Asshole Culture

Asshole Culture has carved out a very clear, unsavory role in American film, literature and life. Entitled, wealthy bros who take what they want, treat everyone around them like shit and then rise to positions of power is a common trope in our mass culture.

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In films and books, these jerks usually get their comeuppance.

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In real life, not so much. They usually just keep working their way up the greasy pole, covering for and enabling one another and rising generations of assholes to come, their paths assured by aging assholes who came before them and now sit atop big institutions.

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Brett Kavanaugh, the GOP leaders in the Senate, and above all Donald Trump embody this subset of the ugliest Americans to such a degree that you can hardly believe they are real. They are cartoonishly smug and convinced that morality is for poor people, notwithstanding the slogans and mottoes found embroidered in Latin on their school blazers, or some of the platitudes they speak when they are either running for office, accepting awards, or presenting themselves to Senate committees confirming them.

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The battle over Kavanaugh centers on our anger not only about what these assholes have done to our country in general, but what in particular their culture has done to women, and how it treats them. Consider how in the past few days, the GOP elite led by their president have opened up an assault on women who have little to gain by revealing some of the most horrifying experiences of their life, discounting all of their claims and going so far as to argue that by coming forward they are the problem, that by making their accusations they are making it less likely that future generations (of assholes) will seek careers in public service.

  The Daily Beast

Sadly, that won't happen.

We also cannot help but reflect on how young assholes-in-training morph into the champions of the patriarchy, the avatars of government by for and of the patriarchy. From Georgetown Prep keggers to Yale clubs where “no means yes and yes means anal” to the Senate to the White House to the Supreme Court, these pigs fight for their ability to behave piggishly not just because it is all they know but because they believe it is their right.

The vileness of it is compounded by the master class-level hypocrisy of those who defend Kavanaugh and Trump as champions of “values”: by the Franklin Grahams and Lindsey Grahams and all those other moralistic but two-faced Graham crackers who provide the smokescreen for the [Asshole Cultur].

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Our revulsion at Kavanaugh is therefore compounded not just by his lying to the Senate or his extremism, not just by his callous abuse of women but by the reflexive response of Asshole Culture to come to his defense to protect themselves and their past and future transgressions.

There will be no fair and decent treatment of women until we break the grip on power of Asshole Culture, the Praetorian guard of the patriarchy.

Agreed. But we're given no suggestions as to how we might do that.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Outdated models of masculinity?

“As Hollywood begins to navigate the #MeToo landscape,” Tatiana Siegel reported, “one of the first casualties appears to be big-screen erotica. [...] Alyssa Rosenberg, writing in the Washington Post, hopes that Hollywood’s embarrassed executives are navigating “the end of a very narrow way of thinking about what’s alluring.”

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This reckoning is long overdue. And it can be extended to another genre that has distorted how men behave: war movies. [...] Some of the biggest war movies of the post-9/11 era don’t just show violence in ways that are often gratuitous and occasionally racist. They model a cliched form of masculinity that veers from simplistic to monstrous."

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Whenever I write about the real-world impact of war movies – and I’ve gone to bat against “American Sniper,” “Zero Dark Thirty” and “13 Hours” — I always get responses along the lines of “Relax, these are just movies. Don’t take them so seriously. They’re harmless.” That’s when it becomes necessary to say that movies can create or reinforce narratives of history and gender that influence what people think and what they do. Boys and men develop their notions of masculinity from a variety of sources that include the films they watch (the extent to which this is true is, of course, open to debate).

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What matters is that well into the second decade of our forever war, the combat movies that populate our multiplexes and our minds are devoted to a martial narrative of men-as-terminators that should have been strangled at its birth a long time ago.

  Intercept

I couldn't agree more with that last sentence.  This is a good article.  I say that without having seen the movie it's reviewing: "12 Strong".  And I won't be seeing it, based on the review and the screenshot, and the fact that I've never been a fan of war movies.

But, this is one of the things I appreciated about 'Dunkirk', a war movie that I did go see - it wasn't war porn. It was an intelligent and beautifully shot movie.  I'm not so sure, though, as the headline of the above Intercept article reads, that these models of masculinity are outdated. They're sad, but they seem pretty strong to me. Maybe that's due in part to the movies. But those movies wouldn't make so much money if they had no appeal because they were outdated.

And, speaking of the screenshot, you know of course that's an American movie piece of propaganda where it's the Americans who are always leading the heroic charges in brown people's wars.  The brown people are always the extras.  According to the review, this is a movie about actual events, but this event didn't happen.  Surprise.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

And one more...

So we're struggling along despite the Trump/GOP efforts to destroy everything this country has fought and died for over the past several decades.  Not sure we can stop the corporate takeover, though.

SAD!

A decade-long study shows a disturbing trend of anxiety levels among US citizens. Deep concerns of war and natural disasters continue to distress people across the country, the newly published survey has found.

In the survey conducted by the global information technology company, Unisys, the US jumped to 8 out of 13 countries surveyed. Americans are now on par with Colombia in terms of their perceptions of security, according to the Miami Herald.

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Some 68 percent of Americans cite national security issues such as war and terrorism as something they are either very or extremely worried about, making it the number one anxiety driver in the US.

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The countries that are feeling even more jittery than the US are Argentina, The Philippines, Brazil, Malaysia and Mexico, according to the Herald.

  RT

When you think about the fact that Colombians are plagued by brutal drug cartels, and the others have notoriously undependable governments, that's kind of crazy. But, when you think about the fact that the US is the world's largest purveyor of war - IN OTHER COUNTRIES - that's really crazy.

“It appears that our cloak of security, the impression that we had, that we are more secure than the rest of the world, is starting to fade,” Bill Searcy, Vice President for Global Justice, Law Enforcement and Border Security at Unisys, said.

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“The rest of the world also climbed, but the US climbed at a higher rate,” Searcy added.

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The last time the US was included in the survey was in 2014.The score for the US spiked 37 percentage points in the wrong direction in just two years.

Trump or Hillary - either one could be the reason.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

HyperNormalisation Convo

This @CHAPOTRAPHOUSE discussion with Adam Curtis is outstanding. Again: watch HyperNormalisation on YouTube. https://t.co/z9TwEdrHPz

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 27, 2016

Yes, this is good.

Here's the documentary:



UPDATE:
And here's a negative review of the film: Another Manager of Perceptions

I think Glenn Greenwald will have some comment on that review, so if you're curious, come back tomorrow and see if I've added anything from him.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

American Culture

This was the problem with George W Bush and Ronald Reagan before him. Each in his turn emboldened stronger racism, tribalism, elitism, selfish interest and greed. We've been on this course for quite a while.  Trump is the ultimate Republican creation, and the GOP doesn't want to claim him.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

So What's One More Sociopath in the Whitehouse?

We're becoming a nation of sociopaths, why bother ourselves with having one at the top of the chain?  Certainly it's not the first time lately.  And as for bullies, well George W wore that like an honorific.

Charles Pierce has a confession to make about his own bullying youth and an observation to make about Mitt Romney's.

[It] takes one to know one, as the schoolyard saying goes, and so my first reaction was that the so-called "presumptive Republican candidate for president" is lying — either to us or to himself. He remembers. Of course he remembers. He has to remember, because no one forgets doing something like that, and the ones who do forget....

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Which is what led me to my second reaction: What if Mitt Romney is telling the truth? What if he doesn't remember because he thought nothing of it? The language of his statement suggests that he's copping to being a prankster but not a bully — that he's not denying the past but simply saying that the past is a matter of interpretation. But it's not, and as man who has spent the better part of his life silently pleading guilty to the kinds of crimes of which Mitt Romney stands accused, I can only wonder what kind of person I'd be if I tried to beat the rap of conscience on a technicality. I can only wonder what kind of person I'd be if instead of confronting the past I tried to forget it or, worse, tried to say it wasn't really that bad. I can only wonder what kind of person I'd be if the stone of cruelty in my heart was subject not to the slow trickle of conscience but rather to my sense of ambition and entitlement — to those jewelers of the self who, beholding the stone, declared it a gem, precious and hard, of inestimable worth in the bazaars of business and politics, and set it for my presidential ring.

And here’s the thing: I thank God I don't know. Long ago, I made an innocent kid suffer; one of the great gifts of my life is that I suffered in return. Mitt Romney doesn't appear to have suffered at all for the suffering he inflicted; but as one lucky enough to have broken the mean bone in my body and to have worn it in a sling, I can tell him that what he's accused of doing to the boy whose hair and existence was such an affront to him was not a prank; it was a punishment.

  Charles Pierce

Even Faster Than I Expected

The Carrier IQ scandal has drawn the ire of at least one lawmaker. U.S. Senator Al Franken (D-MN) published a letter to Carrier IQ on Thursday saying he’s “very concerned” about reports of the company’s software tracking a staggering amount of user information.

Franken also demands that the company and its CEO, tech veteran Larry Lenhart, provide answers to a list of 11 questions about just how Carrier IQ operates, what information it collects and to whom the information is transmitted. Franken wants answers within two weeks, by December 14.

  TPM

Al must be using an Android system cell.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE

In the Land of the Free

I just bought an Android system smartphone.  Ooops.

An alarming new video published to YouTube this week by a 25-year-old security researcher seems to reveal a piece of hidden software included on virtually all new Android smartphones that records every last keystroke users make, sending the data back to its creator in secret later on.

Called “Carrier IQ,” the software is supposedly meant to help mobile carriers monitor and diagnose problems with their devices. The company that makes the software insists it does not log keystrokes, but 25-year-old Trevor Eckhart seems to have proved that claim quite wrong.

Not only did he demonstrate the software capturing his keystrokes from a text message, it was being recorded even before the message he typed was displayed.

“It should be noticed that, if we scroll down a little further [in the logs], here’s where the message is actually being displayed in the end user’s inbox,” he explained. “So, all of the IQ agent processes is happening before the end user even sees the [text].”

Eckhart also demonstrated how the software can read Internet searches over secure connections, meaning that not even encrypted communications are completely private on Android phones.

“We can see that Carrier IQ is querying these strings over my wireless network [using] no 3G connectivity, and it is reading [a secure communication],” Exkhart explained.

He also showed how, even after opting out of using location identification services, Carrier IQ still sends phone location data to its creators. Additionally, Eckhart illustrates how the software keeps itself hidden, is impossible to remove through stock toolsets, and gives the user no choice in whether it may run in the background.

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“Our action was misguided and we are deeply sorry for any concern or trouble that our letter may have caused Mr. Eckhart,” the company later said. “We sincerely appreciate and respect EFF’s work on his behalf, and share their commitment to protecting free speech in a rapidly changing technological world.”

All of the above was enough for Wired magazine to call Carrier IQ one of the top reasons to “wear tinfoil hats” this holiday season.

  Raw Story

I guess I won’t be contacting Venezuela on my cell.

Android, however, is not the only smartphone operating system with security concerns. Earlier this year, researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden discovered that Apple’s iPads and iPhones contain a database with thousands of location points that gets downloaded every time the device syncs with a PC or Mac.

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It includes latitude, longitude, a time stamp, and the IP address for the wireless network the phone was currently accessing.

And as we all know, criminals use burn phones, so what’s the point? Uh-huh. Brave New World.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  Al Franken to the rescue

Are We There Yet?

Hell, I mean. 

The boy who first brought charges against Jerry Sandusky has been bullied out of school for causing dear old JoePa to lose his job.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.