On the (ahem) Acting Career of Tilly Norwood

To say that Curmie is rather ignorant of popular culture is to err more on the side of understatement than of hyperbole.  That wasn’t always true, or at least as true, but especially since retirement, he’s been more tempted to concentrate on things he likes rather than things he should know.  Yeah, he’s that crusty old fart who shouts “WHO?” a lot when watching a parade or a televised holiday celebration featuring “stars.”

But he’s definitely following the… ahem… career of Tilly Norwood, the attractive young woman pictured above.  She’s featured in a newly released two-minute film titled “AI Commissioner.”  She also, of course, doesn’t exist in any unmediated, three-dimensional, sense.  “She” (“it”?) is completely AI generated, and the folks at Particle6 seem pretty damned proud of their creation.

There has been a huge uproar from actors, SAG/AFTRA, and other predictable sources, and of course an equally predictable defense by Particle6 founder Eline Van der Velden.  In fact, about every media outlet you can name has covered the story, and several have published opinion pieces.  The British newspaper The Guardian has already published five different articles about Tilly and the attendant ramifications. 

Curmie finds himself agreeing with Stuart Heritage (why isn’t this guy a historian of the Jacobean period?) that “Sure, it should also be pointed out that her existence alone is enough to fill the pit of your stomach with a sense of untameable dread for the entire future of humanity, but that’s Hollywood for you,” but also that “even if it means that the market will soon be flooded by absolute slop, the betting is that she’s here to stay.”  Heritage also points out that other new ideas that were expected to revolutionize the industry—3D, for instance—turned out to be duds, so perhaps the degree of weeping and wailing is unwarranted. 

The Guardian article that interested Curmie the most, though, was a collection of comments by readers of the first couple of articles to appear.  Virtually all the commenters have a point: no, the threat, such as it is, isn’t immediate; yes, one can presume that “ostlers and bridlemakers were furious with Gottlieb Daimler and Henry Ford.”  But Curmie wants to highlight the commentary of AshMordant:

It’s too late to be scared.

Hollywood is not about making art, it’s about making money.

Give us one good reason why studios should pay for cameramen, makeup artists, set designers, lighting, catering and of course actors when AI can do the job and make money.

Films made with real people – actors as well as all the other innumerable people listed in the end credits – will soon be something like ballet or opera: enjoyed by a few cinéastes who are willing to pay all the money for this art form.

But why would a fan of the, say, Fast and Furious franchise or the Marvel universe or whatever it is called do that? All they care about are visual and aural stimuli, and AI can deliver that perfectly. 

Well, as Curmie used to say a lot in his Asian Theatre class, yes and no.  Certainly there is little interest in Hollywood in making art; mediocrity sells, after all.  Whether films featuring human actors will go the way of ballet and opera is speculative.  But the idea that movies that rely on “visual and aural stimuli” would not be seriously affected by replacing a couple of humans with AI-generated versions is, well, simply a statement of fact.

Regular readers here know that Curmie and Beloved Spouse are fans of TV whodunnits.  Not infrequently, the stars of such shows clearly got their jobs more for being conventionally attractive than for their acting ability.  Almost always, they’re fine most of the time: no one will confuse them with Ian McKellen or Emma Thompson, but they can handle the vast majority of what they’re required to do.  Inevitably, however, they’re called upon to show a spontaneous reaction or display a real emotion… and Curmie finds himself shouting at the TV, “don’t make [insert gender-appropriate pronoun here] act!”  AI is all about processing the past, which makes it a paean to conventionality and mediocrity.  But if what it replaces is already, well, conventional and mediocre, then the loss is negligible.

Well, sort of.  A number of ultimately excellent actors weren’t necessarily brilliant from the get-go.  Whether they were learning their trade in full view of millions of people, or whether they were relegated to eye-candy roles that didn’t allow for actual acting doesn’t matter.  Talent can’t be taught; skill can.  And AI poses a threat in that it stands to short-circuit the career of those with the former but not yet the latter.

Moreover, the actors who will be affected by this aren’t the ones making eight figures for every film or seven figures for every TV episode.  Rather, it will be the ones whose names are unfamiliar to everyone but their family and friends.  As of two years ago, only about one in seven members of SAG/AFTRA earned even the $26,470 in film and TV work required to receive insurance through the union.  It may be easy to scoff at the not-really-so-hard lives of the millionaires and billionaires, but the overwhelming majority of actors in the trenches are struggling to make ends meet while living in the extremely expensive area around Los Angeles.  These, not the stars, are the folks whose jobs Tilly and her manipulators want to put out of work.

“AI Commissioner” is remarkably unfunny for what is advertised as a comedy.  Tilly is not required to do much, and what she does do requires neither significant talent nor skill.  But, just as other variations on the theme of AI have improved significantly over even the last few months, we can reasonably expect that future Tilly clones will be qualitatively better than what we’ve seen so far.  And we can reasonably suspect that some future project might actually hire some decent writers.

It strikes Curmie that there are three areas of contestation here: the technological, the ethical, and the pragmatic.  Let’s tease those out a little.

We start with the technological.  Clearly, Tilly isn’t ready to play a major role yet, and probably won’t be by the time the current SAG/AFTRA contract expires roughly nine months from now.  But progress will be made, and everyone concerned had better be ready for the negotiations.  Actors, the real ones, still have enough clout that the threat of another strike will mean something.  But the studios and producers aren’t without power, either.

One of the principal disputes that led to the SAG/AFTRA strike two years ago was what Curmie called an “obscene” proposal by producers that background actors be paid a single day’s wage for the rights to use their image in perpetuity without consent or remuneration.  Obviously, variations on the theme of CGI were intended to replace background actors, whose images could be manipulated to fill in for a presumably slightly different group of actual humans. 

We know, of course, that CGI has been employed in manifold ways both before and after the latest SAG/AFTRA contract was finalized.  But, and here’s the transition to ethical consideration, CGI is different to the extent that a CGI-generated is generally employed to make a character do something a human actor can’t do (think superhero movies, for example) or to create a character that isn’t, in fact, human (e.g., Gollum, or Thing in the Addams Family franchise).  Curmie isn’t sure how the negotiations ended up on replacing background actors, so there may be an exception there, but some of the commentary he’s reading suggests that there is at least some protection for human background actors.

The unions’ claim that AI is “trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation” is both true and ethically ambivalent.  Where is the line between studying and de facto plagiarism?  When Curmie was 17, he did a show with an experienced comic actor who consistently got laughs by separating line and gesture.  Curmie adopted a similar strategy in future shows, and indeed taught it to younger actors when he began his teaching and directing career.  Was that stealing?  Or just learning?

Still, there is a line there that should not be crossed, especially when we’re talking about an AI “actor” doing literally the same thing as the source rather than simply employing a general concept.  In scholarly writing, even a two- or three-word description (something like “farcical tragedy”) sometimes shouldn’t be repeated without attribution, but at other times a much longer passage, even word-for-word (significant person X was born on this date in this place to this couple, whose occupations were… etc.), won’t cause much concern.  (Curmie, being Curmie, still wanted students to cite sources, even for that generic stuff.)  One supposes that some rules could be put in place to allow some uses of AI but nor others, but it’s difficult to imagine how. 

So now we turn to the pragmatic.  This is a genie that isn’t going back into the bottle, at least until everyone is satisfied that there neither are nor will be further advances in the technology (unlikely), or studios start thinking of rewarding actual artists instead of corporate suits (even more unlikely).  Hollywood is the very crystallization of late-stage capitalism, uninterested in anything but making more money for those in power. 

Tilly Norwood is being touted as the next Scarlett Johansson.  That’s not gonna happen, at least as long as the real one draws movie-goers in large numbers.  Tilly won’t do that, except perhaps very briefly as a variation on the theme of a freak show.  But she is a helluva lot cheaper, even after you figure in the salaries of the geeks who manipulate her, and we can expect studio heads to start circling around Tilly and her successors like sharks around a wounded seal if given half a chance.

Curmie isn’t seeing much of an upside here.  Perhaps, though, the citizenry is more interested in good work than in profits for overpaid capitalist hacks.  Or they’ll just get bored with the gimmick.  ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.  On the other hand, theatre, fiction, and film have all warned us of the dangers of allowing any form of artificial intelligence too much scope: think R.U.R. (which is over a century old!), 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the first Star Trek movie, for example.  That doesn’t mean the prospects are necessarily dire; they are just extremely unlikely to be positive unless, Gentle Reader, you own stock in Netflix or Amazon or Disney or whoever.

We shall see.

The Other UN Story

 

The chances are, Gentle Reader, that you’re well aware of the recent visit of President Trump to the United Nations.  You’ve read about his whining about the escalator, the teleprompter, and the sound system (“triple sabotage”), and about his speech, which was rambling, narcissistic, xenophobic, condescending, and mendacious—exactly as expected, in other words.  Of course, the UN says that Trump staffers were responsible for both l’affaire d’escalator mécanique and for the teleprompter problem.  Curmie doesn’t necessarily believe them, but when the choice is between someone you’re not sure about and someone any sane person would actively distrust…

But that’s not the UN story Curmie wants to talk about.  Rather, it’s about the walkout, pictured above, prior to a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  There’s more coverage of the imaginary slights to Trump, or rather his obsession with them, than about what should have been the top UN-related story of the week.  As noted above, Trump neither said nor did anything unexpected.  Neither did Netanyahu, whose fiery speech dismissed accusations of genocide in Gaza; condemned the recent recognition of a Palestinian state by nations like the UK, Canada, and Australia; and promised to “finish the job” of eliminating Hamas.

The suggestion in a New York Times article that what Netanyahu didn’t say—there was no mention of annexing the West Bank, for example—may be the true story here is intriguing, especially in light of the peace proposal drafted by the Trump administration.  Curmie is anything but a fan of 47, but if he can indeed get buy-in from both Likud and Hamas, that would be a major achievement.  This will, of course, be believed when seen, and past experience suggests that Trump is seeking a distraction from the Epstein files touting an agreement negotiated with only one side, and to which the other side has precisely zero chance of agreeing.

This essay isn’t about what Netanyahu said or didn’t say, however.  It’s about that walkout.  The first thing to notice is that there was no similar display two days earlier when Donald Trump addressed the delegates.  Trump, after all, is a primary reason, if not the primary reason, that Netanyahu can behave the way he does.  Trump has also interfered in the domestic affairs of other nations (Brazil, Argentina…); ordered the killing of the crew of a Venezuelan fishing boat in international waters because of mere suspicion that it might have been carrying drugs; threatened to annex Greenland (from an ally!) and Canada (!); made a sport of insulting foreign leaders (e.g., Zelenskyy) and reneged on promises made in the name of this country; and, since neither Congress nor SCOTUS are interested in doing their jobs, single-handedly enacted and retracted tariffs with less self-control than a two-year-old on a sugar high.

Even if you take issue with one or more of the items in the last paragraph, Gentle Reader, you must grant that there are a fair number of UN delegates who would rather be doing virtually anything else than listen to Trump ramble incoherently for an hour.  But there they sat, or at least we saw no news stories to the contrary, and one suspects that we would have.  So, why did they stay?  Out of respect?  Fear?  Sense of responsibility?  Masochism?  Curmie declines to speculate further.  But it does throw some light on the motivation for the walkout before Netanyahu’s speech.

Let us take as given that the situation in the Middle East, especially as regards Palestine, is complex and contradictory, and that one’s attitude towards that part of the world is likely to tell us at least as much about the spectator as about the spectated.  The Hamas attack just short of two years ago was horrific, and the refusal to release the remaining hostages is unconscionable.  Israel’s response is nevertheless disproportionate, and the only question is whether intentionally starving innocent children is nonetheless ethical, given that there are different rules at play in war than in peace.

Curmie first wrote about the area on his old blog (yes, on LiveJournal) in the immediate aftermath of Hamas winning the election in Palestine over 19 years ago.  He described the moment as “it's put up or shut up time for them, unless they are truly stupid enough to try to subvert the democratic movement that brought them to power.”  Alas, they did prove to be that stupid, although as Curmie wrote in a 2010 piece on attempts by relief organizations to run an Israeli blockade and deliver food, medicine, and other items to Gaza, Curmie had “overlooked the possibility of an Israeli initiative which would allow Hamas to pass the blame—legitimately, or with at least a claim to legitimacy—to the very government they so vehemently oppose.”

If Curmie had to pick his favorite essay on Palestine, it would be this one from 2014, invoking the story of the six blind men and the elephant.  In the fable, each of the blind men engages with a different part of the pachyderm, declaring with certainty that he has encountered a rope (the tail), a pillar (a leg), a solid pipe (a tusk) and so on.  Notice that each of them is completely honest and fundamentally logical in his assessment, which, of course, is at best incomplete.

Curmie wrote:

Curmie has three real-life Jewish friends (at least two of whom have commented on the CC Facebook page) who have threatened to unfriend anyone who publicly supports Hamas. Curmie also has friends, especially in the UK and Ireland, who are not only supporting but organizing boycotts of Israeli goods. None of these folks are bad people, or even particularly narrow-minded. They are just grabbing a tail and can’t imagine how someone could possibly describe the elephant as being wall-like.

Moreover, not only can good, compassionate, people disagree about how to proceed, but we must reject false dichotomies.  As Curmie has mentioned several times (here and here, for example) it is perfectly possible to support humanitarian aid in Gaza for suffering people without supporting Hamas.  It is possible to argue against the Israeli government without being antisemitic, just as it is possible to condemn the policies of Kamala Harris without being sexist or racist. 

It is also possible, without sanctioning a governmental policy that could legitimately be described as a war crime, to understand the disquiet, even thousands of miles away from the Middle East, of American (British, French, etc.) Jews, who not without reason regard the October 7 attack of two years ago as a symptom of a global assault on their culture that has been going on for millennia. 

All of the above is a long-winded introduction to a basic point.  The way out of this morass is through argumentation, which is, of course, the very purpose of the UN to begin with: better a war of words than a war of missiles.  A week and a half ago, Curmie wrote about the attempt by a collection of student groups to disinvite an Israeli actor/director who was scheduled to give a lecture at Michigan State University: “In particular, students’ unwillingness to even listen to opposing viewpoints is deeply disturbing.”

But those are college kids.  Curmie spent half a century in which the majority of the people with whom he came in contact were post-adolescents.  Those folks are trying to find their way in a world they’re only beginning to understand.  They’re exposed to people and ideas the like of which they’ve never encountered before.  It’s unfortunate, even “disturbing,” that they are so tempted to exclude The Other, but openness to the hitherto unknown, at least to the point of allowing alternate points of view to be expressed, is part of the maturing process, and is, in Curmie’s opinion, one of the principal benefits of college. 

The delegates who so ostentatiously walked out before Netanyahu’s speech aren’t college kids.  They’re adults, and representatives of their nations.  It might not be asking too much to expect them to act like it.  Curmie wouldn’t walk across the street to hear Benjamin Netanyahu speak, but that isn’t Curmie’s damned job.  It is theirs.  Their entire raison d’être is to listen to someone with whom they disagree, search for points of accord, and try to make the world a better place for everyone.

They couldn’t be bothered, opting instead for what they undoubtedly believed was virtue-signaling but was really simply an abdication of responsibility.  But, just as that law student at Cal-Berkeley back in the spring of ’24 did her cause more harm than good by being an entitled ass, so did these yahoos hurt their cause by seeking attention rather than solutions.

As noted above, disagreeing with the Israeli government doesn’t mean you’re antisemitic.  But if you claim to be a diplomat, refusing to listen to the Israeli PM when you endured a harangue by Donald Trump pretty much means that you are.  

 

Two Scams Involving Cars and Driving

 

Curmie is trying desperately to think about something other than politics and variations on the theme: the Idiot-in-Chief, urged on by Secretary Brainworm, trying to link Tylenol (by brand name!) to autism; the absurdity of “Escalatorgate” and Little Donny’s obsession with it; plus lots of other diversions so we won’t be talking about the EPSTEIN FILES.  Curmie might come back to some of this, but not today.  So he’s going to talk about a different gaggle of charlatans… well, OK, two gaggles thereof.

After driving the same vehicle for seventeen years, Curmie finally got a new car a little over a month ago.  It happens to be a Nissan, which is relevant here only to the extent of identifying who is not responsible for the slimy tactics described below.

A couple of weeks after buying the new car, Curmie got a letter, pretty much purporting to be from Nissan, proclaiming that they’d been trying to contact me to tell me that my warranty was going to be cancelled unless I called them to confirm.  N.B., “cancelled,” implying this was coverage I already had was in danger of losing.  Curmie got another such letter a couple of days later.  And then there were even more…

Luckily, the stench of scam was pretty obvious.  No, they hadn’t been trying to contact me, or they would have done so.  Nissan has not only my home address, but my email address and cell phone number.  They also, of course, have my VIN number, which two of the letters wanted me to be prepared to tell them.  These epistles stopped just short of claiming to be from Nissan per se; it was implied but never outright stated.  There was, of course, a general “you must act now” feel, and the obligatory ”this is the FINAL ATTEMPT TO CONTACT YOU” bullshit.

Ultimately, Curmie has (so far!) received seven (!) such letters, apparently from at least four different fraudsters (or at least four different numbers to call), all claiming to be the FINAL ATTEMPT to contact me.  (Curmie says “at least four” because the last one was pitched, unopened.)  Only one admitted they wanted to sell me new coverage rather than have me “confirm” an allegedly already existing account.  One version was completely identical to the first one except for a change of deadline date.  Perhaps that first one wasn’t really the final attempt, after all, huh?  Luckily, the villains are as stupid as they are corrupt. 

Exactly how all of these creatures got Curmie’s home address and found out about his purchase is unclear.  The salesman at the local dealership said perhaps they hacked into the DMV, but it’s more likely the DMV cheerfully sold the information: the state has got to make money somehow, and they’re unwilling to make billionaires and oil companies pay taxes at an appropriate rate, so allowing their citizens to be swindled seems an appropriate way to make a few bucks.

The problem is neither new nor limited to one brand of vehicle or one location.  Beloved Spouse is still occasionally getting this crap for a Honda she bought two years ago.  Incidentally, the Honda dealership, the Nissan dealership, and Curmie’s house are in three different counties, so it’s got to be a state-wide (at least) phenomenon.

But here’s the thing: Curmie is a skeptical lad by nature, and even he was almost tempted to call one of those numbers just to find out what was going on.  Partly, that impulse was driven by the perhaps naïve belief that scam artists would have nothing to gain if he was sufficiently cautious on the phone.  Indeed, it wasn’t until he got the second letter—from an apparently different source—that Curmie’s suspicions went from “preponderance of the evidence” to “beyond reasonable doubt.”  Even then, a quick call to the dealership seemed in order. 

It’s unclear how this little exercise in deceit works to the scammers’ benefit if the car owner is cautious.  Still, we can suspect that this kind of shadiness must have the potential to be lucrative or there wouldn’t be so many people trying it, and whereas the victims might not be the sharpest knives in the proverbial drawer, they don’t deserve to be swindled.

Even more instantly identifiable as deceit is the advertising for the UpSide app.  Back when the app was relatively new, Curmie pointed out that you could have a full-time job driving 65 mph with no breaks and still not get the savings the ad promises.  They’ve changed the details of their strategy a little, but the bullshit remains.  The most recent commercial Curmie heard opens with an ominous voice proclaiming that the average American spends $5000 a year on gas.  “That’s crazy,” quoth the narrator.  That’s true, it is crazy: in the sense that you’d be crazy to believe such an outright lie.

Let’s see: the average car gets about 24.4 mpg, and the average person drives about 12,200 miles a year.  That means they’d need almost exactly 500 gallons of gas a year.  The average price of gas nationally is about $3.17 a gallon [https://gasprices.aaa.com/], but let’s go with the most expensive state, California, where the average cost is $4.65 (these figures are apparently updated daily, so they might not be exact if/when you check, Gentle Reader).  That would mean that even in California you’d be spending about $2325 on gas annually: less than half what the UpSide ad claims.  In Mississippi, the cheapest state for gas, the cost would be about $1350: roughly a third of UpSide’s stat.

The app itself may actually be a good thing: Curmie can find nothing to suggest that it doesn’t, in fact, save the user some money, nor is there evidence of hidden charges or even hassles.  If it’s a scam, it’s difficult to see how the operation works.  But if you’re not trying to fleece someone, why would you go out of your way to act like you are?

Curmie shrugs and moves on.

Musings on the Shootings in Dallas... with a personal connection

Curmie really wants to write about something other than the immorality and incompetence of the Trump administration and their minions in more than a few statehouses.  He’s even got something about another topic essentially written and ready to post. 

But.

It doesn’t happen often, thankfully, but this time a personal friend was witness to an event that made national headlines, and his story demands to be told.  By now, Gentle Reader, you’ll have read about the shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas early yesterday morning. 

You may well have first learned of the incident when the Usual Suspects started blathering without evidence about the shooter’s motives, just as they did in the wake of events in Utah a couple weeks ago.  Here’s Kristi Noem: 

This vile attack was motivated by hatred for ICE.  For months, we’ve been warning politicians and the media to tone down their rhetoric about ICE law enforcement before someone was killed. This shooting must serve as a wake-up call to the far-left that their rhetoric about ICE has consequences. Comparing ICE Day-in and day-out to the Nazi Gestapo, the Secret Police, and slave patrols has consequences.

And JD Vance: “The obsessive attack on law enforcement, particularly ICE, must stop. I'm praying for everyone hurt in this attack and for their families.”  Curmie notes that all the victims were detainees, and the day Vance gives a shit about any of them is the day after the Devil tells him why he’s in hell. 

And Kash Patel: “These despicable, politically motivated attacks against law enforcement are not a one-off. We are only miles from Prarieland, Texas where just two months ago an individual ambushed a separate ICE facility, targeting their officers.”

And Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons: “It wasn’t directed at the detainees; it wasn’t directed at civilians in the street.  It was a definite attack on law enforcement.”

And here’s a selection from the rant by the Tangerine Palpatine himself: 

The Brave Men and Women of ICE are just trying to do their jobs, and remove the “WORST of the WORST” Criminals out of our Country, but they are facing an unprecedented increase in threats, violence, and attacks by Deranged Radical Leftists. This violence is the result of the Radical Left Democrats constantly demonizing Law Enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to “Nazis.” The continuing violence from Radical Left Terrorists, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, must be stopped. ICE Officers, and other Brave Members of Law Enforcement, are under grave threat.

OK, let’s unpack that a little.  ICE is not the least bit interested in removing the “worst of the worst.”  Indeed, they’re under orders to avoid high crime areas, especially those with significant levels of gang activity.  Whether this is because of commands that they fill numerical quotas (it’s a lot easier to arrest a grandmother than a gang leader) or simply garden-variety cowardice is unclear.  Probably a bit of both. 

It is indeed true that at least one of the bullet casings found at the scene did have “anti-ICE” written on it.  That may be relevant; indeed it likely is.  But, of course, as some memester pointed out, a real lefty would more likely write “Fuck ICE” or “Abolish ICE”; “anti-ICE” is what “a right-winger thinks a leftist says.”

Still, A hand-written note found at the home of the shooter, Joshua Jahn, seems to support the idea that Jahn was indeed attacking ICE.  It remains curious, however, that there were three casualties, including at least one death (not counting Jahn himself), but none of the victims were the supposedly intended targets.  There’s a difference between a likelihood and a certainty, after all, but you’d certainly never know that if you listened to the squawking from the Trumpian minions.  And some of the evidence that Jahn was indeed anti-ICE wasn’t discovered until well after the accusations were belched forth.  Government officials hurling accusations without evidence is a problem, even if, as now seems probable, they turn out to be right.

In fact, all this hyperventilating about “Radical Left Terrorists,” especially given the inconclusiveness of the evidence, does little but fan the flames and incite further violence.  Curmie isn’t quite ready to say that such is the intent of the administration—providing an excuse for further infringements on First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights, for example—but it does loom as a possibility.  Of course, simple stupidity is the explanation for a lot of what this administration does…

Let’s be honest here.  We may suspect, even strongly suspect, what may have been Jahn's motives, but we don’t know with anything like certainty.  The local Fox affiliate reports that “A sign on a car that reportedly belonged to the shooter reads, “Radioactive fallout from nuclear formations that've passed over these areas more than 2x since 1951.”  So we’re dealing with someone quite likely to be a pancake short of a Grand Slam Breakfast, whatever his politics.  Plus, of course, if he was truly aiming for ICE agents, he’s an even worse shot than Thomas Michael Crooks.

All of this brings us to Curmie’s introduction to this piece.  A good friend and former student of Curmie’s posted on social media that he was on site when the shooting occurred.  His post was public, but Curmie doesn’t want him to get any backlash, so he’ll be listed here only as SR, and Curmie isn’t supplying a link; you’ll have to trust me on this, Gentle Reader.  Curmie also declined to ask for further details: this had to have been an especially harrowing incident, and there’s no need to make him re-live that experience just to assuage Curmie’s curiosity.

Curmie should also mention that SR is a man of exemplary honesty and forthrightness.  He has no political agenda, and is far more forgiving than Curmie of other people’s ethical failures.  If SR says, “this is what happened,” then, Gentle Reader, you can take it to the bank that that’s what happened.  His account may not be complete (how could it be?), but it is honest.  Curmie would bet everything he owns that SR is telling the absolute truth to the extent that he can determine it.

So… SR drove a member of his church, who apparently had an appointment, to the ICE facility.  Apparently there’s a rule that you can’t enter the facility without an appointment, so SR and several other people were directed to an outdoor waiting area.  (Curmie bets this will go over particularly well in February.)  OK, so it’s a stupid rule, but ICE doesn’t have a monopoly on them…

The half dozen or so people outside, including SR and a mother and her infant, still weren’t allowed inside when the shooting started.  SR says he “can’t really blame the employees” for that decision; this is because SR is far more forgiving than the average person.  SR “had nowhere to go, nothing to hide behind. The best option given the situation was to shelter in place and wait and hope.”  Eventually, “Dallas PD arrived at the scene and ordered us to shelter inside, and the ICE agents finally allowed us into the building.”

SR concludes, aptly: 

Frankly, I don't care about the motive because it will just be propagandized to death. Ultimately, this event is another indicator of failed policies and inflammatory messaging.

Perhaps the most frustrating part is knowing that this will not lead to any meaningful change. It will be another fading headline, another statistic, another signpost on the road toward our own self-destruction.

There’s a reason SR is one of the former students in whom Curmie takes the most pride. 

Let’s consider above all his objective statements rather than his analysis.  Those “brave men and women on the ground” that Lyons was praising may indeed have been trying to rescue detainees from vehicles that were under fire.  But we also know that ICE employees—perhaps the same ones, perhaps not—refused to allow innocent civilians to seek shelter inside their facility: an act both craven and cruel.  How do we know?  Because SR said so (without the adjectives).  If the average person on the street said something contrary to a Trump minion’s statement, Curmie would tend to believe that person.  When it’s SR, he’s certain of it.

This, alas, is the true face of ICE: paranoid, cowardly, and mendacious.  They’re not the Gestapo, though.  Those guys weren’t afraid to show their faces.

More Censorial Hijinks in the Kirk Shooting Aftermath

Darren Michael

Regular readers of this blog will understand that Curmie is likely to take the side of theatre professors against The Man unless they’ve done something really appalling.  So it should come as no surprise that when Curmie heard about the case of Darren V. Michael, who was fired by Austin Peay State University for posts on social media, he set fingers to keyboard rather promptly.  You will, one hopes, forgive Curmie for choosing this particular manifestation of institutional censorship to highlight.

Michael had been employed by APSU since 2007, and is referred to as a “professor” in all the accounts Curmie has seen.  That may be simply a term for a faculty member at a university, but it seems to be applied as an academic rank, meaning that he almost certainly had tenure.  What he appears to have done would be protected speech even if he were a part-time adjunct, but tenure carries with it an even broader protection… or, rather, it does at institutions that aren’t run by partisan morons.  And the fact that APSU is a state school means that the First Amendment applies, irrespective of what the administration might think.

OK, so what did he do?  The university won’t say, specifically, only that he “reshared a post on social media that was insensitive, disrespectful and interpreted by many as propagating justification for unlawful death. Such actions do not align with Austin Peay’s commitment to mutual respect and human dignity. The university deems these actions unacceptable and has terminated the faculty member.”

The local news, both TV and newspaper, covered the story, but didn’t dig very far.  KZTV makes no attempt to determine what Michael said or did; ClarksvilleNow.com mentions that Michael reposted a headline from a 2023 Newsweek article: “Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths ‘Unfortunately’ Worth it to Keep 2nd Amendment.”  The irony that it was Kirk himself who suffered because of the nation’s infatuation with guns ought certainly to be worth noting, and no reasonable person would suggest that it’s other than protected speech.  (This is not to suggest, of course, that everyone out there is reasonable.)

Primetimer did a little better in their coverage.  First, they identified Michael’s remarks as “insensitive,” which they no doubt were, although that’s a damned low bar to clear before a right to censorship kicks in.  They also found a post on X by T.R. Sartor (@dripchud), which includes a meme of a conversation between two well-known fictional characters:  “‘Is he dead yet?’ asked Piglet.  ‘No,’ said Pooh.  ‘Fuck,’ said Piglet.” 

OK, that’s perilously close to celebratory, if it hasn’t in fact crossed the line.  But Curmie notes two things.  First, that meme has been around since the first Trump administration, and the pronoun in question has always referred to POTUS.  Indeed, Michael clearly intended that reading: Sartor’s post is on the 10^th, the day of the shooting, but the meme had been posted six days earlier. It’s completely irrelevant to the Kirk assassination except as an indicator of Michael’s general political philosophy.  It’s certainly crude and more than a bit tasteless, but, importantly, it’s still protected speech.  There is no “true threat,” no “intentional incitement to immediate violence.”  Oh, and the often over-zealous Secret Service didn’t show up on Michael’s doorstep.

There’s also, of course, the matter of timing.  Michael’s post of the Newsweek headline was on Wednesday evening.  He was fired Friday morning: not a lot of time in there for due process.  [EDIT, just as Curmie was formatting: the university has changed the dismissal to a suspension, admitting they hadn’t followed due process.  Go figure, right?]  Rather, this was a typical over-reaction by a narcissistic and authoritarian university president, one Mike Licari.  He claims that APSU suffered “significant reputational damage” because of Michael’s posts.  Well, that’s utter crap.

APSU, after all, is named for the segregationist Tennessee governor who is best known nationally for signing the bill outlawing the teaching of evolution, leading to the famous Scopes “monkey trial.”  Of course, those positions were considerably more acceptable a century ago than today, but still there’s a sort of “only in Tennessee” feel to the whole business. The university accepts virtually everyone who applies, and it graduates only 27% of its students.  While Curmie is confident that there are some excellent faculty and students there, APSU is not exactly going to be confused with an elite institution.  There is not a lot of “reputational damage” to be done.

You know what does cost the school, though?  An idiot president who fires a tenured professor for posting something ironic online.  As far as Curmie can tell, there was no accompanying text to Michael’s post, no “Hate begets hate.  ZERO sympathy” like what got an assistant dean at another Tennessee state university fired.  (Hers was protected speech, too, of course.)  Unless there’s something we don’t know about, nothing Michael did was enough to spawn a raised eyebrow, let alone a dismissal without due process... or a suspension, for that matter.  (Also, of course, Curmie’s willing to bet there aren’t a lot of people in Clarksville, TN with the skillset to teach what had been Michael’s classes, either.) There is no such thing as free speech if a state employee can be fired for saying something someone in power finds distasteful.

Oh, Curmie sees that look on your face, Gentle Reader: “Curmie’s a liberal, so he’s going to side with them.”  Nope.  Curmie was a career educator and remains a passionate defender of free speech: of an Israeli guest lecturer at Michigan State most recently, of a law professor at Ohio Northern who opposed his school’s DEI policy, and of a conservative prof at North Carolina State, to name but a couple of cases.  There are plenty of examples on both sides of the political fence.  For the past couple of weeks, the oppressors have been almost exclusively on the right.  That will change in time: not because they’ll stop being censorial, but because the left will find their opportunities.  Alas.

One thing is certain: there are some university administrators out there who are about to get sued.  That brings us to the best Facebook comment Curmie has seen in a while.  The honor goes to Leslie Skrzypczak, responding to a story about l’affaire Michael posted by Cape Cod Women for Change: “They’ve tried to reach him for comment but his lawyer’s eyes were twinkling and they laughed and laughed.”

What she said.

On the Dilemma of House Bill 719

Politicians are, in general, an unsavory lot.  They’re more about winning than about doing the right thing, and winning is often defined not by accomplishing something good, but by embarrassing the opposition.  This applies to those on both sides of the aisle, of course, but, at least recently, the GOP has dominated the field.

Charlie Kirk was, of course, a master of the form: “debating” (i.e., arguing with) college kids, interrupting them, and releasing deceptively edited videos designed to make himself look smart but especially to make the other side look stupid.  Most of his stuff was straight out of the James O’Keefe playbook.  However much his acolytes (and MAGAs who’d never heard of him until he was shot) might choose to lionize him as a champion of respectful disagreement, free speech, and Christian virtues, he was none of those things. 

True, he was longer on smarminess than on Trumpian reckless vituperation (Gentle Reader, can you believe what 47 said about hating those who disagree with him politically?), but that doesn’t change the fact that if you weren’t a white cishet Christian (preferably evangelical) male, he had no respect for you.  He pretended to care about Constitutional values, but, for example, openly despised Muslims (so much for freedom of religion).

Now, in addition to the rest of the multiple hagiographic indulgences, we get House Bill 719, introduced by the creepiest and most sycophantic of GOP Congresscritters, Mike Johnson himself.  It is, of course, a trap.  The string of “whereases” includes a series of descriptions that bear little resemblance to reality: “respectful, civil discourse,” “respect for his fellow Americans,” “commitment to civil discussion and debate,” “worked tirelessly to promote unity,” and so on. 

Of course, equally if not more importantly, there were no such encomia to, say, Melissa Hortman, and certainly no recognition that literally every study of political violence, including the report of the Cato Institute (!) shows the preponderance of such attacks come from the right.

Still, the average person could stomach most if not all of this out of respect for the dead.  The real problem is the resolution:

Resolved, That the House of Representatives—

(1) condemns in the strongest possible terms the assassination of Charles “Charlie” James Kirk, and all forms of political violence;

(2) commends and honors the dedicated law enforcement and emergency personnel for their tireless efforts in finding the suspect responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk and urges the administration of swift justice to the suspect;

(3) extends its deepest condolences and sympathies to Charlie Kirk’s family, including his wife, Erika, and their two young children, and prays for comfort, peace, and healing in this time of unspeakable loss;

(4) honors the life, leadership, and legacy of Charlie Kirk, whose steadfast dedication to the Constitution, civil discourse, and Biblical truth inspired a generation to cherish and defend the blessings of liberty; and

(5) calls upon all Americans—regardless of race, party affiliation, or creed—to reject political violence, recommit to respectful debate, uphold American values, and respect one another as fellow Americans.

Yeah, no.  Curmie doesn’t want to know anyone who doesn’t support the odd-numbered parts, at least assuming a secularized definition of “prays” in #3.  #2 is a little more problematic, as Kash Patel’s FBI bungled the case enormously, detained two innocent people, and only got around to Tyler Robinson when his family turned him in.  If they hadn’t narked on him (Curmie does not mean to suggest that they were wrong in doing so), the killer might well still be at large.  Still, this is the kind of generic praise that often accompanies this kind of resolution.  Curmie would still vote for the bill except for #4.

Ah, #4.  Curmie, and he suspects that he is not alone in this, does not “[honor] the life, leadership, and legacy of Charlie Kirk,” who was, in Curmie’s opinion, one of the most reprehensible human beings on the planet.  He did not have a “steadfast dedication” to any of the three items listed: “the Constitution, civil discourse, and Biblical truth.”  This statement goes beyond the pro forma fluffing of the deceased and enters into the realm of outright prevarication.

Moreover, the unmodified phrase “Biblical truth” should never appear in a resolution in the House of Representatives.  Never.  Ever.  Use it on the floor if you must, but not in a bill.  Of course, if “Biblical truth” is defined to be the actual teachings of the Bible—you know, Gentle Reader, welcoming the stranger, feeding the poor, stuff like that—then it would indeed be welcome.  Fat chance of any of that happening in Trumpistan, of course.

But the bill forces those who have not quaffed the neo-Fascist Kool-Aid either to vote for a resolution that specifically and mendaciously idolizes a despicable person, or to be seen voting against a measure condemning political violence.  Even a number of otherwise intelligent conservatives are pretending that this dilemma doesn’t really exist, and are therefore hurling metaphorical brickbats at anyone who didn’t vote for the resolution.

That’s because they cannot (or choose not to) believe that it is possible to hold two thoughts simultaneously.  But one really can believe that illegal immigration is a legitimate issue (it would be less of one if Trump hadn’t scuttled a bi-partisan bill that would have at least somewhat stemmed the tide because he’d rather have a campaign issue than attempt to solve a problem) and still oppose ambushing people at apparently routine meetings to renew work permits or even to finalize the paperwork for citizenship.  Due process still matters, and ICE’s deliberate avoidance of confronting the real “worst of the worst” is craven, dishonest, and, alas, predictable.

It is possible to despise Hamas and everything they stand for and still think that innocent Palestinians shouldn’t be intentionally starved to death by an authoritarian bigot like Bibi Netanyahu.

It is possible to regard Charlie Kirk as a horrible person and still condemn his murder and his murderer.

How does Curmie know these things?  Because he’s describing himself.

Of course, Curmie also saw a meme shortly after Kirk’s assassination urging Democrats in Congress to introduce the “Charlie Kirk Gun Control Bill,” just so the Republicans would have to vote against it.  The difference is that the suggestion was intended to be ironic if not humorous, and no Democratic pol did anything more than indulge in a sardonic smile.

Hypersensitivity, But the Right Result at Michigan State

Roy Horovitz

You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, but Curmie’s best guess is that this particular attempted suppression of free speech on a university campus comes from the left, as the right-wingers who were chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville a few years ago are now chest-thumping supporters of Israel, up to the point of branding criticism of the Netanyahu regime or the Israeli military as anti-Semitic and demanding punitive action against those who disagree.

The good news is that the scheduled lecture, “Welcome to Theaterland: The Theatrical Scene in Israel Today with Roy Horovitz” at Michigan State University went ahead as scheduled on September 12.  (You can read a little about Horovitz and the topic of his lecture here.)  Apparently, the fact that Horovitz is Israeli was enough to try to silence him (well, sort of…), however, as there was a bill passed overwhelmingly (!) by the General Assembly of the Associated Students of Michigan State University (ASMSU) demanding its cancellation. 

Of course, the ASMSU had no authority to prevent the presentation, and they knew it.  They didn’t even go public with their proclamation until the day of the event (and it received no press coverage beyond the campus, at least that Curmie can find, until several days after the speech went forward).  This would seem to be the proverbial tempest in a teapot, except…

No one would deny that the situation in Gaza is both complex and disquieting.  Curmie has made several attempts to make sense of it all, especially here, here, and here.  Emotions are high on both sides, and not without reason.  Curmie struggles to find anything positive to say about either Hamas or Likud.  But the barbarity inflicted on an overwhelming innocent Palestinian population is indeed outrageous.  To that extent, ASMSU has something of a point.

But, Gentle Reader, you will note that there are two qualifiers in the previous sentence: “to that extent” and “something.”  Taken as a whole, the bill is problematic in the extreme. 

First off, it assumes that inviting a guest speaker who happens to be Israeli is somehow “harmful to Palestinian, Arab, and allied students and is ignorant to the current global context.”  “Harmful”?  Really?  How?  Even if Horovitz was taking a stance on the situation in Gaza, which he wasn’t, it’s difficult to imagine how anyone with a modicum of maturity could feel threatened, let alone harmed.  And to suggest that literally anyone in a position to invite speakers to a university would be ignorant of the context is absurd.

The ASMSU claims that they “obviously believe in freedom of speech”… well, except, you know, Gentle Reader, when they don’t.  But their real issue is that “the university... has adopted a stance of neutrality on the issue.”  Exactly which issue that is—the situation in Gaza or the decision to invite Horovitz—in unclear from the reporting.  Either way, the MSU administration got it right.  Miracles do happen.

Moreover, the principal argument against Horovitz’s appearance is that he is “IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] personnel.”  Seriously?  First, he’s former IDF.  More significantly, with very rare exceptions under extraordinary circumstances, literally every Israeli adult has served in the IDF, willingly or otherwise.  Curmie quotes Beloved Spouse: “who doesn’t know that?” 

You don’t believe in free speech if you don’t think it applies to those whose ideas you cannot support, or even if you find them offensive or “hateful.” (Donald Trump and Pam Bondi, please take note).  If you don’t think Mr. Horovitz should appear on your campus, you have a number of options, the foremost being: don’t go.  There are several means of protest, too, because your speech is as protected as his is.  But you look silly, and indeed hurt your own cause, if you want to deny him the opportunity to speak and your primary objection is that he once (perhaps against his will) was a member of a military outfit that subsequently engaged in some pretty questionable acts.  It’s rather like cancelling a WWII vet because of My Lai or Abu Ghraib.

The bill, in other words, is a silly amalgam of paranoia, petulance, and virtue signaling.  Of course, if the ASMSU statement was a little… erm… over the top, the response from a coalition of campus Jewish organizations is not above criticism.  Yes, they’re right on the basic issue, that the “legislation directly violates the purpose of our student government which should represent all students and foster an open exchange of ideas.”  But it’s a stretch to suggest that the “safety and belonging of Jewish students on campus.”  Again: “safety”?  The reason to oppose this bill is that it’s stupid, not that it’s in any way threatening.

In brief, then, words like “harmful” and “safety” overstate the case on both sides… or at least Curmie hopes so.  If encountering a perspective other than one’s own causes damage beyond mild perturbance, then the fragmentation of society into rigidly defined camps borders on the inevitable.  Curmie may have criticized some aspects of FIRE’s recently-released report on free speech on university campuses, but that doesn’t mean that the findings aren’t a cause for concern.  In particular, students’ unwillingness to even listen to opposing viewpoints is deeply disturbing.  Couple that with hypersensitivity on all sides of virtually every issue, and the ability of educational institutions at every level to fulfill their mission is imperiled.

Curmie does not impugn the motives of either set of students—neither the ASMSU nor the coalition of Jewish organizations and their allies.  They’re speaking out against what they perceive as an inappropriate action, and even if Curmie thinks they’d benefit considerably from a thicker skin and a diminution of hyperbole, they have every right to do so. 

A couple of nights ago, Curmie and Beloved Spouse streamed an episode of the British crime drama “Professor T.”  Our hero, both brilliant and quirky (isn’t that always the case?), is a police consultant whose real job is as a professor of criminology.  In the latter persona, he closes the episode with an intriguing discussion of how easily empathy can morph into hatred.  That seems both relevant to the situation at Michigan State… and chilling.

(By the way, the original Belgian version of “Professor T” with Koen De Bouw in the title role, also available for PBS members to stream, is even better than the British show.  If you’re willing to read subtitles, Gentle Reader, Curmie recommends it highly.)

"Lola" and the Week's Headlines

Curmie was 14 when the Kinks released their classic song, “Lola.”  It was the perfect age at which to revel in the delicious naughtiness, certainly for the time, of a title character who “walked like a woman and talked like a man.”  The most quoted lyric from the song, no doubt, is “Well, I'm not the world's most masculine man / But I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a man / And so is Lola.”  There’s a hint of ambiguity there: is Lola a man, or is Lola also glad that the narrator is a man?  Not that those ideas are mutually exclusive, of course.  Any way you look at it, that sequence had a considerable impact on a rather sheltered lad in the throes of puberty.

The sequence that sticks in Curmie’s mind the most, though, comes a little earlier in the song: “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls / It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world / Except for Lola.”  That word “except” has continued to intrigue for well over a half century.  Lola, whatever terms of sexual identity might be used to describe her, becomes the narrator’s bulwark against the confusions of the world.  There’s a lot to unpack there.

Curmie has always liked the song, and he’s pretty sure he owned it on 45 back in the day, but it has seldom crossed his mind for decades except when it comes around on Spotify or the local classic rock radio station.  But it has risen to the top of his consciousness of late when encountering two Facebook posts.

The first was this one, by Aaron Terr, the Director of Public Advocacy at FIRE (the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression.  His excoriation of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s boast that “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech”  is impressive:

The Attorney General is just flat wrong here…. She’s not the first politician to say that hate speech isn’t free speech, but this is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.  She really should know better, and this is the type of thing that’s going to chill public debate.  It’s going to make people afraid to say things that the current administration might consider hateful, lest they actually be prosecuted for it.

Curmie notes that a representative of FIRE (accurately) calls Bondi a politician rather than a lawyer and makes the obvious point that the Attorney General, of all people, ought to know the freaking laws she’s supposedly upholding.  Bondi is either profoundly ignorant or too big of a political hack to care that she’s advocating the evisceration of Constitutional protections.  Or both, of course.

But it’s what Terr says next that intrigues Curmie:

What’s also incredible about this video is that usually the argument that hate speech isn’t protected speech is something that you would hear from the left side of the political aisle.  But now we hear a top Republican official saying it.  And I think that just goes to show that censorship rationales, once they’re on the table, they’re a loaded gun just waiting to be used by any political party that takes power.

Terr is right about this, too.  Curmie has made the point repeatedly (most explicitly here and to a lesser extent here) that neither of the two principal political parties in this country are much interested in upholding First Amendment protections.  But whereas the right was more likely to engage in political censorship (books in libraries or in school curricula, for example), it was generally the left that sought to deny constitutional protections to hate speech.

Now, we’re living in a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, with the GOP, and especially the MAGA wing thereof, bellowing from the proverbial rooftops about how hate speech should be prosecuted.  Bondi is worse than most—hardly surprising, that—but even she isn’t the most insane right-winger out there.  Remember this guy, an actual Congresscritter Curmie mentioned a few days ago?

Right now, the same people who cheerfully described moderate Democrats as “communists” for arguing that someone who works a 40-hour week ought to be able to afford to pay for essentials, or that programs that help the general population (FEMA, Medicaid, the CDC, the FAA, etc.) ought not to be sacrificed so those poor destitute billionaires can get a tax cut that balloons the national debt—these people are getting righteously indignant that anyone would dare call a racist, sexist, jackass like Charlie Kirk, well, a racist, sexist, jackass.  And they want people fired or even arrested for speaking their truth.  Most of what they’re objecting to isn’t even hate speech by any reasonable definition, but we’ll antiphrastically let that pass for now.

The other Facebook post Curmie wants to mention was this one, which Curmie reposted on his page a couple days ago.  It reads, “Reminder: Fox News host Brian Kilmeade said homeless people should be put to death by lethal injection and they didn’t even take away his morning donut.  The obvious context was the propinquity of Kilmeade’s comment and the firing of Jimmy Kimmel by ABC for his on-air comments about the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

What Kimmel actually said, of course, wouldn’t as much as raise an eyebrow on a reasonable observer.  There were some jabs at both President Trump and Vice President Vance, but the killer, apparently was this: “The MAGA Gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”  That, Gentle Reader, is simply a statement of fact.  Trump blamed “radical left political violence” long before there was any evidence either way, and there remains little if any evidence from a credible source that Tyler Robinson was indeed influenced by leftist politics.

Was Robinson a leftie ideologue?  We still don’t know, and for these purposes it doesn’t matter.  There was, at the time Kimmel was on the air, some evidence emerging that perhaps Robinson was a Groyper, and the fact that his grandmother says his politics were shifting to the left could simply be deflection (“we’re a Trump-loving family, so the assassin in our midst obviously wasn’t like us”).  Were Curmie of a cynical disposition (perish the thought!), he might even suggest the possibility that Robinson was pretty much a Nancy Reagan Republican: dismissing the concerns of others until, in his case, he entered into a same-sex relationship, and Kirk’s homophobia was placed in a different perspective.

The point is that for these purposes, none of this matters.  (Nor does it matter that Curmie has never found Kimmel even moderately amusing.)  Did the MAGA world make a concerted effort to place the blame on someone other than themselves?  Of course, they did!  It doesn’t matter if they were “right” about Robinson’s motivations; they just didn’t want him to be one of theirs.  (To be fair, the left was spinning just as hard in the other direction, but that doesn’t change the fact that Kimmel was absolutely accurate.)

It’s also worth mentioning that Kimmel, like a host of leading Democrats, expressed shock and horror at the news of Kirk’s death, calling it a “senseless murder” and condemning those who seemed to be celebrating it.  Contrast that with the deafening silence (well, there was that one bit of sneering from Mike Lee) of every Republican you can name about the murders of Melissa Hortman and her husband by a right-wing nut job.

Note: the key words here are “nut job,” not “right-wing.”  What MAGA in general is attempting to do is to define the entire group—liberals—as guilty in Kirk’s murder because Robinson might have been a leftist with respect to one particular aspect of his politics.  This is the scam JD Vance is trying to pull off, with outright lies about the relative frequency of political violence perpetrated by the left and the right.  C’mon, JD, only the stupidest MAGA believes that “While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the Far Left.”  Even the report of the hard-right Cato Institute calls that claim bullshit.  Well, that’s not exactly a direct quote, but you see the point, Gentle Reader.

But Curmie reverts to his inner Confucian.  Even if there is some correlation between affiliation X and action Y, we can’t assume that one implies the other.  Curmie quotes himself from a post in 2013 about that gunman in Aurora, Co, at the opening of the new Batman movie.  Just substitute “Robinson” for “Holmes” in the following:

The fact is, Gentle Reader, this guy Holmes doesn’t represent me even if we’d vote for the same person or worship at the same church. If he turns out to be an atheist, that doesn’t mean that atheists are the problem, any more (or less) than Baptists are the problem if that’s what he is. His politics can be from the left, right, or center, and he doesn’t represent any of the good people some of whose views he shares. Even if he had help, he’s a lone wolf. Our society lives on, saddened but intrepid.

OK, one more point, since Curmie knows there are people out there ready to rant about how corporations have a right to hire and fire whomever they choose.  Yes, that’s true, even when Nexstar and Sinclair, the two distributors who refused to air Kimmel’s show in the future, are notoriously and rather proudly right-wing.  It’s the intervention of FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr that’s the real problem.  Carr, appointed in the first Trump administration, has apparently now gone full sycophant, as anyone who wants to stay employed in that administration is likely to do.  Oh, and an administration so openly venal is going to be a lot more amenable to proposed mergers and such-like if you, ABC, suck up appropriately.  Not all bribes are monetary; some just censor alternative voices.  As the singer in “Lola” says, “I got down on my knees…”

Anyway, Bobby Schroeder, a valued longtime reader of Curmie’s page (and a conservative, by the way), responded to Curmie’s post of the meme about Kilmeade, with this: “ABC comedy is more conservative than Fox News?  What in the hell is happening in this world?”

And that prompted Curmie to respond with the line about the “mixed up, muddled up,  shook up world.”  And here we are, Gentle Reader.