A new age of spite and entitlement is dawning in the West, as the haves, confronted by a yawning abyss of their own manufacture, struggle to find a way to so demonize their opposite numbers at the bottom that they need no justification to remain at the top.

It is observed, including by my own perennial favorite Adam Cadre, that a powerful motivator for this sort of behavior is simple spite – that after a certain amount of privilege accrues, one of the main ways of enjoying it is finding ways to wave it under the noses of those without it. We observe this on a daily basis with money – the whole category of Veblen goods could not exist otherwise.

A trans-Atlantic culture of fat snobbery has emerged on similar terms, with people – blessed by the mix of economic and physical privilege such that they do not, by their normal day-to-day- routine, gain or retain large amounts of weight – basically heaping abuse on the disgusting, morally incontinent fat-asses who inexplicably now form a majority in the US and a plurality in the UK. While the temptation, as always within the framework of choice-based liberalism, is to view obesity as a simple consequence of personal choice, a more coherent view emerges if you construct it in the same manner at least some liberals are willing to qualifiedly accept class or wealth.

(Certainly much more coherent than Jamie Oliver flogging up-market delicacies as a substitute for prolefeed with similar caloric content, and treating the choice as one not just of diet but of morality – as though money were no object.)

But these are not subjects I am touching on in detail today. With the 2011 autumn of rage still sputtering along and still making the odd headline,  I would only be adding to a vast stream of noise about money to discuss it; and I have already done too much futile speaking for too long on my left approach to obesity, and a man gets discouraged after a while.

What I am interested in now is a new push against the discipline of mental health.

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Life on Titan? A liberal NASA plot. They say there’s life on Titan, then Obambi and the Democrat congress declare it a wildlife refuge and we can’t drill it for oil!

huh huh hhuuuh

I don’t know how many arms these Titanians have, but I know that each one of them is going to end up holding a Democrat welfare check!!

hhhuuh huuuuuh huh

Maybe they know where Obama’s birth certificate is located!!

hhh hhhuhh [choking sound, heavy clump of body striking floor]

Behold this classy ad for some kind of fascist rally or something being held by Michelle Bachmann:

1) Couldn’t you have found something less lynchy than a lasso, what with race being in the news ex. Jackson Jive, a Georgia peckerwood making and promoting a veiled death threat to a representative from another state, and that entire classy NewsMax coup thing? It’s not like you really ever want to ask your constituents to fantasize about lynching the government, but now is a particularly bad time. Oh, who am I talking to.

2) It took me a few minutes to realize this next thing, and I find that depressing. I hate living in Nevada.

3) Madame Sturmtruppefuhrerin, I know you’re really enthusiastic about Real America stringing the coloreds up high, but if I may: in what conceivable way could you take back reins with a fucking lasso?

Via Greenwald, here is Digby on the taser and its accompanying rise in social torture and authoritarian police behavior. I link this for two reasons: (A) I agree with her 100% on this and (B) I once supported the development of microwave non-lethal weaponry, at least in theory. I’ve increasingly come to believe that American politics makes it simply too tempting to trust domestic forces with. (Not that, what with indifference for the actual rape of Posse Comitatus instead of imaginary FEMA death camps, that distinction is going to matter long anyway, but we might as well postpone the inevitable.)

I hate the word “meme” pretty bad for anything but the Internet sense, but it’s the best way to describe census-hate as a phenomenon – partially because it’s purely political. It occasionally gets vectored by your Dave Barry / Penn Gillette style politics-as-team-sport guys, but other than that there is just no way to come by this meme outside of direct contact with political operatives; its thesis is not ideological but electoral, and it serves no purpose but to provide cover for Republican legislatures’ creative redistricting.

It’s one of those beautiful examples of a purely top-down idea, and because the GOP’s increasing obsession with itself as a Leninist vanguard has been their only solace as they shrink into irrelevance, it’s something we’re going to be seeing a lot more of. UHAUBHAHUBHGUHBHH COLOR TV NEVER FORGET

Although it lacks any statistical punch, Blumenthal’s interviews of American assholes in Israel would seem to suggest the point I made earlier: the Americo-Israeli project seems to disproportionately produce voters in Israel who have no interest in Israel as anything but a political project. I imagine that if one were to poll American Israelis, one would find a disproportionate level of antagonism towards Obama in the wake of Cairo and Netanyahu’s dickery.

Wingnuts have been screaming in incoherent rage about Google failing to doughtily honor our honorably doughty greatest troops in Germano-Fallujah, or as “historians” might call it, D-Day.

There’s an entire blogging career’s worth of right-wing dissembling – ranging from subtle delusion to outright and obvious fraud – over the liberation of France; in general, it follows three core tenets which cannot be budged for love nor money:
1) Liberating France is the most difficult thing America or anyone else has ever done.
2) It is owed an eternal debt of gratitude by everyone, which no one is keen on paying.
3) The rest of the world, in fact, doesn’t seem to remember it happened.

To this end, the hoggleurs-goggleur are constantly inventing new grievances to air and shriek about over various topics to do with France, often (but not always) serving some crass, temporal purpose. In the lead-up to Iraq there were a lot of these: Iraq became France by dint of our invading it, the French owed our President unconditional support because D-Day, and so on. Pictures were posted by outraged tourists in Normandy (to begin with, unknowingly fucking around in the one area where, between intense pre-invasion bombardment and fairly loose Allied policy towards rape and pillage, the native population had and continues to have reservations about the national rejoicing over 1944) guffawing at the British, Canadian, and French flags at Juno Beach, along with the other places which would not see Americans until after the war. Where’s America??? Those fancy Jew fucks.

And now those fancy Jew fucks are at it again: Google has chosen to logo-commemorate Tetris instead of D-Day. Above and beyond the complete saturation-bombing with D-Day information, commemoration, and imagery in every Western country for the last and coming week, see, D-Day is so special that
1) It should violate Google’s policy (set well before the first logo-swap) that its commemorations should avoid any seriously military or political overtone.
2) Google should find a special way to represent something in low resolution whose primary expression in popular culture is information-dense maps and photos -
3) – including to people who have never seen those maps and photos and to whom “D-Day” is a collection of words and facts.

Finally, it’s particularly telling that the outrage has been over the commemoration of Tetris: so defined is the right-wing culture by hate objects that it has eluded and continues to elude them that the main reason France and the Low Countries could be liberated from Hitler at all (Italy took two years and a million lives, after all) was the slow, brutal progress of the Soviet army against the vast majority of the German war machine in what will hopefully remain forever the most brutal and violent military campaign in human history.

I’m just saying, you know. If it were Kraftwerk or something I could see being angry, but Tetris? Tetris is awesome.

Besides which, one of its co-developers is one of Google’s senior engineers, so fucking there. Jesus Christ.