Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

So very ready.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

Stand up, dammit!

Anne Laurie is a fucking hero in so many ways. ~ Betty Cracker

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

T R E 4 5 O N

This chaos was totally avoidable.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

You are here: Home / Archives for 2014

Archives for 2014

Open Sports Thread: “Sam Agonistes”

by | 95 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Deadspin reprints Christopher Glazek’s piece from Out Magazine:

Michael Sam, the first openly gay player drafted into the NFL, is a big fucking deal. This fact alarms many people — not least Sam himself, who mistrusts the media and who expressed skepticism, the day I met him in New York, that his coming out was really an act of courage, as nearly everyone has proclaimed…

The first 15 minutes of the interview were excruciating. Sam refused to make eye contact with me. His answers were curt & nonrevealing. What was college like? “It’s a normal school.” How did you like living in Columbia, Mo.? “It’s a normal town.” He delivered his responses as rebuttals, swatting away my questions as if blocking kicks from a tedious adversary… I was starting to understand why he won defensive player of the year. The only information he volunteered was that he felt annoyed that the photo shoot had run over and thrown off his schedule. “I don’t like when the plan changes,” he huffed.

Desperate to turn things around, I started talking about myself and mentioned visiting a boyfriend in upstate New York. Suddenly Sam’s head perked up; for the first time, he looked me in the eyes. “Wait—you’re gay?” I wasn’t sure how this could have been unclear. “Uh, yes,” I replied, wondering how he was going to take the news. “Oh!” he blurted, his voice rising five octaves. “And Aaron [Hicklin, Out‘s editor in chief]? Is he gay, too?” I nodded. His face melted into a smile; he inched his chair closer to the table and loosened the furrow in his brow. “I thought you guys were straight! That’s why I was giving you a hard time.” His eyes, which had glared with impermeability all through the shoot, suddenly started to radiate warmth and comradeship. Sam’s metamorphosis was so sudden and cartoonish, it suggested how much energy he was having to expend to protect his sexual orientation from people he feared would use it against him…

Over the past four months, as Sam’s fortunes have swung from the giddiest highs to the most deflating lows, he has been freighted with inordinate expectations from all quarters. To satisfy his skeptics, he has had to clear an ever-expanding set of personal and professional hurdles: In effect, he has had to walk prouder, play harder, earn less, and allow himself to be fumbled around as the media’s football in a way unknown to the vast majority of his comparatively anonymous peers.

Sam’s supporters have been nearly as unreasonable…

Open Sports Thread: “Sam Agonistes”Post + Comments (95)

Peak Cole

by | 114 Comments

This post is in: 

John Cole, blogger and influential man of letters (bolding mine).

This is an exhilarating time to be alive. All our efforts, all our resources, our consumption and tastes are maxing out in unison. Everything is hitting its peak.

After Australian researchers announced in April this year that the world had attained “peak beard”, a resource not supposed to be finite, other peaks followed. There were peak suburbs, peak hipsters, peak travel, peak narcissism and peak Beyoncé. There have been countless food peaks: banana, bacon, burgers, ramen, burrito and Freans (too many biscuits).

[…] The obvious question is: have we reached peak peak? Given the parodies (such as “Kittens Reaching Peak Cuteness” on the Daily Mash website), we must be climbing Mount Peak’s upper slopes, at the very least. In which case the interesting question is: where did this phrase come from – and why did it gain such traction?

[….] “Have we reached peak X?” belongs to a family of tropes known as snowclones – a templated phrase whose components offer tireless possibilities for adaptation and regeneration. Other examples are “X is the new Y”, “We are all X now” and “How I learned to stop X and love Y”. The authority on Snowclones is the Language Log blog run by celebrated linguists Geoffrey Pullum and Mark Liberman. […]

There is some good news, though. Liberman remembers the first time he noticed the phrase. It was in 2008, when the US writer John Cole blogged that “we may have hit and passed Peak Wingnut”, a derogatory term for rightwingers.

Cole’s post is nearly six years old, but can he recall what inspired the phrase? “I came up with ‘peak wingnut’ because I was shocked,” Cole says. “The Republicans seemed to get crazier and crazier. The source of it is [US blogger] Kevin Drum. At the Washington Monthly, one of the things he was always talking about was peak oil.”

John probably forgot to mention his big turn in the news because of work or something, but correcting a minor oversight like that is why he brought on co-bloggers in the first place. The potential impact that our little blog has had in the world makes me teary. Just remember to tell your kids one day that you were among roughly 107,000 unique visitors (-ish, we peak around elections) on the day when it happened.

Peak ColePost + Comments (114)

The Deserving Dead

by | 274 Comments

This post is in: , ,

I’m sympathetic to arguments that grave-dancing is unseemly and that we lefties should leave ghoulish glee over the untimely demise of idiots to our more bloodthirsty brethren on the right. On the other hand, it’s hard not to at least perceive karmic justice when a loud-mouthed gun-humper takes a slug in the noggin after handing an Uzi to a nine-year-old girl.

But on the subject of the better angels of our nature and our ability to look past political differences to embrace our common humanity, Zack Beauchamp at Vox is a better person than I am. Writing about Douglas McCain (Twitter handle: Duale Khalid), an American who went to Syria to join ISIS and then got himself killed in a skirmish this week, Beauchamp says:

Regardless of how you think about these problems [the radicalization of Americans], reading the tweets reminds you that this is a real person we’re talking. McCain made terrible choices, and died fighting for an evil cause. But it’s hard not to be haunted by this:

Yeah, no. The only thing that haunts me is the prospect that some of the American idiots who traveled to the Middle East to fight for those evil ISIS motherfuckers will eventually return unencased in a body bag. Rather than heavenly mercy, I hope McCain’s “bros” get drone suppositories. Does that make me a bad person?

The Deserving DeadPost + Comments (274)

Hey White America, Stop Killing One Another

by | 18 Comments

This post is in: 

Folks seem to love to cite the “epidemic” that is black on black crime. But maybe it’s time White Americans take a look in the mirror:

The disturbing truth, according to the FBI’s most recent homicide statistics, is that the United States is in the wake of an epidemic of white-on-white crime. Back in 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, a staggering 83 percent of white murder victims were killed by fellow Caucasians.

And we’re not even talking about just crime here, this is straight up murder. This should be an interesting talking point for Obama to mention, don’t you think? Team Blackness also discussed cops’ inability to deal with mental illness, a black man who apparently shot himself in the chest while his hands were cuffed behind his back, and Michael Sam’s NFL showering habits.

Subscribe on iTunes | Subscribe On Stitcher | Direct Download | RSS

Hey White America, Stop Killing One AnotherPost + Comments (18)

Referee thoughts

by | 21 Comments

This post is in: , ,

The pre-season for fall soccer in the US is winding down and my regular season starts tomorrow night with a great high school game between last year’s Big School Division girls state champion versus the Big School/nationally Top-10 team from two states over.  I’m looking forward to that game as it should be one of the better games of the year.  Good chance there will be fourteen or fifteen players with current full D-1 scholarship offers on the field at a time.  Seldom see that many full scholarship players on the field in a college game. 

Here are a couple of things that have been on my mind for the past couple of weeks:

Card policy in the preseason:

Is the preseason the time to be lenient as the games don’t count for anything more than breaking a good sweat, working on mechanics, and getting some good game tape for the coaches to pore over?  Or is it the time to issue ticky-tack yellow cards to deal with issues early and in a fairly cost free manner as cards don’t accumulate.  Should we be carding for uniform violations when during the season, the appropriate course of action is “Hey #23, take care of it at the next whistle….” or should we be carding for that foul that could be, if we squint the right way, a tactical foul, or just award a simple direct free kick?  I’ve worked with refs who go in all directions on this.  What do you think?

My assignors love/hate me.

This weekend I’m working my first game in a new college conference.  This conference is significantly higher in quality of play than the other college conferences I’ve worked in the past.  Traditionally, the way a ref is broken into a new conference is they get a couple of games on the line to acclimate to the style and expectations of play, and then an easy center.  I just received a game from my assignor between two teams who, in the past five matches, have had a combined 15 red cards.  I’m in the middle.  And, I’m being assessed.  I’m not sure if my assignor loves me, and wants to give me a chance to shine, or hates me. 

How to tell a friend that it is time to step back

I was working a girls high school varsity scrimmage last night in a double dual/three whistle system.  Good game between two quality teams.  My center segment goes fine.  A fellow ref who has been reffing for thirty five years has the middle segment in the center.  Blue was pushing a high offside line and an aggressive big ball counter-attack strategy. I  was the side official for the Blue defensive end.  I noticed half a dozen times that I was the defacto center as the true center was fifteen yards behind Blue’s second to last defender and the ball was rapidly advancing up field on a Blue counterattack. 

He was not doing himself any good, he was not doing the players any good, and he was not doing his crew any good.  How does one tell a colleague that maybe it is time to shift down to very small school varsity games, and middle school where the running requirements are miniscule?  He just can’t cover ground anymore and he can’t sell a good call from 50 yards away. 

Damn the World Cup

Every World Cup year sees moderately skilled players try to do what they saw on TV.  And the coaches reanchor their expectations of physicality in one direction only as they saw the arm bars the Germans were using without getting called for it, so they want their players to lock out, and then scream bloody murder when there is minor hand fighting. 

Time to run

Soccer refereeing fitness is always a different beast than general running fitness.  A good general fitness level is a necessary precondition, but a few weeks of the stop, go, walk, haul ass, backpedal, slide step, spin, haul ass routine is needed to get the legs in good shape again.  I took six weeks off this summer for family time, and I was feeling the reconditioning process in the first two weeks of preseason.

Referee thoughtsPost + Comments (21)

Sorry Grover, Sometimes Government is the Solution

by | 97 Comments

This post is in: 

Via Hilzoy, some great news:

The number of homeless veterans in the United States has fallen 33 percent since 2010, to just under 50,000 as of January. The number of homeless veterans sleeping in the street, as opposed to in shelters, fell even faster, down nearly 40 percent over the past four years.

At least those were the figures put out by a trio of federal agencies in a news release Tuesday. When I first saw the numbers, I was more than a little skeptical. A change that dramatic often reflects a shift in the way data is collected or some other statistical quirk, not a trend. Moreover, the Obama administration has every incentive to make the numbers look good, especially at a time when the Department of Veterans Affairs is mired in scandal.

I’ve looked into the numbers, though, and it seems my skepticism was misplaced. The number of homeless veterans really does seem to be falling. What’s more, it’s falling at least in large part due to government intervention.

50k is still a large number of people, and it would be nice if we would treat all homeless people the way we feel obligated (but often never act) to take care of homeless veterans, but this is still a positive thing in an increasingly ugly world. Click through to read the whole story.

Sorry Grover, Sometimes Government is the SolutionPost + Comments (97)