Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Giving up is unforgivable.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

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

Trump should be leading, not lying.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

“Alexa, change the president.”

Books are my comfort food!

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

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

You are here: Home / Politics / GOP Death Cult / Late Night Open Thread: What’s the Opposite of ‘Schadenfreude’?

Late Night Open Thread: What’s the Opposite of ‘Schadenfreude’?

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Some people can’t even shut up and enjoy the picnics, because they so hate other peoples’ freedom…

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53Comments

  2. 2.

    phdesmond

    googling around,

    “If you want a rough German antonym of Schadenfreude (or simply schadenfreude in English texts — “enjoyment obtained from the mishaps of others,” as Merriam-Webster defines it), then Seligkeitfreude would work. Lisa always celebrates others’ successes.”
    or
    “The opposite of schadenfreude is called fremdscham, or the “vicarious embarrassment syndrome”. Essentially, people who have this syndrome tend to feel embarrassment for someone else’s misfortune.”

  3. 3.

    phdesmond

    @phdesmond:

    here’s a third possibility:

    “Gluckschmerz is also a compound term of two German words: Gluck, meaning luck, and Schmerz, meaning pain. It represents being displeased by an event presumed to be desirable for someone else.”

  4. 4.

    NotMax

    By this time next year it will be so commercialized that there’ll be greeting cards with a sound chip which plays “Unchained Melody” when the card is opened.

    //

  5. 5.

    Steeplejack

    “Journalist Janet Malcolm dies at 86.”

    Her most famous work was “The Journalist and the Murderer,” published as a two-part essay in The New Yorker in 1989 and as a book the next year. A forensic examination of the relationship between Joe McGinniss, a best-selling author, and Jeffrey MacDonald, a doctor who was convicted of murdering his family, it castigated Mr. McGinniss for pretending to believe in Dr. MacDonald’s innocence long after he was convinced of his guilt. Ms. Malcolm focused less on the murder—a story told many times over in articles, books, TV movies and podcasts—than on a lawsuit that Dr. MacDonald had brought against Mr. McGinniss, saying that he had deceived him.

    Her essay began with one of the most arresting first sentences in literary nonfiction: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

    But with the passage of time, and the explosion of a far more complex and treacherous media landscape, her broadsides against her profession seem almost quaint.

    In fact, The Journalist and the Murderer has become something of a classic and was ranked No. 97 on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century.

  6. 6.

    Anne Laurie

    @phdesmond: Gluckschmerz — being displeased by an event presumed to be desirable for someone else.

    Thank you, that’s the word I was looking for!

  10. 10.

    ian

    I guess this isn’t really a surprise, certainly the juicers here more familiar with twitter knew this, but I was surprised at how far apart/ separate universe left twitter and right twitter were.  It is like switching the channel between fox and msnbc.  Two entirely different languages and moral value systems, compressed into repeated bursts of 140 words.

  11. 11.

    NotMax

    @Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]

    Also, kind of, the Yiddish firgun (Feer-GUHN). Ungrudging and genuine vicarious delight, empathetically joining in with tooting of their horns by others.

  12. 12.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    Two Covid stories here in LA:

    I received an email from The Huntington, they’re doing Covid shots there.  Get your shot and get a free admission for you and a guest the day you get your shot.

    On the down side, our positivity rate has gone up from 0.4% to 0.5%.

  13. 13.

    JWR

    Beware the Woke Cathode Ray Tubes!

    On Fox, (Quisha) King said teachers unions “want to remake America” and are “trying to raise up a generation that believes everything that they’re pushing; they’re trying to raise little woke Marxists” through “critical race theory,” which she later added is actually “aligned with the KKK and true white supremacy.” (Media Matters via NBC!)

  14. 14.

    Tony Jay

    “When my ancestors shed their blood on every battlefield from Bull Run to Gettysburg they did it because they loved freedom and rejected tyranny, not to celebrate Hip Hop culture and pour scorn on the heritage of white, working class Americans. This fake holiday trivialises their sacrifice and exists only as a virtue- signalling exercise by publicity hungry radicals!”

    Beauregard Jackson Lee Tarleton III

  20. 20.

    bjacques

    Shouldn’t that be “Manassas” instead of “Bull Run”? But I wouldn’t be surprised if Tarleton got it wrong too.

     

    In the words of Capt Macdonald: Acid is groovy. Kill the pigs.

  21. 21.

    Van Buren

    @Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]: Feel free to experience some Mudita on my behalf, as I have managed to adopt a pupper. It took two weeks, felt like two months & we won’t actually get her til the 26th. She’s the epitome of muttdom & she’s a Jersey girl, so my wife decided she had to be Rosalita. I counteroffered Crazy Janey, but she used her superior negotiating skills to carry the argument.

  22. 22.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @JWR:

    Beware the Woke Cathode Ray Tubes!

    Because I just woke up and am reading with bleary, sleepy eyes, I first took this to be Beware the Woke Catholic Ray Tubes!

  24. 24.

    mrmoshpotato

    You know all the people up in arms over Juneteenth would endorse Trump Day in a hot second.

    Yup.  Because the Confederacy is still alive and, well, they’re still racist, white trash.

  27. 27.

    Tony Jay

    @James E Powell:

    “I’m Buddy Tarleton and I’m here to tell you the truth about the Cultural Marxist takeover of American education, what “Woke Culture” really means, and how a small monthly donation from you can help me stop it. (applause) And this is my wife, Bubbles. She’s here to make the coffee and iron my shirts, like God intended!”

     

    @opiejeanne:

    The trick is not to put a moment’s rational thought into it. 8-)

  29. 29.

    Tony Jay

    @bjacques:

    Shouldn’t that be “Manassas” instead of “Bull Run”? But I wouldn’t be surprised if Tarleton got it wrong too.

    Damn it. I knew it was a po-tay-to/po-tah-to thing, but I backed the wrong horse.

    Though, as you note, scumbag slaver killbot Tarleton was a Liverpool boy.

  30. 30.

    NotMax

    @JWR

    Haven’t assigned a micronanogram of weight to anything emanating from Stewart’s piehole since … ever.

  31. 31.

    Matt McIrvin

    @ian: Most of the Left Twitter I read was knocking the Juneteenth move as an empty symbolic gesture substituting for real action to dismantle systemic racism, which they see Democrats as unwilling to make.

  34. 34.

    Cameron

    @Tony Jay: I am much confused.  The only Tarleton I’m familiar with in American history is Banastre Tarleton, and he operated a whole lot earlier than the US Civil War.  Guess I should stop reading horror stories and watching shitty TV – maybe take some time to, y’know, learn something.

  36. 36.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @JWR: they’re trying to raise little woke Marxists” through “critical race theory,” which she later added is actually “aligned with the KKK and true white supremacy.

    More proof those people are stupid. But it is interesting that even the racialist can’t stand each other.

  37. 37.

    Tony Jay

    @Cameron:

    No, no, that’s the one. I was just riffing off Tarleton’s enduring popularity on the hard-right of military-alt-hist-sci-fi as a ‘worthy enemy’ (in the same vein as Otto Skorzeny) who’s absolute bastardy is offset by his hard-fighting ruthlessness and the fact he was on their wavelength with regard to ‘other issues’, if you l know what I mean.

    Plus, he was English, so he’d have got the name of that battle wrong too.

  38. 38.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @JWR: I saw it and it looked to me that Stewart was try to play it as a joke but really meant it to me. Stewart’s eyes when Colbert asked him for evidence, it was clear Stewart was fighting the urge to break character and start screaming at Colbert for daring to question him.

  39. 39.

    Geminid

    @Matt McIrvin: That fits the left twitter template. These people are intellectually and emotionally invested in the failure of this administration, and nothing it does will ever be good enough for them.

    What I like is the way loyal Democrats push back. There are some very forceful advocates for Democratic policies on twitter.

  40. 40.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Tony Jay: That Tarleton? You should also add “My family fought in booth the American Revolution and The Civil War, from Mananas to Fort Pillow and….”

    Fort Pillow is an infamous massacre of Black Union soldiers after they surrendered.

  46. 46.

    Cheryl from Maryland

    I thought the reference was to the Tarleton Twins in Gone with the Wind.  But I’ll go with the Brit Tarleton who was nicknamed Benny by American General Daniel Morgan during the Revolutionary War as Morgan whipped Benny bad at the battle of Cowpens.  Whichever reference, it’s the name of a loser.

  47. 47.

    H.E.Wolf

    Good choice of surname for your racist character.

    https://fabricforcosplayers.com/tarlatan/

    “Tarlatan would be fun to use in zombie or ghost costumes” … and I bet it would make a good summer-weight KKK robe, too.

    (I’m also reminded of the aside in To Kill a Mockingbird: Naming people after Confederate generals makes slow, steady drinkers.)

  48. 48.

    Geminid

     

    @Cheryl from Maryland: Like Ulysses Grant, Daniel Morgan had been a teamster in earlier life. Morgan’s victory at Cowpens was a turning point for the war in the South. Morgan captured most of Tarleton’s command, and Tarleton himself barely escaped after a close encounter with Colonel William Washington, a distant cousin of General Washington.

  49. 49.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Geminid: IIRC the Briti nasty in The Patriot who kills Mel Gibson’s character’s son (& is eventually killed in return) was rather closely & unflatteringly modeled on Banastre Tarleton.

    (FTR in S. M. Stirling’s alt-history Draka timeline, Tarleton in 1784 becomes the first C-in-C of the armed forces of the Crown Colony of Drakia. Appropriate appointment for a brutal slaveholding state that Stirling has described as an “anti-America” fanning out from South Africa to terrorize the planet.)

  51. 51.

    Tony Jay

    @Uncle Cosmo:

    It’s the Drakaverse version of Tarleton I was thinking of when I took the name. Horrible universe that one, but some of Stirling’s best work. Guy certainly knew his audience back then.

  52. 52.

    Geminid

    @Uncle Cosmo: Have you read Freedom, by William Safire? The author gives a good narrative of events from Ft. Sumter to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, using several dozen historical figures. One of them is Marylander Anna Carroll, political operative and pampleteer. She advocates for the campaign up the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers that helps bring Tennessee under Union control, and (in the novel) counsels politicians such as Frank Blair Sr. and John Breckinride. Carroll had been influential in the recently disbanded American (Know Nothing) Party.

  53. 53.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    This legislation is the culmination of decades of efforts by the Left to prevent unashamed celebrations of our national story, heritage, and history.

    So… slavery isn’t something to be ashamed of? We should *celebrate* slavery? Or just blow it off? Damn it, once lies and partisanship trump truth and reasoning, people can’t even be *coherent*, much less “worth reading/listening to”.

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