opinion to the news section, your confidence in the paper's accuracy undermined by your opinions being in opposition. You can think that the New York Times is full of it for stating that Trump was unfit to be president back in 2016, sure that the were unequivocally wrong about his qualifications while their reporting about his borderline illegal business dealings was beyond reproach and 100% accurate. Despite this widespread distrust in the media traditional newspaper and television media's news (and I include conservative-leaning outlets like Fox in this group) is fairly accurate. What drives the lack of confidence in that accurate reporting is the overwhelming emphasis that is put on the opinion side of the business. Viewers of (for example) CNN or Fox News spend more of their viewing time listening to "hosts" who are doing nothing but giving their opinion, and in some cases, not giving their actual opinion but repeating back what they think their viewers want to hear. 

Another misunderstood fundamental is bias. Everybody has biases. Everybody is biased to some extent. https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart But the question is, how does that bias affect the news, the "what's happening" side of the media? An obvious sign of bias is the facts that a media outlet chooses to publish. A newspaper with a liberal bias may choose to run stories about White police officers shooting unarmed Black men and not examples of White officers acting with restraint and politeness when dealing with Black citizens while a conservative newspaper might emphasize the reverse. In general you would expect the stories that are published to support that newspaper's overall biases. To determine whether a medium's bias swamps its journalistic integrity you have to look at what else is being reported. To extend my example, it's really not "news" for a police officer to be acting with professionalism, politeness and respect - that's their job. But does the newspaper also provide context? Are their stories about the statistics related to police shootings? Are we provided with enough information to form an opinion about whether what they're reporting are isolated incidents or evidence of a systemic problem? The answer to that will tell you whether your news source can be trusted to provide you with accurate information. 

What about fact checkers? The attack, mostly from former President Trump and his supporters, on mainstream media, characterizing it as Fake News, eventually extended to the legions of fact checkers. Fact checkers are a very narrow slice of "presenters of facts" who focus on the veracity (or lack of it) in public statements by politicians (or at least mainly politicians). Like mainstream media, and really, everybody, they have their own biases that sometimes guides who and what they check for factuality. Those who support politicians whose inaccuracies have been called out by fact checkers will reflexively refuse to believe the facts that fact checkers check, apparently for no other reason than that they disagree with them. What I have observed with most fact checkers is that they don't merely claim that a targeted politicians is wrong about something, they provide evidence to back it up. For example, Trump repeatedly claimed in his speeches that he "got Veterans'' Choice". Fact Checker Daniel Dale just as repeatedly pointed out that that the Veterans'' Choice bill had been proposed by the late Senator John McCain and signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2012, 4 years before Trump was elected. He presented evidence that could be easily cross checked for accuracy. Trump also regularly claimed to have completed building "The Wall" (most of it) - fact checkers often posted links to government websites (during Trump's presidency) that showed a small number of miles of new barriers had been constructed. Most fact checkers are not simply saying "nuh-uh" but are presenting a checkable documentary trail that can easily be verified. 

Some things are a matter of opinion. The best way to deal with the effects of climate change is; whether there is climate change isn't. That we had a worldwide pandemic starting in 2020 is not a matter of opinion - the best way to minimize death and illness is. What we are lacking (in my opinion!) is not a lack of facts in the media, but a lack of understanding by the electorate of the difference between fact and opinion.

 
 

Bigots Losing Their Minds Over Pride

Once again it's LBGTQ+ Pride Month and once again the bigots are losing their minds. 

Not that they wait until June to make their bigotry known, but they seem to really ramp it up during Pride Month. 

The most recent talking point among the bigots is that their opposition to anything having to do with gay people, transgender people, diversity, equality...even books, is that "they" are coming for "our kids". The bigots' assumption is that acknowledging that LBGTQ+ people exist, and making public spaces welcoming, not only to the majority, i.e. white, cisgender, heterosexuals, is pushing inappropriate discussion of sexuality on children, or in its more extreme iterations, "sexualizing" children, or grooming them for pedophilia. The overwhelming majority of adults in this country certainly don't want to "sexualize" children and want to keep them safe from pedophiles. They don't believe that pornography should be available in grade school libraries. They don't want third graders focusing on sex. But the bigots have redefined the terms, just have they redefined "woke" and "Critical Race Theory". To them, recognizing that there are LBGTQ+ people out there who deserve to be treated with respect, and viewing LBGTQ+ people as just as "normal" as non-LBGTQ+ people is sexualizing, grooming and even child abuse. Pornography is reimagined as two male penguins raising a baby penguin together. 

They're not concerned about children, that's just a cover for their bigotry, hatred and contempt for LBGTQ+ people. Even this year's signature issue, denying gender-affirming care for transgender youth zooms in on surgeries that they characterize as mutilations and castration quickly devolves into mockery and disdain for transgender people, whether they opt for any kind of medical intervention or not. 

The bigots often say that they don't have a problem with gay or transgender people, but that they're tired of their agenda, or of having it "shoved down their throats". They wonder aloud why there is even such a thing as "LBGTQ+ Pride Month"; why there isn't a straight pride month, why "they" define themselves solely in terms of their sexuality. Well, it's not LBGTQ+ people who define themselves solely in terms of who they want to have sex with, it's always been the bigots and the haters who have done that. Queer people that I know are students, business owners, musicians, photographers, parents, athletes, spiritual advisors, teachers, comedians, authors and government workers. Not one of them has discussed with me (or anyone else in my presence anyway) or made it the center of who they are, that they prefer sex with [fill in the blank]. No, it's always been the bigots who have ignored the entirety of a person's life and worth and defined them primarily (if not entirely) in terms of who they preferred to have sex with. (In general, it's never the marginalized people who define themselves solely with respect to what makes them different, it's the majority, oppressing, population who "others" them and forces them to identify as such.)

So why do we need a "Pride Month" for LBGTQ+ people? Is it any surprise that after years and decades and centuries of being discriminated against, beaten and killed based on one aspect of their lives, that a marginalized demographic will stand up and say "Hell no! - We're not ashamed of who we are, we're not going to skulk in the shadows, we're PROUD of who we are". 

Why is that so hard to understand?