Frayed nerves

Since this seems to be meta-commentary day at LGM I’m going to make a brief contribution to the genre.

I’ve probably banned something like a half dozen commenters in my nearly 17 years of front paging, and I’ve rescinded a couple of those in the wake of subsequent appeals.

I banned somebody today for posting this, after I commented that if two percent of Trump’s voters had voted for Harris instead, she would have won the popular vote, and most likely the Electoral College too (an under-remarked feature of last fall’s election is that the GOP advantage in the EC pretty much disappeared):

You can stop now. You have shown sufficiently you don’t understand how numbers work or what they even do.

That was the whole comment. It didn’t include any argument, and, although I’m extremely slow to wield Grabthar’s ban hammer, repeated gratuitous insults — this person had done this before — will eventually do the trick.

Leaving aside that general statement of individual policy, I think it’s fair to say that people are understandably frayed right now, for the very good reason that an extremely close election, decided as all such elections must be by a lot of essentially random and irrational factors, has proven to be the difference between four years of the normal frustrations of a somewhat dysfunctional late stage liberal democracy, and the nightmare that’s currently unfolding. This fact seems both surreal and wildly unfair: how is it possible that the vague motivations and confused beliefs of the Ariana Grande Theory of Politics portion of the electorate could be the difference between what could have been and what is?

But that is the case, and all of us are struggling to come to terms with this in our own ways, and to figure out where to go from here, given that it so very easily could have been so different.

So it’s not at all mysterious that both front pagers and commenters are sometimes posting things that indicate they are at their wits’ end — and I definitely include myself in that cohort.

Four years is a long time, but it also passes very quickly in retrospect, at least for those who survive it, so lets try to avoid circular firing squads, and point our still metaphorical weapons at the enemy, whose identity right now could not possibly be clearer:

This drunken rapist is at the head of the entire United States Armed Forces. If things like this aren’t enough incentive to avoid needless infighting among the opponents of fascism — and that is exactly what this has become — I don’t know what would be.