smenor/tangents

James Franken

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Indefensible Image via KABC/The Atlantic

Episode Transcript

there I'm Scott and this is Tangents.

Well, I have a whole lot of stuff I need to do

want to do and instead I'm just going to record another one of these.

It is Saturday

the 27th of September 2025 as I'm recording this and this morning, well, like an
hour or two ago, I got a text message from, I don't even know if I want to go
into the details of it, but it's from someone, well, it's not actually from
Peggy Flanagan or Al Franken, but it's from an air quotes Al Franken in
support of Peggy Flanagan.

And of course it's a fundraiser and of course the

fucking thing has a font that looks like, you know, some 1990s website bullshit.

It's bad.

But the thing I wanted to talk about, aside from just, you know, like, I

can't imagine ever, ever giving another Democrat a fucking penny, but it is
particularly wild to me that this party just continuously sends these fucking, well,
I know the party is not a monolith and blah, blah, blah, blah.

But people in this party

continuously send these fucking messages from James Carvelle and Al Franken and
people like this from with their quotes, obviously.

But like, I, these are people

you should be disassociating yourselves with.

These are people like the absolute

best interpretation of Al Franken, the best way that you could frame him is maybe
he was unfairly maligned in blah, blah, blah.

He was, he was not, by the way, I, you

know, when it was just the first Republican who kind of took a picture that was
kind of joking, although I think she was asleep, which is, it makes sense of
the picture a little bit not great, but she obviously had some bias.

So she had

some incentive to misrepresent what happened and frame him in a sort of bad
light.

But then, I don't know, like it does another woman came forward and a lot of

them had no such incentive.

And you start, you know, at a certain point you

start seeing a pattern and it's like pretty hard, pretty hard to determine that
this person's not a sex past.

And even also like our fucking culture, you know, and

especially for older dudes, it's just fucking nomad, not normative.

I don't know what

I was getting.

I had like nominal and then I tried to change it to normative and

just like completely fucked up on the way out.

But it's kind of normative for

people to just be weird and gross.

Like genocide, Joe doing his whole like sniffing

women's hair and massaging their shoulders and all this stuff.

And especially like

little fucking kids, it's gross and it's weird and it's normal for people like that.

It's not like, I mean, it's one of the strange things that so many people will defend

this and I'm going to be like, oh, that's just, that's just you know, how people are.

That's just not a big deal or it's gross.

It's creepy.

It's fucking weird.

And you

don't need to, you don't need to associate with these fucking people.

Like I go back

and forth on this a lot because not, not what I just said.

I stand by all that.

I'll

Frank and you should just not be there.

You know, like the, again, the best case in

area, he was unfairly maligned and still some people have bad feelings about him.

So maybe like don't send random spam messages out to everybody with somebody like

reporting to be some, from somebody that, you know, you don't know, but at least some
of us are going to feel pretty fucking weird about, feel a certain way about, similarly
fucking Carvelle.

And I mean, this guy, like everybody knows how horrible Reagan

was.

Everybody, I think it's pretty well established.

Like people that are not political

understand that Reagan was a terrible person and that he did all these terrible things.

Clinton, don't Clinton, did a lot also.

And I would argue almost certainly like sealed

the deal made, made all the Reagan policies sort of bipartisan.

He did his, air quotes

well fair reform and all those other horrible things that really are sort of Reagan
ask policies, but he brought them into the Democratic Party and made them just the standard
the norm.

And it is impossible to look at that and not consider the fact that James Carvelle

got him there.

He did, you know, he had a significant role in getting him elected.

And

you look at that in context.

I don't know, and also like this guy has not been right about

anything.

Since he got lucky one time, but since then he's been, you know, elbow on the

pulse and still for some reason, this asshole gets to chum around with the people in the
fucking party and gets, again, like, to text message people.

I mean, again, not with, again, again,

again, but not with his name, not with, or not with thumb, like his actual text messaging, but
you know, they're using his name, they're using his likeness to try to fundraise.

And people

give him fucking money.

Obviously they give them fucking money because if they didn't give them

fucking money, they wouldn't do it.

I assume that they just would look at that and kind of go like,

well, this is not really a good use of funds to spam people with somebody who's this bald
buzzard looking guy who's, you know, they made, they used to make a big deal.

They used to make a big

deal out of how his wife was like this mirror image really conservative woman.

And she was doing

the same kind of job for Republicans.

And it's so weird that the two of them could be together

when they're so politically different.

And that was a tell.

That was a fucking tell.

That was like,

oh, wait, they're not so different.

Oh, wait, they're actually the same fucking people doing the same

thing.

Either just market segmenting.

And like, one is doing the red soda, one is doing the blue soda,

and they're both, you know, they're both putting on the same show with slightly different audiences
and for slightly different performers.

And when you when you start seeing that,

it's really difficult for me not to be just fucking infuriated by it.

And also, I mean, I

do two things.

One, I never need to see or hear from this guy again.

If you associate with

either of these two fuggers, all it does is make me feel bad about you.

And I don't mean

like, I feel sorry for you.

I mean, it makes me fucking despise you.

It's like, you must be an absolute

wretched piece of shit.

If you have Carvelle, um, simping for you.

And like, if you wouldn't be

simping for you, but like, fronting for you, you have Carvelle's face on there going like,
hey, give so and so, so money.

So and so must be a terrible person.

That's all I get out of that.

Because I know you're a terrible person.

And the be part here, the second part is, it kills me,

fucking kills me that so many people pay so little attention that they don't know what terrible
people these are.

And, you know, they just, like, and again, I understand the argument with Frank,

with Franklin that, oh, he was unfairly maligned.

And so we've, we've forgiven him now.

I haven't

forgiven him.

I don't think that he was unfairly maligned.

And I, like, I don't know, I think,

again, if it was just one and it was someone with an obvious bias and incentive, then maybe.

But when you start having a pattern forming, and it's a lot, um, and some of them are not good

stories.

It's, you know, I, I think you could write somebody off.

They're, they're,

now, of course, it's even more complicated because you have, like, um, what's your name?
Amy, clob, clob, clob, clob, char.

I think, uh, who was one of the people who specifically

torpedoed him.

And he, she's also a terrible person.

It's like, the whole thing.

It's like,

I kind of liken it in a weird way to Apple after jobs.

Because jobs, I, and don't get me wrong.

I enjoyed jobs.

And when I was a kid, especially, I didn't know better.

And he obviously didn't

personally play a big role in my life.

But I guess in this sort of parasolful sense, um, I didn't,

yeah, I never idolized the guy, I never, I've never, I've never had, like, celebrities or people like
this that I actually felt great about.

Uh, but I did definitely, like, watch his, uh, keynotes.

And he was always sort of there in the background, uh, just as a sort of cultural touchstone.

And I would see, like, the Applads, and I would see all those other stuff, and, um, and so on and so

forth.

And from that stuff, I would think, um, how do you say? I don't know.

I, I, I, I, I didn't think

like great things about him, but I always was aware of him.

And I always, I felt good enough

things about him.

I didn't think like terrible things about him.

Uh, but he made Appl, this horribly

dysfunctional company, uh, with a lot of real pathologies, kind of deeply entrenched in that.

And, you know, you, you look at the, the next guy, Tony Fito, Fuddle.

Have you said his name?

And you look at Scott for, I'm, I'm fucking up all these people's names.

I want to say it's

forced all, forced all, and he's start looking at all of these, um, hair force one.

I can't think

of that.

Craig Fuddle, Fuddle, I, I should know these people's names, but, um, all of these people

basically, in this company, in the leadership roles, are terrible people.

You know, jobs made

an environment that terrible people throw, throw, thrived in.

I don't even know the right

conjugation of that word.

Uh, but terrible people thrived in Appl.

And when he died and left the

vacuum, uh, and actually years before that, when it was obvious that he was on his way out,
people started clamoring on top of each other to see who would get to the, to the top of the pile of
assholes.

And the fact that Tim Appl got to the top, uh, it tells you, wouldn't horrible fucking

person, this guy is, would a absolute wretched piece of shit, this guy is, and, you know, like,
I, I don't know, I, I don't have a specific, well, I could go off on Appl for a long time of
the, I'll spare you that.

But coming back to the Democrats, the domestic rats, this party is also

just full of terrible fucking people, and it's all pathology, and it's all, like, awful people,
doing awful things to each other and other people of course, but to each other, to try to get
to the top of the stack of assholes.

And, you know, you see this with, like, a game Jeffries,

who I, I believe is actually worse than Pelosi, which, it seems like a impossible thing to be,
somebody who would be prominent in that party and be worse than Pelosi.

But he is, he, I absolutely,

I think, is, I don't think it's like a controversial thing.

When I, when I first started saying it,

I always said it with some doubt and some trepidation.

I guess, I was like, yeah, he seems worse than

her.

I think it's objectively he is worse than she is, and more fackless and just, like,

I don't know, these people, it's the most frustrating thing to me, because we absolutely need,
and again, I, I'm not, like, a huge believer in electoral politics and all of this kind of stuff.

To the extent that the system exists as the system exists, there are certain paths to doing stuff

and to accomplishing certain things, and to defending against fascism and so on and so forth.

And we could really use a strong organization that is in a position to actually fight right now,

and we could really badly use a strong organization prior to now that could have gotten us things
like universal healthcare.

It could have gotten us things like, I don't know, do improvements to

how horribly fucked up our immigration system is, how, you know, horribly overfunded our military
is, and the police, and so on.

And instead, we've got this false, pro-gressor-registering,

combatant, the blue maga, to the red maga, the blue party, to the red party.

And they're basically the same thing.

They're basically just market segments of the same thing.

They're really more collaborators, and it doesn't have to be like this big conspiracy,

like, oh, there's somebody behind the scenes pulling, but it's sort of, I would say more,
just you have a bunch of people in a field, the field being money from billionaires and
oligarchs, and the culture as it is, and so on.

And that causes a kind of alignment with people,

and you get the sort of conspiracy without conspirators.

There may be also more elaborate things,

but that's all you need.

You don't need an actual conspiracy.

You just need a bunch of people

getting paid by the same people with similar motivations under the similar circumstances.

And then

they start acting in a way that feels coordinated and is definitely not helping.

But I don't know,

you look at this, and it's like, I saw somebody joking about Jeffrey, joking about him and said,
you know, like, we're sending us strongly worded letter, and then he tweeted, I think it was tweeting,
that they sent the letter to Trump any ignored it, and it's like, what, what, like, Motherfucker,
and then these people also, chuckles is particularly horrible about it, but the lot of them,
really, we'll sit there and they'll make social media posts about how horrible Trump is and how
horrible all these things are and blah, blah, blah.

It's like, yeah, this is some, this is really a

big thing, this is really bad.

Somebody with some power should maybe do something.

I'm just an

asshole sitting in a hotel room talking to myself, you know, I'm just a guy with some internet
accounts and, you know, I'm on social media, but I have zero power, really no money, I have no
influence over anything or anyone of any, any significance.

You're not fucking senator, right?

You're a guy that I'm sitting senator and you've been a senator for so long, you know all the
levers of power, you know where all the bodies are buried, all this stuff, and, you know,
it's like the fact that they just sit there and muggly think this is like a show and it's not,
the legitimately, I think these people probably have one day end up getting carted off,
and when they do, they will have, it'll be a shock to them.

It'll be like, oh, wait,

what the fuck is going on? This is just a show we're not supposed to, because they don't have
a fucking clue.

It's not just that they're complicit, it's not just that they're actively

collaborating, but they're also so detached, they're so isolated and bubbled and outside of the
field of consequences, the realm of like any kind of things actually affect them, that they don't
recognize the situation that we're actually at, and they see stuff, and they kind of like,
I mean, the, the most remarkable and extraordinary version of this is you go back to what was
a January 6th, and they had a fucking gallows out there, right? They were trying, they were talking
about and trying to actually straight up murder people, and you watched this from your offices
in your hardened places, and you got, got removed.

How, how does the fuck do you see that and not

think like you're actually in danger from these people? And it's just, it's, it's bizarre to me.

It's just, how do you not go like, oh, well, shit, if things didn't go well, things might get

really, really bad, and somehow still, you know, they think this is just a show, the thing
it's just a, oh, this is not a, not a big deal, we don't have to worry about it.

It's just kind of a

fun thing, and yeah, it's, it's a roller coaster, and this is just for the, for the plebians to kind
of see, but we know that we're actually okay and blah, blah, blah, blah, you don't know that, you
actually don't know that, which is the most ridiculous thing about it, because I understand acting in
your own self-interest.

I understand, like, you know, your donors and your investments benefit

from the current situation, and so you don't have any real incentive to fight it.

I understand

all of this kind of stuff.

What I don't understand is like, you got people like straight up trying

to kill you openly, and, you know, they don't, you feel a little bit of a preservation instinct,
don't you feel like the, the need to maybe, maybe this is actually serious.

Maybe this is not just

the normal, and flow that you've experienced for your whole life.

Maybe this is not, like, you know,

just fucking show.

It's weird to me, it's just weird to me.

And I mean, it gets back to these fundraising

emails, which, you know, it discussed me that there's no way to globally opt out of act blue,
and what is it called, the action network, because I do not want any of your shit.

I don't want

your spam.

I'm not gonna, it's, it's wasted on me as well, but it actively annoys me.

But I can't,

I can't opt out of it.

I can't say, I just don't want this stuff, stop unsubscribe me, or rather than unsubscribe.

Put me on a do not fucking spam list.

That's what I really want.

It's great, by the way, also,

that the people who benefit from that system are the ones who would be responsible for creating
a system that, you know, the regulations that would prevent that sort of thing from happening.

This is, this is one of many ways where the founders were just fucking assholes, and, like,

had such little imagination.

Let me fair it.

They're one of the first people, or groups of people,

actually, like, implementing something like this.

So it's understandable that the second

museum would not be perfect.

That means just the fact that they had the first one and didn't

quite work out so well.

They had to replace it.

It tells you something.

But they stuck with this thing

for so long, and there are so many things that are just obvious flaws in it.

Not just that there's

no enforcement of, you know, like, like, that you see people like, oh, that's illegal.

You can't do

that.

Who's going to stop? Who's going to stop them? Literally the way it's set up is that you have

the executive branch that is enforcing stuff.

And if the executive branch is not enforcing stuff

against themselves, because why would they? But there's no real consequence who's going to stop
Congress is certainly not stopping them.

The Supreme Court is not stopping them.

They're all

they're all aligned.

They're all of a part of the same thing.

It's just wild.

And a lot of the

stuff also, I mean, Trump, this is another one of many things that irritates me.

But Trump showed

in his first term how much of what the limits on presidential power are really just come down to people
have to quorum.

You know, people they're not going to just be sober isn't.

They're not going to be

so bold.

They're not going to just do whatever.

They have some kind of a sense of vague, something like

honor and decency.

And when you take those things away and you let somebody do whatever the

fuck they want to do, it's it's remarkable how much it does not matter.

How much there's just no

external enforcement.

How much of a just sham your your fucking system is.

This is stuff you should be

taking notes on.

And in a functional system, as soon as Trump got out of power in 2020, the Democrats

should have the very first item on the agenda before anything else should have been okay.

This was all

fucked up.

We saw all these problems and we need to shore everything up.

We need to really build

in safeguards.

We need to limit presidential power.

We need to do all this stuff.

And the fact that

they didn't do that, like many things have gotten me to the point where I just am not a member of that
party and I don't think that that party in any way represents me or aligns with me or anything.

But one of the first ones was watching that shit, watching Pelosi actively fight against Rashida.

Rashida is like, oh, we're going to impeach the motherfucker.

And then Pelosi drags your heels

and won't allow that to go forward until finally she basically was compelled.

Like she had no choice.

You know, you look back and you can remember it and it seems all like, oh, Rashida said this

and then they impeached it.

No, there was a huge gap between the two.

And Pelosi made it very

clear she did not want to impeach the motherfucker.

And she also, you know, like when she did

finally let the impeachment go through, not that she had much of a choice.

It was like one of

these situations where so many people were there that she just couldn't stop it.

But when it went

through, she arbitrarily limited the scope and the duration of the impeachment hearings.

And

basically, you know, put the balls off of the people that were doing it.

And so, you know, you

look at that and it's just like, you're the fucking resistance, you're the ones that are, and
again, I'm not saying that you have to be like, you know, you've had a great life.

You've been in

office for so long.

You're a multi-hundred millionaire.

Why don't you just fucking retire? Why don't

you just step down and let somebody else take over? And of course, when she finally did that,
which, you know, I mean, there are layers here.

When she finally did give it the Jeffries,

she didn't do that when he would have been in any kind of actual power.

She did it when he was

going to be in the minority leadership role, which is perfect.

It says a lot about her.

And I'm not, I'm not a fan of Jeffries, but I'm also not a fan of the low seas and you look at

what Pelosi did to her protege.

It says something, you know, it's like, but these people are taking

up the space that we need for somebody to actually be resistant.

They're taking up the levers of

power.

They're holding with this death grip, the things, the instruments that we could be using

to actually do something.

And you watch them and, like, you listen to these people,

you lagerizing fucking Christophe ashes, wait, not nationalists.

It's just wild,

making a day for them, you know, honoring them.

Like, what the fuck? What the fuck?

And you see this.

And they, to them, they, like, aside from the fact that they just, if you go back

and you've talked about this many times, but I'm, it bears endless repetition.

Now, Hillary got Trump denomination.

You know, they always wanted Trump.

Google that,

search for it, and look for the Atlantic, the Hill, New York Times, Washington Post, and you just go
down the list.

All these publications thought about it.

She had this thing called Pied Piper,

and they, and their infinite wisdom knew absolutely new, because they played 10-dimensional
chess and all those bullshit.

New, that if Trump got the nomination, he couldn't possibly win,

and she could just, like, waltz into the way, into the wayhouse.

And because it was her turn.

And it turned out that wasn't right, because it turns out she just knew what the fuck she's doing.

She has all these terrible advisors who, incidentally, every time they lose a campaign,

the consultants keep their jobs.

They get to, you know, like, it's somewhere where these

pundits, they can be wrong endlessly, they can do terrible things, but somehow they never face
any consequences.

Even if the candidates themselves don't get their just run endlessly,

the consultants that are running their campaigns and doing all those kind of stuff,
and the multi-billion dollar or your electoral industry faces zero consequences.

They, I mean,

like, imagine that you're selling something, any kind of product, widgets, whatever,
and those widgets don't actually do the thing that they're supposed to do, and they explode instead
and hurt you.

You would think that the company making those widgets would go out of business,

or would at least change, or something, but no, instead what happens is you have the same people
making the same widgets, and they sit there a year after year, and people keep buying the fucking
widgets.

They don't even, like, retool.

They don't even go like, you, and then they do occasionally

have like a meeting, and it's like, oh, we have to go further to the right.

We have to go more

after the Republicans who are never going to vote for fucking Democrats, and we have to alienate
more of the base, and remove any kind of leftish policies or anything.

It's wild.

It's fucking wild.

And you look at that, and you see, like, and again, I don't think electoral politics is getting

us out of here, especially it's weird because when you go back to the election, so many people
were talking about projects 2025, and I don't know if they didn't read it, or they don't understand
what's in there or what, but the fucking thing, it's not just like a mission statement and a
little, like, a couple bullet point lists of things that they wanted to do, or like, in specific policies,
it was a large-scale strategic and tactical plan of how to completely reform the U.S.

government

in a way that would give them permanent power, independent of future elections, and basically to
gut systems and then repurpose the vestiges of those systems to their own ends.

And they've done it.

They've been doing it.

They've, you know, like, that's what the fuck they're doing.

And you have these

people that are like, oh, we're just, we'll just use this and we'll fundraise off of it and then
we'll win in 2026 and like, and then what, are you all, and then you want to win in 2028, but with
somebody who's just, like, not an actual opponent to anything, like, in a literal, ffking fascist,
anti-homeless guy like Newsom, or or Buttigieg, or let's, let's get fucking, uh, Harris back in there.

Like, are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me? I, and I don't know, I just, I've

looked at this stuff, and I see where we are, and I see the complete lack of, it's not just a
lack of any kind of action, but like, a lack of even the thought, like, there's no ideation for any kind
of resistance.

There's no, like, what could we do? What, what are the things we could actually

do? And you do see, like, I mean, to be fair.

Occasionally, there's like, uh, some states,

legislator, who has a couple of Democrats that are actually doing something, but for the most part,
those are rare and exceptional, and, you know, at an national level, it's just, does not exist,
and any significant power or significant, you know, amount.

And you just look at that, and it's like,

what, I don't know, even, here's the thing for me.

This is the step back a second.

I think, uh,

and I don't want to make this sound like it's going to be easy or like it'll be good or there won't
be any horrible things happening.

I think in the end, um, things get better.

I think in the end,

fascism is defeated, and, you know, we have universal healthcare, and we actually
have sustainable, you know, energy, and we have walkable cities with public trends at
knowledge, kind of stuff.

I think that happens.

Uh, the problem is, how do you get there? I think,

I think, you know, like, healthcare gets to be a thing and, uh, vaccinations and preventative medicine
and public health and all this kind of stuff and public education.

I think those things actually

happen.

The problem is, you know, could we just skip to the good part? Now, we have to go through

this horrible fucking thing that will last God knows how long.

You know, years is probably

optimistic decades is more realistic.

And, you know, you just look at, like, get, could we just,

like, there are, there are genuinely urgent things that need to be done, like, right fucking now.

And again, like, you have these people who even when they had power, um, and this is another

thing that I find it infuriating, but like, even when the Democrats had power, uh, they didn't
actually do anything about the climate catastrophe.

They're just, and, but Scott, you're not,

you're not, you're not being fair, you're not understanding.

He did the inflation reduction act

in blah, blah, blah.

No, if you actually look at those things, and this is one thing that just

pisses me off, because I know you're not actually a, you don't care, because if you care,
you actually look at, end of these things, and be, you're not actually looking into these things,
because if you actually look at what's in there, it's like there are a couple of bullet point
things that kind of sound good that they sort of lifted from the green new deal, um, at a high level,
but they're not actually doing the bulk of those, what they're actually doing is giving billions and
billions of dollars to various private companies, often just coincidentally, who happened to be
campaign donors, you know, often who coincidentally, uh, our our our feeding money into the system,
and benefiting the people that that set this stop up.

And, you know, you, you actually look at

that, like, it was such a thing in Biden's one term that everything that he did that would get
these Biden wins bullet points.

You actually go into it, and it was a sham.

It was like,

like, the student loan thing, you know, this is a person who is largely responsible for the
inability to dismiss student loans in bankruptcy, and he made the problem, he made it worse,
and he made it, you know, like, very difficult to get out of.

This guy did these tiny little

forgiveness things when he could have done much more, um, and I know, like, you'll get into an
argument with people, and I'll be like, oh, but Scott, the Supreme Court, you know, if you actually,
he could have done much more, just zero doubt.

Like, I, I don't even want to discuss this,

but he did this fucking nothing, and it did help people, like, it certainly helped a few
percent of people, but when you look at what it actually did, in terms of the long term,
um, like, progress of total student loan debt, and, you know, like, the burden that that place
is on people, it made it a little notch, and then it went right back to where it was, like,
did absolutely fucking nothing.

Just very much like, um, if you go to the ACA, prior to the ACA,

you know, you see the progress of how much, um, air quotes healthcare is costing per capita,
or by any metric you like, and it's going up and up and up and up and up and up and up, and then
the ACA makes this little tiny bump down, you know, and then it just goes back up to the trend,
to the historical trend.

Like, you basically, congratulations, you've been basically did nothing

in the long term, and you did something, like, one of the things, part of the nothing,
part of the reason that I find it fucking infuriating, is when you do nothing in this kind of form,
it's not just that you're doing nothing now, but now you've kind of inoculated people
with this notion that there's nothing to be done, or that there's nothing that can help,
or blah, blah, blah, blah, and so you've got people thinking, well, the ACA sucks, so we should try
something else, and that the most wild and ridiculous thing about that, that not that just pitch
about the ACA, but the most wild and ridiculous thing about that is, like, I continue to this day
to see people say shit, like, we just need a free market, we need to let loose the free market,
and then it'll magically fix things.

I just like that, do you not understand the healthcare.gov

is literally called the healthcare marketplace? Like, the ACA is Romney Care.

It is, you know,

the Projects 2025 Heritage Foundations Plan, and giant air quotes, market-based plan for insurance,
and it's also, in addition to just being written by and for the insurance industry,
it's just, it's just wild.

It annoys the shit out of me, like, people have such a disconnect,

and part of the reason they have this disconnect is that there's nobody on the national stage
really giving you, like, any kind of opposition to the framing of, like, oh, there's a crisis on the
border, that there's not a crisis on the border, but you hear people saying this, and you hear people,
you hear the Republicans saying it and talking about how they're going to fix it, and then you hear
Democrats talking about it, and how they're going to fix it.

And nobody's going, there's actually

no fucking crisis on the border.

There's actually, this is, and it made up problem that does not

similarly trans people.

Like, I just wrote a article today actually by a friend coincidentally,

and this is about how a lot of the anti-trans stuff is actually funded by the fossil fuel industry,
which is one of those things like, I didn't know, but it's kind of not shocking when you think about it.

It's a nice distraction.

It's nice to have a scapegoat that you can point to, and you can say,

like, oh, all your problems are coming from this group that has no entrenched power, and, you know,
they're a little, if you don't know, and they're like a little weird, and they're a little different
looking, and they're easy to kind of point to, and, you know, and of course, like a lot of
trans people, you would not clock, right? But some of them are clockable, and some of them are, you know,
obvious, and kind of look a little bit different to people, and so they're easy to sort of point
fingers to, and that's where you end up getting the sort of like scapegoating, and again,
there's no counter-framing.

There's no counter-framing to, you know, I mean, fucking Biden,

just to keep going back to the sky.

But fucking Biden was like, talking about how, if we raise taxes,

then that will hurt the middle class in blah, blah, blah, blah.

The idea of raising taxes,

if you actually look at like the way taxes are structured, you don't have to, you can lower taxes
on the middle class.

You could also, you know, and this, this one is particularly infuriating,

but, well, actually, before I begin to bet, you can raise the, like, eliminate the top income
limit for social security, and get rid of the weird distinction between earned income and investment
income.

You could do a lot of things, and shave money off of the top.

You could go back to, I mean,

personally, I would have tax brackets that are very high when you start getting very high.

So any income over a certain number of millions of dollars, you get basically like 99% tax,

or like something, so the huge, that would be nice.

But, and end also have a wealth tax and stuff like

this to sort of renormalize things a little bit that never mind that now you get.

Instead,

we have to focus on the trans people or the immigrants.

It's all the immigrants fault.

It's all

so-and-so is fault.

It's not.

It's definitely not the billionaires.

Don't look at the people behind

the curtain.

Look over there, it's, it's those people with zero power who are already marginalized,

who are already facing massive consequences.

It's definitely not the old white dudes,

the rich old white dudes.

It's this black and brown people that have no power.

They're the ones

that you should be blaming.

And it's just fucking annoying and infuriating that, you know,

I get like the Republicans, we already know they're awful.

It's not shocking that they're

doing this kind of stuff.

But again, the Democrats are aligned with this and they're operating

within the same framing.

And because they do that, there's no real counter and they're both

essentially reinforcing the same complete bullshit ideas.

And it's just like, I don't know, it is so

fucking frustrating.

Like, I don't, I'm repeating myself here, I know, but I don't know what

else to say.

It's just like, how the fuck do we get out of this shit? And why the fuck can you guys

either A get it, what, why can't you not either A get it together? And start actually going like,
hey, actually, this is, you know, actually, a look at education is good.

Actually vaccines are good.

Actually, this and then explain that stuff.

You have, you have the ability to do this and you don't

do it.

And it just lets people who are terrible define everything.

And, you know, and it just,

I don't know, this is how you get to this point where someone like, like, anti-vax junior
can be taken seriously.

Because you have very few people actually providing like actual counterframe

or another frame or better information or so on.

Now, and then you have, as long as I'm talking

about this, getting back to the fucking genocide, Joe and Uginics, Joe, you know, one of the reasons
RFK junior is so successful right now, as, you know, and it's a pretty big fucking thing,
is that Biden sat there.

And he didn't want to do a lot of stuff and also his donors and blah,

then want to keep all of the pandemic protections going.

So they came up with this idea that was like,

oh, well, if you get vaccinated, then you can just take off the mask, right? It's either either
be vaccinated or wear a mask.

And this is the most ass-in-ion ridiculous shit that the actual

answer, by the way, is A, you don't vaccinate individuals, you vaccinate populations, vaccines
work very well, but vaccines don't magically, it's not a magical personal shield, right?
The vaccine protects you by having enough people in the population vaccinated that things can't
propagate very well.

And because they can't propagate very well, you have herd immunity.

Now,

you're protected even if the vaccine wouldn't necessarily individually protect you.

And vaccines

like really good vaccines protect you against like 70%, 80% of the time, maybe even 90% of
infections, but you know, that not 100%, they're not magical perfect things.

There are very few

cases where vaccines work like that, but Biden sold it like that.

And so, you know, I can explain

to a little fucking kid, Swiss cheese.

You know, the vaccine is a slice of Swiss cheese that has

holes in it.

And it gives you good protection, but it's not perfect.

And you wear a fucking mask,

and it's also a piece of Swiss cheese that has holes in it.

And it gives you a certain amount of

protection.

And you put those two layers on top of each other.

And now you've got, you know, fewer places

where the two holes overlap.

And then you added that like actual public health measures,

actual things like, I don't know, the testing and tracing and isolation when people are exposed.

When you start putting these things together, you can actually really just clamp down on this.

And we could eliminate it.

It's just, it's frustrating.

We could basically fucking eliminate

even to this day, as much harder as it would be because it's had so much opportunity to evolve.

And it's gotten so much better.

And so much more immune invasive and so much more

able to evade vaccines and all those kind of stuff.

We could still today with improved

indoor air quality, with people wearing a mask when, you know, when necessary.

And, you know,

more vaccinations and actually testing and tracing and isolating people when they're exposed.

Until they have, you know, like confirmed negative tests and blah, blah.

We could, we could basically

like zero the shit out.

You know, there would be like a trickle still remaining, but it would be

very, very rare.

And, you know, it would occasionally, you'd have an outbreak, and then you'd

contain the outbreak.

But instead, it's this raging inferno that is just never going to fucking stop

because we're not doing anything about it.

And getting back to the, the Biden thing, because

he sold this idea that the vaccines are magical personal shields, which they again are not.

Because he sold that, people looked at that and they saw people getting vaccinated and still

getting sick.

And so they went, oh, the vaccines don't actually work.

And this is what happens when

you let people who either have an agenda or in his case probably just legitimately don't fucking
understand things.

So bad ideas.

You get people hearing something that's incorrect.

And then

learning, oh, they're lying to me.

And then concluding, not unreasonably, not unreasonably,

that, oh, they must be wrong about these and they don't actually work.

Not that they don't actually

work, by the way, it's that they don't work the way that, that he was saying, but it doesn't matter
because people don't have the basic, basic training in public health or science or understanding
of these things.

You know, I mean, as long as I'm talking about this stuff, like people don't

understand the mRNA messenger RNA is just literally what comes in each of ourselves.

It's first

transcribed from the DNA in the nucleus of yourself out to express genes and genes are like,
there's little cassettes that are in your cells and you want to make something that does
something.

So you express that stuff.

It gets first transcribed from DNA to single-trained ad RNA,

which is best in ger RNA.

And, you know, edited in some other stuff happens.

And then it gets

pushed out of the nucleus and then it gets translated into protein.

Now, again, there's more detail

from that, but that's like the basic just of it.

People don't understand that.

And so they see

somebody talking about, it's mRNA, it's scary.

It's fucking infuriating from many, many perspectives

here.

But one of them is just mRNA is literally what makes you live right now.

If you got rid of

holy mRNA in your body, you would be dead soon.

Similarly, also, you know, coronaviruses are

single-stranded positive-sense RNA viruses.

But genome for the virus is itself a single-strand

of positive-sense meaning it can be directly translated into protein.

RNA, which means it's

is mRNA.

Like the genome of the virus, if you get infected, you're making a bunch of viral

mRNA, literally.

That's how it fucking works.

But you don't explain that to people.

You don't do

like the basic thing of using this opportunity to educate people about public health, about viruses,
about basics of biology and how things work and all this kind of stuff.

And because you don't

do that, it's all scary to people.

They don't know.

And then they hear somebody who acts like they're

authoritative and acts like they know what the fuck they're talking about telling you, oh, you don't
want to do that.

It's going to be scary and dangerous and bad.

And again, when you have one person

from a platform saying that, and you have no one else explaining to you the actual thing.

Part of this is also like public health messaging is fucking terrible.

People don't understand

how important it is.

And they like to oversumplify things and they don't like to tell people,

they kind of assume people are not very smart.

And by assuming that and leaving shit out.

And

trying to oversumplify things, you're really just fomenting a distrust in this stuff.

It's one of the reasons I think the experts are not trusted is that people are not explaining

shit.

Like people are not doing a good job of explaining.

Like just the Swiss cheese thing,

just the mRNA thing, the DNA to RNA to protein thing.

Just what is viral, you know, like what is

a virus even.

Take that opportunity and explain it to people.

Take that opportunity and show

people over and over again how the shit works, what it is.

And then you can't have people like

fucking anti-vex junior.

Take hold because people will be inoculated, not coincidentally,

against that disinformation.

They will have the ability to actually understand and contextualize

and interpret rather than having to have somebody tell them, oh no, he's just wrong.

Why is

you wrong? Why are you? And it's this weird kind of like paternalistic idea that people,
I don't know, they think that people in general are not that smart or not that will informed.

And partly it's true that they're not that well informed, though that's partly your fault

because your education system sucks.

But people can figure things out, people can understand shit.

And also, you know, if you explain stuff to people in very simple terms and you give enough

out there, maybe person X doesn't figure it up.

Maybe they don't quite get it initially.

But person Y can and when person Y does it, they can explain it to person X.

If they're friends,

they can go in and they can kind of say like, oh, you know, this is how it actually works and they
can do a better job of, you know, dialing that in for them and also reinforcing how it actually
works for themselves because you never understand something as well as you do when you teach it to
somebody.

So just the whole thing is just like fucking annoying.

It's just so fucking annoying.

Because whether it's public health, whether it's like how government works or what government

does or, you know, just talking to people about how fucked over they are with with healthcare,
with the lack of public transit, with the lack of walkable cities.

This kind of shit.

If you explain that shit to people and showed them and then said, hey, we're going to, you know,

it sucks that your country doesn't have any high speed trends that are worth the damn.

But we're actually, this is what it's like in other countries.

They have six weeks of vacation

it's kind of standard.

They have the ability to go from one city to the next without having to,

you know, like basically feel like third glass citizens on a bus.

They can just do that.

They can just go and it's comfortable and it's cool and it's nice and it's easy.

And you could have that too.

You could have that too.

You should be pissed off that you don't have it

and you can have it too.

You should be pissed off that medical bankruptcy is a thing and you could

have actual universal healthcare too.

And if people would just have this shit explained to

them and have a lot of people consistently explain it to them, then we would be in such a better
position.

And it's just fucking frustrating that people are not doing this.

And when I say people,

I mean the fucking Democrats because it's the, these are the ones that are in the position to
actually do something and they don't do it.

It's fucking infuriating.

Anyway, with that,

I don't know.

I didn't have an outline for today and I'm not sure if that's better or worse.

I really like extent brilliantly speaking but I think also it's good to have bullet points to hit.

But I just was kind of moved to talk about this because I was just annoyed by these fucking

Al Franken and James Carvelle things and you know, I just wanted to talk about it and didn't
really want to prepare.

And also I had an hour to do something and again, I could have worked on some

shit.

But instead, you know, just decided, oh, I'm going to just going to talk about some bullshit

instead.

And I don't know, probably not the most efficient use of time.

But hopefully was

interesting or entertaining or at least a good sleep aid.

With that, I think I'm going to take

off now.

So thank you as always for listening and Zijin and also like Apple Transcriber

which replaces the transcripts that I put in my fucking things.

It's it's Zijin.

It's not

it's that's you later.

It's that's you again.

It's Zijin with the fuck.

Like it's it irritates the

shit out of me because I I don't really spend that much time on my own transcripts anymore because
the thing just replaces them.

Right, James does.

I bought that apple podcast for other.

But I just

like, could we could we just not give me this actual like the thing that I want? Why do you have
to do this? It's it's frustrating.

Anyway, I actually actually this time.

Thanks as ever and

再见

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smenor/tangentsBy Scott Menor, PhD