Question: if you’re the president & your goal is to win an election & you have made the tough decision to heavily support Israel in the Israel/Palestinian war — I don’t want to discuss not making this decision, as valid an option as it is, for now, as I want to make a mo’ specific point here — & you are, inevitably & predictably, faced with outrage from Arab Americans with family in Palestinian who died during said war, ¿how would you respond? If you’re halfway socially competent & trying to minimize alienating voters you need to remain president, you would probably spew out some characteristically politician fake expression o’ sympathy — something along the lines o’, “I am deeply sorry for your loss. I understand that war is bad for e’eryone. I am working on ending this war so both Israel & Palestine can prosper in peace”, but preferably better written by someone who has experience in writing this kind o’ fluff. Obviously this would be dishonest, but all politicians talk in lies: telling your potential voters the truth is the best way to get them to not vote for you.
Q The part was: Are you concerned with the Arab American votes voting for you during this election because of Gaza? Many say they will not vote for you.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, the President wants to put a — the former President wants to put a ban on Arabs coming into the country. We’ll make sure he — we understand who cares about the Arab population, number one.1
Number two, we got a long way to go in terms of settling the situation in Gaza.
Let’s ignore the hilarious gaff o’ Biden accidentally doing the same thing Republican conspiracists slyly do o’ continuing to call former president Trump the current president ( ¿SEE? ¡E’EN BIDEN KNOWS DEEP DOWN THAT HE IS A FAKE & HE RIGGED THE ELECTION WITH THOSE COMMUNIST USB PORTS! ¡THIS PROVES IT! ). E’en tho, no matter what side you’re on, it’s unquestionable that many Arab Americans like Jewish Americans have faced increased hardship due to this war, either having family members die or experiencing increased hate crimes from bigots, Biden doesn’t e’en offer condolences, e’en tho he’d lose nothing by doing so, other than maybe alienating the vital vicious bigot demographic who get enjoyment from Arab suffering like cartoon villains, but unironically pulls the, “Well, my opponent is worse, so you weak-ass minorities have no choice but to unconditionally support me. ¡So there!”, for which Democrats are widely criticized by their own base. E’en worse, unlike in most scenarios, in this case it’s not e’en necessarily true: ¿why would Arab Americans who are already citizens o’ the US care mo’ ’bout other Arab Americans being able to get in than their own family dying? Biden seems to assume like all too many liberals that people o’ a race love & care ’bout e’eryone else in their race. I’m a perfect example: I don’t give a fuck ’bout my fellow Welshman. ¿What the fuck good has Wales e’er done for the world? If those crackas try to get into the US, I tell ’em, <Take a #>, & they look @ me with bewilderment ’cause that doesn’t actually mean anything.
On Sunday, the Democratic representative from California said she would like the FBI to investigate potential Russian connections and funding behind American calls for an armistice in the Israel-Hamas war.
Responding to a question on CNN’s State of the Union about growing anger among Democrats, particularly young people and Arab Americans, at the Biden administration’s handling of the conflict, Pelosi said: “What we have to do is try to stop the suffering in Gaza … But for them to call for a ceasefire is Mr. Putin’s message.”
Adding to her charges of Russian influence, in a video posted by the anti-war group Code Pink on X on Monday, Pelosi can be seen telling activists outside her home in October to “go back to China where your headquarters is.”
’Gain, I’m not interested in whether or not this McCarthiesque conspiratory claim without evidence is true — I’ve heard plenty o’ very smart liberals™ ( the wacky & very original ™ let’s you know that I don’t actually think they’re smart ) argue that it must be true ’cause she’s on the Intelligence Committee & obviously can’t release evidence, as that’s classified, tho apparently revealing out loud so that Russia can hear that they’re scrutinizing them isn’t, ’cause apparently just putting faith in government officials without any o’ the limitations liberal republics are known for is what “liberals” do. If Pelosi were truly concerned with Russian & Chinese infiltration, the FBI could always investigate in secret & Pelosi could keep her mouth shut ’bout it. Personally, while I could see Russia wanting to troll Democrats & letting in the mo’ sympathetic Trump, I don’t see why China would want Trump to win, given he’s much mo’ hostile toward them than Democrats & is e’en threatening an absurd 10% tariff that would be disastrous for both the US & China’s economies. Then ’gain, they’re scary yellow people, so clearly they must be up to something, no matter how antithetical to their material interests that something is. I wonder if the very moderate & level-headed liberal Pelosi also has any enlightening information on how the Bolshevik Jews are running all o’ US media. It’s a wonder people don’t want to vote when both parties are full o’ people who spew this kind o’ John Birch Society shit. I am also well aware o’ the irony that Pelosi herself is an asset o’ the foreign country known as Israel ( note: pointing out this objective fact is antisemitic, but saying that “those commie Russians & Chinese always be spyin’” isn’t a common racist stereotype gainst Russians & Chinese people, ’cause in the US bigotry is only bad if it’s gainst a race that the US government can pretend to care ’bout to get propaganda points ), as many on the left have already quipped. I think you have to be blissfully ignorant o’ who Pelosi is, or politicians in general, to have any expectations o’ consistency.
No, what I’m interested in is the question, ¿what value does saying this out loud provide to Pelosi & the Democratic party whose interest I assume she holds. ’Gain, I want to emphasize that in politics politicians don’t act like super pooper smart Reddit users & Just Say It Like It Is™2 & tell women that, yes, they’re fat, but, if they’re competent, carefully craft their language to maximize voters. ¿What demographic o’ voter is she hoping to please by saying this?
Obviously not the people who sympathize with these protestors, who, if they have any backbone ( which, to be fair, is not an assumption one should make quickly when it comes to liberals ) would not take kindly to veiled threats o’ being “investigated” ( read: harassed ) by the FBI, the famously corrupt organization infamous for having assassinated civil rights leaders they deemed too radical. As a lifelong anarchist Democrat voter, I myself oft dunk on purity-contest leftists who have way too lofty a view o’ the US’s not-truly-democratic election system & refuse to vote for someone who supported genocide gainst Palestinians ’cause that makes them dirty by association somehow & these people are such rampant narcissists that they hold the delusion that anyone cares ’nough ’bout them to judge them o’ such dirtiness, but will continue to collect blood-money foodstamps or pay taxes to that same government ’cause they “have no choice” ( are too cowardly to form this glorious revolution they insist is the only solution ); but there is a big difference ’tween people so self-centered that they refuse to exploit the meager tool they have to effect political change in the US for petty personal squabbles like being called extreme by some politico & someone unable to stomach voting for someone who lead to them being actively harassed ( or had a family member blown up by said politico ).
¿So is this aimed @ so-called centrists? While so-called centrists ( read: upper-middle-class people who want their taxes lowered but are embarrassed by what ignorant savages Republicans are or hopelessly ignorant people who lazily fall into the golden mean fallacy so they can avoid having to make any critical thinking decisions ) constantly try to guilt Democrats into separating themselves from the fringe left who call for such extremist ideas as black people not being randomly murdered by cops or there being some limits on how much the poor can be whipped ( tho these “centrists” rarely apply this same scrutiny gainst Republicans, who, after all, are completely incapable o’ any sense o’ shame & will, in fact, deliberately shit their pants now that liberals have criticized them for doing so just to show that liberals can’t tell them what to do ), increased authoritarianism is usually not popular ’mong these so-called centrists ( a’least when applied by Democrats ), who, after all, not being full-on Democrats themselves, may find themselves under the same scrutiny.
I guess you could say this outburst o’ Pelosi’s is popular ’mong the most fervent Democrats — those are certainly the people who have gone to lengths to defend this outburst. That is to say that this outburst worked to convince people who are already strongly convinced to vote for Democrats @ the cost o’ e’ery other viable voter. ¡Somebody give these brilliant Democrat planners a raise & maybe write a shitty brown-nosing account ’bout them where you describe them like a love interest in an airport novel!
What we’re seeing is Democrats, both the politicians themselves & the desperate defenses Democrats make for their actions here, making the same mistakes they made in 2016: treating a swing state like Michigan or Wisconsin for granted, attacking significant chunks o’ their target demographic for no reason. Except it makes e’en less sense now, not only due to us having hindsight now, but also due to the mo’ precarious circumstances now: Clinton a’least had a good reason to expect to easily beat Trump when he was widely viewed as a sad clown after Obama’s relatively successful presidency; @ a time when Biden has remarkably low approval rating & polls show literal insurrectionist who claims he’ll be a dictator “for a day” Donald Trump ’bout even or ’bove, for Biden to try so li’l to do the bare minimum not to alienate vital voters he must really not want to be re-elected. & if he were running gainst an early-2000s style Bush Republican who’d only hurt poor minorities, I could understand Biden wanting a retirement 4 years earlier; but given Trump saying he has “no choice” but to lock up Biden if he wins re-election & given the way Republicans have been emboldening people like the guy who violently attacked Pelosi’s husband or threatened e’ery legislator when trying to count electoral votes, it seems weird how unconcerned they are with keeping people who may be a threat to their lives from winning. Clearly the protestors trying to annoy Pelosi into not funding foreign wars are a bigger threat. But we must ne’er underrate Democrats’ valiant determination to lose half their elections, since we don’t want Republicans — e’en those who want us dead — to feel bad if they don’t get their participation trophies. & we can be rest assured that as Biden & Pelosi stand out in the wilderness with a guns aimed @ the back o’ their heads like Francisco Madero, they’ll be thinking, { ¡This is all young people’s fault for not voting harder! ¡They should have #votedbluenomatterwho! }.
Q The March for Life is tomorrow in Washington, D.C. — the March for Life is tomorrow in Washington, D.C.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I know that.
Q What’s your message to those attending?
THE PRESIDENT: March.
BIDEN BOT RECOMMENDS THAT THE MOST RATIONAL BEHAVIOR IN WHICH TO ENGAGE DURING MARCHES IS TO MARCH.
2 Disclaimer: “Like It Is™” may not be an accurate representation o’ authentic reality, but may in fact be the delusions o’ someone whose interpretation o’ reality comes entirely from what random people say on social media.
The Department of Defense clapped back at Fox News host Jesse Watters on Wednesday after he said Taylor Swift could be a “psyop” for the Pentagon.
“I wonder who got to her from the White House or wherever,” Watters said on his show Tuesday night. “Who makes that initial handshake.”
Waters was referencing a partnership between Swift and Vote.org intended to encourage young people to register to vote.
The remark spawned conspiracy theories suggesting Swift could be a government asset or part of a broader information campaign.
Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh shut down the speculation Wednesday in a statement to Politico.
“As for this conspiracy theory, we are going to shake it off,” she said, a tongue-in-cheek reference to one of the pop star’s hits.
¿What the fuck kind o’ world am I living in?
I’m grateful the hip kids @ The Hill took the time to ’splain to my grandpa living under a rock that the phrase “shake it off” is a “tongue-in-cheek reference to one of the pop star’s hits”.
The fact that neither side is “pumpkin pie”, which is, objectively, the best choice that anyone would e’er make, is proof that Newsweek can’t be taken serious. ¿Fucking stuffing? Stuffing is the very telltale American “let’s just throw a bunch o’ random shit together & pretend it’s food” kind o’ “food”. Stuffing gets a D tier — as do both these articles.
For comparison, nobody e’en blames the Nazis for the Dresden bombing & claims that the Nazis really killed those Germans by being dirty Nazis — & you could make a better case for that, since the Nazis truly did start that war by just invading countries, whereas history clearly shows that both Israel & Palestine started the current conflict 80 years ago by ne’er truly agreeing on borders or e’en whether or not they should be 1 or 2 countries. This kind o’ empty-headed propaganda is the apex o’ cowardice & it’s understandable that any news organization who received it would blacklist the artist due purely to the evidence o’ their hopeless hackery & the inevitability that they will ne’er produce any good art.
The gruesome details and brutal savagery of the October 7 attack launched by Hamas operatives on innocent civilians was shocking to even the most battled-hardened [sic] soldiers and war correspondents.
No it wasn’t. Ramirez couldn’t know this ’cause he isn’t a “battled-hardened” ( which is how an illiterate person says “battle-hardened” ) soldier or war correspondent, but a sheltered, spoiled, upper-middle-class cartoonist. My nerdy ass wasn’t shocked by it — probably ’cause unlike most o’ the people who’ve come out o’ the woodwork to share the “wisdom” they just learned on social media last month, I didn’t just become aware o’ the intermittent violence ’tween Israel & Palestine for the past 80 years or so.
Evidence of beheadings, babies shot in their cribs, parents shot in front of their children, entire families massacred, the torture and execution of the elderly, people burned alive, and hundreds of young people gunned down while attending a musical festival for peace, were widely reported and verified by video, audio, and forensic evidence.
Rational people judge actions not on their ultimate outcomes, but on how gross they look. In the end, Palestinians murdering Israelis in exotic ways is no different than Israelis evaporating Palestinians in an instant with drones: death is death. The #s — & in this scenario, Israel’s death count is much higher than Hamas’s — should matter most. If anything, the real revealing aspect is how much poorer Palestine is that they have to resort to brute force while Israel can just use expensive technology. In essence, Palestine is bad ’cause they’re low class.
Most people would be horrified. Yet in an interview on Lebanese television, Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad hailed the brutal October 7 attack and pledged to repeat the October 7 attack again and again until Israel is “removed,” claiming Hamas “was the victim,” therefore “everything they do is justified.”
Wow, nobody’s e’er said stuff like that before in war. It’s not like the US is infamous for calling civilian deaths “collateral damage”.
That interview was the inspiration for a recent cartoon I drew for the Washington Post depicting Gazi [sic] Hamad and his human shields.
No, your inspiration for making this comic involving Ghazi strapping Palestinian civilians round him was mirroring Israeli government propaganda, which invented the concept o’ “human shields”, which is, as mentioned earlier, their Orwellian way o’ saying, “It’s the other side’s fault I’m killing civilians”. If anything, one should give credit to Hamas for a’least being honest ’bout the brutality o’ war. If what Ghazi said had inspired a comic from you, it should show Hamas leader killing Israeli civilians & hypocritically criticizing Israel for attacking civilians. That would’ve made mo’ sense & probably would’ve garnered less outrage since it’d actually be true, whereas Ghazi, in fact, ne’er did strap Palestinians round him while they stared @ the camera bug-eyed like wacky cartoon characters ’cause “human shields” is a myth.
Also, kudos to the tag-team incompetence on both Ramirez & the Newsweek editor that nobody noticed this inconsistent spelling o’ Ghazi’s name.
Any decent human being would agree that this war is catastrophic. I mourn the loss of innocent life—on both sides. I am shocked by the destruction that has shattered their lives and grieve for those families. I wish for the safe return of the more than 240 hostages that Hamas has taken. But those are separate issues.
“Look, I know this is a complex issue that only an idiot would try to boil down to a single-panel cartoon; but I’m choosing to completely ignore all that context & just focus on calling 1 guy a poopy face”.
Hamas is a terrorist organization that blames Israel for the attack on civilians, but ignores its own complicity in their suffering. It was Hamas that first launched the attack on Israel, continues to use civilian infrastructure as cover, and restricts the evacuation of Gaza civilians from areas which Israel has given advanced warning of strikes. [ Emphasis mine ]
Ramirez is so dumb or thinks his readers are so dumb that he’s saying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict started this year, that there wasn’t already violence building up to this day. He is literally just as dumb as those TikTokkers who just realized that Osama bin Laden existed.
It’s ironic that those who criticize the cartoon for overgeneralizing and stereotyping cannot seem to distinguish between a known terrorist group and Palestinians.
No, it’s mo’ ironic that Ramirez is too dumb to realize that the “human shields” is a stereotype o’ all Palestinians, not just Hamas. That’s like if someone were to make a comic o’ Netanyahu being a puppet leader o’ the media or being a banker &, after the inevitable criticism o’ antisemitism, being all, “No, you’re the antisemite ’cause you can’t distiguish 1 Jew from ’nother”. This is, in fact, a common rhetorical game that propagandists use to try & justify their sloppy bigoted statements.
And it’s a tragedy that their only way of coping with the truth depicted in my cartoon is to erase it from view.
¿What truth? Show me this video evidence o’ Ghazi tying children round him like body armor. Let’s see it, Ramirez.
In my speeches, I say, “An editorial cartoon is not humorous for the sake of humor. It is not controversial for the sake of controversy. Whether you agree with it philosophically or not, a good editorial cartoon engages the reader in debate. It informs and challenges. It draws the reader into the democratic process.”
This comic does none o’ that. ¿What debate does this comic inspire? ¿Are civilians fair game if they’re tied round a government official @ which you’ve gone to war? Nor does it challenge anyone: it’s straight-up redundant repetition o’ Israeli government propaganda. ¿Why not just read an article from The Times of Israel? It’d certainly be better written.
Liberty, the free exchange of ideas, is the foundation of our democracy. Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “Our Liberty depends on the freedom of press, and that cannot be limited without it being lost.” The reason our Founding Fathers included the right to a free press in our Constitution was because they knew the communication of ideas and information, the right to inform and be informed, the dissemination of ideas and the expression of opinion, are all necessary components in a political system based on self-governance and individual liberty. Limiting the exchange of ideas even in our common culture limits our freedom.
There is nothing mo’ embarrassing that reading e’ery mediocre pundit trying to pretend like the Constitution was made specifically to prevent their terrible work from being put in the slush pile — like that makes them the next Salman Rushdie.
So, ¿how are we serving the freedom o’ the press by forcing the press to serve government propaganda they don’t like? It seems to me that freedom o’ the press means that any press outlet like The Washington Post can choose to publish & not publish any crap they want & if you don’t like it, well, you can always make your own blog, Ramirez — or just get a 3rd-rate newspaper like Newsweek to publish your whines. This is literally this “I am being silenced” cartoon. ¿How are you being “canceled” when Newsweek is publishing your stuff? Shit, Newsweek won’t publish my articles ’bout you being an idiot; I guess that means I’m getting canceled. & yet, somehow I manage to keep living my life.
The purpose of an editorial cartoon, and a good editorial page is to be the catalyst for thought. By promoting the thoughtful exchange of ideas, we forge a consensus through the fiery heat of debate.
So then it’s a good thing The Washington Post removed your idiotic comic from the editorial page, as ’twas impeding thought & the exchange o’ ideas by making readers dumber. Also, debate ne’er “forge[s] a consensus”, a consensus is — you know what, I don’t need to do that lecture ’gain.
Today, political correctness and the woke —
Good news: since this paragraph uses the word “woke” unironically, we can skip it, since nothing that involves that can e’er be intelligent or useful. You can already guess what it says: people complaining to The Washington Post that they don’t want to pay money for garbage is the exact same as putting Ramirez in the gulag. Left-wing people are the only people to e’er remove content that doesn’t agree with their opinions from their media; this is why Fox News regularly has socialists on their program & those LGBTQ+ book bans ( by government officials, not private organizations, mind you, ’cause conservatives provide the only major forces in support for government censorship in the US ) are not a thing.
Critics of my cartoon are using an accusation of racism as a device to “cancel” the truth—the overwhelming empirical evidence that Hamas uses civilians, both Palestinians and Israelis, as human shields.
You can’t fucking put scare quotes round a word that you are using unironically. ¿What, are you making fun o’ your own inane whining?
Yes, ¡look @ all that empirical evidence that Ghazi tied people to him with rope! ¡It’s right there! ¡Just look!
I do not mind being attacked for my cartoons. People should be emotionally invested in their politics. While the First Amendment guarantees the freedom of speech, it does not insulate you from the consequences of your speech. I accept that. It is part of the job.
Those consequences being the ability to make e’en mo’ money whining ’bout this “punishment” on a different newspaper.
Tier:E
All right, that was intolerable. It would be e’en mo’ intolerable if I found ’nother article ’bout a rich white man whining ’bout being “canceled” while their opinions are clearly still being —
This is “The University of Michigan Failed to Protect My Right To Free Speech” by Josh Hammer. You may recognize him from my previous Newsweek article as the only person to land on the coveted 🤪-tier, given to him ’cause he sounded like a fascist nut, using Nazi phrases like “fifth column”, which is used to depict all members o’ certain races, like Jews, as conspiring with enemies, both real & imaginary; repeatedly using the far-right conspiratory term “liberal imperium”; & writing ’bout modern “decadence” — which as I said, is an idea only entertained by certain reactionary Marxists & fascists, & Hammer certainly is no Marxist. You’ll notice that his photo looks a lot less drunk & disheveled here, tho he does seem to be doing the good ol’ “Dreamworks Smirk”. Good for him. ¿But has he cleaned up his fringe fascist rhetoric?
The talk’s blunt title, selected by the local Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) chapter, reflected my own unambiguous approach to the conflict: “Israel’s Righteous Fight Against Jihadism.”
Nope. Remember, in the previous article he described Israelis who were too sympathetic to filthy Arabs & Muslims as “fifth column”, so we were already familiar with this man’s ardent support for Israeli Islamophobia.
Within minutes of starting my speech, 20 to 25 protestors stood up in unison. They held their arms high in the air to expose their shirts, which featured photos of Palestinian-Arabs who have died in Gaza since the war started. (The students are unaware of, or simply disinterested in, the fact that every one of those deaths is legally attributable to Hamas under international law.) Undeterred, I continued. A few minutes later, the students began obnoxiously coughing in unison each time I opened my mouth, in a clear attempt to drown me out. I reminded them of the university’s code of conduct, which prohibits shouting down speakers, but that only made them cough louder.
Shortly thereafter, the mass coughing turned into shouting, coordinated by a visible ringleader toward the front of the pack. The chants would be familiar to those who have paid attention to the explosion of on-campus antisemitism since the Hamas Holocaust of Oct. 7: “Remember their names!,” “Free Palestine!,” “Stop the genocide!,” and so forth. At one point, a protestor started to walk briskly toward the stage, prompting my body man to leap out of his front-row seat to protect me. Finally, a tepid university administrator replaced me at the podium, seemingly to once again remind the students that their conduct violated university policy. He too was drowned out; his exhortations were largely inaudible.
Eventually, the protestors escorted themselves out of the back of the room. They never ceased chanting, and proceeded to physically bang on the walls of the lecture hall exterior once they exited—leaving red handprints all over the wall behind them, since they had painted their hands blood-red. The whole disruption lasted probably 30 to 35 minutes, after which I finished my remarks for those who had the patience to remain in their seats. After student Q&A and photos, a campus police officer escorted me to my friend’s car.
Even more important, the university failed to secure the other half of the right to free speech: the right to freely listen, especially for those who drove hours to Ann Arbor just to hear my talk.
This is not a thing.
University administrators and campus police officers acted shamefully in failing to suppress the pro-Hamas students’ heckler’s veto—a disreputable act that here, there, and everywhere falls outside the scope of First Amendment-protected activity under well-established case law, and which may even be prosecutable depending on the jurisdiction.
This is, in fact, utter hogwash, & it’s notable that he ne’er provides a single citation. All cases I could find related to the Heckler’s vote, like Feiner v. New York, are defenses o’ police arrests o’ people when they believe those people are in danger o’ starting a riot ( how this is proven or judges is, ’course, vague so as to give the government flexibility to suppress anyone they wish ); it has ne’er involved charging an institution for neglecting to suppress hecklers, nor have I seen any case where people are charged for heckling when they could have started a riot, but didn’t. The fact that a riot didn’t happen here makes this whole idea moot & idiotic. Like all fascists, he makes up whate’er law he wants that serves his interest — for that is the purpose o’ law for fascists: to serve the chosen people & work gainst the hated people.
Most o’ the rest o’ this article is boring, pathetic lusting for punishment gainst the people who don’t obey him & lame, uncreative slanderous attacks gainst people he doesn’t agree with ( anyone who doesn’t support Israeli theocracy is an antisemite, just as how anyone who opposes school prayer wants all Christians to be fed to lions, etc. ). There is something to be said ’bout cooling the bloodthirsty rhetoric o’ protestors; then ’gain, there’s also something to be said ’bout not giving racist, empty-headed propagandists like this writer a special spot to spew hateful propaganda. I ask ’gain, ¿why do colleges, which charge mo’ than $10,000, & oft up to $100,000 & o’er, waste their students time & insult their intelligence by inviting these mediocre partisan hacks speedrunning logical fallacies & not actual scientists? @ that point students may as well just be watching Stephen Crowder on YouTube & save the $100,000. ¿What message are they teaching their students by encouraging them to treat uncredentialed influencers as experts to be listened to & not questioned? ¿That they should be just as shallow as the average person on social media? ’Gain, ¿can’t you get these kind o’ rock-bottom standards for free? ¿Why pay so much money to colleges so ready to throw ’way their credibility?
But I do want to end with 1 ironic part @ the end:
In April 2019, I was personally present at my alma mater, the University of Chicago Law School, to see fellow alumnus and legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich speak about the First Amendment and state-level anti-BDS (“Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions”) legislation.
’Gain, it could not be clearer that this writer thinks the 1st amendment just protects whate’er he likes. In fact, Kontorovich’s anti-BDS laws are real violations o’ freedom o’ speech by governments, which, in some cases, have been struck down.
Color me with the brightest o’ surprises that someone as inarticulate & primitive-minded wilts like grass the second he encounters anyone with a different opinion & runs & hides ’hind authoritarian institutes rather than trying to argue back with them.
Tier: E
Ugh. Tired o’ all this government propaganda for Israel. Well…
This is “Hamas Can Never Again Decide Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die”. It reminds me o’ that inane article from our last trawl thru Newsweek in which a retired lieutenant insisted that Putin, the world’s only war criminal, must be tried for war crimes, e’en tho that was ne’er going to happen — & still hasn’t happened. Similarly, this writer makes the empty moral case that Hamas cannot be allowed to decide who lives & dies ( only Israel can, since, as the Torah says, they are God’s chosen people ). What this article doesn’t do is specify how Israel bombing the hell out o’ random civilians — like I said, Israeli government choosing who can live & die — stops Hamas, many o’ whose members very well may not e’en be in Palestine anymo’, since bombing people & fleeing to unexpected areas is a common tactic o’ terrorists, from deciding who will live & die. If we agree with the “human shields” theory, then Israel killing Palestinian civilians is what Hamas wants & so by doing so they are, in fact, helping Hamas choose who lives & dies. Which means those protestors are, if anything, idiots for protesting: Israel & Hamas are getting ’long fine, both killing each other’s civilians. It’s not like Hamas or the Israeli government are the ones bearing the brunt o’ it.
I won’t quote much o’ this article ’cause it’s boring & makes e’en less attempts @ arguments than the previous 2 articles. This article can be summed up as: the Holocaust existed, the Hamas attack on Israel was kinda like the Holocaust if you squint @ it & multiply its casualties by 5,000, therefore Hamas is like Hitler 2.0.
For all the post-Holocaust promises of “never again,” international support for Israel eroded rapidly once Israel went on the offensive and launched a ground invasion into Gaza.
Yeah, it’s shocking that people who don’t like genocide don’t like invasions, either. I’m not sure why this writer assumes that “no Holocaust e’er ’gain” means “we unconditionally support anything Israel does” or why this idea that genocide is bad should only apply to Hamas threatening to destroy Israel & not Israel’s threat gainst Palestine’s existence or the very nature o’ a Jewish state making any non-Jewish person a 2nd-class citizen. The mo’ shocking thing is that a people who witnessed the horrible outcome o’ a people setting up a state to serve only them, while all others are treated as lesser people, would turn round & try the same thing, but with them as the chosen people now. You’d think they would support secularism & not giving any priority to any religion or race, but nope. It’s mo’ shocking how many people who probably think o’ themselves as “liberal” simping for either Israel or Palestine, when neither are compatible with the principles o’ secularism — & in fact, due to Israel’s insistence on keeping Israel a Jewish state, are also not compatible with democracy, as Israel disallows Palestinians in occupied territory the right to vote for the very reason that they consider so many non-Jewish voters a threat.
After 75 years believing Israel would protect Jews from being lined up and singled out for life or death, Oct. 7 awakened a sobering realization that even the Jewish state’s military, economic, and technological strength offer no guarantees.
¿Who believed this? ¿Dumbasses who had no idea what was going on politically in that region for the past 80 years? I mean, yeah, when you have an unresolved land dispute ’caused by the goal o’ creating a Jewish state in land with both Jews & Muslims, that’s inevitable. Maybe 2 groups trying to set up theocracies that upholds 1 people as better than all others in such a culturally-diverse place ’cause some ancient fairy tales said ’twas super important to an invisible man in the sky was the dumbest idea in the world.
Today, the voices calling for a ceasefire are far louder than those affirming Israel’s right to defend itself.
¿Really? ’Cause I’ve been getting 3/0 on “Israel Rules, Palestine Drools” from Newsweek. ¿Where’s the Newsweek article titled “IDF Can Never Again Decide Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die”?
The goal of peace-loving people should not just be an end to this current war; it should be to end all wars between Israel and Hamas. And the goal of Israel must be to ensure that no enemy will ever again decide who among the Jewish people shall live and who shall die.
Yes, eliminating Hamas will totally eliminate racist hatred gainst Jews that existed for many decades before Hamas existed. This will totally happen & we won’t see several mo’ decades o’ continuous murder & destruction by both sides. This writer is super wise & has demonstrated great awareness o’ the development o’ realpolitik ’tween Israel & Palestine & isn’t just spewing empty hallmarkcard pleasantries while intentionally heeing & hawing o’er the unsavory aspects & was totally worth wasting an article on. ¿Did she pay Newsweek for the privilege o’ writing her blog post for them? That’s the only reason I could think o’ for why they would accept this middle-school drivel. I certainly can’t imagine anyone dumb ’nough to consider it worth monetary compensation.
But I think my favorite is “I’m an Israeli Arab. I’m Embarrassed—and Hamas Is to Blame”, the obligatory apologia by the racist’s Arab best friend defending their racist friend as totally not racist. In actual fact, Hamas is only responsible for what they do, not what they inspire your fellow Israeli to do. If your Israeli respond to actions by Hamas by blaming all Arabs, then that is on them.
Against this backdrop, the paranoia, tension and fear that Jews feel when they encounter Arabs is understandable.
That’s right: Newsweek wants you to think that feeling paranoia round any Arabs, including those who have been citizens o’ Israel for their whole lives, is “understandable”, just like how you can’t blame white people in the US if they feel uncomfortable round black people. I mean, it’s the fault o’ the black people who commit crimes, not racists. If black people ne’er committed crimes, then racists would stop being racist gainst them, totally. Newsweek are literally KKK-level bigots — & cowardly & pathetic ones, too, since they bribed an Arab to give a fake N-word-privileges to the hate they spew.
The other question I’m frequently asked is, “Do you condemn Hamas?” Asking Israeli Arabs this question misses a fundamental aspect of just how much we’re intertwined with Israeli life. Does it make sense to ask an Israeli Jew if they condemn Hamas? Of course not.
This is why the world needs to understand that Israeli Arabs reject Hamas and its ideology just as much as Jews do.
The fact that this writer feels the need to say this is damning: if the average Israeli Jew weren’t racist, they wouldn’t need to be told this; & since they are, they ne’er will understand this. I don’t hear ’bout many American Jews going round questioning random Arabs if they support Hamas, ’cause if they did they would be associated with far-right racists like Glenn Beck.
Showing empathy for one side in a conflict does not negate the capacity to have empathy for the other. Rather, it shows that you’re human. Arabs do not need to choose a side in this conflict.
“Arabs don’t need to choose a side, but if they don’t choose the Israeli government o’er Hamas, they’re evil”.
For the sake of humanity, I implore the Arab community to move forward and to cleverly and responsibly understand the Jewish narrative, as we have been asking them to understand ours for 75 years. For the first time, as an Arab minority we are requested to stand with empathy and understand the majority’s narrative.
1st, ¿how do you “cleverly understand” something? Cleverness is inventiveness that comes from oneself, understanding is getting information externally. When you think ’bout it, they’re contradictory. That doesn’t mean one should always be clever & ne’er stop to understand others; but doing both @ the same time is… I dunno. I’ve ne’er heard anyone use the phrase “cleverly understand” ’cause it means nothing — it sounds like gibberish poorly translated from a different language. If this writer wrote this in a different language, then they should fire the translator.
2nd, this writer is morally demanding that all Arabs just bow down & throw ’way their own beliefs & feelings & just let the “Jewish narrative” ( right-wing racist doctrine ) dictate them, ’cause they are the “majority” ( that’s debatable, considering the amount o’ Arab-majority Palestinian territory Israel controls ). As an American who doesn’t think black people or Native Americans should just accept the “majority” white narrative, I find this peculiar — ¡but this American-oriented article certainly inspires this idea ’mong Newsweek’s majority-white audience! This brings up questions that don’t get answered: ¿why do Jews & Arabs have different understanding in the 1st place? ¿Why is there no call for compromise on this understanding? ¿Is it perhaps ’cause Israel power finds the idea o’ seeing eye-to-eye, to treating Arabs as equally, distasteful? Or maybe it’s that Newsweek finds this distasteful, since, despite what your local Nazi says, I don’t think Israel can force them to publish anything they don’t want. Also, I love how she says that Arabs have been asking Jews to understand their perspective, but doesn’t say how most Jews have responded. If Jews are indifferent to Arabs’ perspective, ¿why should anyone expect Arabs to be open to theirs? Also, I’m very doubtful that this is the 1st time Arabs have been asked to have empathy with Jews & “understand the majority’s narrative” ( just unconditionally accept what the dominant ideology tells them, as in an authoritarian regime ). Undoubtedly, there are many Arabs who don’t have empathy for Jews & ne’er had, entertaining such lovely topics as Holocaust-denial, but despite what Israeli propaganda cries into their pillows, the world has been pretty disgusted by these things, just not ’nough to think they merit decimating any Arab one can find — after all, if Holocaust denial deserves death, then Israel’s own prime minister deserves it.
At University of Haifa, we’re preparing to do just that. While the beginning of the school year has been delayed due to the war, the University’s administration is brainstorming ways to turn down the temperature on campus so that our students are reintegrated into a peaceful environment.
By violently suppressing any protests — just as Newsweek hopes the US starts doing gainst ideas they don’t like.
In the city of Haifa, there are mixed neighborhoods and mixed apartment buildings. At the University, Jews and Arabs learn and grow together. This is the paradigm that Israel must replicate in order to move on from the tragedy of Oct. 7.
I’m not upset when I see the posters in Hebrew around campus stating, “Together We Will Win,” because I know that Arabs are included in that fight.
“A’least I will be, ’cause I’m 1 o’ the good 1s”.
Together we can use our voice to speak against rising levels of discrimination we’re seeing.
You were just saying you weren’t being discriminated gainst. ¿What happened to the idyllic mixed apartments you were raving ’bout just earlier?
I was also asked recently if I ever see myself leaving Israel to a place with a much larger Arab population, like France. My answer is clear: I’m not going anywhere. Israel is my home.
The sad thing is that she treats this racist sentiment as normal. Like, if somebody asked me if I’d be happier being somewhere surrounded by people o’ my own race, I wouldn’t answer them calmly; I’d tell that Nazi to fuck off.
For Jews and Arabs alike, this country is special. When each of us sees an olive tree, we’re in awe of this majestic force, of nature’s ability to grow out of the arid desert soil.
“I see that all the races are equal in their superstitious stupidity & mystification in the face o’ basic biology”.
If Jews and Arabs are adamant about not going anywhere, it’s up to both communities to determine what’s next in a healthy and productive way.
They are not doing that.
On Oct. 7, Hamas did far more than kill 1,400 people. It also set back any hope we had for peace, gearing us all up for another generation of nothing but violence.
But for every tragedy, there is a silver lining. A recent survey by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) indicated that 70 percent of Arabs in Israel identify with the State of Israel. IDI reports the highest percentage of respondents who feel part of the state since they began asking this question in 2003. This demonstrates that the Arab community in Israel aspires to further integrate into society and distance itself from bad faith actors like Hamas.
That’s pretty sad when you have to celebrate a whopping 70% o’ your country’s minority citizens not preferring another country, specially since it’s not as if the people who answered couldn’t lie & wouldn’t have a good reason not to loudly announce, “Nope, I’m an enemy o’ this state”. If you have any attachment to Israel’s far-right government, I guess this is heartening. Personally, I don’t like governments that engage in antisemetic conspiracies round George Soros, so I don’t give any greater fuck than if American Arabs identify with the US. The real issue is how we can get both Jews & Arabs to accept the supremacy o’ Englesist Magical Socialism o’er their silly superstitions, which don’t involve cool things like sticking dicks in each others’ bums, but, in fact, are very anti-dicks-in-bums.
Israeli Arabs and Jews are like salt and pepper: They both belong on the table, and once they’re sprinkled into a dish, it’s almost impossible to distinguish between them.
You got me in favor o’ Arabs & Jews getting together & putting their dicks in each others’ bums till you brought up this metaphor. I disagree: salt does not belong on the table — salt is in too much stuff already & gives you hypertension — & I can very much tell the difference ’tween spicy pepper & too-sharp salt. For me, ¡it’s all pepper, from the river to the sea!
This was the most reprehensible article I have e’er read — e’en compared to the COVID-denial 1 — & Newsweek are detestable for publishing it.
Tier: F
For a palate cleanser, let’s look @ a familiar topic: simping for school privatization schemes, ’cause nothing’s better for the US’s low education problem than doing the opposite o’ what better-educated schools do & dig our heels into the US’s uniquely fanatical obsession with privatizing e’erything & fighting gainst woke schools who teach things like that gay people exist & that dinosaurs didn’t chill with people 6,000 ago when both were invented by that same wacky sky god we can thank for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
We came so close. Texas was on the brink of passing a significant school choice bill (HB1) that would finally achieve the impossible: break the public school monopoly and empower parents with a choice of where they send their children to be educated.
This kind o’ propaganda is perplexing: ¿who likes parents? Parents are dumb karens, & taking ’way their choices only makes the world a better place. After all, they were dumb ’nough to think having kids was a good idea. Plus, parents already have influence o’er their children by being able to teach them whate’er fringe ideas they want for the whole time they have them outside o’ school & have the advantage o’ children hating school ’cause it’s boring & parents’ emotional connection with children ( ’less they’re abusive, which is the only case where schools would probably be liked better by children ). ¿How ’bout we worry ’bout parents monopolizing childrens’ learning so they can’t just indoctrinate them in whate’er cult ideas they have & polluting the voting population so their bad parenting hurts the rest o’ us? Since it’s unquestionabe that how children are raised affects the whole community, including those who don’t have children, it in fact makes sense that the whole community should have a choice in whether or not children are raised into abortion-clinic bombers, not just totalitarian parents. This is the central fallacy o’ this “choice” idea: the Orwellian “freedom” for parents to control their children like dictators. ’Course, dictatorships being freer than democracy is a common philosophy ’mong the right, including laissy libertarians, so this is nothing new.
Now, instead of a law that could help fix our broken public education system, Texan legislators will vote on yet another bill that throws money at the problem. As a public school teacher myself, I wouldn’t mind the extra cash, but I know only a tiny sliver would end up in my paycheck, and today’s systemic problems would continue to fester.
Maybe instead o’ trying to throw money @ random rich organizations with li’l o’ersight, you should try electing government officials that aren’t incompetent, corrupt loons — like, maybe not the kind o’ government officials who take so much cream off the top. I love laissy libertarians who emphasize how corrupt & evil their governments are, but have no concern with keeping them in power, as if that corruption won’t manifest as a problem in other ways. This is probably ’cause the corrupt governments who support them love having their corruption normalized & accepted & can exploit privatization schemes to employ mo’ corruption. In short, when you start with the refrain, “our government is corrupt”, then you already found the root o’ the problem that must be solved before you start discussing issues like education. The idea that a privatization scheme could be properly employed by a corrupt government doesn’t e’en make sense: if your government can so easily embezzle money out o’ funds, ¿what checks & balances exist to keep them from just giving money to their friends during privatization, which is a mo’ subtle form harder to detect?
The original bill would have “establish[ed] an education savings account initiative that would set aside $10,500 every year per student for private school expenses” and “include[d] a bump in per-student spending by the state, from $6,160 to $6,700.”
This is contradictory: ¿does each student get $10,500 or $6,700?
It also would have increased teacher pay.
This is a virtual word-for-word quote o’ the article they cited, but without quotation marks, which is plagiarism.
Neither article provides evidence for this claim, but what data I could find from a decade ago shows the opposite: that private schools tend to pay less than public school.
No longer would poorer students be forced to attend failing public schools in their area. They could use their voucher to attend an alternative.
As one might guess, the success of a bill like HB1 comes down to funding and accountability. It’s not enough to simply hand families a check and expect them to reward good schools with their business. First, there must be viable alternatives to the underperforming public school (whether private or charter) that offer families a real choice. Moreover, those alternatives must be amply funded and properly accredited to successfully compete with the public school.
¿Why are funding & accountability not ’nough for improving public schools? This writer just recently complained ’bout a bill that “throws money at the problem”, but now is doing so, so long as its for their rich friends’ organizations.
The closest thing this article does to back up the vague idea o’ “viable” & “real” choices, as opposed to imaginary choices, is proper accredation, which I assume means regional accredation, but is vague ’nough that it could include any loose restrictions. ¿& if we’re forcing these schools to be accredited, are they truly “alternatives”, since they’re just following government rules? This is the problem: choice & standards are inherently contradictory: in order to have high standards, you must have strict rules; in order to have choice, you must give people terrible choices. & as this article outright admits, parents are too ignorant to know what is & is not a good school, anyway.
As it stands, most charter and private schools have much smaller budgets than their public school counterparts.
That link, which is a pro-school-choice organization quoting a pro-school-choice, conservative newspaper, quoting a study by a pro-school-choice organization, CREDO, is interesting, as a different study by Sanford says the opposite.
This funding gap limits the former’s appeal and makes neighborhood public schools the default option for most families. After all, who wants to send their kids to a school that rents out space from an ugly building and is staffed with untrained adults?
¿What evidence is there that giving mo’ money to charter schools will lead to better training for adults when apparently giving mo’ money to public schools doesn’t lead to better teachers? ’Cause there aren’t tons o’ businesses that make loads o’ money & still barely pay their workers. That’s why expensive iMacs aren’t made by lowly-paid workers in 3rd-world countries.
School choice legislation that significantly boosts funding to public and charter schools can foster meaningful competition between campuses. Schools would be incentivized to increase academic rigor, offer interesting course options, hire the best teachers, and create safe, aesthetically pleasing environments.
¿By what basis? ’Gain, we’re assuming the economic fallacy o’ perfect information: that parents will choose the optimal choices, despite knowing nothing ’bout academics. Based on that logic, video games have mo’ academic rigor than books, ’cause people choose to spend mo’ money on video games than books. ¿& how do we define “best teachers”? ¿The teachers mo’ liable to kowtow to karen parents who demand they give their special child A’s & let them act like li’l shits? ’Cause that’s the kind o’ criteria we’re feeding by giving parents mo’ power.
¿How would creating mo’ school choices — mo’ schools — lead to less inefficiency? In actuality, monopolies can lead to greater efficiencies due to needing fewer redundant resources ( since competing schools, by the nature o’ competition, are working separately, & thus cannot share resources ). As for “expensive technology boondoggles”, that points to ’nother advantage monopolies can have: greater independence from consumers gives mo’ discretion for innovation & research beyond what consumers could e’en conceptualize before it already exists, — ’gain, imperfect information — while competition will just lead to schools climbing o’er each other to fit consumers’ desires, while schools that take the risk on innovation probably won’t last long ’nough to see their innovation to fruition. Meanwhile, the downsides to monopoly are offset by these public schools being democratically run. It’s harder for schools to gouge people when citizens can vote out the government officials gouging them. The fact that this writer doesn’t realize these issues shows how fake is their knowledge o’ economics: rather than truly understanding the complexities o’ competition, they just fall into the lazy “competition is good” fallacy.
I should add that this whole concept assumes that monopolies are only created by the government, which only the most religious o’ market thumpers who have ne’er heard o’ such obscure mom-&-pop stores as Google or Microsoft believe. ¿What happens if 1 private school drives out all other competition? ¿What’s to stop the propagation o’ the Wal-Mart o’ schools, spread out all ’cross the state, but all controlled by the same business? Then you get both the downsides o’ public monopoly & private lack o’ democratic o’ersight.
Ideally, they would have the opportunity to attend schools with advanced coursework, vocational training, and exceptional programs in fine arts and athletics.
Yes, & ideally I’ll win the lottery I ne’er enter & win a million $. Unfortunately, neither will happen.
For once, this wouldn’t only be a possibility for richer parents who can afford to send their child to such schools, but for all students who desire it.
I’m pretty sure there are rich parents who pay mo’ than the $10,000 max than the Texas state is offering students, so this is straight-up false. ¿Does this bill include regulations forcing private schools to accept poor students who cannot pay their full fees? I saw no mention o’ such.
If this same bill is proposed again and actually passes, it could be massive shot in the arm and offer a whole new model for American public education.
Considering this boondoggle goes back to a’least the 90s, there is nothing new ’bout this model.
If the dollar amount of the vouchers is too low, then the only beneficiaries will be private schools and the students already enrolled in them. Private schools will simply raise their tuition, and the parents who already have their kids at those schools would apply for a voucher and enjoy a small subsidy—while those who do not will still be priced out.
This makes absolutely no sense: they claim that paying a li’l to vouchers will cause private schools to raise their tuition; ¿but someone paying a lot won’t? ¿What’s to stop private schools, specially those who don’t want dirty poors in their halls, to just add the voucher amount to their tuition, so that rich people pay the same & poor people are still priced out? “It just subsidizes the rich while still pricing poor people out” sounds like the strongest case one could make gainst voucher systems, & it’s made in this article trying to promote them. Amazing.
If states increase per-student enrollment funding only marginally, or even reduce it, charter and public schools will have to cut back on what they offer. Thus, instead of schools trying to deliver the best product, they will be competing on who can provide the cheapest product and coax the best students. This is the current complaint of a lot of public school educators—they claim charter schools essentially steal away the most motivated students from public schools, which are then left with the most high-need, at-risk students. When vouchers are thrown into the mix, both public and charter schools may be left unequipped to handle their respective student populations. This in turn forces state and local governments to drop standards for teachers and cut back on various school programs, something that is now happening in Arizona.
’Gain: we have a fundamental problem with voucher systems, evidence o’ it happening in real-life examples o’ voucher systems, but then this article claims that magically mo’ money will ’scape these problems, e’en tho they provide no evidence, they just make sloppy claims.
’Gain, the cited evidence is gainst, not for. Moreo’er, the whole point o’ putting schools on the market is to exploit the s’posed regulatory role o’ the market: you were just talking ’bout how market competition would lead to efficiency. If we’re spending government resources on accountability measures to o’erride the market’s failure to lead to efficiency, ¿why have the market @ all, since the proliferation o’ scammers proves that the market utterly fails to do its job? & if a government who’s directly running the schools can’t ensure standards, ¿how would they better ensure standards when they’re indirectly o’erseeing private schools? ’Gain, none o’ this deals with the true root o’ the problem, which is Texas’s corrupt & incompetent government who can’t provide any form o’ good schooling, whether private or public. This is what laissy libertarians fail to realize: the market is ultimately run by the government, so a corrupt & incompetent government will bungle a market just as badly as socialist economics.
That being said, this article is still better written than the last charter-school article I wrote, as it a’least attempts to counter criticisms rather than pretend they don’t exist.
Thanksgiving is the best holiday on the American calendar. It applies to everyone, there are no presents involved, and even if Black Friday is coming, it hasn’t arrived just yet.
Um, no, Halloween is. Halloween also applies to e’eryone ( & Thanksgiving doesn’t e’en apply to e’eryone — ¡it only applies to Americans! Newsweek can’t stop revealing their bigotry by literally being oblivious that there exist countries outside the US ) &, unlike Thanksgiving, does have presents in the form o’ candy.
It brings us together as does no other day[…]
Yeah, it brings us together to fight o’er the dinner table ’cause Uncle Bob couldn’t stop enlightening us on the intriguing news he heard on YouTube ’bout Biden’s globalist, Marxist plot to… ¿be woke? I don’t think e’en conservatives can think o’ anything nefarious for that president to do.
[…]and can be celebrated whether you were born in this country or arrived last Tuesday.
Well, ’less you’re celebrating Thanksgiving inside those cages they put caught illegals in.
Sure, the tradition—at least in the movies—is for families to gather and hate each other, but not only is that an overplayed trope, it doesn’t consider just how sleepy everyone is from the tryptophane and alcohol that are part and parcel of the celebratory meal.
Yeah, pessimists: it’s your fault for not plastering Uncle Bob with so much booze he can’t e’en speak beyond mumbles.
And this year, there are many things to be grateful for. I know it doesn’t look like it at first glance. There are wars being fought and fears they may grow. There are global rivalries, that are, if not hot, scary and point to a dangerous future.
¡Nothing’s scarier than global rivalries that aren’t e’en hot!
Anyway, let’s see what Newsweek thinks should make us thankful weeks after Thanksgiving:
Will Israel and Hamas fight until the last baby is slaughtered?
Interesting choice. I mean, on the upside, it would end the conflict once & for all — you can’t have a war if neither side exists anymo’. You clowns ne’er considered that solution, ¿did you?
We must face the truth that while the war looks lopsided now […]
This is the 1st time Newsweek seems to give some credit to Palestine, that they are the much weaker —
[…] offer Hamas the chance and more Israeli children will die.
Ne’er mind. This article is literally Newsweek being the drunk uncle. Dude, I’m trying to be thankful, ¿& you can’t go a single article without opening your trap with your lazy, uneducated takes on an 80-year war that long predates Hamas? Yeah, & I’m sure given the chance — which Israel has, since they are the mo’ powerful side — Israel would accept & raise in comfort & health all Palestinian children as their own & totally aren’t shoving them out as filthy otherbloods whose cursed blood will make them grow up to be terrorists, regardless o’ who’s raising them.
Will the United States need to face off directly with the cult of death that runs Iran?
No, ’cause Iran isn’t being run by a “cult of death”, but cynical Islamic fundamentalists who pretend to care ’bout religion to keep their uneducated populace obedient, just as how the US is run by the “death cult” Christianity — a religion that looks forward to Jesus coming back & destroying the world in a glorious apocalypse — as a way to get its uneducated populace obedient. Funny how this writer says this, when it’s well known that many US supporters for Israel do so ’cause they view it as playing a part in the Christian apocalypse, as stated in that great religious work, the airport novel Left Behind. It amazes me that a newspaper I assumed was as prestigious as Newsweek would let someone as uneducated as a Jack Chick hero write for them.
And if the Middle East doesn’t get us, perhaps China will.
Ah, yeah, ¡bringing back the classics with that sweet yellow peril! Hey, ¿why stop there? ¿Why not warn us ’bout those sneaky Bolshevik Jews undermining the Aryan race while you’re @ it?
¡That’s the heinous thing China did that you’re complaining ’bout? ¿Having too many nukes they will ne’er, e’er use! ¡Not their treatment o’ Uyghurs? ( ’Course not — they’re dirty Muslim terrorists ). ¡Not their increasing hostility toward Taiwan? ¡Fucking nukes?
A bigger deterrent, as if their hundreds of nukes aren’t scary in themselves. How many bombs does it take to be scary? One is enough. One bomb will do the trick.
¡Then why the fuck are you complaining ’bout China having too many, you fucking moron?
This idiot writes with the elementary-school-level eloquence o’ Donald Trump & it infuriates me mo’ than anything else in these articles. “Let me restate the point that contradicts my earlier point ’cause I assume Newsweek readers are all illiterate imbeciles who just blackhole entire sentences, distracted by their efforts to keep themselves from drowning in their own saliva”.
Thousands more merely ensure the radioactive grease spot that was humanity will be… well, a radioactive grease spot.
We know this thanks to the effects o’ the only e’er use o’ nukes gainst people done by… ( checks notes ) the US. Tell me, ¿how many nukes does the US currently have? ¿Does that not give you concern? ¿Or is it just when dirty foreign hands touch them that they’re dangerous?
And Russia, of course, is fighting a war against Ukraine—a war for which the United States and European Union are paying half. A war for democracy where very little democracy may actually be involved.
O, ¿Newsweek is gainst the war in Ukraine? They just straight up are 100% Republican now, aren’t they.
At home, people are scared to death about their way of life, which is being attacked from so many angles that it’s hard to keep track.
¿What way o’ life & how are they being attacked? Please give me these details, person who has established himself so far as very reasonable & not unhinged @ all.
For decades, people have felt worse off than their parents. And in some ways they are, despite enjoying luxuries and technologies the Greatest Generation could only dream about. There is the feeling of being left behind as the top of the pyramid reaches into the clouds while the people inhabiting it no longer have any idea what lies below them. Those better off have always been with us, but rarely have they been so far from the muck of everyday life. Flying in economy to and from your family this Thanksgiving gives you a sense, certainly, of the divide between that haves and have nots.
Stability at work is virtually unheard of. Keeping a job from one year to the next is the stuff of legends for many. And the flip side of that is that customer service—such a staple of the service economy that we long ago became—has gone to hell. Nobody wants to work crappy service jobs and that makes the service ever more crappy.
It’s pretty funny that the closest to a liberal sentiment Newsweek has had in all these articles has been a Marxist sentiment. That’s OK, ’cause they’re advocating for national socialism, not the filthy Bolshevik kind.
(But by no means consider allowing in immigrants who will do these jobs for the price of air. Keep them out at all costs!)
This writer a’least found 1 thing to like ’bout foreigners: making them their wage slaves.
We’ve reached that point in the column where you’re probably expecting sarcasm and an admonition to enjoy your holiday—if you dare!
I mean, that’s what you’ve been doing for this whole article. It says something that a curmudgeonly asshole like me who constantly complains ’bout “hallmark card” shit is now wishing you’d done that ’stead o’ whate’er this is.
Former President Donald Trump and the end of democracy loom on the horizon (He’s saying it himself, folks, believe it!), but there’s still plenty of time to act and room for hope. People may yet see that when someone tells you Freedom Is Slavery, you might want to look for another option at the ballot box. We must vote it to make it so, and 2024 hasn’t even arrived, yet. President Biden may triumph—or not be on the ticket, allowing someone not older than my grandfather when he died to serve in the highest office in the land.
¿Did this article jumble together the various sloppy hot takes o’ fascists, socialists, & milquetoast liberals or is this writer schizophrenic? My bet: he’s just very ignorant & has no idea how these ideas connect or contradict each other.
And, as much as we all fear economic uncertainty, it’s hard to beat an unemployment rate that stands below 4 percent and has for quite a while.
That’s actually pretty shitty, considering we were @ full employment not that long ago. O, wait, I forgot, low employment is good, ’cause it keeps those dirty poors from getting too much money & keeping it where it belongs, in rich people’s stock market.
It’s encouraging to see that at least some of the country’s infrastructure issues are being addressed, that we’re making some small efforts to fight climate change, to make medicines somewhat more affordable, to stand up to our enemies around the globe.
You mean your enemies; Palestinians & Chinese have done nothing to me & Israelis have done nothing for me.
Sure, the forces of medieval darkness—left and right—are trying to draw us away from the light with book bans, the resurgence of antisemitism, and an ignorance of history that is simply astounding.
¿Where are the left-wing examples? I’ve only seen right-wing examples so far…
Jason Fields is a deputy opinion editor at Newsweek and the author of the murder mystery Death in Twilight.
I love how all the other articles are written by people who are part o’ organizations that a’least seem respectable ( e’en if in reality they are hack partisan think tanks ), but this writer is just a hack airport novel writer — an airport novel that cynically exploits that most cliché & common repository for cheap, easy catharsis, the Holocaust, like a Swiss bank taking in Nazi gold.
Unfortunately, this article came out too early to be thankful for the biggest thing we should be thankful for this year: ¡Henry Kissinger is finally dead!
O’ all the brain-damaging stupidity I’ve read in this article, this is the worst o’ them. Like I said, this writer literally just filled this article with empty Uncle Bob rants @ Thanksgiving. Well, I’m thankful I didn’t have to spend Thanksgiving with this writer, as he sounds insufferable.
We’re not going to read it, — well, you fuckers don’t have to read any o’ it; I still had to — ’cause it’s all empty drivel ’bout how we need to be mo’ civil & dicksuck George Washington some mo’ in a way that’s virtually identical to what pundits were doing in the 90s. The 1 thing I will note is this:
Hans Zeiger is president of the Jack Miller Center, a nationwide, nonpartisan civic venture to build talent networks of educators who share a commitment to the stories, documents and values we hold in common as Americans.
This writer is hypocritically criticizing a lack o’ thinking on the part o’ citizenry ’cause they can’t pass some empty multiple-choice questions that in no way challenge critical thinking skills, but this writer is “nonpartisan”, e’en tho the kind o’ person who can’t tell the moral or qualitative difference ’tween the 2 parties, — like that only 1 o’ them e’en supports democracy anymo’ — must be extremely uninformed. It takes literally no thinking to just say “both sides” for all issues, regardless o’ the actual issues. It’s also ironic, given how 1-sided most o’ the articles in this paper have been — which also doesn’t take much thought if one fails to e’en try arguing their case beyond appealing to mystical phenomena like “the collective Jewish soul”, as all these writers have. Also, if this writer knew so much, he’d know the US was ne’er founded as a democracy, but as a deliberately vague “republic” as a compromise ’tween populists & aristocrats, & that many o’ the founding fathers hated democracy, but this basic fact easily obtained simply by reading their own writing in works like The FederalistPapers, as I had to do in high school, is embarrassingly elusive ’mong “intellectuals” who write for these papers. Complaining ’bout how kids these days don’t know nothing ’cause they don’t know what year the constitution was ratified while being blissfully ignorant o’ the actual philosophical underpinning o’ said constitution is the kind o’ classic boomer energy I expect from dinosaurs like Newsweek.
Tier: F
We’ve finally come to e’eryone’s favorite part: the final tier list.
As you can see, compared to the last Newsweek article, this is a particularly terrible showing. It says something when the articles praising stuffing & cranberry sauce are ’mong the least idiotic.
So, o’ the 14 articles I read in this newspaper that AllSides calls “centrist”, 2 o’ them aren’t right-wing ( the 1st 2 ’bout best Thanksgiving food ) & 1 was a schizophrenic mix o’ e’ery political belief, so long as it’s stupid; & o’ those 11 right-wing articles, only 1 o’ which wasn’t racist & far-right, the milquetoast laissy-libertarian 1 ’bout school choice. 2 articles were unfiltered propaganda straight from far-right governments themselves. Note, I’m not e’en including the op-ed they let Texas Senator, Trump footrest, & pretend human Ted Cruz write for them the riveting & enlightening, “Marxists Have Always Aimed To Infiltrate Education” ( ¿who doesn’t want to infiltrate education? I don’t see Christian fascists going all, “Nah, we’re good”, but Cruz is as absent on that subject as during a Texan winter storm ), ’cause I’m not reading that shit. ¿So I guess Newsweek is just a far-right periodical now? The Southern Poverty Law Center seems to think so, going into detail ’bout our friend Josh Hammer’s lovely connections with white supremacists & fascists & his own use o’ violent civil-war-type rhetoric.
While we’re talking ’bout AllSides, I should note that, despite bragging ’bout how transparent they are ’bout their owners, shocking o’ shocks, their own biases are sus. They were founded by a right-wingers & a “centrist”, while adding on a token leftist. Their definitions o’ right-wing & left-wing are dumb: they list “freedom of speech” & “decreasing taxes” as right-wing principles, despite the right-wing’s notorious history o’ censorship, up to their LGBTQ+ book bans today ( in contrast, most examples o’ left-wing “cancel culture” doesn’t involve government @ all & are just individuals engaging in their right to not consume bigoted garbage ) & right-wingers only support lower taxes for rich people.
In fact, it’s clear that they base these just on the reputation o’ the papers rather than the actual contents o’ the article. Take the article, “House Intel panel chair Mike Turner says Biden ‘absolutely’ deserves credit for Hamas hostage deal”. Now, it’s debatable whether or not this is right-wing or left-wing depending on whether or not you consider the US getting involved & pressuring Hamas to do what Israel wants them to do to be right-wing or whether its praise o’ Biden @ all makes it left-wing. This is why these kind o’ 1-dimensional “maps” are so inane. I would argue that anything that doesn’t call for Israel & Palestine to become secular, racially-equal, democratic socialist societies with no mention o’ Judaism or Islam in the constitution or any government apparatus to be the left-wing side, while both the Israeli government & Hamas are far-right theocracies. Like much US media, the actual left side doesn’t exist, but is shoved to the fringes. But considering regurgitating Israeli propaganda is “centrist”, we’d expect praise for Biden to be considered “left-wing” — we’d assume they define “left-wing” as “pro Democratic Party”, keeping in mind that the Democratic Party is also mostly pro-Israel, with only a few stragglers. But no: they list this article as right-wing. ¿Why? Presumably ’cause it’s The Washington Times, which is popularly considered a right-wing paper. Meanwhile, Vox calmly explaining the recent Israel-Hamas hostage deal is considered far-left. ¿Why? Presumably ’cause Vox wrote it, & people consider Vox super left-wing — & by “people”, I mean ol’ boomers who think anything left o’ calling black people the N word is Marxism.
So if you want a website that will tell you e’erything from Fox News is right wing, e’erything from CNN is left-wing, & e’erything from Newsweek is centrist, then here you go. If you want actually useful information, I would recommend you look somewhere that isn’t run by absolute morons.
#NAFO has its critics, even among opponents of Russia’s war against Ukraine, who accuse the fellas of sometimes going too far in trolling Russia, pointing to recent posts mocking a young Russian tourist who was killed by a shark in Egypt.
But #NAFO has no editors or censors. It’s young and brash, self-aware, and epitomizes the way young people communicate today. The Russian government and its propagandists often have a tin ear when it comes to humor, which the “NAFOFellas” are only too happy to exploit.
While I can appreciate the value in crowding out inane imperialist propaganda with similar inanity, — tho e’en if it arguably contributes to further deterioration o’ good-faith argument, I’m too realistic to believe that good-faith argument is possible in the zoos o’ social media — these 2 paragraphs stood out to me. This article admits that NAFO is engaging in racist attacks gainst an innocent civilian, then just immediately wipes that concern ’way with a, “But that’s just the hip young people not giving into your censorship, bro. Only propagandists have a problem with racist hatred”, ironically feeding into 4chan sentiment that racism is rebellious. I wonder if CNN would take this sentiment when commenting on young people posting memes ’bout Israel. ¿Is it only the Israeli government who has a “tin ear” when it comes to certain kinds o” “humor” that certain propaganda groups are happy to exploit”? That’s the danger o’ borrowing tactics from the far-right: while it can in many ways be mo’ effective than what the left is doing, in some ways it’s intrinsically tied to right-wing ideas like racism.
@ the very least, perhaps a stuffy, pseudointellectual institution most definitely not aimed @ young people like CNN shouldn’t be praising this kind o’ irrationality, specially when bugging me to sign up for a subscription. A’least the college dropouts @ NAFO aren’t pretending their memes are worth money ( well, maybe ).
But, then ’gain, I can’t pretend to be surprised that an institution as mentally mediocre as CNN would trade these long-term issues o’ feeding racism & global division ( which, now that I think ’bout it, CNN probably likes the global division part ) for the quick hit o’ getting their readers on the right side o’ things. Lord knows, it’s hard to get the kind o’ people who still read newspapers to not support Russia — & it’s totally a reasonable goal to obsessively try to get e’ery single person on the planet to agree with your sentiment when there are people who still insist that the world is flat, climate change is fake, & the world was created 6,000 years ago by sky god who is his own son — so it’s important that we encourage young people to be 4channers so we can get that extra 1% o’ people putting Ukraine flags on their social media & doing shit-all-else. The good news is, since no young people read CNN, CNN won’t have any real effect: CNN’s mummified readers will snort ’bout those wacky young people & their beepboops & forget all ’bout.
I also love how so many psuedointellectuals are trying to pump up this random group o’ people screwing round with poorly-paid Russians who probably couldn’t give a rats ass what inane drivel their bosses force them to spew out — if it’s not AI — as if it’s some deep sociological phenomenon.
NAFO was described as a “Western civil society response to Russian campaigns” by Tobias Fella, a political scientist training Bundeswehr soldiers in dealing with social media. It is part of a larger “battle for sovereignty of interpretation” on shared online spaces. According to Politico, “To delve into NAFO is to get a crash course in how online communities from the Islamic State to the far-right boogaloo movement to this rag-tag band of online warriors have weaponized internet culture.”
American media studies professor Jaime Cohen argues that the NAFO movement “is an actual tactical event against a nation state”. British-Lebanese journalist Oz Katerji asserts that NAFO “has hampered Russia’s propagandists and made them look absurd and ridiculous in the process”. Ukraine’s Ambassador to Australia and New Zealand Vasyl Myroshnychenko noted that the grassroots, decentralized nature of NAFO is an important part of its strength.
According to one analysis, “The largely English-language memes have kept Western attention on Ukraine’s war—attention that is vital given the importance of Western arms to Ukrainian forces.” American Lt. Col. Steve Speece of the Modern War Institute at West Point argues “Meme content shared in NAFO channels … is almost exclusively English language and presumably not intended for Russian audiences … These fora exist to generate content for the entertainment and status of their own members. Yet even Western national security policy is sometimes explicitly driven by the emotions—like outrage—cultivated in online communities.” Speece argues that online agitators like NAFO take the role of bad cop in a good cop/bad cop dynamic with policy makers.
According to the Berliner Kurier, “Like real NATO, NAFO has an Article 5 duty of assistance. This means that each fella can call on the others for help if they are under attack or encounter serious disinformation. For this, the NAFO members use the hashtag #NAFOarticle5 and then receive support from other fellas.” An analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations assessed it as being “very effective”.
Yes, I’m sure a bunch o’ randos shitposting to Russian bots is what will save Ukraine, not the fact that Russia’s faltering economy & tin-can military. That’s the dream for pseudointellectuals who pretend that e’ery time they like something on Twitter X they’re fighting the system. I think my own blog is already proof that this tactic doesn’t work: if it did, all my shitposting ’bout capitalism & its cousin wearing a moustache named dapitalism & Zombie Marx from the past decade would’ve brought us sexy communism already, & I sure as shit don’t see any sexy communism in my midst. Nope, it’s all ugly-ass brutalist architecture on 1 side o’ the curtain & pretend copyrights for ugly monkey pictures on the other. O yeah, & CNN.
Normally I don’t like to dive deep into the ugliness o’ politics during the best month o’ the year, October, a time best spent on autumn weather & horror, but recently there’s been an interesting development in arguably 1 o’ the most spine-tingling o’ topics — the current state o’ the economy. ( ¡Boo! ¡Whack Family-Circus-ass joke! ).
CNN, desperate to get their 15 seconds o’ fame for clicks & hits in the same way Jessica Simpson did decades ago or the modern celebrity moron, the average Republican, does today — saying something incredibly stupid & getting e’eryone to make fun o’ them — cooked up something fun for us tonight:
“You” is the word that deserves scrutiny. A common misconception that economists & people who pretend to know anything ’bout the economy ( ¡like me! ) imply is that there is some magical economy that gives e’eryone what they want. For instance, I would question the idea that someone who would otherwise be unemployed not being unemployed endured any cost by having the means to keep themselves from starvation. But people who have plenty o’ money in the stock market are costing a lot by having that stock ticker be orange.
An eternally accurate commentary on US economic philosophy.
Here’s why: Inflation is still biting. Prices continue to rise faster than anyone would like. Although annual price increases aren’t in wild-runaway mode like they were when inflation was above 9% last year, inflation is still above 3%, which is unhealthy for the economy, according to the Federal Reserve and a number of economists. (The Fed believes 2% inflation is ideal over the long haul.)
What I want to emphasize most with this paragraph is that it feels like ’twas written by an elementary school student, with its short, choppy sentences that assert simplistic claims that don’t fit the true complexity o’ modern economics. Saying that “prices continue to rise faster than anyone would like” is as meaningful as saying “there are mo’ deaths in the world than anyone would like”: any inflation greater than 0 is going to rise faster than anyone would like — that doesn’t mean it warrants comment.
The funny thing is that e’en someone who knows nothing but economics but takes CNN @ their word, but can compare #s, can see the mismatch o’ CNN’s tone & what the #s tell: inflation went from a whopping 9% down to “above 3%” ( I had to go to a better news source, NBC News, to find the actual # 3.7% ), which is the best way to try to imply a # >= to 4% without outright lying, which is a whopping 1.7% greater than what the Federal Reserve — here called by their rap name, “The Fed”, ’cause CNN is too down with the sickness to use their stuffy full name that might go o’er the heads o’ the teenagers they’re desperately trying & failing to get to read them — considers “ideal”. I don’t know ’bout you, but inflation going down from such a historical high — 7% greater than “ideal” — to just ’bout a % point or 2 ’bove the “ideal” without hurting the high employment level or rising wages sounds miraculous to me. In fact, it sounds better than the usual pattern since the 70s — coincidentally, when we started taking the monetarist witchcraft “the Fed” tries & laughably fails with time & ’gain — o’ stagnating wages that can’t keep up with e’en the small “ideal” inflation.
Economists had expected the data to show a 3.6% overall increase in inflation compared to a year ago. Annual inflation has now ticked up two months in a row after 12 consecutive months of decline.
These 2 data points — 1 o’ which is just empty tarot-card reading from economists, who tend to acknowledge that economic science is not developed ’nough ( & probably ne’er will be due to the unpredictability o’ humanity & the “observer effect” o’ economists’ predictions being loudly announced to e’eryone thru the media tampering with results ) — don’t connect, since they use completely different time units, the latter o’ which is vague. ¿Who cares if annual inflation has “ticked up” some vague amount 2 times in a row? ¿Is the amount “ticked up” a lot or a li’l? ¿& how would it be better if ’twere 2 months broken off by other months. Anyone who understands basic math knows that consecutive months vs. split-off months wouldn’t affect the sum — which is what the former data point references. ¿Does the 2nd data point add up to the expected o’erall 3.6% increase? We don’t know, ’cause CNN for some reason is trying to give us a fun Halloween mystery by not giving us specific #s. Luckily, as mentioned earlier, a better news source was less interested in Encyclopedia Brown puzzles & just said 3.7%, which, to be fair to economists, is remarkably close to expectations. We should give them all that stuffed carnival panda as a sweet reward.
When you see gas prices at $3.75 on average (and above $4 in plenty of places across the country)…
Hold on — gas prices are that low. $5 gas prices were normal a decade ago. I’ve ne’er in my life seen gas lower than $3.75, certainly not any time in the 21st century. I would expect it to be $8 a gallon by this point — specially since what with gas production literally destroying the planet, I would expect there to be, you know, tax penalties to keep people from buying this shit & helping to destroy the planet.
…and a restart to student loan payments for millions of Americans, that’s why a majority of Americans say President Joe Biden’s policies have made economic conditions worse.
Ah, yes, Joe Biden’s policy o’ forcing students to repay their loans, I remember that. I also remember just 2 days ago CNN themselves mentioning, let’s see, “Biden cancels another $9 billion in student loan debt days after payments restart”. Clearly that’s just a devious plot by Dark Brando the Grando Wizando to lure students into a false sense o’ security before he strikes with surprise loans later. This is what the test broadcast last Wednesday was — those o’ us who believe we had our student loans paid off have now been infected with “swine student loans”, which will be sucked out o’ us thru microchips soldered by Bill Gates himself & into Biden’s secret Marxist pedophile fund for erecting statues o’ Karlos Marukasu e’erywhere — for e’eryone knows that Marx is so sexy that any child who sees a statue o’ him will themselves become erect — ¡e’en those without penises, that red devil is so magical!
That’s CNN’s opinion: very sloppily argued by throwing out a bunch o’ data that doesn’t actually serve their intended conclusion, & some o’ it just straight lies, & saying “that’s why” — the best way to make an argument, I always learned in the ol’ debate class. My opinion, which I would say is backed by centuries o’ gleaned wisdom from experts, is that the reason the average American thinks these things is that they’re uninformed, uneducated morons who jump to “bad economy president’s fault” ’cause that’s the kind o’ best guess you can make when you’re utterly bereft o’ any mental tools for economic analysis. Certainly the legislature ( “¿the ‘ley-jeez-what’?” ) & their barely managing to agree to hold off yet ’nother hilarious government shutdown in the richest country in the world for ’bout a month or so as the final magnum opus o’ politician nobody likes Kevin McCarthy just before he got his face eaten by his fellow leopards & shitposting Democrats had nothing to do with the US’s economy… somehow not being in as bad shape as Europe ( the US is a perfect specimen o’ “failing upward” ). Nonetheless, Americans, ne’er ones to settle for less, have higher expectations & are still debating ’mongst themselves whether or not they might give ’nother chance to the candidate who attempted a dictatorial insurrection, has plans for his next term including indictments gainst all his political enemies & setting up a “gulag” for legal immigrants, & who, those with memory ( not Americans ) remember was the one who exacerbated this whole inflation problem in the 1st place by delaying COVID treatment o’ the nation with his hilarious shitposting on Twitter X.
As prices continue to grow, paychecks are barely keeping pace. They grew 4.2% over the past year, the slowest pace of growth since the early days of the pandemic in 2020.
Also, I can’t imagine “the Fed” are too disappointed by these #s, as the Federal Reserve’s policy for trying to bring down inflation was trying to bring down wages by, get this, inducing unemployment. ( The fact that e’ery “workable” form o’ capitalism that has e’er existed in the real world involves the government using their vast controls o’ the economy to induce or reduce unemployment is why anyone with e’en the most basic understanding o’ economics finds the ol’ “pull yourself by your bootstraps” idea o’ capitalism to be a laughable fairy tale on the same level as “pray to Jesus for economic success” ).
So a robust job market won’t make most people feel like the economy is strong.
Well, yeah: ¿who wants to go back to work after year long forced vacations due to COVID? I wanna stay home & play Animal Crossing all day.
The Fed is working to slow the economy by hiking interest rates — the only tool it has to fight inflation.
Ah, so you are aware o’ this fact, & thus the previous complaint ’bout wages not being high ’nough completely contradicts this point.
It’s too bad there are no other parts o’ the government, like the legislature, who could pass, like, fiscal policy to help lower-class Americans make up for the greater burden o’ high inflation while waiting for inflation to keep decreasing as manufacturing continues to spin back to life. Nah, they would rather focus their efforts on conspiracy theories ’bout the son o’ the president & his possessed laptop o’ the occult, like any serious government should.
A still-robust job market — see the 336,000 jobs added last month — means the central bank could continue to increase rates without fear of sending the economy into a recession.
“The economy is roaring with the demand for workers literally through the roof,” said Chris Rupkey, chief economist at FwdBonds, in a note to clients on Friday. “Interest rates are likely to remain higher for longer to ensure the inflation fire is out.”
Educate me, ’gain, on what the “cost” is o’ the Federal Reserve having mo’ room to fight inflation without the fear o’ inducing a recession. I guess if you want recession or are ’fraid o’ inflation going too far down that’s a problem. Or maybe not having a ’scuse for keeping unemployment up is the real problem.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon repeated in recent weeks his fear that rates could go to 7%. Government bond yields are rising to multi-year highs in expectation of rates going up — and loans pinned to those yields, including mortgages and credit card rates — are set to go up, too.
Ah, average American, CEO o’ giant-ass monopolistic bank, will educate me. It sounds to me like this is a big ol’ problem for creditors, — also known as parasitical leeches — not for people who actually work for their money. I guess when CNN said it’ll cost “me”, they meant it’ll cost my bank CEO.
Credit card rates are well north of 20% on average, a two-decade high. People who carry a balance month to month are paying a hefty premium in interest, which means it will take even longer to pay off what they owe.
O, ne’er mind: e’en the leeches are still doing fine. The only people who seem to be doing worse are people who have debts, — people who have been being screwed for eternity, already — & not e’en by all that much, since according to Nerd Wallet, the average rate was 16.44% in 2021. ’Course, CNN doesn’t offer this # as a comparison themselves, since actually informing people is much less valuable than throwing round #s bereft o’ context & using super scary language is much better for rage clicks.
Meanwhile, US mortgage rates climbed to 7.49% this week, up from 6.66% a year ago and the highest level in more than two decades. That has kept the housing market in neutral [ emphasis mine ], keeping the key to middle-class wealth growth out of reach for so many would-be homebuyers.
Man, you’re really convincing me of our dire situation with this neutral housing market. ¿When will someone finally impeach Biden already?
We should never cheer a bad job market. But a job market that has remained this healthy for this long really isn’t excellent news for average Americans struggling to pay their bills. Meanwhile, we remain in a “good news is bad news” conundrum that makes most people feel like the US economy is in a bad spot.
The best part o’ this self-contradicting incoherent jumble o’ a paragraph trying pathetically to work as propaganda is how self-inflicting it is: @ a time when young people are becoming mo’ & mo’ jaded with capitalism & mo’ supportive toward socialism, I can’t imagine that telling people “an economy good for working class people is actually bad” & calling for mo’ unemployment after Millennials withstood a whole decade o’ being shamed for their high unemployment works as a good advertisement for capitalism, nor can I imagine the average worker having a positive opinion o’ self-proclaimed economic experts whose only solution is to throw 2% o’ potential employees into destitution. & people wonder why homelessness is such a problem when it is considered good economic policy to try & force people to be jobless. Bums who beg for money on the streets told to “get a job” should quip back, “¡but then I’d be causing you inflation & costing you e’en mo’!”.After all, it’ll be much harder for you to buy food if you keep having that job that allows you to have money to buy food @ all. It’s almost as if capitalism is an unreasonable “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” economic system where people who aren’t politically powerful have no chance to succeed no matter what they do & offers absolutely no solution to homelessness or poverty & finding some alternative to capitalism is the only solution. That’s the message CNN delivers, anyway. I doubt they intended to — but then, given how incoherent & inane this article was, I don’t think anyone @ CNN are smart ’nough to understand what they’re trying to say.
As a fun bonus, the New York Times tried the same thing, titling 1 o’ their articles “U.S. Job Growth Surges Past Expectations in Troubling News for the Fed”, which sounds like the title o’ a Superman comic. Like what happens a lot in the modern world o’ social media where ol’, out-o’-touch, moderate conservative New York Times editors have their anti-lower-class biases pointed out & ridiculed by the vicious liberal masses, — who nonetheless, are their target audience, & must be fed accordingly, as papa market demands o’ them — they changed the title like Stalin erased Trotsky out o’ those photos. This is the real liberal fascism that, um… that 1 generic conservative whose name I don’t want to look up wrote ’bout.
The Bad Webcomics Wiki is an ancient website I wrote some shitty sprite comic reviews for mo’ than a decade ago, when I was a teenager, before I realized there were better things to spend my time dunking on than middle schoolers trying to babystep their way into learning how to create comics by screwing round in MS Paint ( I now spend my time satirizing people e’en less talented: writers for The Atlantic ). Back then ’twas mostly run by enlightened centrists who thought Jon Stewart was hilarious ( enlightened centrism was ’nother juvenile delusion I grew out o’ ). I haven’t been there for mo’ than a decade, ’cause I grew up ( I’m now the mental equivalent o’ a teenager rather than a 10-year-ol’ ), but apparently sometime in that time the barren wasteland had been taken o’er by Nazis. What’s most bizarre, is they still have the stuff written by the centrists mixed in with the edgelord fascists, like this article written by pro-mole, who seems very strongly to not be a fascist.
Anyway, I’m not interested in the rest o’ Bad Webcomics Wiki, so much as 1 review they wrote for some comic I’d ne’er heard o’ before called Stonetoss, which I learned ’bout from that classic magnum opus o’ the 21st century, this page o’ TV Tropes nerds whining ’bout stuff they didn’t like on the internet. As cringe — as the zoomzooms say — as that TV Tropes page is, I swear to you that the Bad Webcomics Wiki review is much cringier ( I don’t know if the zoomzooms use that word ). This review is the only 1 I know that praises a webcomic — going starkly gainst brand for a website with “Bad Webcomics” @ the beginning o’ its name. During the early years, their saner community ( emphasis on the use o’ comparative adjective, not absolute ) acknowledged certain webcomics like Gunnerkrigg Court or The Perry Bible Fellowship as good, but reflected this view by not making reviews for them @ all, only comparing comics they viewed as bad to them. So this webcomic, despite its generic name, must be amazing to break that tradition. Surely an institute as well-respected as the Bad Webcomics Wiki wouldn’t sully their illustrious reputation by breaking this custom for some lame 4chan meme comic.
Genre: Edgy political and societal commentary (also memes)
This is not a genre.
A lot of people do not like his politics, but it seems to be an even 50/50 split
Which is why this is a bad webcomic, ’cause s’posedly only 50% o’ people support racism, according to the tiny bubble o’ shut-in Kiwi-Farm nerds who are the only people with which this reviewer interacts. That’s some hard overton-window-pushing this reviewer’s trying. Too bad it’ll only be effective for said tiny minority o’ shut-ins that make up this ancient website, who probably don’t care whether or not their political views are popular, anyway, ¿so what’s the point? ¿Wouldn’t it be mo’ effective to sell this as “edgy” if you admitted that this comic’s politics are fringe?
The reviewer is well aware of the fact that many people do not like this comic.
In the past, this website eviscerated someone e’en mo’ if they were aware that their comic sucked, but now apparently it gets you brownie points — if you’re racist, a’least.
To this end, the debate had been ongoing for years on whether this comic deserves a review or not. Basically, consensus seemed to be that this comic – despite being undoubtably offensive to people who didn’t agree with the comic’s politics – then it’s not that bad, even if it’s not all the jokes that Stonetoss cranks out that seem equally… kosher.
Here’s 1 o’ the million times an idiot online mistook “consensus”, e’eryone, for “majority”. So, this comic is not bad, but it’s included in the “Bad Webcomics Wiki”.
This was actually a prime point of contention on the forum, because the consensus seemed to be that we know he’s an edgy boy, we know he fucking LOVES to push buttons, and we know that not all his jokes are funny or in good taste.
It’s almost as if the early 2000s ne’er ended. ¿Who still thinks racism is “edgy” when so many elected officials peddle the same memes? It’s not edgy, it’s boring. It’s a desperate ploy for attention by someone who lacks the genuine skills necessary to garner attention otherwise. It’s a sad attempt to create a nonfalsifiable narrative that anyone who doesn’t like this comic is woke, or whate’er Orwellian buzzword they’re using this week, which is much easier than actually putting effort into your work so that few people want to shit on your comic. So, ¿what is the purpose for “pushing buttons”? Anyone who knows how actually good satire works knows that good provocation has a purpose for making people uncomfortable, since making people uncomfortable is, all else equal, a negative, & it’s self-evidently irrational to intentionally make the world worse — or a’least it’s not wise for society to praise art that makes society worse. But this review ne’er goes into detail on how this “button-pushing” has any positive effect on the world, since it’s much harder to argue that “black people existing” as an “absurd problem” to be “solved” makes the world a better place, as opposed to, say, Jonathan Swift mocking racist Britons for treating Irish people as just a means for their own consumption by taking it to its logical conclusion: there’s a goal beyond just portraying edgy content for the sake o’ edge — he’s pushing Britons’ buttons in the hopes o’ making them rethink their behavior, not just so he can say, “LOL, yur triggered”.
In fact, as we will see, that is very much not what this comic is interested in…
This comic doesn’t have a serial narrative like The Probability Broach, and it doesn’t advocate for pie-in-the-sky utopian politics either.
Those are weirdly specific criteria. I’ll take it “pie-in-the-sky utopian politics” is s’posed to be a bad thing, e’en tho there are plenty o’ well-regarded works o’ art, including the very work that gave us the word “utopia”, that focus on utopias, like, say, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Nor does this reviewer define what is or is not “utopian”. If one is sufficiently nihilist, it could be any delusion that the world could be improved in the slightest way.
It’s not pushing religion over science, and while it most certainly mocks a lot of political characters then it does so better than most and while you’re never in doubt when an SJW stereotype is on display, then they’re not equally as whiny as often shown in comics.
I hope they put this garbled mess on the back o’ this comic’s inevitable print copy, as it’s inspiring me to read it right now. This reviewer did a great job o’ showing how it does a better job o’ mocking political characters than “most”, which is just 1 other linked comic review. It’s very impressive that this comic still has lazy stereotypes, but they’re less whiny than most other lazy shit, so this comic is just the slightest ’bove lazy shit, which, when you have barrel-bottom standards, is great. Man, this review really wants me to check this comic out now. Actually, I don’t know what the purpose o’ this review is s’posed to be. Maybe the idea that reviews are s’posed to have a purpose is also “utopian”. It, like this comic, certainly isn’t funny, other than as a target for mockery — & that’s questionable, since this article I’m writing is already starting way slower & is unfunny compared to that cheese wrapper article or that recent article ’bout Ondaatje’s genius dog.
Stonetoss also doesn’t advocate race-war
I take it back: this belongs on the back blurb. “It’s not racist if it doesn’t call for race-war”. ’Gain, desperate-ass overton-window-pushing.
indeed, the closest political comic would probably be Quantum Vibe, though the utopian politics pushed in that does put it a bit off the mark
¿What is with these random-ass comparisons? Looking it up, the only thing Quantum Vibe has in common with this comic is very vaguely being right wing. You might as well compare it to Also Spoke Zarathustra while you’re @ it ( ’cept this comic would look pitiful compared to that actual work o’ art ).
Stonetoss has yet to push a comic that has the direct message of “If everyone converts to my views, the world would be perfect” which is what pretty much ALL other political commentary comics seems to do these days.
This is a very accurate description o’ political art & in no way the lazy exaggeration by someone frightened o’ having their worldview challenged. ¿Remember when Doonesbury spent e’ery comic having a bearded man in an eyepatch shout, “¡O’erthrow the bourgeoisie today & free Switch games tomorrow! Anyone who disagrees wants a world o’ just Action 52s”, on e’ery panel? I mean, that would probably be better — the most brilliant comic in the world, actually. No, much better is just empty nihilism that just mocks for the sake o’ mocking without any meaning ’hind it to make it worth caring ’bout, which is much better than actually wanting to have a positive effect on the world if you take pride in being useless.
See, when it comes to political messaging in the Stonetoss comics, then there often aren’t much.
¡This sounds like a good comic to me!
The comic’s style is more of a “hey look at this stupid thing being done” style, which can then be open to interpretation.
Yes, just saying “this is stupid” leads to much greater philosophical reevaluations than imagining a different political scape. That’s why my dumb blog received a Pulitzer & sci-fi has ne’er been popular e’er.
A few are pretty clear, but many are simply meant to make you think a bit –
Let’s see this comic that’s “meant to make you think a bit”:
Ah, yes, the most obvious joke you can make ’bout popular meme for people who aren’t interested in studying actually intellectual endeavors, NFTs, made by an idiot peddling NFTs in their blog below. & by “joke”, I mean lame propaganda point peddlers make. Yes, NFTs are just like the Mona Lisa — ’cept their art looks like shit, are made by talentless hacks, aren’t e’en the art themselves but just a made-up currency that represents them, & are artificially scarce due to stupidity, rather than genuine technological limitations, & are bad for the environment. Yes, this makes you think a lot if you’re ignorant o’ basic economics & have ne’er heard o’ “artificial scarcity”, “conspicuous spending”, or “pyramid schemes” & are ignorant o’ the computer science ’hind NFTs & how they differ from handcrafted paintings… in e’ery way imaginable. If this creator were actually socially competent they would’ve compared it to something mo’ equivalent, like royalty titles or having a star named after you.
of course, to some that is a high crime on its own if they don’t like you weighing both sides of a debate equally
¿What both sides? This comic just shows 1 side: pro-NFT. Not only is it just 1 side & a dumb side, it’s 1 where the artist clearly has a conflict o’ interest since they’re selling NFTs. Yes, political comics are much better if the artist is materially biased, rather than just ideologically biased.
As for the Stonetoss comics themselves, then the format hasn’t changed since its start – it’s usually a simple strip or page, with a clear setup and punchline.
“This comic strip is, indeed, a comic strip”.
On quite a lot of forums, and various subreddits, especially ones that discuss politics, his comics even tend to harvest the occasional bit of praise – because you don’t have to be a political extremist to enjoy this comic.
No, just a mentally-mediocre conservative. ¡Ha, ha, ha! ¡Leninists read Das Kapital & libertarians read The Road to Serfdom! ¿What’s tha deal with dat? ( This is unfair slander gainst laissy libertarians that they read a much mo’ simpleminded work: a’least give them the credit o’ reading Human Action ). This idiot can’t e’en stereotype right: ¿all those young lefties watching TV? Nobody below the age o’ 30 watches TV sets, & they certainly don’t get their news or politics from TV, ’less they’re zoomers unlucky ’nough to live in such a flyo’er o’ flyo’er states that they don’t have internet. C’mon, all you had to do was replace TV with Twitter “X” & it a’least would’ve been kinda believable if you’ve ne’er met actual zoomers, like the bitter ol’ person who writes this comic.
Plus, look @ the hypocrisy o’ this criticism, coming from a political webcomic — presumably where the people reading this comic are getting their politics. This comic sure as shit doesn’t reference accredited academic theories or statistics ( neither does The Road to Serfdom, but that’s a different story… ). This comic is straight-up insulting its own audience as left-libertarians & its audience lacks the bare minimum self-awareness to notice — this reviewer in their novel jerking off to this comic certainly doesn’t bring it up.
This reviewer failed so hard to find examples o’ “smart” people who like this comic that they had to use the same example for 2 different links with the desperate hope that their lazy readers wouldn’t bother to check them both — & worse, the people who vouch for them are idiots who care ’bout the pseudoscientific “political compass” — clearly a subreddit full o’ modern-day James Baldwins here. I’m so much mo’ interested in making sure my beliefs are properly categorized on a grid like RPG stats or whether they’re “woke” or “based” than examining how political beliefs & actions affect different peoples’ material lives in concrete ways, since I, too, am a socially-stunted STEM-lord coddled middle-class white male shut-in who has ne’er actually had to deal with the real world.
But does that mean that everything is honky dory and there’s nothing to debate here?
No, there’s nothing to debate, ’cause this comic has no depth. If you have the brain o’ a child, you giggle @ the mean ol’ SJWs trying to ground you from Twitter “X” as if you just snuck a cookie from the cookie jar before dinner, & if you have a brain, you cringe the minute you look @ this comic’s generic tacky artwork.
( Laughs ). I just noticed “honky dory”. “It’s a reference to how great white people are, ¿right?”.
No of course not. Stonetoss LOVES to court controversy and vigorously fucks with all kinds of sacred cows.
See, that TV Troper was wrong: The Bad Webcomics Wiki did find a furry comic they like.
¿Have I mentioned how eDGy this comic is? ¡It’s so edgy! ¡Look @ how it attacks these things that millions o’ works attack that I also hate so I feel no discomfort seeing it attacked, just like e’ery other comic!
See, I find it funnier that this reviewer is mo’ triggered by comics that actually wish for a better world than lame racist jokes that were ol’ mo’ than a century ago.
This is where most of his critique also comes from, but again it all primarily falls back on whether or not you agree with the political messages being put forth
Yes, that’s how you rate comics if you’re a moron without any critical thought & just chose your beliefs based on which “side” has the dankest memeface. People with any semblance o’ an education can analyze a work by how effective its communication o’ its ideas are, how innovative its jokes are ( none in this comic ), or how accurate its claims are, since, despite what this reviewer, whose only means of obtaining info is lurking forums full o’ 14-year-ol’s, there is this scientific method for determining what is unquestionably true & made-up lies.
The comics that get the most critique are likely the ones where he pokes fun at jews… thing is, we’re not talking swastika-waving bullshit here.
If you criticize Jews as an entire group as if they are a borg & not as distinct individuals who happen to be Jews, then, no, that is “swastika-waving bullshit” — it’s just an e’en worse kind that’s too chickenshit to admit it.
His very first one is about how quite a lot of jews are very rich, and the description of said comic, he links to a Jewish professor who talks about the social pressure in Jewish communities for getting a good education and focusing on upward social mobility, pointing out that 48% of American billionaires are Jewish. This starts a long line of comics where Stonetoss simply spouts what is often called “hate-facts”. You know, things that are factual, but can be interpreted as hateful depending on your political tastes, even if entirely true
“It’s true if a badly drawn comic or 90s-era websites say it’s true. No, I’ve ne’er read a single academic book. I trust randos online o’er those evil SJW intellectuals”. The 1st comic makes a joke that white privilege can’t exist ’cause many billionaires are jews ( which, e’en if ’twere 48%, is still a minority ), a “fact” that only works if you believe no Jews are white, which is only a “fact” if you’re a Nazi with inaccurate racial views, like that dumbass honkey Hitler who thought crackers were Aryans. The other 2 comics don’t link to any facts @ all: the 1st ’bout some imaginary trans battalion is incomprehensible to me ’cause I don’t share this comic artist’s arbitrary bigotry. ¿I guess ’cause 40% o’ trans people have attempted suicide ( I found this stat myself; this comic doesn’t link to it & could be talking ’bout something else, ’cause it’s shittily written ), ’cause suicidal people are “weak”, that means trans people are “weak”? I guess ’cause white men are the most likely to commit suicide, that means white men are the worst people to have as soldiers & the weakest people in the world. The 3rd comic has the “irony”, where someone with wacky pink ponytail, which is the universal sign for gay femboy wokester, tells somebody to educate themselves — ¡e’en tho they already are by reading FBI statistics! Reading biased statistics by an authoritarian force is the best way to educate yourself: that’s why I only trust publications by the Chinese Communist Party to get all my information. Nothing’s edgier than shilling for the most powerful government in the world. This comic writer’s obsession with “facts” — statistics detached from context — only further solidifies that this comic is written by a STEM-lord shut-in who thinks cobbling together whate’er jumble o’ isolated facts back up their bizarre conclusions is an oracle o’ truth, not what most scientists would call, “cherry-picking”.
…and its comics like that which Stonetoss fucking loves to crank out – because they make you think.
Imagine how embarrassing it must be to admit out loud that you’re impressed by the most cliché, simplistic agitprop.
Nobody cares ’bout this topic but weirdo antisemites trying to score random points.
like the amazingly high suicide rate of trans people
Leftists are perfectly comfortable acknowledging that bigoted tyrants incite suicide in trans people & that the best way to bring down this stat is to be tolerant o’ trans people, who provide value to society, & be intolerant o’ bigots, who only sow conflict & are no value to society @ all.
“Fetish” is literally just “non-normal sex”. A sad, sheltered, boring person being triggered by anything out o’ their closeted Mormon community is mo’ a problem on their end than the problem on gay people engaging in cool experimental kinds o’ sex. This artist’s emasculation in the face o’ gay people who can actually get sex is far from the W they think it is.
& looking @ the comic, that’s not what it’s ’bout. It puts words no gay person has e’er said, a gay person s’posedly rebuking a white person for wearing a shirt that says “It’s Okay to Be White”. ’Gain, this comic artist is a socially-stunted STEM-lord who doesn’t understand context ( or pretends to be this dumb to trick actually dumb people ), which he mistakes for some occult wisdom that the sheeple can’t handle, so can’t comprehend that most people who aren’t aliens don’t interpret “It’s Okay to Be White” @ face value, ’cause its face value meaning is stupidly redundant, but as a dogwhistle for “White People Deserve to Be Treated Better than Others”, that white people have been twisting rights for others as slavery for them e’er since southern slaveholders defined freeing black slaves as creating “white slavery”. Anyone who has e’er read a history book knows this.
’Gain, if you have a problem with France having badass Arabian Nights temples with crescent moons on them, that says mo’ ’bout your bad taste than anything ’bout France. “Lol, ¡variety & mixing cultures to create new things!”. Shocking that such bland art would be made by someone who hates anything new or different. If this comic is effective @ anything, it’s providing a meta dystopian worldview o’ how sterile & brainless art would become if the boorish fascists were allowed to take o’er & suppress actually creative people.
Middle-aged man screaming ’bout 1984 for the millionth time & Christian bakeries selling gay cakes are the epitome o’ “media manipulation”. Man, this is so smart. ¿Who needs gay shit like Manufacturing Consent when you have based shit like this? If that gay jew Noam Chomsky talked ’bout important topics like gay cakes ’stead o’ commie shit like studies regarding the effects market economics, nationalistic culture, & inherited assumptions have on media tendencies he would be mo’ based & less o’ a woke soy boy.
Of course, some of his comics are so amazingly spot on that its quite eerie.
“¡It’s eerie how these comics match my preconceived notions so well! ¡Get out o’ my head, Randal!”.
This one about male feminists who turn out to be abusive predators have been prophetic in so many ways, considering the number of cases, stories and articles that have come up over the years on that topic.
It’s “prophetic” when you talk ’bout something that’s been well known for years.
It’s hilarious that the only serious sources this article or these comics cite are for liberal opinions that they misinterpret as rightwing ideas. “Duh, if a bunch o’ dudes do skeevy things with feminism, that means feminism is bad, ¿right?”.
This wasn’t the first time his comics turned out to predict the future either, such as his take on the Jussie Smollett hate-crime hoax.
This “fact” was proven by police officers, noted objective sources, & a jury o’ almost-all white people, calling him a liar. You know this is an objective, unbiased comic just telling it like it is when it just assumes that the black guy is lying & the white people aren’t, ’cause, I mean, you know how those black folks be like. Mo’ importantly, you can’t predict something while commenting on it afterward @ the same time. Those o’ us known as “literate” understand that to “predict” something is to discuss something before it happens, not afterward.
All this comic is doing is cherry-picking 1 black guy out o’ hundreds o’ millions possibly pulling off a hoax, in contrast to the mountains o’ historical documentation o’ centuries o’ mass murder o’ black people, recent ’nough that many o’ the perpetrators are still living having not been taken to justice for their acts o’ terrorism, as well as the many recent cases o’ black people being murdered by police ( but those black people were probably on weed, so they deserved it, unlike all the crackers on opioids, who are still upstanding citizens ). But clearly those are insignificant, whereas 1 actor out o’ hundreds o’ millions maybe lying is the worst hate crime gainst white people anyone has e’er perpetrated. ¿Why haven’t we given white people their reparations yet? The great irony o’ these white “supremacist” whinefests is that they do the opposite, insulting white people far harder than leftists do by portraying them as the biggest crybabies e’er. Imagine comparing the average black person complaining ’bout threats o’ violence vs. some fragile white person with a tear whining, <¡That’s nothing compared to the trauma I’ve suffered! ¡Some rando on Twitter “X” said I said something racist gainst them when I didn’t! ¡I am the Emmett Till o’ white people!>.
Oh, shit, nobody’s e’er made a joke ’bout leftists being coffee-drinking intellectuals before. ¿Get it? They like fancy stuff, but that’s hypocritical, ’cause fancy stuff is bourgeois — that’s what it means, it means “fancy stuff”. “I totally know what socialism is — it’s when the government controls stuff, so these anarchists running a worker-owned business are hypocrites, ’cause no socialist e’er believes in worker-owned businesses, they only love government. My rightwing buddies tell me that’s what it is. No, I have ne’er heard o’ market socialism & can’t tell the difference ’tween market economics & capitalism, & no, I have ne’er read an economics book in my life”.
I always wonder what it’d look like if you were to twist the bizarre extremist purity-contest gotchas that lazy critics o’ socialists — not socialism the economic philosophy, mind you, ( which, like any economic philosophy currently in existence, has room for criticism by people who are actually literate in the subject ), but the people who believe in it, since logic 101 tells you that philosophies live or die not by their own merits, but by how a few cherrypicked people who say they believe in it behave — jump on them toward people who support capitalism in some way — which is probably most people. Imagine wagging one’s finger @ anyone who believes in capitalism in any way who happens to call the fire department when someone catches on fire & being all like, “O, ¿but I thought you loved the free market so much? ¿Why are you mooching off the evil socialist government?”. Nobody does this ’cause it’s widely agreed that people who refuse to touch anything that’s slightly associated with something they’re gainst are neurotics. So, fuck you, I’m gonna keep drinking my Coke while smashing dat capitalism ass & when sexy communism comes on the bourgeoisie’s face & we collectivize Coca-Cola, e’ery worker gets a Coke ( but just 1 — that shit doesn’t just grow off trees & you shouldn’t drink that much Coke, it’s not good for you ). That’s my hashtag slogan: “Peace, land, Coke”.
But I bet he truly triggered so many people with his valiant attacks gainst communism, noted sacred cow in the US. Next he might say something dangerously edgy, ¡like that Stalin wasn’t that cool!
Another topic he absolutely loves to poke fun at is good old political hypocrisy
The linked example isn’t e’en hypocrisy: internet service providers are physical utilities tied up in scarce land grants & require much mo’ capital & are necessary for accessing the internet @ all; social media are basic websites that anyone can make — which is why rightwingers have already made their own bootleg Twitters — & have trillions of other websites as competition if one’s not a lazy, ignorant pleb. This is a common tactic o’ rightwingers with no subtle thought: compare 1 thing to something else completely different in detail, but looks superficially similar. This comic creator is, ’course, too stupid to know the difference ’tween internet utilities, which are concrete, & websites, which are just #s, ’cause they live in a shut-in bubble where e’erything is just abstract ideas. If anything, the net neutrality person should be calling for nationalizing the internet, since it’s an inherently scarce natural utility, not something anyone can just make for themselves. & if this comic were accurate, the net neutrality person would ask the other guy to prove that social media is “censoring” only conservatives or e’en bring up plenty o’ racist idiots screaming racial slurs on social media & the other guy would just raise an eyebrow & go, “C’mon, we all know”, & just end it @ there, ’cause rightwingers assume e’eryone else unconditionally accepts their arbitrary assumptions without evidence.
Sure, its low-hanging fruit, but Stonetoss knows how to make a simple comic strip push an easy-to-understand message that doesn’t necessarily come off as preachy
They’re easy to understand ’cause they’re just simplistic superstitions, like e’erything else by generic conservatives, & it’s not preachy ’cause their conservativism is just empty nihilism.
Mind you, this isn’t to say that Stonetoss wont also mock conservative and right-leaning bullshit
His example o’ “right-leaning bullshit” is white conservatives being somewhat positive toward a black person. “Look, he’s fair & balanced: he attacks both the left & conservatives from the fascist standpoint”.
That’s all we need to know ’bout this comic artist. Just yell, “This comic was written by a shut-in incel who thinks 4chan is real life” repeatedly & you’d get the same idea across.
This is probably less than half this jizzfest for a comic on the Bad Webcomics Wiki. Despite this section being called “Story & Plot & Writing”, nowhere does this reviewer actually discuss writing techniques ’cause they’re too uneducated to know what a writing technique is. They just say “the comic artist makes fun o’ these people, & makes fun o’ these people… ¿Isn’t he so edgy?”. No, he’s fucking boring. It’s ridiculous that a comic as full o’ weird shit as Dominic Deegan has less written ’bout its entire story & writing than this dumb political comic.
The art of Stonetoss is simple, even crude, but over the years he’s built up a solid and easy to read visual language in his comics.
No, fuck off. This art sucks & you have shit taste. ¿What kind o’ fucking losers has Bad Webcomics Wiki become that they’re simping so hard for a fucking Nazi comic?
Despite how similar the faces of his characters often look, then you know that the one with the purple twirly bit of hair is usually some kind of social justice warrior, and so on.
This is ’nother thing Bad Webcomics Wiki would’ve eviscerated before ’twas infested with Nazi teenagers.
It can take reading a few comics to get the full load of references
We get it: you’re uneducated, have not read any real works o’ literature, & are impressed @ the most basic-ass shit.
Another point that Stonetoss should be seriously commended for, is that in his comic he has more or less entirely avoided the sadly common trope in political comics of drawing his political opponents/strawmen in a visually distinctively negative manner.
I’m sorry, let’s go back a few paragraphs:
then you know that the one with the purple twirly bit of hair is usually some kind of social justice warrior
Fascists are such bad liars. I feel bad for any losers who falls for this.
He’s yet to be doxxed, though not for the lack of trying of his hatedom
This doesn’t make any sense: if people wanted to try doxxing him, they would. It’s stupidly easy. Nobody wants to doxx this idiot ’cause there’s a billion o’ them & nobody knows who this idiot is.
Cumclussion
Literally written by a 14-year-ol’.
Basically he’s worse than Hitler.
This is true: Hitler’s existence was actually notable.
A total ultra-Nazi who must be hounded off the internet, at least if you go by his hatedoms on Reddit and whatnot.
Stonetoss’s haters are legion – make no doubt about it.
Shut the fuck up. Nobody cares ’bout you, loser. Get o’er yourself.
This review was obviously written by the person who made the comic itself — ’nother thing that would be grounds for eviscerating this idiot & wiping this shitty review off the internet in the past. I ne’er thought something like the Bad Webcomics Wiki, a website whose logo parodies Goatse, could “fall off”, but if the internet proves anything, it’s that there’s no nadir.
If you want a perfect example o’ what the Orwellian form o’ “freedom of speech”, — a concept whose vagueness makes it perfectly flexible for manipulation to only apply to one’s allies and not one’s enemies — the recent Stanford controversy where students protested an advertisement speaking event Stanford held for a conservative judge, — the only details for which are highly emotionally-charged & politically-charged “they said, she said, he said…” which are useless for any attempt @ an “unbiased” interpretation o’ what happened, beyond unquestionable proof that the judge himself acted unprofessional & insultingly toward the students, so, @ worse, ’twas some tit-for-tat energy — which, predictably, led the amazingly-interconnected rightwing media, so similar & generic they may as well be AI generated @ this point, to parrot the same whinging outrage, which also, predictably, led Stanford to bow down in obsequiousness, as self-defeating liberals always do, & forced all their students, e’en those not involved in the protest, to waste their time attending a freedom o’ speech lecture — a good lesson on how they’ve wasted their money on an institution whose inflated price is based purely on its superstitious aristocratic reputation, not genuine materialistic value, as this university is apparently so legally incompetent that they don’t realize that freedom o’ speech is a regulation on governments repressing speech, not ordinary students protesting a speaker @ a private event, none o’ which involves the government @ all, other than that a member o’ government is the speaker, the s’posed victim. I guess in Soviet America the 1st Amendment protects the government from having their speech suppressed by the dangerous people. Indeed, many conservative & “libertarian” — who show their true stripes by only defending the speech o’ a curséd government official gainst the speech o’ ordinary people when it’s conservative — commentators point out that this is a private institute as a rebuke gainst the left-wing defense o’ the right to protest, blatantly ignoring the fact that this should obviously nullify the judge’s right to speech just as much. You can tell when someone’s just simping for Trump’s remnant dynasty when they either don’t notice this obvious contradiction or deliberately ignore it & care mo’ ’bout the propaganda points spamming their outrage gives their team. & there’s a surprising lot o’ people doing so ( to be fair, this is probably ’cause most leftists are selfish & don’t want to dirty their dignity by getting involved in this political clickbait @ all & have been deliberately ignoring it ).
What’s most notable, tho, is the response o’ 2 conservative judges to this clownshow: threatening to “boycott” Stanford & not hire clerks from them. What’s interesting is that with all the whining ’bout the fake free-speech violation o’ the ordeal, there’s no protests ’bout this clear case o’ government officials threatening to punish a private institution for its ideological policies — a clear violation o’ the 1st amendment in terms o’ 1 o’ its main goals, preventing this clear attempt @ extortion to try & force this institute to employ policies that these judges want outside o’ law. ’Gain, I want to summarize American “freedom of speech” philosophy to those who haven’t gotten it yet: ordinary people who happen to be leftists don’t have the right to protest governments, but the government, who happens to be conservative, must have their speech protected from the people & have the right to use economic coercion to ensure that the poor government is protected from their unruly public. If these political leanings are reversed, ’course, the philosophy may differ. For instance, I saw no fretting ’bout any free-speech violations with MTG heckled Biden during his speech. ’Gain, this is probably ’cause leftists are too cool & have too much dignity to portray something so insignificant as anything beyond “rude” & conservatives obviously gain nothing by encouraging their own so-called principles to be used gainst them, so they, wisely, either ignored this or reinterpreted their philosophy so that now this case is now an ordinary ( government ) citizen protesting gainst the tyrannical president. Like I said, freedom o’ speech is very flexible & can shift & move depending on the circumstance ( &, mo’ importantly, how it benefits or hurts one’s political allegiance ).
I should add that the judges’ “boycott” is very bizarre: it apparently only includes future students, not current students, which would leave out the very students who protested the speaker in the 1st place. I guess these judges take the ol’ school rule o’ children suffering for the sins o’ their fathers all the way. He also described the protest as “intellectual terrorism”, which is proof that Republicans are mask-off fascists, ’cause that’s the most unironically cliché 1984 cringe bullshit e’er.
The implications o’ this whole ordeal, as well as conservatives’ general whining ’bout “woke” leftists & “cancel culture” are clear: conservatives deem expressions o’ left-wing opinions to be a threat to their free speech, & therefore they must be suppressed. That is the “lesson” conservatives wanted Stanford to take here: the only solution they considered acceptable was that the students who didn’t like what the conservative judge had to say should have just kept their mouths shut & let the conservative monopolize the podium, much as conservatives believe in general that the only acceptable solution isn’t any form o’ compromise, but for the left to bend the knee; & those disruptive anarchists who refused should be disciplined by the institute or that institute will face consequences — they, too, must bow down. This should not be surprising since keen ears will note that when conservatives complain ’bout s’posed free-speech violations, they emphasize their violent hatred o’ leftists far mo’ than any concern ’bout lofty principles. ( There’s also, ’course, the hypocrisy o’ simultaneously banning books in libraries & schools — which doesn’t seem quite so hypocritical when you take as a philosophical a priori that it’s only suppression o’ speech when leftists do it; otherwise it’s just maintaining baseline moral standards — those morals being whate’er rightwing authorities say they are ). When conservatives say they want “cancel culture” eradicated, that’s a dogwhistle for “leftist culture”. It is the left that must be eradicated.
This is how the 1st amendment could easily be interpreted by judges who choose to do so & how a pseudodemocratic country with freedom o’ speech could easily transform into a fascist nation with “freedom o’ speech”. In this scenario, government suppression o’ speech is twisted into preservation o’ ( conservatives’ only ) speech, as the ( leftist ) speech being suppressed isn’t really “speech”, but “disruption”, & we can’t have freedom o’ speech with disruption, so the disruptions must be quelled so the orderly ( conservative minority ) can trade unhinged conspiracies ’bout the invasion o’ the female bathrooms by undercover transcommies have civilized discussions.
Addendum: Judgment Day
Howe’er, I can’t leave it @ that, as I also have to talk ’bout the other hidden philosophical element that many haven’t talked ’bout, the growing divide ’tween the increasingly democratic left & conservatives who still cling to aristocratic “republicanism” — a vague term that has been attempting to reconcile the US’s aristocratic leaders with its democratic populace since its birth. A major controversy here ’mong not just the right wing, but also the “moderates”, is that these disruptive anarchists who listen to that hip-hop & have their pants sagging didn’t just act rudely to a conservative, they acted rudely to a judge. Traditionally, in American media, judges are held in the highest regard & insulting or e’en displeasing judges is grounds for “contempt”, a temporary form o’ weak imprisonment. Daytime television is full o’ shows where straight-talking judges who are ne’er wrong solve the problems o’ their dumb whitetrash & ghetto plaintiffs & defense. &, ’course, the “supreme” court is the highest level o’ law in the land, ’bove the president & legislature, able to nullify laws or actions or e’en invent new defacto laws with no veto power from the other branches, & are also appointed for life — which is to say, they’re dictators. Howe’er, judges have lost a lot o’ prestige in the last few years, thanks to Trump shitting up the court by filling it with particularly imbecilic cronies & unpopular rulings they’ve made ( sadly, not due to the inherent authoritarian nature o’ the US court system ). Since traditionally this obviously antidemocratic judicial system has always been defended on “technocratic” grounds ( & like all “technocracies”, the standards for merit are questionable & largely based on superstitious aristocratic traditions rather than anything resembling science ), this is a major crack in people taking the US’s political philosophy seriously. This has led to a conflict e’en ’mong liberals, ’tween the copium-huffing liberals who still cling to the US’s decaying system, holding the delusion that this s’posedly noble institution s’posedly corrupted by fascism can be salvaged, when it is in fact this institution’s inherent corruption that has helped fuel the rise o’ fascism in the 1st place, & those who actually support genuine democracy who believe in replacing the US’s aristocratic institution with… well, to be honest, like most people criticizing the status quo, what should be the replacement is varied from outright incomprehensible & self-contradictory ( no laws or government @ all, which could only be enforced by the defacto equivalent o’ laws or government ) or very vague ( no solution @ all, just protesting ), to theoretically possible, but unlikely to succeed & would have logistical issues actually making it work ( direct democracy ), to theoretically practical, but difficult to change or replace the law to the point o’ virtually requiring a minor psuedorevolution to carry it out ( elected judges with term limits & veto power o’er their rulings by a’least 75% o’ the legislature, if not just a majority / no judicial system @ all, just a legislature / probably plenty of other solutions I’m not thinking o’ ). As it turns out, trying to fix or e’en just improve a broken political systems, which are complex social mechanisms, specially in a country with 300 million people, is very hard, & unfortunately, ’cause so-called pragmatic moderate liberals still cling to childishly simplistic ideals o’ good & bad — albeit ideals so milquetoast & still so cynical that it makes one wonder what the point is — ( & mo’ importantly, still want to advocate for simple, violent solutions to the problem o’ broken politics in other countries, like China, rather than acknowledge the difficulty o’ improving those systems, as well ), rather than acknowledge that the US has a broken political system that ne’ertheless can’t just be fixed immediately by a sexy romantic revolution, they have to make up whate’er ’scuses they can — usually regurgitating traditionalist cant as if they haven’t been debunked by this point or haven’t become completely irrelevant in the 21st century — to present “their” political system as fundamentally good, just with a few flaws, as to believe otherwise would shatter their view o’ themselves & their role in their society. After all, the propaganda surrounding the American Revolution has embedded in Americans’ minds that idea that tyranny must be fought thru violent, sexy, romantic revolution, an idea that is convenient for war profiteers for gathering support to fund wars for “democracy” abroad. This is a great idea for the average milquetoast middle-class American when it involves other countries, like China, since they’re the ones who have to deal with the violence & disruption, but unacceptable if we include the US, since that would make those same liberals feel morally bound to violently revolt gainst the government ( which would also contradict their already contradictory moral tenet gainst “extremism”, — ’nother vague term that can be twisted into anything — since in their minds violent revolt in other countries isn’t extremism, nor was the original American Revolution ).
Judges have themselves, ’course, reacted to their fall in prestige not with humility, but in typical authoritarian fashion by those born & bred to believe that they have the divinely-given right to be worshiped, by lashing out @ the “mob” for daring to believe they, mere mortals, can be equal to their divine kings. This is what “intellectual terrorism” is: the threat o’ the mob gainst the aristocracy — or rather, the threat o’ democracy. This is specially ironic, given how corrupt the current supreme court is, with Clarence Thomas just recently getting into controversy for accepting undisclosed trips ( gifts ) from conservatives & his refusal to recusing himself from trying cases where his own wife has clear special interest1. Unsurprisingly, the court’s reaction to this obvious corruption isn’t shame, but the laziest o’ ’scuses — ¿& why not? They’re dictators — they don’t have to defend themselves with words so long as the military will dutifully do so with guns.
The real question isn’t why the courts act this way — it’s obviously in their interest to do so. The real question is why so many “liberals” would defend the “freedom o’ speech” o’ a member to this corrupt, unjust, undemocratic, unmeritocratic, authoritarian institution, who hardly lacks the means to have their voice heard, specially in the courtrooms they control with an iron grip, o’er the rare instances in which ordinary people can have their words heard.
Footnotes:
1 That article, unsurprisingly, notes that the Supreme Court has “resisted establishing its own code of conduct”, ¿’cause why should supreme dictators deign to do so when e’erything they do is just by their own whim?
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
As someone who has written a review or 2, I’m fascinated by the art o’ reviewing in & o’ itself: not just the conclusions they set out, but also, specially, the arguments they set forth to try & back up those conclusions & how persuasive they seem to me. This is why I’ve written a few attacks gainst reviews in which I agree with the conclusion, such as an inane praiseworthy review for my favorite video game, Wario Land 3. This comes from my schooling, which ( probably to avoid getting sued for potentially violating freedom-o’-speech rights ) was openminded ’bout just ’bout any kind o’ conclusions, no matter how revolting, so long as one made a sophisticated attempt @ backing one’s arguments.
Thus for today I will go all the way & look @ reviews for a book I’ve ne’er read, some 2021 books called “Sorrow & Bliss: A Novel”. Yes, it really has “A Novel” as the official subtitle, & no, I have no idea why.
In case so many of the rest of the books on this list haven’t given readers enough anti-science egomania, this idiotic, carpingly condescending story of a woman with a “mental illness” that mainly seems to turn her into a too-online Twitter-hole ought to make up the difference.
This is an all-too-common example o’ 1 o’ my least favorite types o’ terrible reviews: 1 that focuses so much on conclusive opinions & not ’nough on textual evidence or examples &, worse, is so vague in its criticisms that e’en after reading the review I have no idea what kind o’ book this e’en is. Granted, less than 50 words is way too short for an adequate review for anything worth reviewing, since it leaves no room for detail. I think, ironically, the person who wrote this review is “too-online”, as he assumes I’m familiar with whate’er Twitter bullshit he’s vaguely alluding to. Unfortunately, beyond copypasting the poems I post on this blog into Twitter with a grunt & then leaving ( which I’ve stopped bothering to do now that I’m convinced Musk will be the death o’ it ), I don’t do hardly anything on Twitter ( & I suspect hardly anyone will within the next 5 years thanks to Musk ), so I have no idea how this “Twitter-hole” ( ¿why is there a hyphen there? “Hole” is a separate word, not a suffix ), nor what “anti-science egomania” this book has or why this reviewer puts scare quotes round “mental illness”. ¿Does this reviewer who tries to imply that he’s pro-science deny the existence o’ mental illnesses — which is to ask, is this reviewer a psychology-denying crank, which is certainly not what I or any civilized human being would consider “pro-science”?
Ultimately, this review is just a bunch o’ cursing disguised as intellectualism by the use o’ vaguely-alluded implications. Being “anti-science”, an egomaniac, carping, condescending, & “too-online”, do, indeed, sound bad, but one can’t be sure if they truly are bad without understanding how they are these things & what the reviewer thinks makes this book “anti-science” or what he interprets to be an example o’ the vice o’ being “too-online”. This is a common tactic for people with unpopular opinions who want to disguise their unpopular opinions as general-held sentiments. Thus, “believes that depression is a real mental illness”, which is something with which all civilized people agree, is turned into a generally-hated dog-whistle “anti-science” much in the way rightwingers turn “treats black people humanely”, which, ’gain, all civilized people think is good, into “woke”, which sounds bad & ridiculous, e’en if most couldn’t tell you what it’s s’posed to mean.
Tier: D
So intrigued by this antireview that failed to give me any information, but, ironically, made me mo’ curious to see what kind o’ book would inspire this vague mess o’ ideas, I had to look up the book on Amazon — specifically its blurb.
In this reviewer’s defense, while I must emphasize ’gain that I have not read this book & cannot adequately review it myself, the blurb doesn’t inspire confidence in me. I can definitely say that the blurb is poorly written:
Martha Friel just turned forty. She used to work at Vogue and was going to write a novel. Now, she creates internet content for no one. She used to live in Paris. Now, she lives in a gated community in Oxford that she hates and can’t bear to leave. But she must now that her loving husband Patrick has just left.
A common vice o’ modern literature ( that is literature o’ today, not modernist literature, which is some o’ the best literature out there ) is relying on childish choppy sentences. This paragraph is particularly fragmentary, since the different sentences don’t e’en connect. Most o’ this paragraph is empty details stripped o’ any importance. “She used to work at Vogue and was going to write a novel”. Cool. ¿Who cares? E’eryone is “going to write a novel”, & writing a book ’bout a tortured “genius” middle class white person struggling to become an uppercase-A “Artist” is the most cliché & uninteresting concepts for a book. Meanwhile, bringing up that our protagonist used to live in Paris, but now lives in a gated community, which she hates, but can’t bear to leave, is some unironic 1st-world-problems & exhibit #200,000 o’ how detached from reality upper-class Americans are. That said, there’s no indication o’ “anti-science” in this book so far; & honestly, the concept o’ a book ’bout someone who “creates internet content for no one” is the least uninteresting part o’ this blurb & could be an entertaining topic for a book if done with self-effacing humor & without the bathos-inducing melodrama that this blurb is so far exhibiting.
The blurb continues:
Because there’s something wrong with Martha. There has been since a little bomb went off in her brain, at seventeen, leaving her changed in a way no doctor or drug could fix then and no one, even now, can explain—why can say she is so often sad, cruel to everyone she loves, why she finds it harder to be alive than other people.
This paragraph just insults the reader’s intelligence, pretending that hardly anyone has e’er heard o’ this concept o’ “depression” before. So far it seems like 1 o’ the 47 words o’ the previous review was right: “egomania”. This blurb tries to pass off our protagonist as the world’s only sufferer from depression, e’en tho that is far from the truth. Usually books ’bout depression are written for others with depression in a way o’ creating resonance & understanding, making them not feel ’lone; but this blurb’s use o’ alien diction to depict depression as this 1-o’-a-kind mutation o’ the protagonist does the opposite: as someone who does have depression, it turns me off, & it feels mo’ like an exotic exhibitionist performance put on to thrill people who don’t have depression — which is a gross, dehumanizing thing to do. I can’t tell, since the previous review was so vague, but maybe this was also what Donaghue meant by “condescending”: it certainly feels condescending to people with depression.
With Patrick gone, the only place Martha has left to go is her childhood home, to live with her chaotic parents, to survive without Ingrid, the sister who made their growing-up bearable, who said she would never give up on Martha, and who finally has.
Speaking o’ vague language: ¿what does it mean for Martha’s parents to be “chaotic”? ¿Is that a euphemism for “abusive”? Also, I certainly hope this Ingrid person literally abandoned Martha & didn’t “abandon” her in a metaphorical way by dying, since the protagonist would look like a selfish asshole for complaining ’bout how she suffered for someone else’s death.
It feels like the end but maybe, by going back, Martha will get to start again. Maybe there is a different story to be written, if Martha can work out where to begin.
“It feels like the end but maybe”’s missing comma is a legit grammatical error in an official blurb for a mass-published book.
I’m sure many o’ the hot-shot commercial publisher types I’ve read from would say that this is a well-written blurb, but I disagree. Then ’gain, I think their perspective is that the obnoxiously intelligence-insulting way this blurb is written is “attention-grabbing” to the masses o’ idiots in the same way jingling keys would be, whereas as someone who doesn’t find jingling keys particularly fascinating, I find it, well, obnoxiously intelligence-insulting, so this is probably why I wouldn’t make a good publisher, since my instinct is to criticize the masses for being idiots, which isn’t liable to make the masses o’ idiots want to buy my stuff, whereas the effective way to fleece them is to pat them on the back for their idiocy & indulge them.
But we haven’t gotten to the bottom o’ the swamp yet: that would be the editorial reviews.
“Sorrow and Bliss is a brilliantly faceted and extremely funny book about depression that engulfed me in the way I’m always hoping to be engulfed by novels. While I was reading it, I was making a list of all the people I wanted to send it to, until I realized that I wanted to send it to everyone I know.” — Ann Patchett
Drinking game: take a drink e’ery time we see “brilliant” or [insert adverb] funny. Enjoy that coma from alcohol poisoning.
But this review doesn’t just spew clichés, but also mangles them: ¿what does “brilliantly faceted” mean? Nobody uses that phrase. The phrase is “multifaceted”, not just “faceted”. “Faceted” by itself doesn’t mean anything in this context, & it isn’t made any mo’ meaningful by the addendum o’ an empty superlative before it.
We also have laughably exaggerated metaphors, making it sound like the reviewer has an online fetish for being “engulfed” by literature.
The most shocking thing is that this blurb was written by a real writer & the daughter o’ 1 o’ the most imaginative writers who had a very distinct voice to his writing. I guess you can’t inherit literary genius. My only hope is that Ann crapped this out in a minute for whate’er quick buck they were offering.
Tier: E
“Completely brilliant, I loved it. I think every girl and woman should read it.” — Gillian Anderson
This reviewer judges this book to be “completely brilliant”, as opposed to those which are merely partially brilliant. Then we get a comma splice, & after that redundant padding: Gillian doesn’t just think e’ery woman should read it, but also e’ery girl. ¿Why stop there? Maybe e’ery female, lady, gal, lass, miss, madame, femme, & any other synonym you could find should read it, too.
Tier: F
“An incredibly funny and devastating debut. . . . enlivened, often, by a madcap energy. Yet it still manages to be sensitive and heartfelt, and to offer a nuanced portrayal of what it means to try to make amends and change, even when that involves ‘start[ing] again from nothing.’” — The Guardian
It says something bad when a newspaper as shoddy as The Guardian provides 1 o’ the least inane review o’ the pack. There’s still plenty o’ trite, empty phrases ( “madcap energy” ) & empty, repetitive superlatives ( “sensitive & heartfelt” ), & the reviewer fails to describe this book in a way that distinguishes it from millions of other books, that could also be described as “funny & devastating”, or the many books that vaguely involve “try[ing] to make amends & change, even when that involves ‘start[ing] again from nothing’.
Tier: D
“Exploring the multifaceted hardships of mental illness and the frustrating inaccuracy of diagnoses, medications, and treatments, Sorrow and Bliss is darkly comic and deeply heartfelt . . . Martha’s voice is acerbic, witty, and raw.” — Booklist (starred review)
This is the closest a review came to having anything resembling a specific example from the book to make it stand out from any other book, the conflict o’ struggling with “inaccurate” diagnoses & medications — tho this does make me rethink my earlier interpretation o’ our 1st reviewer’s criticism o’ “anti-science” & makes me wonder if, quite the opposite, he was criticizing this book for exhibiting depression-skepticism or skepticism toward the efficacy o’ antidepressants ( I don’t feel bad for the misinterpretation, since, as I said, he refused to give a concrete example to back up their vague criticism o’ “anti-science” ).
Tier: C
“Meg Mason’s unflagging comic impulses drive this novel about the havoc a woman’s mental illness wreaks on her marriage.” — Shelf Awareness (starred review)
A common vice o’ reviews, specially editorial reviews, which are far too short to give useful information, is trading meaningful critique based on examples o’ the text with empty but poetic ( & that poetry is mo’ William McGonagall than Kobayashi Issa ) diction. If this reviewer wrote “This book ’bout a woman’s depression ruining their marriage is funny” ’twould say ’bout the same thing, but they try to hide such an empty conclusion with laughably o’erwrought purple prose as if they were describing Conan the Barbarian wrestling the ermine-orbed serpent or Moses parting the red sea with his rod aloft: this book isn’t just funny; its writer’s “unflagging comic impulses drive this novel” like a school bus.
Tier: D
“Brutal, tender, funny, this novel—a portrait of love in all of its many incarnations—came alive for me from the very first page. I saw myself here. I saw the people I love. I am changed by this book.” — Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes
’Nother common design pattern for automated review generation: “[adjective], [adjective], [adjective]…]. & if that wasn’t ’nough, we end 1 o’ the tritest, most ridiculous exaggerated praise e’er: claiming that the work “changed” the reviewer. Unfortunately, these works ne’er change these reviewers into people with any form o’ imagination or critical skills o’ analysis.
I mean, I love Donkey Kong Country’s music, too, but I can’t remember any philosophical epiphanies or major life decisions I’ve come to that were inspired by the bubbling melodies o’ “Hot Head Bop”.
Tier: E
“A truly comic novel about love and the despair of depression. It’s a rare and beautiful thing when an author can break your heart with humor; it’s also the quality I admire most in a writer.” — Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author of The Nest and Good Company
This novel is truly comic, as opposed to those fake comedic posers. This review is notable in that it makes a point specific ’nough to be outright wrong: tragicomedy is, in fact, not rare @ all, but goes all the way back to e’en The Bible, & probably earlier ancient literature, too.
Tier: D
“A quiet and achingly beautiful love story. . . . LOVED it. Masterfully written. And powerful.” — Elin Hilderbrand
More o’erwrought prose. I hate it when a book is so beautiful it gives me aches. To wrap up our bathos, we have the high superlative “masterfully written” followed by the much weaker “also, ’twas powerful, too”. “This book is genius & also pretty darn swell”.
Tier: F
“Sorrow and Bliss is hilarious, haunting, and utterly captivating. Meg Mason has created a heroine as prickly as Bernadette in Where’d You Go, Bernadette. Her humor is as arch and wise as the best work of Joan Didion and Rachel Cusk, yet completely original. What a thrilling new voice!” — Amanda Eyre Ward, New York Times bestselling author of The Jetsetters
The other cliché to add to our bingo card is comparing a work to ’nother work — tho I love how this reviewer twists 1 o’ her comparisons by addending, “yet completely original”. Yes, this completely original work that can only be described by saying it’s like other works. I’m also not sure what “arch” humor is & have a sneaking suspicion that this reviewer doesn’t know, either.
Tier: E
“Funny and tragic.” — Jojo Moyes
Give Jojo credit: this says what all the other reviews say in just 3 words.
Tier: D
“I really loved Meg Mason’s SORROW AND BLISS, which is sometimes very sad and often very funny and ultimately hopeful.” — Linda Holmes, New York Times bestselling author of Evvie Drake Starts Over, via Twitter
OK, to be fair, this 1 adds “& hopeful”, too.
Tier: E
“So dark, so funny, so true. You will see your sad, struggling, triumphant self in this deeply affecting novel. What a debut.” — Laura Zigman, author of Separation Anxiety
Calling a book “deeply affecting” is like describing my chair as “strongly sittable”: it may be true, but doesn’t mean much.
Tier: F
“A gorgeous, heart-rending book.” — Flynn Berry, New York Times bestselling author of Northern Spy
¡YOU ARE TEARING ME APART, SORROW AND BLISS!
Tier: F
“SORROW AND BLISS is brilliant. A comic gem that will also break your heart.” — Julia Claiborne Johnson, author of Be Frank With Me and Better Luck Next Time
I’m surprised it took this long to encounter a review describing the work as a gem or some kind o’ jewelry.
Tier: F
“Evocative and hopeful.” — Book Riot, “5 Contemporary Literary Fiction Books That Are Game-Changers”
Generic & meaningless. That’s a great way to describe a book that is purportedly a “game-changer”. Nobody’s e’er written a book that’s evocative or hopeful till Meg Mason invented the concepts o’ evocation & hope in 2021.
Tier: F
“Sorrow and Bliss is a thing of beauty. Astute observations on marriage, motherhood, family, and mental illness are threaded through a story that is by turns devastating and restorative. Every sentence rings true. I will be telling everyone I love to read this book.” — Sara Collins, Costa First Novel Award-winning author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton
¿Why do you abuse the people you love?
Tier: E
“Sharp yet humane, and jaw-droppingly funny, this is the kind of novel you will want to press into the hands of everyone you know. Mason has an extraordinary talent for dialogue and character, and her understanding of how much poignancy a reader can take is profound. A masterclass on family, damage and the bonds of love: as soon as I finished it, I started again.” — Jessie Burton, New York Times bestselling author of The Miniaturist
“Spicy, yet sour, & nose-pickingly readable, this is the kind o’ review you will want to shove into the mouth o’ e’eryone you know. Jessie has a spectacular skill for adverbs & using commas, & her understanding o’ how much zestiness a reader can take is insightful. A Raid: Shadow Legends on drama, diction, & the love triangle o’ adjectives: as soon as I ate it, I ate it ’gain.” — J. J. W. Mezun,The Mezunian bestrepelling author o’ A Year o’ Yuppie Inanity with Mozilla’s Pocket ( An Unpublished Classic ).
Tier: D
“Patrick Melrose meets Fleabag. Brilliant.” — Clare Chambers, author of Small Pleasures
¡Irrelevancy, your honor!
Tier: F
“Examines with pitiless clarity the impact of the narrator’s mental illness on her closest relationships. . . . Mason brings the reader into a deep understanding of Martha’s experience without either condescending to her or letting her off too easily. . . . An astute depiction of life on the psychic edge.” — Kirkus Reviews
They’re not surprising, but these god damn adjectives still get me. You can’t just have regular ol’ clarity: it has to be the “pitiless” kind, like it’s a stronger palette swap in the latter half o’ Dragon Quest. Since we’ve established that the blurb a’least thinks Martha is the only person in the universe with this exotic mutation as-yet unnamed & undiscovered by all the brightest scientists, I’m doubtful o’ the “without either condescending” part. & since Martha apparently complains ’bout how agonizing it is to live in a gated community that they just can’t bear to leave, ’less Martha is given the guillotine by the proletariat by the end o’ the book, I think the author probably does let her off too easily.
Tier: D
“The book is a triumph. A brutal, hilarious, compassionate triumph.” — Alison Bell, cocreator and star of The Letdown
¿Was this review written by Lionel Fanthorpe? “This review is repetitive. A repetitive repetition that repeats & repeats & says the same thing they say ’gain & ’gain & doesn’t say anything else but that which has been said before & nothing mo’ but what was said before”.
Tier: F
“This is a romance, true, but a real one. It’s modern love up against the confusing, sad aches of mental illness, with all its highs, lows, humour and misery. Comparisons to Sally Rooney will be made, but Mason’s writing is less self-conscious than Rooney’s, and perhaps more mature. Her character work is outstanding, and poignant—the hairline fractures, contradictions and nuances of the middle-class family dynamic are painstakingly rendered with moving familiarity and black humour, resulting in a combination as devastating and sharply witty as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag.” — Bookseller+Publisher
I’m glad that the reviewer alerted me that this book is a “real” romance, as opposed to all those fake romances that are truly ’bout martian conquerors. I always hate it when I buy a book with some sexy shirtless man on the cover & it’s just blasting cyberpneumatic cannons @ the Xythnians from Kyklocks. ¿How will my cyberpneumatic cannon shoot off then?
& they let you know that this is a modern love, involving mental illness, which didn’t exist before 2021. ¿Virginia Woolf? ¡Ne’er heard o’ her!
Despite all this, this is 1 o’ the mo’ in-depth — a’least as in-depth as any o’ these Hallmark card reviews get — reviews. Note how it makes a comparison to ’nother writer, but qualifies it by noting specific differences ( which is mo’ meaningful than just saying “but also completely original”, which is just straight-up contradictory ). Granted, it’d be better if the claims o’ being “less self-conscious” & “more mature” were qualified with examples & elaboration, since we’re still taking the reviewer on their word & they’re still relying heavily on vague superlatives. & the rest also devolves into a list o’ superlatives, with the hint that it this book s’posedly goes into greater depth into the complications o’ middle-class families than some unnamed general standard being the closest to what we might call actually giving meaningful information. Still, based on our now subterranean standards this is up on the higher tiers.
Tier: B
“Improbably charming . . . will have you chortling and reading lines aloud.” — People
( Laughs ). E’en the reviewers are vague: we don’t e’en get a specific person cited for this review, but some vague “people”.This gives a new perspective to the phrase “¡The people have spoken!”.
I like how “People” starts by laying out their expectations that this book would be shitty, setting up the gravel-level standards this book apparently surpassed. Presumably, these low standards were based on reading the blurb.
This review carries out the impressive feat o’ being both vague & clearly wrong: it libels me by claiming that I will “chortle” — ’cause our failed poet reviewer can’t use a basic word like “laugh” — & read lines ’loud, which I would ne’er do for e’en the funniest book, simply ’cause reading lines ’loud while laughing noisily in public is something only a peak douche bag would do, & reading lines ’loud & laughing to yourself while ’lone is something e’en a deranged lunatic like me would consider too bedlamite.
Tier: F
Below these reviews my eye caught the author bio, &, well…
Meg Mason is a journalist whose career began at the Financial Times and the Times of London. Her work has since appeared in Vogue, Elle, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sunday Times (UK), and the New Yorker’s Daily Shouts. Born in New Zealand, she now lives in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and two daughters. [emphasis mine]
So we can confirm that Sorrow & Bliss: A Work o’ Literature Comprising Abstract Latin Letters that Combine to Form Abstract Concepts Physically Bound in the Form o’ a Codex is an author self-insert book so transparent that the author couldn’t e’en be arsed to change the name o’ the magazine they worked for to 1 o’ its carbon-copy competitors.
Bonus: Mo’ Bad Reviews
Our 1st reviewer, Steve Donaghue, also wrote a list o’ worst 2021 nonfiction books, & it starts pretty funny:
10 The Chief’s Chief by Mark Meadows (All Seasons Press) – On January 6, 2021, President Donald Trump incited a violent insurrection to attack the US Capitol, overthrow the US government, and install himself as an unelected dictator. Mark Meadows publicly endorsed this attempted coup. Shame on All Seasons Press for giving him a book contract.
Kind o’ low-hanging fruit for a worst-book choice, — specially since the rightwing grift machine pumps out these doorstops e’ery year — but I can’t disagree, & it’s only #10. ¿What’s next?
Tier: B
9 The Tyranny of Big Tech by Josh Hawley (Regnery Publishing) On January 6, 2021, President Donald Trump incited a violent insurrection to attack the US Capitol, overthrow the US government, and install himself as an unelected dictator. Josh Hawley publicly endorsed this attempted coup. Shame on Regnery Publishing for giving him a book contract.
I mean, I can’t disagree…
Tier: B
Unfortunately, Donaghue gives ’way the game when he makes a mistake copy-pasting the review for the Peter Navarro book & using for the Jim Jordan book, as he blames Peter Navarro ’gain. Or maybe he just really hates Peter Navarro & decides he wants to blame him a 2nd time just to be sure.
Some o’ the other items are weirder, tho…
6 The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro (Broadside Books) – Very smart and very lazy Ben Shapiro takes a legitimate social issue – the rise of the authoritarian Left – and lavishes pan-shallow unoriginal platitudes on them while cloaking the whole mess in the fascists talking points of the very monsters who consider him a useful idiot.
1 o’ the great thing ’bout using these vague superlatives or invectives is that I have to play guessing games regarding what the person is trying to e’en say. Now, from Ben Shapiro that’s no surprise, since like most fascists he deliberately communicates in shibboleths to disguise bigotry as profound, complex thought. But Donaghue, who portrays himself as vaguely antifascist & spent half his reviews criticizing what many fascists considered to be a feather in their cap, seems to have different goals. One may expect him to be o’ the Enlightened Centrist™ tribe who feels the need to balance out their outrage @ a Republican attempt to outright o’erthrow the US government by manufacturing an imaginary leftist equivalent. Perhaps he portrays the “Black Lives Matter” riots as the equivalent, despite the fact that these riots presented no threat to the US government beyond being an international embarrassment — & if that’s the case, then we’d have to consider nearly e’ery American who vacations to other countries as an equal evil to the Trump Putsch. ¿But, anyway, would e’en an Enlightened Centrist™ consider Shapiro to be “very smart and very lazy”? I’m hoping Donaghue takes his brilliant “rap isn’t music ’cause my daddy told me it isn’t” & the way he embarrassed himself in front o’ a BBC conservative by being too crazy e’en for him — which adds him to the list o’ Americans who are an international embarrassment — as examples o’ him just being too lazy to unleash that intelligence that he’s keeping very well hidden.
It’s not that I’m in denial that there exists an authoritarian left; but when I think o’ “authoritarian left”, I think o’ Leninists, & I don’t see any big Leninist movement on the verge o’ seizing the US capitol & setting up the American Neobolshevik Communist Party as the dictatorship o’ the proletariat, no matter how many jokes ’bout guillotines I make. As we’ve established here before, we can’t e’en get Biden to do something as symbolic as raising his fist & shouting, “¡Down with the bourgeoisie!”, while still doing their bidding, no matter how funny ’twould be. Maybe Donaghue took some downers & fell asleep while watching a Russian Civil War documentary just after US news & mixed them up in his mind. It happens to me sometimes, too. But given some o’ the other things he’s written, I get the sneaking suspicion his idea o’ “authoritarian left” is just some irrelevant few randos on Twitter calling him a racist ’cause he refused to capitalize the B in “black people” — which is to say that he is “too-online” & needs to stop spending so much time on Twitter & mistaking the idiots on it as relevant to greater society.
Complaining ’bout the “rise” o’ the authoritarian left also really undermines Donaghue’s attacks gainst Trump as a fascist — a clear rightwing authoritarian. ¿Is it reasonable for him to be alarmed that the left should become authoritarian as a counterbalance to the right’s growing authoritarianism, or is Donaghue 1 o’ the many delusional Americans who thinks reality spawns from dreams & wishes & not power & that sternly protesting people willing to use violence & underhanded tactics will magically make these tyrant-wannabes no longer a threat? After all, when fascism rose as a threat in Europe, the allied powers acted in many ways that almost anyone would consider “authoritarian” — far worse than a few randos calling other randos racist for not spelling “latinos” “l@t!n%”, like any progressive L33tspeaker should. ¿Would not Donaghue consider FDR, who interned Japanese Americans & heavily censored newspapers, radio, & e’en letters, an example o’ the “authoritarian left”? ¿Would he say the same ’bout Winston Churchill, who also censored media while the UK was fighting fascists? Also, ¿didn’t Donaghue outright call for publishers to refuse to publish works by Trump supporters? ¿Isn’t that censorship, & thus “authoritarianism” — a far greater form o’ authoritarianism than calling other people bad names, which, in fact, is not authoritarianism, but merely using one’s freedom-o’-speech rights to express their opinion of others? It seems reasonable that in an America where violence gainst minorities is on the rise that jokes ’bout black people go from being harmless edgy comedy to a means to recruiting mo’ fascists, & that it’s a reasonable reaction by the left to feel added urgency to employ whate’er means don’t full-on violate freedom o’ speech, or e’en defacto suppression o’ speech thru economic means, to try & stifle & undermine this tactic, which, ultimately, is for the goal o’ subverting e’en the pseudodemocracy that the US has. But I guess it’s mo’ important that Donaghue ne’er has to fear being called a racist, which is literally lethal to white people, than it is for white people to endure the slightest inconvenience to prevent fascism from coming to power. Expressing one’s disdain for fascism is all one needs to do to make it topple @ its foundation in the fantasyland o’ people who live purely in the world o’ books & not political reality.
But it gets worse…
5 Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm by Robin DiAngelo (Beacon Press) – I wouldn’t have thought it possible that the author of White Fragility could write a book more virulently racist in just one lifetime, but this noxious volume – in which she makes clear that all white people are racist genetically, regardless of upbringing, education, or outlook (Klan members will find such claims familiar-sounding, only in a slightly different context) – does the trick.
This review devolves into outright malicious lying, & one can easily see this simply by reviewing the Amazon blurb:
In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo explained how racism is a system into which all white people are socialized and challenged the belief that racism is a simple matter of good people versus bad. [emphasis mine]
Dr. DiAngelo — who is a white person, & so can shit-talk crackers just as much as I can, just like black people can use the N-word — nowhere blames genetics for racism, but white people’s social conditioning. This makes sense when you consider that Dr. DiAngelo is a sociologist, not a biologist. Mo’ importantly, she distinguishes it from the bitter hatred o’, say, a Klansman, as a different kind o’ racism caused by an unintentional harm caused by ignorance. It is Donaghue who decides to be triggered by being called a well-meaning accidental racist, as if this “offense” is anywhere close to the kind o’ spiteful, actually threatening speech that hardcore racist white people spew ( ¿does DiAngelo recommend harassing white people with depression & urging them to kill themselves in her book, which is what white supremacist groups like Stormfront actually did to people after Trump won the election? ), & rather than do what a smart person with any dignity would do & just shrug it off & say, “¿What are you gonna do?”, he stupidly gives in to the bait & reacts in the most extreme, idiotic way possible, literally reacting to the accusation o’ being racist with the schoolyard comeback, “¡No, you are! ¡In fact, you’re such a superultramega racist that you’re just like those Klansmen who murdered & intimidated black people for decades… ’cept, you know, you haven’t actually murdered anyone or intimated anyone or have done anything but make a few white people feel a li’l queasy”. It shows an amazing lack o’ self-awareness that a white person would unironically attack without e’en the slightest sense o’ humor a book called “White Fragility”. “¡Can you believe these bullies called me a whiny bitch!”, he whinily bitched. I would venture to argue that the idiocy that Donaghue portrays here is mo’ racist gainst white people like me since it does far mo’ damage to our reputation than some guilt-fetishing honkey, whose worst crime is actually probably annoying black people with her constant Jesus-like faux-humility, as if constant apologies & longwinded treatises on made-up jargon acronyms like BIPOC help black people with real problems, like being shot by white supremacist police or poverty — albeit, none o’ which are on the same level o’ enormity as people on Twitter calling Donaghue mean words.
Donaghue could’ve gotten sympathy by merely calling this book dumb & useless; but portraying it as an extreme form o’ racism comparable to Klan lynchings is a ridiculous form o’ both-sidesism that helps the very fascists he pretends to be fighting gainst. Trying to conflate minor misdemeanors gainst white people as equal to the worst acts o’ racist terror gainst black people is the precise tactic that fascists use to justify white supremacist terror as “defense” gainst “the authoritarian left”.
Anyway, this review o’ reviews has gone on way too long. Get the fuck out o’ my house so I can take my pants off.
So it’s settled: Democrats keep the senate ( thank you Masto for saving me from waiting till December to confirm this point ) & Republicans take the house. I’m not sure why people are making a big deal ’bout this: I remember for most o’ summer people were predicting this same outcome, save maybe that Republicans would’ve had a much mo’ formidable win till a bunch o’ troll Republican polls came round & 538 for no logical reason @ all let their trolling pollute their polls. Or maybe that’s not what happened. ¿Who cares? Polls are a waste o’ time.
Moreo’er, I’m not sure why Democrats are hopped up on so much copium ’bout the official fascist party doing less well than expected. Many have compared these midterms to the 2002 midterms wherein Republicans beat historical precedence & kept the house & regained the senate despite having a newly-elected president 2 years earlier, the only time such a thing happened other than in 1934 with FDR, which many credit to 9/11 “bringing the country together”. “Ne’er forget” Americans seemed to have forgotten so soon that we had a 20’s version in 2021 with 1/6, ’cept the difference is that whereas Democrats had nothing to do with 9/11, Republicans had much to do with 1/6. If anything, one should expect that Democrats should have succeeded better this year than Republicans did in 2002, but I guess inflation is mo’ important than protecting e’en the flimsy ’scuse for democracy the US has. To paraphrase Ben Franklin: Americans who are willing to trade democracy for the sake o’ cheaper prices deserve & will get neither.
I should add that while moderate liberals like to emphasize the effect the Dobbs judgment had on the midterms, they don’t acknowledge that the Democrats’ weak loss means that there is no chance that Democrats will be able to pass a bill legalizing abortion — which means that the end result is still a loss for liberals.
So, yes, if one is delusional & believes that nothing has changed, Democrats’ weak loss should seem astounding & a good sign for the future, given that nothing changes. But those paying attention & knowing ’bout the mechanisms Republicans are setting in place should be able to see that howe’er li’l Democrats lost the current battle, they already lost the longterm war. & while Democrats may not have lost by that much, democracy has definitely lost.
The only truly positive sign is that Republicans, in their utter lack o’ consistency other than their desire for winning & having power, have taken a sudden turn gainst Trump & are starting to favor DeSantis, which could lead to a civil war that could hurt Republicans’ chances o’ winning presidency, a’least, in 2024 ( granted I’m doubtful o’ either being able to beat Biden in 2024 — Trump already lost in 2020, after all ). This is too bad, since Trump made a good point that he was the 1st president in a “long period” to go “decades, decades” without war in his 4 years o’ president. Any president who magically turns 4 years into “decades, decades” has to be impressive.
But I’m not so sure: as established, Republicans only care ’bout winning, not ideological purity, &, having such a lack o’ independent thought ( as evidenced by all the Washington State Republicans being clones o’ each other & the fact that Republicans just spew the same unfunny dadjoke memes where’er they are ), so they’ll probably just vote for whoe’er the Republican candidate is, regardless o’ who it is, e’en if not Trump.
¡Ne’ertheless! Regardless o’ the actual consequences o’ this election, Republicans are anusaching ’bout it, & thus it is our satirical duty to dunk on them. That’s right, this year we’re not going to waste our time looking in @ Daily Kos… ¿who else did I look in @? ¿The Nation? ¿r/politics? Democracy Now’s ’bove vulgar racehorse shenanigans & Counterpunch should just have ’nother copypaste article ’bout how e’ery election is just a victory for capitalism. Anyway, we’re not interested in seeing these freaks jerk themselves off o’er this minor win. We want to see some moaning & groaning. Thus, I must dig deep into the sewers that is rightwing media.
’Course we can’t go an election without a li’l conspiracy theorying:
THEY DID IT AGAIN! Two massive unexplained ballot drops gave Gretchen Whitmer the lead in Michigan – They ran a ‘Drop and Roll’ in Michigan pic.twitter.com/VIxjQVYgdh
¡Gasp! ¡Look @ those tall lines! ¿What does it mean? ’Course, anyone halfway literate in graphs — which, tragically, doesn’t include Republicans — will clearly see that Whitmer had the lead long before those circled parts & that the jumps applied to both candidates, so they’re nugatory, anyway.
Anyway, this person, who claims to be “[j]ust an average Joe who loves God, America, Airplanes and Racing”, but apparently doesn’t love reality, had this special scientific insight:
Straight lines are ALWAYS man made. They do not occur in nature, and they NEVER occur normally in reliable data results. If you do see a straight line its a red flag and a sign of human intervention.
Officials in Arizona told CNBC today that they are “prepared to work through Thanksgiving and possibly Christmas as well.” That means results by New Year’s in a race that was held in early November. That seems late. How late is it? Well, by comparison, the results of the 1862 midterm elections, which were tabulated by candlelight without machines or even electricity in the middle of a raging civil war, were clear before the end of the week. That was the entire country. Arizona is a single state, which, by the way, is a fraction of the size of Florida, which, as you may have noticed, counted its votes in less than a day—so did Brazil, an entire country.
1st, considering states are counting votes simultaneously, there’s no difference ’tween the entire country counting votes vs. 1 state; 2nd, votes are still being counted by hand; 3rd, the US has mo’ than 10 times as many people as then; 4th, elections were corrupt & run by boss machines back then, so it’s laughable to use the notorious 1800s as an example o’ good elections. ¿Would he rather have elections like the 1876 election, where it was decided by backdoor agreements?
That seems embarrassing, if not like a full-blown emergency. Counting the votes isn’t some added extra you get from government if they have a surplus, like fighting climate change or bringing equity. Counting the votes is a core function of government, along with law enforcement, maintaining the roads and keeping the border secure.
Since the new government doesn’t form till January, I’m not sure why taking an extra week is a problem, nor how it indicates any suspicious activity. If anything, it indicates higher standards. Handling voting for an entire country o’ 300 million in just 1 day is the stupidest idea in the world & is bound to lead to errors. If Democrats wanted to steal the election, ¿why would they bother prolonging things? ¿What good does that do? Like, we already have well-established examples o’ ballot stuffing in the country from the aforementioned 1800s boss machines & the mid 1900s, & they didn’t involve election delays ’cause the perpetrators were smart ’nough to realize that you can stuff ballots in just 1 day & that looking suspicious for no extra benefits is a dumb idea.
Efficient elections are the reason you pay taxes, but Arizona doesn’t seem to have them.
It most certainly is not why I pay taxes.
Don’t ask, commands CNN. If you’ve got questions about this or any other election, no unauthorized questions. Instead, watch CNN or if you don’t have cable, simply trust your local officials.
I’m not sure who Fox News is eluding to that I should trust. I’m totally sure Fox News are advocating for anarchism, since there’s absolutely no one I can trust, & therefore valid elections are impossible now. It’s not as if we have organizations that o’ersee these elections & that there’s too many people in these organizations to keep a tight lip on the conspiracy. Keep in mind, e’ery terrible thing the US does gets leaked thanks to organizations like WikiLeaks, but this vote steal is as tight as any government scheme e’er produced — well, outside o’ Bush doing 9/11, ’course.
Speaking o’ Bush, ¿is his Proust-loving speechwriter writing Carlson’s script? “If you’ve got questions about this or any other election, no unauthorized questions” is right up there with “you won’t get fooled again”.
They’re doing their jobs. They’re doing it right. Really CNN? Can we get a little more reporting on that? How right are they doing it?
Yes, I expect exact mathematical figures on the objective unit o’ rightness & the precise % o’ rightness. If it’s not ’bove 80%, which electionologists have measured to be the minimum level o’ rightness to reach the natural rate o’ rightness, then it’s not right ’nough & Trump instantly becomes president, as per the constitution.
¿Was CNN really constantly badgering their drooling watchers, “The elections are going fine. We swear no conspiracies are going on”? ¿Do they also host weekly segments informing their brilliant viewers that JFK’s assassination was not, in fact, an inside job? “We’re going to have to rate that Biden is an alien trying to steal your blood with his fluoridated water is a ‘Pants on Fire’ debunked fact”.
It’s pretty funny, but we digress.
I mean, it’s only funny if you’re an idiot & find basic civic mechanisms confusing.
Then there’s the most amusingly stupid explanation of all: bad candidates were the problem. That’s all over Twitter. All the Twitter pundits are telling you now the candidates were subpar and that was the problem. Candidate quality matters. Well, of course, strictly speaking, that is true. The quality of a candidate does matter, but really, how much does it matter? Well, let’s see. Joe Biden got elected president two years ago from his basement. John Fetterman became a U.S. senator last night. Does anyone think John Fetterman was a quality candidate? Is that why he won, because they had quality candidates on the left? Do the voters of Pennsylvania really want a brain damaged candidate who’s never had a real job? Did they think he was more impressive than the guy who spent his career doing heart transplants? Probably not.
I take back what I said ’bout the scriptwriting thing: there’s no way a literate human wrote this babbling. ¿How the hell can someone sound so befuddled while robotically repeating the same memes as e’ery other conservative clone? “¿Do people really not want to support a party who calls stroke victims ‘brain damaged’ just ’cause that party is full o’ repulsive toxic waste in flesh form? That can’t be right — must be ballot-stuffing”.
OK, I can’t stand reading this anymo’. ¿Has Living Bowtie always been this incoherent? It’s amazing that “brain-damaged” Fettuccineman sounded mo’ articulate during his fracking question than Bowtie has thru this whole article. ¿Who the hell can tolerate watching this e’ery day?
’Cause you get mo’ clicks by endlessly repeating yourself, he continued this shtick in a microfiction that seemed like ’twas AI-generated titled, “Democracy is a faith-based system… but who could believe in this?”. Democracy is not faith-based; legitimate democracies involve o’ersight from independent, international organizations like the UN. The fact that an American would say something so stupid shows how Americans know nothing ’bout democracy, which is why they have their idiotic electoral college & senate system & have made their system so that the legislative branch, the most important branch, is the most dysfunctional, while the supreme court, the least democratic branch which is just appointed for life, is the most powerful. ¿Guess which side is adamantly gainst independent o’ersight o’er US elections? So, ’gain, the big question: ¿who are Americans s’posed to trust when it comes to elections? The obvious unstated answer Fox News wants is that Republicans get complete control & can declare elections howe’er they fit like Putin. Those are the only 3 options, since Carlson acknowledges that he doesn’t believe a bipartisan solution is possible: Republicans control the election system, Democrats control the election system, or they’re o’erseen by objective, independent outside sources like e’ery other democracy.
When you look at these things like abortion, it’s popular. And you can thank the Jewish media for that. Abortion is popular, sodomy is popular, being gay is popular, being a feminist is popular, sex out of wedlock is popular, contraceptives — it’s all popular. That’s not to say it’s good. That’s not to say I like that. Popular means that people support it, which they do. It sucks, and it is what it is, but that’s why we need a dictatorship. That’s unironically why we need to get rid of all that. We need to take control of the media or take control of the government and force the people to believe what we believe or force them to play by our rules and reshape the society.
r/conservative, who spent most o’ the past 6 years stanning for Trump, have now turned round & are blaming him for their loss, since as anyone who has e’er met conservatives know, they hate personal responsibility for their own failures & will literally rewrite history in their head & pretend they always hated Eurasia & loved Eastasia.
Modern Voltaire, hoardpepes, who hoarded all the pepes, so you know he’s wise, has this rebuttal:
I agree with hoardpepes: I have no reason to care ’bout founding American values or rights like slavery & the right o’ the supreme court to nullify anything any o’ the other branches do by mere whim & have no reason not to prefer free shit. Maybe if Republicans started offering free shit ’stead o’ garbage like shit that people in the 1700s — who had no taste — like people would like them for once.
But while many are blaming Trump, The Federalist has someone else to blame: ¡time to ditch Mitch McConnell!. The entire basis o’ the criticism is that McConnel didn’t follow Newt’s patented “let shit burn” policy & didn’t refuse to raise the debt limit, which The Federalist themselves acknowledge probably would’ve just led Manchin & Sinema to agree to a Filibuster change to prevent a shutdown & didn’t stick to his principles ( as if McConnell e’er had principles ) & didn’t stick to his threat to sabotage the chip bill, which nobody took seriously, since the businesses that pay Republicans like McConnel benefited from the bill. If anything, Republicans who like to complain ’bout China taking our jerbs & the precariousness o’ Taiwan should be embarrassed they hadn’t passed the chips bill themselves under Trump. As it turns out, McConnell is only gangster when he has a senate majority ’hind him. ¿Who’d have thought?
A Democrat Party that props up an elderly man with obvious signs of mental decay to run as the party’s presidential candidate cares only about power. And voters casting their ballots for the same man, or the even more cognitively challenged Democrat candidate who just won the Pennsylvania U.S. Senate seat, see only one thing: the “D” next to the candidate’s name.
I love how e’en in the article trying to whine ’bout how e’eryone else slanders them as being shitheads the writer couldn’t avoid being a shithead & mocking someone for having a stroke. The secret to why people voted for a man who had a stroke that left them with temporary mental weakness rather than a TV-show host who is just naturally stupid is that they have this thing called “empathy”, a foreign concept to Republicans who would rather whine ’bout their, & only their, problems, as if they matter. If you have to whine ’bout how nobody likes you, that just gives people mo’ reason to dislike you.
The establishment press likewise plays for team Democrat, and conservatives won’t change that even if they nominate the most milquetoast moderate candidate willing to don a scarlet R.
Theoretically, since Republicans haven’t done that.
Enter stage right, 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
The 2012 presidential contest also showed that the Democrat Party, its loyal members, politicians on the left side of the aisle, and the press don’t really care about a candidate’s demeanor either. Then-vice presidential candidate Joe Biden’s clownish behavior during his debate with his Republican counterpart, Paul Ryan, went ignored in the main, and the media continue to overlook Biden’s bullying behavior.
¿Why are we still talking ’bout 2012? I’m sorry Jr. Paul “I Don’t E’en Realize Rage Against the Machine Are Leftists” Ryan got fucking slayed by Biden harder than Eminem slayed MGK, but if you can’t handle a debate, stay out o’ the rap battle. That’s not bullying, that’s doing your job.
[Ignore paragraph o’ Big Hunter’s Emails]
Younger conservatives who didn’t live through the Reagan presidency can be excused for thinking Democrats are open to the right kind of Republican. But for those old enough to remember the ’80s, “come on, man.”
As the r/conservative forum & the recent voting results showed, younger conservatives are a mo’ endangered species than mountain gorillas.
The left trashed Ronald Reagan until Democrats needed to destroy George W. Bush, at which time the Gipper became the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being ever to serve as a Republican.
( Laughs ). This kind o’ pathetic hero-worship is sad. ¿Could you imagine a leftist calling Obama “the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being ever”? ¿Which side is antigovernment ’gain?
Yeah, Reagan was so kind & warm when he hired an administration that made gay jokes ’bout AIDS victims, & had been in so many scandals that there’s a Wikipedia article dedicated to it, including bank bailouts long before Bush made them famous & the infamous Iran-Contra scandal, wherein his administration illegally funneled weapons to fascists in Nicaragua, leading him to have the name “Teflon Ron”, since no matter how many illegal things he did, conservative media still refused to criticize him, since they have no standards, evidenced by their choice for “warmest” president.
And now Bush has been remade the consummate statesman. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
No, Bush is still reviled e’en by conservatives as a war criminal who tanked the US economy.
So going back to the 1st paragraph:
Donald Trump is neither a kingmaker nor the palace’s HR director charged with hiring the next court jester. He didn’t make the Republican Party, and he didn’t destroy her fortunes.
This is wrong. Thanks to shambles Bush left the Republican party in, Trump was necessary. After all, his only competition were Jeb Bush & Ted Cruz, candidates that nobody liked. Most conservatives predicted Clinton would win long before the conservative primary finished. It was only when Trump made his surprise win that the Republican party bounced back.
’Course, a large part o’ that bounce back is ignoring history, so it’s no surprise that The Federalist is trying to ignore history, since it’s the only way to make the Republican party look good after Trump broke what he resurrected.
Democrats have since refurbished this strategy by preemptively branding any potential Republican opponent the spawn of the current evil-incarnate titleholder. We saw this with Democrat and media attacks on Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, which began while Trump still resided in the White House and long before DeSantis rode the only true red wave to victory on Tuesday.
Yes, they preemptively attacked DeSantis for no reason whatsoe’er, who had no connection to Trump. That’s why Trump endorsed him in 2018, after all. & it’s not like Democrats attack DeSantis for things he does, like that Disney fiasco or Martha’s Vineyard fiasco.
Conservatives need to vacate their state of denial and accept that the Democrat Party and its politicians, voters, and paramours in the press will attack and reject any Republican put forward. And so will faux Republicans; in fact, that is how you can recognize them.
Awesome, then we’re in agreement on something.
They will push false scandals, misrepresent positions, peddle narratives to the disadvantage of Republicans, brand negative news about Democrats as disinformation, demonize the person and his (or her) voters — and they will never like us or vote with, or for, us.
Note that nowhere in this article has The Federalist provided any evidence o’ any “false” scandals. In fact, this entire article lacks any evidence @ all that is not incestuous links to themselves, which lead to mo’ sourceless thinkpieces, nothing e’en coming close to resembling sources. The only exception is a link to The Week, which they argued gainst as “incorrect”, but don’t go into details for why it’s “incorrect”. This writer would get an F @ my high school for their utter incapability o’ backing up their claims. They literally think they can say “nope, this is wrong ’cause I say so” & that it matters. No wonder nobody takes you guys seriously.
So support your candidate of choice, but realize that come 2024, to the polarized Democrats and their media mouthpieces, the Republican presidential nominee will be either Trump or Trump 2.0.
Cool, their solution is to sit round & pout & do nothing.
If they really wanted to make Democrats look bad, all they have to do is write, “Look @ how pathetic we are & Democrats still lose to us half the time. Imagine how pathetic that makes them”.
Nothing Newsmax said ’bout the election is interesting, but they do whore out their own documentary for 1/6, where they whiteknight the people involved in the attempted insurrection & complain ’bout their mistreatment, which, if true, is the tastiest karma considering the mistreatment Republicans wrought gainst middle-easterners in Guantanamo Bay, a prison that Republicans like to pretend doesn’t exist.
Real crimes were committed by protesters on Jan. 6. Yet, in the aftermath, the political party in power weaponized the Department of Justice, FBI, and other agencies — leading to unprecedented civil-rights violations of U.S. citizens who engaged in those protests.
¿How ignorant or dishonest do you have to be to call 100 or so people being mistreated “unprecedented civil-rights violations of U.S. citizens”? ¿Have they ne’er heard ’bout black people? “Like, yeah, all those lynchings were bad & all, but they’re nothing compared to a few white people not being able to clip their nails”. The only thing that makes this “unprecedented” is that it’s white conservatives being fucked for once; Republicans are fine when black people are mistreated all the time or Vietnam protesters or
I thought ’bout diving into the cesspool Truth Social, but they want my email & phone #, & fuck that. This may ’splain better than the midterms why their shares are falling fast.
Meanwhile, we have this perfect example for why nobody should take Twitter pundits ( or any pundits ) seriously when they make grand armchair theories ’bout what will win elections ( which makes one wonder why they’re giving this amazing advice ’way for free on Twitter & not charging millions for this priceless advice ):
For the record, I actually know the 1 true trick that works for winning elections, which is to promise to have the government subsidize free Taco Bell e’ery Friday to e’ery American citizen ( when elected blame conflicted legislature for the failure to pass the Taco Bell bill ); show up as a wrestler on WWF, the World Wildlife Fund; stand up gainst half-assed remakes o’ classic video games; & spend e’ery presidential speech talking ’bout what small penises & vaginas e’ery other politician has. I am awaiting my Pulitzer now.
Finally, the New York Post gives us the news we always wanted to hear: “Florida Man Makes Announcement”:
Think Murdochs are done with Trump? This morning's Foxnews website: lead story DeSantis (not Poland)–Trump's announcement is 3 levels down–underneath Fetterman and Madoff, next to the Gender Unicorn! pic.twitter.com/gjdgOKvF8T
But to those who worry that Trump may be too ol’ to run, being the same age as Biden, who was frequently lambasted for his age, when he became president, Fox News has you covered: “People age @ different rates”. So Fox News thinks Trump is a time-traveler. That’s nothing out o’ the ordinary for them.
Anyway, that’s all I can tolerate o’ this nuclear waste. Hopefully that will be all for any political content for… hopefully till November 2023, but I don’t think The Atlantic will be able to wait that long to release a stupid article defending water poisoning or paedophilia or something.
