CSotD: While Making Other Plans

As is so often the case, I find myself reluctantly agreeing with Clyde’s dubious street smarts in today’s Candorville (KFS) over Lemont’s more proper sense of logic and propriety. Or perhaps with John Lennon, who also felt that life was what happens while you were making other plans.

Or perhaps with myself, having watched all sorts of things happen in the world while I was too doped up and busy getting a new hip to be able to comment on them.

However it came about, there’s a lot upon which to comment, and we might as well stick with Darrin Bell a little longer, since he has one of the most piercing takes on Ron DeSantis’s absurd, insulting, racist take on American History.

There’s so much wrong with DeSantis’s take on so many levels that it’s hard to decide where to begin. We could start with his protest that he’s not racist because he doesn’t hate Black people, which reminds me of the old Civil Rights Era joke, “I love negroes. My family always owned several!”

Not understanding others is only sometimes racist. Assuming you do fills in the gaps.

You might excuse De Santis’s blind antebellum job-training argument, common among white people who hadn’t given it much thought, and closely aligned to the notion that slaves were better off than Northern factory workers. But that’s an argument that falls apart under any sort of examination, leading an honorable, decent person to apologize for having thoughtlessly parroted a comforting line.

DeSantis, instead, doubled down on it, insisting that, no, he meant that foolish, hateful thing, despite clear historical proof that it wasn’t true, that skilled slaves were purchased because of what they already knew.

Ignorance can be forgiven. Stupidity can be laughed off.

Hatred can neither be forgiven or laughed away, and it’s the only explanation for persisting in such an asinine point of view.

Normally, when someone makes a stupid statement, the satirists’ response is the reductio ad absurdum, pushing the logic to an unintended extreme at which the faulty logic becomes clear. But Kirk Anderson needs to do nothing along those lines: He has only to depict the reality and the reasoning crumbles on its own.

The only extreme among his choices is the idea that the fellow learning shoe-making — a craft specifically touted by DeSantis in his list of wonderful lessons — will someday have a chance to put that skill to work for his own benefit. Perhaps DeSantis meant the skills would be useful each time 750,000 people died and left the slave free to pursue his own life.

This was not the experience of every slave from the start of the 17th century up through the center of the 19th, and you’d have to be a gibbering idiot to believe it was. In reality, the “slaves” listed were nearly all free Black people, not slaves.

And there’s a truly toxic lack of exaggeration in the idea that the Tulsa massacre stands alone. It was one of far too many.

Which still leaves us, as Pia Guerra points out, in the position of distrusting the honesty, intelligence and judgement of anyone who — upon having the notion challenged — continues to cling to it.

Your numbskull Thanksgiving uncle might do so because he has no resources upon which to fall back upon, and he’s not bright enough to STFU until he can gather a few.

But someone purporting to have the necessary intelligence and resources of a public servant, and even to become the leader of the Free World, must clearly be able to find facts, and to have a small amount of judgement.

Leaving us with the conclusion that either he’s a moron or that he thinks we are. And if he’s purposely crafting his argument to appeal to morons, that does not speak well of his honestly.

De Santis is hardly the only would-be authoritarian, as Lee Judge (KFS) points out, who is willing and eager to distract voters with emotionally-laden nonsense than to take on meaningful issues that ought to be foremost in their minds.

I will confess that I have not seen the Barbie film and so cannot express an intelligent opinion about it, but, first of all, I find it hard to believe there is anything astonishing in it and, second, I also find it hard to believe that everyone spouting off about it has seen it.

As to the first point, I went to see the Brady Bunch movie and “Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion” and they were both silly and fun and I had a good time. I’m not averse to going to see Barbie on the same level.

As to the second point about people expressing strong opinions on topics they know nothing about, so what else is new?

I’d rather hear ignorant takes about Barbie than about racism, poverty, police violence and so forth, after all.

Seems better to be stupid about stupid topics than about things that actually matter.

Bill Bramhall suggests that the courts are about to test how stupidity and reality interact in the real world, as Donald Trump has been allegedly/apparently caught on video working to destroy evidence. If the prevailing theory holds true, he simply doesn’t understand how surveillance cameras work and gave orders for erasure of tapes where no tapes exist.

Nixon may have asked Rosemary Woods to claim an absurd “accidental” erasure of White House tapes but at least it was theoretically possible. At least he understood how audiotape worked. The notion of wiping out portions of modern surveillance records is less clear cut, and Trump has apparently failed to even do a Rosemary Woods level accomplishment.

We’ll see. But the evidence to be presented to the various grand juries seems massive, and Bramhall’s depiction of him attempting to spray-paint survellience camera lenses at Mar-a-Lago after the fact is like a child pushing his vegetables around on his plate in hopes it will look like he ate them.

You’ve got to be a lot smarter than that to get away with being so stupid.