It just had to happen… I just had to stumble on ’nother row o’ dumb articles, & this time from our ol’ friends, The Atlantic, who took time off jerking themselves off o’er the dead bodies o’ Ukrainians to write 5 mo’ shitty news articles. Get out your tier-list cards. Here are the contenders that jumped out @ me while reading some random article I don’t remember:

The 1st 1 I saw already makes me hurl just @ the title & excerpt: “The One Witness at the January 6 Hearing Who Matters Most” & then below that we get the answer: “It’s you”. ¡Boo! ¡Get the fuck outta here! Considering all I did was make lame cum jokes while watching it — tho still, depressingly ’nough, better than the jokes most o’ the rest o’ the internet was making @ the time — ’cause nothing intelligent was said during it, I doubt that.

That this article is written by the same fascist Bush lackey who wrote his inane “Axis of Evil” 2002 State of the Union address, where Bush, in typical Republican projectionism, had the audacity o’ claiming the 21st century version o’ Poland for the US to illegally invade was the equivalent o’ an axis power for having a dictator that the US fervently supported while he was doing his worst war crimes, makes this the greatest o’ farces. I would love to ask Sir Frum what his take on the original “Stop the Count” by the Brooks Brothers to help his former employer steal his 1st election. Then ’gain, no I wouldn’t, ’cause it’d be inane as e’erything else this mediocre Goebbels has e’er written.

We can see this thru this very article, where Frum strings simple sentences, 1 after the other, since Frum ne’er graduated elementary school & ne’er learned such arcane esoterica as a subordinate clause:

The fatalism was always wrong. The important thing to remember about the Trump presidency is that he was beaten again, and again, and again. His protective congressional majority was stripped away in 2018. He was twice tainted by impeachment. He was defeated for re-election. His conspiracy to overturn that president election defeat was thwarted.

’Cept ’course the fact that he took control o’ the supreme court, which have unilateral power to defeat laws or e’en create laws based on what arbitrary interpretation they make up from the constitution, & Trumpists are taking o’er key local governments that are able to pass laws that mess round with the electoral system. There’s a reason people keep comparing 1/6 to the Beer Hall Putsch: if you fail a coup & don’t suffer consequences, try, try ’gain.

But if there is one lesson to take from the Trump years, it’s not the cynical Twitter joke “LOL nothing matters.”

I, WHO AM DEFINITELY A HUMAN BEING & NOT A FLESHY DROID, KNOW HOW THE YOUNG HUMAN PEOPLE TALK. THEY SAY LOL IN ALL CAPS & SAY NOTHING MATTERS LIKE THAT METALLICA SONG.

Now the world will know the full truth.

This was wrong. We learned only shit e’eryone already knew already.

So here’s where you come back into the story. The greatest theorists of American government have again and again warned against the delusion that the Constitution is some self-balancing mechanism, “a machine that would go of itself.” People make that machine go: people who make good choices or bad ones, people who are active or who are passive when their country needs them. People like you. You.

Awesome, since I’m the one who gets to say, I say we throw ’way the constitution & replace it with 1 that wasn’t thrown together @ the last second, just as Thomas Jefferson would’ve wanted, since it’s forced ’pon the public gainst their will & its imbecilic 2nd amendment is currently the greatest cause for the mass shootings that massacre children every few weeks.

The recently defeated president of the United States tried to overturn the Constitution rather than accept the outcome of an election. Brave and patriotic people stood up and stopped him at the time. Brave and patriotic people are seeking to hold him to account now.

The American public didn’t do shit — they ne’er do shit, ’cause they’re lazy & useless. In fact, polls show Trump’s approval ratings are higher than Biden’s, e’en after the committee.

So, yes, lol on the idea that Americans sitting on their fat asses & watching a government play will stop fascism from happening & lol on the idea that Americans, who have always been fascist, including war-criminal-collaborator David Frum ( who, I know, is Canadian — but they have fascists, too ), are going to do anything to stop it any mo’ than the average German did anything to stop the rise o’ the Nazis. David Frum should be grateful Americans have been thinking “lol, nothing matters” for the past few decades or else they might’ve guillotined him as well as his empire-building boss, as they rightfully deserve. It’s not fatalism when you call your fellow American out like you fucking see them ( specially when I know that in the long, long run Englesist Magical Socialism will rise from the ashes o’ fascism, since we’ll all be dead, & the Zombie Marx will rule — bet you thought I forgot ’bout that ol’ running gag, ¿didn’t you? ).

& lol on The Atlantic pretending like they’re liberals while letting war-criminal-collaborator fascists write for their rag.

I love how my quickly-scrabbled-out rant had mo’ sources cited ( Frum’s had none ) & was better written, despite using dumbass ampersands ’stead o’ the word “and” & writing like I’m an Irish Shakespearean gang member, & am stoned while writing this. Turns out the “smart approach to marijuana” is to write shitty. Should’ve smoked up — would’ve thought o’ something much cleverer than this glorified hallmark card. If Frum had turned this article into my high school he wouldn’t gotten a D @ best.

& this fucker has the god damn gall to pretend like Marcel Proust is his favorite writer, as if he e’er read his magnum opus. Get the fuck outta here. ¿Who you trying to fool here?

This entire article was nothing but “nihilism bad, America good”, but wasted several paragraphs reiterating this point in basic sentences. It’s hard to imagine writing a worse article.

Tier: F

Next we have “How San Francisco Became a Failed City”, which is strange, since I know people who live there, & it seems to be doing pretty well. In fact, those fuckers brag to me ’bout how it’s not raining in the middle o’ June there. Well, sucks to be them — I like the rain, give me all that shit, pour your misery down on me.

This article is a bunch o’ concern-trolling by some boomer ’bout how c-c-crazy far-left San Francisco is ’cause they don’t have ’nough people getting the shit beat o’ them by pigs. They do what many boring-ass boomers do & pretend like they grew up so left-wing, but then they rebelled not by being actually clever or unique, but by just going e’en mo’ backward ’stead o’ e’en mo’ forward, as if that takes any extra braincells, & in the process, only prove what ol’-fashioned, reactionary boomers they are. For fuck’s sake, they think helping homeless people is radical left, when it’s decades ol’, guillotining people is the new radical left trend. Get with the times. Christians now help homeless people, & when they start doing shit, you know you’re not radical anymo’, ’less you’re Thousand Foot Krutch.

My grandmother’s favorite insult was to call someone dull. I learned young that it was impolite to point when a naked man passed by, groceries in hand. If someone wanted to travel by unicycle or be a white person with dreadlocks or raise a child communally among a group of gays or live on a boat or start a ridiculous-sounding company, that was just fine. Between the bead curtains of my aunt’s house, I learned you had to let your strangeness breathe.

Your grandmother was referring to you, ’cause if you think this try-hard quirkiness is strange in the slightest you are as dull as butter knives. I love how this idea wastes several paragraphs telling me their life story, only for their life story to be that they’re 1 o’ a million mediocre bougie losers. Nobody fucking cares; get to the point.

It was always weird, always a bit dangerous. Once, when I was very little, a homeless man grabbed me by the hair, lifting me into the air for a moment before the guy dropped me and my dad yelled. For years I told anyone who would listen that I’d been kidnapped.

Add that to shitthatdidnthappen.txt.

If he ever got to heaven, Herb Caen, the town’s beloved old chronicler, once said, he’d look around and say, “It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.”

O my god, ¡nobody fucking cares! ¡This is fucking dreck!

All o’ this shallow detail is a desperate attempt to prove that they’re totally not 1 o’ those conservatives in the red states; they totally love San Francisco & its “strangeness”, so long as the gross poor people get sent to jail for their disgusting poorness. Rather than priming me to see them as level-headed & balanced for their ability to appreciate “lefty” things so long as they serve their particular bougie amusement, I’m left repelled by what a self-centered douche this writer is.

When they finally focus on something other than their terrible life story, they get to the point: Chesa Boudin sucks dick ’cause he’s too left-wing. We see a perfect example o’ this in lush detail wherein the writer describes their disgust in seeing druggies in the open, with, like, syringes & food. Wow, that’s so much worse than kids getting shot up or people going to jail for life for stealing hedge clippers or black people getting murdered e’ery year. This is why I can’t e’en empathize with right-wingers: they’re so fucking lame. ¡Nobody cares ’bout your baby problems! O, no, you had to look @ a boy wearing a skirt. Sorry I didn’t let you pick out my wardrobe, assholes. Only the most boring fucking loser would care. All this person succeeded in doing is ensuring that nobody will e’er invite them to a rave ’cause they’re fucking bummers who’ll probably narc to the popo — & nobody likes them.

A couple of years ago, this was an intersection full of tourists and office workers who coexisted, somehow, with the large and ever-present community of the homeless. I’ve walked the corner a thousand times. Now the homeless—and those who care for the homeless—are the only ones left.

Good. Homeless people are cooler than office workers & tourists are fucking parasites.

During the first part of the pandemic, San Francisco County lost more than one in 20 residents—myself among them.

(Laughs). I had no idea this article was written by a ghost.

It’s too bad San Francisco was the only place in the whole world to have COVID.

Funny ’nough, later on this same idiot will complain ’bout schools in San Francisco taking too long to open, so apparently this writer is fine with children dying o’ COVID so long as there’s no “learning loss” for children too dumb to read books on their own, ’cause s’posedly “ventilation” will cure that right up, right ’long with Alex Jones’s special juice.

The city’s schools were shut for most of the 2020–21 academic year—longer than schools in most other cities, and much longer than San Francisco’s private schools. In the middle of the pandemic, with no real reopening plan in sight, school-board meetings became major events, with audiences on Zoom of more than 1,000. The board didn’t have unilateral power to reopen schools even if it wanted to—that depended on negotiations between the district, the city, and the teachers’ union—but many parents were appalled to find that the board members didn’t even seem to want to talk much about getting kids back into classrooms. They didn’t want to talk about learning loss or issues with attendance and functionality. It seemed they couldn’t be bothered with topics like ventilation. Instead they wanted to talk about white supremacy.

Funny how this writer complains so much ’bout all the money given to the filthy homeless, but wants to waste extra money on maintaining school infrastructure rather than have kids stay @ home & do e’erything they need to do just as well ’cause you don’t need to be physically near each other to read books & hear other people talk. & before you say “but kids need to be physically near each other to interact”: you are a fucking ol’-ass boomer who is irrelevant to the 21st century; no children nowadays communicate thru meatspace, but entirely thru the digital realm, e’en when physically in school. This is precisely why ol’ losers like this shouldn’t be deciding policy “for the good o’ children” they don’t e’en fucking know.

Anyway, after this writer freaks out ’bout seeing a naked child — ’cause, as per Kurt Cobain, they’re a closet pedophile — & failing to get a police officer to give a shit, they spew some anecdotal evidence o’ drugs doing what drugs normally do & blame the lack o’ police officers to beat the shit out o’ druggies, which will magically make them not do drugs anymo’. Red states have that & are still swarming with opiates. If your city’s only problem is 700 out o’ 800,000 people dying o’ drug use in 1 year, your city’s doing pretty fucking well.

Funny ’nough, according to the American Addictions Center, San Francisco is 1 o’ the top 10 cities with the least o’erall drug use. But don’t let actual statistics & facts get in the way o’ this writer’s melodrama.

This whole obsession with needing mo’ police is funny, given they admit this statistic:

You can spend days debating San Francisco crime statistics and their meaning, and many people do. It has relatively low rates of violent crime, and when compared with similarly sized cities, one of the lowest rates of homicide. But what the city has become notorious for are crimes like shoplifting and car break-ins, and there the data show that the reputation is earned. Burglaries are up more than 40 percent since 2019. Car break-ins have declined lately, but San Francisco still suffers more car break-ins—and far more property theft overall—per capita than cities like Atlanta and Los Angeles.

’Gain: if shoplifting, which doesn’t e’en affect anyone who isn’t rich, & car burglaries — anyone who owns a car is a polluting asshole, specially in a tightly-packed city where just ’bout anything you need is just down the street & there’s perfectly good public transit, & the world is made a better place if car-owners are harassed into no longer using their planet-killing machines — is the worst problem your city has, you’re doing pretty OK.

Because it turns out that people on the left also own property, and generally believe stores should be paid for the goods they sell.

Sorry, let me fix this:

Because it turns out that people on the left I also own property, and generally believe stores should be paid for the goods they sell.

Also, leftists don’t believe in property: they believe Property Is Theft™.

The rage against Boudin was related to that locked-up soap, but it went far beyond it.

Bougie motherfuckers are raging ’cause they have to ask for an attendant to get soap. I want you to note the amazing capitalist innovation that this soft-on-crime law has created: rather than rely on violent state force, which inconveniences both them & the criminal, whose life is ruined ’cause their dumb ass decided to shoplift soap, when they should’ve just refused to leave the premises & stunk up the store so that customers leave in droves till the shop owner begs them to take some free soap & use it, the shop adds security, which protects their wares just as well as the police — better, in fact, since there’s no risk o’ the glass shooting you or ignoring your calls for help ’cause they have mo’ important things to do than fight soap thieves — & prevents a thief from being a thief without ruining their future potential. ¿But who cares ’bout that when this Karen has to do 1 extra thing to get soap?

The Atlantic’s so fucking lazy they couldn’t e’en proofread their captions: 1 o’ them says “Students outside of Lowell high schol”. I think e’eryone @ The Atlantic needs to go back to schol.

( Also, “outside of” in this situation is redundant & awkward: just say “outside Lowell” ).

Anyway, back to the school shit, ’cause I can’t stomach a bunch o’ landowners whining ’bout how best to utilize their plantations with the NIMBY-YIMBY-BIMBY shit. Spoiler: they try to pretend that some rich asshole buying up land for houses & slumlording o’er people is the cure to homelessness. How homeless people would be able to afford this rent is a mystery; but one would be delusional to think this writer actually has solutions to problems other people have, when homeless people & school children are just fodder for this rich asshole to complain ’bout how lefties inconvenienced them.

Anyway, after some bullshit ’bout how black people are the real racists for complaining ’bout white supremacy & ’cause 1 black person said something racist gainst Asians — ’cause white people are ne’er racist gainst Asians — we get to the improvements:

But Breed was angry, disappointed with the progressive faction and how it had let the city down. A few months earlier, Breed had announced a new approach to crime, starting with the Tenderloin, whose streets and sidewalks are full of fentanyl’s chaos. She declared it to be in a state of emergency and approved three months of funding for increased law enforcement there.

The order was mostly symbolic—the drug problem isn’t limited to a few bad blocks. Often a sweep of the homeless just means pushing the tents and dealers down the road. And anyone who lives in San Francisco knows the Tenderloin has been an emergency for years. But it allowed the mayor to trot out some new rhetoric: “What I’m proposing today and what I will be proposing in the future will make a lot of people uncomfortable, and I don’t care.” It was time, she said, to be “less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city.”

For those not paying attention: that “bullshit” that we shouldn’t “tolerate” is homeless people. How the police will magic them ’way is a mystery — the could always kill them, ’course. Probably they’ll be sent to jail, which will cost mo’ tax $s — tho that could be offset with a li’l slave labor — but that’s a price worth paying so this Karen won’t have to look @ groddy people.

& then they summarize this article in the best way:

The other day I walked by Millennium Tower. Once a symbol of the push to transform our funky town into a big city, it’s a gleaming 58-story skyscraper in the heart of San Francisco, and it’s been sinking into the ground—more than a foot since it was finished in 2009. A group of men in hard hats was just standing there, staring up at it. The metaphor is obvious, but San Francisco has never been a subtle city. I’d like to believe those guys finally had a plan to fix the tower. At least they seemed to accept that it needed fixing.

Ayn Rand’s grand Atlas is sinking thanks to dirty poor people, & now John Galt has returned to lift it back up & drive ’way all the undesireables.

This article did have some statistics, e’en if manipulated & taken out o’ context, & missing relevant statistics. ’Course, it’s worse than useless for gaining any information, as it’s essentially dishonest; but if we set our standards so high that an article needs to @ bare-minimum be educational in some way all The Atlantic articles will be F-tier, so we have to lower our standards a bit. This article also had some sentence variance, so it’s not as brain-damaged as Frum’s opus ’bove. But it’s way too long & full o’ irrelevant detail & I think I hate Frum a li’l less than this writer. Frum is just brain damaged; this writer is a legit asshole. It’s hard to believe a legit war-criminal-collaborating fascist is mo’ likeable than a harmless Karen, but that’s how it is.

Tier: D

OK, next we have “Mike Pence Is an American Hero — ¡No! ¡No! ¡No! ¿Didn’t you hear the president?: the bipartisan solution is to hang him.

Here is another idea the committee might consider: Take a moment to praise Mike Pence.

All right, here: he is not 24/7 a walking bag o’ toxic waste. ¿You happy now?

Congress can name a building in his honor.

“Congress hereby declares this the National Mike Pence Outhouse”.

The House and Senate could propose nonpartisan resolutions recognizing Pence for his service to democracy.

This is fucking stupid. Mike Pence is a “hero” ’cause he wasn’t a criminal. Yes, normalizing insurrection by treating the refusal to participate in such insurrection not as one’s duty as a lawful citizen, but as a bonus makes perfect sense. While you’re @ it, ¿why don’t I get a building named after me ’cause I don’t shoot up a school? ¿Doesn’t that make me a hero? ¿Did not most o’ the US government refuse to cooperate with Trump’s great heist? ¿Do they not all deserve buildings named after them? ¿Why should Mike Pence get a special reward for being 1 o’ the “good” Republicans, while Democrats get shit, ’cause we just expect them to not be insurrectionists? Any economist will tell you that that’s a good way to encourage people to be bad in the long run by treating bad actions equally as good — which is exactly why centrists are 100% to blame for the toxicity o’ the Republican party by enabling them by refusing to treat them as worse than Democrats, thereby encouraging them to get worse & worse, since they’ll always be treated as equally as bad as Democrats, no matter how bad they get, which is something leftists have been warning ’bout for years & only now have centrists begun to realize it.

He should have been much more aggressive in repudiating Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election.

So, he did less than what the average Democrat does, but deserves a better reward. This is logic in The Atlantic’s tiny brain.

Democrats ought to be trying to pry these voters away from the Republican Party in the event that Trump runs again. By making it clear that the Democratic Party appreciates Mike Pence as a hero of democracy—and that GOP lawmakers do not—they might just persuade a small but crucial percentage of these Pence Republicans to cross over in 2024.

This is so unbelievably stupid, I refuse to believe the person who wrote this isn’t a Republican troll — in fact, considering he wrote an article titled, “Great leap rightward? Nah, just finding balance”, he almost certainly is a Republican, just the fake-centrist kind that are going extinct, ’cause as had happened after the Great Depression in e’ery country, the US, now nearly 15 years into its recent depression, is dividing into the same social-democracy-vs.-fascist lines, with moderate conservatives & liberals crumbling ’tween them. Republicans aren’t going to vote for a Democrat ’cause they told them a Republican candidate is great; they’ll vote for that candidate ’stead. Trump didn’t win by swaying Democrats by praising Clinton; he won by swaying Republicans — you know, their target audience — by convincing them he’s a real Republican by hating Democrats. Maybe Democrats should cater to all those young Democrats they bitch ’bout ne’er voting for them rather than the 17% o’ Republicans who approve o’ Pence ( vs. the 51% o’ Republicans who still stick by Trump ). What pisses me off the most is that as imbecilic as this “advice” is — which, ’gain, I think is disingenuous with the goal o’ sabotaging Democrats — Democrats are just stupid ’nough to take it.

Sorry it’s not politically correct to acknowledge, but Republicans are terrible & will ne’er be convinced into not being terrible by having their terribleness catered to. Mike Pence is still a Dominionist ( read: Christian fascist ); he specifically asked the supreme court he had no problem being packed in the slimiest way possible to o’erturn Roe vs. Wade; he supported sanctions on Iran for bullshit reasons that is starving Iranians. Keeping the US’s shitty ’scuse for a republic up so it can continue to commit war crimes round the world isn’t e’en worth the lives o’ a couple dozen Iranian people. Fuck Pence — & fuck the USA.

I almost want to rank this lower than Frum’s article, since its central argument is much stupider. Frum’s inane feel-good bullshit was a’least harmless, if an opiate for the masses; this article’s message is actively stupid &, whether its dumbass writer acknowledges it or not, unquestionably acts toward moving the Overton Window & normalizing right-wing insurrection by treating those who don’t engage it as centrists, maybe e’en liberals, who deserve praise. Howe’er, structurally, it is better written than Frum’s 2nd-grade-crayon-scrawlings.

Tier: E

“Vaccines for the Littlest Kids Have Already Flopped” is the least interesting, which is to say it’s the least shitty, since we know The Atlantic is incapable o’ making compelling & intelligent articles, so what we end up here is a bunch o’ “news” that anyone not living under a giant Alf pog knows: the US government fucked up, as they always do ’cause the Republicans have strongly normalized an incapable government, which has e’en spread to Democrats, who aren’t exactly obsessed with a functional government themselves, mixed with Americans being uneducated dumbshits produced a strong stew o’ rising COVID cases. Most o’ this article is just stating facts with a few generic anecdotes that are, thankfully, not as “spiced” up as that San Francisco article novella I had to suffer thru, so it wasn’t too offensive to read.

The only part I have to comment on are the final 2 paragraphs, where The Atlantic’s lowest-common-denominator-sense creeps in:

There will be no simple solutions here. Financial incentives could help. School mandates, too, are an effective way to get immunization rates up, though in recent months, several states have introduced legislation to ban such measures. But the biggest and most difficult change will be cultural: repairing parents’ relationships to immunizations, and making COVID shots a little-kid routine. Every person I spoke with for this story stressed the importance of community outreach, and one-on-one conversations, starting with pediatricians, many families’ most reliable touchstone for care.

So we spend the length o’ a cough mentioning that some vague financial or legislative rules could “help” & offshore the work o’ going into detail to actually informative, scientific journals, & then sputter on ’bout “cultural” solutions, based on the advice o’ the same mass o’ idiots whose idiocy is a major cause o’ the problem. Yes, I’m sure a doctor telling their Fox-News-poisoned-brained patient that vaccines won’t put Microsoft 10 into their bloodstream will work. Till this article came out, doctors ne’er e’en considered the possibility o’ advising their patients to take vaccines. ¡Give this writer a nobel prize for their astounding advice!

It can work. Puerto Rico, which has one of the highest immunization rates in the entire country, also leads the U.S. in uptake of kids’ COVID shots—a trend that experts such as Mariola Rivera Reyes, a pediatric pulmonologist, attributes to the territory’s strong sense of community and trust in local leaders. “Almost all the parents I’ve talked to have been very enthusiastic,” said Rivera Reyes, who has taken to social media to connect with parents. “We haven’t encountered the resistance we can see in the mainland.”

“It can work” — then goes on to describe how it worked in a country with a “strong sense of community”, & therefore nothing like the US & an unworkable example. Please tell me how this virulently capitalist newspaper is going to help make the US mo’ community-oriented when they’ve been helping the forces that have been working toward the opposite for as long as they’ve existed.

Tier: B

The last article is just an advertisement for Jack White’s obsession with vinyl, which I give ’bout as many fucks for as the # o’ good articles The Atlantic has written. To be fair, given the choice ’tween Jack White & the Church o’ Scientology, I’d pick the former any day.

Tier 🤷

That’s all we have for now. Making you sit thru anymore o’ The Atlantic would be torture enhanced interrogation techniques. As an extra score count, I should note that this “liberal” newspaper has given us a 3/1 on Republicans vs. Democrats ( I assume anyone who believes that the vaccine is effective & won’t sell all your organs to China is a Democrat ). ’Mong those 3 Republicans were the US version o’ Goebbels; the ultimate example o’ a Karen whose only political stances are hating homeless people & drug users & wanting children to die o’ COVID; & a fervent fan o’ Mike Pence & who also has some weird obsession with falling birthrates, like all conservatives scared by the modern world do. Considering The Atlantic’s idea o’ “liberalism” is deliberately stoking cold wars & being imperialists — which is, I remind you, in fact, a key component o’ fascism — it’s no surprise.

All right, here’s your tier list: