As regular readers of this blog know, I read (or at least scan) reports from a lot of different media. In the process, I increasingly find myself muttering things like “these people are insane!”
Take a look at any rundown of the “news of the day,” and you will find conspiracy theories and behaviors bizarre enough to make Marjorie Taylor Greene look rational. (And that is saying something.)
I recently saw that the GOP in a Florida county passed a resolution “banning the. jab,.” They want to ban the COVID-19 vaccine in the state of Florida. Lest we conclude that the insanity is limited to the Sunshine State, however, U.S. News disabuses us of that comforting conclusion. Arkansas, Montana and South Carolina are the latest states to advance bills or enact laws that ban requirements based on vaccine status.
The war on vaccination joins the war on “wokeness”–and science, and health, and common sense.
The Indiana legislature is a never-never land where logic goes to die. Is the state having difficulty finding qualified teachers? Indiana’s Senate just passed a bill (patterned after Florida’s), that will allow teachers to be charged with a felony for allowing students to check out books some parents don’t want their kids to read.
Indiana sure isn’t recruiting teachers with that message…
The same lawmakers who defend that measure by chanting “parental rights” are busy passing bills divesting parents of trans kids of their right to determine their children’s medical care. (Indiana’s legislature hasn’t improved much since it passed a law changing the value of pi.)
And then–brace yourself for this one.The MAGA folks have discovered that there is no war in Ukraine. It’s all a “false flag” operation! Shades of Alex Jones!
As Josh Marshall recently reported
Since I spend time, for better or worse, swimming in the swill of right wing influencers and Trumpists, I’m often able to see things before they go fully mainstream — or rather before their existence gets picked up in mainstream media. Just over the last few days there’s been a burst of claims that something is not quite right about the Ukaine War, that the whole thing might be made up. Perhaps it’s a potemkin war. Maybe the Ukrainians are just crisis actors, as we sometimes hear claimed about the victims of mass shootings in the United States. The “questions” are characteristically vague and open-ended, designed to sow doubt without stipulating to any clearly disprovable claim.
The particular claim or question is, where are the pictures? Why isn’t there more war reporting as we’ve seen with every other war. How is it world leader after world leader is able to visit Kyiv in relative safety?
Marshall shared a post to Twitter from someone named Becker, who evidently started at Fox News and found it too mainstream. He decamped to The Blaze, TimCast, and the Rubin Report– “more explicitly white nationalist and fascist news organizations. Now he is the “Becker News CEO.” Here’s the post.
I am sick and tired of the lack of footage of the Ukraine war. I worked in cable news. I am initiated. If it bleeds, it leads. Where is the war footage? Where are the Pulitzer Prize winning photos? This smacks of a scam and the American people are fed up.
Produce the documentary evidence or STFU already. We’re not sending our sons and daughters to die over a corrupt undemocratic country’s politics without documentary evidence. We don’t give a crap about your Russian bogeymen. This is not a matter of US national security. So, put up or shut up.
Pick your chin up off the floor! As Marshall notes, in the real world where most of us live, the war in Ukraine is more than well-documented. The pictures–even the sounds–are on television, on social media, on the front pages of America’s remaining newspapers. Everywhere.
Volume doesn’t equate to quality or insight. But quite apart from the nonsense we’re discussing here, there is an avalanche of video, photography and satellite record of this conflict that really has no equal in history. Like so much else, a lot stems from the existence of the smart phone: most of the civilians and the combatants have smart phones which allow them to create high quality records of events in real time. These circulate on social networks and encrypted distribution networks like Telegram. Drones also play a role. They’re all generating video coverage whether they are surveillance drones or simply recording the final moments before they crash or detonate themselves.
Every reader of this blog can add to these examples. We’re seeing the steady growth of what the Trump Administration dubbed “alternate facts,” and you can’t reason with inhabitants of alternate realities.
I guess I’ll go polish my space laser…..
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