Blogger's block

I've had a hard time posting today because it seems half the world has gone batshit insane, smacking my gob. After all the shit she's had to put up with, I think Hillary deserves a hearing: 

Her bid for the White House was engulfed by a tidal wave of fabricated news and false conspiracy theories. Now Hillary Clinton is calling for a “global reckoning” with disinformation that includes reining in the power of big tech.

The former secretary of state and first lady warns that the breakdown of a shared truth, and the divisiveness that surely follows, poses a danger to democracy at a moment when China is selling the conceit that autocracy works. . . .

Five years on, Trump has come and gone from the White House and America now has a female vice-president in Kamala Harris. But the dangerous lies have continued to thrive online, notably in the QAnon conspiracy movement, leading all the way to the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January. Far-right Republicans have become openly anti-democratic, endorsing Trump’s falsehoods and seeking to suppress voters of color.

The traditional the-truth-is-somewhere-in-the-middle approach will no longer do, Clinton argues.

“They’ve got to rid themselves of both-sidesism,” she says. “It is not the same to say something critical of somebody on the other side of the aisle and to instigate an attack on the Capitol and to vote against certifying the election. Those are not comparable, and it goes back to the problem of the press actually coming to grips with how out of bounds and dangerous the new political philosophy on the right happens to be.”

 

But if anything, the Republican party has just gotten more insane. The Arizona state government is actually paying a right wing conspiracy theorist to test Maricopa County ballots for bamboo fibers on the theory that China somehow inserted 40,000 fake ballots into the 2020 election. If you live in Arizona, your tax dollars are paying for this. Rupert Murdoch's minions are telling people not to get vaccinated, in other words committing murder for fun and profit. As you know -- no link necessary -- the Republicans are preparing to expel Liz Cheney from congressional leadership for not endorsing the absurd lie that the election was stolen. Some 25-30% of the country, at the least, is insane. We can't survive this.