Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

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

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

Decision time: keep arguing about the last election, or try to win the next one?

How stupid are these people?

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

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

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

We do not need to pander to people who do not like what we stand for.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

Stand up, dammit!

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

You are here: Home / Politics / Biden Administration in Action / Monday Morning Open Thread: Indigenous Peoples’ Day

Monday Morning Open Thread: Indigenous Peoples’ Day

by | 129 Comments

This post is in: , ,

And it’s not just saying the right words:

Reader Interactions

129Comments

  2. 2.

    Baud

    President Biden says as he expands the sizes of three national monuments that had been made smaller by the Trump administration.

    You could analogize that to the whole nation.

  4. 4.

    Professor Bigfoot

    @debbie: considering how Italian Americans (broad generalization, obvs) have seized on their whiteness, that’s really only to be expected.

  8. 8.

    Baud

    @debbie:

    We tend to value human dignity and equality highly.  But there are a lot of competing interests, including economic interests, in play.  For example, a lot of tribes make money from payday lending, which Dems tend to oppose and the Republicans support.  Some tribes may simply be socially conservative.  Tribes are as complex as any other large group of people.

  9. 9.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    Mr DAW just told me that the new Bond movie is 2 hours and 45 minutes. There’s a little theater in my building that shows old movies sometimes and I recently saw Breakfast Club (1 hr 37 minutes) and Dirty Dancing (1 hr 40 minutes). They told a full, engaging story. Breakfast Club did it with multiple characters. Is 2 hours and 45 minutes really necessary to tell a Bond story well?

  13. 13.

    Betty Cracker

    Sometimes in morning threads Not Max gives us a heads-up on worthwhile classic films that are coming up on TCM. I’m going to do the opposite and warn y’all off a new Netflix film because you don’t want to waste 1 hour and 43 minutes of your lives on the turkey that is “The Starling.”

    I like all three of the principal actors — Melissa McCarthy, Chris O’Dowd and Kevin Kline. I am also fond of starlings. But even the humans’ combined talents and CGI birds’ charms couldn’t overcome the criminally maudlin script and extraordinarily cloying score. Keep scrolling, friends.

  15. 15.

    Emmyelle

    I love Joe Biden. I just do.

    Also, as a white American descended largely from folks who came over in the the late 1800s-early 1900s (and about an eighth from scotch Irish degenerates who came over on the prison ship in like the 1700s), Italian-American was my strongest ethnic identity growing up. I look the part. And I have zero fucks to give about “Columbus Day” which always seems kind of contrived as a celebration of Italian heritage. I mean, sure going into Springfield to watch the parade and stuff our faces with cannolis was fun but really, there is no there there.

    happy Indigenous People’s Day, everyone. May we be ever mindful of the horrible sins committed in the name of the idea of America.

  16. 16.

    Professor Bigfoot

    @debbie: Not really.

    Whiteness became a thing when the US was founded, because how do you tell the superior caste?

    The Irish and the Italians weren’t “white” when their respective immigration arrived; but white supremacy makes this offer to all immigrant waves: “Join us in keeping the Blacks in their place and we can consider you white, too!’

    The Italians and the Irish leaped on that deal.

    It was offered to east Asian people, but Manzanar is still within living memory and they know “what they call white can change whenever they decide to change it.”

  17. 17.

    Betty Cracker

    @Baud: I kept hoping the plot would take that twist. Unlike poor Tippi, McCarthy’s character deserved a mass bird attack. But alas, no.

  18. 18.

    Kay

    Trump’s decision wasn’t popular in Utah. It was most popular in two rural counties, and even they were split.
    I think it’s a near-perfect example of Trump’s penchant for sticking it to the libs aligning with what are really narrow business interests, because some business interests were hurt by it- the tourism industry is big and profitable and they wanted the land protected.

  19. 19.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Professor Bigfoot: That rings true to me. I grew up and Detroit and thought only in terms of White and Black. The few Hispanics I met weren’t Black, so in my childish thinking, they had to be White.

    But it’s relative to some degree. A few years ago, I was in OK and ran into a guy who talked about being the only White person working on the border.

  20. 20.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: To my mind, the Bond movies lost their relevance after the Jason Bourne franchise took off so strongly. 007 is an anachronism these days, unfortunately.

  21. 21.

    Kay

    Or consider the Navajo Nation, the largest Indian reservation in the United States, which stretches across parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado. In Arizona, which Biden won by just 10,500 votes, it’s hard not to argue that the Native vote in general (6 percent of the state’s population) and the Navajo vote in particular (67,000 people of voting age) weren’t crucial.
    Overall, according to Brekhus’ reading of the data, precincts on the Navajo Nation averaged about 84 percent for Biden and 14 percent for President Donald Trump. With Arizona decided by so few votes, the Navajo may legitimately claim that their ballots made the difference. Biden and other Democrats likely couldn’t have carried Arizona — its 11 Electoral College votes and its Senate seat — without them.

  22. 22.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    A recurring theme.  A lot of what the Republicans do isn’t popular. The problem is that they do a few things that we don’t that are highly valued by a certain, fairly large and geographically well placed, portion of the electorate.

  27. 27.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @Baud: That premise sounds like it’d be appropriate for a reboot of The President’s Analyst, the best espionage satire ever made.

  30. 30.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    The analysis of the native American vote I posted recognizes that same dynamic- they’re important to Democrats getting elected in some areas but in others they live within states where 1.6% of the vote just doesn’t make a difference to even get within shouting distance, even if it’s 85% D. In Wisconsin they take it down to the county/precinct level. It’s 1000 votes, but it’s essential.

  31. 31.

    Ken

    @Betty Cracker: For a moment I thought they’d done a movie of Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow.  I might watch that even if people said it was terrible, just to see how the filmmakers handled the central event.  (Probably by re-writing it completely.)

  34. 34.

    Josie

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: I’m happy to know that this happened to someone else.  My husband was really upset with me when it happened.  I don’t even remember which movie it was.  That’s how much of an impression it made on me.

  35. 35.

    Baud

    @Kay: Makes sense.  Our side heavily favors a national message, I think, but it’s not really feasible given the different demos in different areas.  I think we need an overarching framework but we need to leave room for a lot of local variation. But it can controversial deciding what goes into the national message and what goes into the local message.

  36. 36.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Betty Cracker:

    You are far from alone. I hadn’t heard of The Starling, so looked it up on Wikipedia. The section on “Reception” had this to say (my bolding):

    On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 21% based on 68 reviews, with an average rating of 4.20/10. The website’s critical consensus reads, “Burying its talented cast and worthy themes under mounds of heavy-handed melodrama, The Starling is a turkey.”[11] Metacritic gave the film a weighted average score of 32 out of 100 based on 19 critics, indicating “generally unfavorable reviews”.[12]

    Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film a score of 1/5 stars, writing that the film “is so staggeringly peculiar and bad that it almost has some value as a kind of Dadaist event, a synthesis of non-meaning, a randomly generated heart-warmer movie that has come chuntering out of the printer as a result of an experimental computer program.”[13] Clarisse Loughrey of The Independent also gave the film a score of 1/5 stars, describing it as “an utterly bizarre, tonal misfire that fumbles through several ideas before implying that it’s perfectly OK to berate the suicidal for being so suicidal”, and wrote: “Not only are the jokes in Matt Harris’s script badly timed, but they’re also largely incomprehensible – there’s an extended bit about a leg-humping dog and several caricatures of the mentally ill that all feel like half-remembered approximations of Oscar bait.”[14] Johanna Schneller of The Globe and Mail gave the film a score of 1.5/4 stars, writing: “Director Theodore Melfi, who did a fine job with Hidden Figures, focuses his energies here on leaden metaphors, especially a persistent CGI starling, which represents … no one cares what.”[15] Caryn James of The Hollywood Reporter described the film as being “so slushily sentimental it makes the typical tearjerker look like a noir.”[16]

    There were a couple of good reviews (including from The Guardian and FTFNYT, surprise), which explains why the aggregate average score (4.20/10) was so high.

    Thanks for your comment, Ms. Cracker. I’ll stay far away.

    Edited to change “aggregate” to “average,” because I haven’t had my coffee yet.

  38. 38.

    Reboot

    @Baud: Brexit seems to be under-represented so far in popular culture.

    Segue: I’m writing a letter to the editor comparing McAuliffe to Youngkin. My impression so far is that McA’s themes are education, the environment, healthcare and so forth, and judging by his last term, he puts his money where his mouth is. Youngkin’s seem to be religious ‘freedom’ and ‘the family,’ and there’s one section on his website devoted to his ‘pro-family’ endorsements where he’s raving about infanticide. Very happy to have banked an early vote for McA, Ayala, and Herring.

  40. 40.

    Kay

    Naveed Jamali
    @NaveedAJamali
    The “umbrella man” who was seen on video in Minneapolis smashing store windows with a sledgehammer and encouraging people to steal, has been identified as a person associated with the Aryan Cowboys — a white supremacist prison and street gang.

    I felt like the fake Antifa/BLM smashers were blatantly obvious at the time so the investigations are almost a let down.
    He spray painted “free shit for everyone zone” on the Auto Zone prior to smashing the windows which just sounds exactly like what a Right winger impersonating a Left winger would say.

  41. 41.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Baud: One thing we can and should do as part of the national message is to drive home the point that in the ongoing battle between Covid-19 and America, the GQP is firmly on the side of the damned virus.

  44. 44.

    Kay

    @lowtechcyclist:

    My contrarian opinion is the virus isn’t going to matter politically. I think the normies have adjusted to it and the Right wing screamers will finnd less and less interest in their incessant, screeching complaints.

  45. 45.

    Baud

    @lowtechcyclist: I agree that we should be using what the GOP is doing now with respect to the virus to get more decent minded people to regard the GOP as a pariah.  I’m not sure how much the virus will be a priority issue for the 2022 November election though.

  46. 46.

    Jerry

    @The Thin Black Duke: To my mind, the Bond movies lost their relevance after the Jason Bourne franchise took off so strongly. 007 is an anachronism these days, unfortunately.

    That’s the genius of John Le Carré’s spy novels. The system that creates a need for espionage is an anachronism and is it odds with the humanity of people around the world.

    Also, in its greatest opposition point from the Bond series is that the main protagonist in many of Le Carré’s novels, George Smiley himself is viewed as an anachronism by far too many people; colleagues included.

  47. 47.

    Betty Cracker

    @lowtechcyclist: Yep — Republicans are pro-COVID and, relatedly, are tacitly in favor of hordes of deranged people screaming at children and educators about masks. That’s not popular either, and it’s happening nationwide thanks to an astroturf wingnut campaign.

    Other things that aren’t broadly popular: the 1/6 insurrection and the sore loser Donald Trump, which is handy since Republicans standing for office must either grovel before Trump or risk attracting his or his cult’s ire. Dems outside of deeply red districts who don’t make hay of that conundrum deserve to lose.

  48. 48.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Today’s contribution to the “Who’da Thunk It” file:

    US schools gave kids laptops during the pandemic. Then they spied on them

    When the pandemic started last year, countless forms of inequality were exposed – including the millions of American families who don’t have access to laptops or broadband internet. After some delays, schools across the country jumped into action and distributed technology to allow students to learn remotely. The catch? They ended up spying on students. “For their own good”, of course.

    According to recent research by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), “86% of teachers reported that, during the pandemic, schools provided tablets, laptops, or Chromebooks to students at twice the rate (43%) prior to the pandemic, an illustration of schools’ attempts to close disparities in digital access.”

    The problem is, a lot of those electronics were being used to monitor students, even combing through private chats, emails and documents all in the name of protecting them. More than 80% of surveyed teachers and 77% of surveyed high school students told the CDT that their schools use surveillance software on those devices, and the more reliant students are on those electronics, unable to afford supplementary phones or tablets, the more they are subjected to scrutiny.

    “We knew that there were students out there having ideations around suicide, self-harm and those sorts of things,” a school administrator explained to the CDT researchers. “[W]e found this [student activity monitoring software]. We could also do a good job with students who might be thinking about bullying … [I]f I can save one student from committing suicide, I feel like that platform is well worth every dime that we paid for [it].”

  49. 49.

    germy

    Good answer to Matt’s stupid question:

    What exact achievements of "indigenous people" are we supposed to be celebrating on "Indigenous People's Day"? Columbus is one of the founders of the civilization we all live in. I understand why he gets a holiday. But what about the native tribes?

    — Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) October 11, 2021

    Surviving us t.co/OGF2rtM6oc

    — Dennis Bees and Spooky Hurt (@dennisbhooper) October 11, 2021

  50. 50.

    Jerry

    @Betty Cracker: Sometimes in morning threads Not Max gives us a heads-up on worthwhile classic films that are coming up on TCM. I’m going to do the opposite and warn y’all off a new Netflix film because you don’t want to waste 1 hour and 43 minutes of your lives on the turkey that is “The Starling.”

    Yeah, thanks for the heads up on that one, and to show appreciation for that, I will highly highly suggest Midnight Mass on Netflix. A seven part horror miniseries that moves along at a snail’s pace but the story overall is great and the payoffs are so very worth every moment watching it. It stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ brother in New Adventures of Old Christine, Hamish Linklater.

  52. 52.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Jerry: LeCarre’s spies are all the most normal looking, unassuming people one could ever meet. They easily pass for a mail clerk or accountant etc, which is the way it works in real world espionage. Utterly forgettable people. A Bond or Bourne would attract attention just walking thru the door, which is the last thing anybody “working in the shadows” wants to do.

  53. 53.

    Ken

    @Jerry:  Le Carré also has some of the least glamorous, and so I assume most accurate, portrayals of espionage work.  The classic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy consists largely of Smiley reading old files and correlating their contents.

  55. 55.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Ken: Have you ever read “The Perfect Spy”? The main character had a somewhat horrifying childhood, really twisted. Supposedly it was based on LeCarre’s youth.

  57. 57.

    Ken

    @OzarkHillbilly: Yes, I rather liked it while being repulsed, but had to keep reminding myself that we shouldn’t judge foreign cultures by our standards. What we call “horrifying twisted childhood” is in Britain called “public school”.

  58. 58.

    Tony Jay

    @Reboot: 

    Brexit seems to be under-represented so far in popular culture.

    I think producers of pop-culture are having major issues getting their heads around Brexit as something that people that they might want to sell things to actually did to themselves without coming across (quite rightly) as scolding them for their stupidity.

    The only example I can think of offhand is in the current X-Men comics, where the UK was one of the countries that originally recognised the sovereign mutant nation of Krakoa in return for its revolutionary wonder drugs, only to later join countries like Russia, North Korea and Brazil in banning mutants and rejecting all of the life-saving medical treatments they provide, because of, well, fucking stupidity and the lies of a cult of aristocratic wizards.

    It’s virtually what happened.

  59. 59.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    Is 2 hours and 45 minutes really necessary to tell a Bond story well?

    No, it takes 2 hours and 45 minutes to tell a Bond story poorly.

    “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”

  60. 60.

    Kay

    @Betty Cracker:

    Betty C, I know you like poetry (I do too). You’ve perhaps read this poet but if not, do:

    Joy Har­jo, the 23rd Poet Lau­re­ate of the Unit­ed States, is a mem­ber of the Mvskoke Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv (Hick­o­ry Ground). She is only the sec­ond poet to be appoint­ed a third term as U.S. Poet Laureate.

    A three termer! :)

  62. 62.

    germy

    @Ken:

    They taught the colonists farming. The founders were influenced by their political ideas when they wrote the constitution. The Boston Tea Partiers dressed in their garb. They fought in the Revolutionary War. They had a more direct & greater influence on our "civilization" than CC t.co/WjMfRLMVtq

    — Sturgeon's Law (@Sturgeons_Law) October 11, 2021

  63. 63.

    Ken

    @Tony Jay: Brexit seems to be under-represented so far in popular culture.

    Sounds like the setup for a Brexit joke. “The BBC was going to make a documentary, but couldn’t get together a production crew due to the labor shortages.”

  64. 64.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Baud: I dimly recall that something like that did happen in more than one Bond film, gist being that the stoopid politicians had cut the budget for the Double-O branch due to the poor economy, the oil crisis, etc.

  66. 66.

    Geminid

    @Baud: An example of some good messaging this weekend from a certain @Joe Biden:

                Let’s set one thing straight. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill and the Build Back Better agenda are not about Left vs. Right.

    They’re about leading the world or continuing to let the world pass us by.

  67. 67.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @germy: Matt actually got worse.

    Of course this is rhetorical. I know the answer. We don’t celebrate achievements anymore. We celebrate victimhood. That’s why they get the holiday and Columbus loses it.

    What an asshole. Ignorant too!

  69. 69.

    Jerry

    @OzarkHillbilly:IIRC, it was the first book of his I read. Totally sucked me in.

    Coincidentally, it was the last one that I have read of Le Carré’s. Excellent book, thoroughly enjoyed it, but while reading it I was being bothered by a gnawing feeling that I needed to re-read Gene Wolfe’s ‘Book of the New Sun’ and ‘Urth of the New Sun.’ Which I did, of course, and now I am completely and firmly back in my seat for the Gene Wolfe bandwagon. I’m in the middle of ‘Peace’ right now. The Alzabo Soup podcast and The Gene Wolfe Literary Podcast have been really helpful during my re-reads here.

  72. 72.

    Baud

    @Sure Lurkalot:

    We don’t celebrate achievements anymore. We celebrate victimhood.

    We also celebrate some kid’s birth over 2000 years ago and the  completion of the one rotation of the earth around the sun and a completely made up New England holiday that may or may not have had anything to do with Indians.

  73. 73.

    Barbara

    @Emmyelle: ​

    And I have zero fucks to give about “Columbus Day” which always seems kind of contrived as a celebration of Italian heritage.

    So I have no Italian or Irish in me whatsoever, but I always thought that utilizing Columbus Day to celebrate Italian heritage was a post-hoc effort well after the day became an official holiday to try to match the hoopla surrounding St. Patrick’s Day. It meant next to nothing as an actual holiday when I was a kid.

  74. 74.

    evodevo

    @OzarkHillbilly: ​
      Yeah…Mr. Evodevo finds it very annoying when I start critiquing detective/spy dramas where the 6+ ft. tall blond hero is “sneaking incognito” through the crowded marketplace full of short Asian people, or tailing a suspect while driving an Aston Martin/red Mustang/whatever on a public road LOLOL

  75. 75.

    Betty Cracker

    @Kay: I haven’t read any of Harjo’s work yet, but Cheryl Strayed (author of “Wild”) interviewed her on a podcast I listened to a while back, and I was intrigued! She came across as warm, funny and down-to-earth. She read a poem on the podcast that made me want to check out more of her stuff. :)

  76. 76.

    Tony Jay

    @mrmoshpotato:

    Bond arrives at MI6 headquarters and takes the special lift down to Q Branch. Halfway down the power cuts out so he has to burn through the lift floor with his watch laser and rappel down the cable to reach the the proper sub-Basement. There he finds Q sitting in the dark while a couple of white-coated interns try and fail to start up a portable generator.

    Bond – “Q, what the hell’s going on. Are we under attack?”

    Q – “What? Oh. Oh no, not at all. Budget cuts, you see. We’re having to make do while the transition to a new high-technology paradigm works out a few (the generator splutters, barks, emits a cloud of black smoke and the stench of burning cat hair) a few, uh, bugs.”

    Bond – raises an eyebrow “I see. Look, I’ve used my watch up again. Pop us over a replacement, there’s a good chap.”

    Q – “I’m sorry, Bond, no can do I’m afraid. That’s the old way of doing things. Budgetary restraints, you see. We can’t get the parts anyway, not until we’ve finished transitioning into a low input/high extract financial model.”

    Bond – “Well, what am I supposed to do for field gadgets?”

    Q – “For goodness sake, Bond, it was all in the report I sent to you last week. Didn’t you… no, of course you didn’t. You’ll need to go and see M, she can arrange a meeting with Orlov.”

    Bond – “General Orlov? Good. It’s about time that brute was sanctioned as a target.”

    Q – “Targ…? Good lord, man, That’s Baron Orlov you’re talking about. The Prime Minister sent him up to the Lords last month. He’s Chair of the Budget sub-Committee.”

    Aghast, Bond draws his pistol and walks off into the darkness. Moments later a single gunshot is heard.

    Q – “Oh dear. Was it something I said?”

     

    Cut to Adele singing the first few bars of Shitefall. Fade to Black.

  77. 77.

    Barbara

    @germy: ​

    Columbus is one of the founders of the civilization we all live in.

    I missed the U.S. history lesson where I learned that we are considered to be a Caribbean nation. But seriously, when he said that the only thing we celebrate are victims I wanted to ask for his views on Memorial Day in the U.S. or Armistice Day in Europe, but I don’t “do” Twitter anymore. I hate what it does to actual discourse.​​

  86. 86.

    NotMax

    @Barbara

    It meant next to nothing as an actual holiday when I was a kid.

    It was the signal to begin taking winter clothing out of mothballs.

    Aside:

    In a case of historical irony, the Columbian Expositon was nicknamed “The White City.” (Entertaining but journeyman documentary on that fair is available on Tubi and IMDb TV, also in full on YouTube.)

  87. 87.

    Tony Jay

    @Baud:

    “Bond, this is M, are you receiving me, over?”

    “Tiny bit… busy… here, M… can I …call you back?”

    “No, you can’t. Put whoever she is down and listen. It’s imperative that you do not, under any circumstances, attempt to activate the suit-parachutte. There have been supply chain issues and… well… anyway, that’s a direct order. Do you copy?”

    Silence over the line, apart from the very distinct, very unmistakable sound of air rushing past very quickly.

    “I’ll get back to you on that. Bond out.”

  88. 88.

    James E Powell

    Growing up in Cleveland, the celebration of Italian-Americans’ culture was the Feast of the Assumption.

  89. 89.

    NotMax

    @Tony Jay

    “Be aware the chemicals for the smokescreen are in short supply and on back order. In the meantime your vehicle will emit a cloud of atomized Marmite.”

  90. 90.

    Reboot

    @Tony Jay: I bet you can answer something that’s always puzzled me)–I thought the Leave/Remain vote was a nonbinding referendum. Did anyone ever bring the “non-binding” part of referendum up after the vote, or have I been misinformed?

  92. 92.

    jonas

    @OzarkHillbilly: True story: Last year, my youngest (10 at the time) was learning remotely with a school-supplied Chromebook. I get a phone call one day at work from the principal letting me know that the school has detected that my child was looking at a pornographic website. There is no way she could have even possibly known what a porn site even was and those computers have powerful filtering software so I was skeptical. I phoned my wife, who was with her at home and she said she was doing some activity in the living room and nothing seemed amiss. So what apparently happened was, as we later found out, she was doing a math lesson or something when a pop-up spam message appeared on the screen asking her to open a link. Since it sort of looked like the messages the teacher would send, she clicked on it and it opened a webpage with “naked ladies” on it, triggering an alert on the surveillance system. We had a talk about clicking on links you don’t know and how there is stuff on the internet that’s not safe for kids, etc. If they were monitoring other stuff, texts, conversations with friends, etc, I don’t know, but if they were, all they probably found out about was stuff about Olivia Rodrigo.

  93. 93.

    Subsole

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: He is.

    I mean, wealthy, handsome, competent, dangerous, allllll the ladies love him to the point they will sacrifice themselves and betray their country for his enormously potent English peener (but he never has to see them twice, so, y’know, no consequences for that otherwise messy fact…). Gets to blow up god knows how many expensive government toys.

    Yeah. Seems like a fun gig.

    But then, I always preferred Harry Palmer.

     

     

     

     

    PS I am not Stavros Blofeld.

  97. 97.

    Mike in NC

    I never understood the whole thing about honoring Christopher Columbus. He never set foot in North America and was apparently quite the asshole.

  99. 99.

    Kay

    @Betty Cracker:

    It’s clean and …sharp. I like thinking about her talking to 5000 words to say nothing Trump, just staring at him in horror. Although that never happened.

    When he was asked why he cut this national monument by 85% he said he was a real estate developer and when they told him how big it was it was “a lot”.

  100. 100.

    Ken

    @Subsole: PS I am not Stavros Blofeld.

    Exactly what Stavros Blofeld would say….

    No, I take that back; in canon (or at least in Diamonds are Forever), Blofeld would find people willing to get plastic surgery and say “I am Stavros Blofeld.”

  102. 102.

    Subsole

     

     

    @Kay: This. If you had even a peripheral exposure to 4 chan you smelled that bullshit from four states over. It was damn-near verbatim /pol memery.

  104. 104.

    Soprano2

    @OzarkHillbilly: I always thought James Bond would have been the worst spy imaginable. The best – someone who can pass as a cleaning person. You get access to all kinds of stuff and places without it being suspicious that you’re there.

  105. 105.

    Kay

    @Subsole:

    Wasn’t it? I’ll never understand why they didn’t just arrest them at the scene. The (selective) feigned helplessness of America’s police forces is just a continuing mystery to me. Since when are police like “nothing we can do!”

    Figuring out the difference between lawful protests/political speech and criminal behavior was never a problem for them before- it’s their job. All of a sudden that’s too difficult for them? Do they need a refresher course?

  106. 106.

    Subsole

    @Sure Lurkalot: Agraybee over on the twitters summed it up.

    Conservatives have nothing. Zilch. Zip. Zero. Just endless, ass-fractured bellyaching because someone somewhere in America disagrees with their horrible headass prejudices.

  107. 107.

    Ken

    @Soprano2: Surely there’s a story or movie out there where the Bond-like spy is deliberately sent as a distraction, to give the cleaning person a chance to rifle the embassy safe.

  108. 108.

    L85NJGT

    @Barbara:

    Those “ethnic” holidays are about how the majority views and relates to migrant groups, political pandering, and crass commercialization.

  111. 111.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Baud: IIRC, Trump won the Lumbee vote in North Carolina by promising to give the tribe federal recognition. It was a pure, canny transactional move and I can’t really fault him or them for it.

  115. 115.

    NotMax

    @Ken

    “Sigh. The Kickstarter for the Sacco and Vanzetti parade didn’t quite take off as we anticipated.”

    //

  116. 116.

    Subsole

    @Soprano2:

    Oh god, this.

    I am to this day flabbergasted at the conversations I would overhear as a repairman.

    Who was doing what to whom with whom for whom over how many jellybeans, and me sitting there like I was some sort of wall fixture that just happened to know to fix their printer.

    If you were of a mischievous mind, you could probably have had half the management in that place feuding with each other, just by spilling some carefully calibrated tea.

  117. 117.

    Subsole

     

     

    @Kay: Could be they wanted to teach us all a lesson. “You criticized us, so see what happens without us.”

    This utterly pernicious attitude that we owe emergency services a daily parade with on-demand fellatio just because they showed up to work needs to die gasping for water in a desert somewhere.

  118. 118.

    Tony Jay

    @Reboot:

    No, you’re right, it was. But after the shock Referendum result the pro-Brexit forces were energised and it became very hard to say that a majority of voters hadn’t expressed a willingness to Leave.

    Add to that the EU’s understandable refusal to discuss the terms and conditions of withdrawal unless the UK actually enacted Article 50 and began the withdrawal process and the ensuing vote in the House that turned the non-binding Referendum into a binding Act of Parliament.

    After that it would have taken another majority vote in Parliament to  withdraw the withdrawal, and there were never enough votes for that without Tory Remainers splitting away to vote with the dirty Commies, and they refused to do that.

  120. 120.

    scav

    Huzzah!  The foundational cultural avatar of the Walshian culture is a possibly Portuguese immigrant sailing for Spain in search of the Far East who got utterly lost, didn’t know where he was when he stumbled across land that wasn’t here anyway and then killed a lot of people via disease. Yup, nailed it.

  121. 121.

    Another Scott

    Even if you're a white supremacist, Columbus Day is a joke. Shouldn't y'all be celebrating Leif Ericson Day? He was a lot whiter than Columbus. Get with the program, honkies.

    — Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) October 11, 2021

    Good for Joe.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  123. 123.

    Another Scott

    @scav: OTOH, …

    Phys.org:

    New analysis of ancient writings suggests that sailors from the Italian hometown of Christopher Columbus knew of America 150 years before its renowned ‘discovery’.

    Transcribing and detailing a, circa, 1345 document by a Milanese friar, Galvaneus Flamma, Medieval Latin literature expert Professor Paolo Chiesa has made an “astonishing” discovery of an “exceptional” passage referring to an area we know today as North America.

    According to Chiesa, the ancient essay—first discovered in 2013—suggests that sailors from Genoa were already aware of this land, recognizable as ‘Markland’/ ‘Marckalada’ – mentioned by some Icelandic sources and identified by scholars as part of the Atlantic coast of North America (usually assumed to be Labrador or Newfoundland).

    […]

    They didn’t know about Hispaniola and the other islands (at least as far as we know now), but they knew stuff was out there. The world was better understood back then than we were taught.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  125. 125.

    scav

    @Another Scott: Add ignorant to the list of foundational cultural qualities being celebrated.

    ETA, or, maybe lying, as he kept talking about the big economic goal, and not the lesser known opportunity that he still hadn’t managed to land on.

  126. 126.

    scav

    @Another Scott: Also, I’d be more personally impressed by the ”knowledge” of Markland if they weren’t jostling alongside similar about Prester John, Saint Brendan and other confident descriptions of foreign bits and inhabitants that crowded the literature.  They may not have all imagined a blank and empty rest of world, but it doesn’t seem to impact what Columbus was dealing to Isabella.  Still, always interesting to get more info on what geographical ideas were circulating.

  127. 127.

    Just Chuck

    @Jerry: The dialog in Bond movies as far back as the 80’s frequently refers to him as an obsolete relic, a dangerous loose cannon, and so on.  Other than that, what can I say: they’re movies, and they’re not cerebral movies.

  129. 129.

    Geminid

    @scav: I’ve read that the Basques fished the rich grounds off of New England for centuries before 1492. They surely would have known about the mainland beyond. When the Norseman showed up, they probably assured the Basque fishermen that they wouldn’t tell anyone else about the good fishing.

Comments are closed.