I.

Renowned newspaper, The New York Times, writers o’ such hard-hitting pieces as “Momo Is as Real as We’ve Made Her”, “Need to Find Me? Ask My Ham Man”, & the Pulitzer-winning, “The Benefits of ‘Tummy Time’”, — which was actually a swerve from their opinion 5 years earlier expressed in “’Tummy Time’ May Not Be Needed”, only to come to a happy bipartisan, centrist compromise 2 years later with, “The Truth About Tummy Time”, which has, “So, yes: Tummy time is good — but you don’t need to overly fret about it” as its Google blurb, ’cause, fuck no, I’m not wasting my time reading god damn articles ’bout tummy time like a 40-year-ol’ wine mom — had what experts call “a bitch fit” after 180 o’ their own contributers & GLAAD called out The New York Times for being, what we in the ergot call “transphobic shitbags” for spewing stale superstitious op-eds by credential-less professional randos, while offering actual trans people hardly any podium on which to speak on important trans issues, as well as reminding e’eryone that they were homophobic shitbags back in the 80s — ( but they don’t remind e’eryone that The New York Times also in the early 90s peddled that famous book o’ white supremacist pseudoscience, The Bell Curve ).

Anyway, you came here for the bitch fit, so here it is:

Their protest letter included direct attacks on several of our colleagues, singling them out by name.

This “attacking” — as hypocrites who try to weaponize the empty meme o’ “cancel culture” as a sad, impotent Orwellian political tool to silence dissent call “criticism” — was aimed @ articles whose authors were “outed” by The New York Times themselves on the articles themselves, so it’s The New York Times who were the real doxxers here.

This attempt to twist this letter, which barely focuses on the writers beyond a couple name drops as details & focuses entirely on the scummy machinery that is truly responsible for these articles’ existence, is such a pathetic & transparent digression.

That policy prohibits our journalists from aligning themselves with advocacy groups and joining protest actions on matters of public policy.

You have to admit, executive editor Joe Kahn — ¿am I doxxing him in my hurting his fragile feelings attacking homicidal manslaughter gainst him by revealing his well-known name — has the balls o’ a Fox News anchor to lie in such a transparent way. ¿Who is he trying to fool that no other New York Times contributor has had ties to advocacy groups or involved themselves in politics? For fuck’s sake, the open letter itself pointed out that many o’ the op-eds were by people who were part o’ antitrans advocacy groups — tho unlike these people, who proudly announce their ties to LGBT, ’cause it’s something a civilized person would do, these cowards hide their ties ’cause they know they’re terrible people for it. So what Joe Kahn means is that journalists can’t align themselves with pro-LGBT advocacy groups, but they can align themselves with hate groups. This fits perfectly with The New York Times’s “ethics policy” o’ supporting bigotry. Being gainst bigotry obviously violates that policy.

We also have a clear policy prohibiting Times journalists from attacking one another’s journalism publicly or signaling their support for such attacks.

¿Does Kahn have so li’l respect for his own paper that e’en he doesn’t think it deserves to be italicized, or did the typewriter he wrote this on not have a way to italicize text?

The New York Times, by its very nature, must attack others sometimes, so this “ethics policy” is just “don’t bite the hand that feeds”, which is laughable as an “ethics policy”, but arguably just as laughable as a threat, since that shriveled hand is barely feeding shit with what a slum newspapers are now.

Our coverage of transgender issues, including the specific pieces singled out for attack, is important, deeply reported, and sensitively written.

This is so hilariously sad. It amazes me that people try to portray these papers as serious or intelligent with shit like this. Yes, keep telling yourself in the mirror you’re important, New York Times: a’least there’s 1 person who believes it. What’s e’en better is the middle-school level diction here. ¿“Deeply reported”? ¿What does that e’en mean? That’s what a teenager says when they want to seem like they’re saying something important, but have nothing to say.

The journalists who produced those stories nonetheless have endured months of attacks, harassment and threats.

Which, if this did happen, — Kahn doesn’t provide any evidence, which is par for the course for The New York Times — would’ve happened regardless o’ the letter, since your paper was what revealed their names. It’s cute that Kahn thinks that these contributors imagined up this idea that these stories were transphobic, when many other news outlets were already shitting on you.

Nowhere in the letter is there any advocation for harassment or any interaction with the writers @ all, since, ’gain, it’s aimed primarily @ The New York Times as an institution itself. ¿Does Kahn believe any criticism @ all is advocating violence? The New York Times names several people by name — here’s them singling out Lia Thomas, a trans athlete in their article ’bout the riveting topic fascist conspiracy ’bout the spooky trans people scheming to steal all the swimmer medals with their magical secret muscles; I bet nobody has e’er harassed her ’cause o’ this article.

Like all “cancel culture” hypocrites, it’s 100% “rules for thee, not for me”: I can shit talk anyone else I want, but anyone who criticizes me e’en the slightest is a vicious villain. Like they say: can’t take the heat, get the fuck out o’ the kitchen. The fucking nerve o’ this spineless worm to peddle hateful propaganda & then act indignant when it’s thrown back @ him in the most polite, tepid way possible. What a coddled, spoiled brat. But it’s no surprise: this is the attitude one gets when one is spoiled rich, ne’er having to actually deal with real world problems, living in a coddled bubble o’ yes-men.

The letter also ignores The Times’ strong commitment to covering all aspects of transgender issues, including the life experience of transgender people and the prejudice and violence against them in our society.

Which is, ne’ertheless, not worth as urgent a memo or any leash-pulling on the disobedient worker slaves as polite talkback gainst The New York Times — ¡the real victimized minority!

A full list of our coverage can be viewed here, and any review shows that the allegations this group is making are demonstrably false.

There is no list here, so that is accurate, as The New York Times’s sloppy agitprop doesn’t deserve to be called “coverage”. Considering all the other newspapers — who are in no interest to support the proles, lest their own drones revolt — are pointing & laughing @ your transparent transphobia & you’re the only 1 so fervently defending your own paper, no, I don’t think any review backs you up, bud.

We have welcomed and will continue to invite discussion, criticism and robust debate about our coverage.

’Cept this criticism, ’course.

Even when we don’t agree, constructive criticism from colleagues who care, delivered respectfully and through the right channels, strengthens our report.

“Your criticism is only valid if done privately, so I can squash it & punish you ’way from public view”.

We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.

Well, then you’d better go rush in some barely-educated college students, ’cause 180 o’ your employees just fucking did.

We live in an era when journalists regularly come under fire for doing solid and essential work.

“Like these journalists daring to take us to task, & being threatened for not obediently following our corporate line”.

We are committed to protecting and supporting them.

Small print: so long as they only say what The New York Times tells them to say.

Their work distinguishes this institution, and makes us proud.

Yes, it distinguishes you as a bigoted, draconian institute proud o’ your own farts.

What a cesspool o’ a company. In an online era where anyone can bullshit up their own “paper” online or on social media & probably get mo’ views, — certainly anyone who has the clout to work with an o’errated paper like The New York Times — ¿why would anyone subject themselves to being slave drones for these pigs? I hope most o’ these contributors start their own papers & tell The New York Times to stuff it up their ass.

Anyway, I wasted your time, as The Onion, always brilliant, created the best critique o’ The New York Times anyone could.

II.

¡But that is not all! ¿O, you thought The New York Times was done pearlclutching? ¡The New York Times hasn’t e’en begun their pearlclutching! In the 2 billionth installment o’ “Rich White Person Not Loved ’Nough by E’eryone in the World”, The New York Times has made an op-ed dedicated to defending brown-nosing J. K. “Wizards Shit Their Pants” Rowling’s ability to add an extra billion to her Scrooge cash pile, which the vile trans activist antifa commie reds want to sabotage by putting her in the cis gulag where she’ll be forcibly reeducated, as trans people do all the time.

The article starts with a bunch o’ vague platitudes ’bout trans deserving safety, too, which seems nice, ’less you have mo’ braincells than The New York Times’s editors & follow the links to find the extra caveats @ the end that say, “but trans people still get an L”. This op-ed claims that these carefully cultivated quote mines they made up just now are ignored by “a noisy fringe of the internet and a number of powerful transgender rights activists and L.G.B.T.Q. lobbying groups” — truly the spookiest spectres haunting the globe — who actually read the original full quotes & had the audacity to call Rowling a, ¡gasp!, “transphobe”. That’s obviously hate speech & these people should be cast from polite company for their insidious attempts to cancel famous children’s book writer. Hilariously, in the very next paragraph, the writer acknowledges that this “noisy fringe” includes The Leaky Cauldron, “one of the biggest ‘Harry Potter’ fan sites”. That’s an awfully popular “fringe”.

The next paragraph has the predictable topics o’ “cancel culture”, harassment & doxxing, the latter 2 o’ which are, indeed, terrible when they happen to anyone. This article doesn’t have any complaints ’bout it happening to anyone else, tho, — including those “powerful” transgender rights activists & LGBTQ “lobbying groups” ( the 1 type o’ lobbying group The New York Times doesn’t jerk off to ), as well as average trans people who just exist, most o’ whom have far less money to protect themselves than Rowling, nor do they have the arbitrary loyalty that so many o’ these arrested-developed journos still obsessed with children’s books have for this rando celebrity to spew all this propaganda on the public. Moreo’er, it has no relevance to the topic o’ transphobia: if a white supremacist gets harassed, — & some almost certainly have been — ¿does that validate white supremacy? ¿Could Rowling not scrounge together a mo’ educated brown-noser that a’least knows what “ad hominem” attack logical fallacy is & do The New York Times lack the basic high-school education to realize how infantile this article is? ( The answer to the latter is definitely “yes” ). If The New York Times wanted to write an article on the problem o’ harassment & doxxing in general & how it corrodes public debate, that would be good ’nough; but melding it directly into the issue o’ trans issues is peak intellectual dishonesty.

But after that we get the real meat o’ this article: grifting this guest writer’s podcast series, “The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling”, which is just Rowling whining ’bout how she’s the only person who’s been threatened in the universe. Yes, it’s a refreshing take to look @ the bigot’s perspective on things & completely ignore the most threatened minorities — that’s what we call looking @ both sides, ’cept we only look @ 1 side, since trans people aren’t famous & rich ’nough. Sorry, ¿did I say this was refreshing? I meant refreshing like water that’s been left in the sun all summer long. It would actually be refreshing if The New York Times let the dirty underclasses get a single word in edgewise.

This op-ed writer goes to the deranged comparison o’ Rowling to Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed by an Islamic zealot after an Iranian head o’ state declared a fatwa on Rushdie decades ago. Last time I checked, no trans head o’ state e’er declared an official fatwa on Rowling — in fact, last time I checked, there have ne’er been trans heads o’ state @ all, that’s how big & powerful they are. Still, this is “a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers” are “demonized” — that is, ’gain, criticized. The conclusion is obvious: no one is allowed to criticize writers e’er. If you e’er criticize a writer for their opinion, you’re basically leading them to be stabbed to death. Meanwhile, this op-ed writer, who is clearly demonizing LGBT activists by depicting them as violent maniacs, isn’t endangering them. See, it’s only dangerous when the uppity lowerclasses open their mouths gainst their celebrity royalty; when these cissies slander vulnerable groups in the most cowardly & idiotic ways possible, that’s just “having an opinion”. Only famous celebrities have the right to have opinions; average social-media users should keep their mouths shut & be “civil” ( read: obedient to the upperclass ).

And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.

If we translate “her actual views” as “my whitewashed version o’ her views manipulated to make her look better than she is”. I find it funny that this op-ed complains o’ censorship when she herself censored Rowling’s real words to cut out the inconvenient stuff, like “[H]uge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists” & describes caring ’bout trans rights as “scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow” — literally parroting the same rhetoric rightwingers use gainst all women’s rights issues. Granted, it’s easy to see how someone as dense as the average New York Times writer could fail to comprehend the passive-aggression ’hind Rowling’s empty, vague platitudes & skewed perspective, deliberately downplaying the threats toward trans people & deliberately exaggerating the threats toward the most important class, her.

So why would anyone accuse her of transphobia?

Clearly it’s ’cause those people read her full words on trans people & not your carefully-crafted quote mines.

The answer is straightforward: Because she has asserted the right to spaces for biological women only, such as domestic abuse shelters and sex-segregated prisons. Because she has insisted that when it comes to determining a person’s legal gender status, self-declared gender identity is insufficient. Because she has expressed skepticism about phrases like “people who menstruate” in reference to biological women. Because she has defended herself and, far more important, supported others, including detransitioners and feminist scholars, who have come under attack from trans activists. And because she followed on Twitter and praised some of the work of Magdalen Berns, a lesbian feminist who had made incendiary comments about transgender people.

This paragraph is fascinating, since, unlike the rest o’ the article, which has tried to clean up Rowling’s transphobia, here it’s just laid right out — ’long with just plain ol’ sexism. She unironically says Rowling supports “sex-segregated prisons”, like an edgelord on Reddit bragging ’bout how they thought Jim Crow was actually a good thing, O, here comes all the controversy, I’m such an individual. I hope these prisons are “separate, but equal”, since anyone familiar with history knows how well that works. We could just keep e’ery individual isolated & keep down violence for e’eryone, but that would waste too much tax $ on the shameful enterprise o’ treating humans humanely, so let’s just indulge in superstitious traditions & assume that gay people don’t exist & ne’er commit sexual assault — prison rape certainly isn’t a common trope, since separating people by arbitrary chromosome layout genitals I don’t know any coherent way to define genders has done such a great job.

What a “biological woman” is is vague, anyway. ¿Are physically transitioned trans people included? ¿How is this measured? — with the utmost science, I’m sure, as well as genital-groping, ¿since how else would anyone know, &, mo’ importantly, how is it anyone else’s fucking business? This is why society rightfully considers people who obsess o’er “biological” gender fucking gross: it’s literally defining people by body parts that nobody else should be caring ’bout ’less we’re actually having sex. If anything, trans people seem to be mo’ enlightened, since they seem to think beyond just tits & cocks.

& then we have the sudden swerve into an imaginary strawman in the middle with the whole “‘people who menstruate’ in reference to biological women”, which contradicts the immediately preceding statement ’bout trans people being all ’bout “self-declared gender identity”, without any biological element @ all. It’s almost as if Rowling’s being deliberately strict & deliberately gatekeeping people based on criteria that’s simultaneously narrow & vague. Shocking that people might think such a person is an asshole, specially when that criteria isn’t based on any scientific knowledge, — Rowling being a writer o’ children’s fantasy, not a scientist ( & while I don’t have the time to do a thorough investigation myself, most o’ the scientists I’ve seen talk ’bout this issue have a much less hamfisted approach, shockingly ’nough ) — but on this rando’s kneejerk feelings. If The New York Times had any intellectual integrity they would spend mo’ time talking ’bout scientists’ opinions on trans issues, not yet ’nother blowhard celebrity, but we already established that they have no credibility, so here we are.

Then we have “incendiary comments about transgender people”, which doesn’t sound transphobic.

You might disagree — perhaps strongly — with Rowling’s views and actions here. You may believe that the prevalence of violence against transgender people means that airing any views contrary to those of vocal trans activists will aggravate animus toward a vulnerable population.

But nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic.

These statements are contradictory & show that the writer is either so stupid that she doesn’t know what transphobia e’en is or hopes that her readers don’t. This is like people who say, “I’m not racist, but…”. You can assert till your face is blue that you’re not a transphobe, but people are still going to call you a transphobe, ’cause people decide for themselves whether or not you’re a bigot, you don’t get to decide for them. Not only does constantly saying, “I’m not a transphobe” not dispel people o’ that view, it makes the mo’ likely to believe it, since actual “not transphobes” don’t need to constantly declare that they’re not transphobes: they show, don’t tell. In fact, we don’t call people “not transphobes”: we call those people trans supporters, in the same way we use the word “feminist” ’stead o’ “not sexist”. ¿Would Rowling declare herself a trans supporter? Well, that answers the question, doesn’t it.

The “vocal trans activists” part is specially rich. These morons have been filling social media with their mental diarrhea for years, but have the audacity to call other people loudmouths. You wrote a multithousand epic ’bout 1 fucking person, ¿& you’re not 1 o’ those vulgar “vocal activists”?

She is not disputing the existence of gender dysphoria. She is not denying transgender people equal pay or housing.

But she does explicitly support “sex-segregated prisons”, which doesn’t include transgenders — ¡so I guess that means Rowling’s so progressive, she doesn’t believe trans people should e’er go to jail! ¿What bathrooms does she believe trans people should use? If the answer isn’t, “public bathrooms should be broken up into individual stalls for e’eryone ’cause sex-segregated bathrooms is a superstitious barbarism”, then there’s no answer that won’t be transphobic — or sexist, for that matter.

Take it from one of her former critics. E.J. Rosetta, a journalist who once denounced Rowling for her supposed transphobia, was commissioned last year to write an article called “20 Transphobic J.K. Rowling Quotes We’re Done With.” After 12 weeks of reporting and reading, Rosetta wrote, “I’ve not found a single truly transphobic message.” On Twitter she declared, “You’re burning the wrong witch.”

How ’bout I not take pampered randos who have no stake or credentials & ’stead ask actual scientists or trans people. While I’m @ it, ¿why don’t I ask a bunch o’ white male journalists whether or not antiaboriton laws are sexist & read the article, “20 Sexist Donald Trump Quotes We’re Done With”. After all, he tells e’eryone he’s not sexist & believes some women have troubles in their lives ( for instance, he agrees with Rowling on the dangers o’ trans people ), so he can’t be sexist, ¿right? I love the Twitter user who quipped “Serious question: do you think that there are *right* witches that should be burned?”. I should note that having done the most basic research I could bother to do, I found that this rando ran something called “TERF Anonymous”, so clearly they’re an expert on what is & isn’t transphobic, just like I always make sure to ask what the leader o’ the Klan thinks when I think something I say might be insensitive to black people. If this article has informed me o’ anything it’s that all these people being literally murdered for s’posedly being transphobes when they’ve done mo’ for trans people than anyone are laughably terrible liars.

For the record, I, too, read all of Rowling’s books, including the crime novels written under the pen name Robert Galbraith, and came up empty-handed.

Yes, that’s the quality o’ Rowling’s writing for you. I don’t know why you’d subject yourself to such torture.

Those who have parsed her work for transgressions have objected to the fact that in one of her Galbraith novels, she included a transgender character and that in another of these novels, a killer occasionally disguises himself by dressing as a woman. Needless to say, it takes a certain kind of person to see this as evidence of bigotry.

Yes, that certain kind o’ person is “not a fucking idiot”, which is a class that, unfortunately, doesn’t include this op-ed writer. ¿What does this transgender character do, by the way? Surely if ’twas a positive representation, you’d be itching to go into details. I’m guessing the fact that you don’t is an indication that you’re hiding very gross transphobic depiction & are once ’gain, what we in the business call, “lying your ass off”.

This isn’t the first time Rowling and her work have been condemned by ideologues. For years, books in the “Harry Potter” series were among the most banned in America. Many Christians denounced the books’ positive depiction of witchcraft and magic; some called Rowling a heretic. Megan Phelps-Roper, a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church and the author of “Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving Extremism,” says that she appreciated the novels as a child but, raised in a family notorious for its extremism and bigotry, she was taught to believe Rowling was going to hell over her support for gay rights.

Hey, look, ’nother irrelevant comparison. ¿& did you know that Kanye was criticized for saying Bush didn’t care ’bout black people? That means people who criticize his flagrant antisemitism are also wrong. Duh, I understand how logic works.

Phelps-Roper has taken the time to rethink her biases.

Yes, now that Rowling’s a bigot, too, she can finally enjoy Harry Potter. ¡Whew! ¡What a relief!

¿What are these “biases”? ¿Being a “Rowlingphobe”? Yes, ¡somebody please think o’ the Rowlings!

She is now the host of “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling.” The podcast, based on nine hours of her interviews with Rowling —

Jesus fucking Christ, that sounds exhausting to listen to. ¿What obsessed neurotic wants to spend 9 whole hours interviewing some rando children’s fantasy writer? She’s not e’en a great fantasy writer. If ’twere LeGuin, maybe — she wasn’t a bigot, for 1.

— the first time Rowling has spoken at length about her advocacy —

What a load o’ horse shit. Rowling has babbled on & on her spicy hot takes on transgenderism for years.

— explores why Rowling has been subjected to such wide-ranging vitriol despite a body of work that embraces the virtues of being an outsider, the power of empathy toward one’s enemies and the primacy of loyalty toward one’s friends.

Harry Potter embraced species-based slavery as “what’s natural for them” & made fun o’ the 1 person who revolted gainst it, had essentialist morality where someone born in a “corrupt” way is naturally evil & people are sorted into the evil camp & born as a bootleg white supremacist ’cause they have an ugly name like “Draco Malfoy”, & has a chosen-1-by-birth protagonist. Harry’s an “outsider” only till his birth superpowers makes him save the day & then e’eryone loves him. Harry Potter is only progressive to the most regressive morons — which is to say, Americans & Britons.

All o’ this is to say, Rowling isn’t a liberal, she’s a reactionary, primitivist, superstitious ( for example, she’s Christian, which is not only superstitious, but inherently patriarchal ). This ’splains her weird “separate but equal” view on gender & her discomfort with “unnatural” genders. Much as she’s uncomfortable with the idea o’ a hero who doesn’t have certain blood make them the chosen 1 or their name indicate how bad they are, she’s uncomfortable with humans taking control o’er their own gender. Furthermo’, her weird obsession with segregating traditional women — a better term than “biological” women, since there’s no science ’hind her conception o’ “real” women, only ol’ superstitions largely inspired by The Bible — & men: unlike materialist leftists, who rightfully view male supremacy as not being inherent to men’s physical gross penises but to the artificial nature o’ their superior political & economic power, which is in no way integral to their biology, & believe that the solution is to eliminate political & economic equality ’mong genders so that men don’t have power o’er women, Rowling believes there are integral differences ’mong genders that makes true intermixing ’mong them impossible. ( This has the added benefit o’ this neoliberal continuing to support the political-economic system that reinforces this inequality o’ power ).

This is ultimately why I find the idea that trans women are men trying to cynically game the system ridiculous if you have an actual left-wing perspective: men have nothing to gain by becoming women. The idea that trans women want to sneak into women’s bathrooms to creep on women is ridiculous when you realize men have mo’ power to do this than trans women: society has already poisoned the well on trans women ’nough that e’en going near a “biological” women or a women’s bathroom is deserving a lynching; men already have plenty o’ scuses for going into women’s bathroom, including just barging in & not caring ’bout the consequences. The idea that trans women are trying to sneak ’way women’s “benefits” is based on the rightwing delusion that minorities get special benefits; if anything, it should be trans men who are seen as trying to game the system ( tho a liberal should praise this, as men don’t deserve their advantages, anyway ); but this is ne’er the case, for the obvious reason that despite Rowling & other transphobes’ rants ’bout society s’posedly catering to trans people & “erasing” women, the vast majority o’ e’en trans supporters, much less transphobes, still view trans women as separate from traditional women & trans men as separate from traditional men & it’s obvious that trans men will ne’er get the political-economic advantages that traditional men get, & trans women will ne’er get the political-economic advantages that rightwingers claim women have. The unquestionable fact, given all the statistics on how much mo’ likely trans people are to be violently attacked or sexually assaulted, is that trans people are a lowerclass, have-nots, not some privileged class that transphobe liars claim in the same way sexist “men’s rights activists” claim women have imaginary privileges o’er men or white supremacists claim black people have imaginary privileges o’er white people.

If anything, it seems less like Rowling is interested in gender equality, viewing it as futile, as a gender essentialist, & is ’stead jealous o’ the supremacy men have o’er women & want to create a class lower than women to abuse in the same way men abuse women. It’s no different from the bitter poor whites who cling to capitalist economics: they give up on class equality, but since nobody wants to be the lowest class, they sooth themselves by keeping black people lower than them, & thus are horrified by the idea o’ racial equality, leaving poor whites in the lowest class. Trans women being kept separate from traditional women is the only way to keep traditional women from being the lowest class for those too cynical to believe in true equality.

1 o’ the best ways I can frame this is to ask 1 simple question: ¿which side are trans people on? ¿The left or right? ¿Which side is almost entirely gainst trans people? There’s no coincidence: bigots gainst 1 class o’ have-nots tend to hate all have-nots. Rowling only finds the appearance o’ feminism cool ’cause it benefits her; e’eryone else can get fucked. She’s not a leftist, but that all-too-common artificial form, political narcissism; & we’ll not be surprised when later she’s revealed to be hanging out with rightwingers, as political narcissists tend toward the rightwing.

This is far from the only time Rowling has been ’fraid o’ genuine rebellion gainst authoritarianism: ¿remember her hatred o’ actually pro-labor Corbyn ( ’cause he would raise her taxes, unlike nice neoliberal war criminal Tony Blair )? ¿Remember her tepid withering before Israel boycott with weak ( & hypocritical, since I doubt she’d say the same ’bout South Africa under Apartheid ) platitudes?

I should add that “empathy toward one’s enemies” is self-defeating slave-morality tripe typical o’ “turn the other cheek” Christianity that mo’ oft than not enables authoritarians by dampening fighting back — as Jesus did when he tried to distract Jews from genuine revolt gainst their Roman imperialists in favor o’ fake spirituality bullshit & as “centrist” saboteurs do when they continually attempt to needle the left or moderate liberals ( ne’er the right ) into “compromise” or decorum with political opponents interested in neither — tho, also typical o’ Christianity, it’s fake & hypocritical, given Rowling’s deliberate downplaying o’ trans problems for the sake o’ feeding her own pity — & “the primacy of loyalty toward one’s friends” is literally valorizing favoritism, which is contradictory to an equal, just democratic society, which should put the primacy o’ justice o’er giving advantages to one’s buddies. Only backward savages hold these as great philosophical ideals.

The podcast, which also includes interviews with critics of Rowling, delves into why Rowling has used her platform to challenge certain claims of so-called gender ideology

Nobody but transphobes call treating trans people humanely as “gender ideology”. By definition, anyone who has an opinion on gender has some “gender ideology”. As John Maynard Keynes would have said, those who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any gender ideology are usually the slaves o’ some defunct superstitions. So it’s rich — & narcissistic — o’ Rowling to claim that her ideas aren’t “ideology” — they’re just the truth — completely unproven “truths” by a mediocre fantasy writer, not an actual scientist.

— such as the idea that transgender women should be treated as indistinguishable from biological women in virtually every legal and social context.

Rowling doesn’t believe trans people should be treated equally in law, e’en tho equal treatment under law for e’ery human being, no matter who they are, is a fundamental principle o’ liberal democracy, putting her in the similar camp as those principled people who don’t believe women should be treated as “indistinguishable from men in virtually every legal and social context” or that blacks should be treated as “indistinguishable from whites in virtually every legal and social context”, also known as “fascists”. It’s shocking that so many people with firm beliefs in liberal equality & democracy might be disgusted by someone whose political beliefs regarding trans people are fundamentally incompatible with basic liberalism.

Why, both her fans and her fiercest critics have asked, would she bother to take such a stand, knowing that attacks would ensue?

’Cause she’s a grifter who makes money off outrage clicks.

“The pushback is often, ‘You are wealthy. You can afford security. You haven’t been silenced.’ All true. But I think that misses the point. The attempt to intimidate and silence me is meant to serve as a warning to other women” with similar views who may also wish to speak out, Rowling says in the podcast.

None o’ which is helped by Rowling’s attention party, since they’re not the ones who get the 9 hour podcast, she does, & those who do get to be a part o’ Rowling’s boom box are carefully curated to be sure they’re sufficiently in agreement with Rowling on trans issues. If Rowling actually respected other women’s opinions, she would include a variety o’ opinions, including the many women who are trans supporters ( in fact, most polls show that women support trans rights mo’ than men ), not just those “with similar views”; the fact that she only shares her platform with women “with similar views” spotlights that these other women are only valuable insofar as they glorify Rowling’s views. After all, this podcast isn’t titled, “The Witch Trials of Women”, it’s “The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling”. The s’posed harm to other women is only a problem in how it harms Rowling.

Also, you have literally been saying that Rowling was being silenced, but now admitting that she isn’t being silenced — ’nother transparent lie.

All right, I’m sorry, but I can’t read any more o’ this article. It just goes on & on & on, & it’s nothing but pitying & valorizing & Jesus fucking Christ, Rowling could be Mother Theresa & she wouldn’t deserve so much fucking ego stroking. I don’t give a fuck ’bout what some celebrity actor that you yourself admit is biased ’cause, by your own words, their “careers Rowling’s work helped advance”; I don’t care what some other journos in your circlejerk say. Nobody likes journos or care ’bout their uneducated opinions. Nowhere in this entire article does this braindead op-ed writer quote a single scientist or cite any actual biological science, despite their gross obsession with strangers’ biology, nor actual trans people. ¿They couldn’t find a single trans person who was, like, “O, Rowling’s not transphobic”? Look @ all the black people or women Fox News can bribe into pretending Republicans aren’t Nazis. Rowling has to be the biggest transphobe in the world if this op-ed writer writing, like, a whole novel as big as Order of the Phoenix trying her best to make this random idiot sound like the world’s savior can’t find 1 trans person to vouch for Rowling.

For someone who talks up what a feminist she is, there is barely any talk o’ anyone other than Rowling & how mean ol’ critics are saying mean things. There are maybe a few carefully curated examples o’ privileged journos — the only class that matters, apparently — having to write for different papers, but that’s ’bout it. As bad as it is for anyone to get death threats from obsessed weirdos, — which Rowling was probably already getting several years earlier after she killed Dumbledore — it seems like skewed priorities to treat it as the biggest issue facing feminism, specially when it’s matched by downplaying & delegitimizing trans-supporting women getting death threats. I guess “feminism” is now “only some women matter”. Women get harassed & threatened for any opinion under the sun, but The New York Times apparently felt like “not treating a vulnerable minority group like trash” was the only 1 worth defending. Plenty o’ women get death threats & gross comments ’bout being prostitutes for talking ’bout birth control health insurance policy; it seems less like Big Trans is the problem & mo’ that there’s a lot o’ gross sexists out there & trans people have fuck all to do with it. ¿But why should The New York Times criticize sexism & possibly offend the many sexists who read ( or write ) their articles when they can attack a much mo’ politically weak demographic ’stead?

Actually, there’s 1 paragraph I want to point out:

Despite media coverage that can be embarrassingly credulous when it comes to the charges against Rowling, a small number of influential journalists have also begun speaking out in her defense. Here in America, Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic tweeted last year, “Eventually, she will be proven right, and the high cost she’s paid for sticking to her beliefs will be seen as the choice of a principled person.”

Note I included the link for “credulous”, ’cause it’s important: NPR thinks Rowling sucks, The Atlantic thinks she’s going to be the next John Yudkin. That settles my opinion: NPR is 1 o’ the most informative news shows in the US, The Atlantic is shit not e’en fit for the bottom o’ my boot. Yes, I’m sure Rowling will be vindicated just like that COVID-skeptic economist who thought treating AIDS in Africa wasn’t worth the money will be.

1st, I love the hypocrisy o’ trying to use rando journos’ knee-jerk opinions as shallow as book review blurbs as “evidence”, but rejects far mo’ detailed, wellspoken opinions by other journos as “embarrassingly credulous”. So, the evidence that this opinion is right is limited by the litmus that the people providing the evidence believe this opinion is right. That’s known as “circular logic”, ’nother logical fallacy this uneducated writer & The New York Times don’t comprehend.

¿What beliefs will be “proven right”? This article has been vague & been throwing round words to get round the obvious contradiction ’tween “I’ve not found a single truly transphobic message” & “[H]uge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists”. Those beliefs definitely aren’t “trans people are people, too, & deserve to be treated equally under the law”, nor are they beliefs unrelated to trans people, so they’re almost certainly transphobic, & I’m going to bet that they’re not going to be “proven” right in the end, since it’s mostly ol’ boomers like Rowling & this writer who believe it, while millennials & zoomers o’erwhelmingly support trans rights — to the point that despite many o’ them growing up with Harry Potter & worshipping this o’errated series, many have now become jaded o’ Rowling ( for good reason ). Sounds to me like it’s a losing side supported primarily by dinosaurs who will be dead in a couple decades.

Sorry, there’s 1 mo’ paragraph I want to point out:

In Britain the liberal columnist Hadley Freeman left The Guardian after, she said, the publication refused to allow her to interview Rowling. ​​She has since joined The Sunday Times, where her first column commended Rowling for her feminist positions. Another liberal columnist for The Guardian left for similar reasons; after decamping to The Telegraph, she defended Rowling, despite earlier threats of rape against her and her children for her work.

Note to Americans: The Guardian is, as much as revile them, generally considered liberal ( liberal ’nough that, howe’er stupid they may be, aren’t baseless ’nough to cater to transphobes… well, ’cept for that concern troll letter they posted, giving voice to a totally-not-transphobe & not to a trans person @ all, since The Guardian can’t e’en not be terrible in this case ); The Telegraph & The Sunday Times are conservative. Shocking that conservatives are mo’ accepting o’ bigots than liberals. You’d think hard-core feminist J. K. Rowling would be loath to work with such sexists who support abortion limits, but apparently tolerating sexists is better than tolerating trans people. I’m sure this is ’cause leftists are so darn intolerant o’ bigots, unlike rightwingers, who are tolerant o’ e’eryone ( who shares their bigotry ). This isn’t surprising, since, as stated, Rowling’s feminism is thin as thread, & despite the thin facade o’ liberalism Rowling wears to attempt to be hip with the millennials, — which has stupendously failed with e’en their masses o’ raving Harry Potter fans feeling alienated from her transphobia — her integral philosophy is inherently conservative in its reduction o’ humans to biological forms & reduction o’ morality into simplistic biblical ideals with no basis in complex concrete reality.

Also, I wasted your time ’gain, as this article can also be summed up better in this simple comic.

So we have 2 articles that are full o’ lies so transparent, they must be made o’ glass. This is no surprise from such flagrant liars as The New York Times, a newspaper only for the most gullible o’ pseudointellectuals.

I still fret that I didn’t make optimal use o’ my most recent Halloween Break, including wasting a day working on that weird Voter’s Pamphlet post that wasn’t that clever; but I can a’least feel better that I didn’t waste the most important day, Halloween itself, publishing the most revolting form o’ COVID-denial apologetics from 1 o’ the most deranged economists — & we’re talking ’bout economists, the realm that gave us such serious ideas as that forcing woman to let incels rape them ( or giving incels sexbots ) is the same as income redistribution — in the world.

That article is “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty”, written by some economist named Emily Oster, who I will ’ventually show you has o’erthrown Noah Smith as emperor o’ troll economists.

In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes.

I want to remind you that this is s’posedly an “economist”. I spent COVIDtime reading books, which you can do very easily inside, ’cause that’s how you learn ’bout things, something this “economist” should have tried.

We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself.

Which are much less effective than masks made by actual professionals, which was as shocking for me to find out as that time I found out that professional doctors are much better @ treating diseases than some rando next door who “read some things online”.

We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks.

¿So this person’s family are such idiot-savants when it comes to visual abilities that they can see a tiny hand signal before them, but not full-sized humans approaching them?

¿What relevance does this ridiculously contrived fable have to do with anything?

Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

Check off on the bingo card, “Makes up bullshit exaggerated story wherein the protagonist runs into Jack-Chick-worthy strawmen who want to disembowel anyone who doesn’t obey the tribal ways o’ The Mask”. I live round Seattle, 1 o’ the most leftwing places in the US, & people didn’t say shit if they encountered someone without a mask ­— probably ’cause they presumed they were right-wing extremists & didn’t want to hear them start ranting ’bout the Illuminati. E’en if most people round you do think you’re assholes for not wearing masks, they were probably smart ’nough to realize that yelling @ you wasn’t going to magically make you not assholes anymo’, but would probably make you dig your heels in further — as the existence o’ this article proves.

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking.

I’m going to need a big, fat, fucking citation needed for that. ( Fun fact: if you compare newspapers like The Atlantic to my stoner blog you will find to your shock & horror that I oft cite sources mo’ than they do, ’cause newspapers oft like to just coast on their pretend authority than follow basic academic standards ).

Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway.

Yes, that’s ’cause you weren’t wearing real masks, you fuckface.

But the thing is: We didn’t know.

“¡It’s Fauci’s fault my family were all hopeless dumbasses!”.

I have been reflecting on this lack of knowledge thanks to a class I’m co-teaching at Brown University on COVID.

If she had any self-awareness, such reflection would have been, “Wow, it sure is impressive that they hired me to teach a class on a subject I know absolutely nothing about. The US sure is a meritocracy”.

We’ve spent several lectures reliving the first year of the pandemic, discussing the many important choices we had to make under conditions of tremendous uncertainty.

Read: “I wasted my class’s time & money talking ’bout shit that has nothing to do with science”.

To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high.

This writer shows herself to be just as ignorant o’ linguistics as biology: a consensus is universal — it’s an inherent part o’ its definition. If it’s not universal, it’s mere majority, not consensus.

2nd, e’en a fervent supporter o’ democracy like me has the awareness to realize the unfortunate truth that objective, materialist science isn’t based on fucking elections. The fact that the average slackjawed moron, fed junkfood misinformation like The Atlantic, thinks children have magic COVID immunity doesn’t make it true, anymo’ than the fact that 81% o’ Americans believe there’s an invisible man in the sky who runs e’erything makes it true. Americans are dumb: their opinion is worth less than a coin flip.

Nowhere does this “economist” e’en try to look into alternatives that could serve both problems, which would’ve been real compromise, ’cause that would require some semblance o’ curiosity & independent thought, which almost all economists lack. People ( read: right-wing hacks ) assume that falling education came from children not being physically next to each other, & not the lack o’ preparedness or lack o’ resources from skinflint governments drugged up on the religion o’ “Fuck the Poor” capitalism. Hell, the psychological trauma o’ COVID could’ve by itself caused the decline; there’s no proof that the decline wouldn’t have happened if schools didn’t close, or that it wouldn’t have been worsened by children’s fears — whether based on realistic facts or exaggerated — o’ getting COVID themselves. Indeed, the fact that schools that stayed closed longer didn’t have worse effects than those that didn’t & the Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics’s own conclusion on the data imply this. This is specially since the worst effect was on math, which is the subject that should need physical presence the least & can most easily be handled with computers. Also, Americans have always been hopeless @ math — which is amazing when you consider what a STEMlord country it is & that Americans are e’en worse @ liberal arts like sociology, philosophy ( I can’t name a single good American philosopher ), &, as seen here, economists ( also no good American economists — all the English greats, like Adam Smith, Keynes, & Joan Robinson, are from the UK, while we’re stuck with Paul Samuelson, Milton Fucking Friedman, & Paul Krugman, which is like comparing bands like Nirvana & Alice in Chains to Nickelback & Creed ).

But, yeah, it would have made mo’ sense to cost mo’ lives so Americans can become slightly less terrible @ math.

Another example: When the vaccines came out, we lacked definitive data on the relative efficacies of the Johnson & Johnson shot versus the mRNA options from Pfizer and Moderna. The mRNA vaccines have won out. But at the time, many people in public health were either neutral or expressed a J&J preference. This misstep wasn’t nefarious. It was the result of uncertainty.

This is the lamest o’ Appeal to Perfection fallacies e’er. Either way people were @ risk, so this was a case o’ the “least bad scenario”. The FDA themselves continued recommending the J&J vaccine as better than nothing. Only a mental child would think that during a deadly pandemic nobody should e’er have risks or make mistakes when rushing e’er.

Misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem. But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.

Also an unproven claim & irrelevant: people who are “working in earnest” but know they know nothing o’ biology are still dangerously irresponsible. If I hijacked a a tank “for the good o’ society”, nobody’s going to give a shit how earnest I am, other than whether or not to have me sent to an asylum.

Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information.

This is straight-up my parody o’ centrists, O’Beefe: “Look, 1 side says that murder is necessary, the other side says that it is merely sometimes useful” ( who, relevantly, would later turn out to be the equivalent o’ the alt-right ). I swear to you that US-brand centrism is the biggest mental cancer in the world.

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat.

I can’t fucking believe this tremendous misunderstanding o’ how both objective reality & humans work. That’s right, all ideas are a guessing game: people who used their knowledge o’ biology, which is based on peer-reviewed studies & centuries o’ information, just “guessed right”. When I make a website @ work, it’s not ’cause I studied programming for years & know how the web works; I just happened to be lucky that day & can maybe feel the reason to gloat for my good gut instinct. This is the kind o’ idea only someone with no knowledge or skill in anything could think — pathetic & spiteful. The idea that this smug asshole trying to manufacture a “truce” when her side is clearly the wrong side o’ history is accusing people who were trying to prevent deaths o’ just wanting to gloat is colossal projection.

Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts.

“Me, for instance”.

All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet.

Yes, policies that are life & death for millions is just culture war bullshit, but empty civility & decorum are vital.

& you yourself are writing on the internet. But sure, it’s e’eryone else who’s a crybaby.

These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive.

You’re right, but you decided to write this article &, e’en mo’ perplexing, The Atlantic decided to publish it, so here we are.

And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing.

No, but it is a mental failing, &, mo’ importantly, insisting you’re right with whate’er disarray o’ propaganda articles you wrote or whate’er inklings you made up in your head when you know you have less knowledge than experts who spent decades studying this subject is a moral failing, as you’re putting your pride as a “free thinker” ’bove actually helping society.

Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.

This is completely contradictory: by this writer’s own perspective, all decisions are based on luck, there is no free will, & therefore whether or not we move forward is out of our control, just as whether or not taking a vaccine was apparently a coin flip. In these times o’ uncertainty, whether or not “treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others” prevents us from moving forward could be right or could be wrong, & those o’ us who think that insulting idiots like this writer will help us “move forward” could be right, & if we’re not, well, we’re not to blame, ¿’cause how could we know? ¡There’s too much uncertainty! I love this implication that complex sociopolitical philosophical issues are far simpler than hard, materialist sciences like biology. Yes, this idiot’s simplistic, trite moralizing is rock solid, but how viruses & vaccines work is pure witchcraft.

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty.

¿Why not? ¿Is officially pardoning an insentient disease any worse than Roger Stone? No, ’course not — they’re the same thing.

We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation [—]

As we will see, this writer is 1 o’ them.

[—] while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge.

Nope, ’cause they had a very easy choice: listen to the people who did have knowledge. Their preference for listening to charlatans o’er actual scientists is a social failing, & the kind o’ person who makes this mistake is going to make the same mistake ’gain & ’gain & will continue to be a burden on society, evident by the fact that this idiot, having not been content to cause harm in the world by their idiocy, is still writing articles.

Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips.

¿What? That’s a very hard accomplishment, since your family’s hiking tricks made no sense other than that you were bored & couldn’t be bothered to read real science.

But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go.

Keep in mind, e’en if we accept the assertion that the spread o’ COVID outside is mitigated by wind ( which is not the same as impossible ), we’re comparing the mistake o’ killing people to the mistake o’ not letting people enjoy the beach. The latter is sad, but hardly criminal. The fact that this writer thinks people who might have cost people time in the rays might have just as much to apologize for as people who helped people die is deranged & I’m amazed that this writer can have such lack o’ sense o’ shame that she can show her face in public, much less write for a newspaper, without having to wear a paper bag o’er her face. ( ¿But are paper bags truly effective @ protecting disgraceful people from their deep shame? There’s a lot o’ uncertainty ).

Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.”

Note that she only argued that kids were not @ high risk, so she made this recommendation with the full consciousness that she was putting teachers, specially ol’ teachers, @ risk o’ dying, & therefore, it is, in fact, accurate to call her a “teacher killer”, since she admits right here to knowingly recommending a scenario that would lead to mo’ deaths o’ teachers. But, ’gain, since COVID-deniers have no free will due to all that magical postmodern uncertainty, she can’t be a teacher killer, or anything, truly, since e’erything is in our minds.

It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high.

It is much mo’ important that we pay our respects to the dead feelings o’ this rich, spoiled fauxeconomist who has no place writing ’bout biology @ all than the people who died, declares virulent narcissist.

And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.

Then maybe you shouldn’t have written this article.

Student test scores have shown historic declines, more so in math than in reading, and more so for students who were disadvantaged at the start. We need to collect data, experiment, and invest. Is high-dosage tutoring more or less cost-effective than extended school years? Why have some states recovered faster than others? We should focus on questions like these, because answering them is how we will help our children recover.

“Anyway, fuck the millions who died & the millions mo’ with lifelong health problems. Let’s focus on my personal bugbear”. I specially love how irrelevant high-dosage tutoring vs. extended school years is & how it’s focused on “cost-effectiveness”, rather than efficacy. Any halfway knowledgeable economist should know that the US wastes their money on the stupidest shit right & left & that any talk o’ “cost-effectiveness” is futile.

Notably, routine vaccination rates for children (for measles, pertussis, etc.) are way down. Rather than debating the role that messaging about COVID vaccines had in this decline, we need to put all our energy into bringing these rates back up.

Yes, let’s try to solve a problem by deliberately refusing to examine the roots o’ said problem. To be fair, that is how economists typically try to solve economic problems, which is why they suck @ that, too.

Pediatricians and public-health officials will need to work together on community outreach[.]

They can start by recommending all their patients to stay ’way from The Atlantic & only read actually informative news sources.

The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well.

There’s a reason this 2nd sentence isn’t a standard saying: it’s complete nonsense. It’s only doom for the jackasses who made these “mistakes”. After all, ostracizing these people & news sources will create disincentives from fostering misinformation in the future, thereby making it less likely to happen in the future. You’d think an economist would know that, but as we’ve discussed many times, economists only understand personal responsibility when it comes to lowerclass people. Normal people should, ’course, be fired for bad results, but when an economist makes “mistakes”, we shouldn’t fire that economist from e’er writing for our paper, but continue giving them opportunities ( & thereby taking that opportunity from others ), despite doing nothing to merit it. This is the kind o’ meritocratic capitalist system that economists like this, who benefit quite well from it, strangely support a lot.

This writer has been very vague & evasive ’bout the “mistakes” that some nebulous people made. Let’s turn to Abigail Cartus, Ph.D, MPH & Justin Feldman, Sc.D, MPH @ Protean for background:

But despite its prominence, Oster’s work on COVID in schools has attracted little scrutiny—even though it has been funded since last summer by organizations that, without exception, have explicit commitments to opposing teacher’s unions, supporting charter schools, and expanding corporate freedom. In addition to grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Walton Family Foundation, and Arnold Ventures, Oster has received funding from far-right billionaire Peter Thiel. The Thiel grant awarded to Oster was administered by the Mercatus Center, the think tank founded and financed by the Koch family.

¡Le shock! ¡An economist accepting bribes awards for their studied work from rich, “libertarian” organizations — which, in their hate for government involvement, obsessively spend their money on influencing government; “laissez-faire” isn’t French for “rich people control people like dictators” for no reason — to give false authority to pseudoscience that benefits them! ¡But Volcker told me that the only asset economists had was their credibility! Well, Oster sold hers for a quick quid.

Note that liberal fascist The Atlantic ’gain gives a voice to someone under the patronage o’ the far-right — “liberal” media @ its finest.

Still, that’s hardly the worst thing one could —

But the headline statement in the new AAP report is the oft-repeated mantra that “no amount of alcohol should be considered safe in pregnancy.” Media reports have seized on this statement to renew a debate about the dangers of light drinking during pregnancy. Rather than acknowledging the obvious dangers of heavier drinking and working to address the circumstances that lead to it, we are back to discussing whether pregnant women should be shamed for having a half a glass of wine on their anniversary—or any old night.

To me, this highlights the very real downside of recommendations like this one, which do not involve any nuance. The bottom line is that while there is clear evidence of the dangers of heavy drinking—especially binge drinking—in pregnancy, the same cannot be said for low levels of alcohol consumption. As even the AAP report acknowledges, there is consensus on this issue. A large share of OBs in the U.S. report telling their pregnant patients that some alcohol is fine.

That is from Time magazine, by the way, which is, coincidentally, also 1 o’ the worst newspapers in the US. Unsurprisingly, the only academic source I could see who bothered to comment on this obvious troll had strong disagreements.

OK, that was a weird opinion to die on her sword for, but —

Emily Oster re-examines the stats on AIDS in Africa from an economic perspective and reaches a stunning conclusion: Everything we know about the spread of HIV on the continent is wrong.

O… O, dear god, no…

[T]to understand this you need to think about health the way than an economist does — as an investment. So if you’re a software engineer and you’re trying to think about whether to add some new functionality to your program, it’s important to think about how much it costs. It’s also important to think about what the benefit is. And one part of that benefit is how much longer you think this program is going to be active. If version 10 is coming out next week, there’s no point in adding more functionality into version nine.

I want to note that she isn’t e’en right ’bout software versioning here: for most software, version 9 would continue to receive updates, mainly security updates, for plenty o’ time after version 10 comes out, ’cause people don’t all update to the next version right ’way. Some can’t ’cause new versions usually introduce incompatibilities with other software. Considering the newsworthy controversies o’er decades-ol’ Windows operating systems finally having their support ended e’ery time it happens, I’m surprised she didn’t know this.

But your health decisions are the same. Every time you have a carrot instead of a cookie, every time you go to the gym instead of going to the movies, that’s a costly investment in your health.

I wish I were surprised, but, yes, this truly is how many economists think. This is what happens when economists think economics is nothing but math & whate’er gut instincts they come up with, ignoring all other sciences. Yes, eating a cookie ’stead o’ a carrot is just like having sex with someone who might have AIDS, ’cept all the many biological ways it’s completely different.

Actually, despite what many online have been gossiping ’bout, this talk isn’t ’bout how spending money on AIDS treatment is a waste o’ money, but spending money on AIDS education is a waste o’ money compared to… decreasing trade — which is, admittedly, a shocking admission from a mainstream economist, who usually consider trade to be the best thing e’er fore’er. There seems to be no talk o’ decreasing spending on the general problem o’ AIDS in Africa. TED Talks probably demand far higher taste than vulgar The Atlantic & Time, so she couldn’t go full mask-off ( pun not intended ).

That said, the talk does end rather tastelessly:

But more than anything, you know, I’m an academic. And when I leave here, I’m going to go back and sit in my tiny office, and my computer, and my data. And the thing that’s most exciting about that is every time I think about research, there are more questions. There are more things that I think that I want to do. And what’s really, really great about being here is I’m sure that the questions that you guys have are very, very different than the questions that I think up myself. And I can’t wait to hear about what they are. So thank you very much.

I have ne’er seen someone so excited & eager ’bout people dying o’ AIDS.

Anyway, her arguments are debatable, considering the simplistic assumptions in this admittedly short talk —

O, ¿what’s that, Forbes?

This shift in focus raises the question: Is treatment the right solution? In my work I have assumed that our goal in the face of the epidemic is to maximize life. In other words, to save the most years of life with the funding available. Once I decided this, the cost-benefit calculations that economists are so familiar with told me how.

As cold and callous as this may sound, after comparing the number of years saved by antiretrovirals with years saved by other interventions like education, I found that treatment is not an effective way to combat the epidemic. It may be that my conclusions are best laid aside in the name of morality and compassion. But in making the tough decisions about how to spend limited resources, we should understand the economic consequences of our choices.

Ah, here we go. Now, Forbes, they allow you to go full sociopath. There can be no nobler death than to sacrifice yourself to capitalist efficiency, specially if you’re poor.

That’s obviously a wrenching question. But if we choose treatment, we must know what we are giving up. The tradeoffs are there whether we want to face them or not. What economics can do is tell us–in numbers, in black and white–what we give up and what we gain.

We recently developed a simple, easy solution: give up dumbass loser Elon Musk throwing his money down the drain on Twitter so he can shitpost Bill Gates pregnant memes, pour Twitter down the drain like rancid milk, & give that $44 billion to AIDS treatment. I love how economists try to contrive these imaginary tough decisions as if the world doesn’t waste 99% o’ its resources on the dumbest shit. Economists would make their jobs a lot easier if they just recommended giving up shit like Elon Musk — hell, that’s a win-win.

Anyway, I’m intrigued by this new development o’ 4chan Science, clearly meant purely to troll & bolster itself on its clickbaiting audacity rather than any serious thought ’hind them. I thought the era o’ edgelordism might’ve been o’er, but I was wrong. ¡There was just too much uncertainty! Hopefully we can agree to an amnesty toward those who mistakenly believed that the era o’ edgelordism was o’er & that ’twas safe for us to leave our homes without being subjected to cringe.

CNN, who I have been informed have only just recently become “centrists”, really want us to feel bad for rich, Republican ( which apparently didn’t stop the Democrat President from nominating him for a 2nd term ) Federal Reserve chair, Jay Powell, who had the “iron stomach” to provide “shock therapy” ( as if this writer is giggling ’hind their mouth while glancing @ Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine ), AKA suffering & destitution for others, while he takes no economic risks if he makes any mistakes, a perfect example o’ the US’s “meritocracy”, where only the lower classes have to accept the consequences for their actions ­— or for the actions o’ their superiors, as they get laid off for economic & business policies that they had nothing to do with:

Part of the reason Volcker is remembered so favorably by Powell and others is that it required a savvy mind and an iron stomach to a) understand the problem of rampant inflation, and b) implement the painful shock therapy of interest rate hikes that cost millions of people their jobs. Volcker’s plan worked, but it really sucked for a while. There was indeed some pain, to borrow Powell’s euphemistic phrasing.

Considering poverty rose in the 80s, I want to ask how Volcker’s plan ”worked”, but unlike CNN’s writers, I don’t need to pretend to be too stupid to understand what Volcker’s main goals were. One might wonder why the government would want to sabotage the economy for the many for the sake o’ keeping a tiny minority o’ rich people’s hoarded gold stacks still valuable & able to borrow money @ the cheap right before midterms, but we have to remember that Powell is a Republican, so the answer is probably that he wants to screw o’er Democrats. The better question is why Biden would nominate a Republican for a 2nd term ’stead o’, say, Janet Yellen, who led the US to have the lowest unemployment rate since 1970. The best answer is that Democrats are idiots ( specifically, it’s probably for the sake o’ “decorum” o’ following the long-held pattern o’ always giving Federal Reserve chairs 2 terms, which Trump broke when he only gave Yellen 1 term, as Republicans understand that having mo’ power is always better than following made-up rituals that only help the other side ).

“Volcker’s mantra, one he told me again and again through 2008-9, was that in a crisis the only asset you have is your credibility,” Austan Goolsbee, an economist who advised the Obama administration, wrote in 2019 just after Volcker died at age 92.

“¡The only thing that matters is that we keep the scam ’live!”.

But, wait, we have a bonus bit from CNN:

Congrats, rich people — you ranks are multiplying. Thanks to gains in the stock market and soaring home prices, the world got another 5.2 million millionaires last year, nearly half of whom are in the United States. It’s the largest increase in millionaire numbers for any country in any year this century, according to Credit Suisse, which published its annual global wealth report this week.

Well, it’s good to see we have some good news in this dire economy for on —

Meanwhile, the pandemic has pushed about 100 million people into extreme poverty, raising that global total to 711 million in 2021, according to the World Bank.

O… Right… & there’s ’bout 20 times as many people now in destitution. But “congrats”, I guess. Thank the Invisible Hand for that stock market that, nonetheless, is still not high ’nough, so we need to raise those rates & throw some mo’ people out onto the street. A real human being with any semblance o’ empathy would put the massive increase o’ poverty @ the top & be much mo’ morose, but as we’ve established time & time ’gain, US news organizations aren’t staffed by humans, but by sheltered sociopaths.

It’s that time ’gain: time for ’nother example that proves we live in a postparody world where the most ridiculous satire is, in fact, reality.

Yes, in our hypercapitalist dystopian world, this is real headline I read from Reuters, a news organization people keep telling me is s’posedly 1 o’ the best sources for information: “Gen Z poses a problem for the luxury industry”. As you can see, the zoomzooms have grown up ’nough to join an ol’ tradition that millennials have been a part o’ ( & are still a part o’ ) for decades now: newspapers whining ’bout young people not buying ’nough stupid shit. Thruout the past 2 decades there were way mo’ news articles than I e’er needed to read in my lifetime whining ’bout how millennials were too good with their money to invest in housing bubble schemes to buy shitty, o’ervalued McMansions in suburban wastelands so they can be surrounded by illiterate yokels with houses painted entirely in MAGA election stickers, unlike their parents who went bankrupt buying useless houses in 2007. &, ’course, we can’t forget that unforgettable article we looked @ in my Pulitzer-winning treatise on equisquiliology, “A Year o’ Yuppie Inanity with Mozilla’s Pocket ( An Unpublished Classic )”: “The Raisin Situation”, wherein the fucking The New York Times ( Jesus, what a dogshit ’scuse for a newspaper ) described the valiant efforts o’ some rich guy to bring enlightenment to the savage millennials like Promethean fire & manipulate convince them to buy mo’ raisins.

From $300 bucket hats to $900 sneakers and $700 t-shirts, the high-flying luxury sector is fretting over the appetite among financially stretched Gen Z consumers for such “aspirational” purchases.

If you didn’t catch it, “aspirational” here is a euphemism for “stupid & pointless”.

If you pay close attention you might catch the words “financially stretched” & be curious ’bout the point o’ view o’ the Gen Z people & how they feel ’bout their own financial struggles. Well, you’ll have to use your imagination, as Reuters could only find time in their busy schedules to examine the financial struggles o’ billionaires trying to make up for that li’l bit o’ extra gold they won’t be able to add to their Scrooge McDuck swimming pools o’ gold.

Whereas in North America and Europe, inflation and a rising cost-of-living are hitting discretionary incomes of young consumers especially hard, China’s problem is different.

“In the U.S., inflation is a huge issue, the major focus of a lot of luxury companies … In China, it’s the youth unemployment rate that’s alarming right now,” Kenneth Chow, principal at consultancy Oliver Wyman said.

You selfish proletarians probably thought that unemployment is only a problem for you & your inability to afford basic needs like food & rent, but you forgot to consider the harm this causes for luxury sellers: if you can barely afford to buy food or pay rent, ¿how will you e’er pay them for $300 bucket hats?

Government data for July registers the unemployment rate of China’s urban population aged 16 to 24 at a record 19.9%, exacerbated by the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns and a crackdown on big tech firms that traditionally hired droves of graduates.

“This might be the first time that a lot of young adults (in China) are facing (such an) economic impact, so it will be a testing ground on how these consumers are going to spend on luxury items going forward,” Chow said.

Yes, Chow certainly has his word cut out for him, figuring out the magical mathematical equation to get people without money in a deeply dysfunctional economy devastated by a deadly pandemic & the pall o’ rising authoritarian politics to buy mo’ $700 T-shirts with the words “Ne’er Trust a Taco Tuesday Fart” on it. My thoughts & prayers are out there for our brave luxury sellers.

“If a recession happens, then I will 100% buy less or maybe even stop buying altogether,” said U.S.-based luxury lifestyle and travel TikToker Jeffrey Huang, 28, who shares his Louis Vuitton shopping trips and hauls with his 150,000 followers.

The cancellation o’ Pokémon Card Unboxing #243,143 was mo’ tragic than the premature cancellation o’ Firefly.

And big brands have signaled their intention to grow top end sales of $10,000 handbags and $5,000 coats rather than focus on attracting new entrants onto the bottom rung of the ladder.

This is a smart plan: in economies where the total amount o’ money isn’t shrinking, but the # o’ people who have money are shrinking, with those few gaining much mo’ money, it makes sense to rely less on selling several affordable goods to the masses o’ people going broke & rely more on trying to get as much money out o’ the few goods they sell to the shrinking % o’ rich people, relying on their psychological need for conspicuous consumption to reinforce their economic superiority.

“As the prices are rising, I’m becoming more and more cautious because I feel like I did do a good amount of spending in the last year,” said Sara Yogi, a 26-year-old San Francisco, California resident, adding that she may hold off buying a $2,900 Prada bag and one costing $3,200 from Bottega Veneta which are both on her wish list.

You can tell things are dire when people are reducing themselves to the level o’ caveman savagery by withholding from themselves, like water from a parched throat in a desert, $2,900 bags — which is ’bout $2,900 mo’ expensive than the bags you can just cadge from your local Walmart’s self-checkout stations.

This shift to focus on core luxury consumers also encompasses a cohort of wealthy Gen Z consumers less likely to be impacted by inflation or unemployment.

“1% o’ Gen Z consumers are reported to have said, ‘Fuck you, I’ve got mine’”.

But the concern is over would-be buyers who were meant to help Gen Z account for a fifth of all spending in the luxury goods sector globally by 2025.

You other failures, on the other hand, are shirking what you’re meant to do, which is raise your peoples’ abstract # up to 20%. ¿Have you no shame, poor people? ¿Have you no concern for your responsibility to luxury sellers?

Some luxury labels, including Balenciaga and Dior, are embracing the metaverse —

¡Nope! ¡Stop! ¡I’ve heard ’nough!

This is why Marxism is outdated: imagine wasting so much o’ your time writing 3 volumes attempting to critique capitalism in detail when nowadays you could just say, “Look, guys, capitalism led to the metaverse. ¿What mo’ proof do you need?”.

Virtual sneakers from brands like Gucci have already proved wildly popular, with a price point of $17.99.

Who wants to bet that these virtual sneakers can’t be bought with virtual money.

Whether in the real or virtual world, entry-level products call for high levels of creative investment.

“Creative investment” is an interesting way to say “stupidity”.

“There is this young crowd of consumers that are entering into the market that requires a lot of creativity at more affordable price points,” said Bain partner Claudia D’Arpizio, adding that not all brands are equipped for this.

Yes, I can imagine it takes a lot o’ imagination to convince people to spend money on shit that doesn’t e’en exist ’stead o’, you know, stuff that actually exists & has a use. & by “imagination”, I mean “lying”.

There is good news for brands, however.

Well, that calms my breathing a lot. When unemployment is almost 1/5th o’ the youth population, my greatest concern is always how Tony the fucking Tiger is weathering the storm.

If they do find the right offering of entry-level products, or if the economic situation of Gen Z consumers improves, the desire for luxury products remains undimmed.

This is idiotic. If people don’t have money, they can’t buy shit, no matter how “right” the offering — well, ’less they buy on credit, which will ’ventually run out, & would just be a short-lived bubble if many people did that & would lead to many o’ you idiotic companies going out o’ business. That’s basic math. They keep hammering in the importance o’ some vague “solution”, mostly revolving round inspiring or convincing consumers, when the problem isn’t a lack o’ desire, but a lack o’ money. ¿Are they so stupid that they think poor people can be convinced into becoming richer by enticing them with luxuries?

& the situation for Gen Z consumers won’t improve: if fewer people are buying things, then fewer things will need to be produced, & thus fewer jobs are needed, which will only cause unemployment to rise, & therefore fewer people with money & fewer people buying things. This is also basic math & the basics o’ how recessions work.

“Young people in China are enthusiastic about luxury products,” Yi said. “Lockdowns, or the temporary unemployment rate won’t change their long-term preferences.”

What Reuters fails to mention is the obvious solution to this seemingly inharmonious contradiction ’tween unemployed youth’s desire for expensive, useless junk & their lack o’ money to buy said junk: have the government tax these luxury sellers’ excess money & redistribute to the poor youth so they can buy this junk. Or better yet, only redistribute to people not dumb ’nough to want virtual sneakers & let the luxury sellers go bankrupt, ’cause, now that I think ’bout it, these luxury sellers provide no value to society whatsoe’er & the world would be better off if they were gone. In short: no, Reuters, I don’t give a shit ’bout the problems o’ businesses who don’t belong in any halfway meritocratic or productive economy. A bigger question is why Reuters does & why anyone would consider Reuters a news organization worth taking seriously.

While posting some haiku to Twitter I happened to spy “#BoycottCNN” ’mong the typical adspam that covers that website &, being someone who doesn’t watch CNN, ’cause I have some semblance o’ taste, I was curious ’bout what salacious scandal happened @ the most boring, milquetoast news show out there:

CNN’s Centrist Move Triggers Call to #BoycottCNN: ‘New Corporate Oligarchy’

It’s things like this that convince me that I’m the only American who lives on planet earth. ¿How dense do you have to be to call CNN a “new” corporate oligarchy. ¿@ what point weren’t they? ¿& centrist move? ¿What were they before? ¿Liberal? Decades ago I remember them pumping out union-bashing shit. ¿Wasn’t their most prominent anchor before Erin Brunett, a conservative?

“Good morning and Happy Sunday to everyone who agrees that if CNN has consciously decided to push Republican positions, it’s time to #BoycottCNN,” one user tweeted. “I’m watching @MSNBC exclusively now.”

This is how moronic Americans are. Yes, in Soviet America pushing Republican positions is “centrist” — being biased in favor o’ 1 side in the most blatant way is “centrism”. This isn’t e’en taking into consideration the demographic to the left o’ Democrats, far larger & mo’ diverse than what few maniacs are to the right o’ fascist Republicans. Apparently the overton window has moved so much that no longer does supporting merely a pseudodemocratic republic, as opposed to a genuinely democratic republic without the electoral college, & you’ve read this rant before, count as “centrist”: now “centrism” is outright opposing democracy. The US has gone all the way back to medieval times & supporting democracy is a radical leftist agenda. This is why nobody should e’er take the word “centrist” seriously & anyone who uses it unironically is a moron. Also, nobody should take mainstream US politics seriously or Americans as people seriously.

& ’stead o’ going to an actual serious left-wing news show, like Democracy Now!, or learning how to read & reading the various left-wing newspapers out there, like The Nation, or, hell, watching the fucking Daily Show would be better than god damn CNN, they ’scape the cOrPOraTE oLIgArCHy by going to Microsoft NBC, famed community-oriented small press. What a depressing existence these failson “leftists” live. That’s like being a gamer & only playing mobile lootbox games or being a music fan who only listens to tiktok songs. I can’t fathom any reason why someone should punish themselves by watching either news show. To put it into perspective, as much contempt as I have for The New York Times & fucking The Guardian, e’en they are mountains ’bove CNN & MSNBC. Fucking YouTubers like Big Joel giving Marxist analyses o’ The Bee Movie are ’bove their level. You’d be better off not getting any news @ all & being completely oblivious, since I’m pretty sure CNN & MSNBC are like Fox News & make people less informed than an alien’s guesswork.

Some left-leaning CNN fans —

Nope. This doesn’t exist. You might as well start with “Some dry water”. ¿How much are they leaning left? ¿1°?

Many pointed out Malone and his companies’ support of Trump might reflect CNN’s centrist move.

& I point out that “support for fascist who tried to set himself as dictator for life = centrism” is proof that the entire American conception o’ politics is a black hole o’ mental cancer.

Similarly, many also criticized CNN’s Jake Tapper for not pushing back against lies about the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search in an interview with Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw on Sunday’s “State of the Union.”

After Crenshaw said that he hasn’t seen “any evidence that Trump was even give these documents back,” Tapper did not correct this unsubstantiated claim, despite CNN’s timeline on the probe that reported the DOJ served a subpoenaed at Mar-a-Lago in June.

Also: in the US “centrism” means literally fucking lying. If you are biased in favor o’ truth itself, you are a far-left communist. If you believe in journalism that does its actual job & doesn’t lie, you are a far-left communist. Cool country you have here.

The only thing that can make CNN relevant again is a massive boycott.

We can't let oligarch media moguls turn all our news coverage into #FoxNews.#BoycottCNN https://t.co/Q509O0WSJe

— Content Writer (@TomRuffen) August 19, 2022

Nothing will make CNN — or TV news in general, since only ol’ people watch TV — relevant ’gain. Which means this boycott is as meaningful as boycotting a newspaper or COBOL: they’re already way less influential than the average incel on Facebook & are already on their way out.

But a’least the article ends on a high note:

You don't "both sides" it in journalism. You don't give fascists and Nazis equal time.

If one side says "water is wet" and the other says "no, water is dry" you don't have guests on taking up valuable time telling people how dry water is. You report the facts. #BoycottCNN

— Pants McShirt (@pantsmcshirt) August 21, 2022

The only other American who isn’t lobotomized is a man named “Pants McShirt”. This is objective, 100% scientific proof that the US was a mistake & ne’er should’ve happened.

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:

The New York Times is a perennial target o’ mockery for the same reason as mainstream economics: as per my Nobel-Prize-winning Satirical Function for Determining Mockery for Particular Participants, a key component o’ Mezunian economics, as set forth in the face-melting Economicon, people with high opinions o’ their intelligence but low actual intelligence are the choicest targets. This is the newspaper who turn their noses @ the vulgar social media & blogs kicking their asses, which would be fine if they actually had standards ( I, too, turn my nose up @ social media, tho that’s mostly ’cause they have shitty user interfaces & try to dox me just by using them ), but this is also the same newspaper that regularly posts articles by “Suck On This, Iraq” living moustache Thomas Friedman; near Darwin Award winner for apparently almost dying from a pot candy bar, Maureen Dowd; Ross Douthat, a man who bragged ’bout how he was too stupid to read a relatively simple economics book that he shockingly misinterpreted ( Capital in the 21st Century isn’t Marxian but merely an adjustment to neoclassical economics ) while recommending creepy ol’ men in universities act as surrogate daddies to women students so they’d be less likely to be financially successful ( he references a study that shows that college students who attend rich parties a lot tend to be mo’ successful due to the networking opportunities ); & “Hot Dog & Bun Factory fairy tale proves offshoring doesn’t cause unemployment” Paul Krugman, the Nickelback o’ economists, dearly beloved by moderate “liberals” who have ne’er read any other economists.

So ’twas no surprise when looking o’er The New York Times’s list for the best books in the last 125 years ( that seemingly random # is due to it being a celebration for their own book reviews section ) that they also have terrible tastes in terms o’ literature. During the initial preliminaries we had a bizarre hodgepodge: Ulysses right next to “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” ( not only does The New York Times stupidly insist on using the inane US title made up by ignorant executives ’cause they thought US readers would be as dumb as them, they also picked 1 that hardly any Harry Potter fan would pick o’er, say, The Goblet of Fire or The Order of the Phoenix ), The Great Gatsby next to Charlotte’s Web. ( If they were going to include a kid’s book, ¿why the hell would they pick a book that mo’ people probably know ’bout due to the Hanna-Barbera cartoon rather than something like Alice in Wonderland, which has actual literary value & is 1000-times mo’ influential? ). Meanwhile missing are À la recherche du temps perdu, which is regularly put up there with Ulysses; no The Magic Mountain; no Gravity’s Rainbow; no Moby Dick; no Petersburg by Andrei Bely ( admittedly an underrated gem e’en outside the New York Times ); nor a single book by Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, William Falkner, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Umberto Eco, Borges, Yukio Mishima…

But since then they’ve narrowed it to 5 choices. Let’s see what these choices are:

5. Beloved

This isn’t a bad choice, tho NYT readers probably only know ’bout it now thanks to the brilliant marketing assistance Republicans are giving Toni Morrison by banning it from schools for making white kids feel queasy, a common character-building exercise schools employ ( Republicans, as everyone knows, are disgusted by the idea that their children might build mo’ character ’bove their own feebleness ).

I want you to keep in mind this entry’s ranking for later, tho…

4. One Hundred Years of Solitude

Also a solid book, tho I can’t imagine anyone truly familiar with Latin American literature ranking this as higher than much o’ Borges’s work ( indeed, it’s a post on r/unpopularopinions ), which was much mo’ experimental & arguably mo’ influential. Granted, this is probably the only Latin American work these honkeys know.

3. 1984

& here’s where it all goes downhill. This book is dogshit. Isaac Asimov wrote a famous devastating review gainst this book & its cynical attempt to half-assedly exploit science fiction without understanding an iota o’ that genre & all its nuances as a tool for pure political propaganda by a man who, howe’er great his politics were ( a’least before he started McCarthying people he suspected were communist, gay, “too anti-white” — read: opposed to racism gainst black people — to the UK’s IRD ), ne’er had any respect or understanding for art as art itself, who saw it as nothing beyond a tool for propaganda, as everything else. Beyond politics this book has no value: its characters are 1-dimensional strawmen, its language is basic, & the world-building is shallow & inane — a whiny teenager’s idea o’ how e’en totalitarian societies operate, which is why teenagers ( & those whose politics is mentally adolescent ) love it so much.

But e’en as propaganda, this book is an utter failure: it’s an amazing self-own that such a vociferous democratic socialist created the greatest tool o’ propaganda gainst socialism, used primarily by alt-right hacks like Ben Shapiro, which is easy thanks to this book being so broad & vague — which is precisely why it “resonates” with everyone: it allows everyone to fill in the “evil” side with whate’er they want. That the man who warned ’bout the emptiness o’ terms like “democracy” & “fascism” would write a book with heroes & villains so empty is a shocking failure. His nonfiction, specially his essays & Homage to Catalonia, are far better than this waste o’ time.

2. “The Fellowship of the Ring”

The New York Times are such morons that they don’t e’en realize that this isn’t a book, but part o’ a book: mistaking The Lord of the Rings as a “trilogy” ’stead o’ a single, unified book separated into volumes by the publisher gainst Tolkein’s wishes for crass business reasons is a classic amateur move. For anyone else it’d be nitpicking, but it’s hilarious to me that an organization that prides themselves on s’posed honest integrity would make a basic mistake that you’d get roasted for on fucking TV Tropes, the website that lets anyone add whate’er conspiracy theory they want without citations & calls themselves a “buttload mo’ informal” than Wikipedia ( which also wouldn’t let such a sloppy mistake slide ). This is pretty much exhibit A evidence that it’d be safer to get your news from Wikipedia than The New York Times ( which is not to encourage getting one’s news from Wikipedia ).

They also lose points for not using the kickass psychedelic book covers they used in the 60s official US editions as their image:

Some might expect me to laugh @ The New York Times for putting a mainstream fantasy work @ the #2 spot; but while I myself would not consider The Lord of the Rings the 2nd best novel o’ the last 125 years, or e’en in the top 10, I can see some reasoning ’hind its inclusion: it’s unquestionably the most influential book on this list that pretty much created the modern fantasy genre as it exists. That deserves some props. It also has a lot mo’ literary value than people give it credit: it has finely-crafted worldbuilding that pays attention to details down to the moon cycles with believable fantasy languages ( helped by Tolkein being a legit linguist ). While the characters can be hokey sometimes, there is mo’ moral nuance than one might remember: it’s a clever twist that the ring is vanquished not by the nobility o’ the heroes, who it turns out, are not so heroic that they can o’ercome the ring’s power, but by the pitiful Golem, who accidentally drops it in the volcano trying to steal it — & is only able to ’cause earlier in the book the heroes decide to spare him. Granted, it’s just conservative Christian “turn the other cheek” slave morality; but genuine Christian morality is mo’ refreshing than the might-makes-right white-&-black morality that conservatives oft erroneously pass off as Christian morality. Moreo’er, tho, this book has excellent prose, specially its scenery descriptions, which is a rarity in a lot o’ contemporary literature, both “literary” & “genre”.

It’s better than Harry Potter & certainly several leagues ’bove 1984, as well as the next book on this list…

1. To Kill a Mockingbird

This choice for #1 book o’ the past 125 years is such an amazingly bad choice — & yet so perfect for The New York Times’s main demographic. Its o’errated mediocrity is merely a reflection o’ The New York Times.

Much as 1984 is only beloved as juvenile political propaganda, To Kill a Mockingbird is mainly beloved as a weak white-centric attack gainst racism — which is specially bad when you consider Beloved, a much better book in every way that’s much mo’ devastating & unsentimental in its criticism o’ racism, was 4 books below. That none o’ Ralph Ellison’s books made it on this list or e’en the preliminary list is criminal. These fuckers thought god damn Charlotte’s Web is better than Invisible Man. What toilet paper o’ a newspaper.

& yet, it can’t be a surprise that the multitude o’ self-indulgent white liberals who read The New York Times would prefer this self-masturbatory tract o’ the noble middle-class white lawyer who tries to save a black man, who is treated mo’ as a prop to demonstrate our white savior’s greatness than as a real person, from the savage poor whites. Mixed in this book is a ton o’ classism: only the upper-middle-class lazy-libertarian Atticus, who opposes systems o’ racial inequality but praises systems o’ economic inequality that are just as racist, & Tom Robinson’s rich employer are depicted as anti-racism ( the book doesn’t acknowledge that both these people — the Atticuses have a black servant — exploit their racist society to get cheap labor out o’ black people ). It legit reads like a South Park episode, & is a twisted view o’ the real world: tho there are definitely racist, dumb, & repulsive poor white people, rich white institutions are the leaders in exploiting racism for their gains.

In addition to its weak-ass politics, this book doesn’t have all that much literary value. Compare Beloved, with its anachronistic chapter order & its greater use o’ imagery, color, symbolism, & just o’erall much better prose. To Kill a Mockingbird is a thoroughly unexperimental book with prose so basic & repetitive it becomes tedious to read real quick & makes hardly any use o’ the large gamut o’ tools the English language & structures put @ the writer’s disposal. Ironically, Truman Capote’s friend hardly did a better job o’ writing rather than typing than Jack Kerouac.

Here’s an example o’ the stellar prose in this book:

The Radley Place fascinated Dill. In spite of our warnings and explanations it drew him as the moon draws water, but drew him no nearer than the light-pole on the corner, a safe distance from the Radley gate. There he would stand, his arm around the fat pole, staring and wondering.

The Radley Place jutted into a sharp curve beyond our house. Walking south, one faced its porch; the sidewalk turned and ran beside the lot. The house was low, was once white with a deep front porch and green shutters, but had long agodarkened to the color of the slate-gray yard around it. Rain-rotted shingles drooped over the eaves of the veranda; oak trees kept the sun away. The remains of a picket drunkenly guarded the front yard— a “swept” yard that was never swept— where johnson grass and rabbit-tobacco grew in abundance.

& that was me trying to find a relatively good part o’ the book. It’s hardly the worst prose in the world — ¿but this is the kind o’ prose in the best book o’ the past 125 years? ¿Better than the flowing detailed descriptions o’ À la recherche du temps perdu? ¿Better than the haiku-like sharp details & experimental subjective perspectives o’ Virginia Woolf’s The Waves? Give me an hour & I could probably find 100 books with better prose than this book, which hardly has any better prose than your average Stephen King or James Patterson. I think Brandon Sanderson probably has better prose & unquestionably Lord of the Rings does.

Meanwhile, most o’ the prose is tedious dreck like this:

Mrs. Merriweather seemed to have a hit, everybody was cheering so, but she caught me backstage and told me I had ruined her pageant. She made me feel awful, but when Jem came to fetch me he was sympathetic. He said he couldn’t see my costume much from where he was sitting. How he could tell I was feeling bad under my costume I don’t know, but he said I did all right, I just came in a little late, that was all. Jem was becoming almost as good as Atticus at making you feel right when things went wrong. Almost—not even Jem could make me go through that crowd, and he consented to wait backstage with me until the audience left.

I know some people take the “show, don’t tell” thing too far & demand that everyone “clench their fist” & bark like dogs rather than just be pissed off, but “She made me feel awful, but when Jem came to fetch me he was sympathetic” might be 1 o’ the most sterile way to describe something, specially since the sentence right after already shows how he shows sympathy, so this sentence is redundant filler. I refuse to believe this isn’t rough draft material.

& I know this is s’posed to be a child narrating ( ¿tho is it s’posed to be a child now or an adult reminiscing ’bout their childhood? ), but e’en children aren’t this dull, & it’s not as if children are this grammatically correct, anyway. Contrast with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is also from the perspective o’ a child, which has much mo’ character to its hick talk — not the least o’ which ’cause Mark Twain put much mo’ care into the various dialects. Also, Huckleberry Finn is a comedy, so its plain talk works better than when To Kill a Mockingbird tries to use it for s’posedly profound speeches.

Here’s an example o’ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’s much better prose:

We judged that three nights more would fetch us to Cairo, at the bottom of Illinois, where the Ohio River comes in, and that was what we was after. We would sell the raft and get on a steamboat and go way up the Ohio amongst the free States, and then be out of trouble.

Well, the second night a fog begun to come on, and we made for a towhead to tie to, for it wouldn’t do to try to run in a fog; but when I paddled ahead in the canoe, with the line to make fast, there warn’t anything but little saplings to tie to. I passed the line around one of them right on the edge of the cut bank, but there was a stiff current, and the raft come booming down so lively she tore it out by the roots and away she went. I see the fog closing down, and it made me so sick and scared I couldn’t budge for most a half a minute it seemed to me—and then there warn’t no raft in sight; you couldn’t see twenty yards. I jumped into the canoe and run back to the stern, and grabbed the paddle and set her back a stroke. But she didn’t come. I was in such a hurry I hadn’t untied her. I got up and tried to untie her, but I was so excited my hands shook so I couldn’t hardly do anything with them.

As soon as I got started I took out after the raft, hot and heavy, right down the towhead. That was all right as far as it went, but the towhead warn’t sixty yards long, and the minute I flew by the foot of it I shot out into the solid white fog, and hadn’t no more idea which way I was going than a dead man.

Note that when this book’s telling, it just tells in short sentences, saving its long, multi-clause sentences for mo’ detailed description. Also note how the hick talk is done thru a much livelier dialect, rather than just sounding like it’s coming from an uneducated robot.

Keep in mind, most wouldn’t say that Huckleberry Finn has anywhere near the best prose o’ all literature — it’s just 1 o’ hundreds with better prose than To Kill a Mockingbird.

While this book is relatively short @ 96,000 words, its main plots — Tom Robinson’s trial & the mystery o’ Boo Radley — are e’en shorter. So short, in fact, that this book could probably be a novella if not for all the padded-out dialogue of ordinary people doing ordinary things. There’s 1 scene that goes on for several pages wherein Jem tries to give a note to Boo Radley, which just goes back & forth with filler dialogue, only to end on a shaggy dog story when Atticus stops him. This kind o’ stuff isn’t inherently terrible: Ulysses, widely considered 1 o’ the best works o’ English literature, is mostly just ordina — well, people doing ordinary things. But that book plays a dozen literary tricks as it does so, which is why there are entire books dedicated to footnotes for every few sentence o’ that book, while there’s nothing to say ’bout e’ery “Thank you” & “No, sir” in this book. Plus, e’en its prose is better: nothing in this book will compare to the lavish way Bloom describes the uses o’ water in the “Ithaca” chapter.

’Nother contrast. Here’s 1 o’ the dozen or so pointless scenes in Mockingbird:

One afternoon a month later Jem was ploughing his way through Sir Walter Scout, as Jem called him, and Mrs. Dubose was correcting him at every turn, when there was a knock on the door. “Come in!” she screamed.

Atticus came in. He went to the bed and took Mrs. Dubose’s hand. “I was coming from the office and didn’t see the children,” he said. “I thought they might still be here.”

Mrs. Dubose smiled at him. For the life of me I could not figure out how she could bring herself to speak to him when she seemed to hate him so. “Do you know what time it is, Atticus?” she said. “Exactly fourteen minutes past five. The alarm clock’s set for five-thirty. I want you to know that.”

It suddenly came to me that each day we had been staying a little longer at Mrs. Dubose’s, that the alarm clock went off a few minutes later every day, and that she was well into one of her fits by the time it sounded. Today she had antagonized Jem for nearly two hours with no intention of having a fit, and I felt hopelessly trapped. The alarm clock was the signal for our release; if one day it did not ring, what would we do?

“I have a feeling that Jem’s reading days are numbered,” said Atticus.

“Only a week longer, I think,” she said, “just to make sure…”

Jem rose. “But—”

Atticus put out his hand and Jem was silent. On the way home, Jem said he had to do it just for a month and the month was up and it wasn’t fair.

“Just one more week, son,” said Atticus.

“No,” said Jem. “Yes,” said Atticus.

( “‘Come in!’ she screamed”, followed immediately in the next paragraph, “Atticus came in”, is some prime bathos ).

Anyway, here’s the far better “boring” scene from Ulysses:

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 % of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

( This is also bathos, but intentional, & much mo’ interesting & obviously took much mo’ work to conjure up than the filler dialogue before ).

OK… but all these problems would be… acceptable, I guess, for the best book e’er if the plot & characters were jaw-droppingly well-written. Well, they’re not. The story is average @ best, but the characters are straight-up terribly written. This book stars not 1, but 2 Mary Sues: the aforementioned noble white middle-class lawyer, who has no flaws, & his spoiled brat o’ a narrator who’s not like all the other girls & spends most o’ the book praising her flawless father. I should add that this book is heavily based on Harper Lee’s own upbringing, so it’s a shock that the characters who represent the author & her beloved father are depicted as perfect. This legit reads like a bad fan fiction or webcomic.

There are 3 types o’ characters in this book: the perfect anti-racist white heroes, the vile racist poor white villains ( so vile that the main villain has to stoop to attacking the Finch children, e’en tho racist people rarely go round killing the white children o’ e’en antiracist white people, ’cause apparently killing black people isn’t evil ’nough ), & the black people, who are all peaceful, servile Uncle Tom 2ndary props to warm all the white liberal hearts. 1 sickeningly sappy scene depicts a large community o’ blacks giving food to their white Jesus, Atticus. The 1 time a black person does anything resembling active resistance is when Tom Robinson tries to flee from jail & is shot to death, which is considered foolish by our noble whites & worth mo’ noble pitying. In this book black people are worthy o’ nothing beyond pity. That’s why they’re symbolized by the titular mockingbird that’s killed: they’re cute li’l pets to make rich white liberals feel good ’bout themselves ( to be fair, the other “mockingbird” is a shy abused child, who is also a pet for well-off people, & his abuse is ’nother example o’ the evil o’ poor people ). Heaven forbid this book depict actual struggle — ¡perhaps e’en with violence! — as that would make this book’s white audience squeamish & they would probably turn round & root for their white supremacist society. This book’s outdated relic o’ racial ( & specially economic ) politics is perfect for an outdated relic that is The New York Times, whose own politics are consistently early-20th-century.

Special note should be given to their critic note for this book. In addition to acknowledging their idiocy in missing a basic fact stated plainly ( since subtlety was beyond Harper Lee’s literary skills ) in this book when they 1st read it, they @ 1 point brag ’bout how New York is so much better than the savage rural lands ’cause they know how to leave people ’lone ( said the airbag who probably supported “Stop & Frisk” for “improving law & order” ), leaving e’en an urbanite elitist like me wishing to Allah that Al-Qaeda would bomb these fuckers ’gain.

¿Has Newsweek always been shit? I happened to stumble ’pon an article that seemed fine by itself, just reporting news o’ a Republican calling for lynching a black secretary o’ state — you know, typical Republican fascist stuff, nothing new — but then saw to my right a bar full o’ news items that were a feast for stupidity, accompanied by goofy-looking faces that I refuse to believe belong to real human beings. ¿Is this where The Onion gets their main inspiration for their weird “American Voices” section with those same faces o’ the woman with the pursed lips & the drunk man?

Since I know all you hip Zoomers, Moomers, & no-longer-hip Xoomers like tier-lists, we’re going to be placing these on tiers.

1st we have “The State Should Never Have the Power to Kill People”, said next to a face that is giving an honest-to-god Dreamworks smirk, as all the serious pundits give. It’s a nice sentiment, but 1 that the state is unlikely to take him up on ’cause as it turns out they care mo’ ’bout power than being good — shocking, I know.

This article, as it turns out, is a high-school level debate essay ’bout the death penalty. It includes such wacky irrelevant hedging points, like that this doesn’t apply if Hitler’s ghost is coming @ you with a gun. In that case, then I guess killing is OK. Nowhere in these 2 short paragraphs does he mention any statistics or note that Europe has done ’way with the death penalty decades ago & has far less crime than the US, nor does he bring up the fact that a huge proportion o’ death penalty victims are black people charged under questionable evidence, many cases o’ which have been o’erturned after the exonerated has already been toasted. ¡Whoopsie! I should probably provide links to back up those bold statements I just made; but this guy didn’t e’en provide any statistics, e’en made up 1s, so this wacky blog still somehow has higher standards than Newsweek, & middle school debate classes have higher standards than both o’ us. That’s why you need to stay in school, kids not reading this ’cause only ol’ people read blogs anymo’: otherwise you’ll be some junky writing blogs like this or @ Newsweek.

Tier: D

But for balance, under this we have smiling sitcom dad saying that, no, “The Death Penalty Is Appropriate for Proven Killers”, &, holy fucking shit, it makes the previous article look like ’twas written by James Baldwin.

For 1, he doesn’t seem so strong on his opinion, mo’ that it’s a question whether killing suspected criminals necessarily prevents murder, ’cause “you would need apples and apples”, & we only have apples, not both apples & apples. ¡That’s too many apples! You would also need to “hop into a time tunnel” & see if removing the death penalty in this alternate reality would reduce the murder rate — or just not increase it, since, by definition, ending the death penalty would decrease the murder rate if all else is equal, since, you know, it involves murdering people. ’Course, you could also just try removing the death penalty in the reality we currently exist in & see if that increases the murder rate or just compare to Europe; — a strange land that neither op-ed writer seems to know exists — but I think this op-ed writer is just very excited by the potential o’ jumping in time tunnels, ¿& who am I to dampen their dreams?

The next paragraph sputters on that nobody knows what’s good or not, but that it’s definitely true that in some unknown circumstances, killing is permissible. Perhaps we need to create a save state in real life, kill someone, record the results, & then load state, & then compare the results to see whether or not said killing was permissible. What this op-ed writer does know, howe’er, is that blanket statements like “thou shalt not kill” — a phrase only ol’ cranks would use, since the vast majority o’ Christians use modern Bibles that are written in contemporary English & don’t mix up Easter & Passo’er like that filthy English monarch, James’s, Bible, no matter how low the dumb apostles’ who forgot how Jesus magically created fish from nothing after they already saw him do it’s standards were — doesn’t count, ’cause there exists “biblical” killing, so whate’er vague moral reason one has for being gainst the death penalty, it can’t be “biblical”. What this “biblical” killing is is vague. The Ol’ Testament certainly has plenty o’ places wherein God tells Jews to throw rocks @ people who have sex outside o’ marriage & God himself has no problem killing people ’cause they made him shitty fire, but I was under the understanding that Jesus amended that rule & said that only people who ne’er sin can throw rocks @ people. ¡But he didn’t say anything ’bout lethal injection! ¡It’s not uncommandmental!

Tier: F

Next we have some nerd who can’t e’en comb his fucking hair before he took his picture, tho he did have his photographer crop his hair so that it looks like a spaghetti monster, declare, “Hungarian Election Results Defy Easy Narratives”. That’s startling news: it’s almost as if Hungarians are complex human beings & not stereotypical robots.

But the other articles I’ve read have lowered my standards so much that this turns out to be the least bad o’ them so far. Perhaps I should praise him for pointing out something perhaps obvious to well-educated people, but not to Newsweek readers.

Tier: B

Anyway, we need to move onto something much dumber, “Why Is Biden Waging War on Charter Schools That Benefit His Base?”. I had no idea Biden’s base were religious nuts who are ’fraid o’ their children being possessed by the Satanic dinosaur bones o’ the theory o’ natural selection & the spectre haunting America, CRT, or “Communist Reality Tanning”.

No, apparently that base is poor people & minorities, who are badly taught by underfunded public schools, so it makes sense to take funding ’way from public schools so charter schools can teach minorities how slavery was awesome. This writer does, a’least, post evidence ’hind their claim that charter schools have mo’ black teachers & principals. Unfortunately, the evidence doesn’t actually claim that charter schools have mo’ black teachers, only that black students are mo’ likely to have black teachers, & the writer doesn’t mention that these statistics come from a right-wing think tank, not a genuine, peer-reviewed study. In fact, all the references this writer uses are blatantly anti-Democrat think tanks, such as this study propaganda article that starts with evil quotes from Democrats, including Biden himself, who he should apparently be gainst — I mean, he’s a Democrat, so we can assume he hates himself. So apparently Biden’s base are Republicans. That’s probably true; but unfortunately, they will ne’er vote for Biden e’en if he lets McDonalds run everyone’s schools & mandates morning prayers to Jesus in all schools. Howe’er bad public schools may be, I can’t help but notice that the 1 I went to in high school would have standards too high for this writer’s caliber so far, as they would surely grade this down for such sloppy sourcing.

As for the deductive points he makes, well…

But competition helps everyone.

Um, ’cept for the people, who, you know, lose said competition, genius ( which is always poor people ).

In fact, the market is terrible for education, since in the market the customer is always right, whereas in education, by definition, the customer is wrong; if they were right, there would be nothing for them to learn, since being “right” means you know everything. This is why market solutions to education, rather than correcting people’s misconceptions, merely back up their biases — just like how newspapers like Newsweek fail to challenge their middle-class readers’ sheltered political delusions, but, rather, repeat them back. If those being educated don’t like certain “facts” being taught to them they can take their money to a source that gives them “facts” they do like; & since, by definition, since they need schooling, these are uneducated, & thus ignorant, people, they don’t e’en know if they’re shooting themselves in the foot, since they’re too uneducated to tell reality from bullshit.

Or do they just think that they can do what they want because they believe that we’re all stupid?

They can do whate’er they want, which means they’ll probably renege on their attacks on charter schools if said charter schools kick up money to them, & you are stupid, so I don’t know why you’re criticizing them for having an accurate reflection o’ reality.

I love how this writer talks ’bout obvious trickery & believing their audience is stupid when this writer tries to claim that capitalist markets lead to equitable outcomes. I guess that’s why the US has such economic equality, unlike Finland with their stupid high level o’ general happiness & well-being & their 100% public schools.

Still, he is right ’bout American public schools failing Americans: this is the only explanation for why so many Americans would believe in such a stupid solution like charter schools. What he fails to realize, ’cause he’s an American, & therefore stupid, is that American public schools aren’t failing ’cause o’ socialism, they’re failing ’cause they’re run by Americans: much as you can’t have inmates run the asylum, you can’t have idiots educate idiots. There’s an obvious solution, but 1 that’s politically impossible ( given that Americans are too stupid to realize they’re stupid & too prideful to accept such a solution ): the US should hire teachers & education administration only from highly-educated countries like Finland or Japan to completely control the US public education system ( for a good price, ’course, since Finlandians & Japanese are too smart to babysit Americans for free ) so that some o’ their education spreads to us, & then, once we’ve become mo’ educated, we’ll be able to try public schools run by Americans themselves ’gain.

On 1 hand, this writer’s logical arguments are simplistic & laughably counterintuitive; on the other, they were a’least savvy ’nough to make their lies look convincing with deceptive statistics that are likely to trick the average Newsweek reader. While a teacher — who we can ignore, anyway, since they work @ filthy socialist public schools, & thus are pro sending your black children to the gulag — would grade this essay down for neglecting to bring up relevant controversies, such as the lack o’ standards leading to natural-selection-denialism wackiness ending up in charter schools; but that’s only applicable if we were judging this as informational, which it clearly isn’t, since this essay delivers no information. It is clearly a work o’ propaganda, & in such circumstance, not mentioning such debilitating problems — as it turns out, education only works well if it’s based on, you know, reality — wherein the writer definitely has no good defenses is the best solution, given the target audience, who are too uneducated to realize these omissions, being poorly-educated Americans & all.

So, o’erall, 1 o’ the better essays. I hope this writer received a good check from whate’er think tank hired him for his efforts.

Tier: C

Next we have the world’s most generic face next to the article, “With a Russian Veto, the U.N. Security Council is Not Fit for Purpose”, an article which demonstrates its writer’s sweet-summer-child ignorance that Russia is the only country on the UN Security Council that has e’er invaded ’nother country. In truth, the UN Security Council has only e’er been a frivolous joke, so whether or not Russia is part o’ it is irrelevant. Somehow I doubt if Russia were to be kicked out it’d magically make Russia’s army slink back to Russia like a shrinking erection; but it will make the delusional adult children that are American “centrists” feel good to know ’nother useless puppet organization is representing their tilted, inconsistent perspective on good & bad.

Grotesque and vile, these were the two words that came to mind when I was watching a recent U.N. Security Council meeting on Ukraine.

In your defense, considering all the terrible things happening in Ukraine right now, I think you can be forgiven for having grotesque & vile words come into your mind. Shit, I have grotesque & vile words come into my mind every time I wake up with a sore throat. I’m just curious to know what these juicy 2 words were — clearly too grotesque & vile to print.

The problem is, even allowing Russia to make such claims on one of the most important global platforms in the world, is an embarrassing complicity in their actions. It gives Russia, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky astutely pointed out to the entire council, the right to vote in favor of killing Ukrainians.

bUt tHaT’s cAnCeLCulTurE

In Ukraine’s defense, a’least they got a vote. Iraq didn’t get shit.

In the council meeting, the American ambassador, supported by the U.K., stated that she would like to see Russia removed from the U.N. Human Rights Council. This has thankfully now happened, but neither country is brave enough to state plainly that Russia should not have a veto, let alone that it should not have a seat at one of the most important decision-making tables in the world.

The US president basically said he wanted Putin to be found with 2 self-inflicted gunshots to the back o’ his head, but, sure, the US is totes too scared to say mean things ’bout Russia, their bestest bud.

Intermission:

Halfway thru this riveting article I encountered this video titled, “Everyone Who Believes In God Should Watch This. It Will Blow Your Mind”. Luckily, I don’t believe in God, so I don’t need to watch this video. In fact, showing me Nancy Pelosi’s mummy face just before melting after looking @ the Ark while ol’ turtle man has a laughing seizure ’hind her is the least likely thing in the world to make me believe in God.

Anyway, back to the article:

When Hannah Arendt coined the term “banality of evil,” she was referring to the way in which bureaucrats, who dutifully obey orders, are perpetuating the evil system that they occupy.

That was referring to Germans, not, say, the League of Nations, which are a better comparison. The UN Security Council aren’t perpetuating Russias evils, since they have no input on what Russia does, anyway, whether they let Russia into their li’l clubhouse or put up a “No Russians” sign ( “¿But what ’bout Navalny?” “We said ‘No Russians’” ).

It was almost Kafkaesque —

By allowing Russia to continue being a veto member of the U.N. Security Council, we risk playing into this very system.

If you want to prove you’re not a part o’ your system, you just need to throw Russia on the ground, just like in that Lonely Island song. Problem solved. ¿Why aren’t you paying me ’stead o’ these high-school dropouts? ( Just kidding: there’s no way these interns are being paid jack shit ).

This essay was nothing but a clustering o’ clichés. It didn’t deliver any informational content, nor did it succeed in making me hate Russia mo’. In fact, it made me almost feel a li’l bad ’bout hating the Russian government since it makes me, in some way, similar to this writer, which is a terrible thing to acknowledge.

Paul Grod is president of the Ukrainian World Congress.

I hope that’s just a frivolous organization Ukraine set up to make Paul Grod feel good ’bout himself. If not, then I don’t have high hopes for Ukraine winning their war… Well, ’less the Russian World Congress essay on Newsweek is e’en worse.

Tier: E

Next we have “Why Africa Doesn’t Jump Into the Fray on Ukraine”, wherein we get an answer to the stupidest question in the world. I think “why doesn’t a continent that has nothing to do with Eastern Europe & has had a negative history with Europe” is the last question that was on my mind during this war.

Africans have learned the hard way that, as one of their proverbs puts it, “When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.” Now that the East and the West are clashing again, many outside the continent fail to understand why Africa—an important part of “the rest” of the world—is reluctant to join the fray.

I somehow think Africans don’t have such low self-respect to describe themselves as mere grass compared to the west & east.

Other than that, tho, he does bring up way mo’ facts & logical arguments than necessary for an admittedly easy, tho absurd, prompt. He e’en has the awareness to realize that Africans are mo’ likely to be skeptical o’ the same US that claimed Iraq had WMDs & France who apparently were still doing some good ol’ fashioned imperialism as late as 2011, which is rare in US media, where everything is from the US or the general west’s narcissistic perspective wherein they imagine themselves to be the center o’ the world, when they’re, in fact, the west, duh.

Tier: A

I’m skipping “Russia-Ukraine War Makes Georgia’s Security Imperative” ’cause it’s the 1 article whose title doesn’t promise stupidity, &, indeed, as expected it’s just a perfectly competent news item. The guy’s face isn’t e’en funny to make fun o’.

Tier: B

Ah, now we’re back to dogshit with “The Great Sovereignty Reclamation Movement”, by a man, who, fittingly, looks like he’s drunk. This article is a jumble o’ incoherent comparisons o’ various elections & historical events, recent & rather distant, as well as to irrelevant issues like trans rights, & “what criteria we should look for in prospective immigrants”, which seems to be based on the delusion that immigrants are hired by countries after an interview process, rather than that they sneak in when their US-backed dictator hasn’t worked as well as the US advertised — truth in advertising, as they say.

But some of our other most politically urgent and galvanizing disputes revolve less around substantive questions, such as the nature of justice, than they do around one of the oldest procedural questions in the history of political science: “Who decides?”

A look around the world at this present juncture suggests an emerging consensus: We the people, through our own internal deliberations and our own political processes, should decide the fate of our own nation-states.

This is such a laughably longwinded way to say what is obvious: that a country’s decisions are made by, well, that country. In fact, that doesn’t answer anything, since that question usually revolves round which people in that country, since it’s taken for granted that the entire country isn’t a borg &, in fact, have differing opinions, &, given different political systems & circumstances, different opinions have different levels o’ power.

Thruout this article the writer keeps talking ’bout the “liberal imperium”, which sounds like tinfoil-hat shit; &, indeed, doing a cursory Google search gave me such juicy finds, such as a news article ’bout “Rothschild, FDR, & the Liberal Imperium”.

Finally, in Israel this week, member of Knesset Idit Silman formally left Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s ragtag governing coalition, which had been comprised of a bare 61-59 parliamentary majority. Silman’s departure means the Knesset is now split evenly 60-60, and the coalition will require at least one vote from the Likud/Benjamin Netanyahu-led opposition to advance any legislation. Bennett’s coalition, which consists of everyone from purported right-wing Zionists (such as Bennett himself) to Muslim Brotherhood-aligned anti-Zionists such as Mansour Abbas, was always extraordinarily fragile. Crucially, due to the coalition’s presence of Abbas’ Ra’am party, the erstwhile national conservative Bennett permitted anti-Zionists to thwart the Israeli national interest on core issues, such as the Iranian nuclear threat and the territorial dispute over Judea and Samaria.

The key lesson from Israel: A proud, self-governing people will only tolerate for so long a parliamentary (or congressional) coalition in which subversive fifth column actors, perhaps in cahoots with external NGOs, wield veto power.

This is a particularly interesting point: a “self-governing people”, which is not what Israel is, since it’s a republic, not a direct democracy, will only tolerate a parliamentary system ( said republic ) so long as it’s not infiltrated by “subversive fifth column actors”. But nowhere in this 1st paragraph is there any evidence o’ anyone in “cahoots with external NGOs”, ’cept that some hold “anti-Zionist” ( read: anti-theocratic ) views. It couldn’t be that Israelis have become better educated & decide they no longer care which made-up god rules o’er them ( it doesn’t matter: Jews & Muslims worship the same made-up god ). Either way, they better start caring ’bout that made-up god, or else I’d hate to see what happens to that mighty fine parliamentary system they have there.

For Americans who seek forward-looking inspiration, the lesson is simple: The nation-state, and the tangible flourishing of the nation-state’s people, must always come first. There is no more important lesson for a decadent, late-stage republic to imbibe.

Fun political language lesson: when someone uses the terms “decadent” & “late-stage” when describing western countries, they’re either Marxists or fascists; if they talk a lot ’bout the importance o’ “nation-states”, then we can narrow it down to fascist.

Tier: 🤪

“What Makes for A Qualified Supreme Court Nominee?”.

Trick question: the Supreme Court is an inherently undemocratic institution & thus there is no legitimate nominee, since the whole institution is a tyrannical sham.

But gone are the days of assessing potential justices on the basis of book smarts, pedigree and days spent on the job. The obvious defining factor today is judicial philosophy, which is why Republicans not named Romney, Collins or Murkowski voted not to confirm Jackson.

This is wrong & this writer must lack a basic understanding o’ high-school-level US history to think this. The Supreme Court has been partisan since the very beginning, when John Adams packed the court with Federalist judges as a last-ditch effort to keep the waning Federalist party in power ( basically the same thing Republicans are doing now ). These judges later in the frivolous case o’ Marbury v. Madison contrived for themselves power o’ judicial review, which went unchallenged ’cause they deliberately voted in the opposition president, Jefferson’s, favor so Jefferson couldn’t disobey the Supreme Court’s ruling, & thereby delegitimize it.

There are also many other cases wherein the Supreme Court has made partisan & disastrous decisions thruout history, such as the infamous Dred Scott case, which was heavily influenced by then president James Buchanan, also known as the worst president in US history.

As it turns out, when you have judges appointed by partisans, those judges will be partisan, too. The only difference is that since they’re appointed ’stead o’ elected, the public will give them less scrutiny; & this & lifetime appointments give Supreme Court justices the ample position to be as corrupt & arbitrary as they wish, which is why Clarence Thomas is able to vote on issues, such as withholding Trump’s documents from the 1/6 panel, despite conflict o’ interests with his wife’s political involvement, since he knows there’s no chance anyone will be able to enforce any laws on him. The fact is that the Supreme Court is effectively ’bove the law.

But, anyway, please continue with your sloppy analysis:

Overwhelming Democratic opposition to Republican nominees is fueled by the same instinct. No one can argue that the three Trump nominees—Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett—or the George W. Bush ones—Roberts and Alito—lacked the background to be considered worthy.

This is false, & it’s striking that this writer doesn’t mention Biden being gainst Clarence Thomas’s appointment, which was ( before the aforementioned conflicts o’ interests ) similar to Democrats’ complaints gainst Kavanaugh, but without the qualification concerns. Many, in fact, did dispute Barrett’s qualifications, noting her meager judicial experience.

The writer than spews out reams o’ historical revisionism, wherein he essentially claims that Democrats started it, which is on the same level o’ honesty as saying Democrats supported slavery, as it ignores the fact that Democrats, both conservative & liberal, dominated the legislative branches for most o’ the 20th Century, including during both o’ Bill Clinton’s appointments, in 1993 & 1994. For instance, while he brings up Ted Kennedy’s “incendiary rhetoric” gainst the same Robert Bork ’hind Nixon’s corrupt “Saturday Midnight Massacre” to try covering up the Watergate scandal, he fails to bring up that Republicans attacked Thurgood Marshall as a “judicial activist”, which came long before his examples.

But despite his attempt @ “both-sidesing”, like all fake centrists, this writer reveals their bias @ the end:

But let the difference be understood: while Republicans oppose Democrats’ picks because they waver from the Constitution, Democrats oppose Republicans’ picks because they adhere to it.

Mo’ accurately: the difference is that Republicans oppose Democrats’ picks ’cause their interpretation o’ the Constitution wavers from the fantasy theocratic version that exists in Republicans’ heads ( or perhaps just their propaganda, since considering all the Constitutional violations Republicans have made thruout their tenures, it’s doubtful they truly believe in it @ all ).

Sloppy, lazy logic & a lack o’ references, with many o’ the “facts” brought up mangled or outright wrong. Still, he made an attempt @ a convincing case, & to uneducated readers ( anyone reading Newsweek unironically ), it probably will convince them. Luckily it won’t matter, since nobody votes on senators or representatives based on whether or not they’ll vote gainst opposition Supreme Court candidates, & if they did, they’d base it on getting their favored partisans in the Supreme Court.

Tier: D

Finally we have “Vladimir Putin Must be Tried for War Crimes”, written by a pair that includes a US Lieutenant General, so it’s almost certainly hypocritical, since the US military commits war crimes all the time. But o’erall it’s stupid, since Putin is ne’er going to be tried for war crimes any mo’ than any US president e’er will, so long as Russia still has nukes. Anyone with a shred o’ political savvy knows this. The fact that a US Lieutenant General is this stupid shows how low the US military’s standards are for intelligence.

Clearly, the world will have to go after Vladimir Putin for his war crimes in Ukraine.

They won’t ’cause he has nukes, stupid.

If he isn’t brought to justice, the whole concept of tribunals on behalf of those who have suffered war crimes becomes a farce.

It already is a farce.

And it will confirm the common belief that the world’s most powerful nations can simply have it their way.

It has already been confirmed many times o’er. If this clown had any knowledge o’ US law he’d know that the US outright passed a law allowing them to invade the Hague if they e’er dared to try an American for war crimes, under the W. Bush administration, since they knew they would be committing war crimes in the Iraq & Afghanistan wars.

Regardless of how long it takes, or how much energy is expended, it is essential that the international community get this one right.

Sure. The international community will just add that to the slush pile & get back to you ne’er ¡real soon!

He violates international laws, and in doing so he defiles the moral foundations of many nations.

That would require nations to have any moral foundations in the 1st place, which is a false postulate, so we don’t need to worry ’bout that problem.

This beat Mr. Apples & Apples as worst article o’ them all. A’least that 1 was funny & was debatably right in how the death penalty could be either-or morally. This article is painfully boring & stupid, specially from a Lieutenant General, who should have a better grasp o’ realpolitik than a 5-year-ol’.

Tier: F

Thankfully, that was the last o’ them. Here’s our complete tier list you can hang on your fridge or wall so when anyone else sees it they can ask, <¿Who the hell are these assholes?>.

( Note: as it turns out, the “apples & apples proves we don’t know anything ’bout death penalty” guy is the same as the Supreme Court revisionism guy, so I represented the latter with his face & the former with a picture o’ 2 apples ).

Yes, I’m not kidding. This is why I’m 100% justified in hating these o’errated faux-liberal papers — they’re all the worst dregs o’ pretend humanity.

They have the fucking gall to masturbate to this war by proclaiming it a “revitalization” to the “liberal international order”, which sounds like something out o’ an alt-right conspiracy theory. ¿Has James O’Keefe donned his magical pimp disguise once ’gain & snuck in to sneak this gem into The Atlantic’s papers?

But I’m less interested in the laughable combination o’ sociopathy & just plain ol’ social incompetence one must have to cheer o’er dead Ukrainians ( & Russians forced into this war to no benefit to them by their dictator ) ’cause their bloody corpses make westerners look good. These people being morally bankrupt & out-o’-touch is ol’ news, & should be no surprise e’en if ’twere, considering how their sheltered, artificial upbringing must’ve completely starved them o’ any capacity for empathy or compassion with the dirty “NPC”s as they call them while they masturbate to Aaron Sorkin pretending he’s John Galt. No, I’m mo’ fascinated by the way this sheltered upbringing has left these people in an alternate dimension where they think the west — & specially liberalism — looks good in this scenario.

¿What is The Atlantic’s idea o’ “liberalism”, anyway? War isn’t what I consider to be a triumph o’ liberalism, that’s mo’ conservativism’s angle; I consider being able to avoid it a triumph for liberalism. As it turns out, the west failed to do so. In fact, the US didn’t e’en try, but intentionally stokes wars whene’er it can ’cause the US isn’t liberal or democratic @ all, but a far-right empire.

Funny story that The Atlantic doesn’t bring up, ’cause it’s a bit o’ a damper on their sexy party going on here: Ukraine used to have nukes. If they still had them, Russia wouldn’t have invaded them, ’cause if they had, Russia, & probably the rest o’ the world, wouldn’t be anymo’. But then the US, Ukraine, & Russia all made a happy agreement to take ’way Ukraine’s nukes, which I’m sure made Christopher Reeves’s Superman happy, but is probably making the thousands o’ Ukrainians now dead much less happy. Part o’ this agreement was “security assurances”, wherein Ukraine could cry to the Security Council if, say, Russia should be “aggressive” toward them, which in my humble opinion invasion sounds a lot like, & then the US & the rest o’ Europe can laugh & tell Ukraine to eat a dick. Many westerners are quick to raise their fists @ Russia for their obvious breach o’ this contract, as if Russia cares ’bout their opinion or this dumb, meaningless memorandum, but say nothing ’bout the US’s own breaching by doing jack shit to provide security assurances to Ukraine after the US encouraged Ukraine to leave themselves vulnerable to invasion. To be fair to Russia ( so we’re good “centrists”, we need to look @ both sides, both the tyrannical invader & the victim, just as we had to look @ “both sides” when discussing the Vietnam War ), the US also gave some vaguely informal promise to Gorbachev to not expand NATO into former Soviet countries, which the US also broke, tho, to be fair, that was voluntary on those former Soviet countries’ parts & maybe the US & Russia shouldn’t be cooking up agreements ’mong themselves revolving round other countries.

¿This is a triumph o’ the “liberal order”? — which, laughably, includes the US, a country that has done several much worse illegal invasions, which any normal person outside the US would call “fascist”, not liberal. Just recently I was exposed to a fascinating experiment on doublethink on my own soil when I saw the US president say “Putin cannot remain in Power” ( but then also said he wasn’t talking ’bout regime change, e’en tho that is exactly what it is, ’cause he, like just ’bout all US politicians, is a drooling senile, who, like many Americans spewing aimless vitriol, would make better use o’ his time going back to playing as Luigi in Mario Kart, which he was much better @ than doing this whole leading a country thing ) & witnessed the stampede o’ fake liberals — not self-described conservatives, tho with their nationalistic flag heiling & Russophobia it’s hard for me to distinguish them — cheer him on. Yes, it’s a sentiment I agree with by itself, but from him it’s like praising Stalin for attacking Hitler. Apparently I’m 1 o’ the few Americans with memory longer than a goldfish’s who can remember that this same president voted yes on an illegal invasion that killed hundreds o’ thousands, or it’s just considered rude by a political class, who, just like conservatives, find it unfathomable that one can oppose multiple parties gainst each other ( ’gain, anyone with sanity would’ve had to when Stalin & Hitler were duking it out ), criticizing any mention o’ Biden & the rest o’ the US government’s war crimes as “whataboutism”, which is when someone’s crazy ’nough to believe in consistently-applied principles. As true as it would be that the world would be safer with Putin gone, it’s an unquestionable fact that the world would be much safer if the US government were o’erthrown. This is considered a truism in most o’ the world, specially the “3rd world”; only someone completely brainwashed by American propaganda — which is almost all Americans & mostly just Americans — would deny this. ( Note, tho, that I am most certainly not talking ’bout regime change, but just expressing my moral outrage @ a country that has been mass murdering primary non-white populations for its entire existence & nobody should take it serious, guys, which is why I felt the need to say it, since saying things that apparently have no meaning is the smartest use o’ words ).

& yet how many o’ these chickenhawks masturbating to such violent language when its some filthy foreigner far off would cheer on such a thing on their own soil? Obviously very few, since they don’t cheer it on ’cause they have any semblance o’ morals, — we’ve just established that The Atlantic are all sociopaths who cheer on dead Ukrainians when it makes them look good rather than show sadness like actual human beings would — but ’cause it makes them look good ’mong all the others in the US circlejerk to jerk each other off. That’s all this article is: sad masturbation from a newspaper rightfully losing legitimacy right ’long with the country it stays devoted to, which is also, rightfully, losing legitimacy, not the least ’cause o’ its incompetent handling o’ this whole situation. Yes, you “liberals” are so brave & strong shaking your fist & doing nothing else gainst a dictator who has no power o’er you. You’re totally going to o’erthrow Putin & make Russia a rich ( well, for 1% o’ the population; we must keep 99% o’ its population relatively poor, since doing otherwise would be vile communism — so basically, what Russia is already ) “liberal” “democracy” with your inane articles, just like how I’m totally going to o’erthrow the US government & bring ’bout sexy anarcho-communism with my mean blog posts. I’m sure the families o’ dead Ukrainians will feel good that a’least their sacrifice made some empty “liberal order” that has done nothing for them look good to a bunch of o’erfed morons in the US.

This isn’t e’en getting into how stupid Biden’s statement was, disregarding squishy morality, just in terms o’ realpolitik: Biden accomplished nothing but turning himself into a Russian strawman, as if Putin wrote his speech to make him look bad. Which is why Biden had to sputter out that fine print afterward. He knew he fucked up — just like that time he fell off Choco Mountain & ended up in 8th place.

Maybe you could say it’s Ukraine’s fault for trusting the US, a country notorious for breaking contracts. Maybe they should’ve asked some Native Americans how valuable a pinky promise from the US is. But if so-called liberals like The Atlantic are truly so furious @ what’s happening to Ukraine as they pretend to be, maybe they shouldn’t be praising a “liberal order” that intentionally provoked Russia for decades, & yet, hilariously, left Ukraine in a vulnerable spot. If the US’s goal was to keep Russia from invading Ukraine, the only rational conclusion is that the US are dumbasses. ¡I mean, the west’s hands were tied! Ukraine took too long to join NATO, & by the time they wanted to, they had already lost land to Russia in an invasion, which, for reasons that could only be considered cowardly, precludes countries from joining NATO in their rules. NATO is an organization that exists, ostensibly, to defend people who need it, but refuses to help precisely those who actually need it, ’cause they might actually have to do their job & defend. People like to raise their fists @ Putin for this vile trick — ’gain, ignoring the fact that Putin hates them & doesn’t care ’bout their opinion — but say nothing o’ a stupid or apathetic west that made it so easy for Putin to pull off such a basic trick that several commentators & pundits were talking ’bout long before the result that everyone expected happened.

¡But look @ what a triumph o’ liberalism we have! Ukrainians are dying & their country is being blitzed; Russia’s economy is being strangled by sanctions so hard that they’ll probably ne’er recover; — which means Russia will probably ne’er get e’en western oligarchy’s conception o’ “liberal democracy”, since economic ruin is hardly conductive to healthy governments — Europe’s cut off from Russia’s economy, further dividing Europe; & the US is on the verge o’ a fascist takeo’er heavily influenced by Russian misinformation. That in a year when no one thinks the Democratic Party won’t get demolished in the midterms — which means the legislative branch will probably be filled with people sympathetic to Putin, which I’m sure will work well for that “liberal order” you have — The Atlantic proclaims triumph for “liberalism” is astoundingly delusional.

No, I know exactly what this war will bring; the same thing every war brings: greater authoritarianism from governments all round the world that have a “security” ’scuse for greater restriction o’ liberties & greater poverty for the poorest, while the richest still make lots o’ money selling weapons to a poor Eastern European country they fucked o’er ( like always, whether a triumph for the west or Russia, Eastern Europe gets fucked by both, as they have always gotten thruout history ). But The Atlantic aren’t real liberals, — they have ne’er cared ’bout poor people or the rights o’ anyone but rich white people — so they’re not concerned. Granted, they should be, ’cause if that aforementioned fascist takeo’er does happen in the US, their asses are getting the chopping block just like everyone else, & nobody will say anything, ¿’cause who the fuck cares if someone kills The Atlantic? They’re the fucking Atlantic — they used to pretend Scientology advertisements were news stories ( ¡Ne’er live it down, guys! ).

Bonus Shocking News: Ordinary Americans Are Terrible People, Too

I’ve mostly been focusing on the big boys in government & in the papers, but ’cause I hate myself, I’ve also been looking thru what the average moron thinks on places like r/worldnews & r/politics, & immediately regret it each time when I learn that what they think is a hive mind o’ ignorant racism & myopia. It’s fascinating in a horrifying way & gives a warning to what the future for the US holds: these people ne’er gave 2 shits ’bout Ukraine or probably e’en knew it existed, — they certainly ne’er cared when ’twas invaded back in 2014 & the west did jack shit then, either — but now that whate’er media they’ve been swallowing uncritically have become the 24/7 Ukraine channels & have drilled into them that any minor quibble gainst the US or Biden or Europe is pro-Putin, no matter how much one supports the sanctions or e’en outright military intervention ( which the US & Europe haven’t e’en done — nonetheless we must accept that this incoherence is what is right & put trust in our masters like good servants ).

This is nothing new. I saw the same insanity — in fact, e’en mo’ insanity — after 9/11. It’s a reminder why the US is on the verge o’ fascist takeo’er: the average American people have always been totalitarian-spirited.

For instance we have a thread wherein Redditors get pissed to the point o’ wanting to sanction, invade, & e’en nuke Switzerland — yes, that’s right, Switzerland — ’cause they dared to keep to their historical neutrality ( which they broke, anyway, presumably after the west pressured them to get in line ). My favorite part is the few times some Swiss person deigns to respond to the hilarious & clever jokes ’bout chocolate & Nazi gold by casually mentioning how better standing round while others die is to actively killing people & the American babbles out incoherently how they’re better ’cause they acknowledge the bad things they do… which the Swiss guy does, too…

& then we have discussion surrounding an article pointing out that Africans have been having deadly wars fore’er & nobody cares ’cause they’re not white like Ukrainians. What I love most ’bout most o’ the comments is how they reveal the bizarrely inhuman way most Americans think. The article is clearly asking for nothing beyond cheap sympathy & maybe @ the most some money, but most o’ the responses are this kind o’ petulant, <Well, ¿what are we s’posed to do ’bout it? ¿Intervene? Then everyone will say we’re dictators. We can’t win no matter what we do. ¡Americans have it so hard! ¡What do these whiny Ethiopians have to complain ’bout when they don’t have to suffer hearing people say mean things ’bout my country while screwing round on the internet all day ’stead o’ actually working?>. It’s not the narcissism & pity party they’re throwing for themselves that’s surprising — that’s just humanity in general; I expect no different from any other rich people. No, it’s the inescapable implication that in their minds news o’ civil wars are only useful insofar as they say who Americans should kill or not kill; the idea o’ telling someone a sad story simply so they can express empathy or give help that doesn’t involve violence is foreign to Americans, who lack any form o’ empathy whatsoe’er, & operate under a caveman mentality that violence is the option to everything. This is why our solution to school shootings is giving mo’ people guns, since the only way to stop kids shooting people is to shoot those kids 1st, & the US would rather spend trillions on military to prevent a 9/11 maybe every century or so, but not e’en a fraction o’ that on health care to prevent the same # o’ deaths every year. Since you can’t shoot cancer ( well, ’less you’re a German donating to Games Done Quick ), heart disease, diabetes, or mental illness ( tho you can shoot mentally ill people or throw them in prison, which is the usual recommended procedure ), Americans aren’t interested in solving these unsexy problems.

& then we have this amazing subthread wherein a racist “racial realist” gives a totally scientific explanation — lacking any form o’ references & contradicting what mainstream historians, who are not racists “racial realists”, but they’re just saying these things as part o’ the conspiracy, so we can ignore what they say & only listen to ideas that correspond to his as authority, which, conveniently, makes it impossible to falsify his arguments — o’ how Africans wouldn’t have had medicine or roads without white people, which can be totally proved by… C’mon, guys. ( Ne’er mind that much o’ this had to be built by Africans & was mainly enjoyed by white people for a few centuries before white people were nice ’nough to let them have some o’ their own handiwork after using it for a few centuries ). These totally not sloppy stereotypes out o’ minstrel are just “serious facts”, & if you guys are so obsessed with this morality thing — which is the core topic here — then maybe you should talk to 1 o’ your silly superstitious priests ( you know, the people s’posedly civilized white people followed while creating all that medicine & all those roads ).

Ne’er change, fellow Americans. ( Please do: you’re an embarrassment ).

I haven’t been paying much attention to politics for the past… half decade or so. There used to be a joke ’bout comedians intentionally voting for incompetent presidents so they’d have great material, but we have since learned that this is wrong: truly incompetent presidents & the long shadow they cast ’cross politics e’en after their ignoble defeat are themselves jokes, leaving satirists useless. There’s nothing interesting in mocking republicans: they’re self-parodies. Also, I’m getting too ol’ to keep up with whate’er new redundant ingsoc pundits have garbled up without any hope o’ creating any coherent conversation.

Anyway, I have sometimes peeped in for a few seconds just to check to make sure the government hasn’t been o’erthrown while I valiantly fight back with my sword & shield flee to Canada sit round laughing @ how desperate Mario Party fans are for fantasizing o’er DLC GameCube boards for that half-assed remake Nintendo’s regurgitated back onto them like Roger Waters spitting on 1 o’ his unwanted pets. & in this time the “lamestream media”, as all the hip-hopping fly-dog boomers call it, has become, um… weird…

Marx provided a solution. He observed that the working class (the 99%) overwhelmingly outnumbered the rich at the top (the 1%), and thus the working class could transform its massive size into political power by uniting together in a cohesive political movement. Workers of the world, unite!

That is not from some 90s-era website run by a bunch o’ bearded disgruntled commies in their basement but Salon, a major newspaper I’m sure would’ve been stroking themselves o’er the latest milquetoast pontifications o’ Paul Krugman a decade ago.

So you might think I’d be all, “¡Hot shit! ¡I guess you guys are kinda cool all ’long!”. But you clearly don’t know how impossible to please I am. I am, after all, the one who wrote the Nobel-Prize-winning critical review o’ the positive review for Wario Land 3, despite that being my favorite game o’ all time. I don’t know ’bout you young whippersnappers, but I been taught by my school that done taught me good that any dumbass honkey can have the “right” conclusion — a true G has good arguments to back them up.

& the article we’re reviewing, “Republicans claim to fear left-wing authoritarianism — but there’s no such thing”, doesn’t.

1st, let’s appreciate this glorious caption with its glorious Photoshop filters:

Poor Hitler looks so camera shy & Kim Jong-Un looks bored out o’ his mind. Hairpiece, who does not belong with these people, not the least ’cause he’s not nearly as crafty as they were, looks like a turtle looking up @ dangling food offscreen.

Anyway, this article is notable in how poorly written it is. Not to be all “both sides, bro”, but it does kind o’ sound like Hairpiece in its simplistic, broad vocabulary & choppy sentences. After the previous snippet ( which was probably the best o’ that article, helped by being able to steal 1 o’ its sentences by a far better writer ), we have this gem:

This is a powerful idea. Extremely powerful. This idea filled the suffering working class with great hope and inspired them to attempt to join together in unity in order to seek greater fairness for workers.

The article starts by talking ’bout how right-wingers are all liars. This is true, but it’s also true that all politicians lie, &, most importantly, many o’ the greatest politicians, like Abraham Lincoln, were some o’ the biggest liars. ¿Remember when Lincoln tricked ’nough moderates into thinking he was a moderate on the issue o’ slavery when he was, in fact, rightfully, completely gainst slavery. The difference is that some rare few manage to, gainst all expectations, lie for the good o’ society ( which is definitely possible ).

In fact, lying is the only way the right wing can win elections. After all, its policies are profoundly unpopular with ordinary people because the right-wing favors the 1% rich over the 99% working and middle classes.

This is true; ¿but how many “left-wing” politicians truly support the majority? ¿Could it also be that none o’ the politicians offered by the US’s “democracy” truly serve the masses, leaving many o’ the masses, specially the lower class, to not bother voting? Also, this is nice o’ this writer to assert that the poor whites who joke-voted for Hairpiece would prefer improving their own station o’er screwing o’er minorities. ¿Could it not be that the US masses are just legitimate terrible people who prefer others’ failure o’er their own success?

By the way, I still haven’t shown you the absolute worst o’ this article’s writing. I’m now ready to unleash it ’pon you:

The lies are not just little lies. They are whoppers. They are the complete opposite of the truth. They are 180 degrees from the truth. They are the polar opposite of the truth, like from the North Pole all the way to the South Pole. Hence the term Big Lie.

This legit reads like Lionel Fanthorpe trying to fill out 1 o’ his 5 daily Badger Books. I think if I were this dumb ’nough to need this many redundant clarifications I’d be legally dead.

Yet, shockingly, many of these egregious lies actually work. They take hold. They create a false impression in the mind of the public.

You know, I’m still not entirely sure what this “lie” thing is. ¿Could you please elaborate a bit mo’?

The writer finally gets round to describing the “big lie”: that Democrats are totalitarian commies & that Karl Marx is the devil & all socialism is satanic. Interestingly, despite the writer’s constant attempts to simplify, I still get confused on whether or not they’re trying to defend socialism, Democrats, or mock the very idea o’ “socialism” ( which they keep putting in quotation marks ) as a real specter @ all. For instance, when they say “Republicans allege that electing Democrats will turn America into a failed socialist state like Venezuela”, the 1 time they don’t put “socialist” in quotation marks, I don’t know if they’re, ironically, accidentally regurgitating the Republicans’ lie that Venezuela is full-on socialist ( it’s mo’ what most would call a mixed economy, with private property & copyright explicitly protected as rights in the Venezuelan Constitution ).

The most problematic part o’ this article is its, um, historical inaccuracies:

Along came the liberal Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, which celebrated liberty of the individual and emancipation from the strictures of monarchy. These new ideas led to the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, including the American Revolution of 1776, in which the United States declared its independence from the King of England, thereby giving birth to modern liberal democracy. France soon followed with the French Revolution in 1789, overthrowing the French monarchy.

1st, the US was ne’er founded as a democracy ( & it still isn’t 1 ): many o’ the founding fathers, specially the 1s most instrumental in the creation o’ the Constitution, like James Madison & Alexander Hamilton, hated democracy ( literally every use o’ the term in The Federalist Papers is negatively comparing it to a republic, a concept originated by Plato as a distinctly technocratic, hierarchical system in opposition to democracy ) — & it certainly wasn’t a “modern” 1.

Anyway, the real issue is how this article is going to discuss the French Revolution, what with its controversial fall into chaotic mass murder & tyranny…

Unfortunately for the working class, however, even the elimination of monarchies did not improve their plight as they had hoped. From approximately 1850 to 1880, Karl Marx came along and explained the problem. Even though monarchies were receding, a new oppressive force was emerging: capitalism.

Um… I think we might’ve missed some important details regarding the French Revolution. Tho, to be fair, people who emphasize the brutality o’ the Reign o’ Terror noticeably don’t talk as much ’bout things like the violent suppression o’ the Paris Commune o’ 1848, which some historians say had mo’ casualties than the Reign o’ Terror, not to mention worse wars primarily gainst poor people thruout history — too many to count. ¿How many historians or journalists would get ’way with saying “Unfortunately for the US, howe’er, e’en the fall o’ the Taliban did not improve the plight o’ the middle east”? Probably none, since no journalist would allow their writers to write “o’” ’stead o’ “of”. But it is definitely true that while mass murder gainst the rich is a horror that is considered inexcusable in polite media, mass murder gainst the poor is merely an interesting debate to be held by rich people during their surfeit o’ laborless time ( we can call this “Socially-Unnecessary Idle Time”, or SUIT ). So they’re basically a less-bad reverse o’ the whitewashing o’ mass murder vs. poor people customary to the LAME-PEE Media™.

I’m also glad that Karl Marx came round & ’splained a problem that many socialists & nonsocialists who preceded him, like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the Utopian Socialists, & e’en Plato had already described years before.

The world was shocked as it watched Marx’s theoretical idea come into actual fruition in the Russian Revolution of 1917 when the working class united in the Bolshevik party led by Vladimir Lenin and overthrew Czar Nicholas II and the Romanov dynasty, ending the Russian Empire and creating the Soviet Union.

I, too, am shocked, but mainly @ the sheer magnitude o’ inaccuracies found in this li’l paragraph. Anyone actually familiar with Marx’s “theoretical idea” — which is that a fully-developed capitalistic society would lead to a “bourgeois revolution”, setting up a parliamentary democracy/republic, which the working class would exploit to gain control o’er the government — would know that the Russian Revolution — wherein an underdeveloped pseudofeudalistic tsardom ’ventually became a totalitarian statist regime ( so it merely became a li’l mo’ developed ) — is hardly “fruition” for the former. & anyone who has e’er read a history book that wasn’t written by Stalin himself would know how obviously wrong the rest o’ this paragraph is. 1st, Lenin had nothing to do with the February Revolution that deposed the Czar — he was still hiding out in Switzerland. In fact, no single party was responsible for that revolution: ’twas a spontaneous uprising.

2nd, apparently the person who wrote this was somehow completely oblivious to the existence o’ the Mensheviks, despite their rivalry being a famous part o’ Russian Revolution history. Either that or they’re ignorant that the Mensheviks were Marxists, too — nor that the founding divergence ’tween them came from the fact that the Mensheviks were less elitist, opposing Lenin’s authoritarian scam that was his small party o’ “professional revolutionaries” ( also known as an “oligarchy” & obviously contrary to any conception o’ democracy ), which was completely contrary to the Marxist idea that socialism would come from the rational self-interest o’ the masses in a democratic system that, by definition, serves the masses’ desires, not from the idealistic ideology o’ a “good” tiny minority totally different from that other tiny minority who were a “bad” tiny minority.

Moreo’er, they were ignorant o’ the existence o’ the Socialist-Revolutionaries ( they certainly couldn’t have missed that they were a socialist party by their name ), who actually won the election after the October Revolution, only for the Bolsheviks to lead a coup gainst them with bullshit claims o’ electoral collusion with the rich elites like US Republicans ( only Lenin, to his credit, was actually competent ’nough to carry it out ). Later, Lenin would have SRs destroyed with show trials gainst 12 prominent SR leaders that ended in their execution, which was heavily criticized by socialists all thruout the west, such as Karl Kautsky:

The Bolsheviki were first to use violence against other Socialists. They dissolved the Constituent Assembly not by way of resistance against any violence on the part of the Socialists-Revolutionists and Mensheviki but because of their realization of their own inability to obtain the support of the majority of the peasants and workers by means of free propaganda. This was the fundamental cause of the Bolshevist coup d’etat against the representatives of the revolutionary workers and peasants. Hence, the abolition of all rights of all other Socialists who refused to submit to the crack of the Bolshevist whip.

This isn’t e’en taking into consideration the many anarchists who, as per their name, had no involvement with “official” politics, but were heavily involved in the Soviets ( labor unions ) that held a lot o’ power in the weird 2-tiered system Russia had ’tween the February & October Revolutions, who were also backstabbed by the man who declared “¡Power to the Soviets!” by taking power ’way from them & keeping it within the government once the Bolsheviks managed to finally get their filthy paws all o’er it. For instance, Kropotkin, a famous anarcho-communist who actually knew the OG Marx ( tho didn’t like him ), who supported the February Revolution, said o’ the October Revolution, “This is the burial of the Russian Revolution”, as well as the following:

They have deluded simple souls. The peace they offer will be paid for with Russia’s heart. The land they have been given will go untilled. This is a country of children – ignorant, impulsive, without discipline. It has become the prey of teachers who could have led it along the slow, safe way. . . . There was hope during the summer. The war is bad – I am the enemy of war – but this surrender is no way to end it. The Constituent Assembly was to have met. It could have built the framework of enduring government.

(I should add that Lenin, after 1 letter too many from Grampa Kropotkin, apparently became enraged & grumbled, “I am sick of this old fogey. He doesn’t understand a thing about politics and intrudes with his advice, most of which is very stupid”).

Emma Goldman, ’nother famous anarcho-communist, who had been deported back to Russia from the US during the US’s 1st red scare, had this to say ’bout Lenin’s treatment o’ anarchists & his treatment o’ free speech:

I broached the subject of the Anarchists in Russia. I showed him a letter I had received from Martens, the Soviet representative in America, shortly before my deportation. Martens asserted that the Anarchists in Russia enjoyed full freedom of speech and Press. Since my arrival I found scores of Anarchists in prison and their Press suppressed. I explained that I could not think of working with the Soviet Government so long as my comrades were in prison for opinion’s sake. I also told him of the resolutions of the Moscow Anarchist Conference. He listened patiently and promised to bring the matter to the attention of his party. “But as to free speech,” he remarked, “that is, of course, a bourgeois notion. There can be no free speech in a revolutionary period. We have the peasantry against us because we can give them nothing in return for their bread. We will have them on our side when we have something to exchange. Then you can have all the free speech you want — but not now.

He goes on to ramble like an ol’ man ’bout how they recently needed to trade salt for the peasants’ wood & how @ 1st they couldn’t find salt, ¡but then they could! What relevance this had to the issue o’ freedom o’ speech, I have no idea, other than that they apparently needed to find mo’ salt before they had time to not spend time locking up pesky anarchists.

Emma Goldman had good reason to emphasize freedom o’ speech: she had been deported from the US for her political views during World War I. Not e’en the typical US-military-industrial-complex-apologetic moderate “liberal” defends the kind o’ flagrant 1st-Amendment violations the US government enacted during this time. But here we have “leftist” Lenin declaring it OK to throw free speech to the wind when inconvenient. I should add that, despite what many who base Marx’s views on this stranger’s actions think, Marx himself was an ardent supporter for freedom o’ speech, & in fact, 1 o’ his most popular tracts during his time was “On Freedom of the Press”.

Emma Goldman continues…

Why did Zorin resort to lies? Surely he must have known that I would not remain in the dark very long. And then, was not Lenin also guilty of the same methods? “Anarchists of ideas [ideyni] are not in our prisons,” he had assured me. Yet at that very moment numerous Anarchists filled the jails of Moscow and Petrograd and of many other cities in Russia. In May, 1920, scores of them had been arrested in Petrograd, among them two girls of seventeen and nineteen years of age. None of the prisoners were charged with counter-revolutionary activities: they were “Anarchists of ideas,” to use Lenin’s expression. Several of them had issued a manifesto for the First of May, calling attention to the appalling conditions in the factories of the Socialist Republic. The two young girls who had circulated a handbill against the “labour book,” which had then just gone into effect, were also arrested.

But, yeah, other than all those li’l squabbles, socialists were all 1 big, happy family.

Anyway, please continue, Salon article:

But Lenin fell ill not much later, became weak and disabled, and died in 1924. Within a few years, Joseph Stalin seized control, consolidated his power, and ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist for three decades, until his death in 1953. Stalin is now justly regarded as among the worst dictators of the modern era. Stalin created a deplorable totalitarian state, waged a campaign of murder and imprisonment against millions of political dissidents (as well as imaginary enemies) and repressed human rights, free speech and any version of democracy.

We’re gonna need mo’ paint, Jake, ¡’cause it’s white-washing time! The idea that Stalin came in & turned Lenin’s nice li’l democracy into totalitarianism is a blatant lie: Lenin had already banned all other political parties & had called for the Red Terror, as well as many other onslaughts, such as the mass murder o’ kulaks after a peasant revolt.

It’s ironic that they’re praising Lenin when talking ’bout honesty, since it’s well known the many “Big Lies” Lenin spread, such as the aforementioned lies he gave Emma Goldman or his aforementioned unfulfilled promise to give power to the soviets or spreading the name “Mensheviks” based on their purported “minority” status, when, in fact, on most votes they received the majority & had many mo’ members ( Mensheviks, as stated before, allowed people who were not full-time revolutionaries into their party — i.e. real workers ) — which is precisely why Lenin used nondemocratic means to suppress them.

In Lenin’s defense, the Soviet Union did do some ahead-o’-their-time things under Lenin that distinguished him from Stalin, such as setting up free education, implementing greater tolerance for gay people & greater equality for women, legalizing abortion, granting self-determination for countries like Finland ( tho they violently suppressed the independence movement in Ukraine ), ending involvement in World War I ( not doing so being the 1 major mistake the provisional government made — other than putting any trust in Bolsheviks & giving them weapons & access to military ). & ’course he also smashed that capitalism like a like button, which is always fun, but then replaced it with just a shittier Grand Dad bootleg, which isn’t fun.

I don’t know if any o’ this makes up for the mass murder, rampant violation o’ human rights, & tyrannical rule, e’en with civil war going on. Despite Leninists always calling the Mensheviks, the Socialist-Revolutionaries, & anarchists “right-wing”, I see no evidence that they were a threat to the Bolsheviks beyond their opposition to the Bolsheviks’ tyrannical behavior after the Bolsheviks were already doing so, which was before the civil war began. It’s not as if the provisional government they unseated were a major threat — ¡they practically just gave up during the October Revolution! All evidence to me points to Lenin having been an obstacle to democracy & socialism, not a beleaguered leader forced to do ugly things to prevent worse tyranny or disaster. It would be no exaggeration @ all to call him an enemy o’ socialists — he literally spent mo’ time fighting other socialists than monarchists or capitalists.

So what is the assessment here? Was the Soviet Union left-wing? Was Stalin left-wing? Are dictatorships left-wing? Is totalitarianism left-wing?

A bigger question is: ¿who cares? ¿Would this early-20th-century left-wing have any relevance to the average hippie leftist in the US today?

This transformation of the Soviet Union by Stalin from a beneficial left-wing movement into a hideous right-wing dictatorship was masterfully described by George Orwell in his famous novel from 1945, “Animal Farm.” That book, summarized here, tells an allegorical tale about animals on a farm who rise up in revolt, banish the humans from the farm, and seek to govern themselves on the farm under a free and democratic animal society.

Let’s hear Orwell’s actual opinion o’ Lenin:

The article is entitled ‘Lenin’s Heir’, and it sets out to show that Stalin is the true and legitimate guardian of the Russian Revolution, which he has not in any sense ‘betrayed’ but has merely carried forward on lines that were implicit in it from the start. In itself, this is an easier opinion to swallow than the usual Trotskyist claim that Stalin is a mere crook who has perverted the Revolution to his own ends, and that things would somehow have been different if Lenin had lived or Trotsky had remained in power. Actually there is no strong reason for thinking that the main lines of development would have been very different. Well before 1923 the seeds of a totalitarian society were quite plainly there. Lenin, indeed, is one of those politicians who win an undeserved reputation by dying prematurely. Had he lived, it is probable that he would either have been thrown out, like Trotsky, or would have kept himself in power by methods as barbarous, or nearly as barbarous, as those of Stalin.

The Salon article tries to ’splain the mystery ’hind this charade:

Clearly, tyrants should pretend to be someone who can offer what the people desire. Many tyrants falsely proclaim to be Marxists, socialists and left-wingers because the ideas of the left are broadly popular among the oppressed classes in many countries around the world. And for good reason: Left-wing policies would indeed improve the quality of life in most societies.

If we acknowledge that not everyone who calls themselves “left-wing” is honest or good, ¿what people who call themselves “left-wing” can we trust? ¿This Salon writer? ¿Me? Perhaps it’d be mo’ useful to talk less o’ “left-wing” or “right-wing”, which are meaningless when we acknowledge that the words that come out o’ politicians’ mouths are meaningless, but ’stead focus on the composition o’ the government that makes & enforces law — the who, not the what. US leftists elect rich man after rich man into government & are surprise Pikachu face that they serve their fellow rich man — after serving themselves, ’course. If only we could elect a godly perfect human that only thinks o’ everyone else that doesn’t exist. Or if only we didn’t follow a system that actually gave the majority choices that they actually want, rather than a 2-party state.

But implementing a few left-wing policies does not magically convert a right-wing dictatorship into a left-wing democracy. The societies ruled by Castro and Chávez were never left-wing democracies, and cannot truly be considered “socialist.” They were overwhelmingly defined by right-wing attributes, including strongman rule, a one-party monopoly on power, suppression of free speech, false propaganda glorifying the regime, persecution of political dissidents, the restriction or elimination of democracy and so on.

See, I find it funny that this writer goes to such lengths to defend Lenin, but slams on Chàvez, who is generally agreed, e’en by the US, to have been legitimately democratically elected — moreso than US politicians, specially the president we elected @ the time, who didn’t win the popular vote, not to mention all the scuzziness surrounding his victory, such as the Brooks Brothers riot, which succeeded in stopping the vote that may have put Al Gore in the oval office ’stead o’ the man who created decades-long wars & the worst US economic crash since the Great Depression. Maybe this Salon writer should acknowledge that it’s not just Trump — Republicans have always been antidemocracy. It’s not till after Chàvez’s death & Maduro takes o’er that elections get questionable, tho Chàvez did seem to engage in some media intimidation near the end o’ his administration, specially with his shutdown o’ Globovision o’er their support for the attempted 2002 coup & Chàvez certainly said a lot o’ stupid, strongman things. Also, Venezuela has ne’er been a 1-party state, a’least till maybe very recently with the other major party’s boycott o’ the 2020 election. Lenin was certainly worse. In fact, Venezuela broke down the weird power-sharing 2-party state system it had ( basically a reflection o’ the Republican & Democratic Parties in the US ) &, a’least for a while, opened up a plurality o’ parties.

Does anyone really believe that China is a “People’s Republic”?

Considering “republic” is just a vague word that means “people thing” ( making “People’s People Thing” as ridiculously redundant as “The Los Angeles Angels” ) & historically referred to any kind o’ government, not just democratic ones, yes, I do believe China has some sort o’ government.

But Trump intentionally sought the support of blue-collar, working-class voters by promising left-wing policies. He promised a new health care system with universal coverage for everyone at a mere fraction of the cost. He promised he would stop U.S. corporations from shipping jobs overseas, and would bring jobs back to America. He promised he would never cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. He promised to get tough on Big Pharma and cut the high cost of drug prices. He promised a massive investment in America’s infrastructure, like roads and bridges. He promised to tax the rich, including himself, and to provide a massive tax cut for the middle class.

But once Trump was elected, of course, he abandoned all these promises of policies that would benefit the working class, instead implementing right-wing policies that benefited large corporations and the rich at the top, including granting a massive tax cut to himself and the rich, slashing regulations for big business, seeking to repeal the Affordable Care Act and seeking to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

But then the article seems to end with a commercial for the Democratic Party, which is not accurate:

The Democratic Party is not authoritarian, and does not seek to create an authoritarian regime such as those in China or Cuba. In truth, the Democratic Party favors robust democracy in direct opposition to authoritarianism.

Perhaps the Democratic Party doesn’t support full on dictatorship, but since it supports the current nondemocratic US electoral system, with its laughable electoral college ( which gave Clinton the majority o’ actual, real, people votes, but, as per the US system as set by the founding fathers, gave the victory to Trump for having the most magical “electoral votes” ), its skewed senate, its unelected judges for life, its legalized bribery in the form o’ lobbying, & its 2-party monopoly, saying it supports a “robust democracy” is a joke, as is the idea that these clowns sitting round in the white house & capital doing nothing while Republicans are standing round putting together their nooses in public sight as “direct opposition to authoritarianism”. That’s a weird way to talk ’bout the Neville Chamberlains o’ the 21st century US.