From the Washington Post, “Matthew Shepard Will be interred at Washington National Cathedral”:
When Matthew Shepard died on a cold night 20 years ago, after being beaten with a pistol butt and tied to a wooden fence, his parents cremated the 21-year-old and kept his ashes, for fear of drawing attention to a resting place of a person who was a victim of one of the nation’s worst anti-gay hate crimes.
But now with an anniversary of their son’s murder approaching on Friday, the Shepards have decided to inter his remains inside the crypt at Washington National Cathedral, where gay equality activists say they can be a prominent symbol and even a pilgrimage destination for the movement…
On Oct. 26 this year, his ashes will be placed in a niche in the National Cathedral’s columbarium, a private, off-limits area on the lower level of the massive Gothic cathedral, which is the seat of the Episcopal Church and a popular spot for high-profile national spiritual events. Shepard, who had been active in the Episcopal Church, will be one of about 200 people whose remains have been interred at the cathedral in the past century…
The Oct. 26 service will be open to the public and will be presided over by Washington’s Episcopal bishop, Mariann Edgar Budde, and Bishop Gene Robinson, whose 2003 ordination as the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church set off a dramatic split in the denomination that is still unfolding.
Robinson is friends with Judy and Dennis Shepard…
Dennis and Judy Shepard said that their son loved the Episcopal Church. As a child, he was an acolyte while his mother taught Sunday school; when he moved to Laramie for college, he joined an Episcopal church community there, Dennis said.
“He loved the ceremony, the pomp and circumstance that went with it,” he said. “I think he’d be thrilled to know that he’s home, in a place that he would like, a sanctuary. … I think he’s laughing about the whole thing. ‘All this time, I finally ended up in the perfect spot. No wonder you wouldn’t do anything with my ashes.’ It’s like it’s meant to be.”…
On the Road and In Your Backyard
bystander
Moanin’ Joe is appalled by twitler’s response to the Khashoggi murder. Katy Kay explains it as being “transactional”. Not long before bothsides arrives front and center.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone ???
Immanentize
Good morning Rikyrah, good morning all.
I still think Kushner probably green-lighted Khashoggi’s kidnapping. And
Didn’t Andrew Sullivan have some constant bug up his butt that Mathew Sheppard was not really killed because he was gay but because mmff gffufddfs ssdi? I wonder if he is having to smoke an even fatter joint with this news.
OzarkHillbilly
Woman who bought shredded Banksy artwork will go through with purchase
I like her style.
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
Baud
@Immanentize: Was he killed for being a Dem? That would make it ok.
Immanentize
@Baud: Hi Baud. I really have forgotten Sullivan’s whole theory of why another gay man’s suffering other than his own was meaningless. And I am loathe to look it up, but I probably ought to refresh my recollection. I could have misrenembered, but it was so odd, I think I am recalling this correctly.
Baud
Speaking of gasbags, if you’re not amused by Trump, you shouldn’t be amused by Kanye. Fascists all.
Baud
@Immanentize: I have never understood that guy’s popularity.
Immanentize
@Immanentize: Yep, I remember correctly. Not gonna link…. But it seems (according to Sully) Shepard was just a bad man meth dealer killed by a couple of nice fellows looking to rob his house.
Immanentize
@Baud: Everyone loves a British accent.
Baud
@Immanentize: Britain isn’t sending us their best.
Anne Laurie
@Immanentize: Not gonna be arsed to wallow in Sully’s sewer, but IIRC, he lectured all us bleeding-heart liberals that getting publicly ANGRY about a young man being murdered by a couple young white working-class blokes was only going to make things worse for the (surviving) gays. It was uncivil! It would make decent NPR totebaggers start… I dunno, avoiding Andy Sullivan at the best Provincetown brunches, maybe? Or the YWWCB’s friends might feel empowered to seek out & beat up other gays, because they’d feel disrespected. Also, Shepherd was not The Right KInd of Gay, by Sullivan’s standards…
Has it really been twenty years? Seems like, well, we’re still hearing the same godsdamned pap being mouthed by the same godsdamned bigots and bigot-enablers!
Schlemazel
@Baud:
I am not amused by mental illness in any form.
Unrelated to Baud’s comment but to the thread so far. Why has anyone ever considered l’il Andy anyone worth reading? Seriously, I know JC luved him some Sullivan back in the day but he always struck me as a pompous ass who thought way too much of himself & too little of other people.
OzarkHillbilly
Cole’s wish has come true: ‘We believe survivors’: BrettKavanaugh.com becomes resource for sexual assault victims
Baud
@Schlemazel: You and I are on the same page.
Schlemazel
@OzarkHillbilly:
His wish was for barto’kavanaugh.com to become a resources for alcohol recovery resources. It is a great idea & as soon as I win the lotto . . .
JPL
hmmm This is from the editor of telegraph uk.. How long before fox news follows?
@concoughlin
montanareddog
Speaking of bigotry-related stories, there is this one from the Netherlands
The residents of a new development with wind instrument-related street names petitioned the local council to change the name of Hobo (Eng: oboe) because it sounds to much like homo. The council agreed but has now reversed the decision, thankfully.
But, not noticed in the story,is that the name of the next street in the development is the Dutch word for Bassoon – wait for it, Fagot. Apparently, the residents of that street either have poor American-English language skills (unlikely) or they are not quite so stupid.
debbie
@Baud:
OMG, I listened to sizeable chunks of that 40+ minute diatribe. Someone needs to tell Kanye that he was not misdiagnosed.
debbie
@Immanentize:
I wonder if there’s any indication he’s since come to regret that remark? Like all those NYCers who called the Central Park Five monsters?
Schlemazel
@montanareddog:
I was watching a show last night & as the credits rolled I noticed one of the people listed was “Richard Faggot” All I could think about was how much grief do you think that kid had to put up with?
A few years back the state of Iowa started issuing license plates with 3 letter-3 number combinations. They had to recall all the plates with G-A-Y as the letters because cars were being vandalized if they had these plates. We are not dealing with the brightests & best here.
satby
@Baud: the three of us could practically finish each other’s sentences we think SO alike!
@rikyrah: Good morning sweetie!
@Schlemazel: how are you doing today?
rikyrah
@Immanentize:
You are on point, I’mma.
Baud
@debbie:
Kristen Welker of NBC News says it could help with the black vote in the midterms.
debbie
@Baud:
Ah, pandering. The Great American drug.
Baud
Turkey reportedly getting mad at the Saudis about the murder. Saudi should have killed Khashoggi at their American embassy in Washington.
Schlemazel
@debbie:
Andy ALWAYS comes around to correct his statements. He NEVER regrets them, never admits he was wrong and in fact often returns to defend his initial wrong take. Long after the debate has moved on and the original opinion has done its damage he will correct his statement without the slightest hint of embarrassment. This has allowed people to claim he is capable of learning and getting better. They ignore the the next opportunity he will again give cover for the worst of the worst. He also has gone back & supported really bad ideas like “The Bell Curve” after claiming he understood it was wrong and correcting his original support. He is as intellectually dishonest as they come
Baud
It’s amazing those astronauts survived.
satby
@montanareddog: @Schlemazel: so funny story about what an introvert I used to be. An introvert who read a lot of historical fiction. I didn’t know that faggot was a gay slur, but when I heard a gay friend tell the story of how someone called him that at a store I actually said “isn’t a faggot a bundle of sticks? Why would he call you that?”
For years after our code for gay was “bundle of sticks”.
rikyrah
Wednesday, it was 85 degrees.
I sit here this morning in my WINTER coat and a scarf.
This weather is trying to give me pneumonia ???
debbie
@Schlemazel:
Ah, then he’s the perfect Republican. Sheesh.
Gin & Tonic
@Immanentize: As I put it downstairs, all I want for Christmas is to see Jared Kushner indicted as an accessory to murder. Which I believe he is.
Schlemazel
@satby:
Physically I am hurting less today. Emotionally I am still a mess. I had a phone conversation with the Dr last night & am still highly agitated about his work. 2 months ago he used a cystoscope to look around & found a huge stone in my bladder & smaller ones in the diverticulum (I saw them on the video screen while he worked & we discussed them). Wed he found nothing in my bladder and only some calcified mass in the diverticulum. When I asked he claimed he never saw any large stone. could be a couple of weeks before the pathology report gets back and then he wants to run the whole battery of tests all over again.
I applied to see if I can get into Mayo. It is a bit over an hour drive from here but I am feeling it wouldn’t be worse
Patricia Kayden
@Baud: When Kenya grabbed the mic from Taylor Swift, he should have been shunned by polite company and his fans should have deserted him. The irony is how Taylor has come out as a progressive and Kanye is fully supportive of a racist president after decrying Bush for hating Black people.
Baud
@satby: “Gay” used to mean happy.
@Patricia Kayden: The world has turned upside down.
OzarkHillbilly
@Schlemazel: That’s right. My bad.
satby
@Schlemazel: I hope you get in to Mayo. I’ll keep my fingers crossed. I’d be looking for a new doctor too.
rikyrah
They put children in cages.
A rapist on the Supreme Court.
And, WE are supposed to be civil?
Phuck Outta Here ? ?
https://twitter.com/brianbeutler/status/1050492144266502145
rikyrah
@Schlemazel:
Hope that you can get into Mayo
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I’m sure that most black folk are as eager as Kanye to get rid of the 13th Amendment, what’s Kristen smokin’?
OzarkHillbilly
@satby:Faggot also once meant “cigarette”.
Baud
@rikyrah:
I really love Hillary’s recent comment on that.
Matt McIrvin
@Immanentize: I definitely remember conservatives insisting it was not a hate crime but an ordinary robbery. I didn’t know Sullivan was pushing that line.
Eural Joiner
Re: Kanye and the mid-terms
Purely anecdotal but I teach hundreds of urban youth who are all into Kanye…the musician/celebrity, not the intellectual. A lot of these kids are not real well informed about current politics but with very, very rare exceptions they howl with laughter at his rants and “political” commentary. The only ones persuaded by his pro-Trump stuff are the ones who were already in that tent. Just my experience :)
Kay
@Baud:
Amazing he felt excluded by “I’m with her”. You can’t even say “her” without that being perceived as excluding men. Huh. But “him” doesn’t exclude women, and they would laugh if you said it.
Imagine if women did this – “I felt excluded by the fact that 90% of powerful people are men, so I could not support him, obviously”. Maybe at some point we’ll all explore the role of sexism in Trump’s rise, but that time has not arrived.
CliosFanboy
Sullivan is also one of the “that was not Sarah Palin’s baby, it was her daughter’s!” nut jobs…. Americans really can be suckers for a British accent.
rikyrah
In moderation. Please help
rikyrah
Just dust ? ?
https://twitter.com/SInow/status/1050057048686092288
Anne Laurie
@OzarkHillbilly:
Brits were still using ‘fag’ that way in living memory — probably the older ones still are. That’s definitely from the ‘bundle of sticks’ etymology, since working-class Brits used to buy single cigarettes from corner newsdealers.
On the other hand, in British public (i.e., private) schools going back to the ‘glory’ days of Victoria’s Empire, younger boys would be assigned to fag for older ones — to act as their servants, fetch & carry for them, keep their room clean. Of course, given teenager hormones, especially among teenagers being explicitly trained to exploit other human beings, you know exactly how some of those older teens took advantage of the “rules”. That’s almost certainly how the word became a slur targeted at homosexuals.
Immanentize
@debbie: It wasn’t just a comment, it was several long posts, articles, and defenses. He started off supporting Dreher, then owned it like a boss
Baud
@Kay: It’s Hillary’s fault for being binary, I guess.
Kay
@Baud:
I felt like the “Sully” love was part of liberals weird penchant for needing validation from conservatives. Like their views aren’t valid unless there is a fancy conservative who approves them. Like they actually believe it’s a “center Right country” so Sullivan turning against Iraq means they were RIGHT about Iraq.
Anne Laurie
@Matt McIrvin:
It’s analogous to the (conservative) women insisting that any woman who’s raped must have been “asking for it”. If Matthew Shepherd was murdered just for being gay, and not because he was secretly dealing meth / cruising the wrong dudes / overly flamboyant in a conservative area, then Andrew Sullivan might end up on the wrong end of some violent bigot’s violent impulses — and Andrew Sullivan DOES NOT WANT to think that might happen.
Ken
@Gin & Tonic: Considering the people he’s dealing with, prison for life might be the best of his options.
OzarkHillbilly
@rikyrah: Must be a dawgdamned dust storm.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: The Soyuz has a really good and time-tested launch escape system. They had a couple of non-fatal launch accidents in the past that were even crazier than this one–an abort after launch in 1975 and a rocket that caught fire and blew up on the pad in 1983. In both cases the capsule got away safely.
OzarkHillbilly
@Anne Laurie: It only happens to those people.
Jeffro
@Anne Laurie: and they’re still lecturing us about getting angry over the shit they say & do. Just another double standard.
Just a couple more weeks to go, and then we can put all that awful librul anger to good use, folks. Double-check those registrations! It seems like half of the states have been purging voter rolls like crazy, some in defiance of court orders.
Kay
@Baud:
Maybe they’re doing it but Democratic strategists need to think seriously about this. Now that they have the first major candidate so they have some more real information. I remember sitting in an Obama organizing meeting early on- before he won the primary- and the organizer calmly and matter of factly explaining we needed (white) “validators” in my county so white people wouldn’t be freaked out by his race. “Validators” are well known in the community and can therefore reassure skittish voters. This wasn’t presented as social theory. It was presented as a practical obstacle that could be surmounted. I suppose they could have DENIED that white people would be freaked out, but they instead decided to deal with reality.
Needs exploration, despite the vehement denials, it exists. Not our fault but it is our problem. Not sure how we’ll get around “her” but people are clever and they’ll figure something out.
Baud
@Kay: That makes sense. It’s one of the things that annoys me about us.
Baud
@Kay: Will you validate me, Kay?
Chyron HR
I think if Matthew Shepard was alive today despite having been lynched, he’d agree that Melanie is the most bullied person ever.
Schlemazel
@Kay:
This is why I have felt that the first woman President would be a Republican (but then I thought that the first person of color would have to be also) they do a decent job of providing ‘validators’ but a much better job od demolishing Dem ones.
I put no stock in the ravings of a mentally ill man so I am not convinced the there is an issue with “I’m with her“. The loss in ’16 had many fathers and I think gender bias was a very minor player. Yeah, we need to work to make it not an issue at all.
Platonailedit
@Kay:
I never got the amurkan left, ‘middle’ & right’s obsession what pundtwits say every fucking day or with every fucking op-ed drivel. No other nation gives a shit about bloviators like us of a does. Lack of self thinking or self reflection?
Baud
@Schlemazel: I think it was a big part in losing enough progressive men to Hillary Hate.
Schlemazel
@Baud:
I did not get that impression from the calling & door knocking I did. But that is admittedly a small sample size & did not include places like Michigan where a few votes would have made the difference.
Steve in the ATL
@Schlemazel: and I always thought that we’d have a Latinx President before having a black one.
Of course, my political prognostication skills improved dramatically after I had dinner at a restaurant on Quinnipiac Street last night.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I see my R House member (Roskam) is listed as endangered. It would be super exciting if the first vote I cast in my new place contributed to a seat flipping to D.
Kay
@Platonailedit:
I just found him unbearable. “I will now air my views on US health care” or, worse, “let’s talk about at-risk pregnancies”
OMFG, he knows nothing about these things.
That’s why it was all “point… counter-point!”. It was all pulling it out of his ass bullshit. But it benefited everyone. They were all in on it. Liberals would just glow with pleasure when Sully told them they were “grappling with hard questions” or whatever.
MazeDancer
How about helping to Flip the House, today?
Got some fresh addresses to write PostCards for Jenifer Wexton, Vangie Williams, and Harley Rouda. Two VA, and one Remove the Ruskie Rohrabacher in CA.
Get addresses: PostCardPatriots.com
And, why, yes, I will be spamming the threads a bit more in the next week and a half.
Gotta Flip the House, people. Must happen.
chris
Morning chuckle, Daniel Dale discovers the joys of the Left Coast.
Kay
@Baud:
I do too. Everyone will get mad at me but I also felt her platform and approach were dated. Not current enough. It’s not the age of the candidate. It’s if they stay current- in touch with their voters and their base. Pelosi does, Schumer doesn’t. Schumer could be 50 or 90- if he doesn’t know what’s going on it doesn’t matter. Some of these people could be transported back to 1996 and they would fit in better. I feel like Warren is intensely tuned in. Aware.
Elizabelle
@rikyrah: Today’s the first really cool morning in Richmond, VA. Which means: sweater for the early morning. And it’s already warming up.
We have the Richmond Folk Festival in town this weekend. Mavis Staples tomorrow night — think I have to go see her.
Hildebrand
@Schlemazel: I can guarantee you that in Michigan, misogyny was a significant factor. The suburbs and exurbs around Detroit definitely have a very evident strain of bias against women in any leadership position. The auto industry is a pretty ‘he-man woman hater’s club’ type of environment – I know women who both work the line and work as top engineers, and they live with this crap every single day. It filters out into everything around here – my wife is a Lutheran pastor, and she has never dealt with the kind of direct, open misogyny she has dealt with here (and we have lived in North Dakota, Indiana, and Deep South Texas).
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@montanareddog: Also shows up as the name of an organ stop, which presumably sounds oboe-ish. I once heard an organ piece which introduces you to all the stops one at a time with a little poem. It’s a perfectly good word, with the emphasis on the second syllable so it doesn’t even sound like the slang American word.
Nevertheless, the composer introduced it with this little ditty:
The Clarion needs Marian.
The Fagot does not.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Elizabelle: It’s 36 degrees right now. High of 48 predicted. Winter is coming.
For Chicago area jackals, I’ll be at the Schaumburg library tomorrow from 11-1 for Indie Authors Day. If you’re around, drop by and see me. It looks like they have writers scattered at tables throughout the library. I’ll be the little old lady hawking YA fantasy.
Emma
@rikyrah: Oh lord. I’m going to have to explain to my boss why my eyes are red and my nose blotchy.
Plationailedit
@Kay: Exactly. These bloviator morons, both in print and on teevee, know jacksquat about anything and are ‘experts’ on nothing.
WaterGirl
@OzarkHillbilly: Yeah, but Cole wanted Bart Kavanaugh to also be purchased and set up as a substance abuse site.
Elizabelle
@rikyrah: I love that Nike is doing that. Good Friday morning to see that.
Platonailedit
@Kay: Exactly. These bloviator morons, both in print and on teevee, know jacksquat about anything and are ‘experts’ on nothing.
eta: so bj version xyz123 is the same as xyz122 despite all the tall promises?
NotMax
@Steve in the ATL
Polish food?
:)
@Anne Laurie
Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag,
And smile, smile, smile,
While you’ve a lucifer to light your fag,
Smile, boys, that’s the style.
What’s the use of worrying?
It never was worth while, so
Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag,
And smile, smile, smile.
Elizabelle
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Life in the ORD area.
I’d come to your library event if I was in the area! Bundled up.
Kay
@WaterGirl:
When conservatives were all endorsing teenagers engaging in black out, binge drinking in order to give cover to their douchebag I was imaging all the earnest and overwhelmed public high school administrators bashing their heads against a wall.
30 years of school assemblies, out the window. Next up- drunk driving, dangerous or really just a rite of passage?
rikyrah
Democratic aide arrested advocating for voting rights in Texas
Rachel Maddow reviews the history of voting rights battles at Prairie View A&M University in Waller County, Texas, and talks with Mike Siegel, Texas Democratic congressional candidate, and Jacob Aronowitz, Siegel’s campaign field director, about Aronowitz’s arrest after delivering a letter of support for voting rights at the school on Siegel’s behalf.
rikyrah
But MAGA, remember??
Barack Obama saved the American car industry. Now Trump’s tariffs are demolishing it. They’ve cost Ford $1 billion in profits, resulting in massive layoffs. Tired of winning yet? https://t.co/e433eD1feN
— Richard Stengel (@stengel) October 12, 2018
rikyrah
I believe it, because nobody in this Administration gets the benefit of the doubt??
I’m unsure how well sourced this is, but it’s extremely scary. Hopefully a Democratic House will unearth the truth.https://t.co/rjc5pcUpTD
— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) October 12, 2018
rikyrah
BREAKING: We just filed a lawsuit against Brian Kemp over #Georgia’s discriminatory exact match law, which impacts over 53K voter registrants this #MidtermElection season. @LawyersComm
We’ve sued him on this SAME issue in 2016 and prevailed and we’ll win again. https://t.co/SSQ7HhIsg3
— Kristen Clarke (@KristenClarkeJD) October 11, 2018
rikyrah
Uh huh ? ?
So a campaign staffer for House candidate @SiegelForTexas was delivering a voting rights letter to the Waller County courthouse, got detained and then arrested after identifying his candidate as a Democrat. https://t.co/uI3Kv72UT7 via @TPM
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 11, 2018
rikyrah
???
Kanye was not born impoverished. His mom was an English professor and his father was a successful photographer.
He grew up in a middle class neighborhood in Chicago.
Maybe a good start would be not to just assume he grew up poor because he’s black? https://t.co/0Uf5uX2Z9p
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) October 12, 2018
Amir Khalid
Andrew Sullivan is an okay magazine writer who knows how to present as an intellectual: he namedrops the right smart people, i.e. those not around to tell him that he understands nothing of their work. Unfortunately, he himself is not a smart people, or an empathetic one, or a rigorous thinker, and at some point in his life the Flying Spaghetti Monster smote him a mighty blow with the Hammer of Hysterical Silliness. His opinions just got too annoying for me long before I became a jackal.. But I’ll concede that his View From My Window feature was a harmless diversion.
Aleta
@Schlemazel: He used people (such as TNC and women he encouraged to speak about their late term abortions) and then advertised it as a debate to get traffic, and then finished the ‘debate’ by passing judgement.
Kay
@Plationailedit:
It’s all the same with him. Take X, add “Margaret Thatcher”, analyze. He doesn’t need to know anything other than Margaret Thatcher. I felt sorry for the liberals some days, re: Obamacare. They’d be debating specific provisions..he doesn’t care about health care! He;s just killing time till he can circle back around to his one area- The Tenets of Conservatism.
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: I found Balloon Juice through Sully’s blog. Also TNC. He is not that interesting a thinker or writer but did link to good stuff back in the day. This was the waning years of Bush II.
schrodingers_cat
OT:
I am curious to see if the the Indian Me Too movement takes down union minister M J Akbar. Think Charlie Rose as an R cabinet member, to get an idea of Akbar’s stature as a journalist before he became a politician. My cousin worked for the Asian Age when he was the editor and the stories she would tell, left my jaw on the floor. I was so not surprised to see his names among the predators who have been named and shamed right now. So far 11 women journalists have come forward.
catclub
@JPL: The subtext: … and therefore he deserved to be killed. is vile.
Ella in New Mexico
My God that Melissa Etheridge song. Gave me chills back then, still did this morning. Thank you for that, AL.
Bit OT I know but I miss that era of music-late 80’s early to mid 90’s–of all those strong female musicians. I love ME plus so many others because for the first time in my life I was listening to a woman sing the music that spoke to my soul instead of finding a way to integrate things from a male perspective into what I felt. .
The whole “Lilith Fair” gang others, like the incredible Dolores O’Riordan from the Cranberries and Alison Krause and Mary Chapin Carpenter….It was a time of so much growth for women, for all of us. Being right around 30, I was moving into my own power as a female, finally learning that I was good enough and the music then could be like my best friend, my own private cheering squad to face the world
The time felt full of so much hope, so much excitement we were making progress for women, for people of color, for LGBTQ folks, for being a great and just society. No one told me how easily it was to make those gains go backwards.
If I recall it was a time that followed the Reagan-Bush heyday of wrecking the economy and trying to destroy the planet. of stirring up racism, bigotry, and tribal wars between Americans. We’ve made a lot of steps forward in the decades since, with a couple of steps back. Obama represented the best of what our country was about. Trump is the worst. But I keep praying that it’s just one step back and we’ll pick up where we left off soon…
Putting some Tori Amos on now while I get dressed for the day…”Never was a cornflake girl…”
WaterGirl
@Kay:
I laughed in the moment, but what you are saying is absolutely true. And horrifying.
schrodingers_cat
ETA to #96: In case anyone is interested, one of the 11 testimonies against Akbar
laura
@Elizabelle: go and see Mavis Staples!11!
She played Hardly, Strictly Bluegrass last Friday and Tore. It. Up. A beautiful, joyful set. It did my poor heart good.
Patricia Kayden
@rikyrah: Civil as in shutting the hell up. Naw. Not gonna happen. Keep speaking out. Keep pushing back. Keep resisting.
And most of all vote.
jonas
@Immanentize: Sullivan was promoting the work of Stephen Jimenez, a (gay) investigative journalist who argued in a 2013 book that Shepard was killed as a result of a drug deal gone bad, not simply because he was gay. He suggested Shepard himself was both an addict and dealer and that he was known to both his killers, who later made up the “gay panic” defense to cover up for their involvement in a major drug ring. Most people dismissed Jimenez’s theory as a lot more speculation than fact, but Sullivan thought it was intriguingly contrarian, and Jimenez is a friend of his, so it got a lot more publicity than it probably would have otherwise.
Patricia Kayden
@rikyrah: Good. It’s ridiculous that a contender gets to kick opposition voters off the rolls. Talk about conflict of interest.
Elizabelle
@laura: The great Mavis Staples was here last fall too, opening for Bob Dylan. I did not go, and have been kicking myself ever since. (Was getting ready to go to Europe, but Mavis and Dylan — bad decision making!!!)
Yes! Mavis is on the weekend schedule. And we’ve got lovely weather for the festival.
jonas
@Kay: I can’t wait to hear about some high school senior challenging the yearbook editor about boasting on their yearbook page about sexual conquests and binge drinking and saying, “well, a guy on the Supreme Court got to tell everyone that he did a devil’s triangle…why not me??”
Fun times.
Immanentize
@WaterGirl: I had the same reaction. I teach DUI, intoxication defenses, etc. in my Crim. class. I tell my students how much things have changed. But now I’m wondering whether that is true everywhere.
Immanentize
Further speculation on Kashoggi — This is the reason Haley quit. She was implicated in it, knew about it, maybe argued against allowing it and then when it happened, people at the UN knew of her involvement and she had to go.
japa21
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I may well stop by. It’s a great library.
LAO
@Immanentize: Well, it would be irresponsible not to speculate.
WaterGirl
@Immanentize: Apparently not — if you’re rich enough, white enough, connected enough. Oh, and I forgot one more — feeling entitled enough.
I know I’m preaching to the choir; I just need to vent, I guess.
Gin & Tonic
@LAO: As I wrote downstairs, everybody and his brother is now pulling out of the “Future Investment Initiatives” conference in SA the week after next. Except for Steve Mnuchin. Because he’s a soulless piece of shit.
--bd
I have a handful of 1120s I need to get out of my office yesterday. I have this on repeat on Spotify:
The Decemberists – Calamity Song https://youtu.be/xJpfK7l404I via @YouTube
trollhattan
@Elizabelle:
Go.
Have seen Mavis twice–once as headliner and once opening for Bonny Raitt. Warm, magnetic personality and a fine performer who seems ageless in some ways. Wanted to take her home and be my new Grams. I doubt she’d ever run out of stories.
Immanentize
@LAO: I feel it is my duty to speculate!
ETA Feeling any better about your profession today?
The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
@Anne Laurie: While this appears logical at first glance, it’s incorrect. The first recorded use of “faggot” as a term of abuse for gay men is American in 1914 in A Vocabulary of Criminal Slang, edited by Louis E Jackson and C R Hellyer. “Fag” or “faggot” for homosexual was regarded as an Americanism in British slang, and did not gain broad currency until the 60’s. The preferred British usage for gay men was likely to be “queer” or “pouf”. The usage appears to derive from the application of the term as an insulting reference to an obnoxious woman (synonymous with “baggage” in both British and American slang), in which context it survived in the British Isles until the 1970s, though it was never recorded there as a synonym for gayness. Further, the system of serving as an “errand boy” for upper-classmen is referred to as “fagging”, or being a “fag”. There is no recorded usage of “faggot” in this context. This has been your pointlessly pedantic proclamation.
Kay
@WaterGirl:
I feel as if Kavanaugh was profound for them, another lurch downwards, almost equal to Trump. Race to the bottom.
I mean, from the get-go he was the “lesser Merrick Garland” – they literally chose the 2nd place candidate. You can do a direct comparison! They said “bring us the worst of those two and we’ll hire him”. Let’s find two people, offer them both the same job, and we’ll block hiring the better one and vehemently support hiring the less qualified and less suited. It’s the opposite of merit. It’s political patronage.
Immanentize
In the good news bin — I see that USA Today published a big debunking of
Steven Miller’sthe President’s op-ed about Medicare, Socialism, bad immigrants, etc.Immanentize
@The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion: Rolling Stones — Memo from Turner: 1970
Aleta
@Gin & Tonic: There was a clip from a recent press conference, of Trump speaking to a reporter (a woman). His group was in back of him, and Mnuchin was making the strangest face with his lips as Trump said things he thought were funny. The other ones too. It was weird and looked a little gang-y, superior, though it’s possible I’m projecting onto their expressions. Mnu’s lip thing could instead be a tic I guess. No matter, he’s detached from a soul for sure.
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: Rs in power are treating government like despotic princely regimes of the old, did. This is the final stage of fallen empires. I hope that the empire that falls is the R party not the country.
LAO
@Immanentize: Nope. But thanks for asking. I’m 99% ready to move on. Even had the conversation with my partner.
bemused
Not so long ago, I could not have imagined seeing at the WH two people who are clearly off their rockers, a president and a president’s guest. Watching it with sound off, seeing trump atypically silent, nodding to Kanye’s incoherent rant was horrifying.
randy khan
@OzarkHillbilly:
She also probably realizes that the notoriety has made the piece even more valuable now.
trollhattan
@bemused:
His “What have you got to lose?” campaign line came to mind. What, indeed. Trump thought balloon: “See, I told you ‘the blacks’ love me.”
The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
@Immanentize: Cool reference, but a British usage from the 70s doesn’t illustrate anything about the origin of a term that entered British usage from the States in the 60s (if that was the point. I’m not sure it was. If it was just to throw in a cool Stones reference, then good on ya.)
Kay
The President spent 35 minutes on the telephone with Fox news celebrities this week. That’s not counting the Kanye reality television appearance, which probably took them days to plan.
Eventually you pay for low quality hires, because the organization becomes low quality. It can go for a while! But eventually it starts to show.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
I’m impressed. I think Trump has found a way to damage the United States’ position as world leader even more than he did before.
randy khan
@Amir Khalid:
I was a pretty steady reader of the Dish, and my impression over time was that Sullivan was much better when he was reacting immediately to something or writing something short. The long, carefully-edited stuff was where he ran into trouble, and if something was a topic of obsession (Palin’s pregnancy) he often went off the deep end. It’s kind of an inversion of the usual thing, where hot takes are stupid, and longer pieces are better considered, which is kind of funny.
Immanentize
@The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion: It was the latter — where the homosexual slang reference gets cleverly combined with the slang “stick.” Nicely done, Mick.
SiubhanDuinne
@schrodingers_cat:
I think I did the same — I know I came here in 2007. Have been trying to remember from what site I first followed a link, and Sully’s place feels right.
Brachiator
@Frankensteinbeck:
Trump relinquished America’s position as world leader long ago. But inertia and uncertainty still leads some other countries to look to the US. But they are learning that in the new world order, “making America great again” means America first, and everybody else is a sucker.
Russia, Turkey and Syria know the score and are now, along with Iran, the major players in regions of the Middle East where the US previously could exert more influence. And Trump is fine with this, even though the State Department still pretends that they never got the memo.
The other thing that confuses people is that Trump tries to accumulate more personal power and prestige, but not to the benefit of the United States as a leader of nations. And so, you have world leaders laughing at Trump at the UN when he tries to puff himself up.
cleosmom
@satby: @Baud:
The myth of “being nice” as a response to everything at any price, has apparently infected men as well. Especially here.
Elizabelle
@SiubhanDuinne: Yup. You, me, and Ms. S. Cat found our way here via excitable boy Andrew Sullivan. Grateful for that.
Plus, he linked to that great blog “John Kerry is a douche, but I’m voting for him anyway.”
And Sully likes beagles.
So, thank you, Sully, but you are still one excitable and frequently wrong-headed boy.
Aleta
Charles Blow quoted something interesting (in “White Male Victimization Anxiety: Trump represents all the white men who feel they’re losing ground”).
The zero-sum relationship might be one way to explain something I’ve wondered about—why even some younger liberal men remain unlikely to give credit to women or to read/cite their work. Does one end up with zero-sum relationships if you’re trained to see the world as a hierarchy and power struggle (as is taught in Kav’s prep school world and the military, and practiced by corporations and gamergate types)? It’s seen in white women trained for this too, of course, and in their beliefs and politics about equal opportunity.
Blow then talks about race and Kanye’s WH visit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/opinion/trump-white-male-victimization.html
Patricia Kayden
@Eural Joiner: Trump will use Kanye’s visit as evidence that his deplorable supporters can use to argue that he has Black friends. Trump doesn’t care about Black voters so Kanye’s visit isn’t an attempt to woo us.
cleosmom
@Kay:
At that point, drunk drivers will be referred to as “the drunk driving community.”
Count on it.
Elizabelle
I pulled some excerpts out of Susan Glasser’s article in The New Yorker, her letter from Washington today:
I Listened to All Six Trump Rallies in October. You Should, Too
It’s not a reality show. It’s real.
From the article: (1) he’s a liar.
“Many of the statements are not only untrue but are repeated from event to event, despite the industry of real-time Trump fact-checking and truth-squadding that now exists. This summer, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker looked at all the statements in one rally and determined that seventy-six per cent of the ninety-eight factual assertions Trump made were untrue, misleading, or baseless. Since then, Trump seems not only undeterred but to be stepping up his pace.”
2) He paints a false picture of the world and current events: “I found myself reeling most at the end of my rally-watching marathon not from the lying but from the bleak and threatening world view offered by a President who is claiming credit for making America great, strong, and respected again, while terrifying his fans with the grim spectre of the scary enemies he is fending off. Even more than they did in 2016, these threats come accompanied by an increasingly grandiose rewriting of history.”
(3) CULT OF PERSONALITY: “The biggest difference between Trump and any other American President, however, is not the bragging. It’s the cult of personality he has built around himself and which he insists upon at his rallies. Political leaders are called onstage to praise the President in terms that would make a feudal courtier blush, and they’re not empty words. These are the kinds of tributes I have heard in places like Uzbekistan, but never before in America. ”
(4) He’s got ENEMIES and he’s relentless in villifying them: “Every single rally included multiple attacks on the media and “fake news.” In Mississippi, the press bashing began seconds into the speech; in Pennsylvania, it took seven minutes; in Minnesota, ten. Deadbeat allies, rapacious foreigners ripping us off, and murderous gang members from MS-13 also figured in every one of the speeches.”
(5): “Where Trump differs starkly [from other Republican presidents] is in his insistence—made at an increasingly high pitch as the week went on—that Democrats not only want to legislate their way to socialism but that they are an actual clear and present danger to Americans.”
6) The end of Ms. Glasser’s article: “But what the President of the United States is actually saying is extraordinary, regardless of whether the television cameras are carrying it live. It’s not just the whoppers or the particular outrage riffs that do get covered, either. IT’S THE HATE, AND THE SENSE OF ACTUAL MENACE THAT THE PRESIDENT IS TRYING TO CONVEY TO HIS SUPPORTERS. [my capitalization] Democrats aren’t just wrong in the manner of traditional partisan differences; they are scary, bad, evil, radical, dangerous. Trump and Trump alone stands between his audiences and disaster.
I listen because I think we are making a mistake by dismissing him, by pretending the words of the most powerful man in the world are meaningless. They do have consequences. They are many, and they are worrisome. In what he says to the world, the President is, as Ed Luce wrote in the Financial Times this week, “creating the space to do things which were recently unthinkable.” It’s not a reality show; it’s real.”
Uncharted waters. If someone tries to tell you it’s just show business, they are gaslighting you.
We have to see that Trump and his enablers fail miserably and go down hard.
prostratedragon
Greg Palast has been doing exposes about the voter cross-check program under which many voters around the country have been “purged” from voting rolls without their knowledge. I just heard him talk about it on WVON radio in Chicago. He has lists of purged voters for Georgia and Indiana up on his website now, and by mid-afternoon will have a list for Illinois.
***This is urgent for those who have been purged, because they have limited time to re-register before the November election. In Illinois, there is only one week left of on-line registration.***
Schlemazel
@The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion:
The other British term I have come across is “sod” I always liked the term ‘odds-n-sods’ for a collection of useless people (that was how I first heard it used) then I found out sod was short for sodomite & it ruined it for me. Still like the way it rolls of the tongue though.
Schlemazel
@SiubhanDuinne:
I came here from the great orange satan. That was back in the day when our host was still wingnutty & I really did not understand KOS affinity. I was aware of Andy before that & already sick of his shit. BJ introduced me to TNC, a favor that would be hard to repay even balanced against its constant fawning over Sullivan
A Ghost To Most
No surprise – he’s a fascist, playing to his christian fascist base.
Glasser finally gets it.
Aleta
@cleosmom: I had relatives (died while not that old) who were die hard libertarians: not only did they rail against taxes, seat belts, helmet laws (+ any gun control natch) but also against drunk driving laws.
Literally: ‘We have a right to drive drunk because we know how to handle drinking + driving.’
Sadly for them, they never lived to enjoy the survival-of-the-fittest apocalypse they knew was coming. I believe that (lacking cooperative skills and flexibility) they wouldn’t have lasted long there anyway.
The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
@Immanentize: Mick has always been a master of that kind of thing. It’s one of the many reasons that he’s a rock god.
Aleta
@SiubhanDuinne: I found both Sullivan and John Cole from links at TNC’s blog.
The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
@Schlemazel: Great band name! I would totally love to introduce myself as the lead singer of “Odds-N-Sods”.
Aleta
@Schlemazel: Well, that’s a new disappointment. I always pictured ‘that old sod’ as originating from peasant sod-cutters, rural cottagers and peat bogs. Now ruined for me too, thanks. : )
Kay
This is why I like earnest political reporters. It’s actually worse when they just state facts :)
Why would he be “popular” though? He lied for 3 straight days and then yelled at us for an hour.
Brachiator
@Aleta:
Very interesting. And very provocative. I don’t have any kind of answer, but your excellent thoughts here got me thinking about a couple of things.
Zero sum implies the possibility of equality. Two sides vie for something, and even though it will end up with a winner and a loser, both sides are in theory equally matched. But a hierarchy suggests that there is an ordering of things, and one side, one person, one group, is always supposed to get what they want, the first choice or more of everything. And the other side, by definition, deserves less or is less important, less valued.
And of course there’s the aspect of sexism that says that women are not equal and independent beings, but only a prize, loot or reward that men can get, when in competition with other men. So, here, by definition, their thoughts and contributions don’t matter.
Some men maybe understood that this is bullshit, but the Age of Trump encourages them to revisit their childish fantasies and resentments and to try to re-assert their delusions about hierarchy and patriarchy.
bemused
@trollhattan:
I watched a clip (CNN?) in which Habermann’s takes were that trump didn’t seem to know how to react, WH staff divided between those embarrassed by the spectacle, questioning why do this in a week when trump had his Kav victory and those loving it. Also, setting this up was Jared’s doing and supposedly he looked happy about this fiasco while Ivanka, not so much.
ruemara
@Immanentize: I’d say yes. He did give a list of intel on enemies to the prince.
Brachiator
@Aleta:
Two different words, with different meanings.
Sod or turf as an agricultural term
Also,
Hence, sodbusters. Which may mean something else entirely in the world of sodomy.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Eural Joiner: I always took West as a modern form of the ministerial show; there to comfort his white audience they aren’t ignorant racists.
Mnemosyne
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I just touted in on Facebook for my Chicago-area relatives, so if someone says, “My cousin/niece/aunt said you were an online friend of hers?” you’ll know I sent them. ?
They will probably use my real name, so don’t act surprised. ?
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Mnemosyne: I’ll be thrilled to see any juicers and their friends and relatives.
tam1MI
@The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion: You guys come up with every band name under the sun and not “The Jackals”?
Tsk, tsk.
;)
Schlemazel
@Aleta:
It may have changed over time, most of the use as a slur seem to be very old & by the time of WWI (judging solely by books I have read and imputing meaning) sod was just an off-handed term for a bunch of nondescript blokes.
ruemara
@Brachiator: Men understand that? They sure don’t seem to.
Aleta
@Elizabelle: The outright lies seem to be part of other dark money Republican campaigns too. Collins has been telling lies in every interview (immediately and easily disproved by facts). She is currently getting support ads from a dark money org. (Which proves she’s also lying about how many people agree with her re: Kav.)
A robo call for Bruce Polliquin (a few days before the same USA Today op-ed lies from T) started out with (paraphrase) “Jared Golden is deceiving people. He wants to kill Medicare,” and other lies that accuse Democrats of what Polliquin is actually doing.
Accusing Dems of what Rs are doing seems to be the strategy they’ve come up with to weaken the impact of the facts.
Which is astounding — they know and admit they won’t get elected if they tell the truth about their plans.
Citizen Alan
@rikyrah:
Here is how the civility game is played. Civility, as it is understood today, is the idea that everyone should be respectful towards Republicans and not say or do anything that offends them. This is a virtue that the media cherishes. The idea that Republicans should be respectful towards other people and refrain from saying or doing things that offend other people is political correctness. That is a vice which the media despises.
Aleta
@Schlemazel: what you said seems obvious now that I think of it though.
Aleta
@Brachiator: I wonder what astro turf meant 300 years ago.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
I think that Freudian psychology is bullshit for the most part, but I do think it’s not uncommon for men to carry some resentment towards the authority figure of their mother, and it’s worse if their mother was abusive or neglectful in some way. They resented Hillary’s seeking of authority the same way they resented their mother having authority over them as children, and they were gleeful about being able to deny Hillary what they wanted.
And that’s even before we get to the whole Hillary reminds men of their nagging first wife meme …
Patricia Kayden
@Dorothy A. Winsor: It’s great that the House is most likely going to flip but it’s too bad that the Senate won’t do the same after what they did with Kavanaugh. McConnell really needs to be taken down several pegs.
ruemara
@Mnemosyne: I think that it’s really much more simpler than that. Some men truly detest anyone not a man being in charge. They don’t like anyone without a dick telling them what to do and they barely like anyone not themselves being in charge. They want to identify completely with the person on top and that has to be a man. And, tellingly, a white man. That goes for left, right and center. They got conned, they continue to be conned and they want to be conned.
Patricia Kayden
@Citizen Alan: Because in the end, the MSM worships at the feet of the political party which derides them as biased, fake news and undeserving of protection. Thank goodness for blogs like these.
Tazj
@Kay: I’m happy about that. I wondered when it was going to dawn on most people that he was getting away with behavior most people never could never engage in and expect a promotion.
@Mnemosyne: There were many male pundits, some even on our side who couldn’t stop talking about how bad and irritating her voice was.
Martin
@Aleta:
I think it’s much broader than that. The US thinks of EVERYTHING in those terms. The ‘government budget is like a checkbook’ is a good example of that. Go ask any farmer if they would be more profitable next season if they didn’t buy seeds (even if they had to borrow for it) and they would laugh. Yet, they’ll vote as if the entire US economy can’t work the same way.
We’re very good about teaching kids about conservation. Think of the problems you solved in school: 3x = 9. The equation balances. One side can’t be larger than the other. We extrapolate that to everything, and politics reinforces that. A new chinese job must be one less american job. Giving healthcare to younger people must be taking it from older people. We make a lot of bad decisions from this way of thinking.
Gravenstone
@Kay:
C’mon, we all suspect this is the reality. Be curious to see whether the Turks 1) have any solid proof and 2) would expose it in their desire to weaken MBS even as it would also piss off Trump.
japa21
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I mentioned you were going to be there to Mrs. Japa and she is excited to meet one of these strange people I am always talking about and communicating with on line. We will be there.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
I think that Freud and Jung were right in terms of recognizing the importance of the subconscious mind, but otherwise don’t have much use for them. Nor do I have much use for blaming shit on mothers, even “abusive or neglectful” mothers.
Again, I don’t have definitive answers for this stuff, but it is natural for adolescents to bristle at authority figures, and a right of passage to reject them. But of course, some people go on to become authority figures themselves, so the resentment masks an inevitable struggle against parents and old leaders.
…A chunk of white women resented Hillary. And men and women hated Bill and Hillary, together and separately. And I doubt that the men who hated Hillary would ever consider her to be a mother figure. In fact, a lot of the hatred directed at her was because she seemed to dismiss or ignore or devalue the traditional maternal sphere.
White people also hated Hillary because she was a race traitor who aligned herself with Obama. And we can even through in the crazy evangelicals who saw Hillary as trying to be manly and overthrow the natural order set down by God Almighty which put man, and particularly a white Christian man, in charge of America and the world.
Thank goodness John McCain was not elected president, but I wonder whether some of the same people who hated Hillary would have voted for Sarah Palin had she succeeded a President McCain.
And of course, some of the most intense Hillary hate comes from supposedly ultra-progressives, men and women, who see Hillary as the ultimate demonic betrayer of progressive values. I expect that there will be whole sections of libraries and bookstores devoted to idiotic dissertations on Hillary hatred and why it is OK.
J R in WV
@
Frankensteinbeck
@Elizabelle:
These are generally good observations, but the writer misses that none of this is new. Trump is just so obvious about it that the hate-stoking and lies that have been the GOP’s stock in trade for decades are unignorable. Of course, that’s why he got the nomination. Most Republicans wanted more, not fig leaves of dignity.
As for Kanye, don’t underestimate the importance to Trump of the ‘good n—-r.’ Kanye both agrees with Trump and his racist positions, and is himself a racist caricature that makes Trump feel good about his prejudices.
@Brachiator:
I believe this is crucial. As things stand, the situation IS zero-sum, because the power they are in danger of losing is the power to do things to women against their will. Like all abusers, it infuriates them and it’s unacceptably rude for the victim to try to defend themself in any way.
Patricia Kayden
@Chyron HR: It’s amazing how Conservatives always pose as victims while calling progressives snowflakes. Quite a neat trick.
Brachiator
@ruemara:
Some men like to play at being ignorant, even though they know better.
@Tazj:
Here in Southern California, one talk radio station would always have a woman host or associate whose main job was to knock Hillary and to essentially signal to listeners that it was OK to hate her because women hated her, too. And yeh, these women would often single out her “irritating voice.” I often found this ironic since there have always been a core of male listeners who always go on about how they hate the voices of women radio and TV personalities.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@japa21: Oh cool! I really am a little old lady. Mr DAW will be there too.
WaterGirl
I just read this on Preet’s twitter:
Someone also comments that until 2 months ago, Melania’s parents had the same legal status as Jamal Khashoggi, who was a green card holder.
Trump and his whole administration need to be gone. By yesterday.
Frankensteinbeck
@Brachiator:
While I don’t understand it, I have seen up close that there is a significant population of women who hate Hillary for not dumping Bill after Bill cheated on her. They have invested all of their personal feelings on the topic, and consider her absolutely untrustworthy for that one reason.
Elizabelle
@Frankensteinbeck: It isn’t new. But it’s not called by what it is, which is facsism and impending authoritarianism.
That needs to be said, again and again. Trump’s message is getting out there. Ours needs to, too.
And she makes a good point about the danger of ignoring him.
Mostly, our newspapers and cable TV need to figure out a better way of covering him. Just amplifying and broadcasting his message and this hour’s outrage is insufficient.
schrodingers_cat
@WaterGirl: Green Card holders mean nothing to this administration, case in point, the Muslim ban. Where close to a 1000 people were made to surrender their GCs under duress at various ports of entry, under General Kelly’s DHS.
japa21
@Dorothy A. Winsor: we’re old as well.
Gin & Tonic
@WaterGirl: Bill Browder unfortunately knows about this sort of thing.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: Exactly.
Brachiator
@Frankensteinbeck:
There are a lot of people, men and women, who believe that an uncovered affair should mean the immediate end of a marriage.
So, I guess some women resented Hillary for sticking by her man.
But this gets complicated. Some women (and men), maybe some of these same women and men then turned around and resented Hillary for being in a political marriage. A lot of Americans did not know how to deal with a woman who had political ambitions in parallel to or independent of her husband. They later resented Bill for encouraging and supporting Hillary’s political ambitions.
So, no matter what she did, people would find a way to hate her. This kind of free floating hatred often attaches to women and nonwhite people in the public sphere. Everything they do is suspect. On the other hand, a white man like Trump can do anything he wants and find defenders.
Butter Emails!!!
The sad thing is that if you refer to the Republican Supreme Court Rapist, “Which one?” is a perfectly reasonable follow up question.
Mnemosyne
@WaterGirl:
Wow. I’m assuming that Khashoggi was able to do that without his murderers realizing it? If so … wow. He must have suspected going in that this might happen and wanted to make sure the truth was broadcast to the world. ?
James E Powell
@Elizabelle:
That’s not going to happen because our newspapers and cable TV are fine with covering just the way they are. The owners are rich people, not at all like the rest of us. Amplifying and broadcasting his message is how they make their money and get their tax cuts.
And for cable TV broadcasting “this hour’s outrage” is their reason for being.
WaterGirl
@Mnemosyne: It’s horrifying to think of, but I hope it’s true. I hope they don’t get away with this.
James E Powell
@Frankensteinbeck:
I, too, have encountered this. And not from RW or Republican leaning types. I’ve heard that from more than five but less than ten women who are ordinarily reliable D voters who usually mention abortion rights as a primary issue.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
IIRC, what Freud said is that boys reject the authority of the mother and adopt the authority of the father. Basically, sons are supposed to gain patriarchal authority over their mothers. Obviously, this is a cultural assumption and not strictly a psychological one, but since patriarchy and misogyny still exist, the cultural expectation that the mother figure will defer to the younger man is still in play.
As I said above, Freud thought it was “natural” for sons to gain authority over their mothers as they became adults because they adopted the authority of the father and eventually moved into the patriarch’s role themselves. I think this expectation by young men is still in play, which is why you see so much rage at Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein for not stepping aside to let a younger man take their place.
This is all subconscious, cultural, and symbolic, which is why it’s hard to root out. These men feel that there’s something wrong about women having authority over them but can’t articulate why because the external and conscious cultural expectations have changed while the subconscious and symbolic ones have remained.
Again, to be clear, I’m not talking about psychology per se, but about culture and archetypes that affect peoples’ beliefs and behavior without them consciously realizing it. It’s not necessarily about “blaming the mother” of a specific person, but looking at the “mother” archetype and symbolism and how that affects how people viewed Hillary.
(I know that Freud also talked about authority and girls/women, but it was probably about the necessity of them accepting patriarchal authority over them as natural and good so I would have skimmed over that BS.)
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Yeah, Freud is wrong and has been contradicted by anthropology. Simplified, adolescents create their own society, mimicking the rules of the larger society, and accommodate, duplicate and reject all authority, before finding a way to enter society, or leave it and create a new one.
And yeah, Freud was talking about mental life, but even here he makes too much of men identifying with fathers and taming their mothers. We can go back and forth regurgitating this stuff, but I don’t really buy into it, not even as good critique of culture.
I categorically reject the utility of fumbling around in archetypes and symbolism, but as always, your mileage may vary.
Well said. I agree that this is a problem, but we are going to need something better than old, discarded Freudian or Jungian categories to understand it.
Gravenstone
@Mnemosyne: Think of it as the ultimate extension of people using smartphones to stream police encounters (and abuses) to the cloud in real time. That way, even if the phone were confiscated, the record to that moment would persist for later recall and distribution.
Steve in the ATL
@Gravenstone: nevertheless, it persisted!
Dan B
@Elizabelle: Trump’s rallies are right out of Goebbel’s playbook. That’s the story Glasser should be telling. He’s using the tools of propaganda, what used to be called brainwashing. Modern cognitive science shows these techniques actually alter the brain’s structure. Basically: Tell a simple emotional story. Trump’s story is you have good reasons to feel uneasy. You are under attack. Those people are dangerous. The other parts of Goebbels are: Tell a big lie and repeat it endlessly. People will begin to believe it. Now we have cognitive science to demonstrate that people begin to believe the lies because their brains are rewired.
Trump Uses Tools of Propaganda Straight Out of Goebbels is the headline Glasser should have written.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
I write fiction, so archetypes and symbolism are my bread and butter.
What I think about Freud and Jung is that they were very much products of their time, and thought that the culture they were immersed in was universal to all humans (the old “fish doesn’t realize he’s in water” problem). That’s why IMO they are now more useful to look at in a cultural and symbolic context rather than as a guide for individual behavior. And I do think that our culture still promotes the old patriarchal ways of viewing women even if we have superficially tried to change.
Dan B
@bemused: Jared should get Kanye to appear at a Trump rally, or three. Imagine the possible scenarios: A. Kanye fans rumble with T white supremacists. B. Trump can’t stand Kanye getting all the applause and media, has K escorted out or worse. C. Kanye won’t give up the mike. See outcome B with more screaming. D. Rally crowd believes Kanye and follows him over closest cliff. Sad, Bigly!
Dan B
@Brachiator: Speaking as the Queen of Sod, sodbusters refers to a type of sodomite who wore brown shoes in a bygone era. See also Buster Brown’s.
(Oh, it’s not that… ) Nevermind!
Dan B
@tam1MI: Is ‘The Juice’ taken?
Dan B
@Aleta: I believe accusing your opponent of what you’re doing is Rove’s technique.
Gex
The only thing Andrew Sullivan has done of value as a pundit is to direct me to much better thinkers and writers that I can read instead of him.
MisterForkbeard
@Frankensteinbeck: I have a cousin like this. Generally good, likes Bernie quite a bit but flat out detests Hillary, mostly because she didn’t divorce Bill immediately. Says this means she has to be a power hungry ambitious harpy, etc. It’s colored her entire perception of the Semocratic Party. and not in a good way.
She did vote for Hillary, but also takes the time to chastise people who like Hillary. Sad, because it’s caused a few rifts in our relationship that didn’t use to exist
Scamp Dog
@Schlemazel: I was something of a fan when he was taking a strong stand against the use of torture by the Bush administration. Hey, a conservative who’s not purely a shill for the already wealthy! Then I started realizing how bad he was on so many other things, and realized that’s he’s a classic example of a competitive debater: he can come up with an argument for OR against anything. If it’s something that makes sense (torture is bad!), he’ll come up with a cogent argument. If it doesn’t, he’ll come up with some “good lines” to say that ignore or bypass the actual issues. I have no idea how he figures out what side he comes out on, except that it’s usually in the defense of the wealthy and powerful. So much for my original impression.
tom
@schrodingers_cat: I found BJ through Sullivan’s blog too.
I still read BJ. I haven’t read Sullivan in years.
J R in WV
I never read Sullivan at all. Don’t recall, but think I must have come here from Daily Kos, which back in the day, before John found his way to the one true political party, was where to go for the things we find here.
Wife and I went to see and hear Ms. Melissa Etheridge Wednesday night. She does a great rock n roll show, and we enjoyed it a lot. Seemed like lots of the fans were alternative gendered folks, LBGTQP and whatever other letters there are coming and going. Don’t know why this would be….
OK, I’m kidding, I do know why, and it was really pleasant to party down with everyone.
;-)
It was a great show, she’s a wonderful performer with a boatload of talent. Hope she’s as happy as can be with her slice of Rock ‘n’ Roll fame and generally wonderful persona. Crowd was responsive, loved her, so that was all good. One more RocknRoll star we’ve seen.