Friday, March 04, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



Hope Fat Tuesday was good to ya.

•   Yesterday I released the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue about the Freedom Convoy fantasy and the credulous reporting that makes it look like a military invasion of the capital. There is little evidence that such a display of might is actually pending, however. Here’s a fun clip Patriot Takes found on Twitter of some Indiana insurrectionists looking at some trucks -- not big rigs, mind you, but pick-up trucks and some SUVs -- and declaring that the feds don’t stand a chance. 


Bottom-feeder websites like The Patriot Chronicles (warning: site is pop-up-spam-riddled) make similar claims:

Liberals must be losing their minds. We already know that the Biden administration has been afraid of this day—Just look at the fence they built around the Capitol, but the time has come. 

I think the reporter, “Daphne Moon” (guess this one’s not going in anyone’s clip file!), is talking about the fence that went up for the State of the Union address and has already been taken down -- but forget it, she’s rolling:

[Another website] observed the convoy in Missouri Monday, using the state’s traffic cameras. We estimated at least 500 participating vehicles, although it was hard to distinguish non-convoy trucks and other vehicles from those with drivers participating in the convoy… 

So, in other words, they saw a bunch of trucks on the highway. But here’s the main thing:

Online, the convoy’s following has grown. Aniano said the convoy’s followings on various social media platforms have moved from the hundreds to the thousands in the past few days…

Online -- that’s where I’m a Viking! They’ll keep this up until such fools as try it are hauled away, and then they’ll come up with another Army of Butch Stereotypes that will take over the government -- perhaps multiple editions of Joe the Plumber (remember him?) to clog the sewer pipes of the Swamp.  Got to have a dream/ If you don’t have a dream/ How you gonna make a dream come true? 

•   Oh, I also freed one of my REBID vaudeville sketches, this one about a Russian spam farm hit hard by economic sanctions. Of course, the joke's on us because Putin has plenty of spammers in the U.S., though I don’t know how much they’re getting paid. As you may have seen from my Twitter feed, Rod Dreher’s been very helpful to the subject of his famous 2016 “Putin: Our Tsar-Protector?” column. His current shtick is to cry UNDERSTAND, I AM VERY SORRY RUSSIA IS DOING THIS! at intervals while defending Russia. For example:

I can’t see where the West had any choice other than to have imposed harsh sanctions on the Russian government, but Westerners delighted by the punishment we are inflicting on the Russian people (as opposed to seeing it as a tragic necessity) are fools. We are in the process of immiserating an entire nation, and turning its people against us for a generation or more. 

We’re immiserating a nation! Boy, wait’ll Dreher finds out what Russia's doing to Ukranians! 

We are driving that nation, which we needed to help the West contain China, right into China’s arms. There may well have been no alternative here — at this point, I can’t think of one — but this has been a massive strategic defeat for us. 

I wonder who’s responsible for this massive strategic defeat? Maybe it’s the transsexuals Dreher’s always on the warpath against. Next Dreher approvingly quotes John Mearsheimer’s Ukraine Got What It Asked For POV and, as if he sees the Springtime For Hitler shock on his readers’ faces, rushes to explain:

I know, I know: we aren’t supposed to say these things. We are supposed to stay focused on the evilness of the Putin regime. 

Just like we’re not supposed to say the N-word! And we're supposed to say Orange Man Bad! It’s all soft totalitarianism, see.

Any introduction of complexity into the narrative cuts the purity of moral clarity. But facts don’t disappear because they are inconvenient to the story we want to believe. I’ve seen tweets in the past day or two from people saying that yes, the Ghost of Kyiv legend wasn’t true, nor are some of the other heroic pro-Ukrainian myths passed around this past week … but so what (they say): what’s important is keeping up Ukrainian morale.

To openly prefer a manipulative lie to the complicated truth is corrupt.

One million Ukranians have been made refugees by the Russian invasion. Dreher doesn’t dare call that a lie, yet, so he paints the corners. 

I’m taking some criticism in the comments section for spending more time talking about the way we in the West are responding to Russia’s aggression than I am talking about the aggression itself.

LOL no comment.

Thursday, March 03, 2022

TRUCK NUTS.


I have un-paywalled an issue of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down about two aspects of the Freedom Convoy thing: 1.) How the press has been talking up their alleged truck invasion of Washington, D.C. for weeks, but only a few alleged Freedom Convoyeurs have as yet visited our nation's capital, and 2.) the fondness of conservatives for protest movement that are basically cosplay -- the Tea Party, the Hardhats, the Bundys, etc. (The dress-up is always hyper-masculine, though they make occasional exceptions such as the Brooks Brothers Riot.)

At this writing the Washington Post, which has been flogging the thing at least as much as any other media outlet, reports that 

Despite organizers touting numbers in the thousands, Indiana State Police spokesman Captain Ron Galaviz said the convoy amounted to fewer than 300 vehicles when it was in Indiana this week, and a majority were passenger vehicles, not large trucks.

Now, as a normal American, you might look at that and think the thing is not so much brave Pigpen and the Rubber Duck running a Breaker 1-9 Braveheart juggernaut of big rigs to smash through the toll gate into the DC Swamp and kick some libtard ass, and more like convoy of campers coming to act like assholes for a few hours and take in the Air & Space Museum. 

But rightwing sites want you to think it's clobberin' time: "ON THE HIGHWAY, Okla.," datelines the wingnut Epoch Times, "—The largest truck convoy in the United States has grown in size since departing California and is attracting thousands of supporters as it makes its way toward the East Coast." "Liberals thought the U.S Trucker convoy is going nowhere," snarls 2020 Conservative (warning: site is mostly pop-ups), "well, they just got pranked. 'The People’s Convoy' is getting big and the D.C. swamp continues to struggle with their plans to counter the convoy." 

"Struggle with their plans" apparently means "put the National Guard on standby," so if any of these cowboys has been hypnotized by the hype into trying Jan. 6 II they're going to be hilariously disappointed. I expect some light MAGA tourist action and then the usual Great Forgotting -- just like after the "Ride For The Constitution" convoy that wingnuts claimed was going the paralyze the capital during the budget shutdown fight in 2013, and which also turned out to be bullshit. As I reported at the time

Anyway the Ride was breathlessly covered by rightbloggers such as Susan Duclos, who informed readers that “already one report has come out about cops pulling over portions of the convoy” and ran a picture of trucks on a highway as evidence that the protest was in full effect.

The great thing about Ride for the Constitution, Moonbattery said, was that “you don’t have to drive a truck to take part.” This was apparently how the overwhelming majority of supporters chose to participate.

Plus ça change, huh?

Friday, February 25, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



Fave Wray.

Rushed again! Just a couple freebies from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down to hand out: 

First, today’s issue, with extra added CPAC sessions. I’m not at the real event, thank God -- others like Laura Jedeed are there and you can follow them if you dare. Jedeed reports on a session in which “several prosecutors [are] discussing the need for solutions that go beyond incarceration and actually rehabilitates people.” Funnily enough, last time I attended, in 2014, they had a session on the subject starring Bernard Kerik. Maybe they do it every year -- wonder why, since sympathy for the incarcerated doesn’t fit the psychological profile of your average CPAC attendee. Maybe focus groups told them to leaven the sadism? Anyway, the real agenda looks nuts enough that my additions should fit right in.

And the second freebie is my backgrounder on American conservatives’ Putin love -- which, as I mentioned yesterday, got an airing when Vlad the Chad invaded Ukraine. Most of them seem to have gotten the message to cool it, but I gotta say, I’m trying to imagine liberals in the Iraq War run-up talking about Saddam Hussein the way conservatives are talking about Putin, and coming up empty.

Thursday, February 24, 2022

AID & COMFORT CONSERVATIVES.

Back after 9/11, when America itself was attacked, conservatives demanded we invade a country that had nothing to do with it and called those of us who said “hey, wait a minute” traitors

This memory adds piquancy to the roll call of prominent conservatives who, in the wake of his unconscionable invasion of Ukraine, are loving up Vladimir Putin. Tucker Carlson:

Tulsi Gabbard:

Glenn Greenwald:

Steve Bannon:

And the leader of the opposition:


A former president praising a foreign dictator's invasion. Well, you get old enough, you live to see it all. 

And this is just a partial list. Some of it's based on the longstanding Putinphilia of the American Right, but there's even weirder stuff behind it. Rod Dreher, "mainstream" conservatism's favorite religious maniac, has utterly flipped; while dropping in "I don't approve" every so often (his primitive idea of ass-covering), Dreher explains Putin's invasion

So, when I read these days that much-quoted line Vladimir Putin uttered some years back, in which he lamented the tragedy of the USSR’s demise, I think of Trianon and the Hungarians. Though he was a KGB man, I don’t think Putin is a nostalgist for Bolshevism. He’s a nostalgist for Greater Russia — a Russia that was bigger, more powerful, and prouder on the world stage. If I had not come to Hungary last year and learned about Trianon, I am sure I would not have been able to grasp what this means to people whose countries have been dismantled or disempowered by war and historical fate.

Similarly, it has helped me to understand why so many Southerners feel so bitter about the Civil War and its latest iteration — the demonization of Confederate monuments and Southern culture.

So, see, this invasion isn't just imperialism or psychosis -- like Dreher's hero Viktor Orban, Putin just wants a return to the Old Order, which when you think about it is true conservatism. More than that, it reminds Dreher of the nostalgia for the Confederacy in his neck of the woods. Talk about bringing it all back home!

Another aspect of today’s news that we Americans should consider, but rarely do: the role of Ukraine, especially Kiev, in the Russian religious imagination. We simply have nothing to compare it to.

It's religious, people. And we have to stretch our concept of "freedom" and "right and wrong" to accommodate it, because as we all know religion can't have any bad consequences. 

As has also become his habit, Dreher reminds us that the West is rotten and Putin at least has Christian values (i.e., persecutes minorities):

But what about the Western empire today? To my eyes, we are decadent, and ruled by an elite that despises our own history, traditions, and the unwoke deplorables among us. We are ruled by an elite who think of many of us as savages: racist, transphobic bigots who must be brought to heel...

Putin is an authoritarian who uses Western decadence in the same way the Soviet regime did: to justify its own repression. Nevertheless, that decadence really is there!

 I'll only add this bit from a post Dreher put up the night before:

Now, if you think the US can funnel military supplies to the Ukraine resistance without suffering any consequences from Russia, you are being a fool. Russia’s cyberwarriors would devastate American institutions. We are not nearly as strong as we think.

When, as I said, conservatives (including Dreher) were denouncing those of us who opposed America's invasion of another country as un-American, if any citizen had talked about how the United States had better not tangle with Saddam Hussein because we were sure to be "devastated," that person would probably have been spirited away to a black site. Things sure have changed. 



Now she's blaming it on Hunter Biden. Jesus. I can imagine if she were starving or her family were in danger, but otherwise there's really no excuse for sinking this low except an absolute lack of human decency. 

UPDATE 2. This cannot be an exhaustive list but just wanted to get this fuckface in here:




Tuesday, February 22, 2022

MR. CONSERVATIVE.


Unlocked here is today’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down item on the now-traditional lovefest between American conservatives and Vladmir Putin and how I expect it to inform the Ukraine discourse. And since it came out it looks like I called it:


The first of the high-circulation wingnuts to rise fully to Russia’s defense is Candace Owens (“NATO [under direction from the United States] is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward. WE are at fault”). I expect there will be more. (Charlie Kirk is playing with it.) 

I'd say this is an instinct, if not a legacy. The double backflip will be “Russia is justified and it’s Biden’s fault,” as Donald Trump’s Gotta Hand It To ‘Em remarks suggest.

My position is the same as it was in 2003, when I was no fan of Saddam Hussein but didn’t see a reason for the U.S. to fight him. It would never have occurred to me, though, to defend my position by saying what a great, godly, manly leader Saddam was. 

Friday, February 18, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



As fresh as when he cut it 96 years ago.

Busy week! I must be brief. Got two Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies for you: First, today’s edition on the current high tide in conservative victim-claiming. Sadly this came out before I could include Brother Rod’s latest:

I wonder how many people wander over to Dreher’s tent show, having heard from The New Yorker and David Brooks about how he’s one of America’s real intellectual conservatives, get a load of this kind of thing and do a Duck Tracy Meets Mouseman (“Go… back… in again…”). The latest evidence that liberals are going to tyrannize your godly Republican family is Canada finally clearing the Parking Convoy off the streets of Ottawa, which Dreher describes as “the government crushing dissent under the guise of keeping Canada ‘safe’ from haters and deplorables” and “a prelude of what’s to come here.” When the Liberal Fascists take over you won’t be able to block city streets for days on end! Of course, when protestors were “spilling into the street and blocking traffic” to denounce Donald Trump, Dreher felt very differently about it: “That deranged Latino mob in San Jose just convinced a hell of a lot of people to buy tickets to the Trump train,” he snarled.  And when some red states made it legal to run over protestors when they block traffic -- which was clearly aimed at Black Lives Matter protests -- Dreher never made a peep. Like I say in the REBID item: Their whole identity is victimhood now. 

Second, and relatedly: An analysis of the Canadian Parking Convoy situation by a couple of experts! 

Friday, February 11, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



Made an album, couple of EPs, then stopped (except for a brief reunion).
Gotta respect that.

•   I'm just gonna give ya one more Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie for the week: Trump appointing a Rubber Duck for his Convoy. It was obvious from the start that this Canadian truck fiasco was designed to travel south, and now that Rand Paul, Tucker Carlson and other stateside assholes are pushing it, I’m sure it will -- notwithstanding the cause and the tactics are extremely unpopular among the citizens who are suffering through them. As we’ve seen in Russia, Hungary, and elsewhere, neofascism is an international movement, and the American Bund has been working its chops with the Bundys and other homegrown honky insurgencies for years, knowing they can count on getting away with the kind of shit black and leftwing protestors get beaten and killed for. Like the Bundy’s Marlboro Man shtick, the Manly White Trucker routine will play great on Fox News and inspire legions of dotards to buy more Trump coins. I doubt Merrick Garland has the balls to Koresh these clowns, so get ready for weeks of interstate bullshit before the spring thaw. 

•   As Alex Chilton said, Pretty soon we're all gonna get it/ It's time to buy some stuff on credit. I see a lot of people who should know better saying well, we tried (not really) and going commando on COVID because masks are a drag. I'm used to it from the morons, but the alleged smart guys who are picking it up as a form of popularism -- i.e. the polls show people are getting antsy so abandon ship -- really burn my ass. Steven Thrasher tells 'em off good, but there are too many that need telling, like Yair Rosenberg, who hauls aboard esteemed science historian Steven Shapin to tell us that the Establishment is just not talking the (rightwing) People's language, man, and that's why they love Joe Rogan and think vaccines are poison, so when you think about it this is all the Establishment's fault. Shapin:

It needs a face, it needs PowerPoints, it needs metaphors, it needs analogies. It needs a face of sympathy, and a face that says, “I am caring about you and we are all in this together.” Because America is so divided, it’s very difficult to talk about that. But if you want to ask people to believe something, and to do something based on that belief, you’ve got to show that you care.

Maybe Fauci and those guys should have dressed up like Care Bears or something. I know -- they should have gotten stoned and done a podcast! Jesus Christ. Pretty clearly our Betters have decided there's no hope, and are counting on the high ticket and menu prices of the places they hang out at to protect them from the infected hordes. Oh, well, I've had a full life. 

Tuesday, February 08, 2022

TODAY IN CAREER ADVANCEMENT.

Today’s issue of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, released to the general public, is inspired by the latest hilarious symptom of prestige media’s accelerating degeneracy: Jonah Goldberg hired by CNN

Longtime readers will know that I have followed The Man They Call Pantload with interest since 2003, or five short years after his mom and a sploogey blue dress bought him a media career, from his early Bad Boy/Moral Scold act through the publication his magnum opus Liberal Fascism or I Know You Are But What Am I, during years of terrible, terrible columns at National Review, occasionally with fart jokes and catchphrases, and into his half-assed apostasy as he realized his South Park Republican shtick had been rendered useless even among conservatives by the mouthbreathing mobs of Trumperdom. 

Over this period I have come to consider Goldberg not merely a bad writer and worse thinker, but also one of my great literary creations -- an overfed momma’s boy who, thrust (still dribbling Cheetos) onto the public stage, tries to charm his audience with horseplay and, failing that, claps a mortarboard on his head and proceeds to launch ludicrous syllogisms, fretfully farting as they range out of control.  Seeing him rise to CNN, I feel a little as I imagine Jaroslav Hašek would have felt seeing his Good Soldier Schweik elected to the Austrian parliament. 

When Goldberg noisily left Fox News I figured he'd join the New York Times' stable of rightwing gasbags; it would be easy to pretend people who know how to read can abide him. Putting his sputtering ass on TV seems like a mistake -- like when 60 Minutes created a pundit bank of P.J. O'Rourke, Molly Ivins, and Stanley Crouch, and viewers begged them to desist.  Well, it's their money! 

Sunday, February 06, 2022

MEMENTO MORON.

Sometimes I just have to put something here to save it for, I don't know, future generations maybe, or as a reminder for when I get senile as to when America really lost it:




The Wallethub ranking that Bongino inverted is here. (You will notice that, in their eagerness, the Fox News staff mistook Irvine, California for Irving, Texas. Wonder if they'll apologize!)

It's kind of a refreshing in a way: For years we've been dealing with their half-truths, bad faith, whataboutism, etc., and sometimes it takes so much effort to explain what they're doing even I lose interest, but when they just plain declare black is white and vice-versa, it makes things clearer and easier.  

Friday, February 04, 2022

FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN.



Are you mesmerized?

•  I’ve got two Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies for those of you who, unaccountably, have yet to subscribe. First is Monday’s item on all the Neil Young/Joe Rogan bullshit. (There’s also a review of Barn in there.) The general inability of rightwing dummies -- and though they often call themselves “libertarians” or “skeptics” or “free thinkers,” upon inspection they always turn out to be rightwing dummies -- to distinguish between “deciding not to do business with a disinformation vendor” and “censorship” continues. Bari Weiss offloaded her cancelculture belly-aching to the ex-banjo player from Mumford & Sons, and it’s a testament to her shitty writing that I thought at first it was her own work. After ominously talking about Soviet repression for three paragraphs, Banjo Guy says, “I’m not suggesting the music scene of the West today, or the creative industries more broadly, resembles this top-down authoritarian dystopia.” Then why bring it up, one might wonder. Then he talks awhile about how Ice-T swore at Tipper Gore -- possibly to stoke the crowd -- until finally: 

But in 2022, the censors are not in charge of governments. Something resembling a bottom-up authoritarianism has become the norm. Or perhaps one could call it lateral censorship. It’s artists shutting down other artists—or trying to.

The absurdity of the phrase “bottom-up authoritarianism,” which makes as much sense as “diet lard,” to one side, Banjo Guy seems to miss that artists do indeed oppose and even refuse to work with other artists all the time. How many theaters have rung with cries of “either he goes or I go” throughout the ages? Yet before our low, mean age, no one thought to pretend it was a First Amendment violation. To use an example from popular music, some players got mad enough at Eric Clapton in the 70s to form Rock Against Racism; I suppose by the standards of Bari Weiss and Banjo Guy, that, too, was censorship. Anyway I can report that the thing never gets any better, but it does contain plenty of gripes like "the producer insisted that the orchestra be racially diverse” and -- notwithstanding the beg-off on Soviet parallels -- a citation of The Gulag Archipelago and an assertion that “maybe a return to Soviet-style censorship is well on the way. Apparently banjo isn’t the only thing this guy knows how to play. 

•  Now where was I? Oh yeah, second freebie, about the rightwing college that other Bari Weiss Special Guest Star went to. I hope America survives, and if it does I wonder what our descendants will think when they look back on this phenomenon of rightwingers pretending to have been leftwingers so they can write about their conversion experience. Going to Hillsdale for "diversity of thought" is like going to Golden Corral for diet options.  

Monday, January 31, 2022

WINGNUTS VS. ARTIST, PART 453,409.

I have released to gen pop my Roy Edroso Breaks It Down essay on the Neil Young/Spotify thing, which controversy has some interesting (and by interesting I mean stupid) political facets but is mainly significant as a reminder that for conservatives “culture war” is actually a war on culture. 

It is something to see rightwingers (and other idiots) attack Young, first on the ridiculous grounds that he is somehow “censoring” Joe Rogan, and then, in the manner of old Superman TV show villains ineffectually emptying their guns on Superman and then throwing the guns at him, claiming he’s a shitty musician. Even worse than the Twitter morons who say he sucks because [citation needed] are wingnut enforcers like Armond White in National Review who claim Young is inferior to, I shit you not, Kid Rock because the latter is more authentically anti-establishment (i.e. worships Trump):

Yes, a brief time between culture wars produced the lovely, singular Americana Are You Passionate? and Greendale, but now it’s disappointingly clear that Young’s facile politics often lacked moral foundation.

“Young’s facile politics often lacked moral foundation” -- barring a few translation issues, Andrei Zhdanov couldn’t have put it better himself. For White music as such doesn't even exist except as a vehicle for appropriate propaganda. In this war I’ll stay on the side of culture, thanks. 

Friday, January 28, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



It's good, and sort of new!

•  Got a hot-off-the-press Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue inspired by the McMinn County Board of Ed pulling Art Spiegelman’s Maus from its schools on the grounds that the rudeness of its depictions of the Holocaust and its fallout are unsuitable to its students. 

Yair Rosenberg, who is the author of one of the dumbest essays on film and TV criticism ever written, takes a look-on-the-bright-side angle on the Maus controversy: surveys suggest Americans know more about the Holocaust than they do about their own democratic processes! For obvious reasons, that’s certainly not unmixed good news; also, just because students know the Holocaust happened and who the major players were doesn’t mean they’ve grasped its full significance, and the rise and spread of eliminationist rhetoric in the United States as directed toward other minorities -- for example, the Latino immigrants whom Fox News sturmers call “poison” -- suggests that not enough of them do. It may be that, as the kids have been encouraged to think of racism as something that's over and done with (because to suggest otherwise is critical race double-plus-ungood), so they consider genocide something that was knocked out when the camps were liberated. 

Also, Maus is not the only book yahoos are currently banning or looking to ban, thanks to the CRT scare and related pathologies -- see here and here just for starters. Conservatives have been freaks about culture war for decades, but the Trump metastasis has upped the ante; once they were content to snarl every once in a while about Tinky Winky or some shit, but now they’re rampaging through reading lists and erasing anything that might give their kids a different way of looking at the world than what they try to beat into them. And heads up, because they never stop at schoolbooks.  

•  Actually there’s a bumper crop of freebies at REBID, including this one about Joe Biden calling that stupid son of a bitch a stupid son of a bitch, so go look around and, if the spirit moves you, subscribe so you can get it all on an ongoing basis. It’s cheap!

•  Rod Dreher, prestige media’s favorite religious maniac, just gets better and better. Here’s the header on my favorite Dreher post of the week:

Mouthy darkskin pussy-hat GRRRRR splurt! But what’s this about “some of her generation are choosing sterilization, because of wokeness”? Turns out this refers to a single alleged instance in the Dreher “Reader” “Mail” that constitutes most of the post, the author of which Dreher has thoughtfully anonymized lest the Woke Mob come after him, sure that’s it wink wink. 

Author’s assistant “Annie” moonlights as a bus driver, see, and she says she knows a family with three college-age girls, one of whom “graduated third in her class of thirteen hundred and was given a scholarship to attend an Ivy League university.” If you’ve ever read a rightwing column, I bet you can already hear the sinister background music! Sure enough:

The other day, Annie told me that there was a family argument because the daughter was going to schedule an appointment at the gynecologist to get her tubes tied. She is twenty-two years old! Her rationale was that the world is too awful and that no more children should be brought into this hellhole.

[Organ sting!]

I have known her daughter since she was eight years old, and for the past fourteen years her mother has told me about her increasingly radical, Leftist views. Starting in high school, the cause was environmentalism, and then being at that Ivy League university, especially during these last two years, the cause has also grown to include the usual diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice and destroy-Western-Civilization bullshit.

Wow -- if she goes to grad school, I reckon she’ll kill herself for Gaia! But wait, there’s more psychosexual just-so storytelling:

Last year, the same daughter made an appointment at Planned Parenthood to have an IUD implanted. Her mother threw a fit, as they have good health insurance; she lamented to me that if she wanted an IUD she could go to any gynecologist in the suburbs for a more hygienic and safer procedure. 

You know how dirty those Planned Parenthoods are, on account of the abortion germs. 

And what’s even more troubling is that the daughter isn’t even sexually active according to her mother (knowing the mother and the daughter, I believe it). Therefore, it wasn’t even for preventing pregnancy but rather for making a statement of solidarity with her “Black” and “Brown” sisters.

We’ve all been to the marches and seen the “PESSARY SOLIDARITY” banners, haven’t we? (I would love to hear this cowboy explain why "Black" and "Brown" are in quotes, too.)

Two years ago, none of the three daughters wished their mother a Happy Mother’s Day, as they considered it an antiquated custom. 

Wow, if only I’d thought of that one whenever I forgot to mail a card! “Sorry I missed your birthday, but you know how I feel about annualism.”

These kids are becoming evil. At least one consolation is that if the daughter gets her tubes tied, that’s the end of that bloodline.

“They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” ‘member that joke?

Now on a more optimistic note, I have attached a Christmas photo from one of my neighbors. The father is the pastor of a local Mennonite church. They have eleven children (they had twelve, but one died shortly after childbirth). They have all been homeschooled, and they are all very sweet and pleasant…

WHICH WAY, WESTERN MAN? Will it be the false god of IUD, or Daddy’s Little Brood Sow? If these clowns ever Benedict Opt out of the internet, I have to say I’ll miss the laughs.

Thursday, January 27, 2022

THE SUPREME COURT NOMINEE IS A NI[CLANG]!

Justice Breyer’s retirement from the Supreme Court reminds conservatives that Biden had pledged to nominate a black woman, and the results are as expected. From the libertarian* (*conservative with crippling social anxieties) Ilya Shapiro:


Screenshotted here, because Shapiro's careerism coach told him to delete it.  Others among the brethren are also going for the reverse-racism angle (“I mean, what kind of qualification is that, being a Black woman?” -- Maria Bartiromo).  But then there's Tucker Carlson laughing that Biden should nominate “George Floyd’s sister,” and Half-Pint Shapiro suggesting Cardi B -- straight-up old-school T-bone-steaks-and-Cadillacs stuff, and plenty more where it came from.

There are all kinds of hypocrisy involved here -- for example, as noted by Melissa Murray, Amy Coney Barrett, no one’s idea of a legal genius, was transparently pushed to the Court by conservative brain-trusters so there’d be a female on board when they banned abortion. Not to mention the Republican stunt casting of Clarence Thomas.

But hypocrisy is always a bit subtle at least, since of its nature it involves some masking to achieve its effect; their racism is full-blown, out and proud. What we now see is what they are, in fact what they always were, but in their Trump degeneracy they have no need to conceal it. 

Monday, January 24, 2022

(ALMOST) NO COMMENT.

GG's wrongness factor has officially gone off the charts. Next he's gonna tell us that a hot dog is a sandwich. 

UPDATE. Here's how StupidSonofaBitch-gate should have gone down. It's not too late! As for GG and that lot, commenter redoubtagain makes an excellent point: I don't recall them saying anything when Trump threw Jorge Ramos out of a press conference

UPDATE. Also, it's instructive to see what kind of people would rather listen to a weed-and-'roid-addled dumbass than to "On The Beach" or "Live Rust": Who-Moved-My-Cheeseballs and ragequeens. I'm very much a chacun à son goût guy and if someone prefers noise to lovely melodies I'm all for it, but this kind of willful perversity challenges my equanimity.  

Friday, January 21, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



Been listening to Jimmy Driftwood lately and --
man, he's
strange, ain't he?

•  Every so often I go among the Twitter morons and waste time talking back. It's interesting to see which subjects draw the dumbest respondents -- in this case, it's the removal of the Teddy-Roosevelt-and-the-lesser-races statue from in front of the American Museum of Natural History. Even the TR Presidential Library in North Dakota, to which the statue is being removed, finds the thing "problematic in its composition," and it always seemed kind of gross to me, but apparently its disassembly, which began this week, has got the MAGA types raging about wokeness and cancelculture and all that bullshit. As usual there were respondents who think statues are the only way to learn history and those who think taking out statues of famous racists is totalitarianism. None of the brethren seemed to grasp that it was not their statue to dispose of, and this is something I've noticed about their hot-button issues concerning statues and movies and advertising and other forms of intellectual property: that to them free speech is based on other people doing things with their own property that they don't like. It's an idea of free speech, in other words, that's not about their own right to express themselves, but anger at how other people do. As you might imagine they really didn't like my suggestion that they make their own Rough Rider statues out of Play-Doh and put them up on their front lawns. 

•  Busy day, not much time to do more than pass you some Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies! Here's one on Monday's crop of bizarre rightwing tributes to Martin Luther King, and another with the minutes of a development meeting of the University of Austin Board of Advisors Starring Wari Beiss.  That's just two of the five weekly installments -- if you don't subscribe (cheap!) you're missing out! 


Thursday, January 20, 2022

CHECK YOUR HEAD, BUCKO.

I see Patron Pseud of Anti-Wokeism Jordan Peterson has pulled a BariWeiss -- that is, not having succeeded by obnoxious behavior in getting himself martyred by defenestration, he has quit his academic sinecure while blubbering over the unfairness with which he has been treated, hoping for the same effect. At the Ezra Levant Post the professor explains

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked. My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions....

By "unacceptable philosophical positions" Peterson seems to mean "status as a public laughing stock." The rest of his lament resembles your average Rod Dreher column: Lots of sweeping and hysterical claims with thin or non-existent documentary evidence, e.g. "there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough... This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades." Peterson also says his colleagues "all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same," which ought to really set the tone for his U of Toronto going-away party (and excite his future Substack readers!). I especially liked this bit denouncing a well-known implicit-bias test, about which I am fully prepared to entertain doubts if they are expressed via coherent analysis, as opposed to whatever this is: 

The much-vaunted IAT, which purports to objectively diagnose implicit bias (that’s automatic racism and the like) is by no means powerful enough — valid and reliable enough — to do what it purports to do. Two of the original designers of that test, Anthony Greenwald and Brian Nosek, have said as much, publicly. [Cite please - Ed.] The third, Professor Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, remains recalcitrant. Much of this can be attributed to her overtly leftist political agenda, as well as to her embeddedness within a sub-discipline of psychology, social psychology, so corrupt that it denied the existence of left-wing authoritarianism for six decades after World War II....

Is this guy still on the all-meat-coma diet? He seems to have missed a few OS patches.

You can see how this is meant to work: the casual reader may see the length of the thing and catch some keywords, but be put off by the poor writing and painfully aggrieved tone from reading too much of it, and think, "Well, he has a long list of complaints, some of them must be justified." That's how the whole cancelculture/CRT scam gets over; when it wears out, they'll move on to the next grift. 

Sunday, January 16, 2022

"THE SNAKE," REVISITED FOR SLOW LEARNERS.

I used to post here way more often than I do now. That was partly because I was young, dumb, and full of rage. Also I had fewer outlets then, whereas now I have Twitter and the daily newsletter Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (subscribe, cheap!).

But every so often I see something that I really worry will be overlooked if I don't say something. (I know, hubris -- but in a good cause!) So in this public forum I would like to call your attention to a detail from Tubby's Saturday lie-fest in Arizona.

In recent weeks many people who should know better have been giving Trump credit for saying nice things about vaccines. It's a hangover from the old bothsider trope: Of course we should encourage Trump to push vaccines! If he wants to take credit and make political capital from it, let him! It's fine if it will get people to vaccinate! 

Well, Trump has spoken up for vaccination publicly a few times. I'm sure the moderates and milquetoasts are thrilled, notwithstanding that his yokels booed him for it

Like the trimmers, I knew when Trump pushed vaccines it would not be out of a suddenly spasm of altruism. But unlike them, I was not deceived that it would cause Republicans to vaccinate, or favor vaccination, or take any other public health precautions against COVID whatsoever,

And I appear to have been right. Take this poll from last month, showing 30% of Republicans saying they'll never get vaccinated. Congressional Republicans are still objectively anti-vaccine: When, in the face of the Omicron surge, D.C. instituted an extremely limited vaccination requirement for some public accommodations, GOP members raved about Nazis and Big Brother. And one of crypto-Trumpkin Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin's first acts in office was to make mask mandates in public schools illegal.  

So de facto Republican policy is, obviously, to make it as easy as possible for COVID to rampage through the country and then complain about how Biden isn't stopping the pandemic. And in Arizona last night, Trump made clear what his yeah-sure vaccine endorsement was all about:

The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating, white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white, you don’t get the vaccine, or if you’re white, you don’t get therapeutics.

Claiming liberals are taking vaccines belonging by right to white people and giving them to the dusky hordes -- that's guaranteed to cause something, but it ain't vaccination. 

I don't know how many times I have to tell you: This guy is not going to help America even if it appears to be in his interest to do so -- because he finds it much more rewarding to make everything worse. He's not a recalcitrant public servant who has to be prodded to do the right thing; he's a sociopath and a public menace and he really has to be stopped. 

Friday, January 14, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



About how many bands can you say
you're always glad to see them?

•  It is, along with everything else, strange to say Terry Teachout has died. As you can see from his About Last Night blog, he was busy as a drama critic for the Wall Street Journal -- as well as a playwright, librettist, and biographer -- when death swooped in and took him. He was no spring chicken, but he was sufficiently buoyant to make you think he was, so his death feels even more untimely than it is. Terry was good at paying attention, which was part of his arsenal as a critic but also his charm as a human being; whether he agreed with you or not, he took account -- generous account -- of what you were saying and doing, and you knew it. I’m very bad at taking advice or criticism, but I didn’t mind it from him, for that reason. And though he was a man of strong (and, I often felt, wrong) beliefs, he had admirable perspective and a very good sense of humor about them. He knew that there was more to life than meets the eye, and I like to think he’s currently following up on that insight.  

•  The Supreme Court, allegedly a politically neutral body, has decided to kill us slowly in order to make it look less like they’re killing us. No other explanation makes allowing the CMS mandate and killing the OSHA mandate look coherent. I mean, if I were forced to come up with a rationale, I hope I could do better than Neil Gorsuch:

…[OSHA] directs us to 29 U. S. C. § 655(c)(1). In that statutory subsection, Congress authorized OSHA to issue “emergency” regulations upon determining that “employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful” and “that such emergency standard[s] [are] necessary to protect employees from such danger[s]”…

The Court rightly applies the major questions doctrine and concludes that this lone statutory subsection does not clearly authorize OSHA’s mandate. See ante, at 5–6. Section 655(c)(1) was not adopted in response to the pandemic, but some 50 years ago at the time of OSHA’s creation. Since then, OSHA has relied on it to issue only comparatively modest rules addressing dangers uniquely prevalent inside the workplace, like asbestos and rare chemicals... As the agency itself explained to a federal court less than two years ago, the statute does “not authorize OSHA to issue sweeping health standards” that affect workers’ lives outside the workplace… Yet that is precisely what the agency seeks to do now—regulate not just what happens inside the workplace but induce individuals to undertake a medical procedure that affects their lives outside the workplace.

If only there were some way workers could “clock out” of the onerous requirement that they be vaccinated against a deadly disease when their shifts end! But they can’t, so undue burden, everyone go get sick and spread it at work for freedom. 

If the right wing killed the health care worker vaccine mandate as well, it would have made the death-cultism too obvious, so they got Kavanaugh to take the bullet and vote with the liberals. It was truly gruesome to see, when “Kavanaugh” was trending on Twitter last night, how many of those tweets were from conservatives enraged that he let hospitals require what would seem to any sane person an elementary health precaution. (Jesus, I hope Pete Hegseth doesn’t get any more popular or we’ll soon be waiting on pins and needles for SCOTUS to decide whether hospitals have the right to demand doctors scrub in before surgery.)

The American conservative movement is objectively pro-COVID -- and that goes not only for the lunatics with their crackpot theories and tubes of horse paste, but also for the politicians and conservative justices who flatter those nuts and cause their madness to be enacted in law and practice, in hopes that the continued spread of the disease will sabotage their opponents. Weird way to live! 

•  Oh, yeah, here are two Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies: one,  my own version of the hot-TV-wingnut-of-the-moment mainstream puff piece; and two, a review of Ross Douthat's foray into filmmaking. Subscribe, why don't you? 

Thursday, January 13, 2022

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART INFINITY.

CNN:

New York (CNNBusiness) -- Grocery store shelves across America are wiped clean, and they're staying empty as stores struggle to quickly restock everyday necessities such as milk, bread, meat, canned soups and cleaning products.

Disgruntled shoppers have unleashed their frustration on social media over the last several days, posting photos on Twitter of bare shelves at Trader Joe's locations, Giant Foods and Publix stores, among many others.

By “disgruntled shoppers” on “social media” I assume they mean the people working the #BareShelvesBiden tag -- which is as obvious a coordinated campaign as it gets. (Sometimes they use foreign grocery shelves to illustrate their point.)

The other day my wife went to the Eastern Market Trader Joe’s and found many of the shelves empty. There was a note explain the situation, pictured below: 


Makes sense. She went to a Whole Foods a mile away and got everything we needed. Also TJ’s was stocked back up the next time she went in.

Temporary shortages during a snowy winter and a freaking pandemic are neither new nor a big deal, and it may seem puzzling at first that operatives are telling Americans who are in absolutely no danger of running out of food or even missing a meal that somewhere in this favored land we’re experiencing Soviet shortages. Wouldn’t they go to their own grocery stores and see the disconnect?

But these days propaganda is often about the Other who are portrayed as suffering or depraved; the message is that you better watch out or else their suffering or depravity will be visited on you. The best example is all those rightwing stories about how crime is out of control in the cities and you can’t walk down the street without getting shot (which I recall was an actual line from one of Trump’s 2016 debate yammerings). Many Americans (and certainly most Republicans) don’t live in cities and have little experience of them, so they may be easily persuaded that urban life is one big prison-yard smorgasbord of violence punctuated by BLM “riots,” and that the evil Democrats who run these hellholes will try to drag you good non-city folk down with them via their drive to “abolish the suburbs.”   

The idea is to portray people who live differently from you as not only deprived but depraved, and thus a threat to your way of life -- and that’s why, the reasoning seamlessly goes, we have to keep them from doing “election fraud,” i.e. voting. 

Friday, January 07, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



Boy, that must have been some party.

I noticed a bunch of liberals objecting on Twitter to this John F. Harris/Politico story, “We Are In a New Civil War … About What Exactly?” Sample:

If this is a 21st century version of 19th century disunion, shouldn’t it be more obvious what the war, at bottom, is all about?...

Only in recent years have we seen foundation-shaking political conflict — both sides believing the other would turn the United States into something unrecognizable — with no obvious and easily summarized root cause. What is the fundamental question that hangs in the balance between the people who hate Trump and what he stands for and the people who love Trump and hate those who hate him? This is less an ideological conflict than a psychological one.

Now, this is Politico so I guess one has to be sensitive to its bothsidesing agenda (“the Trump phenomenon defies explanation,” Harris says -- ha, yeah, if your first acquaintance with the GOP was Romney 2012!) But I take his point to this extent: that all the yap about civil war -- and despite all claims to the contrary, including Harris’, as I have written before “civil war” really is overwhelmingly a rightwing thing -- it’s just ridiculous. 

And I’m not calling it ridiculous because I don’t think these guys wouldn’t do it if they could -- on the contrary, as polling and experience show, conservatives are now extremely comfortable with violence against liberals. I call it ridiculous because they have no actual complaint even remotely worth having a civil war over. Here’s the top of an email I got from one of the many rightwing mailing lists to which I subscribe:

Now, I ask you: What normal American would read something like that without wondering: What the fuck is this guy talking about, America is a "dystopian, tyrannical state"? 

It’s like when Rod Dreher goes on about “soft totalitarianism” and constantly invokes non-soft totalitarianism when talking about it (e.g., “There is no Stalin of the Social Justice Warriors, but that in no way means they are not dangerous”), but when someone (someone who’s not a mark, I mean) takes him to mean what he seems to mean, he weasels, “do I say that the libs are ‘just like’ the Bolsheviks? No, not at all,” and then explains that the liberalism “seeks domination and conformity not by imposing pain and terror on people, but rather by manipulating their access to status and comfort.” Which sounds like a pretty weak kind of “totalitarianism” in the first place, and when explicated it  turns out to mean a bunch of just-so stories about how everyone’s too scared to say trans women are men because they might lose their jobs -- which is 99 44/100% Pure Bullshit -- or that a racist getting kicked off a social media platform for flouting its terms of service is the Coming of the Camps.

The next time one of these nuts tells you about the intolerable tyranny under which Americans live, ask him what he means, specifically. Watch his hands, though. 

Want a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie? This week, along with the January 6 anniversary one I mentioned yesterday, there’s also Amy Wax’s talk radio audition. That leaves three very fine issues you could have read with a subscription, and more where that came from. Sign up and treat yourself