Sometimes They Come Back

I haven't really written much about Trump's rise to public leader of the Republican Party because, really, what's the point? No-one who reads this is remotely likely to disagree with my opinion of the man, and if by chance a Trump supporter gets so lost among the internet weeds that they stumble onto my blog, what hope have I of persuading them of their error?

But that doesn't mean I haven't been paying attention. It doesn't mean I'm not concerned. And not just about Trump himself. Yes, clearly, the prospect of President Trump is beyond terrifying. Last I checked Nate Silver has Trump's chance of victory at around 15%. Long odds if you're betting your life savings in a casino, sure, but still vastly too high for me to sleep properly until November. Sure, it's only half the chance Silver gave Romney four years ago, and Mitt was resoundingly thumped come the day. Still, though. 15%. If you get pregnant today, it's more likely your child will be born under a Trump presidency than they'll be born on a Sunday.

That's not why I'm writing this post, though. What terrifies me - what truly scares out every atom of waste product my body contains - isn't Trump. It's the guy who comes after Trump.

Because what Trump has demonstrated, utterly beyond argument, is that the Republican nomination AND a minimum of 131 electoral votes (just under half of what's needed to win) is more or less automatically yours if you run as a fascist, even if your campaign is incompetent and your candidate is an idiot thug. Seventeen states, including the second-most populous in the union, will happily wave in a new era of bigoted tyranny even if the new generalissimo doesn't seem capable of tying his own shoelaces, let alone negotiating an international treaty.  In the current political climate the only way in which you might fail to secure the nomination is if someone else runs who's better at being a fascist than you are.

That's what terrifies me. Not that Trump will win, but that next time around everyone will be a Trump. But smarter Trumps. More well-disciplined Trumps. Trumps who knows when to reach for the dog-whistle. Trumps the GOP and its media allies can pretend aren't even Trumps at all.

This is not a wild hypothetical devoid of supporting evidence. The politicians and media on America's rightmost flank faced what I'm sure was an ugly choice in the weeks since Trump's coronation. They could admit this cluster-cuss was the inevitable result of two decades of rightward drift, political tribalism, and the cynical embrace of white supremacy. Or they could insist Trump was an aberration, something never to be repeated following his inevitable defeat.

To no-one's surprise, many if not most immediately made a mass dash for door number 2. The solidifying narrative in the right-leaning media would seem to be that Trump is not only an obvious political outlier, but one created by the left. When your reaction to seeing an actual fascist take control [1] is to blame your political opponents for claiming the last three guys also had some pretty extreme tendencies, you reveal yourself completely. You don't want to avoid horrifying extremists. You want to avoid horrifying extremists you can't give cover to. You don't want better people. You want better masks.

Well Ted Cruz is busy carving his mask right now, and he won't be the only one.

And that's just the crimes of those who've admitted anything is amiss. Plenty of career arseholes are acting as though this is simply business as usual. Mark Rubio, Paul Ryan and Chris Christie have all endorsed Trump (admittedly with varying degrees of enthusiasm). In doing so they leave us with only two possible conclusions: either these career-politicians would actually prefer Trump to Clinton, or that they secretly want him to fail but think a future in the modern GOP requires them to establish fascistic bona fides. The difference isn't really all that important. It doesn't matter if they want it themselves or just know their voters want it. Either way, the future isn't fewer Trumps. It's "better" Trumps.

Defeating Trump is of course utterly necessary to prevent the arrival of fascism in the United States. But it isn't sufficient. Sending Trump packing come November isn't a final victory, any more than the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch represented the end of Nazism (yes, I went full Godwin; fuck you). Hell, Hitler went to jail, and he still got to take control of an entire nation. At best, Trump [2] is just going to lose a national vote, and that by far less than he should.

Fascism doesn't slink away to die when you knock it down. It comes back. It comes back smarter. It learns where it went wrong and it adapts, like a flu virus in jackboots. And it keeps coming back until eventually it's smart enough or even just lucky enough to win.

And the people who once thought they controlled the American Right have decided they can live with that.

[1] Albeit one so lacking a coherent political philosophy that actually nailing down what type of fascist he is proves difficult, though incompatible goals and positions are nothing new to fascistic thought in general. 

[2] Who is almost certainly not going to be the next Hitler. But he might be the next Hitler's test-case.

Geek Syndicate Review: Black Wings Of Cthulhu 4

Over at Geek Syndicate I review a new short story anthology based in the Cthulhu Mythos, and make exactly the argument you'd expect me to make.

"He Said To Hold A Glock To Their Heads; He Didn't Say To Shoot Them"

Added because otherwise the picture for this post will automatically be Gambit

Holy hellfire, is the world filled with some truly disgraceful assemblies of swamp-water and cowshit.

Aside from rage , the only thing I can really add to Surrence's comments is context. One of my roles in my department is to act as first contact for around twenty or so undergraduates. Their physical and mental health are a primary concern. Sometimes that means talking to them about the process by which they can apply for special consideration of "extenuating circumstances" because they've broken a leg and can't get to lectures, or they miss an assessed class test because they got food poisoning.

On occasion, I discuss with students how we can support them during long-term depression.

This is a tough job, partially because my own depression means these conversations are entirely too familiar, but also simply because I'm a human being and listening to another human being talk about how much they're suffering and how completely helpless they feel in the wake of that is a profoundly upsetting experience. It is my job to find a way to ask a student if they are planning on harming themselves. It is my job to phone them if they've stopped responding to emails to check they are still alive. All of this is as part of a considered departmental response, of course; I'm not suggesting I'm going above or beyond here.  But that's precisely the point. When it comes to mental health, the standard response has to be to understand the worse-case scenario and react accordingly.

Unless you're Mount St Mary's University in Maryland. If you're there, you need to ask your students whether they're mentally ill so you can flag them as likely underachievers who can then be asked if they'd rather not leave so they don't spoil the graduation ratio with their miserable tear-stained failures.

In an email exchange, obtained by the Post, some professors expressed concern about the survey, and one shared with colleagues some questions he said were from the survey that troubled him, given that the survey was not confidential and would be used to judge students. It included questions such as:

“How often were each of the following things true in the last week?:
I felt depressed.
I felt that I could not shake the blues, even with the help of family and friends.
I thought my life had been a failure.
I felt that people disliked me.”

I'm sure the story of the fired academics is worth following up on, but it's this section that needs to be engraved on stone tablets and fired through the window of every who has argued those with depression need to pull themselves together. Somehow we've arrived - in 2016! - a situation in which there are people who don't just under-consider or ignore or refuse to take seriously depression, but who will actually seek out those suffering from it so they can be pressured into going away.

This is utterly contrary to the most basic standards of care a university should be held to, to say nothing of basic human decency.  The idea of ever having to hand out this questionnaire as part of my pastoral duties makes me want to toss back a paraquat cocktail. The fact that the man who instituted this policy described those who would fall afoul of it as bunnies in need of drowning is almost too perfect.

Something to think about the next time someone tells you universities are slaves to the PC brigade.

Greedy Geoff's Warporium Of Death

What's the good in having a Labour MP if you can't even trust him to not vote to murder children?  I asked him that very question via email.

Actually, I didn't. I just abused him for a bit. Changing hearts and minds is all very well, but on occasion one simply needs to vent in an appropriate direction.

Dear Mr Robinson,

There seems little point in writing this email – how can one hope to persuade those with so much blood on their hands they think they’re undergoing a brain haemorrhage every time they pick their nose? – but nevertheless, let it not pass unremarked that your vote has shamed your party, your city (which these days is also my city) and essentially humanity in general.  Innocent people will die, and you have killed them. Innocent people will become refugees, and you have set the torch to their houses. Innocent people will hate our country, and you have shown them why they are right to do so.

We will not win this war with bombs. We will not win this war with Tornadoes. And we certainly will not win this war with you presuming to lead us. It would please many in the fine city of peace and reconciliation if you were to resign immediately, join a religious order of your choosing (if they'll take you, though you could always try Sam Harris if you get desperate), and take a vow of silence, to last until your dying day, with exceptions made only for the phrases “I am so, so sorry” and “Oh Gods, what have I done”?

Yours in disappointment and disgust,

Dr Richard Crossman

Victor And No-One (Fuck The Fascists)

I haven't a great deal to add to the cold, swirling outrage spinning around the Hugo Awards getting themselves rocket-jacked by grotesque fractions of human beings so that the corpse of the awards' good name can be tanned and cut into swastikas. Adam Roberts has already covered this beat with his usual aplomb (Update: as has Abigail Nussbaum, as Jamie points out in comments) and further strong contributions have emerged from Jack Graham, Philip Sandifer and Andrew Hickey.

Those three have, in fact, slapped together an Emergency Anti-Fascist Podcast, which I can't recommend highly enough. All of it is smart and considered - I completely endorse the strategy of buying in to voting to vote "NO AWARD" across the board - but I'm particularly interested in the idea that geek culture is particularly susceptible to the kind of villainous horrors Vox Day is openly pedalling because so many of us had a genuine claim to victimhood as school-kids that we're refuse to let go of as we reach adulthood. As Sandifer points out, even at its worst the experience of a cis white male geek is unlikely to match up in the horror stakes with the ever-present threat of sexual or racist violence, but for many of us it was legitimately terrible, and having to go from years of that to suddenly be told you're now on top of the pile and owe it to others to be constantly aware of how good you have it can presumably be an awful wrench.

I wonder though if this captures the whole picture. When Sandifer points out that Vox Day's most controversial comments are so reprehensible not even FOX News or the Republican Party would put up with him, Graham notes this would only be true if those comments were public. Sandifer shoots back that Day's comments are public, but it may simply be that the sense of the word "public" is critical. It's at least arguable that what would cost Day his position at a "news" corporation or a seat in politics wouldn't be the disgust of his colleagues but the fear of the inevitable push-back from the public. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that supporting the throwing of acid in women's faces or calling black people less evolved than whites are positions you'd find much sympathy for in Ailes' world. Much as I despise those people, I'm not going to assume that level of derangement from them. What I am saying is that there seems to be at least a grudging tolerance of extreme views on the right so long as you remember what side you're supposed to be on. It may be that geekdom is not more tolerant of grotesque extremism, so much as has far less motivation to rid itself of those spouting said extremism.

That may or may not be a compelling thought. Either way though it's at least instructive, because it leads us to a potential limitation in Sandifer's argument. I think it's almost impossible to deny that conservatives have made delusions of oppression just as much a central facet of their world-view as has the post-eighteen year old geek. That the latter group can are clinging to an essentially irrelevant past rather than an entirely fictional one doesn't seem that useful a distinction: we believe what we believe. To the extent thy differ, how do we distinguish between the persecution complexes of the conservative and the geek?

Alas, I have no idea. I mean, I could quite easily take Sandifer's theory further, arguing the problem with geeks isn't just the insistence on hanging on to old grievances, however legitimate, but our (often subconscious) insistence that the battles we lost in school must be re-fought with ourselves as the victors. Attempts to marginalise geeks for not being the right sort of geeks are everywhere, because for every one of us who took from school the lesson that a war over tastes and opinions in fiction is a bogus construction [1], two of us concluded the only problem with the war is that we should clearly be the ones winning it.

In other words, for many of us our early life taught us to be on a hair trigger, but gave us no morally defensible process for deciding where to point the gun. And I see that as feeding the appalling unwillingness to call out people like Vox Day, who operate as "one of us" only insofar as they don't operate as one of the nebulous "them" of our shared past.  We've become so caught up in a war we consider quintessential to our own being that we're seemingly prepared to forgive anything "our people" do, so long as they don't say anything that actively betrays us.

This is, without doubt, a thoroughly disgusting position to hold, and can only work so long as we define "our people" as a cabal of straight white cis men terrified that anyone else might get a turn at enjoying themselves .  But I still don't see how that thoroughly disgusting position varies from the thoroughly disgusting position held by the right-wing. That so much of us operate as though we are members of the right-wing is a disgraceful and humiliating stain upon our fandom.  But that's not the same as us being uniquely awful. On the contrary, the problem with our awfulness might be precisely that it's so pedestrian.

[1] To a point, of course. Fiction has power, and that means it can be used by the enemy. But that simply makes it all the more important that we focus on what aids the enemy, as oppose to what simply turns us off personally. Simply put, the wider we cast our complaints, the less force we can exert on what genuinely needs to be fought against.

Seriously Unpleasant

There's absolutely no chance of this, of course.  There never was.  Daniel Larison is kind enough to highlight an article explaining why: 

Willingness to torture became, first within elite government and opinion-making circles, then in the culture generally, and finally as a partisan GOP talking point, a litmus test of seriousness with respect to the fight against terrorism. That – proving one’s seriousness in the fight – was its primary purpose from the beginning, in my view. It was only secondarily about extracting intelligence. 

I'd put extracting intelligence at third, actually, behind not just the search for seriousness but the search for bloody-handed revenge, but otherwise this is dead on balls accurate, as someone once had Marissa Tomei say. The Americans - with our own enthusiastic assistance - tortured people because it suited a certain type of mind to believe that our goals can only ever be bought with the blood of others.  We can't be serious about terrorism unless we torture someone else's sons.  We can't be serious about global stability unless someone else's kids die with their organs staining the sand outside a town they'd never heard of the day before.  We can't be serious about sensible government spending unless other people's daughters are being left alone to starve under bridges. We can't be serious about reforming the healthcare system unless other people's children are allowed to be choked to death by their own windpipes because their parents can't afford medication and every trip to the ER is a crap-shoot that sooner or later will see you roll snake eyes [1].

It's everywhere.  It always has been. Socialism is childish. Empathy is childish.  Wanting as many people as possible to live as dignified a life as possible is childish.  The only way to be serious is to pitch one's opinions somewhere between disinterested sociopathy and outright sadism.  It's like we all got as far as comprehending that nothing important was ever achieved without sacrifice, but tuned out en masse before we could be reminded that something is only a sacrifice if you're the one giving something up. Otherwise, it's theft. Theft of money, or of freedom, or of life, in the name of preserving money, or freedom, or life. Because there's only so much of it all to go around. If you don't believe that you're unserious. And because there's only so much to go around, the best thing to do is make sure those that have the most get more of it.  If you don't believe that you're unserious.

Seriousness is a murderer. You'll forgive me if I take no interest in it.

(h/t to Balloon Juice)

[1] Something the resolutely serious Dr Larison might want to reflect on himself, when he's finished complaining about how keeping one's citizenry alive costs too much.

#Ferguson

Jesus, this is ugly.

Note I don't say this has become ugly. It was ugly from the first moment this all started.  From the first bullet.  From before the first bullet, when a police officer saw two black kids walking in the middle of the road and decided "That shit has got to stop!".

It's clear that there can be no justice for murdered people of colour in a society where a sizable number of people - perhaps even a majority, depending upon where you're standing - simply will not accept that the loss of a life requires answering for if the person who took the life was white and the person who gave their life - had their life stolen from them - wasn't.

Note that I don't say it has become clear.  It has been clear for hundreds of years, and there's no sign of it changing, not really, not completely. I remember what they did to Rodney King in '91.  I remember what they failed to do in '92 to those who did what they did to Rodney King in '91. I remember the Spitting Image sketch of twelve men in klan robes insisting the video be played in reverse to demonstrate how quickly the cops helped King to his feet after making sure all those dangerous batons were removed from nearby. That was the first moment I realised just how terrifyingly horrible the world is. It's not a feeling that goes away.

Too many people want to believe this is about a tragic misunderstanding and a cop that was in fear for his life. Bullshit. At best, at the absolute limit of my capacity for empathy, I can believe the problem lay not just in Darren Wilson's attitude - you don't get to claim self-defence when shooting someone in the back unless you're watching him run towards a Sherman tank, and Wilson's own testimony that he only used the gun because he finds carrying a taser uncomfortable means that at best Michael Brown is dead because Wilson didn't like a non-lethal weapon pressing into his hip - but in his training. Perhaps it genuinely hasn't occurred to Missouri (and I'll not be able to watch Defiance ever again without thinking the show is a desperately naïve image of racial harmony compared to the actual Show Me State) that its police officers should consider that a job in which you get to carry a gun isn't a job where you get to start shooting because you're a little panicked?  Cops in the US are pulling their guns in situations soldiers are trained to keep their weapons down.  Cops in the US are pulling guns in a job which results in a lower rate of homicides than fast food workers. That results in a lower rate of homicides than in the general population.

Think about that. You're less likely to be murdered in the US if you become a cop, and that's before we add in all the civilians the cops themselves murder and we're told it was all just an accident. @mightygodking has pointed all this out. @ShaunKing has pointed out vastly worse. You simply cannot believe this was a tragic accident, as free of antagonists and guilt as a sudden earthquake, unless you desperately, completely want to.

Unless you want to sleep better, because you get to sleep better. Unless you want to tell yourselves everything is fine, because you get to tell yourself everything is fine. An unsourced quote is barrelling through Twitter right now: "White privilege is the ability to be outraged by the Ferguson decision, rather than terrified by it". Which is true, of course, but even so I can't help wishing a lot more of those who share my skin colour could even be stirred to be outraged here. Not least because the UK has its own horrors to atone for on this subject.

I still believe a future lies ahead of us where military-minded all-but unaccountable thugs kill just as many white people as black ones.  I just no longer believe we're necessarily walking towards that future.  Instead, here we all are, one half of us treading water and the other half drowning, slowly, one by one, as the water turns ever more obviously the colour of spilt blood.

Dawkins Go Home: Jesus No, Eugenics Yes

I didn't want to be doing this.  I wanted to find a nice quiet few minutes so I could organise some photos of my trip with Fliss to Scotland, and to fill you in on our exploits in Greece.

Instead, we have to deal with Dawkins.  Again.

Abort [the Down's Syndrome baby you are pregnant with] and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.

There's just nothing left of the man who wrote The Blind Watchmaker any more.  He's been eaten from the inside out by the worst kind of smug, gloating internet troll, a spiteful ghost haunting better people's feeds, grinning from ear to ear as he announces the Logic of Dawkins defeats your puny, thoughtless feelings.

But it isn't the initial tweet I want to talk about. It's so obviously actively vile-going-on-evil that there's nothing to pick at.  It's Dawkins' reply to his critics that we can gain something other than nausea by reading.

Apparently I'm a horrid monster for recommending WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS to the great majority of Down Syndrome fetuses. They are aborted.

This is the worst kind of bad faith goalpost-moving. Dawkins didn't recommend something, he said not doing it is immoral. That's like saying The Smiths called their second album "Meat is Murder" in an attempt to recommend goat's cheese salads. We should also note that just because something does not become moral just because it is common. More to the point, just because something isn't common does not make it immoral, as you'd think a man dedicated to furthering the cause of atheists in strongly religious societies would find easy to comprehend.

I have no intention of discussing the moral quandaries involved in making this sort of decision.  That's not my place.  I've never discovered my partner is pregnant with a baby demonstrating signs of Down's Syndrome.  Even if I had, I'd still not be in the driving seat, for obvious reasons. What I will say is that it's possible to support both sides of a binary decision. You can defend the morality of those who choose option A without calling those who choose option B immoral. You just have to be, you know, a fucking human being about it all.

But it isn't just the sheer awfulness of Dawkin's position and the objectively terrible argument he's using to defend it, it's what the interaction between the two shows: a complete disinterest in the responsibility of people with platforms to consider how they are used.  In Dawkin's world, it would seem you can state that in a world with total information/abortion access no people with Down's Syndrome should exist, and not think it's worth ensuring your accompanying argument survives the most casual inspection.  Because why would that be worth it? Just toss out your fifteen seconds of thought on the subject and move on.

It doesn't matter how many people (Dawkins has one million followers) will be infuriated, enraged or made miserable by his incoherent bumbling. It doesn't matter that when you put so little thought into so emotive a topic and start spouting off about it, you are telling people no more thought is needed and those seeing greater nuance are simply wrong.  It doesn't matter that there are still many people who look up to you and might take your definitions of immorality to heart. All that matters is that you can say whatever you like, whenever you like, because you're Richard Dawkins, and to silence you is to silence SCIENCE!

I really don't think that's a bad definition of a monster at all.

Update: Dawkins has no clarified that he is not telling pregnant women not to do, only saying that if they disagree with him, they are immoral.  Good to have that cleared up. 

He's also whining that he isn't advocating eugenics, because Down's Syndrome apparently contains little in the way of hereditary aspects.  Which, fine. That seems like using pedantic definition-quibbling to side-step an entirely fair general accusation, but perhaps we shouldn't suggest Dawkins is embracing eugenics.  Just, you know, mass extermination, a fact that does not become palatable simply because he doesn't want the end of Down's Syndrome people to be applied retroactively.

Weir Awl Doomed

I'm a bit behind in reading my letters from America, what with all that eagle-chasing/bear-impersonating I've had to do [1]. So I'm only just getting to this, via Elon James White over at Balloon Juice,

"I had to look up the word" Woodger said, according to the account Torkildson published on his personal blog, "because I didn't know what the hell you were talking about. We don't teach this kind of advanced stuff to our students, and it's extremely inappropriate. Can you have your desk cleaned out by eleven this morning? I'll have your

What did Torkildson do to get himself fired as an English teacher in a Utah language school?  He wrote about homophones online. Because what a word!  So provocative, what with those nasty dirty syllables hanging around the start, causing a ruckus.  True fact: homophone is actually a homophone for homosexual! All right, so it isn't!  But you didn't know that! You thought homophone meant homosexual, you filthy-minded fool!

Woodger, for his part, was kind enough to confirm this to the Salt Lake Tribune, just in case anyone took the otherwise entirely wise step of assuming this was all nonsense:

"People at this level of English," Woodger told the Tribune, "may see the 'homo' side and think it has something to do with gay sex."

So I guess that's OK. It's not that Woodger has no grasp of his own language, it's that he's worried all those immigrant-types won't get it and kick off a fuss. You can't trust foreigners to look up words in dictionaries, like he had too! They're too busy flying off the handle when they read about being homo sapiens, or the homogenous nature of humus. I once saw a Spanish statistician shiv his colleague for asking if he'd checked his residuals were homoscedastic!  This is what we're facing, people!

Every day I become more convinced we are doomed as a species.  Every day I become more convinced that being doomed as a species is exactly what we deserve.

[1] I would have thought a hungover academic, even a bearded one, would not be easily confused with an ursine aggressor, but my friends' three-year old son begs to differ; I'm either a bear or "a big dog"; ironically he thinks actual big dogs look like moles.

Friday Anger

This is the saddest story you'll read all week not connected with a terrible plane crash or boys being murdered on a beach (via LGM):

Debra Harrell is currently in jail because she let her 9-year-old daughter play, unsupervised, in a public park. Almost everything about this story (which I noticed courtesy of Lenore Skenazy) is horrifying. Harrell works at McDonald’s. Her daughter used to tag along and stare at a screen at her mother’s workplace during the day. She asked to go to the park instead, was discovered to be without an adult, and her mother was arrested.

(Harrell has now lost custody of her daughter.)

The article goes on to note - entirely correctly - that this a transparent case of helicopter parenting, and part of a more general trend of obsessing over paedophiles despite actual cases of child abduction being mercifully extremely rare.

I don't think we should ignore the broader picture here. The appalling treatment of Harrell isn't happening in a vacuum, it's the inevitable result of conservative public policy, which states the following:

1. Working class people should not be allowed access to abortion;
2. Working class people should not get financial support for their children;
3. Working class people should not be allowed access to cheap childcare services;
4. Working class people should not be allowed a guarantee of working hours known in advance to allow them to put together a workable routine.

(Note that I'm not saying Harrell would have wanted an abortion, I'm just pointing out the degree to which the system is borked in general.)

The end result of these three policies is a system in which working class people either refrain from having sex entirely, or they accept there will be times when no-one can look after their children.  Now we learn that unless on those occasions they literally keep their children at their jobs at all times without any form of activity to keep them busy they will be arrested.

5. Working class people should not be allowed to decide for themselves when a child is old enough to look after themselves in a public place, and whether endless days of staring at the wall might be a problem in itself.

This isn't an issue free of sexism; I find it hard to believe a father would be thrown in jail over this.  This isn't an issue free of racism; I find it hard to believe a white mother would be thrown in jail over this.  But at it's heart, this is about the right-wing belief that we should give the poor nothing but our judgement.

Somewhere a Coca Cola executive is thinking how to use this story as proof the world needs fewer unions. Somewhere a Daily Telegraph writer is putting together another piece on how much the UK could learn from US Republicans. Somewhere Iain Duncan Smith - ironically the worst "fit to work" call the Tories have made in power so far - feels a stirring in his loins and doesn't know why.

And somewhere a woman learns to live without her daughter because she thought letting children play in parks is a nice thing for them to do.

(I Pray For) A Lack Of Will

I've worked this beat before, but it's been a few years, I have new readers now, and anyways it's nice to take some time out every now and again to note what a fucking idiot George Will is, especially when we can use it to segue into what fucking idiots climate change deniers are.

Obviously everything Will says or has said or presumably ever will say on the subject of global warming is utterly vacuous and would embarrass even the most intellectually incurious nine-year-old were they to be picked up on it.  I guess nothing here quite matches his 2009 insistence that because 1980 was the hottest year on record, there had been no global warming in three decades [1]. I guess that by his own logic, the fact that his hilarious and  piteous ignorance peaked in 2009 means Will hasn't been a calamitous failure on every level when discussing climate science in the last five years. Which is nice for him, but for those of us not paid to make the world a worse place through smug self-immolation, I think we can consider the point proved.

So what's he up to this time, this worthless anti-science hack who can't even be bothered to bring his worthless schmuck A-game any more?

“If you want money from the biggest source of direct research in this country, the federal government, don’t question its orthodoxy.”

This - and I mention it because Will is bound to get on his high horse about it again soon enough - is why people laugh in conservatives' faces when they complain progressives treat them like idiots.  Yes, the federal government gives more money to climate scientists than do, say, petroleum companies. The annual bill to feed federal workers grossly outweighs that spent by the seven US restaurants with three Michelin stars, too, but if you think people interested in expensive ingredients should be chowing down at school canteens in central Baltimore, you're a fucking idiot.

You would hope a man so obviously and embarrassingly devoted to US conservative orthodoxy would understand higher paying jobs are both more rare and more tempting, but this is an opportunity to stick it to the Feds, so fuck it. [2]

But then, as always, Will is nothing if not a perfect microcosm of his tribe's political thought in general. There are two types of self-proclaimed "climate sceptic".  The first is at least approximately tolerable; they can be discerned as those who resolutely refuse to believe either side has yet made their case well enough. They're wrong, and in many cases they're wrong because they haven't bothered to actually listen to each side for long enough to slap together an informed opinion, but hey: there's plenty of issues in the world about which I know nothing and haven't attempted to correct the fact.  It wouldn't hurt for some of those people to be a little less smug and dismissive when confessing their ignorance, but at a basic level I'm uncomfortable telling others who might be outside my privileged position of having easy access to information (and, quite frankly, the kind of brain that can assimilate and weigh that information correctly) that they have a moral duty to read up on the kinds of things I think should be read up on. It's aggravating that their position is basically a licence to do nothing about climate change (every time they read an article saying everything is doomed, they can read another saying it's all a big fuss, then commend themselves for being so even-handed whilst they drive their 4x$ to the steakhouse), but there it is.

That's not Will, though, nor Krauthammer neither. They are not and never have been sceptics.  Sceptics require a greater level of proof before they believe something.  Will and Krauthammer requires absolutely no proof at all before they believe something, as long as they want to believe it.  They're as credulous as those people that still somehow mean the Nigerian prince email scam still seems to be worth pursuing.  It's just that their credulity makes them money rather than causing them to lose it.  Which is nice work if you can get it, I suppose (though I'm sure the Fed spends much more money on fact-spinning than does FOX News, so clearly Will must think he's made a terrible mistake somewhere in his career), but being covered in money for being a chump doesn't make your inherent chumpery any less obvious.  You can't spell "useful fucking idiot" without "fucking idiot".

Which is why the label "deniers" fits them like a studded ball-gag. No argument is too weak, no factoid too implausible, no equivalence so obviously false for these people to swallow faster than Chris Christie would a jam doughnut sprinkled with proof he masterminded the GW Bridge scandal.
Scepticism is about checking others are right.  Denialism is about desperately hoping others are right so that you don't have to change your opinions or behaviour. Scepticism is how science brought us every innovation for the last six hundred years. Denialism is how scientists got thrown in dungeons for asking whether the dude in the priest's robes really knew all that much about astronomy.

Scepticism, properly exercised scepticism that faces of against orthodoxy rather than simply avoiding it, is brave. Denialism is cowardly. And the fact that you can get rich through weaponising cowardice might actually be a stronger reason to believe mankind is ultimately doomed than any amount of evidence for climate change might be.

Just kidding. It's climate change that will screw us.  I know this because I bothered to check. 

[1] Except 1998 and 2002-2007, but who's counting?

[2] Were I dealing with anyone else, I'd point out his argument is logically indistinguishable from the argument that most of the world's resources are held by non-white people, and hence being white is a profound disadvantage. The problem, of course, is that not only am I concerned that might not actually be true - splendid work Europe, really - but that neither Will nor Krauthammer would have any problem with the idea that it's super-tough to be white and why is everyone always so mean to them?

FOXFix

This is why I hate them. This is why I always introduced my GCSE stats lessons as "lessons in lying". This is why I'm going back to statistics teaching (undergraduate level this time) full time in September.

FOX News:

Correct graph:

Note that they didn't just invert the y-axis.  Any fool can do that.  Note that they rearranged the x-axis to put events out of chronological order.  That's some high level bullshitting right there. 

(Important note: just because I've corrected this doesn't mean I think the correct graph is actually particularly useful; I don't.  But at least the information is honestly displayed.)

Update: forgot to h/t JJ and There's Coffee In That Nebula. My apologies, folks!

Update 2: Clay points out in comments quite persuasively that it's a fake, though a fake based on screenshots from another spectacularly bad FOX graphic.  Clearly I should have checked thoroughly before throwing this up.  We regret the error.

"If I Can't Ruin People's Freedom, How Can I Know I'm Free?"

I profoundly dislike Andrew Sullivan.  He's the living definition of a man who doesn't give a shit about anyone's problems until they become his own, and he has a nasty sideline in smearing those he disagrees with as liars and traitors.

Still, when something lands in the areas he actively cares about, he can do a fine job.

The law empowers any individual or business to refuse to interact with, do business with, or in any way come into contact with anyone who may have some connection to a gay civil union, or civil marriage or … well any “similar arrangement” (room-mates?). It gives the full backing of the law to any restaurant or bar-owner who puts up a sign that says “No Gays Served”. It empowers employees of the state government to refuse to interact with gay citizens as a group. Its scope is vast: it allows anyone to refuse to provide “services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges; counseling, adoption, foster care and other social services; or provide employment or employment benefits” to anyone suspected of being complicit in celebrating or enabling the commitment of any kind of a gay couple...

If you want to taint the Republican right as nasty bigots who would do to gays today what Southerners did to segregated African-Americans in the past, you’ve now got a text-book case. The incidents of discrimination will surely follow, and, under the law, be seen to have impunity. Someone will be denied a seat at a lunch counter. The next day, dozens of customers will replace him. The state will have to enforce the owner’s right to refuse service. You can imagine the scenes. Or someone will be fired for marrying the person they love. The next day, his neighbors and friends will rally around.

If you were devising a strategy to make the Republicans look like the Bull Connors of our time, you just stumbled across a winner.

As always in these cases, this law fails the SpaceSquid Sin Standard: if you want to deny access to homosexuals, you have to do it with all forms of sin.  And not even sin currently being carried out - there is exactly zero chance this law was written because of a pandemic of people having their dirty gay sexy-sex on lunch counters and restaurant tables.  And if you want to keep people out because they have sinned, and because they will sin, then... what are you left with?

It is long past time we gave up trying to humour these people.  Considering homosexuality a sin bothers me, but hell, it's your life, to fill up with as much pointless fretting as you want. Considering a homosexuality as so great a sin as to require legislation to guarantee you can be a dick to people?  That's all on you, pal.  You could choose to focus on the people who kill, or who hoard their wealth, or who bear false witness - starting with the arseholes who drafted this bill, perhaps - but you don't.  You decided your time was better spent raging against people who do the least harm, but who also happen to have the least power.  You deliberately chose the "moral stance" that would be easiest for you, and most harmful to the people you bully.

Fuck each and every one of you.  Sullivan is right.  You're Bull Connors with a crucifix.  You are the last rampage of the dinosaur who just watched the sky darken and doesn't understand why.  You are the coward who realises making his life better would be hard, but making other lives worse would be easy, and has chosen accordingly.  In thirty years all you will be is mocked; in a hundred you will be forgotten forever, mourned only by those who can no longer use you to make the world worse.

Pass. The. Damn. Bill (2014)

It's been a little while since we checked in on the US political scene; I wonder what they're up to?

Oh.  A debt ceiling fight. How quaint.

Let us remind ourselves of the stakes here.  if the US defaults on its debt the global financial consequences will be somewhere between severe and apocalyptic.  There is no-one in this fight who does not know this - though a few of the more eye-swivelling Republicans are pretending not to get it.

So, just like the last debt ceiling crisis - which ended less than 17 weeks ago, if you're counting - the debt limit has to be increased, or 2008 could end up looking like the last scene in Return of the Jedi.  And what was the Republican plan? To reverse a pension cut to former US veterans they themselves forced through previously so that they can look like heroes when the benefits are reinstated.

Read that again.  The Republican leadership is so unhappy with the idea of not destroying the world's economy that they need to cancel out their own fucking over of veterans to make them feel good about it.

Which is both cynical and pathetic, however you slice it.  Apparently it doesn't matter though, since within a day the plans had been scrapped because too many of the rank-and-file Republicans claimed this was a shitty plan because it would make them look heartless when they voted for not helping vets and wrecking the world at the same time.

Every time I see the Telegraph insisting the Tories could learn a lot from the Republicans I start wondering if I'd really find a lobotomy as bad as people say.

Wherein I Simply And Forever Loathe These People

Via LGM, let's all take a moment to remember what constitutes a hero in Republican circles.  Take it away, Governor Christie:

A series of newly obtained emails and text messages shows that Gov. Chris Christie’s office was closely involved with lane closings on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge in September, and that officials closed the lanes in what appeared to be retribution against the mayor whose town was gridlocked as a result.

Mr. Christie has insisted that his staff and his campaign office had nothing to do with the local lane closings, and said that they were done as part of a traffic study.

[...]

The mayor of Fort Lee, Mark Sokolich, is a Democrat and did not endorse Mr. Christie. In the emails and texts released Wednesday, Mr. Christie’s staff and appointees were gleeful when the abrupt lane closings gridlocked the town for four days, beginning with the first day of school and including the anniversary of Sept. 11. Mr. Sokolich, who had not been informed of the closings, texted the governor’s top appointee at the Port Authority asking for “help” because the lane closings were making children on buses late to school.

“Is it wrong that I am smiling?” Mr. Wildstein texted Ms. Kelly.

“No,” she texted back.

“I feel badly about the kids,” he texted.

“They are the children of Buono voters,” she said, referring to Mr. Christie’s Democratic opponent, Barbara Buono, who was trailing consistently in the polls and lost by a wide margin.

Political scientists centuries from now, when lecturing the mutant cockroaches who've just arrived on the moon from the smoking embers of Earth, will point to this as one of the most perfect expressions of Republican thought the early 21st century produced.  Who gives a damn about children if their parents are probably going to vote against you?

As Lemieux says, there was no political upside to this at all.  It was done purely to make life more difficult for people who happen to live in a city whose Mayor pissed Christie off (for the hideous crime of being a Democrat who wouldn't endorse a Republican).  This is SOP across the GOP these days, of course; hurt innocent people because Democrats don't want you to, then justify the damage by demonising your victims. From denying free money (free fucking money!) to pay for poor people's medical bills to insisting on expensive regular drug tests for anyone claiming benefits, the priorities of the Republican party have collapsed in on themselves to form a singularity of sheer adolescent vandalism. The goal is no longer to win.  It is simply to hurt your enemy.  And if one can do that by making vast swathes of the population miserable, well then that's OK, because those are your enemies too!  Otherwise, why would you be hurting them?

Still, at least no-one was hurt this time.

Emergency responders were delayed in attending to four medical situations – including one in which a 91-year-old woman lay unconscious – due to traffic gridlock caused by unannounced closures of access lanes to the George Washington Bridge, according to the head of the borough’s EMS department. 

The woman later died, borough records show.

Ah.

(Yes, as the full article states, no-one yet has any evidence Christie actually orchestrated this.  He may simply have been lying to protect his giggling, sociopathic staff, rather than himself.  You'll forgive me if this possibility does not exactly make me swoon.)

Fourteen Million Reasons To Despair

(Trigger warning: sexual assault is mentioned, though not discussed, below)

One of the most strange truths about the growth of the ludicrous far-right bigot smorgasbord that constitutes the bedrock of the modern Republican Party in the United States is how blase everyone seems to be about it.  I can't count the number of times I've had a conversation about the horrific state of American news media in which someone has said: "Yes, but aside from FOX News".

The suggestion seems to be that FOX is so outrageously and openly biased that it has a disproportionate effect on the overall shape of American journalism.  Which is true, but not in the way these people mean.  FOX doesn't make the whole shebang seem like it's more slanted and mendacious than it is, it demonstrates the full value of slant and mendacity to everyone else. Arguing the most successful and influential example of a given group must also be an outlier strikes me as a damn hard sell.

The radio equivalent of FOX News has to be Rush Limbaugh.  This is a man nobody with the brains nature assigned to his least-favourite lungfish would take seriously for the length f time it takes to boil an egg in molten rock. This is the man who spent days calling Sandra Fluke a slut because she has sex with people for money testified before Congress that access to birth control was a genuine health concern for women.  If Limbaugh were an ice-cream flavour, he'd be Rocky Salmonella. If he were a Doctor Who villain, he'd be Davros' speech-writer.

Rush Limbaugh has over fourteen million weekly listeners.

I mention him today because this hideous man, this addled mess, this capering fool with the unique talent for making Howard Stern look like Cicero, has decided to weigh in on the question of whether the Senate is better off now the filibuster is partially gone:

Let’s say, let’s take 10 people in a room and they’re a group,” he said on his radio show. “And the room is made up of six men and four women. OK? The group has a rule that the men cannot rape the women. The group also has a rule that says any rule that will be changed must require six votes, of the 10, to change the rule.

How is any rational human being with an ounce of empathy in their souls supposed to process this? The forty-five millionaires who make up the Republican aisle of the Senate (88.9% of which are white men, of course) are kind of like women held hostage voting for themselves not to be assaulted?  Because they can't stop Democratic candidates from becoming judges?  Are we not to be concerned - and revolted - about a mind that jumps straight from restoring majority rule to one half of the legislative branch to the idea of gang-raping women trapped in a room.

And does the sweatiest mouthpiece the Republican Party has yet created really want to be using comparisons like this whilst his cronies in government are trying to crank out as many laws as possible forcing vaginal ultrasounds on any woman wanting to have an abortion?

In its own despicable way, of course, this hideous piece of non-think demonstrates just how absurd the thinking behind the Republican freak-out has really gotten.  It's not just that Rush has his sums wrong - in a Senate with ten people six people get their way even with the filibuster; he'd have been better off saying "in a Senate with twenty people the filibuster needs twelve of them to agree" - it's that the sheer horrific nature of the analogy is essential to hide what's really happened.  To switch the metaphor to something that doesn't make want to be ill, let's say twenty people are in a room.  Eleven of them want capital punishment to be mandatory for all crimes, and the other nine are sane.  Under this new system, it is not the case that capital punishment could then be voted in.  Even if the insane death-hungry party controlled the White House and the House of Representatives, the ability to directly vote for such a lunatic policy is still covered by the filibuster.

What our blood-crazed frothing madmen (in their white shirts, blue suits, and red ties) could do is vote for a judge that was similarly divorced from reality, and hope that judge eventually came across a case involving capital punishment so they could announce leaving any given criminal alive was contrary to the constitution.  Then you'd need for the Supreme Court to agree with so utterly insane a reading of what constitutes unconstitutional.

So, to sum up: Limbaugh's nightmare scenario is that eleven out of twenty senators could nominate a judge with views almost no American voter would find even close to tolerable, who might get lucky and get a case on which they can work their utterly insane thinking, which might then not get reversed by the Supreme Court despite its self-evidently lunacy. Limbaugh believes the correct number of those twenty senators to obliterate their electoral chances in the off-chance of acting contrary to overwhelming public opinion should be twelve. [1]

Fourteen million weekly listeners.  It took twice as long as usual to type this because my hands kept balling up into fists.

[1] On the other hand, the Democrats have a genuine reason to fear some of this coming true, since the current Supreme Court is both extremely conservative, and contains at a bare minimum three judges who have repeatedly contradicted not only clear precedent but their own clear precedents in order to achieve the result Republicans want.  Amongst other things, this is why Al Gore was never president, it is now illegal to limit campaign contributions, states are now able to refuse to accept money for improving their healthcare systems, and there is no longer any effective way to take Southern states to task for minting laws blatantly aimed at preventing non-white people from exercising their right to vote.  This would be a major concern for me, except that the current status quo favours Republicans to a major extent, and I don't believe the filibuster would survive the next Republican Congress in any case.

I Have Hatred In My Heart

Pop quiz, hotshots.  You've been called to fix a tenant's broken stair so that they don't fall down it and injure themselves again.  Do you:

a) Set a time and turn up then?
b) Set a time and turn up hours late?
c) Set a time, decide not to come around at all, and let the tenant or the letting agency know?
d) Set a time, decide not to come around at all, tell absolutely no-one, and when challenged say you're weren't in the area at all today anyway.

If you answered anything but d), congratulations! You're less of a feckless dickchimp than the guy we have to rely on to stop us breaking our legs.  Fancy fixing our stairs?

Update: After some very annoyed phone calls, I was able to impress upon our letting agents that having taken the afternoon off, and with guests around on the following afternoon, coming round the next day was completely unacceptable.  They then arranged to have DC (as we shall now know him) to arrive at five that afternoon.

At seven that evening, he arrived to announce he couldn't do anything anyway, since he didn't have his tools with him (what self-respecting handyman would, after all?), and could he come round tomorrow.

Which is when things got strange.

Handyman: Can I come tomorrow?
Squid: Only if it's mid-morning; we have guests coming in the afternoon.
H: How early should I come? 
S: Shall we say ten?
H: Not sure. How early do you get up?S
: We can be up by nine, no problem.
H: Let us say eleven, then. 
S: ...

Update 2: Ah, 'tis fixed now.  Just so long as your definition of "fixed" isn't so rigid as to insist a stair be parallel with the floor, of course. That much, sir, would simply be too far.

They Want A Body Count, They Don't Care How They Get It

I should probably say something about the shutdown of the federal government over in the US.

No-one who reads this blog or knows me personally probably needs help in working out where I stand on the matter, but just for the record:

As long as the government is shut down, the National Institutes of Health will turn away roughly 200 patients each week from its clinical research center, including children with cancer.

Unless President Obama and the Democratic Senate agree to allow hundreds of thousands of the countries poorest citizens to give up access to health insurance, treating children with cancer is something the GOP figures can be done without.  They know they can't win, but every day they can delay a restart is another day when people who aren't then can suffer, and it turns out, die.

As poor old Miss Hardaker would say "No love in Heaven or Earth for you".

In Which I Hate Everything

It's been kind of a shitty week for progressives, or really anyone with souls.  First off, Starbucks in the States decides there's just no fun in drinking a soy latte if you can't stir it with gun barrel.  Which, in itself is up to them, though I hope they make it exceptionally clear to their patrons just who it's' been decided they'll be safe sitting next to.  Of course, the NRA - one of those organisations so horrifically unpleasant at its highest echelons it's difficult to feel for those members who object to being lumped in with their mickity-mucks - decided this was reason to celebrate, and the best way to get their gun-lovin' a goin' was to head off for a day trip to the Starbucks at - and you know where this is going - Newtown.

The bloody-minded insistence that a country can only be safe when it's packing enough lead to sink Grenada (actually, they tried that in the '80s, I think) strikes me as pretty much entirely untethered from anything I can recognise as reality, but fair enough. People can believe it honestly, and they can believe it completely.  Showing up to gloat about their victories in a town that lost twenty six lives in a school shooting just eight months earlier?  That's about just wanting to be dicks.  Every time Aaron Sorkin gets on his high horse about liberals just plain not liking people who like guns, I think of instances like this, and I think "Well, gee, chief, why do you think that is?".

Naturally, when the Starbucks in question shut early, the NRA complained they were being victimised. Because freedom doesn't just mean getting to carry guns, it means being forced to sell coffee to gun-carriers who should be spat upon in the street.

(And not for nothing, but Charles Pierce absolutely nails it here: how can a Muslim-sponsored building near Ground Zero be a profound offensive to the survivors of 9/11, but sending armed caffeine-addicts into Newtown to remind them how utterly, completely their horrific tragedy has mattered to anyone with any power is what the Constitution is all about?)

Sticking with America and guns - because really, how could you run out of material that way? - we stumble across some delightful anti-abortion protesters (via Maha) who are attempting to get an abortion clinic in Wichita moved.  Their justifications for this contain two of the most perfect encapsulations of far-right thought I can remember reading:

[I]t is inappropriate for schoolchildren commuting past the clinic to see protest signs depicting graphic images relating to abortion.

[T]he South Wind Women’s Center is allowing volunteers to escort women into the clinic in hopes that they will harass the anti-abortion protesters outside and provoke a shooting. He said Julie Burkhart, the founder and owner of the clinic, would blame the incident on the protesters in order to raise money.

I'm not sure there's any point in playing Wingnut Bingo ever again.  What right-wing bromides, soundbites, insults or accusations could compare to these statements, these masters of the form.  This victim-complex as artwork.  Abortion protesters should get what they want because otherwise they'll show horrible photographs to passing children?  Volunteers are deliberately exposing themselves to gunfire so that if they're shot they can blame the protesters?  It's not that I've never heard this kind of argument before - I've seen Reservoir Dogs - but there's a reason "If they hadn't have done what I told them not to do they'd still be alive" is a line from an actor playing a psychopath rather than a comment offered to the local press.  It gets hard to listen to the far right complain liberals all think they're smarter than them whilst they also insist they can't be expected to see a worker at an abortion clinic offering support for victimised women without blowing their heads off.

Guns don't kill people, people doing things wingnuts hate where wingnuts can see it being done do.

But let's not pick on the US. Terrible arguments and terrible treatment of people is the sport everyone can get in on nowadays.  Unless they're gay, obviously.  To say that this is an unbelievably cowardly decision by the IOC seems a waste of breath, but it's the decision's basis in a rule banning "propaganda" that turns it from snivelling wretchedness into an out-and-out "fuck you".  Because in an entire country just been told to round up their homosexuals and keep quiet if it makes them queasy, nothing says "presenting only one side of an argument" like the idea there should be one building in six and a half million square miles where people can sit without fear of being beaten to a pulp for the crime of making Vladimir Putin feel icky.

Gods, but I loathe this world.

The Five Worst People In America Today

I should say a little about the SCOTUS ruling yesterday - less of a ruling and more of a middle finger to Martin Luther King Jr., really - which is tough, because I'm just so depressed about it.  How did Bush vs Gore become only the second most ridiculous decision the court made this century?  How did concluding the person who sets your shifts, your hours, and your tasks at work isn't your supervisor become only the second most stupid thing Sam Alito said this June?  How did a black judge have the balls to stand up and say black people deciding what's best for black people is no less racist than white people saying what's best for black people? 

How can anyone believe in a loving God when not one of these people's faces burst into flames?

For those not in the know, there used to be a bunch of states - all of them with histories of deliberately trying to stop anyone not white from getting as far as the polling booth - who had to clear changes to their voting laws with the feds.  This is not just because of their past performace; some of these states to this day kept coming up with ideas the Justice Department had to overrule because they were so transparently aimed at keeping black and Hispanic citizens from getting to exercise their constitutional rights.  With the new decision declaring such activity bad because... something... five of the states previously covered have immediately launched new legislation aimed at screwing over any person who doesn't look like they belonged on the Mayflower unless they were scrubbing the decks.

People much smarter and with far more legal and constitutional knowledge than me are still picking over this thing trying to work out what happened.  Right now the best anyone can cobble together is that this part of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional because racism doesn't exist anymore.  You'd think all that would be needed to refute this would be to look at the states who'd prepared obviously racist legislation that they waited until the ruling to introduce to know that wasn't true, but instead the court looked at all the laws these states had passed that weren't aimed at suppression - because the VRA stopped them - and declared that clearly everything was fine.

SCJ Ginsberg pointed out that this was equivalent to throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you're not getting wet, presumably because she didn't think she could get away with calling it tossing out your birth control since none of your fucking led to pregnancy.

(Not for nothing, but try and imagine this court striking down the Second Amendment on the grounds that times have changed and the King of England ain't gonna head over to demand back taxes no more.)

There is zero chance this Congress will fix the issue.  There is zero chance anyone with any clout in the US media will report on this issue, at least not in any stronger terms than "Democrats say these laws are racist, Republicans disagree, logic and maths are hard so who knows".  Tens - hundreds? - of thousands of people just lost their de facto right to vote in America.  Corporations might be people, but the rural poor are landscape features.

The Republican party have faced a stark choice these last few years: embrace minorities, or disenfranchise them.  The choice they've made is obvious to anyone with access to a television screen or an internet connection.  This week, SCOTUS decided the biggest problem with that choice was that it was going to be a hard sell, legally speaking. 

Today, that is no longer the case.