American Idiots

A Twitter trip to Trumpton

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So, Donald Judas* Trump has cleared the number of delegates needed to become the Republican nominee for US President. Which keeps Sounds of Soldiers relevant, and means it stays at 99p/99c at least until November.

To get a feeling for Trump supporters, I’ve been conducting an experiment for the last couple of weeks. I’m following the Twitter stream of one, vocal Trumpeter, highlighting bigoted tweets or retweets from him. I didn’t just pick him at random. In fact, he picked me. I have a twitter account for Garth Owen, and when I put something out on there that mentioned Trump, it got a follow from this guy. He mostly goes on about how awesome Trump is, rather than spewing almost constant racism and hate, as I’ve found others doing within one or two retweets of him. So I haven’t gone out of my way to find the worst example possible, before anyone starts accusing me of that.

What sort of stuff have I found on his timeline? Let’s see-



One remove from my test subject, I found this intelligent commentary. (Update having revisited this account, it now looks more like a parody)-



“Not one of us” What could that possibly mean?



And that’s not including the extended conversations I go into, which included gems such as-



This is just a scratch of the surface, and a few of the tweets I’ve seen this week. I’m going to keep watching, because it’s car-crash levels of compelling. It’s going to be a long, darkly comic and worrying run up to the US elections. Expect irregular trips back to Trumpton.

*What does the J stand for? I recently rewatched a lot of Red Dwarf, so sticking Judas in there is the natural reaction.

Sign this petition to help make the 2016 Quicken Loans Arena Massacre happen

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Watching it from the outside, US politics is fascinating, terrifying and hilarious. Usually all at the same time.

When the Republican party gathers to decide which moral vacuum they’re going to put forward to run for President, they’ll be gathered at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. The arena management, sensibly, have a policy saying no guns or weapons are allowed inside. A number of gun nut Republicans have taken offnce at this, and started a petition to have the venue’s right to declare itself a gun free zone overturned.

It’s unlikely (I hope) that they’ll get their way. But if they do, I don’t see how it could end well. There wouldn’t even have to be an argument that escalates to shooting for things to go horribly wrong. All it would take would be one accidental discharge, and a stadium full of paranoid people primed by rhetoric about high crime rates and terrorists would have their guns out. One shot becomes another, becomes a fusillade.

And then, probably before they’ve even got all the bodies to the morgue, the surviving attendees would be making statements about how gun deaths shouldn’t be politicised and announcing that they’ll be praying for the victims.

Source: Petition · Quicken Loans Arena: Allow Open Carry of Firearms at the Quicken Loans Arena during the RNC Convention in July. · Change.org

Trump is really Vicky Pollard, isn’t he

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On March 8, Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski asked Donald Trump whether he had a foreign policy team. Trump gave a rambling response, saying, “Yes, there is a team. There’s not a team. I’m going to be forming a team. I have met with far more than three people.” On Wednesday morning, Brzezinski gave Trump another shot at the question. She asked him again about his foreign policy team and strategy and, more specifically, whom he consults with consistently.

Trump replied: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things. I know what I’m doing, and I listen to a lot of people, I talk to a lot of people, and at the appropriate time I’ll tell you who the people are. But my primary consultant is myself and I have, you know, a good instinct for this stuff.”

Yeah, but no, but yeah, but no. But USA! USA! USA!

Via: Mother Jones

Donald Trump is too gullible to be president – Vox

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Who wants to sell Donald Trump a bridge?

His tendency to solicit, repeat, and retweet self-serving falsehoods served up by sycophants and hangers-on should be taken seriously. Among the most important tasks the president has is knowing what to believe, whom to listen to, which facts to trust, and which theories to explore. Trump’s terrible judgment in this regard is one of the many reasons he’s not qualified for the office.

Trump’s record here also undermines the strongest argument for his candidacy: that his showman’s persona is just a front, and at heart he’s a calm, thoughtful, coolheaded businessman who will surround himself with the best people and govern in a pragmatic, results-oriented fashion.

Source: Donald Trump is too gullible to be president – Vox

In these Trumped up times, you need to buy Sounds of Soldiers for 99p

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SoundsofSoldiers-cover_thumbI’ve reduced the price of Sounds of Soldiers as it’s so appropriate to current politics. It is now available for 99c/99p/the local equivalent.

Amazon

Smashwords

Five years ago the United States began to self destruct. As momentum toward a nuclear civil war grew at home, US covert kill teams- and then the military- rampaged through Europe attacking imaginary enemies. The USA found itself at war with former allies. Great Britain closed its borders and stayed mostly neutral.

Robert Jones didn’t get on the train out of Paris after it was bombed. He chose to stay on the continent and make a name for himself covering the conflict with reports on his blog. He saw the first blows, witnessed nuclear explosions lighting up the Mediterranean and was present for the final acts.

Now the borders have been reopened and Robert Jones is back from the war. He has returned to Manchester to reconnect with friends and family, to investigate the changes the city has gone through and to find out what life was like away from the warzone. He’s striving for a new, peaceful life, but there are still some ghosts and secrets from his time on the continent which are ready to come back and shake it up.

A novella about what happens when a technothriller goes horribly wrong, Sounds of Soldiers is part travelogue from the future, part war story satire, and takes a look at how the civilians usually ignored by the big war fantasies cope and survive.

Want to know what happens if Trump wins? I already wrote that book

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SoundsofSoldiers-cover_thumbI started work on Sounds of Soldiers in November 2008.

Luckily, the premise genuinely was fiction within a few days of starting the project, as Obama was elected US President, rather than McCain. Thus the (implied but not stated outright) backstory for the book- that Sarah Palin rose to commander-in-chief and started a stupid war with Europe- genuinely was fiction. For the next eight years, anyway.

Now, the USA is, once again, teasing us with the potential setup for thousands of dystopian novels, in the shape of Donald Trump. Trump’s far scarier than Palin ever was. She’s stupid and incompetent, but he takes those two traits and piles bullying, vindictive, (more) racist, and thin skinned into the mix. If anyone had written President Trump (or even potential-presidential-candidate Trump) before this year, people would have said the character wasn’t believable.

If anything, Sounds of Soldiers is an optimistic read in a world where “The Donald” could be leader of the free world. A Trump inspired future would look a hell of a lot more like Mad Max.

Sovereign citizens

This entry was posted in American Idiots Conspiracy theories on by

The sovereign citizen movement in the USA is a peculiar, and dangerous, bunch with ideas right out of the conspiracy theory pick and mix.

Their belief system is complex and rooted in a series of bizarre conspiracy theories that hold that the original US government set up by the Founding Fathers has been replaced with an evil secret government that has sold all US citizens into slavery by using them as collateral against foreign debt.

As explained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, they believe the government creates a secret alternate identity for each American at birth and sets up a secret US Treasury account — sort of like a corporate “trust” — under that alternate identity. The US government funds these “corporate shell” accounts to the tune of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.

Because the US no longer uses the gold standard, it instead uses these accounts as collateral to back up its currency. The money is said to represent each citizen’s future earning potential. The sovereign citizens thus believe the government has “pledged its citizenry as collateral, by selling their future earning capabilities to foreign investors, effectively enslaving all Americans,” according to the SPLC.

Part of their proof is that birth certificates and other government documents, said to represent this scheme, put names in all capital letters. So whereas Jennifer Williams is the real person, JENNIFER WILLIAMS is the secret Treasury account.

By declaring themselves “sovereign citizens,” members of these groups say they are freeing themselves from government enslavement and separating themselves from their secret, government-created alternate identity.

Michelle Bachmann is making Sounds of Soldiers relevant again

This entry was posted in Barack Obama Michelle Bachmann Sarah Palin Sounds of Soldiers US Election on by

I started writing Sounds of Soldiers on November 1st 2008. It’s a near future travelogue satire on the presumptions and world view of technothrillers which takes place, mostly, after a big dumb war. Given when I started it, I always saw it as what could happen if “the wrong people” won the US elections.

Thankfully Obama won. His presidency may be turning out a huge disappointment, but just imagine how much worse it would have been if McCain/Palin had won. The simplified back story of Sounds of Soldiers was that McCain keeled over after a couple of years in one of the most stressful jobs in the world, Palin took over and the stupid just cascaded from there until the Americans were bombing their European allies and ordering their soldiers to run amok across the continent. This is mostly alluded to, but there is at least one mention of “the mad woman” taking over.

The mad woman was Palin, of course, but now Michelle Bachmann has come along as the Tea Party’s preferred Republican candidate and she may be even more scary. So Sounds of Soldiers is relevant again (well, Palin never went away, I guess Bachmann makes it more relevant).

Sounds of Soldiers is available from

Amazon UK
Amazon US
Amazon DE
Smashwords
In print from Lulu

The Solar System for simpletons

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Bill O’Reilly is a well known and, sadly, influential US TV pundit. He specialises in a brand of arrogant ignorance which is amusing until you realise that a lot of Americans take it as guiding principles. He recently outdid himself by claiming that tides were evidence for God. When it was pointed out to him that it’s been known for centuries that tides are driven primarily by the Moon (with a 30% or so input from the Sun) he came back with a selection of questions designed to silence his critics-

“How’d the moon get here? Look, you pinheads who attacked me for this, you guys are just desperate. How’d the moon get here? How’d the sun get there? How’d it get there? Can you explain that to me? How come we have that and Mars doesn’t have it?”

Tough, tough questions. Which have all been answered, of course. Starts with a Bang gives short, coherent answers to all of O’Reilly’s questions. It’s just a shame that neither he nor the majority of his followers will bother to read them and actually learn something.

But, as a bonus, here’s a clip from The Colbert Report which was included in the post-

Will Amazon ban Switzerland?

This entry was posted in American Idiots censorship Facts and Fictions Kindle Sounds of Soldiers on by

Amazon is suffering from user fury again, but on a smaller scale than over their behaviour towards Wikileaks. They have recently been deleting books from their Kindle store without giving a reason beyond a generic statement that “these books were removed from sale for violating our content guidelines.” The content guidelines are very vague about what subject matter would be in violation, but the books removed have been primarily about adult incest fantasies. Not a subject that many people are comfortable with but not one which is explicitly barred from their site. What’s more, the banning of books has the appearance of being arbitrary, as other books with similar, or even more bizarre, subjects have not been banned.

Most likely, after a furore about a self-described paedophiles’ handbook a few weeks ago, Amazon have become more nervous about complaints and are knee-jerk jumping to ban almost anything which is complained about. They’re a commercial entity, they have every right to run their business this way. But it could harm them in the long run if they are seen to be doing the censors’ work for them and harming free speech. If the banning net is cast any wider every one of the independent authors publishing through Amazon would have reasons to be nervous. Sounds of Soldiers could be viewed as anti-American (to paraphrase one of the Dilbert collections, I’m not anti-American, I’m anti-idiot), and goodness knows there’s a lot of very loud, very dim Americans who’d gladly complain about that if they were told to. I reckon I’d be safe, but you never know. The best solution would be for Amazon to either include a list of subjects they will not sell (eg. incest, paedophilia, bestiality, biographies of talent show contestants etc.) and stick to it (not the preferred method, even if it would clear Jedward and SuBo from their shelves) or be more open, and more open to counter persuasion, with the people whose books they do ban.

On the subject of incest, the upper house of the Swiss parliament has drafted a law which would decriminalise consenting sex between adult family members.

Daniel Vischer, a Green party MP, said he saw nothing wrong with two consenting adults having sex, even if they were related.

“Incest is a difficult moral question, but not one that is answered by penal law,” he said.

There are some obvious jokes about a certain bunch of castaways, but does this also put a whole country in danger of being delisted by the world’s biggest bookseller?

There’s crazy, there’s stupid and there’s pompous. And then there’s Glenn Beck 1

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Yes, the Obama administration want to kill Glenn Beck. In Glenn Beck’s head. There’s a reason I have a category called American Idiots.

Point of Contact shall feature a character called Ben Glock (unless I change my mind and use the man himself because no parody could be as extremely stupid as he is), who will look like a balloon on a stick propped inside a bad suit and saying the dumbest things possible whilst thinking he’s being clever.

Congratulations to the USA on joining the civilised world 2

This entry was posted in American Idiots Barack Obama on by

More or less. The USA has taken a big step towards having a healthcare system they can be proud of.

I can’t be the only person who’s watched this unfold and felt that the Republicans weren’t opposed for ideological reasons but out of fear. By doing the right thing- making life easier for millions of people- Barack Obama will win a huge number of votes. The Republicans are facing years in the wilderness, no wonder they were scared of health care reform.

That damned liberal biased Bible!

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From Conservapedia, the project set up to counter the liberal bias of Wikipedia (ie its insistence on editing out lies) comes the Conservative Bible Project. [Right now that link doesn’t work, it may be back by the time you click on it.]

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias

2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity

3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level

4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms as they develop; defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words which have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.

5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as “gamble” rather than “cast lots”; using modern political terms, such as “register” rather than “enroll” for the census

6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.

7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning

8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story

9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels

10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”

More information at Thoughts From Kansas.

The American Right are revolting!

This entry was posted in American Idiots Facts and Fictions Glenn Beck Sounds of Soldiers US Election USA on by

That’s revolting as in disgusting, nauseating and horrific. They think they mean revolting as in starting a revolution but, as usual, they’re wrong.

Sounds of Soldiers was based upon the premise that McCain/Palin stole the 2008 election then McCain keeled over and left the mad woman to play out her apocalypse fantasy with the world’s biggest military machine. Glenn Beck’s wet dreams, if realised, could plausibly lead to the same catastrophe.

Barack Obama’s real birth certificate finally revealed 1

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Or Nirth Certifikit, as Little Green Footballs calls it. LGF used to be home to some of the most hateful, uninformed, racist arseholes imagineable (based upon the few times I visited, which were unpleasant enough to keep me away for a long time). Now it seems to be one of the few relatively sensible right wing blogs in the USA. Anyone who upsets the idiots at Stop The ACLU is fine by me.

Sarah Palin wants to sue the internet

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Sarah Palin resigned as governor of Alaska on Friday. So news organisations and bloggers have been speculating about her reasons. The mad woman has tweeted a few comments about getting the truth out to the American people and had her lawyer send out threats to anyone she thinks will say things she doesn’t want heard.

This is the woman some fools want to run for President of the USA in 2012. (She’s also the inspiration for the big war in Sounds Of Soldiers. I imagined a world where McCain won last year’s election then died, leaving a scary, incoherent, ignorant woman in charge of the most powerful military in the world.)