why i’m done with bernie

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A friend recently asked me why I dislike Bernie Sanders now. I said I didn’t dislike him; I just wish he hadn’t decided to run for POTUS again. I supported Bernie for most of his 2016 campaign, so of course I like Bernie. I mean, the guy has devoted his entire life to social justice. Plus he’s managed to demystify democratic socialism to a LOT of Americans. Also plus, he doesn’t smile of laugh a lot — but when he does, it’s a very genuine smile or laugh. How can you NOT like him?

But then I thought about it…and I realized that yeah, I kinda do dislike him now. Which is sad and disappointing because I really like Bernie Sanders a lot.

The problem isn’t Bernie himself. The problem is there’s a small but very loud segment of his base — folks I think of as OBAs. Only Bernie Assholes. As in ‘Only Bernie can save us!’ As in ‘Only Bernie has the right ideas!’ As in ‘Only Bernie, and if Not Bernie then America deserves Trump!’ As in ‘Only Bernie or let the whole world burn!’

I respect their passion (no, I really do), but I have no tolerance for that sort of political purity. Political purity is just a nice way of saying ‘extremism’. OBAs are extremists who won’t accept a nuanced opinion about Bernie. They think you must either be totally and completely FOR him and everything he says or else you’re absolutely AGAINST him. If your support isn’t pure, undiluted, and unqualified, then you’re compromised in some fundamental way. They see the notion of ‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ as a betrayal of All Things Bernie.

That’s annoying, but everybody has the right to vote the way thay want. The thing that really cements the ‘asshole’ in OBA is that so many OBAs are as conspiracy-minded as the Q-Anon folks. They seem to be truly convinced that if Bernie isn’t winning, it can only be because shadowy corporate forces (usually in the form of the DNC) are actively conspiring and working against him. Other Democratic candidates are frauds who are stealing Bernie’s ideas only in order to get elected, at which point they’ll revert back to corporate whores. They are totally convinced Bernie was cheated out of the nomination in 2016 by the Democratic National Committee, and are equally convinced the DNC is doing it again in 2020.

(Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images)

At the beginning of this campaign season I joined a pro-Bernie Facebook group (I also joined a pro-Cory Booker and a pro-Mayor Pete group because I wanted a better sense of who they were). The pro-Bernie group initially seemed pretty reasonable and I felt better about Bernie joining the race. Then it slowly became dominated by OBAs, who either drove less pure Bernie supporters out of the group or effectively silenced them. Here are some of the posts and comments that appeared in that group over the last day or so:

— Anyone who was in the trenches from the beginning knows this. It didn’t take Russians to talk us out of voting for Hillary. It took looking into her record. Her scandal. The theft of the 2016 primaries. her online army of trolls. Shutting down Bernie Sanders Web pages with child porn.

— If the dnc rigs the election against sanders and gave us Harris or Biden, then I’m going full Bernie or bust. If we don’t have standards, then the corporate dems are just going to shaft us.

— When the establishment prop up Warren, it’s only to try to hurt Bernie. They are focused on trying to take him out in any way they can because he is an existential threat to their excessive amounts of wealth and corporate bribes.

— If the democratic party really wanted to beat trump they would pick Sanders if that truly was their main concern. It is not. They would rather lose to trump then have a Bernie presidency and that is a fact not some outlandish conspiracy.

—  I used to like [Meryl Streep], and watched most of her movies. But she is a hypocrite, a big supporter of HRC among other Hollywood elites and out of touch. She has blindly supported HRC who is also as corrupt as Trump. Because of this reason, I do not watch the  Oscars any more.

— Biden sucks. Everyone knows it. Even the DNC. That’s why they are now artificially inflating Warren. Not cause they like/want her. But they’d rather have her, than Bernie. And it’s becoming clear to everyone.

— I voted for Bernie in the primary I voted for trump in the general reason I never trusted Clinton I am back behind Bernie now like him he is the original deal a true socialist the one that will enact everything he is saying BERNIE 2020

— I wonder why Obama is mute about Bernie but openly support HRC in 2016??

— Bernie or GTFO!

— [T]he 1% run the D.N.C. They want to run another “Hillary” candidate that no one likes to make it look like a real win for Trump again.

— Polls are same as gerrymandering, or even worse totally biased!

— Bernie in did win CA in 2016, his hundreds boxes of ballots were not counted. On the day of HRC declared her so-called landslide won in CA. The Staffs posted hundreds of unopened box of his ballots.

Okay, that doesn’t quite approach the lunacy of the Q-anon theory that 1) JFK Jr. is alive and 2) is actually Q, and 3) is working secretly with Trump and Mueller to build a case against Obama and Hillary. But still.

Let me just say that the OBA’s dislike of the Democratic National Committee has some basis in reality. Some members of the DNC openly disliked Bernie — although, to be fair, Bernie had spent years denouncing the DNC. But the DNC didn’t ‘steal’ the nomination from Bernie. He lost it. He lost it in part because his followers didn’t bother to learn how the primary and caucus systems worked. A lot of Bernie supporters who hadn’t registered as Democrats turned up at closed Democratic primary sites expecting to vote and were turned away. Instead of acknowledging their error, they claimed they’d been disenfranchised — that they were refused because they were Bernie supporters. Which is nonsense.

Bernie wasn’t cheated out of the nomination; he just lost. I say that as a person who caucused for him. He just flat out lost. There’s no shame in that. There’s no need to concoct conspiracy theories to explain his loss.

I really like Bernie Sanders. I won’t support him in the primaries, but I’d happily vote for him if he’s the eventual candidate. Because I believe ‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’ is a valid strategy to rid ourselves of the Trump administration. In my opinion, Bernie has always been more of an inspirational leader than a policy wonk, but that’s okay. One of the most important jobs of POTUS is to inspire the populace to be better citizens. Bernie would be good at that.

I like Bernie. I really do. But I don’t think he can win the nomination. And I cannot abide OBAs. And that’s why I’m done with him.

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Stormy! Stormy! Stormy! Russia! Russia! Russia!

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Your probably one of those snowflake liberals who think paying off porn stars to keep them from publicly stating the prensidential candidate they had sex with while he was married to his third wife (having cheated on the first two) in order to avoid a scandal before the election ought to be illegal or against the law. Hah. This is the big leagues, and if the water’s too hot, get off the bridge before it hatches.

Now it’s been confirmed that Donald J. Trump — the greatest prensident god gave the planet earth in his lifetime and much more — knew about the payments his lawyer (who, by the way, is a born liar who can’t be trusted to know when to keep his mouth shut) made to the porn star (and c’mon, who’s gonna believe a porn star, who is a slut who can’t be trusted to keep her mouth shut when she’s been paid to keep her mouth shut) even though he totally denied knowing anything about those payments. Which, okay, means Trump lied, but who wouldn’t lie to protect his wife? It’s proof of how much he loves Melanie (who is totally hot and classy in a way most women with big tits wish they could be that classy).

So there’s nothing really there, right? But the liberal maimstream limp-wristed commie media keep bringing it up and bringing it up in an effort to ‘prove’ that committing a felony to protect his hot wife ought to be against the law. They hate women.

I wanted to see what real patriots and America-loving Americans thought about this so-called “issue” so I checked in on FreeRepublic, which is as American as mayonnaise. And here’s what they said.

— So what would the crime be? It’s his money?

— is there anything illegal about paying a hooker not to tell your wife? seems like good business practice to me.

— Basically, FBI was being used to do oppo research for Hillary. Paid for with taxpayer money. While other serious crimes (like Hillary’s server, bribes delivered to her “family foundation,” etc.) weren’t investigated.

— Yup……she admitted she lied. Which makes Trump the VICTIM.

— trump better start indicting these jokers before the election rolls around, as a supporter,i am tired of not seeing hillary in jail.

— it is widely believed that Michell aka the Wookie, lived on the streets as a prostitute when she was about 17. She was saved by a Chicago pimp who realized she was too ugly to generate sales. The pimp signed a sealed affadavit that is in Chicago DA custody.

— The FBI is a branch of the Dem/Antifa party and they believe altogether too much.

— Stormy! Stormy! Stormy! Russia! Russia! Russia!

I couldn’t have said it any more better than that. Stormy! Stormy! Stormy! Russia! Russia! Russia! Why can’t the libs just accept the fact that they lost and deserve to be in the dust bin of history with all the other losers like Russia China Viet Nam and Venevuela (sp) down there in South America where all the illegal immigrants come from who are all or mostly gang members and drug deals. Or have vans with tied up women gagged in the back? Why?

The Deep State FBI should just go back where they came from so Prensident Trump can continue to make America Great Again MAGA and Keep it that way for ever until the Rapture or even after.

 

yeah, he’s lying

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Comrade Donald J. Trump is a liar.

Every president has told lies. Every person on earth has told lies. We all lie. Most of our lies are social lies — lies told to lubricate social interactions. “No, the pie crust wasn’t overbaked.” “I’d love to visit, but I’m running a bit late.” “Yes, of course, I’d be happy to help.” “Please, stay as long as you’d like.”

But Trump isn’t just a social liar. He will lie about anything to anybody for any reason without any compunction and without any concern for consequences. He’s an unrepentant liar. A serial liar. An inveterate liar. Worst of all, he’s a dangerous liar. I mean that quite seriously. Trump’s repeated barrage of lies are damaging the stability of our democracy.

Yeah, he’s lying.

Back in 1978 the French writer Roger Errera interviewed Hannah Arendt for the New York Review of Books. Among the things they discussed was the role played by lying in totalitarian governments.

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

We are still sometimes shocked by the viciousness and cruelty of some of Comrade Trump’s lies. We’re sometimes amused by the absurdity of his lies. We’re occasionally baffled by the pointlessness of some of his lies. But it’s been a long time since we were shocked by the fact that he lies. He’s normalized lying. And increasingly, the result is exactly what Arendt said: it’s not that anybody believes most of Trump’s lies; it’s that a lot of people no longer believe anything.

In the last election we elected a Democratic House of Representatives because they told us they would act to hold Comrade Trump accountable. They haven’t. And because they haven’t, we’re less likely to believe them when they promise they will. It’s getting harder and harder to believe anything.

Yeah, he’s lying.

As Arendt said, it’s getting harder and harder to act. I’d intended to join the protest at a local detention facility last Friday. But I had company coming for a few days. Instead of inviting them to the protest, I stayed home. We cooked a meal, drank some locally brewed beer, talked, laughed, enjoyed ourselves. We did this while families seeking asylum are being separated and detained in appalling conditions.

This is how the fatigue caused by Comrade Trump’s constant lying and hate damages the nation. This is how a weary population surrenders. This is how democracy dies.

Yeah, he’s lying.

One last comment by Hannah Arendt.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.

Most of still make those distinctions. Most of us aren’t ‘ideal subjects’ for totalitarian rule. But many of us — I hope it’s not most of us — are just tired. We’re just so goddamn tired. But I truly believe we’d find our energy again IF the Democrats in the House would begin impeachment proceedings.

So today I’ll struggle to find the energy to call my member of Congress and, once again, encourage them to pressure Nancy Pelosi to do her fucking job. Democracy depends on it.

fixed it

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Comrade Trump tweeted this in his morning rant:

The tweet needed work.

If Democrats Republicans want to unite around the foul language & racist hatred spewed from the mouths and actions of the very unpopular & unrepresentative Congresswomen president, it will be interesting to see how it plays out. I can tell you that they have he has made Israel the American people feel abandoned by the U.S. president and his Republican enablers.

There. Fixed it.

in which i buy a hat

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I needed a new cap. Wait…first let me say this: I’m not a hat guy. Some folks can wear a hat; some folks just can’t. Some folks look like dorks whenever they wind up beneath a hat. I am one of those folks. Except baseball caps. Anybody can wear a ball cap. Even me.

Right. So I needed a new cap. And I decided…wait. Maybe need is an exaggeration. I actually had two ball caps. A nice one bought at the ball park, with the logo of the local minor league team (Iowa Cubs). It’s a good cap, moderately expensive, but when I bought it I had long hair. I’ve cut my hair since then; now the cap doesn’t fit. A stiff wind will swipe it right off my head.

The other cap is what I call my ‘Commie Coke hat’. It’s moderately cheap grey cap, adjustable, has a Co-cola logo with a red star on the front. I mostly wear it when I’m in the woods. Or doing some sort of manual labor. Which means it’s pretty beat-up and stained. Not something you’d want to wear in public.

Co-cola Commie cap.

As I was saying, I needed a new cap. The problem was finding one with a logo I could tolerate. I tend to logo-resistant. I wouldn’t wear that Co-cola cap if it didn’t have the red Commie star (which I assume wasn’t intentional, but still). I mentioned my logo problem to a friend, who gave me the following advice:

Go look on Etsy, you putz.

So I looked on Etsy (which, if you don’t already know, is an online marketplace). There are easily a gazillion ball caps on Etsy. A mind-numbing selection. An overwhelming number of choices and options which left me…well, overwhelmed. I was about to exit the site when I noticed a seller who’d let you put your own lettering on a cap. That had potential. Plus the cap looked fairly nice. Plus it only cost like US$15.

Then I saw it was a seller in South Korea. How could somebody in Korea customize a cap and mail it to the US for about twenty bucks (including shipping)? The answer, of course, is because the Korean seller doesn’t have to fuss about with inconvenient stuff like a livable minimum wage for their employees, a safe working environment, worker health care costs, reasonable working hours, or child labor laws.

So fuck that, right? There was absolutely no way I could ethically buy a cap made under those conditions. Here’s a confession: my ethics can get a tad elastic when my curiosity is engaged. And I was curious. If I ordered that cap, how long it would take for the order to be delivered? Would the product be what I actually ordered? Could a $15 cap made by oppressed workers in Korea be anything but shoddy?

So what the hell, I ordered one. I ordered a specific color, with ITMFA (Impeach the Motherfucker Already)  on the front in a specific font.

You guys, it arrived in ten days. It’s a better quality cap than my Co-cola commie cap. It’s the color I ordered. And while the lettering isn’t perfectly centered, it’s still pretty good and it’s in the font I ordered. In fact, the entire experience was so good that it’s discouraging.

I’m mostly a writer, which means I’m relatively poor. I come from a working class family, which means I feel solidarity with working folks. I can understand why poor folks would opt to buy a quality product from the Asian market for a bargain price instead of a quality product from a US source for a higher price. I think it’s still ethically wrong, but understandable. In the long run, this hurts the poor and working class — but let’s face it; the poor and working class can’t always afford to think about the long run. They’ve got bills to pay now.

So here I am, a relatively poor American wearing a cap made by significantly poorer and much more oppressed Korean workers. Here I am, wearing a hat calling for the impeachment of a man who not only endorses but enthusiastically utilizes the oppression of foreign workers for his own personal profit.

I like the hat. I like the message. I sort of regret buying it. I hate that I don’t regret it more. I deeply regret that global conditions exist that allow one group of workers to be exploited like this, and that allow other workers to justify exploiting less fortunate workers. We can say it’s a dog-eat-dog world, but it’s mainly that way because the rich are starving the dogs. I regret that I contributed to starving the dogs.

If YOU want an ITMFA cap, don’t do what I did. Instead, if you can afford it, kick out the extra coin and buy one made here in the US. In fact, I encourage you to kick out the extra coin and buy a ball cap from a source who’ll use the profits to support worthy causes. A source like, say, the ITMFA Store.

pointless, sort of stupid, dorky = fun

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My brother and I started geocaching last April and let me just start by saying flat out that geocaching is pointless and sort of stupid. But like a lot of pointless and sort of stupid things, it’s also fun.

Okay, so some a lot most of you are probably saying, “Greg, old sock, just what the hell is geocaching?” First, stop calling me ‘old sock’. Second, geocaching is…well, it’s described as an ‘outdoor recreational activity’. Which makes it sound incredibly dorky. (Also, when I said geocaching is pointless and sort of stupid, I should have included dorky, because let’s face it — it’s also fairly dorky.) Basically geocaching involves using a GPS-enabled device to locate a container hidden somewhere in the world.

Yeah, there’s a geocache hidden here.

That’s basically it. You may be wondering why you’d want to use GPS to locate a hidden container, especially if it’s pointless, sort of stupid, and dorky. That’s a perfectly valid question. It has a lot of answers, most of which can be boiled down to what I said earlier: it’s fun to find hidden things. Think of it like a treasure hunt. Only without the treasure. Oh, some cache containers include trinkets or toys or other swag, but most don’t — and really, nobody goes geocaching with the idea of finding anything more valuable than the fun of finding it.

There’s one under this bridge.

So how does it work? You download an app, of course. That’s how everything is done these days. The app shows you the general location of caches and gives you some idea of what to look for — the approximate size of the container (most range in size from an ammo box to a teensy tube no larger than the tip of your finger), the difficulty of the terrain (on a scale of 1-5), the difficulty of finding it (again, 1-5), and maybe a hint. Maybe. The app will usually get you to within 10-15 feet of the cache. Then all you have to do is find it.

Yeah, one hidden here too.

It sounds easy. Sometimes it is. Like the one we found yesterday. The map showed us where it was at. All we had to do was park in the lot of some electrical company, hike a third of a mile over a field to a pair of boulders, nose around a bit, and there it was: a dark metal tube on the ground. Easy peasy lemon breezy.

1) Find it on a map.

2) hike to the location.

3) Find the damned thing. It’s right there in the middle of the photo. Honest.

But sometimes it’s not so easy. Sometimes the cache is disguised. Sometimes it’s a false electrical plate on an air conditioning unit. Sometimes it’s a hollow chunk of dead wood in the crook of an old tree. Sometimes it’s in an old bird’s nest or in a magnetic box painted the exact same color as the metal girder to which it’s attached. Sometimes it’s a tiny container inside a hole drilled into a bolt screwed into an old section of railroad track.

Seriously.

The thing is, you never know. The cache might be out in the open or it might be cleverly disguised. You let the app get you close, then you just start looking. The only thing you expect to find in a cache is a logbook — which is often just a rolled up piece of paper. You sign the log, date it, put it back in the cache, put the cache back where you found it, and…well, that’s it. That’s the whole enchilada. Oh, except for this: don’t let anybody see you doing it.

Folks not involved in geocaching are referred to as ‘muggles’ — and yeah, the term was snitched from Harry Potter. As in the PotterVerse you’re not supposed to let muggles see you engaged in that thing you’re doing. Partly because muggles will, out of innocent curiosity or malevolent intent, fuck with a cache. They might take it, move it, destroy it, throw it away. Or worse — they might all the police.

And one hidden here behind a flood control barrier, though we never found it.

And who could blame them? If you see somebody sidle up to a light pole in your supermarket parking lot, lift the cover of the base, and remove or insert an object of some sort, you’d probably be suspicious. A couple of guys skulking around the flood control barriers looks dodgy as fuck. They could be hiding drugs or planting an IED or cheerfully murdering homeless folks. So you’d be forgiven for calling the police.

Seriously. It’s happened. In Wetherby, England a waitress saw a man behaving suspiciously outside the restaurant.

He appeared to have a small plastic box in his hand and after fiddling with the container he bent down and hid it under a flower box standing on the pavement. He then walked off, talking to somebody on his phone.

She called the police, the police called the Army, the Army sent in the bomb squad with a robot to conduct a controlled explosion. There have been at least five geocaching bomb scares in the last few years. So yeah, when geocaching in urban/suburban you need to be somewhat discreet.

Okay, this is part of the reason we go geocaching.

But here’s the thing. It’s pointless, sort of stupid, dorky, and sometimes suspicious, but geocaching is fun. The brother and I used to get together and sort of lackadaisically noodle around the countryside, stopping at some point for food and beer. Geocaching allows us to lackadaisically noodle around the countryside, stopping at some point for food and beer, only now with a pointless and sort of stupid dorky purpose. We’ve only found about 40 caches, but we discovered a great BBQ place in the small town of Slater that serves a kick-ass modified Cuban sandwich and serves local craft beers. And a place in the small town of Norwalk that serves kick-ass egg rolls and serves local craft beers. And a place in the small town of Carlisle that serves a kick-ass mac & cheese made with some sort of spicy sausage and serves local craft beers.

Okay, maybe geocaching isn’t entirely pointless.

 

knuckles hits fifty

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A couple days ago I posted the 50th photograph in the Knuckles Steals the World project — which isn’t really called that. In fact, isn’t really called anything at all, but I felt a momentary need to give the project a title, and that’s what immediately came to mind. As a reminder, this explains the origins of the untitled project.

GSV #22

Fifty seems like it ought to be some sort of project milestone. Milestone is, I suppose, a weirdly appropriate term, given the project is sorta kinda grounded in imaginary travel. Because it’s a sort of milestone — and because it’s a Monday and I don’t feel like doing the stuff I ought to be doing — I thought I’d piss away part of the morning nattering on about the project.

GSV #25

It’s been amusing and interesting and fun (in a very quiet way). I’ve yanked images of windmills in the Netherlands, chickens in a Turkish yard, a woman hanging laundry in some remote Brazilian village, people doing yoga in an Utrecht alleyway, a ruined castle in Andalusia, a small sunlit farmhouse in rural America, an abandoned car in Belgium — all ordinary moment and mundane scenes snatched from Google Street View (as mediated by Geoguessr) and extracted from context. I’m about six months into the project, and it’s still holding my attention.

GSV #34

I’ve actually had a few interesting conversations sparked by the project, mostly about the process and practice of appropriation. One friend, who is also engaged in an appropriation project, said he’d almost abandoned photography. “[I]t got to the point where everything looks like stuff I’ve seen before, and that was in 2005. Curation is the new photography.”

I don’t entirely agree with that last line, but he’s got a point. The unanticipated problem with the notion of the democratic camera is that once we hit the intersection of Everything Can Be Photographed and Ubiquitous Cheap-ass Automated Digital Imagery, it’s only a matter of time before almost everything HAS been photographed.

GSV #38

As I noted when I began this gig, Google Street View has amassed imagery of over ten million miles in 83 countries.

“In that ten million miles, there are bound to be a LOT of things worth looking at. So if you are stupidly persistent and pathologically curious and live a moderately well-regulated disorganized life that allows you to piss away a few hours now and then in an endeavor that has no real value except your own amusement, there’s a decent chance you’ll get to see some of those things.”

GSV #46

I have seen some of those things. That’s where the curation kicks in. Rummaging through all those miles of unedited images and finding a few things that are, at least in my opinion, worth looking at. And of course, because I’m me and I tend to overthink all the unimportant stuff, I’m struck by the fact that ‘curation‘ comes from the same Latin root as ‘cure‘ and originally referred to the act of attending, managing, or restoring health. Art curators attend to the health of the art world — or at least are supposed to. I’m not going to pretend that this project is attending to the health of photography, but it most certainly attends to the health of my interest in photography — so there’s that.

GSV #50

Anyway, here we are at fifty images, deliberately and semi-thoughtfully culled from who knows how many possible GSV images in the world. It’s a ridiculous and pointlessly complicated project. I don’t know how much longer this project will last. I don’t have any end point in mind. But the sheer immensity and randomness of it continues to hold my interest, so I expect it will go on for a bit.

NOTE: If you’re interested, all the equally pointless Knuckles projects — GSV, My Feet Double Exposed, Things on a Table — can be found here.