Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The dwarfs are for the dwarfs

If you have wondered, as I have, how in the world some of our neighbors are so determined to spread (and believe) malicious rumors and conspiracy fantasies in the wake of natural disasters, a Sunday sermon.

C.S. Lewis wrote his The Chronicles of Narnia series in the early 1950’s, publishing “The Last Battle” in 1956. The books concern English children teleported to Narnia, a magical land filled with talking animals as well as humans, the good and the bad. Like Lewis’s space trilogy, the Narnia books are rich in Christian allegory (much of it barely allegory). They contain some scenes never to be forgotten.

For those who never read “The Last Battle,” one scene may be instructive this morning, whatever Lewis meant by it. Perhaps disillusionment and loss of faith after the war. In our case 70 years later, perhaps the dispelling of the comforting notion among MAGA cult members that this country was founded by and for people who look and believe like them. My friends, my neighbors, my church, my money, etc.

The last of the true Narnians find themselves trapped in cave used as a stable. As an enemy army waits outside, inside they wait to die. The great lion Aslan, Narnia’s Christ figure, appears and opens the back of the cave to a land of goodness and light, basically heaven’s footfills. His faithful rise to join him there.

Except the dwarfs. Narnia has changed for them. They feel betrayed by a false Aslan sold them by enemies. They’ve darkened, turned inward and cynical, tribal, and in the end self-deluded. They’ve rejected hope. The exit to a better world is there but they cannot see it:

“Aslan,” said Lucy through her tears, “could you – will you – do something for these poor Dwarfs?”

“Dearest,” said Aslan, “I will show you both what I can, and what I cannot, do.” He came close to the Dwarfs and gave a low growl: low, but it set all the air shaking. But the Dwarfs said to one another, “Hear that? That’s the gang at the other end of the stable. Trying to frighten us. They do it with a machine of some kind. Don’t take any notice. They won’t take us in again!”

Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs’ knees: pies and tongues and pigeons and trifles and ices, and each Dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right hand. But it wasn’t much use. They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn’t taste it properly. They thought they were eating and drinking only the sort of things you might find in a stable. One said he was trying to eat hay and another said he had got a bit of an old turnip and a third said he’d found a raw cabbage leaf. And they raised golden goblets of rich red wine to their lips and said “Ugh! Fancy drinking dirty water out of a trough that a donkey’s been at! Never thought we’d come to this.” But very soon every Dwarf began suspecting that every other Dwarf had found something nicer than he had, and they started grabbing and snatching, and went on to quarreling, till in a few minutes there was a free fight and all the good food was smeared on their faces and clothes or trodden under foot. But when at last they sat down to nurse their black eyes and their bleeding noses, they all said:

“Well, at any rate there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”

“You see,” said Aslan. “They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”

1956.

The Good Liars, of course, choose only their craziest MAGA encounters for posting. But they are plentiful enough.

MAGAs distrust the government. (It sent hurricanes to red states.)

MAGAs won’t trust science. (The Earth is flat.)

MAGAs believe FEMA is not here and to blame for what it is doing here and what they imagine it’s doing here but it’s not. (Despite the Chinooks and Black Hawks flying over my house.)

The dwarfs are for the dwarfs, trapped in a prison of their own minds.

And that’s my sermon.

[Missed my 6 a.m. PT post. Still having internet outages and bandwidth issues here in Asheville, both fiber (ATT) and cell (Verizon). The fixers are fixing their fixes. The outage ATT promised to have fixed at midnight, they changed last night to 3 a.m. Now they’ve changed that projection to 6 p.m. today. Bandwidth comes and goes. Had to go around my ass to get to my elbow, figuratively speaking, to post this. ]

Steelmanning (as opposed to strawmannin) is a rather obscure concept defined as:

A steel man argument (or steelmanning) is the opposite of a straw man argument. Steelmanning is the practice of applying the rhetorical principle of charity through addressing the strongest form of the other person’s argument, even if it is not the one they explicitly presented. Creating the strongest form of the opponent’s argument may involve removing flawed assumptions that could be easily refuted or developing the strongest points which counter one’s own position. Developing counters to steel man arguments may produce a stronger argument for one’s own position

Apparently, the Washington Post called up economics journalist Noah Smith and asked him to make the best case for Trump’s economic policies, ostensibly in order to give people a good faith argument that they could easily understand so they’d realize that Trump’s policies aren’t actually very good. Steelmanning. Smith declined because while there may be some reasonable uses for this type of argumentation. using them with Trump’s ramblings easily turns into sanewashing.

This is what some journalists and most headline writers are doing. By making Trump’s inane blather into coherent arguments they are missing the point entirely. Trump’s an imbecile and a lunatic and there is no real policy except revenge, racism and xenophobia. Giving his wild fascistic bleating the veneer of respectable policy proposals, regardless of your motive, is to mislead the public.

People need to hear his insanity as it’s delivered. Only then do you really understand what’s going on.

David Roberts explains it well:

Kudos to @Noahpinion for refusing this absurd assignment. And the @washingtonpost should be ashamed of itself for still, at this late date, failing to understand Trump & his movement.

As @whstancil has articulated so well, the whole appeal of fascism is that it releases you from any obligation to be decent or intellectually curious or coherent in your beliefs. It is a permission structure to wallow in your basest instincts, which is why it attracts assholes. 

When Trump tries to pitch his giant nationwide pogrom as a solution to the housing crisis, he is bullshitting. He’s reverse engineering some plausible rationale for what he & his followers really want, which is to make brown people suffer. 

In other words, the real truth of Trump’s housing policy is raw xenophobia & racism. By “steelmanning” that argument, the WA Post will be directly deceiving readers, leading them to believe that the real truth of the policy is some coherent set of “reasons.” 

Whatever your thoughts on steelmanning in general, specifically steelmanning *fascism* is an intellectual sin. The point of fascism is to unleash raw ugly instincts — that’s why it is built around “rallies,” ie, mobs where people can subsume their individual thought. 

Steelmanning an individual fascist policy, just in and of itself — regardless of *how* you steelman it or what specifically you say — is grossly misleading. There are not good, credible versions of these policies, because they were not derived from credible policy objectives. 

The “real truth” of fascism is the ugly instincts toward cruelty, persecution, resentment, and anti-intellectualism. The rickety “policy” they offer as a facade for those instincts is a pretense, a distraction. Steelmanning it makes it look otherwise. Shame on WaPo. 

I wish I could understand why the media hasn’t learned this lesson by now. It’s been almost a decade of this. It’s not as if they have anything to lose by being honest about what they, and every other sersone who isn'[t indoctrinated in the Trump cult, can see with our own eyes. Trump already sees them as an enemy of the people unless they are groveling at his feet like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. There’s no benefit to trying to make the nonsensical make sense.

It’s their job to tell the truth and they simply are failing to do that a good part of the time.

Don’t tell me that’s hyperbole:

And who is the man in charge of this operation?

I think Trump using the “Aliens Enemies Act of 1798” on the stump is new but I might be wrong. I’m sure he loves the sound of it.

If you’d like refresher on this odious archaic law, the Brennan Center has a good one.

He wants people to think he’s a superman:

That’s no doubt true. “I may be a criminal, a fascist and an all-around disgraceful human being but I’m leading in the polls, so vote for me!” does sound like Trump. I also think he just believes that he can make reality conform to his desires. And for millions of his cult members, he can.

But there’s an actual, longstanding campaign strategy involved as well. I wrote about it back in 2022 just before that election:

One more day until the voting is done. Hallelujah! When the polls are so tight and the campaigning so intense you reach a point where you almost don’t care who wins anymore and just want it to be over. But of course you do care, as we all must in this age of authoritarian right-wing, lunacy.

I wrote on Friday that nobody really knows anything about this election. It could go either way. It might be a close result or one side could sweep both houses of Congress with big wins. But if you just read the headlines and listen to the pundits and strategists on TV, you’d think the evidence showed clearly that Republicans were running away with it. There’s a reason for that: Republicans plant this notion in the press and the sad-sack Democrats play into it by prematurely assembling the circular firing squad whenever a race is close.

You see headlines like “Democrats fear midterm drubbing as party leaders rush to defend blue seats,” but the fact that Donald Trump held big rallies just days before the election in Florida and Pennsylvania, where the GOP is defending numerous seats, isn’t framed the same way. There’s “CNN panelist predicts ‘bad night,’ says Democrats didn’t ‘listen’ to voters throughout the election” while the New Yorker publishes a widely-read article headlined “Why Republican Insiders Think the G.O.P. Is Poised for a Blowout.”

Maybe it’s all true. Maybe it will turn out that Democrats have blown the election (even though all the fundamentals and historical precedents suggest defeat was more or less preordained) and maybe the Republicans played a masterful hand (in winning an election everyone assumed was already in the bag). We will see. But let’s not kid ourselves about what is going on in these final days. Republicans are playing the press for chumps, as they do every single time. Of course they may win, but this election is close and they’re not soothsayers. It’s a deliberate strategy.

The most famous purveyor of this strategy was Karl Rove, also known as “Bush’s Brain,” the strategist who eked out a history-changing victory for his guy in 2000. Rove was a big believer in the “bandwagon effect,” which assumed that a significant chunk of the voting public will go with those they perceive as winners. So when a race is close you put on a big show to pretend that you’re confident of winning, in the hopes of getting any last-minute wobblers or people who might not otherwise vote to get behind your team. It’s fun to win! In close races, Rove reasoned, this strategy might just make the difference. But it’s not scientific and nobody should take a GOP strategist’s word for anything in the final days of a campaign. They’re just spinning.

Rove even went so far as to send George W. Bush to California in the final days of the 2000 campaign, to convince the press that they were so confident of a blowout that they were hoping to expand the map into deep blue states. The New York Times blared, “A Confident Bush Says He Can Win California’s Vote.” As it turned out, Al Gore won the state by double digits, leading observers to wonder whether Rove should have sent Bush to Florida instead, the state he ended up “winning” by only 537 (disputed) votes. They did the same thing four years later by sending Dick Cheney to Hawaii, and the Los Angeles Times dutifully reported, “Aloha State Has Become a Surprise Campaign Battleground.” Um, no. It hadn’t. Democrats won Hawaii by nine points, as per usual. 

Rove didn’t just deploy this strategy for election campaigns. As Bush’s senior adviser, he played the same game with public opinion over the war with Iraq:

In shaping their message, White House officials have drawn on the work of Duke University political scientists Peter D. Feaver and Christopher F. Gelpi, who have examined public opinion on Iraq and previous conflicts. Feaver, who served on the staff of the National Security Council in the early years of the Clinton administration, joined the Bush NSC staff about a month ago as special adviser for strategic planning and institutional reform.

Feaver and Gelpi categorized people on the basis of two questions: “Was the decision to go to war in Iraq right or wrong?” and “Can the United States ultimately win?” In their analysis, the key issue now is how people feel about the prospect of winning. They concluded that many of the questions asked in public opinion polls — such as whether going to war was worth it and whether casualties are at an unacceptable level — are far less relevant now in gauging public tolerance or patience for the road ahead than the question of whether people believe the war is winnable.

That helps explain the infamous 2003 Bush gaffe with “Mission Accomplished.” That didn’t work out in the long run because Republicans couldn’t deny reality forever as the Iraq war began to go south shortly after that. But the press was gullible enough, and the public stayed on board long enough, for the Bush team to win re-election and support the “surge” that prolonged the war. It’s simple enough: If you call yourself a winner, people will believe it (at least for a while) and will act accordingly.

We’re in a new landscape these days with election denial prominently featured on the menu. (Karl Rove is actually getting booed as a RINO sellout at GOP rallies.) The bandwagon effect is still in play but they now have a back-up: the Big Lie. It’s not overly cynical to suspect that a whole lot of the happy talk coming from Republican strategists whispering in reporters’ ears about how great their private polling looks is just a set-up for the possibility that they won’t do as well as they would like. As we already know, their voters are fully indoctrinated to believe that Democrats can only win if they cheat, and Republicans have created a full-scale election denial operation to challenge any negative results they don’t like. In some instances, they have challenged election systems in counties Trump won by double digits! Election denial has become the party’s primary organizing principle.

All of this has been aided and betted by Republican pollsters flooding the zone this cycle and right-leaning aggregators like Real Clear Politics which have helped to set sky-high Republican expectations. As the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein quipped on Twitter:

None of this is accident or coincidence. The strategy is clear: In a close race, pretend you’re winning in hopes of enticing voters to jump on board. If that doesn’t work, claim the election was stolen and deny the legitimacy of your opponent’s victory. This is just what they do. Why the press allows itself to be manipulated this way, year after year, is another question. Media folks can’t possibly fail to understand what’s going on, after all this time. On some level, they fall for it because they like it. 

And guess what? That red wave didn’t materialize and the Democrats kept the Senate while the Republicans went through months of turmoil with a tiny, ingovernable majority.

It’s worth noting that things could go the other way this time. But don’t fall for all the GOP polls (which are distorting the averages again) or the GOP’s misdirection. All we need to know is that it’s close.

The alleged billionaire feels poor:

Donald J. Trump took his seat at the dining table in his triplex penthouse apartment atop Trump Tower on the last Sunday in September, alongside some of the most sought-after and wealthiest figures in the Republican Party.

There was Paul Singer, the billionaire hedge fund manager who finances Republican campaigns and pro-Israel causes, and Warren Stephens, the billionaire investment banker. Joining them were Betsy DeVos, the billionaire former education secretary under Mr. Trump, and her husband, Dick, as well as the billionaire Joe Ricketts and his son Todd.

Some politicians might have taken the moment to be charming and ingratiating with the donors. Not Mr. Trump. Over steak and baked potatoes, the former president tore through a bitter list of grievances.He made it clear that people, including donors, needed to do more, appreciate him more and help him more.

He disparaged Vice President Kamala Harris as “retarded.” He complained about the number of Jews still backing Ms. Harris, saying they needed their heads examined for not supporting him despite everything he had done for the state of Israel.

At one point, Mr. Trump seemed to suggest that these donors had plenty to be grateful to him for. He boasted about how great he had been for their taxes, something that some privately noted wasn’t true for everyone in the room.

The rant, described by seven people with knowledge of the meal who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, underscored a reality three weeks before Election Day: Mr. Trump’s often cantankerous mood in the final stretch. And one of the reasons for his frustration is money. He’s trailing his Democratic rival in the race for cash and has had to hustle to keep raising it.

Not only does Ms. Harris have far more money to buy ads and pay for staff after raising $1 billion in less than three months as a candidate — a sum greater than the total Mr. Trump raised all year — but she has also been freed from having to plead directly to donors anymore. She raised more than twice as much as Mr. Trump in July, August and September.

Trump doesn’t have to beg anymore. The richest man in the world just bought him.

What is this democracy you speak of?

Rumors and their origins

Northeast of here, near the the little town of Spruce Pine, NC, there is a mine that provides key minerals used in the manufacture of microelectronics (NPR):

Semiconductors are the brains of every computer-chip-enabled device, and solar panels are a key part of the global push to combat climate change. To make both semiconductors and solar panels, companies need crucibles and other equipment that both can withstand extraordinarily high heat and be kept absolutely clean. One material fits the bill: quartz. Pure quartz.

Quartz that comes, overwhelmingly, from Spruce Pine.

“As far as we know, there’s only a few places in the world that have ultra-high-quality quartz,” according to Ed Conway, author of Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization. Russia and Brazil also supply high-quality quartz, he says, but “Spruce Pine has far and away the [largest amount] and highest quality.”

Conway says without super-pure quartz for the crucibles, which can often be used only a single time, it would be impossible to produce most semiconductors.

Very quickly after the remnants of Hurricane Helene blew through WNC, rumors flew that some bad guys (the gummint and/or rapacious industrialists) wanted to steal people’s property to mine lithium (used in batteries for devices like my PHEV). From here the rumor spread to other storm-impacted areas. There is a lithium mine scheduled to reopen near the town of King’s Mountain, so there is a kernel of truth behind the rumor.

Someone else may have a better explanation, but my speculation is that in a disaster-driven game of “telephone” somehow quartz from Spruce Pine and lithium from King’s Mountain became lithium under Chimney Rock (and everywhere a storm hit) and conspirators were off to the races.

Daniel Dale also recognizes how a kernel of truth powers these fantasies.

What else is new?

New reveleations yesterday from Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, “War,” out just in time for the fall of the American empire. An MSNBC pundit last night wryly observed that the first two outlets to report it are based in England (that is, beyond Donald Trump’s immediate reach should he win a second term next month), The Independent and the Guardian.

The Independent first:

Mark Milley, the US Army general who Donald Trump appointed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, now says the current Republican presidential nominee is a “fascist to the core” and says no person has ever posed more of a danger to the United States than the man who served as the 45th President of the United States.

In perhaps an unprecedented (time to retire that term?) move, a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked to meet with the new U.S. attorney general. Milley urged Merrick Garland post-Jan. 6 to investigate domestic extremists and far-right militias. Woodward describes Milley as “deeply convinced” that despite the failure of the attempted coup, Trump remained “a danger to the country.”

“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country,” Milley told Woodward directly. “A fascist to the core,” Milley repeated.

The Guardian:

Mark Milley, a retired US army general who was chair of the joint chiefs of staff under Donald Trump and Joe Biden, fears being recalled to uniform and court-martialed should Trump defeat Kamala Harris next month and return to power.

“He is a walking, talking advertisement of what he’s going to try to do,” Milley recently “warned former colleagues”, the veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward writes in an upcoming book. “He’s saying it and it’s not just him, it’s the people around him.”

Woodward cites Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist now jailed for contempt of Congress, as saying of Milley: “We’re gonna hold him accountable.”

So, they’d like to recall Milley to service simply to try him before a kangaroo court and jail him. Or worse.

Trump’s wish to recall and court-martial retired senior officers who criticized him in print has been reported before, including by Mark Esper, Trump’s second secretary of defense. In Woodward’s telling, in a 2020 Oval Office meeting with Milley and Esper, Trump “yelled” and “shouted” about William McRaven, a former admiral who led the 2011 raid in Pakistan in which US special forces killed Osama bin Laden, and Stanley McChrystal, the retired special forces general whose men killed another al-Qaida leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in Iraq in 2006.

Milley was able to persuade Trump to back down, Woodward writes, but fears no such guardrails will be in place if Trump is re-elected.

Woodward reports Milley receiving “a non-stop barrage of death threats” since retirement in 2023.

A month ago, I suggested that, handed power again, Trump would go full “Off with their heads!” A year ago, we looked at a Christian nationalist, Stew Peters of “The Stew Peters Show.” Appearing with Trump inner circle members at a ReAwaken America event in Las Vegas, Peters argued per a Right Wing Watch report:

“We are going to see extreme accountability,” Peters asserted. “Maximum accountability. We are going to have permanent accountability, with extreme prejudice!”

Every one of Peters’ violent threats was met by wild cheers from the audience.

From last November:

What may be most alarming is the lack of alarm among Americans in general, much less mobilization. Trump’s MAGA foot soldiers? They hunger to be led by their man-child-king. The rest seem blissfully unaware that the Party of Trump has abandoned democracy save for going through the motions.

From Salon:

“This is the nightmare scenario that to millions of Americans is unfathomable but realistically possible,” Bennett Gershman, a former New York prosecutor and law professor at Pace University, told Salon. “It is also the scenario that millions of Americans look forward to with glee and the opportunity for retribution against the enemies of Trump.”

What’s a little pogrom if the tree of Trumpism needs watering?

First, they’ll come for the immigrants, etc.

Threatening to hang Mike Pence wasn’t grisly enough. Trump and his mob will want blood.

Trump is a fascist to the core. Who among us will be the last to know?

[You might want to knock some doors and/or make some calls this weekend.]

Fat Bear Winner!

Mama Bear beats the Big Bruiser:

In an exciting and personal rematch from last year, 128 Grazer and 32 Chunk faced off again in the final round of 2024’s Fat Bear Week contest.

And this year, embattled mama bear 128 Grazer has retained the crown of the most popular fat bear in the annual online competition, which is observing its 10th anniversary this year.

Grazer more than doubled Chunk’s vote count, garnering 71,248 votes to her male rival’s 30,468 votes. The nature site Explore.org administers the online voting, which saw a final tally for the weeklong contest of 1,041,124, according to the site around 9:30 p.m. ET Tuesday.

The contest is held by Katmai National Park & Preserve to promote public awareness about the wild brown bears of Alaska. Like scenic drives to see the changing leaves, it’s become a popular fall ritual in the United States and around the world.

She’s the first female bear to win it and it was a grudge match:

128 Grazer and 32 Chunk are developing quite the history between them, and it’s not all in the manmade, online brackets-style competition, either.

Grazer has “a long, straight muzzle and conspicuously blond ears,” according to Explore.org. More important than her looks, though, she’s “a highly defensive” mother bear who has raised three litters. She’s given a lot of respect and a wide berth by other bears.

But sometimes accidents of nature and the intentions of rivals intervene in the life of a mother bear.

In July 2024, both of her first-year cubs were swept over the Brook Falls, where the Katmai bears gather to fatten up on salmon ahead of their winter hibernations, according to Explore.org. The rushing water in the Brooks River swept her cubs toward Chunk, currently the most dominant male bear on the river.

As large, male bears sometimes do, Chunk went on the offense. And as mother bears do, Grazer went on defense for her cubs. But Chunk was able to injure the cub nearest to him before Grazer could stop him. That cub later died from its injuries, Explore.org and Katmai said.

The surviving cub, called 128’s Spring Cub, was a contender in the 2024 Fat Bear Junior contest held in late September. That contest was won by 909Jr., a “large-bodied nearly 4-year-old female cub.”

Don’t mess with Mama Bears.

There’s a message in there somewhere.

Update:

A smattering of recent ads from the Harris campaign.

You can see them all here.

I think these are pretty good. It’s hard to know if they’re breaking through he cacophony of news and social media noise. But if they do I think they’re effective with the discrete groups they’re trying to appeal to.