Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

T R E 4 5 O N

Weā€™ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

If rights arenā€™t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

The willow is too close to the house.

If ā€˜weirdā€™ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

A democracy canā€™t function when people canā€™t distinguish facts from lies.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

In after Baud. Damn.

Letā€™s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. Thatā€™s why orange juice was invented.

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

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it is not glory.

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

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You canā€™t explain that.

When I was faster i was always behind.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

You know itā€™s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on ā€œHow To Be Normalā€.

Iā€™d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

No one could have predicted…

I really should read my own blog.

This blog will pay for itself.

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

You are here: Home / Civil Rights / LGBTQ Rights / LGBTQ Rights Are Human Rights / Friday Evening Open Thread: No Republican Wants to *Work* Any More

Friday Evening Open Thread: No Republican Wants to *Work* Any More

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Big, hulking, apparently quite physically healthy Ethan Schmidt is trying to make a career out of harassing retail clerks instead of doing honest work. And he can’t even be arsed to do a half-decent job on his self-promotional videos, because as long as he blarts out the worship words often enough, he figures his marks philosophical fellows will throw money at him.

Of course, he’s just following the template of his Republican betters…

Friday Evening Open Thread: No Repub Wants to *Work* Any More

Friday Evening Open Thread: No Repub Wants to *Work* Any More 1

Reader Interactions

117Comments

  4. 4.

    Dan B

    So, I have questions.Ā  Why does this guy think “sex” Immediately when he sees a Pride Flag?Ā  Has he ever looked in the mirror and asked himself why?Ā  Has he ever asked friends why he thinks of sex, and children?

  6. 6.

    Old Dan and Little Ann

    I wish anyone of those workers just said, “Go fuck off and die under your bridge, troll.”Ā  What a douche.

  9. 9.

    JaneE

    He objects to the pride flag but he goes out in public looking like Snidely Whiplash?Ā  Enticing kids by looking like a cartoon character maybe?

    It is really too bad that the employees have to be polite to the customer even when he is a jerk.Ā  And he doesn’t even know where he is.Ā  On something or just that stupid?

    He should know that all the BS he was spouting is just that – BS.

  11. 11.

    CaseyL

    Madison Cawthorne made it clear when he was being oriented along with the rest of the freshman class that he wasn’t interested in policy, just “coms.”Ā  He said the secret part out loud (like he did about cocaine and orgies amongst the GOP): not a single GOP politician is the slightest bit interested in policy.Ā  They’re only there to pass laws favoring their donors, and otherwise grift.

  12. 12.

    Alison Rose šŸ’™šŸŒ»šŸ’›

    @Dan B: Because they’re the sick perverts, not us. They are the ones who think consenting adults in a relationship is no different than pedophilia, bestiality, and whatever else. They come up with that shit in their heads, yet they call us sick.

    As a queer person, that video makes me angry, but also just makes me want to cry. And that dude ought to get pummeled just for that fucking mustache.

  13. 13.

    bbleh

    Pure performativeness is more like it. Ā They can’t run on their policies — those are wildly unpopular, if not outright ghoulish — and they can’t state their feelings openly — overt racism is still frowned upon — so all they have left is code-words and acting out.

    They’re like children trying to assert themselves by deliberately misbehaving. Ā It’s sort of sad, and it might be comical at times, except for those assault weapons and stuff …

  14. 14.

    Ken

    @lgerard: I assume “round” is a code word. Sane people assume he means “sphere”, but those in the know understand it to mean “plate shaped”.

  18. 18.

    SpaceUnit

    Ha. Ā That PetSmart manager wasn’t having none.

    That’s the way you do it.

  19. 19.

    Alison Rose šŸ’™šŸŒ»šŸ’›

    The Petsmart troll and my comment above reminded me of something. Now, obviously Marilyn Manson has turned out to be a massive pig and a horrid person, and he can fuck off every day and twice on Sundays, but I recall an interview he did when the band was in its heyday. There were always these wild crazy rumors about shit he would do during concerts. Just the most bizarre claims. I saw them in concert twice and the worst thing I ever saw him do was grab a disposable camera (this was obviously many years ago) out of someone’s hand who was in the pit up front, use it to take a picture under his kilt, then toss the camera back into the crowd.

    But there would be these fundie Christians claiming he would throw bags of drugs into the audience, or drag girls onstage and make them strip, or throw a puppy into the pit and say the show wouldn’t start till it was dead. Just the height of insanity. And in an interview, he noted that 1) he never did anything like any of that and never would (though the thing about harming women…yeah, you would do that, and you did, you asshole); and 2) it was these supposed good righteous Christians who were coming up with these sick, disgusting acts. So, he said, which one of us is actually the sick one? It’s their minds creating these scenarios, so it’s their minds where the sickness is coming from.

    Same shit different style with these Q monsters and their LGBTQ IS SATANIC CHILD MOLESTATION!!!!!! bullshit. You’re making all these wild claims about me and my people, yet the sole source for the repulsiveness is your own depraved mind.

  22. 22.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Dan B: oh this is their new thing. Any mention of the QUILTBAG community is about sex. Thatā€™s why itā€™s important to pass laws outlawing having a picture of your same-sex spouse on your desk if youā€™re a teacher. For the children you see

    Same as their old thing really although Iā€™ve noticed I hear less about shoving things down their throats than I used to.

  25. 25.

    Jeffro

    @Albatrossity: Frankly, it’s probably a good thing that they are lazy SOBs

    I was gonna say the same thing!

    Are we sure we want these clowns to display even a hint of a work ethic?

  27. 27.

    Jeffro

    @CaseyL:not a single GOP politician is the slightest bit interested in policy.Ā  Theyā€™re only there to pass laws favoring their donors, and otherwise grift.

    THIS.

    Mallory McMorrow up in MI called them out on it too, about using culture war “issues” to fundraise while doing nothing to actually improve their constituents’ lives. Ā Nota bene, Dems.

  28. 28.

    ColoradoGuy

    We need a name for “Internet-amplified mass psychosis”, because that’s this is. It’s what the Republican party (and their info apparatus) has become.

  30. 30.

    John Cole

    Ethan Schmidt has a long history of this. Is currently on probation and was just arrested again for violation of probation and trying to buy a gun via some gofundme for wingnuts. He was banned from all Target stores and cops are on him for making death threats. He’ll be in jail or dead from suicide after a mass shooting within a year or two.

  34. 34.

    Another Scott

    Speaking of people with too much time on their hands doing disturbing things with video… PetaPixel:

    Researchers from Samsung Labs have developed a way to create high-resolution avatars, or deepfakes, from a single still frame photo or even a painting.

    Called MegaPortraits, the team says they can create megapixel-sized avatars from simple single-frame starting points. The team says that its advances tackled a particularly challenging problem of when the appearance of the driving image is substantially different from the animated source image. For example, it is much harder to operate an effective deepfake of Angelina Jolie when the subject is a short-haired male.

    Impressive, but I’m having trouble thinking of a good use for this while coming up with all kinds of bad uses…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  41. 41.

    E.

    One of the most frightening parts of Handmaid’s Tale for me was the flashback to the women getting harassed in the store for their clothing, just before everything changed. The Petco thing brings shivers down my spine. “That’s offensive we can’t have that. Take it down.”

  42. 42.

    Jay

    When I worked retail, we had to deal with morons during Pride and other occasions.

    I dealt with the homophobes by interrupting them, pointing out that homophobia was a mental illness, left untreated destroys the brain and the heart, that there were a wide array of treatments ranging from talk therapy to chemical castration, and that they should seek professional help before it was to late.

  43. 43.

    Betsy

    In a country founded in slavery, obviously no one wants to work.

    This is what labor abuse does to people – work is hell, so what idiot would work?

    And conversely, if you work for a living, then you must be an idiot or a dupe ā€” and obviously one of godā€™s non-chosen people.

    Want to stop the grift and the grifters? Support labor.

    Make work pay. Ā Make it a choice rational people want to make, instead of right-wing grifting, quackery, etc.

  46. 46.

    different-church-lady

    At some point weā€™re going to have to address the aspects of our electoral system that reward sociopathic narcissists with increasing frequency.

  47. 47.

    Alison Rose šŸ’™šŸŒ»šŸ’›

    @E.: Yeah. But also, I love how they’re all going all in on the “the rainbow is from God and gays corrupted it and we have to take it back” thing. I’m like…sorry bitches, God gave it to us, it’s ours now. You can make one out of Earth tones.

  48. 48.

    different-church-lady

    @Albatrossity: This is probably the very reason Liz Cheney wants to put Trump away: she knows that true power takes work, and Trump keeps fucking up the machine.

  51. 51.

    Alison Rose šŸ’™šŸŒ»šŸ’›

    @different-church-lady: It’s not that they think they can’t–it’s that we gays have made it all icky by getting our gayness all over it. They think we’ve perverted it by making it our symbol.

    Plus TBH I don’t love when straight people wear stuff with rainbows on it. It’s hard enough as a useless lesbian figuring out if a chick is into you. Like literally a girl could stick her tongue down your throat and you’re like…………….I don’t know if she likes me like that, though.

  53. 53.

    Ksmiami

    @different-church-lady: the prion disease Charles Pierce coined has fully taken over the GOP. Once you stop looking at government as a way to make peopleā€™s lives better thru civil society, Ā the whole thing becomes about performative grifting, or worse, a power trip to hurt the ppl you hate.

  54. 54.

    Urza

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Same as their old thing really although Iā€™ve noticed I hear less about shoving things down their throats than I used to.

    I think this was their personal fantasy about Obama, seemed to mainly be used then and tapered off quite a bit as soon as he wasn’t the main boogeyman.

  55. 55.

    cliosfanboy

    I’ve never heard of this clown before. Good on the managers for tossing him out.

  57. 57.

    Kropacetic

    Why won’t you accept these claims I’m making aboutĀ  a whole group of people at face value? I don’t have an obvious agenda or anything…

  60. 60.

    different-church-lady

    Iā€™n going to look at the weather report for the weekend. Please pray for me.

  62. 62.

    different-church-lady

    @ColoradoGuy:

    We need a name for ā€œInternet-amplified mass psychosisā€

    I kinda like the name Ā ā€œInternet-amplified mass psychosisā€ as it is.

  66. 66.

    Subsole

    @HinTN:

    Media Exacerbated Mass Delusion.

    “Oh shit, Uncle Steev’s all Meem’d again. Who left Tucker on?”

  67. 67.

    James E Powell

    @Baud:

    SoĀ heā€™sĀ the so-called reasonable republican the media keeps talking about.

    He was a happy, well-adjusted person until he read an article about pronouns & micro-aggressions.

  68. 68.

    different-church-lady

    @Another Scott:

    Iā€™m having trouble thinking of a good use for this while coming up with all kinds of bad uses

    Youā€™ll be rich in Silicone Valley in no time!

  69. 69.

    Subsole

    @Alison Rose šŸ’™šŸŒ»šŸ’›: Huh. The things I learn here.

     

    Do you mean like, it’s hard to tell if they’re just using you for sex, or like, they’re just exploring their identity and you happened to ge there, or what? Not trying to pry, just genuinely confused.

  71. 71.

    Subsole

     

     

    @Jay: Thanks. The fact it says it was coined as a self-designation makes me think I’d best stick to ‘LGBTQ’ if I want to avoid giving offense. Correct?

  76. 76.

    Lyrebird

    @Alison Rose šŸ’™šŸŒ»šŸ’›:Ā ā€‹
     

    TBH I donā€™t love when straight people wear stuff with rainbows on it.

    I don’t see the “Straight but Not Narrow” bumper sticker anymore, I wanted it before I had a car. Guess it sounds kind of old school.

  79. 79.

    BeautifulPlumage

    If Dan B is still around – thank you for the lovely garden pics. I especially lived the irises bred for PNW. Both of them were gorgeous.

  81. 81.

    ColoradoGuy

    OK, “Internet amplified mass psychosis” it is. Since I design vacuum-tube power amps as a hobby, I guess I missed the obvious acronym.

  82. 82.

    Anotherlurker

    The video at Petsmart is infuriating. Ā These bible humpers are really low life.

    BTW the jerk sports a handlebar mustache that would make him fit right in in a Bear Bar . Ā However, I hope he stays out of gay bars and leaves the customers alone.

    On 2nd thought, he is probably a coward who likes to punch down on retail workers and would piss his pants if he got any serious push back on his hateful nonsense.

  83. 83.

    dnfree

    @Ken: I have had that very conversation with a fundamentalist relative.Ā  He says that the Bible (which is always correct) refers to the earth as “round”.Ā  But the Bible actually uses the two-dimensional term for a circle, apparently, not a sphere.

  84. 84.

    Kropacetic

    @tom: Iā€™m a gay man and honestly this is the first time Iā€™ve heard this expression.

    Same here. I like it, though. Pithy.

    @Anotherlurker: BTW the jerk sports a handlebar mustache that would make him fit right in in a Bear Bar . Ā However, I hope he stays out of gay bars and leaves the customers alone.

    On 2nd thought, he is probably a coward who likes to punch down on retail workers and would piss his pants if he got any serious push back on his hateful nonsense.

    If you need to get your feelings out, retail workers are cheaper than a therapist. Less likely to help provide insight. This man needs help worming through whatever emotions he is sublimating.

  85. 85.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Subsole: sure? I picked it up on a writing forum. You got all those letters, might as well spell something nice.

    Nobody will know what you mean if you say it out loud, but itā€™s pretty clear spelled out cuz of the caps.

  86. 86.

    Xavier

    @Jeffro: R’s want two things from government: protection of private property rights and preservation of the status quo of privilege. They regard any attempt at promoting the general welfare as a threat to those rights and privileges

  92. 92.

    Tony G

    @John Cole: I’d never heard of this particular asshole before today, so I used the Google-machine to look him up. Ā Twenty three years old, apparently, and this is apparently what he does all day instead of working for a living. Ā When I was 23 (in the Stone Age) I’d been working for 7 years, two years full time. Ā I wonder who’s paying this guy’s bills — buying food, mustache wax, etc. Ā Is he just freeloading off Mommy, or is some wealthy fascist supporting him? Ā What a worthless lump of protoplasm.

  96. 96.

    VOR

    I think it was The Daily Show when Jon Stewart was the host, did a piece on Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), then a Representative and now a Senator. They showed clips of her on Fox talking about how she couldn’t wait to ask questions of someone, how she had a long list. The day of the hearing comes. She asked 1 question, yielded the rest of her time, then rushed out into the hallway to do an interview. All about the soundbite.

  98. 98.

    mrmoshpotato

    Middle of 9

    Blue Jays came to Boston to play football.Ā  28-5 right now.

    Also, Boston Beaneaters, 30 — vs. Detroit Wolverines (8) on June 9, 1883 hehe

  99. 99.

    prostratedragon

    Young runner just crushed the WR in 400 hurdles at the World Championships.Ā  Sydney McLaughlin.Ā  Looks like Secretariat at Belmont.

  102. 102.

    caphilldcne

    So Iā€™m late to this conversation. Please donā€™t give this idiot any oxygen. Heā€™s a complete anti-masker fool whoā€™s been banned from the grounds of the Arizona state capital. Prior to this he was famously owned by some DARE kid – admittedly funny:
    https://twitter.com/SamHaft/status/1441068604179374083?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1441068604179374083%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fgod.dailydot.com%2Fethan-schmidt-dare%2F
    The kid lost his job then got it back – Iā€™m pretty sure heā€™s smart enough to stop repping DARE. Anyway, this guy is a grifter and he doesnā€™t need the publicity Ā unlike John, I donā€™t believe heā€™ll shoot anyone up because heā€™s a grifter Ā heā€™ll just find another scam Ā will he get someone killed for being gay or trans Ā he wouldnā€™t think twice about it
    Sent from my iPhone

  106. 106.

    HumboldtBlue

    All of a sudden, my bathroom door and its hinges have taken on the squeaking sound of a horror flick, and it’s disconcerting. Two days ago, unannounced and unwelcome, the hinges started squeaking, and I have no idea why.

    Then I wonder why my knee is aching.

  108. 108.

    Ken

    @HumboldtBlue: I’d love to see some comedian or performance artist start showing up at Trump events, dressed in the classic white asylum uniform and holding a giant butterfly net.

    But it would be incredibly dangerous for that person, given Trump’s fans are nearly as unhinged as he is.

  112. 112.

    Ruckus

    @different-church-lady:

    That is why I call TFG – SFB, Shit For Brains. He’s one of them. I don’t know what has so fucked their brains, other than right wing politics, money churches – those places that exist to pass the collection plate as often as possible. They have turned politics and religion into a combination of a mental ward and a kindergarten class of people that act like acid heads on a 4 week high.

  113. 113.

    Ruckus

    @prostratedragon:

    She looks a lot better than that!

    Oh, you mean her running form……

    OK I stand by my first statement. That was beyond a magnificent run and a new worlds record.

  114. 114.

    2liberal

    @mrmoshpotato:

    Middle of 9

    Blue Jays came to Boston to play football.Ā  28-5 right now.

    Also, Boston Beaneaters, 30 ā€” vs. Detroit Wolverines (8) on June 9, 1883 hehe

     

    the last time sidney sweeney gets asked to throw out the first pitch for the red sox

  115. 115.

    prostratedragon

    @Ruckus:Ā  Heh-heh! That was the last time I could think of that a racer beat a world-class field that badly. Guy on tv compared to Bob Beamon’s long jump record, which is another good one; I saw that on the telly when it happened and it really did look like he was flying.

  116. 116.

    PIGL

    @Wvng: And their behaviour exposes weaknesses, or rather fatal flaws, in our notions of and systems of justice. Performative assholery does far more harm than almost any actual crime that people are charged with. It should be treated as the serious matter it is, and subjected to dramatic extreme and public forms of punishment….just like the offense itself.

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