Written by Nick Carraway –

“Cause you gotta be hangin’ tough

Hangin’ tough, hangin’ tough,
We’re rough.” — New Kids on the Block

There’s nothing quite as ridiculous as watching five suburban white teens dancing in unison and telling us how tough they are. This song sold millions of records, so I guess it fooled someone. It’s just hard to say if it was anyone over the age of fourteen. They certainly weren’t fooling any teenage boys or any adults. It’s one of those songs that inspires laughter today. It almost makes you feel sorry for those five boys. Almost.

The problem comes with the illusion of masculinity. We saw that again when Lindsay Graham tried to defend gun rights in the only way he can. He asserted that he owns an AR-15 and he would use it to hunt down gangs. Yup, I can see him now just mowing down street hard gangsters. Sure, and the New Kids were rough.

The trouble with a topic like this is that it exists in layers. The first layer is that we know Graham isn’t exactly the picture of stereotypical masculinity. There have been nasty rumors about his sexuality since he’s not married and seems effeminate to some. So, the picture of Graham with his big gun is laughable at best.

Of course, then there is the immediate second layer. What exactly is the definition of a man? Then, we get the question of whether any of this really matters. What if Lindsay Graham is gay? What if he doesn’t really participate in stereotypical alpha male activities? Should any of that really matter? Certainly, it is a little rich for progressives to trumpet the rights of LGTBQ+ individuals and then turn around and whisper about Graham. If you are going to support some people on that journey you need to support all people on that journey.

Of course, this doesn’t mean anything about Graham. I’m not speculating one way or the other. I honestly don’t care. What I care about is how people portray themselves and portray masculinity as a whole. The insinuation is that men own guns and bigger men own bigger guns. In my younger days, I remember seeing a bumper sticker that said, “If you own a gun you are a citizen. If you don’t you are a subject.” I certainly didn’t realize that the right to own a gun had turned into the duty to own a gun.

I don’t own a gun and I’m pretty confident in saying that I never will. I guess you would surmise that I’m not really a man. Would I become more of a man if I somehow lied about that? Maybe I could say I own a gun. Maybe I could say that I can lift 200 pounds. Maybe I could brag about a would be enormous porn collection. Maybe then I would be a man.

All of this goes back to marketing. The NKOTB were mass marketed as a group of tough teens that could also sing and dance. Graham is mass marketing himself as the man’s man there to protect us from the big bad government. Meanwhile, we can’t help but wonder what this is all saying about manhood and what it means to be a man. Obviously, these notions inspire more laughter than anything else and yet we can’t be blind to the overall effect that it has on us as men and on culture in general.

Men as a whole are struggling. Some of us are struggling since we aren’t going as far in our careers as we thought we should. Not being the breadwinner in a family can be a blow to the male ego. Some men are struggling with the “Me Too” movement and how to navigate the workplace and society at large with women. Some men struggle with the concept of male identity as it pertains to their own sexuality and how they are perceived in the world. All of these things get jumbled up when we are bombarded by the images of false bravado.

So, it isn’t so much to poke fun at NKOTB or Lindsay Graham for what they are. It is about poking fun at who they were trying to convince us they were. No one really believes those five teens were hanging tough and no one really believes Graham is roaming around town with his AR-15 looking for hoodlums to kill. Maybe he’s going after that Trump vote after all and thinks he can fool us into thinking he’s the man’s man. Most of us don’t care and those that do aren’t buying it for a minute.

Gun nuts from all over the country crowded around the Virginia statehouse yesterday (on Martin Luther King Day) to protest laws that no one has proposed.  Their main objections that caused their fake outrage was that the new Democratic majority was going to…I kid you not…to “shut down the internet”, “have no-knock raids on gun owners”, and to “start confiscating everyone’s guns”.  This is in response to the state legislature’s consideration of improved background checks and limitations on the number of guns on can purchase in one month.  That’s real tyranny, right?  Generally, I find that those who parade around like this are either 1.  Criminals who can’t legally own a firearm, 2. Right wing racists who try to piss off normal people by co-opting holidays like MLK day, 3. Mentally unstable, and 4. Compensating for a physical deficiency.  Namely:

Most of said demonstrators yesterday were all dressed up in body armor, helmets, radio headsets, multiple firearms and vests that hold multiple high-capacity magazines.  Many claimed they were members of “militias”.  A news flash for these fine fellows – you’re not a member of a militia.  You are a member of an armed mob.  Militias come under federal, state and local authorities, and not just any group of idiots can dress up, and run around in the woods playing Army.  Here’s a really good explanation of the laws surrounding actual militias.

I’ve found these folks impossible to talk with about their gun obsession.  Their minds are so full on nonsense about the Second Amendment that they believe it was written to allow individual citizens to attack the government if they disagree with what their government is doing.  The Second Amendment was added for the opposite reason, which was to provide a structure for federal, state, and local governments to protect from insurrections and attacks from standing armies (like the British).  So much bullshit has been pumped into the public domain about guns that we have the result today of thousands of gun nuts protesting laws that are not proposed.  And most of the media let them get away with that.

Last night I extricated myself from a FB conversation.  Yes, it was one of THOSE conversations, started by one of my conservative acquaintances who has become a Never Trumper.  A couple of days ago, he asked what act would turn his Trumpist friends against The Orange One.  The answer (nothing) was predictable; what was shocking was the nonsense they spewed in a continuous stream to justify that.  Intellectually, we all sense that Trumpists are unbalanced and misinformed.  When it’s laid out in plain English on social media, it makes your hair hurt.

One Trumpist would deflect all questions about Trump to Biden and his son, Hunter.  He would simply not address any of the issues about Ukraine or the thousands and thousands of easily disproven lies from Trump.  His source is Sean Hannity and he actually begged me to watch his show to “get the facts” that were going “to bury” Biden and his son.  He would only gloat about how Biden is “cooked” and would not even address the question.  Another Trumpist resorted to immediate grade school name calling and wanted to bet all comers $2,500 that Trump would not be impeached and that he would again be elected president.  He didn’t like I said I didn’t believe I wanted to bet on the level of stupidity of Trumpists.

One Trumpist kept quoting the Bible.  One even quoted Shakespeare, which I found entertaining.  One kept quoting the lies of Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash, one of those fact free “investigative” books that makes people’s brains soft.  One said he would only vote against Trump if “he was convicted of a crime”.  He seemed puzzled when I said that was impossible since DOJ policy didn’t allow a sitting president to be indicted for crimes they committed.

The one who took the cake?  The QAnon Trumpist.  I have never had a social media conversation with anyone as unhinged as this one.  These folks are obsessed with pedophilia, and have this weird article of faith that the “Deep State”, whatever that is, is somehow covering up Hillary’s pedophilia ring that has “pedavores” as members.  I have no idea what a “pedavore” is, and don’t want to know.  This person was so unhinged that even the most Trumpist of Trumpists paused their ranting momentarily, one even saying, “I don’t even know what that means.”  I burst out laughing at that one, almost spilling my Jack on the rocks on my keyboard.

What I learned during this exchange was that to a person no level of corruption, criminality, or misconduct would cause a Trumpist to think again.  The really disheartening lesson was that how thoroughly these people are brainwashed with pure unadulterated bullshit.  We knew that the Hillary nonsense is encoded in the DNA – but right alongside those lies, the lies about Biden and his son have already been ingrained.  The facts have no bearing on these opinions; none.  I have finally given up even trying to talk to these people because I make no progress.  The message framing, as defined by George Lakoff, a linguist and retired professor of language at Berkeley, is perfect.  This message framing hits all the emotional buttons of fear, belonging, and Them vs. Us.  Once that kind of messaging becomes encoded, it’s almost impossible to alter it, and that’s what we’re witnessing.

These people are beyond reach of reason and critical thinking.  The only way they can be beaten is to neutralize them at the voting booth, and that requires the engagement in massive numbers of normal people who haven’t been brainwashed.  That is a huge task.

This is the latest handy-dandy chart on political media bias put out by allgenearlizationsarefalse.com, home of mediabiaschart.com which rigorously studies media outlets for systematic bias.  Media outlets are charted on two axis, with the x-axis used as a measure of political bias with neutral in the center.  The y-axis scales from factual news at the top to inaccurate and fabricated at the bottom.  The developer of this chart is a patent attorney from Denver who also has a degree in English.  She uses both her legal skills and technical English skills to decode bias and then chart it. If you click on the pic, it will give you a bigger chart to see the detail.  Most interesting is the grouping of media outlets by characteristics of each’s reporting – the green box is News; the yellow box is Fair Interpretation of the News; the orange box is Unfair Interpretation of the News; the red box is Nonsense Damaging to Public Discourse.

Let’s look at who’s in the red box.  On the left are the obvious ones that no one I know reads or reposts since they are so biased.  But look on the lower right corner.  Look at that group.  From Fox News, to the Daily Caller, Newsmax, RedState, Breitbart, and the Blaze, these outlets make up the sources of “news” for the vast majority of conservatives.  This is how you get the arguments that “Bill Clinton passed a law in 1997 to separate kids from families” and “Barack Obama separated kids just like Trump”, or that immigrants are flooding the country when they’re not, or that Trump is the most accomplished president in history, when in fact he’s actively destroying what’s left of our democracy.  Even today, they are raging about “liberals attacking” Melania Trump for her tone-deaf fashion faux pax last week on her trip to south Texas.  Down is up, up is down, and the sun rises in the west.  This is why you can’t get anything accomplished through debating these folks.  They are so far out in right field that you’ll never get anything done trying to talk to them.

I highly recommend the posts on this blog describing the methodology of plotting the media companies in this light.  Oh, and go show it to one of your conservative friends.

Just don’t get splattered when their head explodes.

We’re entering Reality TeeVee World.  Now every national security or economic issue is going to be teased for days, just like Celebrity Apprentice.  Last night, Cheeto Jesus promised reporters a “revelation” on “Tuesday or Wednesday” about the hacking by the Russians of our elections.  This arrogant ass (sorry Momma) has decided he knows more than 17 intelligence agencies, using the false accusation that they got the WMD wrong in Iraq.  The fact is that the intelligence agencies didn’t get WMD wrong.  Cheney and his cronies cooked the intelligence to get the answer they wanted.  But we all know that.

“I just want them to be sure because it’s a pretty serious charge,” CJ said.  When asked how he knows more than US intelligence agencies, he said, “You’ll find out on Tuesday or Wednesday.” So, national security issues are teased like crappy television shows.  CJ’s nonsensical declarations last night harken back to the whole birther mess in 2011 and 2012.  Remember when he said, “I have people that have been studying [Obama’s birth certificate] and they cannot believe what they’re finding …”?  What they found was nada, zero, nothing.  So, the guy who made a career out of peddling BS as jewelry is now saying he knows more than 17 intelligence agencies.

One last thing that I left out – The stupidest thing he said?  Look at this:

“I don’t care what they say, no computer is safe,” he added. “I have a boy who’s 10 years old; he can do anything with a computer. You want something to really go without detection, write it out and have it sent by courier.”

“Send it by courier”?  This clown is so out of touch that he thinks the average American can afford a courier.  Jesus.  No, really.  Jesus.

This should be entertaining, if not infuriating.