Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

This country desperately needs a functioning Fourth Estate.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Fight them, without becoming them!

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

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

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

In after Baud. Damn.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

Never forget that he train is barreling down on Trump, even as he dances on the tracks.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

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Archives for June 2016

Open Thread: Ivanka, It May Be Time to Hide Daddy’s Car Keys…

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When does it stop being a joke, and start being a genuine issue?

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Brexit: “I Want My Country Back”

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I owe some commentor a hat tip for this rather-too-close-to-home rant. Laurie Penny, in the New Statesman:

… So, here’s the thing. This was never a referendum on the EU. It was a referendum on the modern world, and yesterday the frightened, parochial lizard-brain of Britain voted out, out, out, and today we’ve all woken up still strapped onto this ghost-train as it hurtles off the tracks. Leave voters are finding they care less about immigration now that their pension pots are under threat. Maybe one of the gurning pundits promising them pride and sovereignty should have mentioned that, but they were too busy lying about the NHS. The curtain has been torn away and now we all have to look at the men behind it. They are not good men.

Anyone feel like they’ve got their country back yet? No? That, after all, was the rallying cry of the Leave campaign – the transatlantic echo of “Make America Great Again”. There’s a precedent for what happens when svengalis with aggressively terrible haircuts are allowed to appeal to parochialism and fear in the teeth of a global recession, and it isn’t pretty…

There are huge areas of post-industrial decline and neglect where people are more furious than Cameron and his ilk could possibly understand, areas where any kind of antiestablishment rabble-rousing sounds like a clarion call. In depressed mountain villages and knackered seaside towns and burned-out former factory heartlands across the country, ordinary people were promised that for once, their vote would matter, that they could give the powers that be a poke in the eye. Westminster may have underestimated how very much it is hated by those to whom mainstream politics have not spoken in generations…

In the meantime, the cackling clown-car drivers rolling this catastrophe over the wreckage of civil society are already cheerfully admitting that they lied about their key campaign statements. No, there won’t be £350m more to spend on the NHS, whatever Farage wrote on his battle bus. It turns out that the reason you can’t get a GP appointment isn’t because of immigration, but because the Conservatives have spent six years systematically defunding the health service and cutting public spending to the bone. Brexit will mean more of that, not less…

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Help WV If You Will

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atheist

Many of you know how how I feel about religion- but since I have some time, I might as well post it again now. Long story short, I really have no use for it. I’m not a believer, I don’t think it should guide our political discourse, and I hate the destructive impact it so often seems to have on so many people.

On the other hand, I’m also not the asshole who needs to run around and convince everyone else there is no God or to abuse people who believe- I’m kind of with Marc Maron on this. I may agree with Richard Dawkins a lot, but man is he an asshole.

At any rate, my mom was a Quaker and my dad’s mom was Catholic but for some reason he was a Methodist, but when they moved here to Bethany, WV they both became Disciples of Christ. I went to church as a kid and was baptized before I had a say, but none of it really stuck. My only really profound memories of church and religion are giggling inappropriately. Disciples is actually a rather progressive church, LGBT inclusive, that was partially founded in Bethany.

Back to the point- even though I am not a believer or a member, I generally choose to give them money every time they have a bake sale, or pancake dinner, or what not, because they are good people, my friends and neighbors, and I trust them to make the most out of whatever I give them. I guess I think of it as a small way to help my community. Anything that makes that many people happy and gives them comfort is worth keeping, in my book, and they are not out actively doing harm like many churches and religious sects (see Tony Perkins and those human scum). This is the place that helps my friends when their loved ones dies, the place where people go to be married.

So when it comes to donating to help people struck by the floods, they were my first choice, and if you are so inclined, this would be a good place to donate. It’s a local congregation that one of my friends recommends and they have a modest and attainable fundraising goal, so if you have a few bucks you want to chip in, these folks would make the most of what you donate.

Here’s the link for the gofundme.

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This Week in Defeating Rape Culture

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Houston Press ran a fabulous essay that demolishes one of creepsters’ main defenses: that they’re awkward with women. After listing a bunch of first-person narratives by women who were groped, grossly propositioned, leered at, and otherwise abused, Jef Rouner writes:

This is not being “awkward.” Ross from Friends was awkward when he would flirt with girls by naming types of gas. This is being a creep and hoping that a combination of societal expectations and fear of escalation on the part of the person you’re creeping on will allow you to get away with it consequence-free.

It’s easy to hide this as the lasting repercussions of childhood bullying or frustrated romantic hang-ups from adolescence, but, sorry, that’s a cop-out. The “nerds are sexless losers who can’t get a date” was already an aging trope when I was growing up in the ’90s, and in a post-Matrix world where hackers are also ninjas and occasionally Jesus, this sort of idea doesn’t really fly. Geek went mainstream a long time ago. Calling yourself an otaku is not a get-out-of-all-social-responsibilities-free card.

Truth is this behavior is not a clumsy misunderstanding of how courtship and human interaction work. It’s the end by-product of years of ingesting rape culture telling you that touching women without their permission or assigning them as sex partners whether they’re interested or not is okay. You can choose to understand this, or you can choose to ignore it and pretend it isn’t there. However, do not be surprised if women avoid your company when you do the latter. It’s not because you’re awkward. It’s because you scare them….

And this:

Life is not a John Hughes flick, and there’s a reason why when most of us re-watch the “loser pursues the girl until she loves him” genre of film, we start to feel a little sick to our stomachs. Duckie Dale was a creep, Lloyd Dobler wasn’t much better, and if anyone acted like Randy from Valley Girl around my daughter, I would have that bastard under a restraining order.

Amen. Read the whole thing: it’s great.

Meanwhile, Laura Hilgers writes powerfully in the Times of the economic toll her daughter’s rape during her freshman year of college had on her family:

It would be impossible for me to describe in the space of a newspaper article the emotional toll this took on Willa and our family: the grief we felt that our child’s body (and soul) had been violated; the anger that we (and the college) could not protect her; the fear that our once spirited, ambitious daughter might never be more than a shell of herself. But I can offer, by way of illustration, a financial reckoning — collateral damage that demonstrates the devastation, and that rarely comes up in the national discussion on campus sexual assaults.

The financial burdens of an attack can be overwhelming. A 2014 White House report noted that the cost to survivors (of all types, not just college students) can range from $87,000 to $240,776 per rape. While the numbers are staggering, they seem abstract until your family is the one paying the bills. In our case, they were on the higher end of the range.

Then she breaks it down, the major categories being lost wages (parents and daughter, who is now 22 and starting her sophomore year—so about three years spent recovering), addiction treatment and rehab, lost tuition, therapy, and various unreimbursed medical expenses. She and her ex-husband–”writers not investment bankers,” she notes–paid by borrowing from family and their retirement funds; also using the proceeds of a house they sold.

She notes:

We’re fortunate to have top-tier health insurance, which helped defray many of the costs. But this is still an extraordinary amount of money, and I often wonder how survivors from less privileged backgrounds recover from these attacks. It’s not a hypothetical question.

No it isn’t—and I’m sure the answer is devastating.

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Open Thread: Donald Trump, Insult Muppet

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As you probably know, Donald Trump went to Scotland yesterday, not as a politician but to ballyhoo his idiot son’s second vanity-project golf resort. Since his arrival coincided with the #Brexit vote, he seized the opportunity to yammer jingoistic garbage — and the Scots were quick to respond. The tweet above, via Quartz, is my personal favorite so far. (Rough translation: “Go away you hamster-topped idiot, go boil your head [to make moron soup]”.) But there’s a rich lode for mining: polyester cockwomble; weaselheaded fucknugget; tiny fingered, Cheeto-faced, ferret wearing shitgibbon…

Buzzfeed has a nice selection, too — witless fucking cocksplat! Mangled apricot hellbeast! SPOON! [as in: Too dumb to be allowed the use of a fork].

Lord Short Thumbs is such a chaos muppet, he’s even managed to break Reddit. Per Jesse Singal at NYMag:

Ever since it became clear that Donald Trump was a serious threat to win the Republican presidential nomination, people have pointed out that the man doesn’t seem to hold solid, ideologically grounded positions in the way most politicians do. Many politicians flip-flop and present a massaged version of themselves in national elections, of course, but in Trump’s case there doesn’t appear to be much there there. He speaks in the language of resentment — his platform is simply Screw you, elites and Screw you, immigrants, screamed over and over at a deafening volume.

Much the same can be said about his most dedicated online followers. They are obsessed with fighting social-justice warriors, with breaking what they see as the chafing constrictions of “political correctness.” It’s a formula that works: People can’t get enough of arguments about who is offending whom, whether people are too outraged, whether people are too outraged over other people’s outrage, and so on.

For these and other reasons, tDonald Trump subreddit, r/The_Donald, has become one of the largest, most active and most influential places for Trump fans to gather, to the point where it has garnered major media attention, hosted AMAs with alt-right heroes like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter, and, naturally, pissed off hordes of progressives with its denizens’ over-the-top antics.

But all is not well at r/The_Donald. Earlier this week, the moderator most responsible for launching the subreddit to its current lofty perch, CisWhiteMaelstrom (known more recently as Dylan-W), was removed from his position by the subreddit’s own mods, according to a post from those mods that went up late Tuesday. His story offers a tidy online microcosm of the Trump phenomenon itself, of the question of what it means to perform outrage online and how the act of doing so can be used for selfish and manipulative purposes…

The moderator responsible for the banning explained to Singal:

… Dylan-W/CisWhiteMaelstrom privately told me about this plan of his to create an alt right subreddit, to hand it over to white nationalist celebrities Jared Taylor, Walt Bismarck, and Richard Spencer, and to promote it on /r/the_donald using /u/Dylan-W. Having a moderator of the largest pro-Trump subreddit promote people that Trump himself would disavow does nothing to help Trump. It does, however, give credibility to the left wing narrative that Trump’s campaign is built on racism. Back in February Cis was helping us to keep white nationalists out of /r/the_donald, now he’s looking into promoting them and recruiting some of their leaders to run things. I do not support white nationalists and I don’t have reason to believe that Cis personally holds the views of these people. That said, this is not about what any one person on the moderator list believes in. This is about doing what is best for Donald Trump. The people who Cis said he would hand control of an alt right subreddit to are people who promote the idea of creating a white ethnostate in the United States. They are people that Trump would want nothing to do with. Just as Trump would, we disavow them…

Just in case you were worried that the public antics of the nuttier #BernOuts made the Democrats look like the biggest bunch of self-obsessed nitpickers and conspiracy theorists in modern American politics.

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