• Sen. Rand Paul announced he would be running for president. The Kentucky Republican styles himself as a libertarian and the opponent of government regulation of corporate markets, so it’s sweetly ironic that Paul’s presidential announcement got blocked by YouTube bots for using a copyrighted song as background music. Live by unfettered corporate power, die by unfettered corporate power.
• Ellen Painter Dollar on the culture-warrior trolls who are coming for your birth control.
• The more that lying pseudo-historian David Barton talks, the more he reminds me of former Gong Show host Chuck Barris. But who knows? Maybe David Barton really did smuggle Bibles into the USSR and work as a translator for the Russian gymnastics team. And maybe Barris really was a CIA assassin during the 1960s.
• Back in the days of broadcast-only TV, the characters on our favorite shows seemed to be following the same basic calendar as viewers. They got together for Thanksgiving dinners near the end of November, and they decorated their homes for the holidays in December. Granted, a lot of those holiday episodes were clunkers, but some of them were annual highlights. (I always looked forward to Halloween in Sunnydale, and the Christmas lights in Stars Hollow were pretty.)
It seems to me that the shift to streaming platforms eliminates this annual calendar. A show created for Netflix, etc. — or even for cable/broadcast, but with an eye toward digital viewers, streaming or on DVD — doesn’t have this calendar built in. Shows that aren’t structured around weekly episodes, with some to be broadcast around Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas, will likely shed this old pattern. So does the new streaming model of TV-watching mean the end of Christmas episodes?
• Tuesday was April 7. Timothy Thomas was unarmed when killed by police on April 7, 2001.
• “A gun lover sees the evils of gun culture: White supremacists, Obama haters, and me.”
I have known several people who own and enjoy guns for whom “gun culture” is not a proxy for rank racism and white supremacist fever-dreams. They are a small minority of the gun-enthusiasts I have known or encountered. A greatly outnumbered minority.
That pattern matters. It means that until a gun-loving white individual demonstrates to me otherwise, I can and will and must assume that they’re really, really racist.
• “The Populists were wrong about who was responsible for the conspiracy affecting their lives. But they were absolutely not wrong about the conspiracy itself.” That’s Erik Loomis on the corrupt Gilded Age politicians who enriched themselves at others’ expense through the Coinage Act of 1873. But I think it’s more generally true of many populist conspiracy theories throughout time.
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