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How Donald Trump Could Subvert the 2024 Election

From How Donald Trump Could Subvert the 2024 Election:

Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.

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We suffer from Republican radicalization

From It’s not ‘polarization.’ We suffer from Republican radicalization:

While it’s true that the country is more deeply divided along partisan lines than it has been in the past, it is wrong to suggest a symmetrical devolution into irrational hatred. The polarization argument too often treats both sides as equally worthy of blame, characterizing the problem as a sort of free-floating affliction (e.g., “lack of trust”). This blurs the distinction between a Democratic Party that is marginally more progressive in policy positions than it was a decade ago, and a Republican Party that routinely lies, courts violence, and seeks to define America as a White Christian nation.

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politics

A Brief Statement Regarding Kyle Rittenhouse

On Friday, November 19, 2021, just after 1:00 pm EST, a citizen jury serving at the Kenosha County Courthouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, acquitted a young white man named Kyle Rittenhouse of first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide, attempted first-degree intentional homicide, and two counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety.

The verdict, as with virtually every public decision nowadays, divided the populace of the United States. A large percentage of citizens celebrated the Rittenhouse verdict for strengthening an individual’s right to defend themselves. Another bemoaned the verdict as yet another data point in the criminal court system’s historical defense of white power.

While members of the ruling classes debated the verdict from their laptops and television studios in the country’s major metropolitan areas, a doctor in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, named Kyle Pfefferle, contacted an LSU student he met at the university’s library, a man named Kyle Sellers. Dr. Pfefferle knew Sellers was a double major in computer science and computer engineering set to graduate in December. Dr. Pfefferle challenged Sellers to build a data-mining tool to scrub the Internet for any bit of contact information belonging to each of the Kyles in the United States.

By Saturday evening, Sellers accomplished the task, and at 6:39 pm CST, Pfefferle and Sellers possessed a Google Sheet with the phone numbers and email addresses of over 160,00 individuals in the United States whose names began with Kyle. Based on Social Security data from the past 100 years, experts estimate that over 460,000 Kyles currently reside in the country.

I received my first text from Dr. Pfefferle on Sunday, November 21, 2021, at 8:03 pm EST. It read:

My name’s Doctor Kyle Pfefferle, and I invite you to join a Zoom call tonight to discuss with 163,631 other Kyle’s [sic] what our response will be to the Rittenhouse verdict.

Astounded, I confirmed my interest and attendance.

At 11:10 pm EST, I received an invitation to join the Zoom call, but due to the technical limitations of the service, when I logged on, I found only 99 other Kyles in attendance. Dr. Pfefferle was not one of them. Instead, a middle-aged man named Kyle Pretsch greeted me. Pretsch was a Vice President of IT Development for a company in Phoenix, Arizona, and he introduced himself as the group’s facilitator.

Pretsch announced that out of all the Kyles invited to the emergency conference, 87,917 signaled their willingness to attend. Dr. Pfefferle asked the first respondents to facilitate meetings of 100 Kyles each. Our task was to determine how we felt as a group about the Rittenhouse verdict and to elect a representative who would attend a second gathering to speak on our behalf later in the night.

The meeting lasted 75 minutes. The conversation covered everything from the validity of The New York Times’ 1619 Project to the wisdom of constructing a physical wall along the nation’s southern border. Our facilitator successfully navigated the noisy voices of the rest of us, and as we approached the end of the meeting, he called a vote on whether we, as a group, approved of the Rittenhouse verdict.

With a majority opinion decided, we spent the last five minutes constructing an acceptable statement of our feelings. At the end of the meeting, the group nominated three potential representatives to attend the second meeting. I was humbled when a plurality of these strangers elected me to speak for them. I don’t know why they did so, but I vowed to take the responsibility seriously.

On Monday, November 22, 2021, at 1:30 am EST, I attended another Zoom call with 999 other individuals named Kyle. Each of us represented roughly one hundred other Kyle. I learned that not every Kyle who had signaled their willingness to attend the first meeting had done so, but most had. A few individuals in this second meeting represented groups with odd numbers, but most of us represented 100, and none of us knew who represented the smaller groups.

Dr. Pfefferle facilitated the conversation, but he did not get a vote in the meeting and did not express his opinion. Instead, in his role as facilitator, he wielded the mute button. From my perspective, Dr. Pfefferle restricted his use of the mute button to enforce unspoken rules of time and decorum, but I suspect some of those he muted may have felt slighted.

When Dr. Pfefferle turned the microphone over to me, I spoke on behalf of my constituents to express their opinions and concerns. Out of a sense of fairness to the minority opinion-holders in our group, I also expressed their significant positions. I believe I represented our group fairly.

At the end of the call, Dr. Pfefferle called for nominees to speak on behalf of America’s Kyles. Over 139 names were called in the first round. The voting lasted for 29 rounds, but in the end, the group reached a majority conclusion.

At 6:11 am EST on Monday, November 22, 2021, I was rewarded (or perhaps cursed) to be elected to submit that conclusion for public review.

And so, on behalf of the majority of Kyles of the United States of America whose contact information could be scrubbed from the Internet, I now offer this brief statement:

Fuck Kyle Rittenhouse.

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asides

Fix Facebook by Making It More Like Google+

From Fix Facebook by Making It More Like Google+:

A lot is wrong with the internet, but much of it boils down to this one problem: We are all constantly talking to one another. Take that in every sense. Before online tools, we talked less frequently, and with fewer people. The average person had a handful of conversations a day, and the biggest group she spoke in front of was maybe a wedding reception or a company meeting, a few hundred people at most.

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One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia

From One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia:

[H]istory is an edit war. Truth, factual and moral, hangs in the balance.

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The Death of White America Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

From The Death of White America Has Been Greatly Exaggerated:

During a rant about what he perceived as left-wing giddiness over the “extinction of white people,” [FOX News commentator, Tucker Carlson] asked, “Where did all these people go?” The millions of missing white Americans did not, in fact, go anywhere. And they are not being replaced by minorities. Growing numbers of white Americans have multiracial children and grandchildren. Others were recategorized in 2020 as multiracial themselves, instead of single-race white.

In other words, White America is only going extinct if you maintain the illusory violence of the “one drop rule.

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Review: ‘The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity’

From Review: ‘The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity’:

[The authors make] the case that the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress was developed in reaction to the Indigenous critique in order to salvage the honor of the West. We’re richer, went the logic, so we’re better. The authors ask us to rethink what better might actually mean.

One of the authors, David Graeber, wrote one of my favorite nonfiction books, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and I can’t wait to get my hands on this one.