Random bits
Michigan beat Maryland handily yesterday (19 January 2021) in basketball. The Michigan Women's basketball team is also a top 10 team and currently undefeated. Go Blue.
I worked less than 10 hours today, but it was still a long day.
Biden Inauguration
This evening I watched the presidential election and it was struck by what a different vision of the United States it was. The only positive about the 'rona is that the evening broadcast was it allowed for a highly polished virtual celebration in the evening. My son probably could see the fireworks in DC, so I am a bit jealous about that. The production was very much in line with the Democratic convention but smoother and more studded with A list stars. I would not be surprised to see this repeated in the future.
This Digby's Hullabaloo post a nice piecing together of key snippets of the actual inauguration. The Amanda Gorman poem was my favorite part.
The evening "concert" is such a different vision of America than the January 6th siege crowd that it is hard to think they co-exist ... if we did not all know a Qanon fan boy or girl and realize that Fox probably didn't cover it at all.
Extraordinary Evidence
In the run up to 2016 my brother-in-law's wife's father, an evangelical, trying to get into a discussion about the secret cabal controlling everything. It was straight up Protocol of the Elder's of Zion stuff (racist hate-justifying bunk). Given his age I tried to basically say I did not really for that kind of conspiracy theory stuff and we have not spoken too much since then. Suffice to day he believed that "Trump was going to be a game changer." Admittedly, he was right about that.
To the old man's point, I did posit that there was also the impact of money and control of the media that did give people a lot of control of the narrative which allowed them to control people's beliefs. I had in mind Fox and the highly funded bubble it had created; and how that provided enormous control of people's beliefs. The January 6th coup attempt was the ultimate metastasis of the the right wing bubble. The US may yet fall to a right wing fascist regime, but it was averted for now.
The Qanon stuff is one I've never quite understood. In the beginning Fox very craftily shaped the narrative about what was going on and intermixed it with factual reporting. That selective reporting and messaging about intent is very potent. On the surface, the Qanon conspiracy requires accepting very extreme beliefs that are pretty out of the range of common sense explanations of events. When I hear those kind of things, my first reaction the easiest explanation is usually the correct one. Common sense frequently rules - even in complex modeling situations. It always brings back Carl Sagan's position on aliens: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Show me a captured Bigfoot, show me live alien, otherwise kindly don't try to kill me or people like me. Find a better hobby.
After Trump won, I was asked what I thought about Trump. It was January 2016 and I said, Trump is a destroyer. HIs gig is contradicting everyone else, lying, and seizing on the fact that most people are not used to dealing with that all of the time. Of course, I also had a boss that did the same stuff and I was forced to quit my job to get away from it. I was proven profoundly correct.
I did get a "smart" response that "sometimes you have to destroy stuff to make it better."
I guess that could be true if the problem is a group of people trying to overthrow the government in a coup who also believe in racial purity and killing everyone else.
Our government is more like a bridge across a river that allows people to get together and supports all sorts of positive benefits. If you destroy the bridge, all you are left with is nothing. Terrorists blow up bridges. Trump was really nothing more than a terrorist who spent 4 years trying to tear about our nation. But, you watch enough Fox and Newsmax, and there you go.
Today was so much about the believing in a common good and the value a functional government. Of course, I'd like to be hopeful, but much of the mechanics of the the last 30 years of the right have not changed just because Trump inspired extremists attempted a coup. (Of course, there was no real Qanon seizure of power and Trump isn't some kind of secret genius spy. You'd have to provide some pretty extraordinary evidence for that when a lying sociopathic grifter is the common sense explanation. I'm pretty thankful for that since I'm a Democrat and I'd hate to be killed in part of some societal purge).
But may be, just may be, we will see some discussions of policy and compromise in the coming year. You know, the kind of thing you'd expect in a democracy.
Everyone stay safe.
PS - There was some talk about CA pulling a hold on a lot of Moderna COVID vaccines. That seemed to disappear, but it was simultaneously good see epidemiologic principles of tracking in use and bad to hear about a potential issue with one of the vaccines. I'll have to research it a bit more I guess.
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