Friday, October 28, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 10/28/22.



Friend of mine just reminded me of these guys.
They're contenders and I hope someday they get a title match.

•   I have been generous with the free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down stories, but don’t count on it lasting – baby needs a new pair of shoes, so please subscribe (cheap!)

Meantime here’s one about what’s next for the newly Muskified Twitter. You can take it as a prediction or as a mere bag-o’-shells, but one thing’s for sure: Musk is going to fuck it up, either so’s you notice or so’s you don’t. But like the Bard said, we who have free souls, it touches us not. My attitude is the same as it was the last time the dummies who used to run it suspended me for absurd reasons. I will repeat part of it here:
I do not mention this [suspension] to invite sympathy – no cancelculture crybaby bullshit for me! These morons can do what they like with their own property – but to remind you that Twitter constantly pitches people off for stupid reasons while turning a blind eye to actual hate speech…

One day I expect they’ll toss me forever, perhaps for some equally innocuous comment, so if I go quiet there you should look for me, not in instructions behind a rock that has no earthly business in a Maine hayfield, but here at alicublog (or, better still, at REBID – subscribe, cheap!).
That’s how I feel now, too; the place has always sucked, and will continue to suck in a different way. Fortunately the platforms I use are not a significant part of my identity; if I can share Substack with a bunch of a bad-faith cancelculture crybabies without getting cooties I can certainly use, abandon, or be cashiered from Twitter without drama or regret.

It’s certainly a better way to look at it than that of all the rightwing nuts now screaming for Elon Musk to avenge them for their alleged "shadowbanning" (i.e. losing followers whom you have come to believe you own, like Egyptian tomb-slaves) and "censorship" (i.e., suspension after violation of terms of service), as if the fat fraud were Jesus and they were the souls in limbo rather than socially backward shut-ins who couldn’t touch grass it you threw Kid Rock tickets on their lawns. What a way to live! Count your blessings, normies.

•  Also on the free table this week: One on the escalation trajectory of Sam “Everyone’s Out To Get Me” Alito. A few people, including REBID commenters, have noticed that even as conservatives like Alito increasingly get pretty much everything they want – from politics, anyway – they nonetheless bitch harder and louder with each passing day. I may well work up an essay on it sometime, but the short answer to the conundrum is: The same abnormal psychology that informs their politics also informs their private lives, and they’re just acting like other, less famous jerks you probably know personally who’ve fucked over other people to get what they loudly announce they want and deserve and have to have, and still aren’t happy, and they know it’s got to be the fault of someone other than themselves.

Saturday, October 22, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN (ON A SATURDAY!): 10/22/22.



That French station again! Wacky versions of classics
like this the missus calls “singer competing with song,”
but for me this one’s pure pleasure.

•  Well, why not Saturday ‘Round-the-Horn, huh? I was busy yesterday, sorry.

We’re in the psycho-nutso phase of the election campaign, with a lot of sketchy polling to rile the rubes. Here’s a MAGA douchebag trying to portray himself as beating Letitia James for New York AG based on a poll from Trafalgar Group – who, as I discussed in June, predicted Trump would win in 2020, and have a weirdly opaque method...

…which includes “proprietary digital methods we don’t share publicly,” nudge nudge, as well as “methods to accommodate the ‘Social Desirability Bias’” which they say “allows us to obtain a poll participant’s true feelings in situations where we believe some individuals are not likely to reveal their actual preferences.” In other words, it corrects results to account for the terror of cancel culture that allegedly animates rightwing nuts nowadays — how, they don’t say, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it involved some “wait a minute, this guy’s white, he can’t possibly mean it when he says he thinks America fought on the right side in World War II, maybe antifa is holding him hostage” judgement calls.

For the usual reasons, things do look bad: Midterms are traditionally poison for the party in power and God knows the Prestige Media are pushing rightwing fuckery especially hard now. I don’t counsel hope, so much, as a continuing insistence on the truth because, if the bad guys win, what you really don’t want is for people to forget where the ensuing unpleasantness came from – because you know conservatives, who rely heavily on bamboozlement, will either try to portray it as Just The Way Things Have Always Been, or blame you.

•  Now for the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies – which were generous this week, because I’m a hell of a guy: First, a plausible Herschel Walker scenario, given his “I meant to do that” follow-up on his toy sheriff badge thing; second, a shorter and more enjoyable version of Rod Dreher’s latest lengthy blubberfest over why he has to forsake his beloved Dixie (and wife and children) for the Führer of the Moment. I mean, can't you just imagine Jean-Jacques Rousseau telling Dreher, “TMI, buddy"?

Wednesday, October 19, 2022

A HYPE IS NOT A "HOME."

Ross Douthat is a menace on so many levels – to our politics, to English prose and reason, and so on – that one would think if the Times allowed him to bring in a couple of ringers to help they would vitiate his awfulness. No such luck!  Bad as his columns are, their partisan/theocratic intent is at least more or less unconcealed. But in this “roundtable” collaboration with a couple of other nudniks he tries to portray himself as the friend of the “Politically Homeless” -- in fact the thing was titled “Politically Homeless is Not Politically Hopeless” before it got switched it to “The Midterms Look Very Different if You’re Not a Democrat or a Republican” – as if it weren’t just a Republican recruiting tactic dressed up as high-mindedness.  

Maybe someone at the Times realized some readers would notice that “Politically Homeless” is a red flag signifying that rank bothsider fuckery is coming – the sort indulged by Andrew Yang’s ridiculous Forward Party, and by stray dummies who think “the left wants to censor us because they reject creativity” (??) and thus are no better an electoral choice than people who literally compare them to literal Satan. This is bothsiderism with an extra helping of woebegone and winsome: People who apparently can’t deal with the stresses and hard choices of everyday life -- try to imagine them picking an internet service provider or a wedding dress – and, faced with shitty democrats versus stark raving fascists, choose not to vote for the side less likely to kill them, and instead complain that neither side is serving them so they’ll just sit and cry about it. 

But at least those guys seem sincerely childish. Even without the warning label, you can smell the wingnut shtick Douthat and his collaborators – Reason’s Stephanie Slade, and Tablet’s Liel Leibovitz – have concocted a mile away. Leibovitz:

I came to this country, like so many other immigrants, because I care deeply about two things — freedom of religion and individual liberties. And both parties are messing up when it comes to these two fundamental pillars of American life, from cheering on law enforcement spying on Muslim Americans in the wake of 9/11 to cheering on social media networks for curbing free speech.

On the one hand, Republicans using the actual government to spy on Muslim-Americans (and, under Trump, to keep Muslims out of the U.S. entirely – though maybe Leibovitz doesn’t mind that); on the other, Democrats not doing whatever the fuck they’re supposed to do when Twitter (not a branch of the U.S. government) enforces its Terms of Service on users. It’s bothsides bingo because they’re both “cheering”!

Though Liebowitz is supposed to represent the “left,” he gives no positive defense or endorsement for any liberal or left principle – he just makes the same scared noises about Trump as any Republican milquetoast might. Also he says he’s going to vote for GOP New York governor candidate Lee Zeldin, who’s a literal 2020 election denier – but that, too, is cool with Liebowitz, who actually finds it a reason for a “very big dose of – dare I say it? -- hope”:

Voters are gravitating toward candidates who are telling them coherent stories that make sense. To the political classes, these stories sometimes sound conspiratorial or crazy or way removed from the Beltway reality. But to normal Americans, they resonate.

I guess Big Lie bullshit is OK because it's resonant, and shows independence from the reality-based beliefs of the Beltway elite.

As for Slade, she’s a libertarian, and (as I long ago observed) that means a conservative with social anxieties so, sure enough, while she professes an “almost unimaginable abhorrence… toward some of the Republicans who would have to win in order for the G.O.P. to retake the Senate,” she nonetheless favors them to win the House because

… the sheer economic insanity of the Biden years — amounting to approving more than $4 trillion of new borrowing, to say nothing of the unconstitutional eviction moratorium and student loan forgiveness — is mind-boggling to me, so almost anything that could put the brakes on some of this stuff seems worth trying.

So, she’s mad that the Democrats gave people trillions in COVID financial aid, and hopes to return to power the other party that gave them trillions in COVID financial aid. (Douthat says this makes her sound “like a swing voter”; I’d give him points if I thought he actually knew what that meant.)

The whole thing’s preposterous, but craziest thing is this from Liebowitz:

…I look at the Democratic Party and see a lot of energy I love — particularly the old Bernie Sanders spirit, before it was consumed by the apparatus. I look at the Republican Party and see people like Ted Cruz, who are very good at kicking up against some of the party’s worst ideas. There’s hope here and energy, just not if you keep on seeing this game as red versus blue.

Douthat professes interest in this “Bernie-Cruz” coalition. I would pay a few dollars to see this roundtable reconvened so that the participants could explain what that coalition would be like. Democratic Socilaism without the Democracy and Socialism, but Owning the Libs? Hey, maybe that’s Tulsi Gabbard’s plan! 

Long story short, you should always be suspicious of crypto-non-partisan come-ons, and when it's peddled by post office wall fixtures like Douthat definitely hold onto your wallet.

Friday, October 14, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 10/14/22.



The missus found a French internet station
that plays odd jazz and pop vocal tracks.
This one tickles me, and I think it shows 
how strong the song's underpinnings are.

•  I'm releasing unto the world today's Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue, which is more cultural than political -- it's about how the arts and entertainment press talks a lot more about movie box office standings than they used to. This is an observable phenomenon for interested people over a certain age, but I seldom see it brought up. 

Commenters are drawing parallels with other areas of life and media coverage thereof -- for example, the "horserace" approach to politics that predominates among our prestige press outlets. I think it also distorts audience expectations of what movies are about. I don't think it's just nostalgia to lament the vanished film culture where people went into movies not much knowing or caring about the business end of them. Now so much film news is basically business news that I think it must have an effect on audiences -- and they approach movies more as social phenomena, that is, things with which to identify, rather than to just enjoy. 

You can also see its effect in the way movies are used as political props. I’ve written about the weird hate-on rightwingers had for the Toy Story spin-off Lightyear, owing to a miniscule amount of gay-friendly content in it, and how they tried to convince readers the film was a flop because it finished second rather than first in opening grosses. Insane politics aside, the whole idea of a film being a flop because it was only the second most popular release in the country seems to be, among other things, a product of the weird, zero-sum, hypercompetitive way we're encouraged to look at -- well, everything. 

•  Oh, also freed from the mothership: An Alex Jones intervention. The whole billion-dollar thing is pleasing to some people, but more bemusing to me, because first, like a lot of other rich assholes under fire, Jones seems not only unconcerned with but OxyContin-numb to the judgement  -- since it happened he's continued to rave as if he's a big winner. And who knows whether they'll ever be able to extract enough of his money to make any difference in the way he lives? 

As is always the case with the law, I want to see the guilty punished, not for the joy of retribution, but so that those who would do likewise may be discouraged -- and as it stands I'm sure Jones' millions of followers think his is a positive example because he has, even at this moment, gotten away with it. Which guarantees that we'll get more of it. This lesson can be applied to other areas of pubic life as well. 

Friday, October 07, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 10/7/22.


Kids on the back of the bus were listening to this.
I think Schoolly D would approve.

Got a hot one for you at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down today: Inspired by the latest batshit-crazy rightwing ruling on guns, it’s an overview of evidence that conservatism is not so much a political or philosophical position as it is a death cult. Everything they push for is clearly calculated, not to help anybody, but to make life worse for people they hate – even if they have to make life worse for themselves as well in order to achieve it.

Their pretenses are hilariously shoddy. Look at the difference, for example, between their recent “constitutional” positions on abortion and on universal gun suffrage. In the case of abortion, in the Dobbs decision they read the constitution to mean that a generally popular and useful procedure may be banned because walla walla rhubarb rhubarb sanctity of life, buttressed by the wisdom of a 17th-Century witchfinder. Since they can’t (yet) affirm of behalf of our (so far) non-theocratic state that zygotes are people, they rule that the religious beliefs of a few Americans must trump the health and happiness of most. Our hands are tied – it’s in the constitution! 

But as to the right to brandish guns anywhere and everywhere – a license that very clearly has caused immense damage to our quality of life – their constitution tells them this right must be expanded ever outward, into churches and concert halls and fairgrounds and subway cars, whether we want it or not. Conservatives used to say the constitution is not a suicide pact; now they say, oh, yes it is. Your hands are tied – it’s in the constitution! 

Their constitution, in other words, is as peculiar and malign as their Bible. 

I will add that, along with all the other emotional infirmities that inform the actions of the conservative death cult, there is an important but generally unremarked one which I believe is a major force behind the gun mania: Desegregation. Having been alive during some of the sequelae of Brown v. Board, I recall how deeply conservatives resented having to live by the then-new constitutional order decreeing separate-but-equal an unacceptable accommodation of the civil rights amendments. For most of them, it was the first time a constitutional ruling had interfered with their lives – even if they weren’t subject to, for example, forced busing -- and I believe they never stopped resenting it; nor have they stopped resenting that it has become unfashionable (or, in their modern argot, "cancel culture") to say out loud in mixed company what they think about it. Thus, in the back (at least) of their minds, when they push guns into liberal cities that don’t want them, they consider it revenge for being forced to live with black people.

Tuesday, October 04, 2022

IN DEFENSE OF NO DEFENSE OF HYPOCRISY.

At Roy Edroso Breaks It Down today I wrote a bit about the Herschel Walker revelations (paid for girlfriend’s abortion, son hates him for terrorizing his family) that have been added to the previous Herschel Walker revelations (terrorized his family, left bastards all over the place). 

That it will not necessarily cause Walker to lose the Georgia Senate election is much discussed in the REBID comments section. Some readers suggest this is proof that hypocrisy is a dead letter, at least as far as elections go.

While I agree that Republicans have no compunction about nominating and sometimes electing people who self-evidently do not live by their own professed principles – for example, the myriad GOP officials who, though their party is obsessed with “groomers” and child sex crimes, enjoy statutory rape – that doesn’t mean we should give up, as it were, on hypocrisy as a political issue. 

For one thing, as I wrote back in 2006 during one of several Republican sex scandals that revived the issue, attentiveness to hypocrisy is not merely a campaign strategy – it’s a meaningful feature of civilization:

… human society depends upon at least a rudimentary concept of justice. We can forgive inconsistencies, and even admire trying and failing, but when someone amasses power from us based on his personal superiority, and is proved a fraud, he has broken the basic bargain of leadership. We mock him not out of meanness, but out of a communal survival instinct.

I guess a Republican could argue about relative degrees of hypocrisy and even whatabout the Walker revelations, but frankly they wouldn’t have much of a case. For example, I was at first surprised more Republicans didn’t bring up Bill Clinton, who as you know liked to have sex with women who were not his wife, but Slick Willie didn’t campaign on mandatory fidelity, nor did he hold a gun to Hillary’s head, have a spate of illegitimate children, etc. I expect most people understand this, which is why prominent wingnuts are pulling intellectual feats of derring-duh like this:

Boy, if things were totally the opposite, they’d sure be different, right? Again, as I said this morning, there’s plenty of hypocrisy in politics, but it takes conservative levels of hypocrisy to get us to the point where we’re even wondering whether hypocrisy has become so normalized that it’s no longer a meaningful issue  – which, come to think of it, is similar to the way conservatives have also normalized attempted treasonous insurrection and criminal acts by a president. Which is all the more reason to resist 

Friday, September 30, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 9/30/22.



Lou Rawls got into some heavy shit during his Axelrod years.

•  So much going on these days -- Vlad P’s little “I now declare these territories conquered” ceremony, Clarence Thomas’ crackpot wife just straight-up telling the House committee Biden stole the election, and Trump’s bought judge further demonstrating her indebtedness, etc. – so the whole rightwing pants-shitting spectacle over Lizzo playing Jemmy Madison’s flute comes as an amusing diversion and a suitable subject for a free issue of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (Subscribe! Cheap!).

Watching dullards like Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro dig with their sputter-spoons an ever-deeper hole is fun, but it also reminded me of the old days when I used to pay closer attention to the Konservetkult and Sons of Zhdanov, and what has changed since. Back then the ridiculous fist-shaking communiques conservatives regularly issued about how corrupt our “culture” was and how, once the lumpen were suitably indoctrinated with rightwing wisdom, it would become again fresh and pure were just funny – an endless series of reminders that these clowns were as morons before the Muses, that they had no idea what works of art were for and thought they could hector people into accepting their shabby substitutes. As I’ve said more than once, when they say “culture war” they always mean a war on culture. 

That’s still mostly true and the cream of my jest. But in the Trump age there’s been a slight and disturbing change. First, as has happened generally since I began on this beat, the one-time rightblogger small fry have advanced within the conservative movement, so their ravings receive greater attention from the High Command. Once, George H.W. Bush would just make a dumb crack about how Americans needed to be “a lot more like The Waltons and a lot less like The Simpsons” and let it go at that. But in the Reign of Tubby, their fantasies were promoted at the highest levels; for example, they started to push through a Garden of American Heroes --  a sort of anti-woke Disneyland where tourists could stare at heroic statues and get Cultivated. Albert Speer might have blushed.

And Trump’s arts-beat acolytes got more belligerent. When a Public Theatre Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar imagined, reasonably enough, Caesar as Trump, the wingnuts went wild because in the play Caesar gets assassinated – and they thought (or pretended to think) this meant liberals (because artists are all liberals) were calling for the assassination of Trump. In one of the creepier Trump-era writings, National Review Zhdanovite Kyle Smith cheered when sponsors began withdrawing funding from the Public and crackpots like Laura Loomer began interrupting performances because it meant that “Lefty Actors Are Beginning to Fear Donald Trump” – that is, the Trumpkins were terrorizing the Entarte Kunstlers, the logical endgame of culture war when you can't produce any real culture yourself.   

So yeah, it’s still funny that Lizzo and the Founding Flute can set off these clowns (and don’t let me spoil your enjoyment of the story!), but it’s also a reminder of how far they’ll go if they get any power. 

•  Speaking of culture war, one other thing I wanted to mention was the latest entry in the conservative hate-on-for-cities sector: An essay promoted by the hapless Steve Inskeep and written by Hillsdale legacy pledge Carmel Richardson about how all you stupid liberals complaining about housing prices should move to a big house in redstate Bumfuck like she did. Like all her kind, she describes cities as hellholes (“There’s a reason literature’s greatest protagonists [Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, for one] go off the rails while living in seedy rented rooms”); Richardson’s innovation is to attribute the continued – indeed, timeless – appeal of cities to fads spurred by social media:

With the rise of social media and online journalism, key housing markets have become trendy in a way they never could have before. A classified ad now has a national audience, and bougie neighborhoods a ream of TikTok viewers. People are moving to areas they have no connection to and no relatives near because they saw it online and thought it looked cool. I know a few. This has the effect of driving up prices in areas that otherwise would never have known such demand.

Actually, the top end of this price-gouging is driven not by Tik-Tok but by realtor greed, absentee tenantssub-tenancy gone wild, and other late-capitalism pathologies. But, perhaps owing to her youth (ha, I’m kidding, she’s an apparatchik and must know better), Richardson misses that the big cities she excoriates are always more expensive than cowtowns for a simple reason that people prefer the cities to the cowtowns and people pay more for what they prefer. In fact, she offers as evidence of the attractiveness of Oklahoma and West Virginia that those states are offering cash bonuses to people who come and settle there – as if she’d never heard the old saying “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.” 

Her closing is a marvel:

It is true that builders cannot keep up with the demand in places like Colorado, Florida, Tennessee, and Northern Virginia, but in the Midwest and other rural regions across the country, in towns no one ever visits on vacation, countless homes stand for sale and empty -- old, beautiful, and undesired by most.

You don’t say. Why “undesired”?

The towns they fill are thinly populated, and the old storefronts are mostly dark. What would happen if we started buying and living in these towns, dusting out the cobwebs and bringing in new life? One has to wonder what kind of people we would have to become to choose a quiet life over nightlife, and a county fair over a $75 brunch.

You stupid libtards with your brunch and nightlife, why won’t you move to a big house out in the middle of nowhere HURRY PLEASE COME KEEP US COMPANY I’M GOING MAD. Maybe the journalism thing is just a front and Richardson is actually working for brokers. 

Friday, September 23, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 9/23/22.



If I had my way in this wicked world I would tear this building down.

•  Got a couple of hot ones for you from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, a big underground hit on the Substack circuit. First, a little something about how the rich are “enclosing” all the good things that were once the domain of the poor. That comparison to the old English enclosure of the commons was a reader’s (in the very lively comments section, which you are invited to join), not my own, but it fits: in my reading the toffs not only increasingly take the fruits of our labor, but also take such bygone common privileges as the right to reinvent oneself, once a quintessentially American option that grows more difficult for us paupers to avail with each biometric innovation but which seems to be all the rage among the “rebranders” of the rich

Speaking of which, another reader made a comparison between this diminution of options for the non-rich and rightwing rage against trans people:

Also it's getting harder and more expensive to legally change your name, and I suspect this is largely gatekeeping trans people which I'm sure they think is a win, but is also conveniently making it harder for everybody to get away from bad lives, and that's a bigger win.

In my view anti-trans bigotry is at bottom about conservative authoritarian misogyny (because how are we supposed to know which is the “weaker sex” if gender is fluid?). But it’s worth considering that part of what riles rightwingers about trans people is that their existence implies people has a choice about who and what they will be – which is obviously in conflict with conservative traditionalism, whether the MAGA choad version of the tradcath “Ye offend the Lord with thy top surgery” blather. Anyway, thinky fun! 

•  Also on the REBID free table: I had a laugh at Scott Adams’ cancellation claims over “Dilbert" being dropped by Lee Enterprises (no one’s idea of a “woke” organization). In point of fact Lee dropped dozens of strips at once, but Adams, being a prominent wingnut, was apparently obliged to hint that he was dropped for political reasons so as to titillate the cancelculture crybaby community. This is another great example of one of my famous equities: the Rightwing Mood Swing TM between delusions of grandeur and persecution mania! I really should make a gift book out of those.

•  I don’t like to focus on Trump much because, as recent events have shown, the Republican Party is a vicious death cult that offers its followers nothing but brutal vengeance against their perceived enemies, and Tubby is just a giant symptom. But I do find this interesting:

Former President Donald Trump reshared a video on his Truth Social platform on Thursday night filled with numerous far-right QAnon conspiracy images, as well as references to satanists and pedophiles. The over a minute-long video contains a series of memes that show Trump alongside QAnon slogans and includes vague threats of retribution against his opponents. 

"Every last traitor, liar, leaker and enemy will pay for what they have done to America," reads the text in front of one image of Trump.

Tubby going full QAnon can be seen a couple of different ways. On the one hand, of course, it’s terrible: QAnon is nuts and its adherents are dangerously deluded. On the other hand, MAGA people are already every bit as dangerously deluded – really, some of them may not know from the alleged central character Q and its mythology, but don’t a lot of them already think that anyone who’s decent to trans people is a Pizzagate pedophile, and that violent insurrection at the Capitol was A-OK

One might argue the danger of the QAnon component is that it’s a social mechanism that pushes the already unmoored Republicans a little further out into la-la land. But if you believe, as I said, that it’s a death cult, maybe it’s better that their separation from the reality most of us share be made more obvious, so that more voters can see exactly how nuts they are and react accordingly. 

Of course this relies on the prestige media paying closer attention, which is by no means a sure thing.

UPDATE. Back to the subject of control over one's gender/personal identity, and the conservative antipathy to it: I'll just add this link to my Twitter thread about something that's related to it: Conservatives trying to get rid of no-fault divorce. This too is part of the modern conservative drive to overturn the modern world and its signal feature, self-determination. I'll highlight the button, which I think is worth repeating -- and I expect I will, in days to come: 

Friday, September 16, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 9/16/22.


Preach.

•  Here’s today’s free issue of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, on the conservatives’ latest New Low – BTW these New Lows seem to be coming faster, don’t they; like the contractions of the birth of fascism – namely, dumping even more immigrants in blue states, only this time sending some of them to Martha’s Vineyard.

As mentioned in my previous and more thorough examination of this trollery, conservatives have been enjoying Greg Abbott’s months-long shipments of immigrants to blue cities because they think the hardships they cause prove that a.) immigrants are disease carriers that no one wants and b) liberals don’t want them either so they’re hypocrites and the Real Racists™. 

But even conservatives know that the blue cities to which they've been sending immigrants are already full of black, brown, and indeed every other kind of people, among whom we white neighbors live quite comfortably. Which is probably why they pulled the Martha’s Vineyard stunt – it’s easier to portray those non-urban toffs as the limousine-liberal-racists of their imagination. 

This is a version of the old conservative gag about how If You Love [People We Despise] So Much Why Don’t You Let Your Daughter Marry One. You may think they stopped doing this one in the civil rights era, but rightwing internet sleazebags have been doing it as Babylon-Bee-level "satire” for years -- only now they usually focus on Latinos; here's an example from 2018, “Seize Ivy League Dorms and Give Them to Immigrant Families.” You can go read it, but I’ll make it less painful for you by supplying my own contemporaneous, better-written description:

Zmirak's big joke thereafter is an image of Messicans nestled in a "glorious Gothic dining hall, with sixty-foot carved ceilings and iron candelabras," being served their food by the silly SJW students. Liberals made to serve the brownskins they pretend to love so much -- it's a classic conservative humiliation fantasy straight out of Birth of a Nation. To add cream to the jest, Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds pimps that shit to his own coprophages and, in their rush to assault their strawmen, they suggest things like "Just dump them all in Brooklyn" -- because that's where the hipsters live, see, and since they're all limp-wristed sissies they've probably never seen an immigrant, especially in the trendier nabes like Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy.

All that’s new about the routine now is that they've got their politicians doing it with them and – as has been the pattern for decades – they’ve gotten even more vicious and stupid about the whole thing, and the contempt in which decent people hold them is still more justified. 

•  BTW I just got out of a week-long Twitter jail sentence for this, inspired by Sullivan weeping over the Queen:


This Twitter claimed violated their "hateful conduct policy” – which anyone with a middle school education would recognize as an absurd misreading of my comment, unless Andrew Sullivan has become a protected class (beyond the prestige media world where he clearly is one, I mean).

I do not mention this to invite sympathy – no cancelculture crybaby bullshit for me! These morons can do what they like with their own property – but to remind you that Twitter constantly pitches people off for stupid reasons while turning a blind eye to actual hate speech.

I really don’t think it’s political in the sense that Twitter is picking one side or another; I think their poor decisions are partly due to shit algorithms, but mostly just ass-covering gestures – gestures toward ass-covering, I should say, because the owners of the multi-billion-dollar company know they’ll only get in trouble if their decision follow any kind of a pattern, even (maybe especially) if the pattern is simply logical. For example, if they got rid of all the genuine hate speech on their platform, they’d be hauled before Congress to explain their hostility toward conservatives. But if they keep on throwing people off for jokes they don’t understand, along with occasional real offenses, they will have shown themselves to have “done something,” and no one can accuse them of bias.

One day I expect they’ll toss me forever, perhaps for some equally innocuous comment, so if I go quiet there you should look for me, not in instructions behind a rock that has no earthly business in a Maine hayfield, but here at alicublog (or, better still, at REBID – subscribe, cheap!).

Also, as a treat, here's one more free issue that may be of use to those of you who will spend the weekend standing in line to see Lizzy in a box. 

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

REST IN PISS.

To tide us over while we're waiting for Kissinger's fast train to Hell, we have the passing of Ken Starr, a first-class piece of shit: Grand Inquisitor of the Clinton Investigation (who then defended Trump from his own, more richly deserved impeachment!), enabler of widespread sexual abuse at Baylor, Jeffrey Epstein mouthpiece, and more. 

Funnier still are the conservatives sticking up for Starr. For example, the also-loathsome Andrew C. McCarthy at National Review:

...he had the patriotic devotion to take on the most thankless task in modern American history: independent counsel in the investigation of President Clinton.

You see this a lot in conservative salutes to Starr: His actions described as "thankless," meaning "all decent people were disgusted by them."
For that, the media-Democrat complex spared no effort to destroy him . . . personally.

That is, they noticed his malfeasances (like Baylor and Epstein, which go unmentioned by McCarthy) and reported them accurately, which is the worst thing you can do to a Republican . 

The best, though, is Quinn Hillyer at the Washington Examiner, under the already-answered-by-my-tshirt headline "Ken Starr, not a villain, did his duty with good intentions":

Former federal judge and independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who died today, was an eminently decent man and dedicated public servant who did not come close to deserving the calumny he received from most of the establishment media.

This is not to say that Starr’s judgment, especially when involving political ramifications, was always the best. But it is to say that he did his duty thoroughly and, importantly, fairly and without malice.

Yeah, he ran those people over, but he was on his way to church! 

...As it happened, both as a staffer on Capitol Hill and as an editorial writer in Little Rock, I became deeply involved in investigating the scandals of the Clinton era, trying to separate wheat from chaff. One bit of chaff (among many) was the persistent rumor that Clinton friend Vince Foster’s suicide had been staged. Some conservatives absolutely would not accept the suicide story and insisted that Foster was murdered.

Starr, with his then-young staffer Brett Kavanaugh playing a lead role, meticulously put that conspiracy theory to rest. And Starr’s team had Kavanaugh walk me through the report they presented, noting key clues that, while public, were ones the media missed. The effect was to exonerate the Clintons further on that score, even as Hillary did lead a cover-up of some materials in Foster’s possession when he died. If Starr had been “out to get” the Clintons, he and Kavanaugh would not have been so intent on noting even more of the exculpatory materials about the Clintons than the media had gleaned.

To recap: The liberal media and the Clintons themselves were to blame for the rumor that Hillary killed Vince Foster, but Ken Starr saved them. And look at the thanks he got! 

The highlight:

As it was, Starr went on to a productive career in academia, again sometimes showing better judgment than at other times.

I wonder if they honestly don't know how funny this is. Nahh, they can't be that dumb.

Sunday, September 11, 2022

NONE ELEVEN.

I wrote this a year ago, in "The Last 9/11":

God bless you if you have dead to mourn. But I’m done with 9/11. I don’t want to invade any more foreign countries to make some yahoos feel good and some billionaires richer. I just want this country back from the people who manipulated all that violence and heartbreak to make it this way.

I'm only here to say that nothing has changed. Even the sort of buffoons accustomed to automatically wave the bloody shirt seem to be losing steam; at National Review this morning, for example, 9/11 is way down the page, far below stories like "The Biden Administration Is Engaged in a Massive Censorship Campaign"; hapless Dan "Baseball Crank" McLaughlin is wheeled out, and he begins, "One bright, sunny, seemingly perfect Tuesday morning in September, everything changed," and the eyes of anyone who lived through those years of mindless militaristic rah-rah glaze over -- and then you realize his story is datelined last year. They couldn't even come up with anything new.

Which makes sense. Modern conservatism is thoroughly exploitative, and what's left to exploit from 9/11? They long ago wrung all the graft they could out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and so have no real use for jingo perorations -- though they managed to tap some final drops last year, when Biden withdrew U.S. troops, acting as if ending that disgraceful occupation and not the occupation itself were the real crime.  

Their mob boss has no interest in foreign adventuring, except to pick up checks from Saudi butchers; his style is to defend our foreign enemies, saying after all the U.S. is not so innocent so who are we to embark on moral crusades against them -- a crude cracked-mirror version of what conservatives have accused liberals of believing for decades.

To them, 9/11 is like our natural resources -- something to be pumped mercilessly until it's used up, and then abandoned. 

Friday, September 09, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



God save your mad parade.

 (Note: Contrary to custom, the freebie links are at the end.)

Funny, I’m actually susceptible to royal drama. I remember the scenes around Victoria’s death in PBS’ dramatization of The Forsyte Saga – the maid crying out, “it’s the Queen, mum, the poor old Queen – she’s dead!”; the archival footage of the cortege, and the infirm Old Soames tottering to his feet: “Don’t care to be seated when the Queen is passing.” I even felt a little blush of sentiment in Frears’ The Queen when the little girl proffers Liz the flowers and says “they’re for you,” notwithstanding the real meaning of the scene is that foxy Tony’s scheme worked a charm.

But I’m not so depraved that I can’t also enjoy some good Dead Queen jokes, and apart from Irish Twitter the funniest have been unintentional – that is, the puffed-up boo-hoos of reactionaries who halted, as if by reflex, their usual smackdowns and slurs on the poor and underprivileged to blow their noses over Betty Saxe-Coburg and talk about the Passing of the Old Order. For example, Andrew Sullivan:


For my impertinent reply I got a week off Twitter. Worth it! 

Sadly I can’t slap ‘em all. Erick Erickson, for example, glurges that the people cracking wise at the Queen’s death are all snooty liberals. He seems particularly incensed at the black ones, whom he angrily accuses of anger; “undoubtedly,” he fumes, “they also understand their careers are what they are because of white progressive elite head-patters, and it makes them angrier.” Hey, give Erick credit – he learned a variation on “liberal plantation”! But the rest of the shtick is musty as hell – “the left is increasingly cloistered inside a bubble of their own making,” blah blah blah – though nothing in the thing is more sick-making than his attempts at funerary prose: 

Truly, I have no words to add to the hundreds of thousands already written about the death of Elizabeth II. I can only offer my prayers. Her shoes are too big for anyone to fill, so I will also pray all of us can give King Charles the grace to walk in his own shoes in his own way, unshackled from the expectations left by our memories of his predecessor, his mother, the Queen. In the shadow of his mother’s crown for so long, he now comes into the light beneath its weight on his head and its burdens on his shoulders as he and his people mourn Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other realms and territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. What a time.

As their eyes pass over this, I doubt even the people who take Erickson seriously are paying close attention, and it registers merely as a gush of So Sad So Sad God Save & Are Eye Pee. But for those of us who can’t help ourselves, it conjures vision of King Charles III trying out one of his thousands of pairs of shoes with a renewed sense of purpose (and a great fat book on his head, to improve his posture), and Erickson, squeezed into an equerry costume, bawling out the late Queen’s honorifics at a suburban barbecue. 

I’m grateful that old Bess stood up to the Nazis with whom her wicked Uncle liked to party, and can even understand how the durability of her reign gave very old people some sense of continuity and stability, and that it must be rough to lose it. But most of us do not have such a sense, because the world has been getting worse for a long time and dragging our hope and fortunes down with it; and in that light the bejeweled lady hanging in there year after year to greet one horrible knob after another, then bidding them cheerio as they went out to fuck up England and the world some more, doesn’t seem so much a comfort as a cruel joke.

That’s why the jokes are funny. And speaking of jokes, I have a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue on the subject – accept it please in the spirit of the occasion (and tell your friends, since, ahem, I can’t tweet the link). And while you’re at it, read and enjoy the previous one about people who think liberal arts degrees are bad because they don’t make you rich.

Friday, September 02, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN,


Dedicated to all the MAGA shitehads out there.

•  Here’s this week’s unlocked Roy Edroso Breaks It Down story – a consideration of conservative attacks against drag queens. It may hardly seem worth mentioning, given the insane hate-on conservatives have for other groups such as trans people (whom, it is worth noting, conservatives are currently trying to chase from society and some are trying to murder). But I think it’s noteworthy for the very weirdness of their jihad. For years it seemed even lunkheads liked drag queens because of the the joy they bring. I guess when bigotry blossoms, it’s important to attack the pleasure centers. See what you think! 

•  I guess the big news now is Biden’s perfectly reasonable speech on how Trump supporters’ attacks on democracy should be resisted, and the ravings of said supporters in response. In a way it’s perfect: Biden said they were dangerous nuts, and here they are acting the part perfectly. Like this:

Prognostication is a mug’s game, but I think we can safely assume independent voters are not gonna look at shit like this and think, yeah these guys are definitely not the violent lunatics they looked like on January 6. 

The weirdest thing, though, has been the argument made by some of conservatism’s finest minds, that since MAGA stands for Make America Great Again, Democrats are against making American great:

That’s like saying “’Arbeit mach frei’” just means ‘work will make you free’ – it’s really a positive message!”

Oh, and for lagniappe


If only stupidity made evil people ineffectual, we could count ourselves safe from these losers. But we know they’re going to continue to act out, in violent language and behavior, protesting their innocence all the while. Well, at least the non-idiots know the score. Let's hope my optimistic view that non-idiots represent a majority turns out to be accurate! 

•  Finally, goodbye to Barbara Ehrenreich. I've only read a few of her excellent essays, and ought to take this opportunity to finally get to Nickeled and Dimed. I will mention that she was yet another subject on which Jonah Goldberg showed his utter worthlessness

Friday, August 26, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


I don't think Hoagy could write a bad song if he tried --
and he may have here.

Yes, only one free story from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down this week – and I remind you, Satan-to-Jesus-in-the-desert style, that all this – i.e. five days a week of deathless prose on contemporary topics – will be yours if you send me seven measly dollars a month. Considering he was only offering Jesus a bunch of hot sand, I'd say you'd be getting the better deal.

The current freebie is a version of that Rich Lowry essay defending FBI-threatening Trumpkins, stripped of its bullshit veneer. Lowry and that whole Republicans with Good Taste crew have certainly disgraced themselves in the Trump era – more than usual, I mean! – but, two impeachments and a coup later, their continued fluffing of Tubby should make it plain even to the dimmest professional centrist milquetoasts that the whole movement is rotten and irredeemable. 

Based on the continued ineducability of Damon Linker et alia, I guess it can never be made plain enough for some people. But at least some of us are trying. And now there’s the White House Twitter account mainstreaming the “This You?” attacks on Republicans who blubber about student loan forgiveness but turn out to be PPP pigs. I think it’s awesome that Biden’s people are smacking these wretched hypocrites around, for the usual petty reasons but also because it does the great public service of acknowledging that the civility with which liberals are always expected to treat conservatives is not only never reciprocated but also continually exploited.

I mean, these people worship Donald Trump, for fuck’s sake. All the hardcore rightwing ragebait emails I get are filled with stories like “DeSantis BLASTS Fauci to Kingdom Come: WATCH” and other equally combative rants. And Republicans candidates are pretty much expected to show themselves shooting or leading airstrikes against their unseen liberal enemies. 

American politics is a free-fire zone – except it’s only free going one way, toward the left. And yet, as the many citations of Murc’s Law have shown, when liberals even so much as point out how crazy these people are acting, they draw a red card from the prestige media.

Well, fuck that shit. The civility train left the station a loooooong time ago. I’m only disappointed that Biden called them “semi-fascist.” Uh uh, Dark Brandon, they’re full fash, and letting people know and giving the evidence is simply good citizenship.

UPDATE. I try not to be too "cry harder" about this, but really how can you resist when it's Timothy P. Carney at the Washington Examiner:

Did you know that if you ever took any form of federal aid, you’re never allowed to criticize any other form of government aid?

? No, I did not know that. What -- 

That’s the only reasonable interpretation of the snarky tweet campaign spearheaded by the White House on Friday, comparing the forgiveness of student debt to the forgiveness of the Paycheck Protection Program...

What they clearly believe is that giving money to anyone — in any circumstance — buys the White House the right to say “shut your mouth” any time that person criticizes a government program.

The White House "snarky tweet campaign" was just this: they ran Republicans' rages against the loan forgiveness next to the amounts of said Republicans' (often quite substantial!) forgiven PPP loans. That's it. The simplest kind of mockery. And this has reduced Carney to a full-body sputter of persecution mania:

In that light, you can better understand the unending desire to expand government. The more thoroughly you get everyone on the dole, even if you do it by first cutting off their access to nongovernment money, the more you get to boss everyone around.

We'll subsidize your electric car, but then, you have to shut up. We'll subsidize your crops, but then, you can never criticize us. We'll subsidize your home purchase, but then, you have to agree with us on everything.

The italicized section is very like what Carney italicized-fantasized was being said to him during the 2015 RFRA controversies: "Bake me a cake, photograph my wedding, pay for my abortion and my contraception." Guy's got an M.O.! 

Finally:

The only sensible response is to get government out of every part of our life we can so that we preserve the standing to criticize the government. I don’t generally support that take, but that’s what’s required by Biden’s behavior.

You liberals have forced me to pretend to be a libertarian, again! Yeesh, what a whining little bitch. Makes you want to creep under his window at night and stage-whisper BAKE ME A CAAAAAAAKE.

UPDATE 2. Ugh, it's a real pity party on the right today:

But we should blame ourselves: We should have been telling them to fuck off long since. Now they're spoiled. 

Wednesday, August 24, 2022

LOL STUDENT LOAN FORGIVENESS GO BRRRRRRRR.

I'll have to suss it out more but so far I like the Biden student loan forgiveness plan -- especially the part where none of the Jubilants (if I may call them that!) have to pay more than 5% of their discretionary income per month toward loans. For one thing, it underlines how this isn't the giveaway to the rich that Republican assholes are making it out to be. 

It also has the added benefit of making Megan McArdle mad:



If you're wondering how McArdle knows that all you horrible people who got student loans were just whooping it up in college, wearing nice clothes and painting the town and studying something silly like literature or sociology, you have to understand this is what it sounds like when a child of privilege swallows old-school outrage-based rightwing propaganda -- you know, hippies cashing their welfare checks while the silent majority works hard, goddamnit -- and regurgitates it in a snippy little pundit voice. 

In the battle of reality and resentment, resentment wins every time. That is, it wins in McArdle's world -- but in an America where a growing number of people go to college (a trend reactionaries would like to reverse, for obvious reasons), and parents still want better for their children, I suspect it's very different. 

Anyway I paid my loans off years ago (not hard because I had scholarships -- marvel at it, ye sons of Reagan!) and I think it's great.

Friday, August 19, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


Church was like this, I might go.

•   I got through the entire week without dropping a single free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down episode – that’s how committed I am to driving you chiselers into the paid-subscription corral. (Sign up now it’s cheeeeeeap.) But since you alicublog readers are the O.G. late-night real people, I have unlocked my latest fantasia – The Mar-a-Lago Raid as The Alamo, as the Duke might have imagined it. (Of course you have to remember he’d be 115 years old and hella senile.) Feast your eyes! 

•  I also want to share with you my logical atrocity of the week. Surprisingly it has nothing to do with Mar-a-Lago, directly; it’s about Liz Cheney. I have no brief for her – she sucks, and while her standing up to Tubby on this one particular thing (i.e. trying to destroy democracy) shows admirable grit it doesn’t excuse a lifetime of rightwing malfeasance. But the conservatives who are excited that she lost her primary because she displeased The Boss are even worse, and include a lot of what I am accustomed to call Just the Tip Trumpers – rightwingers who used to find Trump de trop but now defend his every thuggish act. This definitely includes Byron York, late of National Review and now at the Washington Examiner, who offers the worst equivalence between Cheney and Trump I’ve seen: 

There have been dozens of headlines in recent months suggesting that radical supporters of former President Donald Trump hope to start a new civil war in the United States…

Now a new voice is talking about civil war, or more accurately, Civil War. In her concession speech Tuesday night, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), soundly defeated in a GOP primary, invoked Civil War imagery to describe her determination to "do whatever it takes to ensure that Donald Trump is never again anywhere near the Oval Office." Cheney's words were filled with martial imagery and indirect comparisons of today's atmosphere to the 1861-1865 war that claimed as many as 750,000 American lives…

In any event, Cheney's speech shows that Trump supporters are not the only ones engaging in dreams of civil war.

See, Trump may have incited his goons to insurrection, and since his joint was raided may have stepped up his rhetoric to the point where Republican candidates can comfortably call for the murder of federal officers – but he’s not the only one inciting civil war: Liz Cheney used martial imagery, and also vowed to keep The Boss out of office, which when you think about it is like slavery -- except, you know, ha ha [pushes in nose] so even worse. 

As has been made abundantly clear, even putatively housebroken conservatives are full-bore MAGA shitheads. In fact even the anti-Trump ones are monsters (I'm still waiting to see whether Jen Rubin's conversion is sincere). And the ones who are Trumper on the Downlow are probably the worst of all.

Friday, August 12, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


Pointers, Toussaint. Band is
tight.

The Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie for the week (yes, only one -- subscribe, ya tightwads, it's cheeeeap) concerns the raid on Mar-a-Lago, and is I think the only one getting at the nub -- that holding Tubby to account with the rightfully employed instruments of the law is not only the right thing to do, but will also have a positive and indeed healthful effect on our politics. Read, note my historical allusion, discuss, disseminate! Then try a free trial subscription, plenty more where that came from.

Of course, many of our top pundits think it's too dangerous to do a law-and-order on this career criminal because we might make his yahoos mad. The most shamefully high-placed of these nudniks is David Brooks, who cites a bunch of right-wingers and Republican consultants to the effect that this is Bad News for The Democrats:

In a normal society, when politicians get investigated or charged, it hurts them politically. But that no longer applies to the G.O.P. The judicial system may be colliding with the political system in an unprecedented way.

So the obvious answer, to Brooks, is for the rule of law to make way for mob rule:

I presume in those circumstances Trump would be arrested and imprisoned. I also presume we would see widespread political violence from incensed Trump voters who would conclude that the Regime has stolen the country. In my view, this is the most likely path to a complete democratic breakdown...

America absolutely needs to punish those who commit crimes. On the other hand, America absolutely needs to make sure that Trump does not get another term as president. What do we do if the former makes the latter more likely? 

Jesus, what a pussy. I guess he thinks now that Pence should have agreed to accept the bogus electors in January 2021 -- then maybe we could have avoided the riot on the 6th.

Brooks says DOJ has "unintentionally improved Trump’s re-election chances" and "unintentionally made life harder for Trump’s potential primary challengers and motivated his base," which is like saying the Allies unintentional got a lot of their soldiers killed on D-Day. Some things you do because you have to -- you know, Bobo, like your maid cleaning your toilet. (No, I'm not expecting him to understand.) 

Friday, August 05, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


Holland. Dozier. Holland.

•  Did a little something at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down on that shit-bonkers trend among prestige media clowns of, first, reporting in tones of outrage that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ran ads telling Republican primary voters how conservative their most conservative candidates were, and then blaming the DCCC rather than Republican voters when those candidates were nominated.

Megan McArdle is first among equals in mendacity here, dudgeoning that Democrats are willfully making it more likely that the worst Republicans (that is, the ones that are 5% worse than the second-worst) might win if the Democrat loses, and that this shows -- say it with me now -- Both Sides Are The Same ("Democrats can stop asking how Republicans could have sold out their principles and their country in a pathetic grab for some evanescent political advantage. Because now they know"). This will come in handy when McArdle inevitably pimps Yang's Forward Party as the Choice of People Who Want Clean Hands When DeSantis Becomes Dictator.

I complained about this trend a few weeks back when it first rolled out, and noted it then as a clear example of Murc's Law: Only Democrats can have any agency or causal influence over American politics; Republicans are as little children, buffeted hither and thither by Democratic actions, and so cannot be held responsible for anything they do or say. McArdle is apparently a believer:

Which leaves us only with the common deflection: Why blame Democrats instead of the Republican voters who chose a candidate aligned with Trump? I think those voters are grievously mistaken, and should stop supporting the treasonous oaf, or his imitators. But at least they think they’re doing the right thing.
It's like she's chastising Democrats for picking on their slow-witted older brother. The McArdleites on Twitter are even worse, sometimes hilariously so:


Sometimes I feel like Chris in All My Sons. Don't you live in this world? What the hell are you?

•  It's not yet at 8,000 cases but monkeypox is a declared public health emergency in the U.S., which is good because, given how this stupid country has handled COVID, it's clearly going to take all the feds' power to keep idiots from spreading it around. Sadly they can't protect us against weaponized bigotry, which we must expect because of the association of the current outbreak with gay sex. Though monkeypox is mainly spread by physical contact with skin and objects that have come in contact with skin -- like clothing, towels, and furniture -- some assholes are already using it to promote their hoary homo-hate. The loathsome Erick Erickson
It really is time to stop trusting the public health establishment.
How could anyone ever trust their claims on vaccine integrity when they lack the integrity to speak truthfully about the spread of monkeypox and demand the necessary actions to stop its spread? They want to bar your kids from school if they don’t take the COVID vaccine with which they’ll still get COVID but could not bring themselves to cancel the kink festival in the actual epicenter of monkeypox for the nation wherein gay hedonists could actually and probably did spread monkeypox. Heck, they even screwed up vaccine distribution for monkeypox.
There follows an absurd misinterpretation of California state senator Scott Wiener's comment on the decision not to close the annual Folsom Street Festival (an ancient rightwing rage-equity), and then:
Wiener, of course, was fine with closing churches, mandating masks, and banning people from going to the beach. He was not fine with people making “their own decisions about their own risk levels” with COVID.

Not being able to abstain from sex for two weeks is a damning indictment of the social order of the left — their pleasure trumps your health and safety. We’re governed by pagans worshipping Moloch and participating in Ashtoreth’s orgies.
Just be ready, because this pox is definitely going to spread faster from this pig-eyed piece of shit to his fellow scumbags than monkeypox. 

Wednesday, August 03, 2022

HAVE SOME KANSAS COPIUM!

Just a brief look-in to celebrate, not only the voters of Kansas rejecting a Republican-approved referendum that would have enabled an all-out abortion ban, but also the humorous coping strategies of prominent forced-birth advocates. At National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru:

The lopsided result in the referendum is an illustration of first-mover advantage. 

18 points is one hell of a "first-mover advantage."

Kansas (where I grew up) is by no means a pro-life state, but it would probably never have adopted a sweeping abortion-protective constitutional amendment by popular vote. Once the state’s high court effectively amended the state constitution by itself, though, dislodging its mini-Roe by referendum became — as the result suggests – impossible.

Kansas is the home of Operation Rescue and already has heavy abortion restrictions but, to paraphrase Spinal Tap manager Ian Faith on Boston, it’s not a big pro-life state. And the “victory is impossible” tautology is fantastic – why then have the referendum at all? Forced-birthers were very enthusiastic about it, as I recall.

Ponnuru’s colleague Alexandra DeSanctis blames the “confusing” text of the referendum – a gambit employed by Erick Erickson as well – without explaining why the confusion would be all among the putative supporters of the abortion ban rather than the opponents. Is she saying they’re stupid? (Also, she claims opponents were trying to exacerbate this alleged confusion, which is rich considering who was actually caught trying to bamboozle those voters.)

It's not hard. Kansas Republicans wrote the damn referendum question and scheduled the vote to give themselves maximum advantage, and still got wiped out in a heavy-turnout election. Americans don't like what the Supreme Court's rightwing loons did and everywhere they are given a voice in the matter they will say so.

I'll probably have more at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down later but meantime enjoy this bagatelle in which Ben Shapiro decides to do something about this Wet Ass Pussy thing once and for all!  

Friday, July 29, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


Mainly known for his funny get-up and act, but he could rave.

•  Like I keep telling you good people, I need paying customers and can't be giving it away so much anymore. So there is only one freebie from the week's Roy Edroso Break It Down: A transcript of Glenn Greenwald's latest interview. Ah, you got me, it's fanciful satire! A jape, a jest! But really it's only a matter of time; as low as Greenwald had sunk in my estimation I never expected him to interview Alex Fucking Jones and portray his amazingly vicious and stupid slanders on the Sandy Hook massacre victims like some kind of honest mistake. (His and Jones' shared portrayal of Jan. 6 as a set-up was, alas, already believable.)

But that seems to be the horseshoe racket these days: Matt Taibbi is also sucking up to Jones as well as the Jones-adjacent incel crowd. In this interview with a director who made sympathetic documentaries about Jones and these people, Taibbi suggests taking them seriously has been "forbidden" by the big media nomenklatura, notwithstanding his subject's films are freely available and one of them is, per Taibbi, "topping Apple pre-order charts." (The rightwing moodswing between persecution mania and delusions of grandeur strikes again!) In another essay (mercifully clipped by the paywall) Taibbi is offended that Paul Krugman said the MAGA movement seems based on "nothing at all." "In the pre-Trump era," says Taibbi, "it was understood reporters weren’t supposed to avoid ugly or scary topics. We were supposed to dive right in, and in the nonjudgmental manner of doctors figure them out." Actually in 2017 we had months of Trump diner safaris; maybe the reporters saw enough of their nihilism and got tired of finding new ways to make it look like something more exalted. I jest, of course -- to this day, there's always someone at a major newspaper willing to tongue-bathe these guys. Does Taibbi really not see that? Maybe he's aware that without the cancelculture crybaby angle he'd look like a higher profile Jim Hoft.

•  Oh, tell you what -- you can always go to my Substack and look at older free stories. They're all quality (and I do it five days a week!) and some of them remain blazingly relevant. For instance: Here's a tweet from a recent stream endorsing an excellent Bloomberg story on the distance between New York City's actual crime profile and the media panic stirred up about it:



This is right in keeping with what I wrote in the summer of 2020, in the heart of the COVID pandemic, about how rightwingers were using Death Wish stereotypes of New York to inflame their suburban base:
...if you read conservatives these days — even as New York has beaten back the virus, keeping the curve flat for months, but still struggles economically — you’ll find they’re not cheering for New York to come back; they’re cheering for New York to die...

...the operatives spreading this stuff don’t care about reality, and they certainly aren’t trying to show any 9/11-style sympathy for New York as it pulls itself out of the COVID-19 hole. Because their pollsters have certainly advised them that stoking their base’s hatred of highfalutin’ city folk might energize them to come out and vote Trump, and that is far, far more important to them than any old-fashioned idea of solidarity with one’s fellow citizens in a time of crisis.
Really, this gift seems like a curse sometimes. A curse I'm willing to share with you for the low, low price of $7/month! (While supplies last.)