Left, Right, and Enter

 

You guys have seen the map before. I've written it up longer, and I hope more coherent, with new material, and corrected French history (which now looks very poorly done in the old post, especially the art history), so there's a lot to read that you haven't read. It was also a lot of work, which is a reason I haven't been here much, so I hope you'll all read it.

For the Record: Lab Leak

Philippine pangolin pup curled up with its mom, via Wikipedia. 

Matt Taibbi, pushing a report by his "Twitter Files" coconspirator Michael Shellenberger (best known for his work in the crusade on behalf of the despised plastic straw in his 2020 book Apocalypse Never)

Michael Shellenberger’s Public today released a blockbuster story, “First Person Sickened By COVID-19 Was Chinese Scientist Who Oversaw “Gain Of Function” Research That Created Virus,” which generously credits Racket. The story cites three government officials in naming scientist Ben Hu, who was in charge of “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the “patient zero” of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is a major story, contradicting early official explanations pointing to zoonotic cross-species “spillover” at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, colloquially known as the Wuhan wet market. The mystery bat or pangolin suspected of transmitting the disease to humans at that market was never found. The Public story for the first time asserts the source of contamination: a Wuhan Institute scientist fell ill after exposure to a virus engineered at his place of work.

Well, engineered or not engineered, according to the same story, since it also suggests (with pix!) Hu didn't use enough protective gear when he was working with naturally occurring bat and pangolin viruses, so he could just as easily have gotten sick, if he did, from a virus his colleagues brought to the lab from the wild.

Socialism of the right?

Postmodern mariachis att Turnberry, June 2015 in The National.

Wrong. The Nazis were far RIGHT, always have been, always will be. By the way, the Democrats and Republicans essentially switched platforms during the mid 60s after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so the entire basis of that book you mentioned really IS "The Big Lie".

— Jim Salomon (@JimSalomon) November 26, 2017

Cite for that Goebbels quote please?

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 26, 2017

I'm sure Dinesh has a better one, but this took me 2 seconds on Google.
Goebbels: "The NSDAP [Nazi Party] is the German Left. We despise bourgeois nationalism." (Der Angriff, Dec 6th, 1931)

— Janey Mack (@JaneyMackWriter) November 26, 2017

I spent a ridiculously large part of the afternoon looking for a decent and adequately contextualized source for that quote, which originates from an especially poorly made and poorly documented WikiQuotes page), and ran along the way into a good deal of stuff that might be interesting beyond the usual spectacle of me throwing a pie in Dinesh's face, on the issue of what we're to do with these awful old terms of "right" and "left" and "fascist", especially relevant in the age of Trump.

The best source was a chapter, "Von der amerikanischen Sklaverei zum bundesdeutschen Kampf gegen Rechts: Metamorphosen des Rassismus " (From American Slavery to the Federal German Struggle Against the Right: Metamorphoses of Racism), from a 2008 book by Joseph Schüsslburner, quoting in turn from a 1987 book by the journalist Wolfgang Venohr, Stauffenberg: Symbol des Widerstands ("Stauffenberg: Symbol of Resistance", on the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler):

For the Record: Can you name one rightwing group persecuted by Hitler?

Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1883, The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer, via Wikipedia.

Yes, because Hitler was right wing who killed leftists and he can't name a single RW group the Nazis targeted. #TheBigLie

— 🃏The Joker 🃏🏴 (@ATrueJoker) October 5, 2017

Yes, I can! Hitler targeted the churches and imprisoned or killed innumerable Christians who resisted Nazism in the name of their faith https://t.co/SxzyEWz1Pz

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) October 6, 2017

I love that. "I can so!"

But can he? It's true that most of the 2,720 clergy imprisoned at Dachau (of 160,000 prisoners total, over 100,000 of them political prisoners) were Catholic priests, but I don't find any record of any of them being killed, while Nazis killed between 80,000 and 200,000 Freemasons and 2,500-5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses (because of their refusal to swear fealty to the Reich)...

Wait, you define Christianity as "a rightwing group"?

You won't believe this one stupid trick the Washington Post used to get clicks

You can't use a simple algorithm to decide which way is left; you have to apply some real-world conteztualized knowledge.

Seeing some chatter originating in the Wapo this morning about the startling new Trump strategy of "running to Hillary's left", wooing the Sanders voters:

“Now, I’m no fan of Bernie Sanders, but he is 100 percent right,” Trump told a crowd [in Eugene, OR] this weekend. “He is 100 percent right: Hillary Clinton is totally controlled by the people that put up her money. She’s totally controlled by Wall Street.”

It's obviously worth asking yourself to what extent this is "left", as opposed to typical Republican populist posturing—how it's different from Ted Cruz railing against "crony capitalism" and "corporate welfare" and the "Washington cartel". What's Trump's proposal? You know, for not being controlled by Wall Street, other than claiming that he's as rich as Lloyd Blankfein, and therefore incorruptible, just like um wait a minute.

The curious case of the busted bunker busters (continued)

The case of the busted bunker busters may turn out to be a case of that fascinating but elusive animal, the Political Observer's Paradox, in which the way you choose to observe a particular political phenomenon—whether you focus on its position at a particular point in time, or its velocity as it works its way through a particular set of spatial coordinates—can affect the way it comes out. But it's a pretty complicated matter, and we'll have to go into some background first.

The GBU-28 (Guided Bomb Unit 28), improperly known as "Deep Throat", and originally created by Texas Instruments and Lockheed but now manufactured by Raytheon, is a bunker buster: a hard-target laser-guided bomb developed during the First Gulf War in 1991 to penetrate the underground concrete bunkers in which the Iraqi command was thought to be hiding from Operation Desert Storm, 19 feet long and stuffed with something that makes it incredibly heavy, 5000 pounds.

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

It works, according to HowStuffWorks, like a gigantic nail shot from the gigantic nail gun of a B-52 or F-111, plummeting nose first toward its target and piercing through 100 feet of soil or 20 [jump]