Another Mikey Goes Berserk - What's With These Psycho Mikeys?

Mike Grimm(left) , and Pastor Mike - in his latest selfie.

Seriously now, what's with all these Mikeys going berserk? Is it something to do with the name, or is it some hormone (testosterone) over-production leading to insane behavior and acts or what? Inquiring minds want to know!  Recall that we had already seen, some two years ago, a "pastor" by the name of Mike who wanted to put all atheists into a National Registry of Atheists - like a sex offender registry. This whacko actually wanted atheists to be singled out and identifiable the same way sex offenders are for current state registries! The bozo actually claimed, I shit you not:

 "I mean, think about it. There are already National Registrys [sic] for convicted sex offenders, ex-convicts, terrorist cells, hate groups like the KKK, skinheads, radical Islamists, etc. This type of 'National Registry' would merely be for information purposes."

Right! Whose information?

Then, more recently, we beheld the nutso Reep Mike Rogers, going off half -cocked and accusing Patriot Edward Snowden of being in league with "Russian Intelligence".  Without a shred of hard evidence, and in contradiction to an earlier conclusion reportedly  reached by NSA,  this turkey actually said:

"I believe there's questions to be answered there! I don't think it was a gee-whiz luck event that he ended up in Moscow under the handling of the [Russian intelligence service] FSB.”

Now, we have another Mike, this one named Michael Grimm, who - as reported by Rachel Maddow three nights ago, actually confronted a reporter trying to ask him a question and going off on him with f-bombs and threatening to hurl him over a railing, after saying he'd "break him like a boy". At which point Rachel rightly asked, "Wait, do boys break more easily than men?"  Apart from the fact he implicitly insulted the reporter in making the threat. 

Grimm, an ex-Marine, displayed all the bravado and fake macho that we've beheld in a certain other "Mike"  ex-Marine, who's bragged about how many bat and tire chain fights he's been in, and how many times he's broken skulls and had his broken. (No shit!)   The difference is that while the latter Mike is a nobody sitting in his den somewhere in FLA blogging baloney and hate against "homos, blacks, and libtards", Mike Grimm is an actual representative from NY  - somehow getting in on the Tea Party bandwagon in 2010. That means how he acts and what he does - especially to other citizens - has far more  import than a wannabe backwoods pseudo-preacher blogger.

Meanwhile, this current Mikey's history evidently precedes him, as Rachel noted and as others have exposed an unstable, possibly dangerous goon. That much was obvious in the video in which he corners and threatens NY1 reporter Michael Scotto. His act may not have surprised readers of The New Yorker’s 2011 profile of Grimm, which describes the 1999 night that Grimm, brandishing a gun, terrorized a nightclub full of people in search of a man with whom he’d fought earlier.

What is it with these aggressive asshole Mikes, anyway? Do they all eat the same GMO-manufactured crap and feed off the same prion-tainted beef? Is that what turns them into screwball rage-aholics replete with all the macho posturing ? Or is it something else? Maybe an inferiority complex? Like they are out of their depth and know it.

And once more, like Mike Rogers, we have the earlier lawman background. As noted in a recent piece (The Real Problem with Dangerous Goon Michael Grimm)  on salon.com by Alex Pareene :


Grimm’s actions that night at the Caribbean Tropics nightclub in Queens would have likely put a regular citizen in jail for years. But Grimm was not a regular citizen: He was an FBI agent at the time, and thus, after an internal investigation, he received no punishment at all.

Pareene went on to cite former Grimm opponent, Dem Mark Murphy, who opined that maybe Grimm is a victim of roid-rage, from steroids. But really, this level of anger doesn't require drugs to attain, only the right (wrong?) political persuasion - the arch-conservative individualist bully. In this case, as Pareene observes: "Grimm is just what happens when the worst sort of hyper-aggressive lawman transitions into another field where being a short-tempered bullying prick is rewarded rather than punished: Conservative politics"

Cut those benefits! Take the kid's food away, because his parents are deprived of food stamps or unemployment benefits! Meanwhile, by virtue of this cutting, slow down the nation's growth. Nearly 1 % of GDP is believed to have been lost in the last quarter, thanks to GOP- demanded austerity measures - the major one being to no extension of unemployment benefits for the long term unemployed.

But this is the natural attitude that really binds all these 'Mikes' in common. Be the bully, the one who pushes around the weakest, the most vulnerable, including kids. Then call yourself a "man".  But the rest of us aren't fooled and we understand that brutal  macho posturing - even in the guise of conservative "tough" love economics - only renders you a mouse.

To my "Poe" Atheist Friends: Pastor Mike's Blog was not a "Poe"

As I continue to peruse google links for the extent of attention to my youngest brother, Pastor Mike Stahl (after his National Atheists' Registry proposal) I am amused by the degree to which resident net-heads are victims of their own over-think. (Ironically, it was Pastor Mike himself, in a blog about 8 months ago, who made reference to atheists as congenital "over-thinkers"). In this case it concerns whether his blog - and specifically his National Registry proposal - was a "Poe" or for real.

Now, for those who are blissfully unaware, according to the word gurus at Wikipedia :

"Poe's Law was originally formulated by Nathan Poe in August 2005.[2] The law emerged at the Creation & Evolution forum on the website Christianforums.com.[3] Like most such places, it had seen a large number of creationist parody postings and these parody posts were usually followed by at least one user starting a flame war (a series of angry and offensive personal attacks) thinking it was a real post. Nathan Poe summarized this pattern in his original formulation of the law:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake it for the genuine article. "

And subsequently (ibid.):

"However, the usage of the law has grown, and now the term "Poe" is almost synonymous with any parody on the internet. "

Well, maybe...except if you're his for real (blood) brother who has expended something like 2 gigs debating this guy and trying to instill some rational sense into him! And also beheld the gigs HE has put up on any number of fundamentalist topics near and dear to his heart.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but no "Poe" devotes or expends THAT much energy! In other words, make no frickin' mistake that all Pastor Mike's blog positions are honestly and sincerely held and not remotely "parodies". (As I've often kidded him, he wouldn't recognize parody or irony if either came up to him and bit him on the butt.)

So why this pre-occupation with insinuations and speculations that this or that blog is a "Poe" when the answer ought to be patently obvious to anyone with a grain of common sense?

I trace this back to the "Facebook" effect, and the counterfactual nature of web reality itself which is now infecting millions of brains, mainly those of the young -say between 17- 29- putting them through multiple hysteresis loops toward an ultimate dumb down. It's not pretty to see, which is why I avoid most blogs - unless some unique event is triggered (such as my brother's proposed registry and the reactive outcry) that bids me to visit them out of curiosity.

Much of this brain degeneration has already been dealt with by author Mark Bauerlein in his The Dumbest Generation. In his book he depressingly documents how the under-30 crowd are foregoing knowledge-based maturity to wallow in a self-confected, solipsistic, social mirror world of their own egos and selves. The fallout includes their not even meeting basic standards of knowledge for employment, far less earning a degree that actually means anything.

One dire consequence as regards higher level analysis and thinking (of which the "Poe" syndrome is an imitator): A delimited reality is confected via over-exposure which deliberately excludes the harsh outside world, and confines the personalized reality to chirpy “how r ya’s”, or gossip, mainly in deformed English which Bauerlein ranks just above the reading level of pre-school children’s books (determined by the median frequency of rare or difficult words per 1000 – with print newspapers at the top with 68.3 and pre-school books at 16.3)

The entire mental superstructure was revealed in the words of one 16 year old girl quoted (p. 137-38) when asked by a journalist if she wasn’t worried that she was denied a broader picture. Her illuminating retort: “I’m not trying to get a broader picture, I’m trying to get what I want”.

Out of the mouths of “babes”! But are we really helping to engender a generation of über-dumpkopfs? Maybe, maybe not. At the very least the Twitter-Facebook obsession (compulsion?) may be contributing to the emergence of a generation of pseudo-intellectual Babbits governed by their own opinions, supported by very little factual basis. (See for example how many are totally invested in the "Poe" paradigm despite objective reality screaming at them: Wake the fuck up, bozo!) How can they assimilate a factual basis when the language to describe much of what is happening in the world’s most critical domains exceeds the language difficulty level to which they’re accustomed?

Just take what’s happening in the world of global finance with seminal events in Greece, Spain. the UK, Portugal and now the U.S. (last month) with the down graded bond rating. Do these net-wits even know what a bond rating is? Do they understand the full repercussions? Hell, do they understand the difference between a demand poor economic environment and a supply-poor one? Can they describe the basis of the Pareto distribution?

Who knows?

Are most electronic media addicts even aware that a Greek-style austerity crash might see them pawning their laptops at the nearest pawn shop just to buy a few Mickey D burgers and fries! How many of the Twitter-Facebook generation are aware of any of this? How many even think it’s relevant to their lives? (Well, maybe they will when their college loans are affected, new conditions applied, e.g. higher interest rates, or college tuition, room and board etc. are increased 50% or more).

Or wait! Maybe they think all the Standard & Poor's kerfuffle was just one big POE!

Any person can basically access an electronic medium if they apply even minimal effort, that includes cell phones, TV, video games and twitter. Any person can also employ those media to blab nonsense, gossip or indulge in aimless chatter. But what defines the adult mind is whether it can tackle a serious print work such as Being and Nothingness, The Origin of Species, The Origins of the Federal Reserve System, or ‘Relativity’ – the popular rendering of special and general relativity by Albert Einstein. Thus, the barrier to adult intellectual capacity is breached once one proves he or she can handle the latter.

And, IF one can handle the latter, then he is most likely going to be mentally able to discriminate a genuine manifestation of a Poe, from the real (non-parodied) McCoy.

As for Pastor Mike, let's get real for once and not let a faux skepticism cloud what is abundantly obvious...or should be!

Internet Hive Mind: Almost....hived out!

Well, it's been a hellacious last 4 days for my youngest brother, Pastor Mike. Who would have thought that one of his (typical) blog posts left from LAST September would have incited such internet fury and outcry currently? I mean, talk about delayed reaction anyone! But it just goes to show that the optics of the web and internet are often different from reality. While in reality if I found a sealed letter from a cousin with a postmark from a year ago, and on opening found he'd written that he thought I was a candidate for the looney bin, I wouldn't NOW call him up and pile on...sending it hither, thither and yon...to everyone I knew. No, the very fact of extended displacement in time, would advise against that. Hence, nonreaction would be more rational than losing it.

But on the net? Hell, no way! Time literally stands still and doesn't pass. Talk about "time dilation" in special relativity. Time dilation effects on the net are even more impressive since they occur and one isn't even traveling at light speed!

Anyway, what the "Pastor Mike" incident also reveals is a kind of human hive mind at work on the web. One atheist blog (I believe from PZ Myers) just happened to turn up a one year old blog of Mike's about a "national registry for atheists" and all hell breaks loose as the diffusion of the meme ("this hillbilly crazy pastor's out to get us') goes to work.

And so, even today, four days after the net-based memetic diffusion commenced, I'm still reading comments on it by everyone from Amy Alkon to jurisprudence expert Jonathan Turley - and viewing several entertaining Youtube performances as well. (Including from a limey who really does a good impersonation of a fascist out to get "gingers").

There are also still some of the over top comments being left on atheist blogs, not quite, but approximately of the same tenor as the hateful, threatening emails sent to Mike.

Look, I have a kind of love-hate relationship with my pastor bro. I believe he does have a bully complex and this probably evolved from being beaten up all the time as the youngest, by three older brothers. That was how it was with us! That was how we showed our "love" when we weren't ganging up on Lutheran kids walking the streets of Milwaukee in the 50s and pounding their heads into the sidewalks. (Hell, don't blame us! We were brainwashed by the nuns to convert Lutherans else they'd face eternal fires. Since most resisted we resorted to some off hand techniques...and we were only 6, 7, and 9!)

At the same time, as family and blood, I haven't been able to abide the outrageous email attacks on him...over a freakin' year old blog. Reading some of those (that he sent me), the first thought that came to mind was "Can't these fuckin' people get a LIFE?"

Are they so tied to their blinking monitors that the monitors become their confined reality? How about instead of firing off an email on how you want to slash open his belly, you go outside, pull some weeds, grab some fresh air and get back in touch with NATURE?

And then there was a thread about Pastor Mike on one freethought -atheist blog that questioned (obviously re-posted emails from him) that they were real as opposed to examples of "Poe's law", and debating sophisticated manifestations of this "law" and whether Mike's criteria met them (about the dumbest ass things I ever read). Others also questioned that the hate he reported was really as bad as claimed. When I posted examples, with a link to my earlier blog:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/08/atheists-have-to-show-more-tolerance.html


One clueless bozo replied conceding the hate, but then - in response to my call for a higher atheist standard - saying one ought not use "retard" either. Obviously referencing the few occasions I did use that for assorted numb nuts who deserved it.

As I replied to him, that may not be the "highest standard" but it was still a damned sight different (and preferable!) to employing violent speech in which words are expressed concerning actual physical retribution such as: "stomping" a person "on the back of the head", leaving him "to die in horrible, agonizing pain" or vowing (to Mike) to "have your stomach sliced open and your entrails spilled out"

As I informed this nitwit (who complained about the use of "retard"), that was a clear example of a syndrome too widespread on the net: conflating extreme violent speech with merely generic ad hominem and pro forma snark which is as ubiquitous on the net as emoticons. And anyone who doesn't see that is blind, stupid or both.

My point? Yes, in the ideal world of human social networking and commerce we would refrain from referring to each other as "retards", "assholes" and "ass wads". But given the intensity of much debate today, that's like asking most of us to sprout wings and become angels.

However, despite that failing - which I admit to freely - it does not warrant using violent speech or rhetoric merely because one violently disagrees with another! People, to get schooled on this, can go back and read my own responses to lots of Pastor Mike's previous claims - which while it does get vehement, never ever crosses over the line to threaten bodily harm, or even imagine it for him.

Would that my atheist brethren could learn that too....and maybe they can when this storm in a net teacup finally blows over and they gain some perspective.