The New Yorker's Cavalcade of Ignorance

The rag has high production values. I'll say that much for it. Otherwise, the current issue is a tsunami of folderol.  Sample:

“American Fascist,” Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s contribution, uses some variation on the word “fascist” 44 times across two and a half pages, along with 15 combined mentions of Hitler, Mussolini, and Putin. One imagines the interior of Snyder’s brain as a scarcely endurable popcorn machine, a rhythm of repetitive hissing and clicking that produces buckets of nearly identical thought kernels. Perhaps silence would be even harder for Snyder to endure. He offers one accidental moment of reflection, which serves to frame the entire New Yorker feature: “A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meaning … When a fascist calls a liberal a ‘fascist,’ the term begins to work in a different way, as the servant of a particular person, rather than as a bearer of meaning.”

Snyder believes himself a meaning-bearer in a landscape of lies. He is hardly alone. Exempted from the need to understand or even bother to describe the objects of their disdain, the magazine’s chosen blatherers accuse the invisible masses of the worst possible affronts to democratic order, language, and perhaps reality itself before an audience that is presumed to share their prejudices and to have uniformly voted the same way that they did. They are on one side, with “bad America” arrayed on the other. Snyder quotes the historian Robert Paxton, who warns that “the Trump phenomenon looks like it has a much more solid social base, which neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have had.” This is a ludicrous, ahistorical, paranoid, self-discrediting, and of course convenient statement for Paxton and Snyder and The New Yorker. It allows them to stand bravely against an entire nation of monsters, and just sorta leave it at that.

Read more if you can stomach it.

 

Dems urge Biden to sabotage Trump.

 

Debunking the Debunkers. That reminds me of Joe and Mika who paid a visit to Hitler in his bunker.  Did they make it out alive?

Comments

[Joe Odegaard]

Hi Brother Bill

Yeah, I read more. They are all nuts. Listen to them rave.

But while they can manipulate the noise, they cannot manipulate the Silence.

Error requires constant chatter.

Truth can stand in silence.

Note that "blue" areas on the election map are the loud cities, full of hive mind.

"Red" areas are countryside, where you can hear God more easily.

Off to Santa Cruz tomorrow, back on Saturday. Happy Thanksgiving ! It is a good one this year.

[BV]

Good points, Joe. Hive mind, groupthink, noisy blue enclaves and echo chambers in which vicious leftist shitheads reinforce each other in their intracranial feculence.

I feel a rant coming on . . .

We do indeed have much to be thankful for this year. As the patriarch of your clan, you are well-advised to exhort those present at the feast to avoid all talk of politics. On Friday we take up our weapons once again.

Happy Thanksgiving, old friend. My best to you and your numerous siblings, all of whom I remember and their names.

[Joe Odegaard]

Hi Bro Bill

We had 20 people at Thanksgiving dinner in Santa Cruz at my sister Mary's house, Family and friends both, and all we talked about was family. We had vegans and carnivores both, and we accommodated everyone.

[BV]

Well done, Joe. A politics fast at the feast. Did Uncle Inky show up?