Friday Funbag #4--Spooky Season Begins
The VP debate, Helene's aftermath, and the decline of the Internet.
Who won the vice-presidential debate, and was JD Vance wearing eyeliner during it?
It’s difficult to state that anybody “won” the debate on Tuesday. Senator Vance spent the entire time using a technique known as the “Gish Gallop” in which he lied with stunning impugnity and frequency. The whole point of the Gish Gallop (named after a creationist who would '“debate” scientists about the origins of the universe and spout so much pure nonsense that the scientists would struggle to answer coherently) is to overwhelm your debating opponent with bullshit. For much of the debate, it worked on poor Tim Walz, who was trying very hard to be kind and decent, and as a result struggled in his answers much of the time. Governor Walz is a good and intelligent man who does a lot better when not stuck in the silly artificial time limits of political debates. He was trying to teach. The man to the left, Vance, was trying to scare the crap out of Americans, and lied so shamelessly that the CBS anchors had enough.
Vance went on such a tirade that CBS producers cut his microphone. He was incensed by his egregious lie about residents of his state, here legally as Republicans claim they want, being called out as a lie. The fact that Vance keeps digging into this racist, fascist smear of a black community speaks to the power that such lies hold in America. It’s a disgrace. He looked more polished than Walz, but he was polishing a lot of hate and lies (it isn’t the “Kamala Harris Administration” no matter how often he says it, Joe Biden is the president and calls the shots). Walz did get one good shot in when Vance refused to say the 2020 election was legitimate.
I can tell you one thing, though. There was definitely a loser in this debate: the reputation of CBS News. The use of nonsensical, irrelevant statistics was bad enough, but sanewashing a deeply fascist, Nazi-inspired mass roundup of immigrants as a “housing plan” is a complete dereliction of duty. Rather, Cronkite and Murrow would never.
Oh, and the consensus amongst the makeup artists ELLE Magazine consulted was that JD Vance was not wearing eyeliner, but I’ll let you guys decide.
Are inland hurricanes going to be a regular occurrence now? Why was Helene so destructive?
Despite what congresswoman Moron Taylor Greene says, we don’t control the weather. While I suspect she was dropped on her head as a baby (frequently), it doesn’t excuse the sheer stupidity of claiming that a shadowy “they” (is it Jews? Democrats? the Clintons’ secret cabal of adrenochrome harvesters? She reports, you decide how much of an idiot she is) directed Hurricane Helene to only affect red states. Never mind history or geography, which shows that the current “red states” are frequently afflicted by hurricanes, there must be a conspiracy!
There’s no conspiracy. Climate change is real, and its long-warned destructive force is being repeatedly demonstrated. Helene went from tropical storm to Category 4 in two days time, and maintained hurricane strength due to other weather factors. This was especially catastrophic in the Appalachian/Smoky Mountains region, because cities like Asheville had been growing rapidly based on the premise that they were immune from the dangers of climate change. Headlines ran across the country that they were “climate-proof” at their elevation of over two thousand feet above sea level. North Carolina’s legislature, run by a supermajority of Republicans, allowed builders to cut corners to meet demand by refusing to update the building code. Construction was done in flood-prone areas because the state doesn’t ban the sale of land parcels in flood plains. When Helene arrived, the locations of housing development and the insufficient quality of the homes themselves led to an utter catastrophe.
Asheville may not have drinking water for months. Roads have been destroyed. The photo up top shows the flooded River Arts District. The death toll is now at 210 people and rising, as many towns and villages in the mountains were unreachable on the ground (an example shown below—photo taken by a National Guardsman). Videos were posted by people in cabins and cottages and AirBnbs of how they were trapped by landslides and road collapses or flooding. An entire bridge was washed away in eastern Tennessee. Dozens of people climbed to the roof of a rural hospital in Erwin to be evacuated by helicopter as floodwaters had cleared the entire first floor.
Asheville, North Carolina is 300 miles from a coastline. North Carolina’s history and rescue apparatus was designed for what, historically, had been damage to Wilmington and the Outer Banks. They never imagined they would need to rescue people en masse from the mountains. Nobody did. A mere two years ago, Asheville was touted as an ideal fun, hip, climate-safe city. Much of the “hip” parts drowned last week. The lesson should sober us all into finally insisting the government treat climate change like the emergency it is.
Is it just me, or is the Internet getting worse in every way?
It’s not just you.
Streaming services have led to a rapid removal of content across the Internet. Movies are disappearing. Entire seasons of shows like The Daily Show were removed from Comedy Central’s website. Users were redirected to Paramount Plus, where many of the deleted seasons are not available. Warner Bros Discovery scrubbed the entire Cartoon Network site, again pushing people to their Max streaming service, where, again, many shows are not available.
Search results are becoming increasingly clogged with AI-generated slop. False images, nonsensical websites with randomly generated words and links, even AI-written “books” sold on Amazon, all of it is contributing to an inability to find what you are looking for or to locate a quality, trustworthy answer. For example, I put in my top collage three results from searching Hurricane Helene videos. Every single one included results that mixed real video of places with AI-generated cyclones and tsunamis. It’s horrendously fake, but yet they are receiving engagement large enough that it generates money for the people passing this trash off as real.
One of the great things about the Internet for the first decade, maybe two, was that it was pretty easy to spot a fake, and just as easy to find quality sources of information. Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto has yielded to “Let’s make money and make everyone’s experiences worse.” Every time a government has passed legislation that requires this near-trillion dollar behemoth to compensate copyright owners for the product they are actively using, Google threatens to cut off searching for those items in the state or country passing the laws. MSN was posting AI-written news stories that falsely proclaimed the deaths of people who were very much alive last year, and withdrew in the face of criticism. MSN and Yahoo continue to aggregate low-quality results in their “news” sections that are nothing more than glorified clickbait.
Meanwhile, good sites like the Internet Archive are being threatened with extinction for daring to host out-of-print books in their virtual library. Wikipedia is under attack by Elon Musk, who showed with Twitter there’s no amount of money he won’t spend to destroy anywhere that truth can be shared. Twitter is the perfect distillation of lies, hate, and AI trash—trending topics routine exclude important items, one wrong click leads you to windows you can’t close trying to get you to buy a blue checkmark, journalists are banned for covering Musk, and regular users get banned for using words like “cisgender.” Meanwhile, racial slurs…are totally acceptable to Elon. I have not seen so many uses of the N-word in public as I have this year on Twitter.
As with many areas, our politicians failed us because they were too busy taking campaign cash from the tech behemoths. Elon Musk holds a top-secret security clearance despite enabling activities that destabilize the country and openly violating the law in other cases. Mark Zuckerberg is deliberately removing any “political” content, which includes many posts about basic human rights, forcing users to come up with Pig Latin-style code to discuss things like genocide. Shopping on Amazon is like walking through a minefield of copyright-violating, cheaply made knockoffs of products people worked to design and create. These companies dominate everything in our lives, and all Congress can do is come up with a ban on TikTok, one of the few places where you can even find information about certain events at all.
Just like with climate change, we deserve what we tolerate. Next month we can boot out the bootlickers. There’s a lot of good young candidates for public office, who have dealt with the same crap we have and know they’re sick of it too. I pray that enough people join me in working to change government while humanity still has a chance.