Month: October 2016

by William Skink

I mentioned in an earlier post that the interest in how down-ticket political races could be negatively impacted by the presidential campaigns has been primarily focused on Trump and Republicans. When the focus is on Democrats, much of what I have read has been efforts to scare-shame disillusioned millennials away from voting 3rd party.

But what about those of us refusing to vote altogether?

Last night I made sure I wasn’t voting by burning my ballot. I’m not just apathetically not voting, I’m emphatically not voting. There is a difference, and today a piece by Lara Gardner explaining why she’s not voting articulated this difference way better than I could (I wrote and performed a terrible song instead). From the link:

So many have said to me that not voting is not going to change anything and that it is simply giving up. I disagree with this. Not voting is a legitimate non-violent means to proving a government is not sanctioned by its people. South Africa endured many years of violence under the Apartheid regime. Many people and countries worldwide boycotted Apartheid, yet in spite of this, the US government insisted on supporting Apartheid, saying that while the US abhorred Apartheid, the regime was the legitimate government of South Africa. After an Apartheid election where no more than seven percent of South Africans voted, suddenly things changed. The world could no longer accept that the regime was legitimate because so few of the governed participated in the election process. The ANC, which prior had been treated as a terrorist group trying to overthrow a legitimate government, became freedom fighters against a government that did not have the consent of the South African people.

Read the whole article, it’s great. Or, if you’re not in the reading mood, here is my little acoustic ditty using some of the ugly language the candidates have used–grabbing pussies and killing heads of state, respectively–with a little profanity-laced disdain for the evil globalists pushing the world into another global war. Enjoy!

by William Skink

I made a little documentary (only 11 minutes long) about the homeless camp clean-up I volunteered for a few weeks ago. I hope it adds some context to why I’ve become so disillusioned with Missoula, especially these last few years.

Before getting to the video, I did a little surfing for a link between the perception of threat and being conservative, because that is one of the dynamics at play with how my perception of the world has changed in the last 8 years. Sure enough, I found something worth considering about a neurological/political link regarding perceptions of threat and conservatism:

A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology and even traits like physiology and genetics.

That’s a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew about politics — upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic interests, and calling into question the notion that in politics, we can really change (most of us, anyway).

The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a “negativity bias,” meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. (The paper can be read for free here.) In the process, Hibbing et al. marshal a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of images. One finding? That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of “a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it,” as one of their papers put it).

In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets — centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns — would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.

Pretty fascinating. Kind of gives me some additional insight into how my experiences have changed worldview. For more on that, here’s the video:

by William Skink

New polling should put Montana Democrats on notice that what they are doing isn’t working. Denise Juneau is going to lose to Ryan Zinke, the Governor’s race is within the margin of error, and there is a good chance that Matt Rosendale will beat Laslovich for State Auditor. For more insight into these Mason-Dixon poll numbers, Flathead Memo has a post worth checking out.

While there have been plenty of articles examining the down-ticket impact of terrible Trump on local candidates, there has been virtually no interest in taking a closer look at how Hillary Clinton’s corrupt political operation has impacted Democrat candidates in Montana. Democrats in this state don’t seem to want to acknowledge that they have any culpability in creating a toxic political environment that turns off voters. Instead we get the kind of condescending analysis from partisan hacks like Don Pogreba, who is already promoting the stupid voter meme as the reason Democrats are sucking in 2016:

I’ve been reading the Lee stories about their polling of the statewide races with interest. The two trends that seem to have emerged from the polling are that Republican candidates are doing better than in 2014, and that wide swaths of the Montana electorate are poorly informed about a significant number of these races. I have some concerns about the polling results, a subject I hope to tackle later, but today I’d like to focus my attention on just why so many races seem to have badly informed voters.

If voters are poorly informed about these races, that would be the media’s fault, right? And if the media isn’t informing the voters the way partisans would prefer, then doesn’t that hint at the media rigging this election for Republicans? Isn’t that the underlying sentiment of this whiny scapegoating of stupid voters?

Here is the next paragraph from Pogreba, laying out the argument that money and the media are to blame for the shitty campaigns his candidates are running:

The nexus of the sudden emergence of limitless big money in our elections and the slow, death spiral of newspapers in this country are a clear and present danger to representative government. Why does Congressman Ryan Zinke, for instance, need to connect with voters when he can raise millions of dollars from out-of-state donors to fund negative, dishonest attacks on his opponent? Why does Greg Gianforte need to worry about his ongoing support for the worst forms of discrimination or his outsourcing business record when he knows there will be little coverage of either and can self-fund millions in ads of himself fishing in streams and talking about how much he loves Montana?

So is it all the media’s fault for not informing voters the way partisans want them informed? I don’t think so. In fact I think it’s two issues championed by Missoula Democrats that have gotten lots of attention from the media that have terminally hurt their statewide candidates: guns and refugees.

The timing of Missoula’s symbolic background check ordinance, and the do-gooder crusade to relocate refugees to Missoula, are the two biggest issues that will stick in the minds of those stupid Montanans who live outside the blue Missoula bubble. And to make things worse, the fear expressed by non-liberal Montanans over these issues is met with condescending accusations of ignorance, bigotry and racism.

I guess when you repeatedly insinuate that voters who don’t agree with you are stupid, and that their fears stem from ignorance and bigotry, then they are less likely to vote for your Democratic candidates. Go figure.

Don Pogreba claims voters aren’t undecided, they are just under-informed. He is wrong. Voters are scared and angry. They are more economically insecure than they were 8 years ago. They know Obamacare is a scam. They watched Hillary Clinton win a rigged primary election. And they are starting to figure out that under Obama, this country is creating terrorists, not fighting them.

If the only response from Democrats to all this is, you are stupid, ignorant, racist rednecks, well, get ready to lose, and lose big. Go ahead and blame the media if that makes you feel better on November 9th. Go ahead and double-down on your liberal disdain for the basket of deplorables who don’t have the good sense to live in West Boulder (Missoula). If that’s how you want to rationalize losing, fine. But don’t expect anything to change until you drop the smug condescension and scapegoating whininess that has accompanied the social wedge issues that have dominated the media attention in this election cycle.

by William Skink

Ugh, I’m listening to the droning sound of two deplorable candidates in the background, but you don’t have to. Instead, you can watch my latest Chapel video, this one a little ditty with some clips from my favorite movie, Donnie Darko. Enjoy!

by William Skink

Blog skirmishes are nothing compared to the bigger world of media warfare. For example, I could speculate whether recent Zinke oppositional research about where he lives was actually investigated and solely authored by Don Pogreba, or if maybe someone else is filtering political hits through ID, but that is not nearly as important as the attacks on media covering the Dakota Excess pipeline and the British bank freeze out of RT. Regarding the latter, here is a snip from the link:

Although I’m perfectly happy admitting I’m no fan of segments of RT’s coverage, those who criticise the network but stay eerily quiet about the fact that both the British and American mainstream media have supported almost every one of their respective military escapades over the last few decades are clearly more interested in playing Cold War mind games than tackling systemic media bias.

Moreover, RT lends a tremendous amount of coverage to marginalised issues and people in the West. In the United States, for example, RT were reporting on the country’s largest prison strike in history amid little more than a tumbleweed response in the mainstream American media. They even received an Emmy nomination as one of the first networks to cover Occupy Wall Street.

Sources are a big deal to some people. Or, to be more specific, the “right” sources. Reading broadly while knowing bias exists everywhere is down-right threatening to some people.

Some other recent developments in the media wars leads me to suspect a liberal authoritarian shutdown of free speech is brewing. Julian Assange is now under direct threat after Ecuador appears to be caving in to US pressure to shut him up. Just today a mysterious disclosure has some speculating whether something has happened to Assange, and/or an “insurance policy” data dump has been enacted.

While the erosion of free speech has been brewing on campuses across the country–with increasingly hysterical demands for safe spaces and trigger warnings to protect these alleged adults from the sometimes harsh forms reality takes in this fucked up world–it’s the latest lament from President Obama that I find the most disturbing for what it could portend. Here’s a taste of how liberal authoritarianism is being framed as good and necessary:

“We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to,” Obama said at an innovation conference in Pittsburgh.

“There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world,” Obama added.

His remarks came amid an election campaign that has seen Republican candidate Donald Trump repeat ideas and take on key staff from right-wing media outlets.
…
“That is hard to do, but I think it’s going to be necessary, it’s going to be possible,” he added.

“The answer is obviously not censorship, but it’s creating places where people can say ‘this is reliable’ and I’m still able to argue safely about facts and what we should do about it.”

…”obviously not censorship” my ass. Remember, this is the President who has taken the gloves off when it comes to going after whistleblowers. That link is to a Counterpunch piece, by the way 😉

It remains to be seen what will happen to Julian Assange. Liberals made a big deal out of Trump suggesting he would have Hillary Clinton prosecuted if he won the election, but Hillary Clinton has actually suggested having Assange assassinated by drone. She may not get a chance, depending on how desperate the power-mad sociopaths are to keep more drips from dripping out of Wikileaks.

If Assange is taken out, one way or another, how will Democrats spin this lethal suppression of information? Has Assange been sufficiently Kremlinalized to warrant execution in the hearts and minds of the liberal class?

Stay tuned…