Two days after CNN's 'town hall' and I am still scratching my bald pate about their invitation to loathesome Dana Loesch, mendacious NRA spokescreature. Did they really need to 'balance' grieving friends and family members with a serial prevaricator and pusher of stochastic threats? Just because Loesch can almost convincingly play a simulacrum of a pretty human (note: it's all about the glossy raven tresses, probably a dye job- even Christy Moore might be fooled) doesn't mean that she deserves to be on television, not even in a sitcom.
Predictably, Loesch mendaciously played the victim, claiming that she was rushed by an audience of individuals screaming 'Burn her!' It was an odd assertion, seeing as there were cameras all over the auditorium (the 'town hall' being put on by a television network and attended by thousands of social-media savvy teens with phone cameras), and video clearly shows her exiting without any peril, though being shamed and booed. Dana not being the most stable individual on this planet, she probably thought the crowd was yelling 'Boo-urn her!':
That's pretty much all the courtesy that this slimy bottom-feeder named after a slimy bottom-feeder deserves.
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Can't remember where, but someone, somewhere today, commented that that hair color is very expensive, & very Southern High School Princess.
Consider yourself lucky you don't have a telebision set; this could have popped up at you late at night. (It happened to me.)
It seems only fair to have a spokesweasel from the N.R.A. on a mass murder town hall. Too bad for the N.R.A. she's the best they can do.
Hmmm. Interesting turn of phrase:
"...doesn't deserve to be on television..."
I'm unclear on who gets to make that judgement (the 'deserve' part - we know the network make the decision about the 'on television' part). This is the kind of statement that I find even more loathsome than the topic of discussion.
First, OF COURSE the NRA spokesman needed to be there. The represent millions of Americans (and millions of Trump voters) - excluding the opposition from the conversation would have been authoritarian and indicate that we're somehow intimidated by their invective.
Second, I'm really disturbed by the current liberal stance on our so-called conservative opposition. They can't speak at campus events. They can't write for the NY Times. They can't go on CNN. You're all starting to sound like Fox News viewers - KEEP THOSE TERRIBLE OPINIONS AWAY FROM MY FRAGILE EARS!!!!.
People like Loesch are horrible, but they speak for millions of Americans (remember all those people who voted for Donald Trump?), and they HAVE to be part of the discourse so we can overcome their propaganda...
Your blog refused to load for me all day :[
I came online this morning and tried to check up on some Blogger sites I hadn't visited for ages, and got blank pages for hours. Even now the little Firefox loading dot is bouncing back & forth trying to get to more than just the first couple of posts to show up. The rest of the internet was and remains unaffected. CONSPIRACY???
So, comment content:
I don't actually think Dana Loesch is all that hot. She overdraws her lips and Kardashianly flatirons the texture out of her hair. Fuck her.
I do think that the more we put NRA shills in the spotlight, the worse they look. People who call massacre survivors 'attention whores' (not sure if Loesch did something like this, because I don't watch things like CNN town halls, but it's been done a lot) and suggest they shouldn't be allowed a platform are going to rub lots and lots of people, including "conservatives" with vestigial consciences, the wrong way. Letting a thing like Loesch hoist herself with her own petard is probably a half-decent idea (as long as the entire procedure is filmed, as you mentioned, so she can't later fictionalize a case for her own victimization).
@mikey — I'm not sure I'd go as far as comparing liberals to Fox News viewers. I don't think it's quite that bad. A lot of people think that some viewpoints shouldn't be represented in the public square at all; like, it wouldn't be very advantageous to let Roosh V write a pro-rape op-ed for the NYT, or give table-time to somebody who wanted to reinstate racial segregation on Meet the Press, even though there are lots of Americans who probably think those are good ideas. It can be hard to see where the line should be drawn. We don't want to legitimize right-wing extremism by treating it like it's 'normal.' We also don't want to pretend that the American right isn't getting more extreme, by only selecting moderate conservative opinions to shower our liberal attention on. I think that kind of thing is what got us Trumped in the first place. But this is hard! It's painful. If there were any kind of justice in the world, Trump would be pilloried for his obvious, graceless lying and corruption on a daily basis — but the left instead finds itself having to first define the parameters for what counts as "lying" in the first place, and then move on to trying to convince a lot of willfully-ignorant morons that Trump's guilty of it. Those kinds of fights can have a deranging effect. My opinion, anyway.
You solved the riddle in your first paragraph, Emma.
I do think that the more we put NRA shills in the spotlight, the worse they look... These are objectively horrible people. They are speaking to objectively horrible (deplorable) people. But I don't trust anybody, not gawd herself, to make some kind of judgement about who can speak and write and publish and make a living. And when somebody's (NYT, WSJ, Fox) paying, they certainly DO get to decide who they hire.
But they keep going up and doing and saying awful things. That's how the market will decide they have to go - when they can't get clicks and subscriptions for saying these awful things...
Well, thank you for replying.
That's how the market will decide they have to go
Oh man, I wish I had that kind of confidence in "the market." Most of America is at least marginally leftist ("leftish"?), and nearly everyone supports socialist economic policies and is willing to pay taxes to get them. Statistically everybody wants to see Wall Street & the TBTF industry punitively regulated. Statistically everybody wants to see a top tax rate of 278%. Statistically everybody wants to stop prosecuting 19th century global imperialism on an 1980s budget. And look where we are, over here, one nation indivisible under Trump. The market has failed us in a lot of different but interconnected ways, and I'm not really optimistic that it'll rescue us from the NRA in our current lifetimes — which, if these gun-humpers have their way, will be artificially shortened for everyone by the arithmetic inclusion of communal shooting deaths.
But I don't trust anybody, not gawd herself, to make some kind of judgement about who can speak and write and publish and make a living.
Yeah, this doesn't bother me at all. If someone was advocating that Dana Loesch be thrown into prison, denied her civil rights, sued by the government, or slapped with a gag order that prevented her from making public statements just because she's demonstrably wrong about everything, I'd have a problem with that. But being forced to pretend that her opinions are sufficiently worthwhile to include them in a "town hall"? Nah. & nobody is entitled to 'make a living' by lying professionally. I think a federal jobs guarantee is a great idea, but I can't extend its purview to include salaried bullshitting on behalf of Pure Evil.
Which is, for me, the whole ballgame: We can't expect the holy market to correct for failure when the people who are served by it are being lied to every minute of the day. If the people are sold a mess of pottage for the price of prime rib, and the pottage industry is allowed to legally change the name of its dish to "prime rib" so the poor dumb jamokes never find out, we've got a bigger problem on our hands than the opinion-spectrum fascism of Lyin' CNN (or Fox News, if you prefer). The NRA will lose in a fair fight; they know that, and that's why they hire people like Dana Loesch to do their dirty work. I can't wrap that deception in the Constitution and feel good about it, as an American and a person whose frail mortal corpus isn't naturally bulletproof.
But, also. This is some complex ish, where sweeping, reasonable-looking statements easily become self-owns depending on the circumstances. This is just how I feel about this particular issue.
It is, however, worth noting that the lies and deception you think are so awful that perhaps she shouldn't even be permitted to have a job as a spokesperson were utterly effortless for you to see through.
People are only fooled if they want to be. At the end of the day, it's the consumers of content that will decide, not the providers. And silencing the providers has NEVER been an effective solution.
Remember the Soviet Union? How'd that work out?
Okay, I've seen your comments around the internet for years, and you seem like a lovely guy. I have no interest in antagonizing/insulting you. However, "ANYTHING LESS THAN A PUBLIC FREE-FOR-ALL IN WHICH LIES AND FACTS ARE GIVEN EQUAL TIME AND LEGITIMACY IS STALIN SHIPPING HIS DETRACTORS OFF TO SIBERIAN GULAGS THE END Q.E.D." is not an argument. It's a gesture. I think it was Lao Tzu who said, "No slope is slipperier than the slope that doesn't exist."
I don't support shipping NRA off to Siberia. I don't want them stripped of their rights. I'm not suggesting they be forcibly disbanded by the federal government. But they also don't need to be put on tv, presented to a willfully-ignorant public in a way that suggests they represent a "side" to some argument. That's not a bulwark against censorship. It's dumb.
Also, in your first comment you were angry that BBBB would want to exclude Dana Loesch from a CNN town hall because she "represent(s) millions of Americans (and millions of Trump voters)." And now we have to haul her in to testify because she's so obviously unpopular that further public exposure to her lies will harm her cause. Both those things can't be true. She can't represent millions of real people with rational opinions and also be a fringe crackpot whose views generate instant repulsion.
it's the consumers of content that will decide, not the providers
And yet this reliance on the good judgement of "consumers" has resulted in a political landscape in which the majority of the nation's politicians are out-and-proud about their advocacy for the super-rich, & actual voters don't get any of the things they say they want. Fox News serves outright lies to scared old white people, Russian shitposters have spent 3 years messing with Facebook Moms, and now I have to put the word "president" in front of Donald Trump's name forever.
People are starting to turn on the NRA. But the thing that inspired the sea change was dead kids. If the NRA hadn't been given a seat at the table for the last 30 years, if its members had been othered and excluded from gestures of public legitimacy, it's likely those kids (and a lot of other kids) would still be alive. That matters a lot more to me than the baseless worry that kicking Mike Cernovich off Medium puts America on the path to Stalinism. Mike Cernovich is not entitled to a public platform. Those dead kids were entitled to their lives.
Well, somehow Blogger cut the last two paragraphs off my EXTRAORDINARILY LONG comment. I'm trying not to believe that's an editorial decision. Here they are, though. Take that, Blogger!
...
I find it easy to "see through" Dana Loesch's bullshit geyser because I am outside the debate and I hate the NRA. Objectivity isn't costly for me. It was much harder for me to deal with the brutal, accurate criticism leveled against President Obama by the far left after the 2016 election. I've managed to internalize it all, but it's something I still struggle with, because I like & approve of (in theory) Obama. His election made me feel welcome in my own country. And, in an exactly parallel situation, if the naked facts of Obama's genocidal foreign policy had been prioritized over the administration's happy-talk in the moment, there would be a lot more people alive in the Middle East right now. I, among many others, am responsible for those deaths — just like anybody who is willing to pretend that the NRA has a point is at least somewhat responsible for all the dead schoolchildren in America who were shot with firearms that should've stayed banned in the 90s. That's it.
The Holy Market does not entitle conmen to profit from their crimes (or it shouldn't). There is no difference, for me, between selling bad stocks or bad products and selling bad information. Dana Loesch should not have a job, right now. If she cleaned up her act so that her patter wasn't 97.8% lies, I might revisit that opinion. She won't. She can't. If CNN had been brave enough to call her what she is in public, and deny her the opportunity to lie about it afterward, it wouldn't have been a case of dangerous, fascist oppression. It would've just been the truth.
with regard to the etymology of her surname - my opinion is that it is likely not based on a fish, but on a german verb löschen, meaning
delete
clear
discharge
erase
wipe out
quench
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