Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

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

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

No Justins, No Peace

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

I really should read my own blog.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

You are here: Home / Humorous / Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Where Are the Snowflakes of Yesteryear?

Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Where Are the Snowflakes of Yesteryear?

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In the Benedict Option, “Dreher argues for the formation of virtuous Christian communities in response to an increasingly secular culture”…

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101Comments

  3. 3.

    Tony Jay

    If America decides to invade Canada and defeats the military, Canadians are going to be powerless to stop them.

    Ian Miles Chong (his father must be so ashamed) didn’t need to add any more to that statement.

    And re: Dreher the Devout Dick, his wife recently dumped his well-flagellated ass. He’s feeling the loss of his ‘every third Tuesday five-minute Funtime’.

  4. 4.

    debbie

    Abbott’s clearly learned…something.

    Texas Gov. Abbott has called for a new school safety review process that will include “in-person, unannounced, random intruder detection audits” on the state’s school districts.https://t.co/kaG4Z2IkpG
    — Axios (@axios) June 1, 2022

  6. 6.

    Gravenstone

    What’s Seb trying to show?

    1. hates Black people
    2. loves guns
    3. raging asshole
    4. pure tribalism
    5.  your suggestion here
  8. 8.

    Gravenstone

    @debbie: So, they’re going to randomly intrude into schools, to test if they’re ready for random intruders? This won’t end well…

  10. 10.

    Ken

    All I can say in response to that picture of Sarah Palin is “Don’t you think she looks… tired?”

  11. 11.

    David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch

    speaking of libel cases, a case we’ve all been following:

    ABC [email protected]

    “There you have it. A substantial for verdict for Johnny Depp, but not complete. A devastating defeat really for Amber Heard, although she did win on one count,” @TerryMoran reports.

  12. 12.

    debbie

    @Baud:

    Ohio just passed a law to train teachers and other adults in schools. How much stupider are we capable of becoming?

  13. 13.

    dmsilev

    @zhena gogolia: Apparently so. I refuse to actually play the video and find out. “Anachronistically Pert Boobs” does sound like it should be a band name; an all-woman punk group maybe?

  15. 15.

    debbie

    Takes one to know one.

    NEW: Republican Paul Gosar calls for restrictions on pornography. He says “porn is simply too accessible” and that anyone who “opposes any restrictions on porn is ignorant at best and malicious at worst.”

    But sure, “party of small government.” Got it.
    — Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) June 1, 2022

  16. 16.

    Baud

    @debbie:

    anyone who “opposes any restrictions on porn is ignorant at best and malicious at worst.”

     
    Or, you know, really horny.

  19. 19.

    David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch

    @Ken: ​
     

    All I can say in response to that picture of Sarah Palin is “Don’t you think she looks… tired?”

    Meanwhile, Tina Fey still looks awesome

  21. 21.

    Old Man Shadow

    Fundamentalist asshole prudes are the largest consumers of pornography and probably the largest market for sex workers.

  24. 24.

    SpaceUnit

    In my experience the virtuous communities and the Christian communities are in different parts of town.

  27. 27.

    Feathers

    @zhena gogolia: This trial was just so strange. Both parties live in California, but the trial was in Virginia. The judge disallowed her contemporaneous medical records as hearsay. The jury wasn’t sequestered, so they went home to all the toxic three ring circus surrounding the trial every night. Depp lost in England, known to be the easiest venue for winning a libel verdict, yet he loses in Virginia?

    I hope there are appeals and we find out what went wrong in the courtroom. We must have the standard that truth is an absolute defense in a libel case.

    I would be very intrigued to hear from the lawyers on how this trial went so far off the rails.

  28. 28.

    Jeffro

    @debbie: more pounding on the schools, lovely

    “WHY DIDN’T YOU STOP OUR SECRET SHOPPER FAKE GUN MASSACRE-COMMITTER WHEN HE HAD EIGHT HANDGUNS STUFFED DOWN HIS CARGO PANTS???  WHAT ARE YOU, BLIND???!?”

    also

    “WHY DID YOU STOP A LAW-ABIDING, NON-GUN-BRANDISHING AMERICAN PARENT WHO HAPPENED TO BE WEARING CARGO PANTS FROM VISITING WITH HIS KID IN THE MIDDLE OF SOCIAL STUDIES TO SEE IF THE TEACHER WAS TEACHING ‘CRT’????!?”

    fuck these people

  32. 32.

    David ☘The Establishment☘ Koch

    @zhena gogolia: ​  He’s a TCM guy. they ran a couple of commando movies on Memorial Day, (Merrill’s Marauders and Dirty Dozen)[note the lazy alliteration].​

  34. 34.

    MattF

    One sometimes forgets how bizarre some of the RWNJs really are. Blaming Jesus is a cop-out, IMO.

  36. 36.

    Bex

    And we have another mass shooting in Tulsa.  But since people can’t get abortions there it’s all good.

  38. 38.

    Old Man Shadow

    @Feathers: I don’t know.

    I’ve heard from a social worker friend who thinks there was mutual abuse. I’ve heard from someone who dated a narcissist who thinks Depp is completely innocent. And I’ve heard from survivors of DV who very much identify with and believe Ms. Heard.

    Neither one of them came off looking great in this trial, but that shouldn’t matter legally. All that should matter is the evidence.

    I too expect we’ll see an appeal and I expect that fifteen million dollar award will get cut down quite a bit if not overturned.

    But again… I wasn’t on the jury, so maybe they heard evidence that led them the way they voted.

  40. 40.

    debbie

    @MattF:

    Weird, like this?

    The Utah County Attorney is asking the Utah County Sheriff to resign after the sheriff's office said they were investigating a group for "ritualistic sexual abuse and trafficking" and apparently implicated the County Attorney, saying he murdered and ate children. https://t.co/wCrFMIYMtA— Paighten Harkins (@PaightenHarkins) June 1, 2022

  41. 41.

    Narya

    How can a boob be anachronistically pert? Unnaturally, or … something. But anachronistically?

  43. 43.

    Tony Jay

    @Baud:

    That’s understandable. The years you’ve spent courting that base with suggestively shaped taco and blow evenings would be wasted.

  48. 48.

    WaterGirl

    @debbie: Is there a cliff notes version?  Did he do something wrong, and shouldn’t have (mostly) won?  Or was it a bullshit case and he should have won across the board?

  49. 49.

    Old Man Shadow

    Another goddamned one.

    Second amendment be damned. Get rid of all the guns. Melt them down into farming equipment like their Bible tells them God will do.

  53. 53.

    Mai Naem mobile

    @Bex: I casually mentioned to my sister yesterday that there was a shooting in New Orleans. Today, apparently she saw the news on the Oklahoma shooting so she asked me if yesterday’s was Oklahoma. I told her nah, New Orleans. One would be a weeks long story in any other country. Here we can’t even keep track of them.

  54. 54.

    Geminid

    @Jeffro: Gorka has a third-tier radio show that gets some weekend airtime in Charlottesville. I was scanning the radio one Saturday when I heard his obnoxious voice. I was about to scan on, but then I realized he was introducing his guest, Lauren Boebert. Well, this should be interesting, I thought.

    It was. Once that motormouth got going, Gorka couldn’t get a word in edgewise. He didn’t even try to stop her at the hard break. One second she was babbling away, the next second some lady was selling mattresses.

  55. 55.

    Another Scott

    Meanwhile, …

    Another round of targeted student debt cancellation from the Biden White House, and this one's big—full cancellation of debt for all attendees of Corinthian, one of the most notorious of the huge predatory for-profit colleges. https://t.co/4LqPC0tfl0

    — Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) June 1, 2022

    Good, good.

    (via LOLGOP)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  56. 56.

    JWR

    @Bex: Three people killed, multiple people injured, suspect dead. OK is an open carry state, but as he walked across the parking lot, carrying the damn rifle, some people called the cops, which is why they were there so quickly, but not before he made it to the second floor. And so on and on it goes.

  59. 59.

    Another Scott

    @Feathers: Popehat’s been kinda speechless about it, but says he hasn’t paid particular attention to it.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  61. 61.

    Anne Laurie

    @Old Man Shadow: Some people just set off the worst in each other.  Adult children of alcoholics, and survivors of childhood abuse, use the metaphor of an ‘invisible mark’ on one’s forehead that only other survivors can see — we’re drawn to people who (mostly unconsciously) replicate the abnormal worldview we grew up under.

    Or, as Ogden Nash wrote, well back in the last century :

    Which the Chicken and Which the Egg?

    He drinks because she scolds, he thinks;

    She thinks she scolds because he drinks;

    And neither will admit what’s true

    That he’s a sot and she’s a shrew.

  62. 62.

    Anne Laurie

    @Delk: Ha! My first thought, seeing that pic, was Somebody thinks he has a newly svelte physique to show off…

  64. 64.

    braccio

    Just a translation. AR-15s are sometimes called Black Guns. ‘Cause they’re usually black. So Gorka is saying that AR-15s matter. Which is a whole lot of dehumanizing going on in three words.

  67. 67.

    Betty

    @WaterGirl: The trial revealed two very dysfunctional people who apparently tormented each other. She made an allegation of domestic violence. He sued her for defamation and won. She also won a claim against him. Just an ugly situation.

  70. 70.

    different-church-lady

    What’s Seb Gorka trying to show here?

    That he’s a sociopath. Why is this even a question?

  71. 71.

    Ken

    @Narya: There was that bra slogan, “it lifts and separates.” And based on my viewing of late 50s and early 60s TV, a lot of bodices were cut so they were, how to put this, pointed.

  73. 73.

    Jay

    @braccio:

    “black guns”, refer to AR pattern and other Military “pattern” guns, ranging across a broad scale, from M14’s, ( Norinco M1’s, a Chinese clone), to Ruger’s and SSK’s.

    it’s the magazine/clip excuse writ large.

    any semi auto rifle with a magazine with more than 5 rounds, (in Canada) is now a “black gun”,

  74. 74.

    Tony Jay

    @Jay:

    Ha! People be crazy.

    Good Google-Fu. The Echo site is notoriously awful to navigate. 90% intrusive adverts, 5% stories about paedophiles, 5% stories about benefit ‘cheats’ driving big cars.

  77. 77.

    Feathers

    @WaterGirl: it was a bullshit case and should have been thrown out, and would have been, except for a technicality.

    In the UK, Depp sued the Sun newspaper for calling him a “wife beater.” UK libel law highly favors litigants, so Depp was favored to win. However, the judge ruled that there were 12 instances of physical abuse that were verifiably true, therefore Depp could legally be called a “wife beater.” That should have been enough to have his case against Heard thrown out, except for the fact that he sued the newspaper, rather than Heard, so the Virginia case was allowed to continue.

    I’ve been following the trial, but not every moment, because I couldn’t find someone taking it seriously from a legal standpoint.  I know that contemporaneous medical records were disallowed as hearsay, in an unusually strict reading and that changes in his testimony between the UK and US trials were ignored. Bad lawyering from her side? I don’t know. But I’m pretty close to his age and he has a history of violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and trashing hotel rooms since the 1980s. He admits to being a blackout drunk, but knows he couldn’t have hit his wife during those times. Basically, his defense was that she faked bruises with makeup, lied to her doctors and therapists, all in a nearly decade long conspiracy to frame him as an abuser.

    @Old Man Shadow: Mutual abuse is when two violent (and usually drug/alcohol abusers) enter into a relationship and both start fights with each other. It happens, but is rare. Researchers and DV therapists now talk about their being an abuser and “reactive violence.” Namely, someone who is in a controlling and violent relationship begins to fight back. That appears to be what happened here.

    As a general aside, I did go looking for someone taking the case seriously. As someone on Twitter said, we have a real problem with these sorts of cases, because the mainstream press sees them as sordid and beneath them. They get covered as gossip, with what the tabloids are saying as the main story. So the tabloid version just gets magnified by the NYT and such, rather than there being pushback on the sorts of issues I’m bringing up. Thus the NYT gets plaudits for re-examining the Britney Spears saga, while not treating what is happening to Amber Heard as a serious legal case, rather than a tawdry tabloid acrimonious  divorce story.

  79. 79.

    Geminid

    @Jeffro: I had followed Boebert’s election campaign. I was interested because she had knocked out the Republican incumbent, as had happened here in the VA 5th CD. But I had never heard her speak so I was curious. What a motormouth!

    Boebert is being challenged in the CO 3rd primary by State Senator Don Coram. The 72 year-old Coram looks like rancher, but he’s actually a hemp farmer. He and Boebert debated last week, and Boebert brought up a state Senate vote of Coram’s that helped the hemp industry and himself. Boebert tried to accuse Coram of having ulterior motives, but she read her notes wrong and it came out of her mouth as “alternative motors.”

  81. 81.

    ian

    @Tony Jay:

    US and Canadian forces share many important command posts, including Norad.  Makes a sneak attack tricky.  Also the record for the US trying to invade Canada is 0 for 3, so I think the Canadians have better odds than you give them.

    Imagine occupying a country with the same population as Iraq, but 20 times the territory to hide in.  No easy feat.

  82. 82.

    different-church-lady

    Sarah Palin lost her bid for a new trial in her libel case against The New York Times.

    I have to say, even for him Lou Reed is lookin’ kinda rough in that photo.

  85. 85.

    Tony Jay

    @ian:

    Hey, I said ‘If’, didn’t I?

    Plus if Canadians wanted to hide from American patrols in all that wide-open, they’d have to deal with all the bloody Wendigos, right?

    It’s a toss-up, but I bet they’d knuckle down under the Occupation while they researched the writings of the Sasquatch Extermination League.

    In retrospect, I may have some misconceptions about Canada.

  90. 90.

    different-church-lady

    I feel good thinking that Seb Gorka has never had a happy day in his life.

  92. 92.

    Anne Laurie

    @different-church-lady: Wasn’t Dreher the guy who first achieved ‘fame’ by blogging about 1950s advertising / marketing?

    I think he’s got some kind of unfortunate adolescent sexual fixation on those bullet-cone bras from the Maidenform ads…

  93. 93.

    Cameron

    @Another Scott: So the moral of today’s story is….go to a shitty bogus college, get your debts scrubbed; go to a real college, too bad, so sad?  I’m a confused old man.  I don’t understand what’s so wonderful here.

  94. 94.

    Feathers

    @different-church-lady: The issue is having their media reporters cover it as a cultural event, rather than having legal analysts talking about what is actually happening in the courtroom.

    The jury found that Heard libeled Depp by calling herself a victim of domestic violence in an op-ed that didn’t mention his name. This jury also found that Depp libeled Heard when he called her claims of being a domestic violence a hoax. How TF did we end up here?

  96. 96.

    Another Scott

    @Cameron: I don’t know all the details, but my understanding is that many/most people who went to “school” there got a worthless “degree” in spite of promises to the contrary and a mountain of expensive debt.  People who are swindled should have an out, and if the government was backing loans (and thus implicitly saying the “education” from that “institution” was valuable), then the government should eat the debt – not the people who took it out in good faith.

    Plus, the courts have been involved. StudentAid.gov has more.

    Impoverishing young people for decades for their education (when their parents and grandparents didn’t have such huge burdens) is unfair and bad for America. This is another step in the right direction (but much more needs to be done).

    My $0.02. YMMV.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  100. 100.

    Ms. Deranged in AZ

    TBH the Depp v Heard thing was sordid.  They both came across as assholes, her being more of one than him.  However, as a survivor of domestic abuse there was some testimony from Depp that rang very true to me–I have no doubt that she was abusive toward him.  I can also say that if he did start to fight back, and some of us do, we can be just as ugly in our responses (when I fought back, the last time he tried to lay hands on me, I broke his ribs). In other words, it’s hard to live with an abusive asshole day in and day out without building up some serious and destructive anger, and when it comes out, it ain’t pretty.   And acknowledging that Heard was abusive, in no way excuses Depp from being an annoying pain in the ass drunk….so it was a wash reputation-wise if you ask me.  One final point, not sure why so many of you are saying Depp lost. Jury found she had defamed him and cost him money, awarding him $10 mill in compensatory and $5 mill in punitive. Heard’s countersuit was about defamation due to statements made by Depp’s attorney.  Jury found that to be true as well awarding her only $3 mill in compensatory and zero in punitive.  That’s a win for Depp.  Is it perfect?  No but in that mess of a case,it’s as good as he was ever going to get.

  101. 101.

    MisterDancer

    @Feathers: As someone on Twitter said, we have a real problem with these sorts of cases, because the mainstream press sees them as sordid and beneath them.

    This whole business has me so enraged that I cannot see straight.

    We treat this as spectacle, like the OJ Simpson and so many other cases. And it’s more like how we treated Britany Spears, how we fail to see the larger societal issues to these situations — especially in an age where we know political/media manipulation is rife and sophisticated.

    Depp didn’t land in a courtroom that televised by accident. We didn’t see waves of social media by accident; hell, I’ve been seeing “people” on Reddit attacking Heard for years, in ways very similar to Bot activity on so many topics we discuss here. That the raging media coverage, including social, was not an accident, but deliberate — and involves a lot of the same assholes, like Tucker Carlson, that we rightly excoriate daily, here and elsewhere.

    Bothsiderism, now weaponized for more than just political apathy.

    Legal issues and right/wrong of the people aside, this was a Trap.  And I hate that so many of us — including myself, for a time — fell into it.

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