DL Open Thread Sunday, July 18, 2021

We laugh and shake our heads at conservatives who believe American cities are being burned down by Antifa and BLM protesters, but we’re guilty of the same thing when it comes to media reports about the popularity of American fascism. Two stories illustrate this.

First, a couple of has-beens, Donald Trump and Bill O’Reilly, have started selling tickets for a speaking tour in December, and they’re selling like Trump steaks: hardly at all. O’Reilly threatened to sue Politico for reporting this, but check out the Ticketmaster seating chart at that link — they’ve sold perhaps a dozen seats in Orlando. What the media ignored while hyping his Nuremberg rallies is the fact that they are free. As the Delaware GOP has learned over the past decade, the louder the mouth, the tighter the wallet.

The second example took place yesterday, when Matt “Young Blood” Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene took their Nazi road show to southern California. After three hotels canceled them, they decided to hold their rally outside City Hall in Riverside instead. It did not go well. Their rally was attended by tens of people, who were outnumbered by counter-protesters. And it’s not as if this is unusual. All over the country deluded wingnuts try to hold “White Lives Matter” and similarly stupid public events, only to find that barely a handful of people show up. This is true here in Delaware, too — remember photos of Lauren Witzke trying to create a spectacle and perhaps two dozen people showing up? The conclusion is obvious: The media are overhyping these crazies to gin up fear. Yes, they’re out there, because they’ve always been out there. I’m not even certain that they’re worse than before — as numerous police brutality videos show, everybody’s now a cinematographer, so we have footage of acts that previously went unseen. If I weren’t so lazy and wanted to drive the point home, I’d post a photo of an actual Nuremberg rally. Gaetz and Greene would literally kill for a crowd that size.

Last week’s biggest stories all involved the Earth trying to rid itself of its human infestation. Heavy rainfall caused massive flooding across Europe, particularly Germany and Belgium. More than 150 have been confirmed as dead; more than 1,300 remain missing. Smoke from wildfires in the West cover the country, causing hazy skies across the East Coast. Part of the Amazon rainforest has burned and died — so much jungle canopy was lost that the region will no longer support tree growth and will revert to savannah. Even the moon is getting into the act. NASA says that we’re in for a decade of coastal flooding caused by wobble in the moon’s orbit, which affects the tides.

There’s a bit of good environmental news, though. Biden has reversed a Trump policy that would have opened the Alaskan forest to logging.

The Biden administration is also taking the decision by some asshole federal judge in Texas to end the DACA program to appeals court.

Did you hear about the four-day work week experiment in Iceland? You almost certainly heard it wrong. As this article points out, the experiment wasn’t about a four-day work week: It was about cutting the work week from 40 to 36 hours — over five work days.

A University of Delaware prof characterized the school’s president as a “soy boy,” which helps explain the school’s decision to examine its own role in white supremacy, probably an overdue move at a school that has barely enough Black students to fill Mitchell Hall.

To end on a lighter note, it’s national ice cream day, so naturally somebody has come up with a rundown of each state’s favorite flavor. As the map shows, Delaware and Pennsylvania each stand alone in their choices: cherry for Delaware, mint chocolate chip in Pennsylvania. But these aren’t each state’s best-selling flavor; rather, it measures what flavor most exceeds the national average in each state, for a simple reason: America’s favorite ice cream flavor is plain old vanilla, with 26% of all ice cream sales. I actually think that helps explain why Joe Biden won, and why people always tell pollsters they want bipartisanship: A majority of Americans simply are conservative in the old-fashioned sense of the word. They don’t like trying anything new.

The floor is yours.