Progress and Terms

Head Nurse Cake is on the job!

My brain surgery with Doc Curry was on May 28th. That’s 33 days ago—a hair over one month; almost, but not quite, five weeks ago.

I’m finally feeling like I have a tiny shred of energy and that I WILL, in fact, recover from this latest tumor excavation bullshit. This may/probably sounds like a piffling accomplishment to you BUT, for the past four mornings in a row, I’ve been able to get up, walk to the can, do my business and then stand up long enough to wash my face AND brush my teeth! This is big.

Also, for the first time since before the op, I slept through the night! Well, mostly. What’s important is that every time I woke, I was able to drift back into Dreamland. I haven’t felt this way refreshed in over a month.

YEA!

In other news (and corridors of my bean), I’m wondering do I really need to bother remembering all the new phrases and terms that come out each election cycle?

There’s the Overton Window.

The Overton window is a political theory that refers to the range (or window) of policies that the public will accept.

The idea is that any policy falling outside the Overton window is out of step with public opinion and the current political climate, and formulated to try and shift the Overton window in a different direction, or to expand it to be wider.

You will usually hear the Overton window used in relation to the centre ground, and whether a certain party has managed to shift it to the left or right. (source)

Did the egregiously on-the-take Supreme Court try to force shift the Overton window by killing Roe? Or was their not-so-smooth-move no more than a stupid, power drunk, premature ejaculation of authoritarianism?

An aside: I’m still amazed that the Republican party is running a quadrice-indicted, twice-impeached, popular-vote-losing, adderall-huffing, insurrection-leading, testimony-ducking, judge-threatening, witness-tampering, disabled-veteran-dishonoring, language-mangling, serial-sex-assaulting, draft-dodging, daughter-perving, hush-money-paying, real-estate-scamming, justice-obstructing, classified-war-plan-thieving, horse-paste-promoting, tax-evading, evidence-destroying, charity-defrauding, money-laundering, diaper-overloading, 91-count, fluorescent tangerine racist felony factory currently cowering under the covers down in his excruciatingly tasteless bedbug-infested Florida golf motel. (to borrow from the tremendous Jeff Tiedrich) 

I realize that a full third of this ignorant, benighted country’s citizens will vote for a dead stoat over a candidate who tells the truth and isn’t racist OR misogynistic, as long as said dead stoat claims to be a “christian” (but only one of the greed-is-good, fuck-your-neighbors, hate-everyone-different-from-yourself denominations). STILL—seems pretty shortsighted for the entire damn party to go all in on a transparent, incompetent mob boss clown who wears more makeup than KISS (and applies it nowhere near as skillfully). Was this originally a bet between oligarchs? Ya know, MusKKK and the Koch’s, over a bottle of Macallan 1926, are wondering how far down the rabbit hole of idiocy have they/could they lead the sheep. If we can get them to vote for old Donnie, we can make them do anything!

Stochastic Terrorism entered my vocab courtesy of the sundowning convicted felon, the Mango Maniac. What is it?

stochastic terrorism, the repeated use of hate speech or other vilifying, dehumanizing rhetoric by a political leader or other public figure that inspires one or more of the figure’s supporters to commit hate crimes or other acts of violence against a targeted person, group, or community. (source)

Trump, Trumpism and all his pointy headed acolytes. The Republican Party is a stochastic terrorist group.

What is Gish gallop? The always clear and brill Heather Cox Richardson neatly explains:

“It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.

It is a form of gaslighting…” (source) 

Essentially, Gish gallop is a tidy, concise way of saying the fucker just stood up there spewing his worm, drug and privilege decimated brain’s diarrheal lies and hate with overwhelming firehose speed and force.

Yeah, if I can remember the difference between meningiomas, vestibular schwannomas, craniopharyngiomas, neurofibromas, hemangiopericytomas and more, I can remember a few new political terms.