Showing posts sorted by date for query dreher. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query dreher. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Tuesday, November 19, 2019

THE NIGHT THEY DROVE CHICK-FIL-A DOWN.

I'm opening to the general public (that's you guys!) the latest issue of my newsletter, about Rod Dreher's extended shitfit over Chick-fil-A's disinvestments. Longtime readers may recall my writing at the Village Voice in 2012 about how a couple of colleges booted the fast food chain for its president's homophobic sentiments and conservatives went nuts, making special "Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day" trips (or saying they did) to gorge on waffle fries and show the gays and gay-lovers that nobody out-grievances the Right. Sample:
“Tastes Like Liberty,” said Doug Ross. “Tasted like freedom,” said Mollie Hemingway. They must have changed the formula since we ate there. 
“80% of the folks at the tables [at the food court] were sporting Chick-fil-A bags. Taco Bell and Sbarro’s shared the rest of the tables, it seemed, with Five Guys, a very popular Washington area burger chain,” reported Robert Morrison of the Family Research Council. “‘I’ve had enough of those ‘gaystapo tactics,’ we heard one diner say.” 
“The Chick-fil-A controversy has no doubt been polarizing in some corners of the country,” said Mark Hemingway of the Weekly Standard, “but the undeniable success of yesterday’s nationwide rally to support the fast food chain means we’re likely to remember August 1, 2012 as Silent Majority Day.” 
It was a watershed (or a Diet-Mr.-Pibbshed) for late-stage homo-haters, and the news that CfA had removed some investments in gay-averse charities hit several of them hard, though few as hard as Rod.

Astonishingly, Dreher is not the author of the stupidest thing written on the subject. This is from John Hinderaker of Power Line:
I won’t stop eating at Chick-fil-A on account of this retreat, but I won’t do it with the same enthusiasm, either.
And some people think John McCain was a hero!

UPDATE. Yikes, Dreher's got a third Chick-fil-A post:
About Chick-fil-A, I know you liberals are laughing at us, drawing comparisons between Thomas More and a chicken shack.
Yep! Bye!

Friday, October 25, 2019

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



Selections from Melvin Van Peebles'
Ain't Supposed To Die a Natural Death --
performed at the motherfucking TONYS.
Miss me with your
Hamilton bullshit, honkies.
(Check also a young Garrett Morris.)

•   I am releasing to you good people who have yet to subscribe to Roy Edroso Breaks It Down a free issue from Wednesday -- it's about Tulsi Gabbard's non-victory tour of rightwing media outlets since Hillary Clinton called her out, and how I expected it to evolve, and man, was I on the money or what:
To prove Clinton wrong, Gabbard went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show Thursday night — she and Hannity both touted mistaken initial reporting that Clinton had claimed Russia, not Republicans, were “grooming” her for a third-party run — and blamed Clinton (a former senator and secretary of state) for the last 18 years of U.S. wars, then echoed Republican complaints about the “transparency” of the House impeachment inquiry.
And get this:
Tulsi Gabbard, fresh off her nasty tussle with former first lady, secretary of state, and 2016 Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, was given a hero's welcome at a meeting with Wall Street executives and potential donors on Wednesday evening in New York City that took place at Anthony Scaramucci’s Hunt and Fish Club restaurant, FOX Business has learned...
"Tulsi is a rock star," said one Wall Street heavy hitter who attended. "She's warm and smart, people in the room loved her."
I'm beginning to suspect Gabbard is being worked on in Dr. Jillenstein's lab for third-party service.

•  Conservatives are trying to pump up the case of a seven-year-old biological boy who identifies as a girl; the child's divorced mother supports this but, after shitfits by Greg Abbott and Ted Cruz, her ex-husband, who's against the transition, has been given a say in the matter by a court. (The child is not currently undergoing hormone treatments, though wingnuts talk as if she were.) The Daily Beast has good coverage, revealing that the old man is a fraudster:
Younger [the husband] and Georgulas separated in 2015. In marriage annulment proceedings, a court awarded Georgulas more than $45,000 in damages for a truck Younger fraudulently purchased in his name through her company. Georgulas also accused Younger of fabricating his background before they married....
A court took this fraud seriously enough to grant Georgulas an annulment. You won't learn about this, natch, in coverage such at that of The Federalist, which also insists that the kid doesn't really want to be a girl -- and, double natch, you won't learn anything about it from Rod Dreher, who doesn't seem to know about the annullment :
It’s a horrifying situation. It sounds like a terrible divorce. Granted, it is hard for anybody outside a failed marriage to know its internal dynamics.
LOL. Dreher, triple natch, is beating pots and pans to portray this unusual case as a harbinger of the trans menace: "The situation with the Younger boy in Texas looks like it’s serving as a wake-up call to people all over the country about how far the trans ideology has spread, and how much it has captured institutions," he writes under the headline "When They Come For Your Kid." This is consistent with his years-long drive to reverse all the protections gained by non-binary people. Oh, by the way, from the Dallas Morning News (Dreher's old paper):
Texas leads the nation in transgender murders. After the latest attack, the Dallas trans community asks why
Frankly, I don't think they need to ask.

•  Speaking of rightwing tropes, you may have noticed a lot of conservatives -- from Steve Scalise's Mooks Brothers Rioters to Tulsi Gabbard -- demanding "transparency" from the Democrats on Trump's impeachment. Well, to paraphrase the old saying: when you have the law pound the law, when you have the facts pound the facts, and when you have neither pound your pud.

The most pathetic of this lot is, to me, National Review's Kevin D. Williamson. He likes to play internet tuff guy, and his normal attitude toward the Constitution is hey, them's the rules and if you don't like 'em, tough. As he told Bill Maher in August:
“Like me, you don’t trust big masses of people because they tend to be stupid and easy to scare. All of the best things about our Constitution are the anti-democratic stuff like the Bill of Rights, which is America’s great big list of stuff you idiots don’t get to vote on..."
Welp, here comes impeachment, which is one of those Constitutional things the "big masses of people" have no say in, and Tuff Guy Williamson is pleading to "Bring Impeachment into the Light":
And so we are obliged to ask the question: Who in Washington has the moral authority, the political intelligence, and the patriotism to see the country through this episode in a way that fortifies our institutions rather than undermines them, that leaves the country better off rather than damaged, that builds trust instead of pissing it away? 
Answer: Nobody. 
Trust is not an option. That leaves us with the second-best option: surveillance. 
And so Nancy Pelosi must end the secret hearings and closed-door depositions, and put the process, the politics, and the evidence before the public.
Bullshit she "must," buddy. Man, there's nothing more obnoxious than a tuff guy who starts crying for mercy.

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

YOUNGEST LIVING REAGAN DEMOCRAT TELLS ALL.

The New York Times does it again!
Why Are Democrats Jilting G.O.P. Voters Who Want to Like Them?
I just want to like you, Demmycrats, but you insist on killing babies and letting immigrants see a doctor when they're sick, says Ericka Andersen -- described by the Times only as "a freelance writer in Indianapolis," but, David Klion notices, a longtime rightwing operative, writer for The Federalist, and former "Online Media Director for GOP House Leadership  under Vice-President Mike Pence." So you can tell she's ready to consider voting for a Democrat!

Andersen:
Under President Trump, a small slice of America’s electorate seeks a reason to call the Democratic Party home for the very first time. But without adequate hospitality to welcome them, they will disappear quickly.
Is she talking about those Trump voters the Times breathlessly apotheosizes every couple of weeks? I get the impression Andersen seeks to rep a more upscale conservative constituency -- the kind who don't fly Confederate flags but post endlessly on Nextdoor about black hoodlums dragging down their real estate values.
With a few exceptions on particular policies, the Democratic presidential field neglects abundant pools of potential Democrat converts, leaving persuadable audiences — like independents and Trump-averse, anti-abortion Christians (some of whom are white evangelicals) — without options.
The exception is Representative Tulsi Gabbard, the candidate making the most visible effort to help moderates and newbies feel included.
Holy fuck -- she's pushing Reason magazine's favorite Democrat! True, a lot of conservatives who cheered Gabbard for challenging Obama's foreign policy fall off the wagon whenever she claps back at Trump's -- see the mean MAGA comments to her condemnation of Trump turning our armed forces into Saudi rent-a-cops -- but Gabbard has something that Andersen and dozens like her will always love -- the potential to fuck up the Democrats in 2020! She's a Jill Stein they can jerk off to.

It seems Andersen mainly likes Gabbard -- despite Gabbard's positions like Medicare for All which, I'm pretty sure, the former Pence operative does not endorse -- because abortion:
She has a progressive agenda that includes Medicare for All, but she’s also one of only two candidates who supports abortion restrictions in the third trimester. “Unless a woman’s life or severe health consequences is at risk,” she told the conservative podcast host Dave Rubin, “then there shouldn’t be abortion in the third trimester.”
If this op-ed achieves anything, it will be to make more Democrats dislike Gabbard. Which will make more Republicans like her! It's two-and-a-half-D chess.
Appearing on right-leaning media is another clue that she’s serious about attracting new voters (something Andrew Yang, the businessman candidate, has also prioritized.) 
Oh God, that asshole. Anyway, why should Democrats nominate an abortion moderate, what would they gain? Andersen (author of, I swear to God, "Peter Buttigieg Loves God’s Creation When It’s A Rainbow But Not When It’s A Baby") does the non-math:
The voters are there, according to FiveThirtyEight. Younger white evangelical Christians now view Mr. Trump far less favorably than their parents’ generation: 60 percent of those 44 and under saw the president as “very” or “somewhat” favorable, compared with 80 percent of those 45 or older. 
I have a sneaking suspicion that of you're a young white evangelical Christian who doesn't like Trump, you're a Rod Dreher "King Cyrus" type who will cry about Trump's vulgarity all the way to the polling station to vote for him. (Either that or you're secretly gay and it's gonna go off like a bomb at Thanksgiving so have your traveling shoes polished, honey.)
And independents leaning right, who may have voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, hover around 10 percent of the electorate. There’s no guarantee that this translates to voting for the Democratic candidate in 2020...
LOL
...but speaking as a member of this group, I think the opportunity exists where it once didn’t.
Speaking as someone not born yesterday, GTFOOH. We're not (Andersen actually writes) "quick to placate culture warriors who demonize those with traditional beliefs about sex and gender" -- we actually think gay and trans people are cool and have rights and we're not going to trade them away so you'll maybe decide to vote Democrat for the first time in your awful Jesus freak life.

Thursday, September 26, 2019

CRUMBS, MARY, WHY DON'T YOU JUST KISS HER ALREADY?

King of the JustTheTip Trumpers Rod Dreher, shortly after doing one of his highly outraged Look What Trump Has Done This Time posts, says good conservatives should defend Trump because he's like Edwin Edwards, because he's crooked but acceptable as opposed to "the Left" -- that is to say, Democrats including (I shit you not) Joe Biden, whom Dreher excoriates for his defense of "radical transgender rights" -- which is like David Duke, the Klansman Edwards defeated in the 1991 Louisiana governor's race:
It’s hard to express strongly enough how much both conservatives and good-government liberals despised Edwin Edwards. He was, and remains, a clever man, but also a symbol of good ol’ boy Louisiana political corruption. To find oneself in a position to have to vote for EWE because that was the only way to keep a Klucker out of the governor’s mansion was revolting. I can remember to this day standing in the voting booth and pulling the lever for Edwards — something I never, ever imagined doing.
I bet that's not to only time Dreher had to overcome his disgust before "pulling the lever."
As regular readers know, I did not vote in the 2016 presidential race (it didn’t matter; my state was heavily pro-Trump), but if I end up voting for Trump in 2020, it’ll be a VFTC:II thing.
"If I end up voting for Trump"? He must think his readers are awfully stupid. With good reason tho!
It’s easy to see how Trump is analogous to EWE (though unlike Trump, EWE was quite competent).
Oh for fuck's sake.
But how can the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates possibly be analogized in any way to David Duke?
A non-lunatic would have stopped there, balled up his laptop and thrown it in the trash. But not Dreher: He argues that even though "Duke’s political positions were mostly boilerplate Reagan conservatism... everybody knew that Duke was no ordinary Republican." (Boy, there's a statement that could use some examination!) So many Republicans rebuffed him to avoid "mainstreaming a truly hateful figure."

Of course, from my vantage point in 2019, it looks like mainstreaming a truly hateful figure is Republican strategy and David Duke -- now an ardent Trump fan -- was a prophet of the party's future. But Dreher says no, the Democrats are the Klansmen, because abortion and whatnot:
What about immigration? Am I happy with the way Trump has handled the immigration issue? No. But unlike Elizabeth Warren, his likely 2020 rival, he is not for open borders. Biden has been evasive on his immigration stance, but I have every confidence that he will move to the far left.
As a Christian, it's important to maintain the baby cages to prevent a Mexican from working at my local gas and go.

Oh, and before we leave the topic I have to include some classic Dreherisms. To wit:
Remember Nina Burleigh? She’s the journalist who, back during the Clinton impeachment proceedings, said that she would fellate Clinton herself to thank him for preserving abortion rights. At the time, conservatives (including me) cited that as an example of how corrupt liberals were. Just look at that so-called feminist, carrying water for that dirtbag Bill Clinton! we said. Where are her morals now? 
In retrospect, Burleigh was right... 
Yeah, it was gross. But from a pro-choice feminist point of view, it was defensible. Trump has turned a lot of us into Nina Burleigh Conservatives.
Just close your eyes and think of the Rapture! On the other hand:
UPDATE.2: I’m struggling with this. I’m going to think out loud here for a minute.
It's 4 a.m. and he's still got his pants on. But when your date is Donald Trump, I imagine the idea is to hold out until he gets rough.

Tuesday, September 17, 2019

QUACK.

Rod Dreher, better known for his obsession with gays, transsexuals, and cuddly neofascist dictators, has branched into medicine with disastrous results:
You might remember the post here about “Moralistic Therapeutic Med School,” in which medical schools are starting to remove or relocate images of white men affiliated with the school who accomplished great things.
Ah, yes, I remember -- it was bullshit.
This is about something related, but much more serious. 
A reader who is a physician sent me this WSJ op-ed column the other day. He said that this is bad news for the medical profession. The author is Stanley Goldfarb, a former administrator at Penn’s medical school. Excerpts:
Goldfarb's brief op-ed, "Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns," is just a series of grump-farts -- he complains, for example, of being "chastised by a faculty member for not including a program on climate change in the course of study" at his med school. Ooooh, how SJW! But Goldfarb's real bugbear is the "educational specialists" he encounters who "emphasize 'social justice' that relates to health care only tangentially" and "focus on eliminating health disparities..."

In case you don't know (and Dr. Golfarb seems to hope you don't), this is something known as population health, to which Goldfarb refers as if it were some ghastly new fad like rainbow parties but which has been around for decades and is studied by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and thousands of scholars and think tanks. It is not something working MDs do instead of treating their patients. Even holy Mike Pence employed a few such experts for his Healthy Indiana Medicaid initiative, from which Seema Verma was promoted to CMS Administrator, in which capacity she often talks about addressing "health disparities." Tell me they're SJWs!

Goldfarb also says that "teaching these issues is coming at the expense of rigorous training in medical science," an outrageous claim for which he offers absolutely zero evidence. Does he really think new doctors don't know how to treat the sick because they spent too much time on "social justice" in school? Doubtful, but I expect he knows some Journal readers will be dumb enough to buy it.

Dreher takes this all at face value, natch:
At some point, reality will take its revenge, and the woke will be banished. But how much suffering will innocent people have to endure before it does? And how many people of faith will be deterred from seeking a medical career because the militant left has placed absurd barriers to keep out the politically incorrect.
Come on, guy, can't you at least find some Young Republican who can claim he was discouraged from attending Johns Hopkins by hippies?

But wait, there's more: Dreher finds a way to connect this paranoid miasma to his transphobia. Instead of hectoring trans folks as usual, though, he tells them (from a hygienic distance) that he understands their plight because he's been there, in a sense:
I have never felt comfortable in my body, though I thought for most of my life this was simply neurosis. No, I have never had the faintest thought of gender dysphoria, but it manifested itself in something feeling … not right. Something hard to define.
Snnkkk.
To be frank, one reason I drank so much in college — aside from the fact that LSU in the 1980s had a massive binge-drinking culture — was to overcome that sense of not-rightness, so I could talk to girls. The point is, when I read about officially-diagnosed autistic young people seeking sex changes because they say they don’t feel right in their bodies, I get that. I can’t pretend to know about that from a sexualized point of view, but that sense that things aren’t right is quite familiar to me. And it never goes away. You just have to learn how to cope with it. For me, it got better as I grew older.
See, y'all don't need top surgery -- you need time and Jesus! But no, they won't listen -- these transsexuals turn away from their Savior and allow themselves to be "driven by the popular culture and the culture of medicine [!] into asking for life-changing procedures that will not actually cure them..." When Rod takes over as Patriarch of the Popes, them so-called doctors will have to dispense the Blood of the Lamb!

Dreher's materia medica is also invoked in an earlier post:
I’ve done research in the past on the phenomenon of demon possession, and it does seem to be tied closely to intense childhood trauma, especially in the family — sexual trauma in particular. There is something about trauma that cracks the psyche; sometimes, that crack is big enough for evil spirits to come in. It is certainly not the case that everyone who experiences childhood trauma become possessed! (Actual possession is rare.)
Well, there's a relief. I wonder why Doc Dreher just doesn't go the whole hog and start selling nootropics.

UPDATE. Comments are choice on this one, and one guest reminds me of this wonderful bit from Dreher's autobiographical segment:
I’ve come to see, for example, the fact that I have unusual superpowers when it comes to taste and smell to be an advantage. This is why I love food and wine so much: I can experience aromas and flavors more intensely than most people.
It's not gluttony, it's my superpower! I've laughed for two straight minutes imaging Dreher's audition for the Justice League. (For more enjoyment of Dreher's food fetish, see here.)



Tuesday, September 10, 2019

AND WE HEIL, HEIL, RIGHT IN DER FUEHRER'S FACE.

Rod Dreher's been on another of his foodie-Nazi vacations (doesn't spend much time down on the farm, does he?), this time in Hungary, and by utter, absolutely unforseeable coincidence someone decided that one of America's leading white nationalism apologists should meet Victor Orban!

You may have heard that the Hungarian prime minister is a cryptofascist who gutted the nation's top court when it gave him a hard time, took over the national media likewise, and chased a leading university out of the country because of (((Soros))), among other atrocities. But Dreher basked in the man's presence and wants you to know he's dreamy -- in fact, so mesmerized was he that though he had 90 minutes with Orban he didn't ask him any questions.
I tell you this so you readers don’t ask me why I didn’t challenge Orban on this or that policy of his government. I am perfectly aware that he is a controversial figure who has done things and pursued policy goals that are highly controversial for a number of reasons. However, this was a completely unexpected opportunity to be in the presence of one of the most extraordinary world leaders of our time, and to get a sense of his mind.
I mean, would you ask Jesus questions?
If the only thing you know about Viktor Orban is from Western media accounts, you would think that he was nothing but some kind of mafia thug. The Viktor Orban you encounter in person is very, very different from the Viktor Orban shown to Americans by our media. In Orban — who speaks good English — was energetic, fiercely intelligent, funny, self-deprecating, realistic, and at times almost pugilistic in talking about defending Hungary and her interests. 


Well, I'm convinced. In case The Leader's act wasn't enough to convince the group Dreher was part of, Orban also had on hand "Nicodemus, the Syriac Orthodox archbishop of Mosul, whose Christian community, which predates Islam by several centuries, was savagely persecuted by ISIS." What that's got to do with Hungary? Silence, mortal! Nicodemus does Flava Flav to Orban's Chuck D, ringing out every so often with "Those people, if you give them your small finger, they will want your body" and such like.

Dreher faithfully transmits Orban's messages ("Western peoples have decided to create a post-Christian, post-national, multicultural society. Peoples in Central Europe do not") and closes with what he clearly considers the convincer:
Hungary has a million problems, but Parisian-style banlieues filled with angry and unassimilable Muslim migrants, vicious institutional combat around so-called “white privilege,” and endless fights in locker rooms and libraries over gender ideology are not among them.
Yes, Paris is nothing but a wasteland of ooga-booga and trans commisssars, just like California is nothing but bum shit and New York covers up its high crime with low crime!

If you aren't convinced by Vic 'n' Nic, Dreher comes back at you with a whole extra post of Orban fan art:
[Christopher] Caldwell points out that the [Orban] anti-Soros campaign arguably did traffick in anti-Semitic rhetoric... still, that completely justifiable circumspection should in no way justify averting one’s eyes from the fact that Soros really is using his considerable fortune to liberalize Europe, and to dilute European peoples.
Well, at least he said "dilute" instead of "mongrelize." Maybe in February Dreher can jet off to Brazil and, along with the food and drink, take in Jair Bolsonaro, who will explain to the no doubt speechless American why God wants him to destroy the rainforest.

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

HEY SAL, HOW COME YOU GOT NO HONKIES ON THE WALL?

Look, I know you can open Rod Dreher's blog at The American Conservative any day of the week and get some yuks, but this new item is particularly ridic. As often, it's about how some institution is being destroyed from the inside by political correctness -- in this case, medical school.

How is it being destroyed, you ask? Are students being forced to alter prescriptions to benefit black patients? Is every tenth surgery patient to get forced gender reassignment?

No -- some pictures of white guys are being taken down at some med schools.
If it’s [any day of the week], our Very Woke Media is going to find some new way of telling the story about how white people, especially white male people, are the worst people in the world, and need to be Otherized for the common good. Yesterday it was NPR, bringing to us this “health news,” as they call it.
NPR quotes Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist with Rockefeller University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, on the 100%-male portraits of Lasker- and Nobel-winning scientists hanging in a university auditorium: "It's probably 30 headshots of 30 men. So it's imposing... I think every institution needs to go out into the hallway and ask, 'What kind of message are we sending?'"

Sputters Dreher:
Leslie Vosshall is in most respects vastly more intelligent than I am, but she is a racist, sexist nitwit. What kind of crazy person looks at portraits of a medical school’s Nobel Prize winners and other alumni who have great achievements to their name, and only sees … white men. Who are (therefore) bad people who need to be erased from public life and the institution’s memory?
The Vosshall bitch maybe knows about so-called "science" and "medicine" but by God Rod Dreher knows when white men are getting erased! Plus they got a black guy complaining about his representation! Jesus Christ, what is this, Hitler's "Woke" Germany?

Dreher also relies on this Twitter spin on the traditional Dreher Letters to Penthouse for backup:



"Afraid to say openly" yeah, I bet that means they said "who gives a shit" and Flier said "Gasp! So they got to you, too??" Do check the responses to that tweet -- many female students and MDs kick this guy's ass. And note especially this exchange:


But Dreher totally buys it:
“Afraid to say openly” — because they’re intimidated by the commissars. I keep hearing this, over and over: that people see injustices like this, and they hate it, but they keep their mouths shut because they’re afraid. Guess what, people: this is how bigotry and oppression takes root. In part because of your cowardly silence.
He gabbles on ("Liar. Bigot.") and finally gets to a doozy of a oh-yeah-what-if-it-was-black-people bit:
Let’s say we were talking about the Berklee School of Music, and most of the high-achieving graduates in jazz in the school’s history were black men. If there were a move to remove or relocate portraits of those men because it would make white students feel unwelcome or ill at ease, we would know exactly what was going on here: a racist attempt to deny history, and human achievement. But in this case it’s happening to white males, who, in the eyes of American elites, are demons.
There will be a terrible price to pay for this, you progressive trolls.
Wait'll he finds out there's no picture of Kenny G at Berklee.

UPDATE. Commenters make the excellent point that nowhere in the story is it confirmed that the palefaces will disappear -- Voshall is "redesigning that wall of portraits at Rockefeller University, to add more diversity." Some are just being moved, or integrated, as it were, with portraits of women and people of color. ("We really want to emphasize that we're not trying to erase our history," says a student at the University of Michigan. "We're proud of the people who have brought us to where we are today as a department. But we also want to show that we have a diverse and inclusive department.") Commenter Mortimer2000 notes a Boston Globe story in which some of the living subjects say it's cool with them if their portraits at Brigham and Women's are moved. Ah, but that's only because they fear the PC po-po, no doubt!


Friday, August 09, 2019

THEY MAY NOT KNOW MUCH ABOUT ART, BUT KNOW WHAT THEY LIE.

As I mentioned to readers of my newsletter (Subscribe! Cheap!) this morning, Rod Dreher is raging that a screenplay for The Hunt, apparently an upcoming The Most Dangerous Game ripoff in which people are kidnapped and hunted as prey, shows the hunters in the film referring to the hunted as "deplorables," which Dreher, following the age-old conservative formula of judging movies they haven't seen by their collateral materials, took as an assault by Hollywood on conservatives. Other rightwingers have picked up the cry, and Fox suggests that Trump was talking about this during his latest brain-fart about Hollywood, even though he didn't mention the movie and in fact referred to Hollywood's "racism," which seems not to be a factor in The Hunt.

Snopes is, as you would expect, more cautious about the alleged connection and more sensible overall:
However, the ideology and political affiliation of the characters who hunt and kill what appear to be working-class people from largely rural areas remains unclear, despite the aforementioned websites’ repeated and emphatic descriptions of them as “liberal” and “left-wing” elites. Notwithstanding the context of a fictional horror movie, it should be unnecessary to point out that hunting human beings for sport has never been a tenet of Enlightenment liberalism or modern-day American progressivism. 
Equally, it should be obvious to any mature consumer of culture that a movie that portrays wealthy psychopaths paying to hunt and kill other human beings is not likely to reflect well on the wealthy psychopaths, despite PJ Media’s claim that “The Hunt” actually “promotes violence against ‘deplorables.'”
(Snopes is referring to this dumb Matt Margolis PJ Media thing, which cites the Steve Scalise shooting as evidence of liberal bloodthist.) "It should be unnecessary to point out" are of course famous last words in the bad-faith festival that is modern conservative discourse. In fact Dreher seems to understand that the film's intentions are as yet unknown, but spreads his paranoia capaciously enough that no matter what it turns out to be, he can still be one outraged JustTheTip Trumper:
If you watch the trailer, it’s clear that the liberal elites — talk about your armed Social Justice Warriors! — are not portrayed as good. Still, what the hell could NBC Universal be thinking? They are treating the hunting down and murdering of white conservatives because they are white conservatives as entertainment. Or, more neutrally, they are presenting political mass murder as sport. For all we know, this movie will make the Red Staters out to be heroes. That’s beside the point. In a time of deep and rage-filled political division in this country, in which unhinged people are committing politically-motivated mass murders, this is insanely irresponsible. You cannot convince me that this isn’t an example of wish fulfillment on the part of the Hollywood executives making this movie. 
Universal is stirring up and exploiting primal hatreds. And these cretins wonder why so many people hate them, and vote for Trump. At least now it’s more out in the open than ever.
We last saw this kind of willful misreading in the wingnut sputterfest over Shakespeare in the Park's Julius Caesar which, against all logic, conservatives claimed was inciting violence against Trump. Lord knows they're always comfortable misinterpreting things, but I think they're even more eager to do so with movies, plays, novels etc. because they realize even the simplest works of art have power they neither possess nor understand, and the only way they can deal with it is by squeezing its meanings into tiny bullet-shaped units of propaganda.

Thursday, August 01, 2019

THIS YEAR'S GIRLS.

There's always something creepy about Republicans offering what I am accustomed to call Advice From Your Mortal Enemies, but in the wake of the two Democratic Presidential debates this week they've managed to make it creepier with their encomia to weirdos Marianne Williamson and Tulsi Gabbard. It's not just the interplay with the rightwing operatives pushing Williamson and Gabbard in online polls, though that's weird enough; it's their passive-aggressive insistence that these fringe candidate could lead the party to sanity and victory if only Democrats weren't such losers.

Since Libertarians Are The Worst let's start with Christian Britschgi at Reason:
While the rest of the candidates at the first Democratic debate tonight have been doing their best to out-socialist each other, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has been trying to keep the country out of war.
Save us from those famous neocon-socialist hawks Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Tulsi! Ha, kidding, he maybe means these guys:
Gabbard's position contrasts with the positions of other Democratic candidates on stage. Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) was the lone debate participant to say that he would not automatically re-enter the Iran deal worked out by President Obama, suggesting a better deal could be had. 
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) said that, while she favored reentering the deal, she would like to push for stricter terms. Klobuchar also stressed that if a war with Iran were to occur, it would require congressional authorization.
Stricter terms! Better deal! Well, that couldn't possibly be look-tough bullshit for the moderate wing, it has to be socialist bloodlust. But wait -- how do we know Gabbard isn't a socialist? After all, she's standing up there with all those socialists and not wearing a dollar-sign pin nor quoting Ayn Rand. Here's the best Britschgi can do:
That Gabbard was willing to duck a softball, red meat question about raising wages for women to focus on America's war-making abroad was nonetheless a refreshing moment amidst the otherwise dreary, shockingly left-wing rhetoric from the rest of the Democratic field on stage tonight.
Higher wages for women -- that's how Kennedy got us into Vietnam, right?

Meanwhile at The American Conservative, James Antle III, a buffoon, assures that while Bernie Sanders has "mostly failed to recapture his 2016 magic" (cite needed), Gabbard, "perhaps the most interesting Democrat running for president," has the secret sauce:
While reliably progressive, she has occasionally reached across the political divide on issues like religious liberty and Big Tech censorship, a potent combination that could prove more responsive to Trump voters’ concerns than what we’ve heard from her neocon lite interlocutor from Youngstown.
By "religious liberty” I assume Antle means she ragged on Senators Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono for questioning anti-abortion crusader Brian Buescher, now comfortably ensconced on the federal bench, on his Knights of Columbus membership during his Senate hearing, which she called anti-Catholic bigotry; by "Big Tech censorship" I assume he means her lawsuit against Google, a tedious tactic of Republican cry-babies that she has adopted and promoted on Tucker Carlson's show.

Antle affects to believes that Democrats' failure to take Gabbard up is because their party "cares more about wokeness than war." Think of all those Social Justice Warriors who want to abolish ICE and invade Iran!

As for Williamson, well, let's just stick with the always good for a laugh Rod Dreher:
Russian Orthodoxy treasures the yurodivy, or “holy fool,” an ascetic who behaves in ways that seem insane to normal people, but who, in so doing, reveal Christian truth. The New Age guru and Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson is not a holy fool according to the usual definition, but I can’t help thinking that to some extent, she’s playing that role. We all love to laugh at her, because she is something of a kook … but she’s onto something important about us. 
In last night’s Democratic debate, Williamson spoke of the “dark psychic force” of “collectivized hatred” that Donald Trump draws up and exploits. Here’s the clip... 
I know: ha ha, what a ding-dong! But she’s not wrong, except in that she pins this entirely on Trump.
In other words, the holy fool is absolutely right about Trump being evil, except she doesn't realize that evil is also Al Sharpton, and since TV commentator Sharpton is, like President Trump, the leader of his party, it's all the same really, just like the Republicans were really just as bad as the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, and we should all unite to persecute homosexuals.

Can they get the suckers to lemming after one or both of these new Jill Steins? Once upon a time I would have said God doesn't hate us that much yet, but now I'd say it's a toss-up.

Thursday, July 18, 2019

I CAN'T DO THIS TO ME!

There are of course the dead-enders who think Trump's straight-up Hitler impersonation -- telling outrageous lies about Rep. Ilhan Omar supporting Al Qaeda, and goading his goons to chant "Send her back" -- is an unmixed good, a sign that their Leader is finally going full Herrenvolk, but they barely count; they just serve to keep the Q-anon Infowars Pizzagate freak-rump roiled and red-faced. The most offensive reactions are from the mainstream conservatives, or what I have come to call the JustTheTip Trumpers -- those who occasionally admit Trump is gauche or non-U or not quite our kind (or whatever specific demurrers they use in their gated communities) but have heretofore supported virtually everything he does. There are several fine examples of people who will slur Omar and her allies all day long but, now that their ugliness has been mirrored back to them, wonder how such a thing could happen.

It's like, to paraphrase Harlan Ellison, having lain with pigs, they are surprised to get up smelling like garbage, and cast about for someone else to blame.

Worst of all, as usual, is Rod Dreher, who wonders why Trump would do such a thing:
The truly psychotic thing about Trump is that he doesn’t have to do this! It’s easy to fight the radicals of the Squad without resorting to this kind of thing. In fact, he is winning on the politics of Omar & Co. But that’s not enough for him. You’ve got to wonder if he’s some kind of sadist.
Or maybe -- stay with me now -- he leads a conservative movement that relies on racist xenophobia to win, and his goon-squad ravings are only more polite versions of the Save The White People stuff in which Dreher specializes.

Outraged as Dreher pretends to be, he's still doing the pee-dance over Trump 2020:
I have said for some time now that as bad as Trump is, I believe that putting Democrats in power would be worse, solely because of what it would mean for laws and policies that are important to me. But this degrading demagogic behavior is exactly the kind of thing that would flip me to the other side.
So why doesn't he? He could say it right now: It's too much, I quit. But he won't, because he's a pussy as well as a white nationalist.

UPDATE. Here, Trump's making it easier for him:
President Donald on Thursday disavowed the “send her back” chant that broke out at his rally on Wednesday night. 
"I was not happy with it. I disagree with it,” Trump said to reporters about the chant, which began after the president again went after Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) as part of his ongoing attack on four progressive freshman congresswomen
If only there had been someone there who could have told the crowd to stop! This is good news for John McCain's reputation.


Sunday, June 23, 2019

YOU'LL RU PAUL THE DAY!

Sorry to trouble you lovely people with another "I thought I could no long be outraged" post, but I made the mistake of reading Rod Dreher this morning. He's been on another fact-finding mission/foodie vacation for a while, delectating his sacramental snacks in England and hanging out with pomposeurs like Roger Scruton. After days of pictures of food and tourist attractions, Brother Rod returns to the states fresh and ready to witchfind. A little kid in Texas (a state which has so disappointed Dreher in the past) apparently likes to sing his songs while wearing a dress and makeup. Dreher, who apparently never saw Dee Snider, flips out ("We have completely lost our moral minds") and then starts yelling about how them there he-shes can get their titties chopped off if they've a mind to, all they got to do is call up a doctor, what-all is happening to his beloved heterosexual America, "We are a sick civilization that deserves to be punished," etc.

I guess Dreher felt as if he needed a better button, and veers into this:
UPDATE: Another, very different but still disgusting way we treat children:
And then he quotes a Times story about the Trump baby jails. That's right -- Dreher is willing to stipulate that kiddie koncentration kamps might be sorta as bad as kids allowed to play dress-up. Of course, after years of "I'm no Trump fan but" posts in which he hints that he'll support Trump anyway because he hates homosexuals, that doesn't mean anything except that he's a coward as well as a bigot.

To add piquancy, here's a tweet from National Review legacy pledge Jonah Goldberg:



Clearly this little boy's family, like the parents of all little boys in skirts, wants grown-ups to fuck him. Man, drag's been mainstream since Lady Bunny; do we really have to wait for the new millennium for these dopes to chill out about it?

Friday, May 31, 2019

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



R.I.P. He always gave a song its due.

•  I have unlocked today's newsletter issue (for those of you who for some reason haven't gotten around to subscribing). It's partly about the ridiculous Sohrab Ahmari-David French contretemps -- and when I say ridiculous I mean it on a variety of levels. (Short vs. here.) A number of famous wingnut have stepped in it, including Godly Rod Dreher. I won't attempt to encapsulate his entire 343,000-word essay. but feel I must reproduce this wonderful, thoroughly Dreherian tangent on how he's No Trump Fan But:
French can’t stand Donald Trump, and that seems to be at the core of Ahmari’s ire. French was one of those conservatives who regarded Trump as a betrayal of core principles of conservatism. For his views, French — the adoptive father of a black child — had to endure a torrent of spite from Trump fans that can only be described as satanic. That is important to keep in mind. Personally, I’ve come to think more favorably of Trump than I once did, both because of judicial appointments and because of the raging radicalism of the left, but I think in no way can Trump be rightly understood as an advocate for the restoration of Christian morality in the public sphere. Trump is a symptom of our decline, not the answer to it. Mind you, I can understand traditional Christians voting for Trump as the only realistic alternative to annihilation by the angry left — I might do what I didn’t do in 2016, which is to vote for him — but I can’t understand trying to convince ourselves that he is a good man.
Oh crumbs, Mary, just put on the hat and yell Lock Her Up already!

Wednesday, May 22, 2019

FUN ON THE FETAL FEE-FEES FRONT.

I sense the conservative elite (which is probably the wrong word, considering their lack of elite characteristics like education and professional training) is a little nervous about the wack-ass abortion laws coming out of the Bible Belt. They're not less insane on the issue, mind -- just worried that actually bulling this shit through might be a little rough on their election prospects. Even Rod Dreher, a fetus-hugger if ever there was one, counsels the brethren follow Ramesh Ponnuru's go-slow advice: "I think he makes a strong point about the possibility, perhaps even the likelihood, that the pro-life movement has miscalculated by rejecting incrementalism at this stage," says Dreher -- the bolding is presumably meant to tip off his God Squad that this is a tactical matter and when the time is right they can unleash Gilead.

To leaven their impatience, Dreher does give his fans a taste of that old-time psychosis, claiming the destruction of in-vitro fertilization blobs is also murder -- "IVF is widely used by Christians, and a consistent, logical pro-life position would outlaw it" -- and that his co-religionists only fail to wave signs with grisly pictures of discarded petri dishes because rich people do IVF. Of course, Dreher also says "I don’t think the inconsistency of the Alabama law can be honestly chalked up to a desire to 'control women’s bodies,'" so we can discount his testimony.

At The Federalist, however, moderation is treason, they can't stop/won't stop -- Georgi Boorman and James Silberman:
3 Negative Consequences From Not Prosecuting Parents For Obtaining Abortions
Guess no one told them ix-nay on the ilead-Gay. In another Federalist story, author Lew Jan Olowski laughs -- laughs, I tell you! -- at the baby-murdering Washington Post, "Washington Post Publishes Abortion Article So Stupid You Won’t Believe It." Already I am crying with amusement! Key graf:
The headline says it all: “If a fetus is a person, it should get child support, due process and citizenship.” Why, yes, it should; this is a commonly held view among pro-life Americans. But the author apparently doesn’t know that. Nor, apparently, do any of her editors.
He sure showed us! My question is, does Citizen Fetus have the vote? And how does it make its preference known? One kick for yes, two for no? Or does its pastor vote on its behalf?


Sunday, May 05, 2019

P.C. B.S.

I've been talking a long time about the idiotic applications of the term "political correctness" by rightwing choads, who started using it as a way suggest that people who got mad when you used racial slurs were just like Chinese Communists during the Cultural Revolution (and in this sense it was the mother of all SJW Snowflake burbles, not to mention Rod Dreher), and have ended up using it as a curse word to apply to anything they don't like. Well, as with so many things, Trump has proven himself more wingnutty than wingnuts with his sputtery tweet about the Kentucky Derby:


I can't figure how giving the race on a technicality to one horse owned by a rich guy over another horse owned by a rich guy qualifies as PC. Maybe it'll come out that the owner of the awarded horse is a friend of (((Soros))). More likely Trump's lizard brain intuited that the involvement of officials and a review process meant it had something to do with justice and judgment, which would be offensive to him on several levels.

Once again I side with Charlie Brown and his outrage at the regnant bullshit of his age:


Friday, April 26, 2019

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



Charme pour les jours.

•   We have a new entry for the Children of Zhdanov files, those depressing attempts by conservative pencil-pushers to colonize the arts by just slapping a PROPERTY OF THE RIGHT label on any book, movie, or video game that titillates them. It's at National Review, which has published many prime examples of the form -- from John J. Miller's notorious "50 greatest conservative rock songs" to Jonah Goldberg's "there’s a profound conservatism to all great fiction." Suprisingly, this new one's not from Kyle Smith, their full-timer on this beat, but from Kevin D. Williamson, who has so many other ways to annoy you'd think he'd leave this to the pros.
The great works of art that appeal to the conservative sensibility rarely if ever are constructed as self-consciously conservative stories — propagandistic literature lends itself more readily to progressive causes, in any case.
I'm torn here between "please explain" and "no, wait, please don't."
What Coriolanus tells us about populism and mass politics is not true because it is conservative but conservative because it is true.
Coriolanus thinks he's more Roman than Rome and turns traitor, which may make you think of Donald Trump until you consider that his mommy eventually makes him be loyal instead, which he does knowing his new Volscian buddies will kill him for it. The play does exhibit a lot of contempt for democracy, which may be what Williamson is getting at, or maybe it's just a brain chemistry issue.
The relationship between the beautiful and the true helps to explain how it is that so many actual Communists in Hollywood’s golden age produced works that were moving, true, often patriotic, often speaking to religious faith, and in many cases profoundly conservative. They weren’t out to make something right-wing, but something great.
Ha ha, last laugh on you Dalton Trumbo, by being good at your job you were actually conservative all along, PSYCH.
I doubt very much that either Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead...
The few punters still reading relax. Oboy fun stuff, I bet that's rightwing too!
...is the product of an overwhelmingly conservative group of storytellers. (From what I can learn of the politics of the writers, that does not seem to be the case.) But both shows are obliged by the nature of their dramatic structures to consider the fundamental questions of politics, and both invite deeply conservative interpretations.
Deeply indeedly! Williamson tells us the zombie comic book show is explained by Murray Rothbard and "Mancur Olson’s idea of the state as a 'stationary bandit,'" and in the end democracy doesn't work. (A theme emerges!) The tits-and-lizards show, meanwhile, shows the "liberal" leader to be "incompetent" and the "power-mad megalomaniac" to be a great one, thus making "an implicit case for things like federalism and the separation of powers." Also tits, also lizards. Thus the fans are reassured: Everything they like -- tits, lizards, zombies, choc-o-muts ice c'eams -- is conservative.

•   BTW I released the bats, so to speak, on Thursday's edition of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, my mildly popular newsletter, so even non-subscribers can read it. I already told you this but I'm taking a cue from Ted Bates and hitting the USP (Subscribe! Cheap!™) hard and often. My fortune's assured!


•  Let's have a dash of Dreher, eh?
I know some conservatives who are closed-minded, bigoted, you name it — but I don’t know any conservatives who would refuse to be friends with someone because they are liberal. They must exist, but in general, the disposition to cast out the impure from one’s circle of friendship is something I have seen much more commonly among progressives. Let me be clear: I’m not talking about holding extreme views; that is common on both sides. I’m talking about the way one interacts with those on the other side. It has seemed to me that in general, people on the Left get a lot more wound up about politicizing social interaction, and treating people who hold opposing views as morally tainted, than people on the Right do...
This is a personal view, admittedly. It’s something I’ve noticed over the years.
Oh, I bet he has. It just might be everyone knows Dreher is a twerp, but conservatives tolerate him because he might be good for a few votes or to help usher in a theocracy, while liberals have no such motivation to put up with his nonsense.
A guess: because left-wing politics has become obsessed with questions of power and status, and that breeds a natural sense of personal insecurity. Leftists have forgotten that one can be wrong without being evil incarnate. And, when you perseverate over whether or not you feel “safe” in the presence of something or someone challenging, you cannot help but generate a neurotic politics.
It's hilarious that Dreher keeps going to that snowflakes-in-their-safespace well when his whole Benedict Option racket is that the homos and he-shes are persecuting him with their deviant sex and the godly must join him in WiFi monasteries to escape them.

Tuesday, April 23, 2019

PERSECUTION ENVY.

The Federalist:
Sri Lanka Attacks Highlight Growing Worldwide Persecution Of Christians
Author Kenny Xu leans hard on a Pew Research Center report -- but does not link directly to it, preferring for some reason the British Church Times, which screams "Christians are the most persecuted religious group in the world, says Pew report," though even the figures it chooses to pick from Pew aren't as cut and dried as that:
The Centre’s report on religious harassment in 2016 found that Christians were harassed in 144 countries, up from 128 the year before, while Muslims were harassed in 142 countries, up from 125 in 2015.
So it looks like Jesus and Allah are neck-and-neck! (The Pew report is headlined "Global Uptick in Government Restrictions on Religion in 2016," which is not nearly as good Republican ragebait.) After yelling about Muslims a while ("Few groups have suffered as Christian minorities have due to the rise of Islamist political parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and ISIS in Libya"), Xu makes the bold leap:
While many European journalists rightly blame mass migration from majority-Muslim countries for these religious persecution issues, migration is not the only factor here. Just as significant is Western Europe’s culture of enforced secularism, a world where religious speech is policed and religious symbols (such as burqas) are not allowed in French public schools or German business settings.
Hundreds murdered in Sri Lanka, dress codes in school -- same diff! Also at The Federalist, David Harsanyi:
Islamic Terrorism Remains The World’s Greatest Threat To Peace
After sputtering over "Islamists" -- a usage I hadn't heard much since the glory days of the Iraq War, but which seems to be coming back -- Harsanyi, too, rages about secularists:
Yet the American left continues to downplay the danger, first by arguing that Islam has nothing to do with Islamic terrorism, then by lumping every white-skinned person who commits a terrorist act into one imaginary coherent political movement to contrast against it.
Actually, that "imaginary coherent political movement" of white supremacists is America's #1 terror menace, far outstripping Islamic terrorism, and it's spreading around the world. But Harsanyi has an explanation for that: Islamic terror only looks weak because our Middle East wars have been so successful!
It’s true that Americans have been spared much Islamic terror since 2002—a year that, curiously, nearly every graph media uses to measure domestic terrorism starts—but only because we’ve spent billions of dollars each year and immense resources, both in lives and treasure, keeping it out of the country and fighting it abroad.
Perhaps sensing that even the morons and yahoos who constitute most of his readership won't buy this, Harsanyi gets back to a trendier attack on godless libs:
Another reason the majority of Americans might not comprehend Islamic radicalism’s reach is the skewed intensity of the media coverage. Political correctness and a chilling fear of being labeled “Islamophobic” makes it difficult to honestly report on terrorism around the world.
If it weren't for liberals you good people would be shitting your pants in fear of Mohammed at the 7-11 or the pediatric clinic, just like you were in the great Nine-Elevening!  Yet now, despite conservative urging, you still haven't killed Ilhan Omar. This isn't the country Harsanyi once knew.

These guys are catching up with Rod Dreher, who is every bit as nuts as you'd imagine:
A liberal friend of mine was lamenting recently that the left has gotten so good at policing its own thoughts, and never letting itself notice things that contradict its narrative, that it is often being shocked by events in the real world. When things like the Sri Lanka attacks happen, the first thing that many American and British journalists think is, “Oh dear, this is going to cause a spike in Islamophobia.” They cannot imagine sympathizing with Christians. They really can’t. Yes, these dead Sri Lankans may be Catholics living on the other side of the world, and sure, they may have roots in their country going back to the 16th century (or earlier), but deep down, when many journalists imagine these people, they see them wearing MAGA hats, and carrying around invisible knapsacks full of privilege.
If only Dreher would actually fuck off to a Benedict Option survivalist compound where he could tell the kids, "Yes, Rachel Maddow and Kamala Harris used to throw rocks at us Christians and put us in concentration Bible camps!"

Meanwhile at National Review we get more of the same ("Islam remains the fount of the most virulent and violent attacks on Christians worldwide"), and Eli Lake at Bloomberg telling us "White Nationalism Is a Terrorist Threat, but Not Like Radical Islam," because "white nationalists have no territory they control, as Islamic State did until recently. Nor is there evidence of a state supporting white nationalist groups..." LOL, who wants to tell him about America?

American conservatives in the depths of their Trump phase are, like their fearless leader babbling about the unfairness of his dropping Twitter numbers, addicted to victimhood, and so it was only natural that they'd treat the Sri Lanka bombing as an excuse to talk about how persecuted they are. Sure, no one's mass-murdering them -- over here, that seems to only happen to schoolkids and black people and victims of gun fetishists -- but liberals are insufficiently respectful of them, and try to make them bake wedding cakes for homosexuals, which is just as bad. One struggles to imagine them confronted by Jesus as they flee their martyrdom, and declaring, "that's it -- I'll go back to my six-figure job and put up with my kids not going to church and swears on the TV! It'll be rough, but Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam!"

UPDATE. Relevant: "Steve King, censured by his colleagues for racist remarks, compares himself to Jesus... 'And when I had to step down to the floor of the House of Representatives and look up at those 400-and-some accusers — you know, we’ve just passed through Easter and Christ’s Passion — and I have a better insight into what He went through for us, partly because of that experience,' he said."

Monday, April 15, 2019

I SHOUTED OUT, WHO BURNED DOWN NOTRE DAME/WHEN AFTER ALL IT WAS YOU HEATHENS' LACK OF SHAME!

The fire at Notre Dame in Paris is terrible and it's touching to read the tributes and outpourings of sorrow it has occasioned.  Of course there have been some absurd reactions too -- and some that go way beyond that:
Like James Poulos above, I cannot see this as anything other than a sign. The only church in all of Western civilization more important than Notre Dame de Paris is St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The consuming fire is likely to have been started from a construction accident. I hope that is the case; if this was terrorism, then France is in for unimaginable spasms of violence. Nevertheless, if this was an accident, it still symbolizes what we in the West have allowed to happen to our religious and cultural patrimony. What happened in Paris today has been happening across our civilization. 
It happens whenever we fail to live out our baptism, and fail to baptize our children. It happens by omission, by indifference, and it happens by commission, from spite. It happens in classrooms, in newsrooms, in shopping malls, in poisoned seminaries and defiled sacristies, and everywhere the truths that Notre Dame de Paris embodied are ridiculed, flayed, and destroyed in the hearts and minds of modern men. The fire that destroyed Paris’s iconic cathedral made manifest what we in the West have been doing to ourselves for over 200 years.
This may be the nuttiest thing Rod Dreher has ever written, and that, my friends, is saying something. At one point he compares the fire, as yet not proven to be anything but an accident, to 9/11. (He also keeps saying he hopes it's not terrorism, which, ha, we've all caught your act, guy.) Also:
For you in the West who are not religious, I hope you will reflect on what this cathedral meant in artistic, architectural, and cultural terms, and that you will think hard about what we are losing as we collectively repudiate our patrimony.
Me, I'm thinking about what we're losing when we collectively repudiate basic fire safety. It's like the inside of Dreher's head is a bad editorial cartoon where the spark that set the blaze is labeled "secular humanism." And I'm waiting for Peggy Noonan to tell us she saw "the face of the Evil One" rising in the smoke. Who knows, maybe even Trump will get with it and say something like, "Many people are saying that the devil actually set this fire, like it was Halloween. I don't know if they're right or not. Personally I think it was whatshisname, the guy in Venezuela we're supposed to go to war with."

Friday, March 29, 2019

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


Been on an early Waylon kick lately; here's one I got off my mama's old radio.

I'm unlocking yet another issue of the newsletter (Subscribe! Cheap!) that's just for funsies, albeit the grim modern political kind, in which the White House gets a couple of special dinner guests. Enjoy!

• I get after Rod Dreher a lot, but he's such a perfect amalgam of nearly every terrible conservative trait that he's sort of irresistible. Take this one in which he riffs on a Michigan Live story, "Teen who traded tennis for video games says more pressure playing virtual sports." The kid, Ben Stoeber, is interested in robotics and says he was drawn to tennis "because of the social aspect of it" and expresses no other feeling for it, so I guess it makes sense he'd switch and who cares, but Brother Rod howls "Decline and fall... So this kid left his body, and now lives inside his head. What a tragedy this is!" and goes on about how "doing work with your body (or playing games with your body)" is imporant because "When we remove ourselves from the physical world and retreat into our heads — as these young people are doing — we habituate ourselves to a false narrative about who we are, and what we are. We also become weaker, more subject to authoritarian rule."

That seems weird coming from a guy who doesn't look like he's done much heavy lifting himself, and is so exquisitely sensitive that he can't clean up after his dog without puking. Maybe he figured other readers would make this connection, too, and so rambles about how when he was growing up his old man was always trying to push him to do sports, but young Rod wasn't into it:
I honestly can’t say to what extent my resisting his attempts to get me into the world beyond my head was about a character flaw within me, or it was about him pushing too hard for me to do something that went against my nature. Had my dad not been so pushy about it, or if he had tried more gently to introduce me into nature, or if he had ever shown interest in the books and ideas that captivated me as a child, maybe I would have been different.
This reminds me so much of one of Albert Brooks' narration bits in Real Life: "I’m an entertainer but, quite frankly, if I’d studied harder -- or been graded more fairly -- I would have been a doctor or a scientist."

Anyway, just because Rod Dreher can't snap an emery board doesn't mean anyone else can get away with ignoring the physical world. (Plus, he reveals, his own son has taken up bicycling -- see, Dad, maybe if you weren't such a hothead we'd be a sports dynasty now!) "Please, Ben Stoeber, pick your tennis racket back up!" Dreher cries. "You don’t have to quit playing video games, but make them secondary to your life. Watch Wall-E and think about the choice you’re making..."

At no point does Dreher seem aware that Stoeber's leisure-activity choice may be reasonable and in any case need not be made with any consideration for the False Narrative of Modern Man; nor that his own lack of athleticism is something he might, after years of adulthood, take responsibility for himself instead of laying it on his now-dead father.

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART 5,200,843.

When Rod Dreher ostentatiously shows concern for his fellow man, you know there's a catch:
Readers, I have to go out for a few hours on a sudden errand. When I get back, I would like to hear from you who are in the flood zones of Nebraska and Iowa. It’s amazing how little coverage your tragedy is receiving. If I didn’t follow the Twitter accounts of Sen. Ben Sasse and Jake Meador, I would barely know a thing about it. I know the same thing happened in 2016 when we had the devastating Louisiana floods.
Let's see what The New York Times, which is Liberal Media Central and must be suppressing this story out of irrational hatred for the Common People, has been doing about it in the past three days:

March 20, "U.S. Farmers Face Devastation Following Midwest Floods [Reuters]"; "An Iowa Town Fought and Failed to Save a Levee. Then Came the Flood"; "The Latest: Minnesota to Help Nebraska Flood Fight [AP]"; "Missouri River Towns Face Deluge as Floods Move Downstream [Reuters]"; "Flooded Iowa Communities Surviving With Trucked-In Water [AP]."

March 19, "Rising Waters: See How Quickly the Midwest Flooded"; "Like ‘House Arrest’: Flooded Roads and Swamped Bridges Strand Nebraskans"; "Pets, Livestock Among Victims of Midwest Flooding [Reuters]"; "Missouri River Flooding Catches Small Nebraska Town Off Guard [Reuters]"; "Midwest Floodwaters Tear Through or Spill Over Many Levees [AP]"; "‘It’s Like an Island’: Scenes From the Midwest Floods [multimedia]"; "The Latest: Pence Views Raging River, Visits Shelter"; "Floodwaters Threaten Millions in Crop and Livestock Losses."

March 18, "Why Is There Flooding in Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa and Wisconsin?" "‘It’s Probably Over for Us’: Record Flooding Pummels Midwest When Farmers Can Least Afford It"; "Flooded U.S. Air Force Base Underscores Climate Risk to Security: Experts [Reuters]"; "'Angels of the Sky' Offer Flights Into Flooded Nebraska City [AP]"; "Scenes from Record Flooding in Nebraska [multimedia]"; "Homes Flood as Missouri River Overtops, Breaches Levees"; "Nebraska Nuclear Plant Still at Full Power as Floodwaters Recede [Reuters]"; "Three Dead, One Missing in Devastating Floods Across U.S. Midwest."

I may have missed a few. Dreher seems to have missed considerably more than a few. In comments (not in his main post), he breezily notes,
To be fair to the media, some readers say they’ve seen a lot of coverage. I think that this is an example of how silo’d we tend to be, even if we don’t mean to be. Sometimes a reader or two will accuse me of ignoring a particular news event because I haven’t posted on it — and I haven’t even heard of it!
Tee hee! Meanwhile a number of Dreher's commuters snarl things like "Why isn’t this covered more, Rod? This affects only the benighted people in flyover country..." and "The headlines are the latest nothingburger from the Mueller probe and Beto eating dirt." Elsewhere on Twitter, a bunch of people who seem unable to use Google News act like there's a media blackout on the floods. "Is it me or would this be getting a lot more attention if this were closer to New York or LA?" uueries pollster Patrick Ruffini. Others chime in: "This is catastrophic and mainstream media is pretty much ignoring this." "If a disaster happens on the coast, it’s full scale media coverage. But a disaster in the Midwest .....crickets. It’s ok, we don’t need u elites anyway." "Where is all the media’s coverage about the devastating floods in Nebraska?!?!" Ad infinitum.

I keep telling and telling and telling you guys: There is no flakier snowflake than a wingnut, and their propagandists feed them on grievance stories like the Great Media Blackout of Your Tragedy and how the big bad city slickers don't care because a steady diet of bullshit is what keeps them voting Republican.

Wednesday, March 06, 2019

RODDY DREHER IS TOO SENSITIVE TO WORK AT THE POST OFFICE.*

* apologies to Charles Bukowski, really, but get a load of this from Rod Dreher's latest:
Here’s something interesting. On Jonathan Haidt’s test for moral foundations, I scored unusually high on the “purity” scale. It so happens that I am extremely sensitive to certain aromas that most people find disgusting (and even some that most people don’t). It’s so bad that there are times when I will have to leave the room quickly so as not to vomit (which means my wife is the one left behind to clean up the dog poop, and suchlike).
[Lips pursed, arms folded] Snnnkkk. Snnkk.
It is entirely involuntary. Entirely. When I was a kid, I couldn’t be nearby when the men gutted and skinned a deer they had killed. It wasn’t the visual imagery; it was the smell. I would double over gagging, and couldn’t help myself. 
[Hand over mouth] Snkkk. Snnkk. Snnkk.
This is also why I can taste and smell pleasant nuances in food and drink, and enjoy eating more than most people.
BAA HAA HAA HAA oh my god -- you peons just gobble your food but Sensitive Rod tastes the rainbow! When he's not vomiting, that is.
Two of my three kids are the same way — except their sensitivities are ramped up so much that they don’t like to eat things that taste vivid. All three of us can detect aromas that most people can’t, and when we find them unpleasant, we also find them to be intolerable. Weirdly, my daughter cannot stand the aroma of bananas. It’s so severe for her that we don’t eat them in her presence. Just the sight and smell of a banana is enough to put her on the edge of vomiting.
Those poor kids.
Does this have anything to do with my conservative politics? Maybe...
Ha ha, I know guys, but wait that's not even the real punch line --
...but how would this theory account for the extreme sensitivity that so many left-wing college students have to the mere presence of conservatives in their midst?
Those SJWs -- such sissies! Oh, sorry, honey, I can't clean up after the dog -- I'm too SENSITIVE.

Have we decommissioned "pussy" as an epithet? Pity. (What I wonder is, does Rod ever get too sensitive to enjoy his sacramental meats?)