Trump and Vance Serve Up a Feast of Political Lies & Olympic Boxer Sues Musk and JK Rowling for Cyber Harassment
Trump and Vance Serve Up a Feast of Political Lies & Olympic Boxer Sues Musk and JK Rowling for Cyber Harassment
What I’m Discussing Today:
Kareem’s Daily Quote: Claiming that both sides are equally wrong is a weak excuse for avoiding responsibility.
A trio of silly, false claims that JD Vance makes about Kamala Harris: Three lies from Vance are all the more stupefying because they are so easily disproved.
Donald Trump’s campaign says its emails were hacked: Yet, a few years ago he invited Russia to hack his opponent.
Trump falsely claims Harris crowd was faked: This is a worrying claim because it may indicate a serious cognitive issue.
Kareem’s Video Break: Man, if I could move my feet as fast as this… If I could move anything as fast as this…
J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk Named in Cyberbullying Lawsuit Filed by Algerian Boxer Imane Khelif After Olympic Win: Khelif won a gold medal in boxing, but she’s just begun to fight the rich and famous who tried to tarnish her gold.
What I’m Reading: Breaking the Dark: A Jessica Jones Marvel Crime Novel and Otto Normal's Monsterton: The Disappearance of White Pine Beach. An exciting and thoughtful mystery novel and an entertaining and original middle-school novel.
Mike Casey Plays “Universal Gratitude”: A lovely jazz performance that soothes the soul.
Kareem’s Daily Quote
There's battle lines being drawn
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
Buffalo Springfield, “For What It’s Worth”
Throughout my life, I’ve heard many people complain that they are fed up with both sides of the political discourse and that no side is right because they’re all crooks, posers, and thieves so there’s no point in getting involved. Whew! That’s a whole lot of bullshit packed into one run-on sentence.
First, people are right to be frustrated by the low level of political insults and outright lies being spoon-fed to them daily. But that doesn’t mean both sides are the same. Nor are both sides automatically wrong because they both engage in childish name-calling.
Logic tells us that one side is always better because it more closely embodies the goals we share and because the means of achieving those goals align with our values. All that’s left then is deciding whether or not there’s any evidence that one side is more effective at realizing those goals and whether or how they achieve those goals expresses our morality. We support our friends because they reflect our morality but we don’t cut them off when they prove to be less than perfect.
It’s appropriate that the quote exploring this question comes from Buffalo Springfield’s classic 1966 song “For What It’s Worth” because there are so many misconceptions about the song. Most people think the song is about the Vietnam War protests taking place at the time:
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and they carrying signs
Mostly say, "Hooray for our side"
Stephen Stills (later of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young) was a member of Buffalo Springfield at the time, which was the house band at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, California. At the time, young people were just coming into their own social power and they annoyed business owners on the Strip by crowding the streets at night to visit music clubs and record stores. This was the blossoming of the counter-culture in real-time. Police were called in to enforce loitering laws, which resulted in protests by as many as 1,000 demonstrators, including Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda.
Even the title was a misunderstanding. Stills was pitching the song to his record company, saying, “I have this song here, for what it's worth, if you want it.” Later they added the parenthetical subtitle “Stop, Hey What's That Sound” so people would recognize it.
This election has been overstuffed with misunderstanding and misinformation. But then so have our lives since the domination of social media and the internet. So much crap flying at us every second that it’s hard to distinguish the lies from the truth. Hard, but not impossible.
I don’t care about Vance being in drag in a photo (which is not evidence of anything, not even hypocrisy about his criticism of LGBTQ+) nor do I care about Walz’s possible misuse of a military rank. I care that people stop deluding themselves that there’s no difference between candidates just because they are too lazy or disillusioned to take responsibility for choosing the best future for this country.