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I just read the stupidest article I’ve read in a very long time, and it wasn’t even  featuring Donald Trump.  It was from a woman named Marcie  Bianco, over at NBC.com.  Actually, I didn’t read the whole article.  Maybe the first half.  It was that stupid.
She was all pissed off at Elon Musk, not just for launching a car into space, although she wasn’t much impressed with that, either, but for wanting to colonize Mars.  She felt that was a very ‘patriarchal’ thing to do because men are always out conquering and exploiting new lands, and never staying at home, where there’s so much that needs to be done.  She said men just like to grab anything that isn’t nailed down, destroy it, and move on to the next.  She actually compared the prospective colonization of Mars to Trump’s statement about grabbing pussy.
So, Ms. Bianco seems to thing that Marco Polo shouldn’t have gone to China, and Columbus should not have sailed to the New World.  Of course, there was a brutal side to the colonization, what with all the killing, and torturing, and enslavement, but can you imagine Europe if he’d never gone?  No Mark Twain, no F. Scott Fitzgerald, and a seriously  overpopulated European continent.  Would never have happened, though.  If Columbus hadn’t gone, somebody would have: the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, the English, or maybe the Russians across the Bering Strait.  Somebody was bound to discover America.  It’s on Earth.
In fact, one of the main advantages of colonizing Mars is that it’s uninhabited.  This is unexploitative because there’s nobody there to exploit.  Because it’s uninhabitable.  Which makes it the perfect test run for our eventually becoming a space faring civilization which will last forever, which  apparently Ms. Bianco  is  against.  If we can survive, and grow crops, and reproduce on Mars, then we can  do it anywhere.  The  universe will  be ours.  And when I  say ours,  I’m including the women.

There’s a reason we call  them gun nuts.
The other day, I got into an argument with one of them again on Facebook.  I don’t know her in real life, but she seems like a very  pleasant, older woman who paints. (Very  well, I might add.  That’s the original connection, I wrote a couple of poems about  her paintings)
However, she (and  her friends) seemed to be totally accepting the Trump  line that what we need to do is arm the teachers, have metal detectors and guards roaming the halls at every school in America, and that this is a better solution than just banning assault weapons.  So, I  used the term gun nut.

Of course, they refer to us as ‘the loony left’ and there is just a lot of name calling and noise instead of reasoned political discourse, but the more I thought about it the more I came to the conclusion: they really are nuts.
To embrace the dystopian vision of a man whose world view is clearly stuck at a child’s level (when I was 10 years old, I would have thought building a 2,000 mile long wall was a fine thing, just because it would be big and awesome) is insane.  To  respond to every reasonable solution (ban assault rifles, insist on proof of mental  health for purchase, liability insurance for guns, limit magazine sizes, etc…) with “Second Amendment!” is insane.  The second amendment is extremely vague, and just says people have a right to own a gun.  It says nothing at all about what kind of gun, and it doesn’t say they can’t be regulated.
To love an inanimate object so much that you  put it above the lives of people is completely, and dangerously, insane.  It is normal for people to  love other people, and admirable.  It is normal to  love cute animals, especially little kittens and puppies with big eyes.  I  think  people who love snakes are a bit weird, but tastes differ.  I wouldn’t say they are clinically deranged.  It is normal, and healthy, to love music, art, fine cuisine, antique wooden  furniture, wine, science fiction, ancient Greek  mythology, classic cars, or even movies with Tom Cruise in them.  Whatever floats your boat.
But to love an automatic weapon?  What the hell  is wrong with you?

One question mark means it’s a question.  Three question marks means you’ve got to be kidding.  The accusation that those Stoneman  Douglas students who’ve become anti-gun activists are actually not students at all, but paid actors, is not only absurd, it’s also easily disproven. (this is a high school.  A lot of the kids know each other, and their teachers know them)  The Republican congresspeople making these nonsense charges were surely aware that they were nonsense.  In  fact, they could have had no possible reason to believe they were true. (because they weren’t)

So, the only possible explanation is that they figured saying something,

even if it was completely untrue, was better than saying nothing and

allowing the anti-gun people to have  the initiative for one news cycle.

They are so invested  in the ‘keep throwing shit against the wall and

some of it will stick’ tactic that they are just blurting out random

nonsense, and they know their base will forgive them for it and

the rest of the people never expected  any better of them anyway.

They are liars and slanderers who are not above spitting on the

graves of dead children, if  it  keeps reasonable gun  legislation from being passed and keeps their bribes from the NRA rolling in.

I suppose it’s  a good  sign.  It means they are running out of arguments.

They said “this is not the time to talk about it,” and everybody

else said “Yes, it is.”  They said “It’s really  a mental  health issue”

and everybody else said “O.K., let’s talk about mental health.  We’re against

mentally ill people being able to buy guns.  How about you?”

They said “Let’s arm the teachers” and everybody else said “Jesus H. Christ

on a pogo stick, just how completely retarded are you?”  So, then

they say the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High speaking out on the issue aren’t really students at all.
There is just no low so low that they won’t go  there.

The right wing, I have  often  noticed, speaks with one voice.  This is a very effective political tactic in the short term, and it has got them to where they are today, but that won’t last.  Progress may come in fits and starts, but it is the general direction of history and conservatism is rowing against the current.
The left wing, on the other hand, is made up of so many different opinions it is  difficult to keep straight.  It is frustrating and irritating to argue with right wingers, but it is actually  more difficult to argue with left wingers, because  each one has a different view of what kind of world we’re working  toward.  There are feminists, and vegetarians, and more genders than I  ever knew existed, and Luddites, and Buddhists, and people who speak Klingon.
Anyway, back to the  ‘one voice’ thing.  It’s kind of not working for them in  the current, post-Parkland gun debate.  First, they all jumped on  the ‘mental health’ bandwagon, and it was so instant it had to be orchestrated.  The comments from Republican politicians and from my gun loving Facbook friends appeared almost simultaneously.  The mental  health argument didn’t work too well  for them, though, because a lot of liberals said “O.K., let’s talk about mental health.  Wouldn’t you agree that we  should keep guns away from mentally ill  people?”  (I was stunned at how many people answered “no”), and we pointed  out that Trump had made it easier for crazy people  to get guns.
They may have been a bit surprised at how quickly the Parkland student body turned activist (I know I  was) but they wasted  no  time in attacking them.  Being used by George Soros, they said.  Paid actors, they said.  And now, one Texas School district is threatening to expel students who walk out to protest school shootings, which is a mindless response (expelling students from school because they are leaving school), but not surprising, because right wingers speak  with one  voice.
The paid actor thing is a particularly stupid charge, because (as in every  school everywhere) the students know the other students and every student at Parkland High knows that Emma Gonzales and David Hogg are students at their school.
But, they don’t care.  “Throw enough shit at the wall and some of it’s bound to stick” has been their strategy for a long time.  Though this argument is laughable, and was swiftly debunked, they’ll have moved on  to another by morning.  Because they all speak with one voice.

I’ve got a pet peeve and it surfaced today.  It’s not that people post stupid fake memes, although that, too.  Stupid bothers me.   Fake bothers me more.   Especially if I can’t tell it’s a fake.  It’s sort of an uncanny valley thing.  If you’re talking to someone non-human, you would rather know it.  (Just watched ‘Get Out’ by the way.  Fantastic movie but I’m not going to say anything about it. See it.) See it.
Anyway, I’m used to stupid fake memes.  They come up every day.  It’s how people react to them that bothers me.  Today, a friend of mine posted a meme.
Let me make clear that this  is an intelligent person with whom I agree more than 50% of the time.  It was a short video of a couple of shoplifters who foil a more serious armed robbery with a skateboard and sophisticated teamwork.  After a short back and forth with a couple of people about whether it was fake or not, it was conclusively proven that it was.

In defense of the site that produced the video, they had clearly labeled it as fiction (I guess.  It comes from a site that posts ‘fake memes’ quite openly, at any rate.)  But the people who reposted it just didn’t bother to include that.  It’s the internet, and it happens.  This is what anarchy looks like.
But the original poster, when faced with proof that the meme was not real (as he had thought it was, and I wasn’t sure) did not  say “Whoops, my bad, I’ll take it down forthwith” nor did he just take it down forthwith and maybe send a private message to whoever sent it to him pointing out its complete lack of veracity.  Those would have been appropriate responses.  He wrote(as so many do, which is my  pet peeve) “It may  be fake, but it’s still funny.”

I don’t think so.  The transition between our old, person to person communication culture was sometimes slow and unfulfilling, but the mass communication of the internet, while promising us infinite connectedness and knowledge, has become a maze of misinformation, a noisy casino of bells and whistles, a swamp of ignorance and distraction that sucks us further in at every step.
If we react to the first hint of bullshit by immediately scrubbing it from our screens, we still have a chance of turning it all to positive dialogue.  But if we don’t, then we don’t.