Cranky Pants Day

• Yes, there is a forthcoming rant, but right now, I'm listening to Thelonious Monk's "Epistrophy," and slapping down stupid can wait.
• Liberals v. Leftists.  Yes, like Batman v Superman:  Dawn of Justice, only without the noise and special effects and probably without the justice.

  [...] Since the election, leftists and conservatives have also seen eye to eye when it comes to denouncing liberals like Markos Moulitsas, the founder of liberal website Daily Kos, who gleefully cheered when it was reported earlier this year that people in red states would be disproportionately hurt by Trumpcare. “Be Happy for Coal Miners Losing Their Health Insurance,” declared Moulitsas on his blog. “They’re Getting Exactly What They Voted For.” In another instance, the liberal blogger earned bipartisan condemnation (so to speak) when he tweeted in response to the Trump administration denying North Carolina hurricane aid: “There’s your reward for voting Republican, North Carolina.”
  
  Liberals like Moulitsas have almost become caricatures of the smug and unsympathetic liberal elite that right-wingers have long depicted; it’s as if liberals have gradually come to adopt the ridiculous qualities that Republicans have assigned to them over the years. Which brings us to an important point: Leftists haven’t suddenly jumped on the liberal-bashing bandwagon because it’s the hip thing to do in the age of Trump, but because many self-described liberals have become the obnoxious and out-of-touch liberal elite that conservatives have long claimed them to be, while simultaneously shifting toward the right on various economic issues. (To be fair, obviously the right doesn’t see it this way.) Saval touches on this in his Times Magazine essay, observing that to call someone a liberal today “is often to denounce him or her as having abandoned liberalism.”
  
  [...]
  
  In response to the left-wing calls for class politics, liberals have frequently argued that leftists have an unhealthy “obsession” with economic issues, and that they disregard social issues like LGBTQ rights or women’s reproductive rights. Some liberals have even implied — absurdly — that left-wingers are closet cultural reactionaries. It was sometimes claimed during the 2016 primary campaign that progressives who favored Sanders didn’t like Hillary Clinton because of her gender, rather than her politics. But this kind of deflection simply reinforces the leftist critique of liberals, who, as Saval puts it (in summarizing the left’s perspective), “shroud an ambiguous, even reactionary agenda under a superficial commitment to social justice and moderate, incremental change.”

  (Conor Lynch, Salon, via AlterNet)
  
• Rachel Cohen's (The American Prospect) conversation with Maia Szalavitz on drug addiction as a learning disorder.

  There is no reason other than racism that marijuana is illegal, and it’s very clear from the history that that’s the case. [...] But all of our drug laws, including alcohol prohibition, resulted from racist or anti-immigration panic, or a combination of the two.

• Might be related; might be bunnies:
• Libertarian roots of the right-wing grasp at power.

  In a nutshell, he studied the workings of the political process to figure out what was needed to deny ordinary people -- white and Black -- the ability to make claims on government at the expense of private property rights and the wishes of capitalists. And then he identified how to rejigger that political process not only to reverse the gains but also to prevent the system from ever reverting back. He sought, in his words, to "enchain Leviathan," which is why I titled the book Democracy in Chains.

  (Mark Karlin, Truthout via AlterNet)
  
• "Russiagate" not likely to help "progressives." (John Feffer, Foreign Policy in Focus, via AlterNet)
• A Pew poll indicates that Republicans believe higher education is Bad for the nation (with graph).  (Noor al-Sibai, Raw Story, via AlterNet)  I saw this yesterday with various responses.
• Power may cause brain damage.

  “Hubris syndrome,” as he and a co-author, Jonathan Davidson, defined it in a 2009 article published in Brain, “is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” Its 14 clinical features include: manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence. In May, the Royal Society of Medicine co-hosted a conference of the Daedalus Trust—an organization that Owen founded for the study and prevention of hubris.

  [Emphasis added] (Jerry Useem, The Atlantic)
• Conspiracy ... or military control?

  It is impossible to know exactly how widespread this military censorship of entertainment is because many files are still being withheld. The majority of the documents we obtained are diary-like reports from the entertainment liaison offices, which rarely refer to script changes, and never in an explicit, detailed way. However, the documents do reveal that the DOD requires a preview screening of any project they support and sometimes makes changes even after a production has wrapped.
  
  [...]
  
  In all, we are looking at a vast, militarised propaganda apparatus operating throughout the screen entertainment industry in the United States.

  Plays spoooooooky theremin.
• In memoriam:
• Sheila Michaels, helped popularize "Ms."  (Did a lot of other stuff, too.)
• Elsa Martinelli, actress
• Nelsan Ellis, actor